In 1910, in an article first published in the New York journal the Independent, called ‘The Souls of White Folk’, the Black American historian, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about his perception of a sudden change in the world, indeed the emergence of a ‘new religion’: ‘the world in a sudden emotional conversion, has discovered that it is white, and, by that token, wonderful’.^[1] In noting that ‘white folk’ had suddenly ‘become painfully conscious of their whiteness’, Du Bois was pointing to the emergence of a new subjective mode of identification that crossed national borders, an identification as white men. That same year Du Bois helped establish the journal, The Crisis, to combat ‘race prejudice’. ‘It takes its name’, declared the first editorial, ‘from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of man’. ^[2]

As an historian, Du Bois wanted to emphasise the historical novelty of what he witnessed, especially the emergence of a new ‘personal’ sense of self:

He also noted white men’s proprietary claims, likening the intermittent outbursts of rage among white folks to the tantrums of possessive children, who refused to share their candy. When applied to the relations between the different races of the world, however, the message seemed rather more ominous: ‘whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen!’ A new global movement was in the ascendancy. ‘Wave upon wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time’. That nations were coming to believe in it, wrote Du Bois, was ‘manifest daily’.^[3]

In seeking to explain the rise of this ‘inexplicable phenomenon’, Du Bois noted the political claims to equality that were beginning to be made by colonised and coloured peoples around the world: ‘Do we sense somnolent writhings in black Africa, or angry groans in India, or triumphant “Banzais” in Japan? “To your tents, O Israel!” these nations are not white. Build warships and heft the “Big Stick”’. ^[4] In 1908, United States President Theodore Roosevelt (the author of the diplomacy ‘Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick’) had sent the United States Naval Fleet on a tour of the Pacific, its ill-concealed intention to intimidate the Japanese, whose challenge to the United States over its restrictive immigration policy and the Californian policy of segregated schooling had led to a crisis in relations between the two naval powers, their ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ of 1907, notwithstanding.

In seeking to explain the ‘new fanaticism’ that was taking hold, Du Bois insisted on the transnational nature of, and response to, the movement for racial equality:

As Du Bois noted, the proclamation of ‘white men’s countries’ was a defensive reaction to the mobility and mobilisations of colonised and coloured peoples around the world. The global migrations of the late nineteenth century provide the crucial historical context for claims to racial equality that were often expressed as equal rights of mobility.

In his influential book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defined nations as ‘imagined communities’ in the sense that they were composed of individuals who, though they might never meet face to face, came to identify with their compatriots and believed themselves to hold certain values, myths and outlooks in common. At the core of this process of identification was the cultural and historical imagination, its key instruments the novel and newspaper. Anderson stressed the affective as well as the imaginary dimension of national identification which he imagined as ‘fraternal’. ^[6]

Paradoxically, one outcome of Anderson’s argument has been to naturalise the nation as the imagined community of the modern age, an effect that has obscured what Du Bois saw so clearly in 1910: the ascendancy of racial identifications and the emergence of an imagined community of white men that was transnational in its reach, drawing together the self-styled ‘white men’ of southern Africa, north America and Australasia in what Theodore Roosevelt liked to call a condition of ‘fellow feeling’.^[7] In this context, the designation ‘white men’ referred to those of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ descent or ‘English-speaking peoples’ who shared what Roosevelt in The Winning of the West called the same ‘race history’, which began, following E. A. Freeman, with the ‘great Teutonic wanderings’.^[8]

White men were thought to have a genius, not just for self-government, but also for colonisation. The settlement of the continents of Australia and America, Roosevelt argued, were key events in world history: ‘We cannot rate too highly the importance of their acquisition’, he wrote. ‘Their successful settlement was a feat which by comparison utterly dwarfs all the European wars of the last two centuries.’^[9] Clearly, the ‘manhood’ espoused by white men was a racialised as well as gendered condition.^[10]

Just two years before the publication of Du Bois’ essay on the ‘Souls of White Folk’ in the New York Independent, the same journal had featured a long report by W. R. Charlton, a Sydney journalist, of the effusive welcome offered by Australians to the visiting American Fleet, white men rapturously greeting fellow white men from across the Pacific. On arrival in Sydney, Rear Admiral Sperry told his hosts he spoke to them ‘as white man to white men, and, I may add, to “very white men”’.^[11] Charlton’s article celebrated the new alliance between the ‘Republic and the Commonwealth’: ‘It is delightful to us to say – whether it be delusion, half-truth or the truth-absolute – that the Americans are our kinsmen, blood of our blood, bone of our bone, and one with us in our ideals of the brotherhood of man.’ ^[12]

