Early Sociologists on Racial Mixing and Mulattoes

John R. Commons:

Mulattoes “differ but little if at all from the white race in the capacity for advancement” because “in their veins runs the blood of a white aristocracy.” (1920, Races and Immigrants in American Life. New York: MacMillan 209-219)

John Lewis Gillin, Clarence G. Dittmer, and Roy J. Colbert¹

“Random mating of various breeds of dogs produces the mongrel, and this same principle is as true for divergent human races as it is for dogs.” (1928, Social Problems. New York: Century 199-203)

Grove Dow :

It is the white male, “too often the degenerate blood of some of the best families in America,” who causes the problem [a reported increase in the population of mulattoes in the US in each decade 1890-1920]: “it is the reckless and immoral element of the white population that mingles with the negro, for the mulatto is in nearly all cases illegitimate.”(1920, Society and Its Problems: An Introduction to Sociology. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 181-182)

Charles Ellwood:

• “On the one hand it [racial mixing] has resulted in creating a class of so-called negroes in whom white blood and the ambitions and energy of the white race predominate, and on the other hand it has also resulted in creating a degenerate mixed stock who furnish the majority of criminals and vicious persons belonging to the so-called negro race”
• This unfortunate result “comes from social rather than from physiological causes” when the illegitimate offspring  “of the union of white fathers and negro mothers are frequently the product of conditions of vice.” (1924, Sociology and Modern Social Problems. New York: American Book 255-25

1. Gillin, Dittmer, and Colbert were slow - when compared to most sociologists of their time - to abandon their eugenic perspective on race relations and were working to incorporate the new scientific knowledge about heredity to their arguments in favor of the practice of sterilization to rid society of the unfit.  Their objection to racial mixing was that too much interbreeding leads to deterioration of the human stock. (McKee, James B. 1993. Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pg. 83.)