In recent scholarship, the investigation of ‘whiteness’ has emerged as a productive new field of historical enquiry, but most studies have conceptualised their subject within a national frame of analysis, charting national dynamics and histories. When overseas ideas are identified as important they are usually conceptualised as external influences shaping a national experience rather than as constituting transnational knowledge.^[13] Yet, as Du Bois saw clearly, the emergence of this ‘new religion’ of whiteness was a transnational phenomenon and all the more powerful for that. It produced in turn its own powerful solidarities of resistance. One commentator writing in Fortnightly Review, in 1907, worried that the new solidarity of white men and their claim to monopoly of four continents, would drive Chinese and Indians into an unprecedented pan-Asiatic alliance led by the Japanese that would ultimately see the eclipse of Western civilisation.^[14]

White men, meanwhile, whether in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia or Kenya, looked to each other for sympathy and support, for ideas and practical instruction. They exchanged knowledge and know-how, in particular the uses of the census, the literacy test and the passport as key technologies in building and defending white men’s countries.^[15] This chapter looks at the deployment of the literacy test as an instrument of racial exclusion and its circulation between the United States, South Africa and Australia. It also charts the concomitant racialisation of a diversity of national groups, including Africans, Americans, Australians, Indians, Japanese, Hungarians and Italians in a process that produced dichotomous categories of white and non-white, subsuming earlier multiple classifications.

The targets of the literacy test changed as did its specifications, from the requirement to write one’s name, to demonstration of the comprehension of the constitution, to the ability to fill out an application form in English to a dictation test in any European language. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, the deployment of a literacy test for racial purposes was a key aspect of the transnational process noticed by Du Bois: the constitution of ‘whiteness’ as the basis of both personal identity and transnational political community. Literacy was used to patrol racial borders (electoral as well as national) within and between nations, and in the process literacy became code for whiteness.

While a number of Australian historians have noted that the infamous Australian dictation test of 1901 followed the precedent of Natal in 1897, they have not noticed that the Natal legislation explicitly emulated an American Act of 1896 – passed at the behest of the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League, but which, as it happened, was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. The United States example was all important, but the British imperial frame of analysis adopted by most historians of Australia has diverted attention from the importance of American experience to white colonials. Both in Australia and South Africa, white men looked to the example of the country they liked to call ‘the great republic’.

And they looked to American history lessons more generally. The main lesson they imbibed from nineteenth century American history was the impossibility of a multi-racial democracy and the most influential source for this understanding was James Bryce’s magisterial The American Commonwealth, first published in 1888 and re-published in a new and expanded third edition in 1893, that included two chapters on ‘The South Since the War’ and ‘The Present and Future of the Negro’. The ‘negro question’, said Bryce, was ‘the capital question in national as well as state politics’.^[16] Moreover, ‘the problem was a new one in history, for the relations of the ruling and subject races of Europe and Asia supply no parallel to it.’^[17]

At Oxford University, Bryce had been a student of the pre-eminent race historian of the nineteenth century and leading proponent of Anglo-Saxonism, E. A. Freeman, whose work was also much admired both in the United States and Australia. Bryce was not so committed as his mentor to racial determinism, but following his extended visits to the United States in the 1880s he, too, became convinced of the unfitness of non-whites for self-government.^[18] ‘Emancipation found them utterly ignorant’, he wrote of American Blacks in 1888, ‘and the grant of suffrage found them as unfit for political rights as any population could be.’^[19]

Bryce was a key transnational educator on the subject of history, nation and race. He played a crucial role in circulating knowledge about the ‘failed experiment’ of racial equality ushered in by Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, when the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed the ‘equal protection’ of the law to ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States’ and that prevented States from denying the right to vote on grounds of race or colour. Hailed by Liberal Republican Carl Schurz as ‘the great Constitutional Revolution’, in Bryce’s account, Radical Reconstruction was a ghastly mistake, leading to terrible violence on the part of whites accompanied by ‘revolting cruelty’.^[20]

As Hugh Tulloch has observed:

Wendell Phillips Garrison, on the other hand, writing in the Nation, regretted that Bryce had thrown ‘the weight of his humane authority into the white scale’ and Bryce drew further criticism from old English friends, including A. V. Dicey.^[22]

In Australia, however, The American Commonwealth commanded a faithful following, where it was taken up in the 1890s as the ‘bible’ or ‘great textbook’ by colonial leaders engaged in the work of drawing up a new federal constitution.^[23] In South Africa, too, as John Cell, in his study of the origins of segregation in South Africa and the importance of the American example, has noted, Bryce became the accepted authority on American race relations among English-speaking white men.^[24]