Archive for the ‘History We Would Rather Not Know’ Category
Lothrop Stoddard: White Supremacist
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, he includes a veiled current events reference:
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
Fitzgerald deliberately mangled the reference. The title of the book was The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, written by Theodore Lothrop Stoddard in 1920. It wasn’t really scientific; it was pseudo-scientific, but he had a substantial following at the time.
Stoddard was born in Brookline, MA, in 1883. He served in the Phillipine Insurrection, which occurred from 1899 to 1902. After his service, he attended Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1905. He returned to Harvard to obtain a Ph. D. in History in 1914.
Stoddard had constructed a theory of everything underpinned by race. Having done so, he was naturally drawn to both the Klan and to eugenics.
The late war has taught many lessons as to the unstable and transitory character of even the most imposing political phenomena, while a better reading of history must bring home the truth that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics, but race.
— Stoddard, pp. 4-5.
Stoddard was hardly alone in his views at that time. His book made several references to the work of sociologist Edward A. Ross, whose views I have previously discussed here.
Stoddard was not merely a white supremacist; he was a Nordic white supremacist. He argued against industrialization and modernity generally as injurious to genetic purity:
Furthermore, modern migration is itself only one aspect of a still more fundamental disgenic trend. The whole course of modern urban and industrial life is disgenic. Over and above immigration, the tendency is toward a replacement of the more valuable by the less valuable elements of the population. All over the civilized world racial values are diminishing, and the logical end of this disgenic process is racial bankruptcy and the collapse of civilization.
— Stoddard, pp. 302-303.
In 1929, Stoddard engaged in a debate with W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual of the time, where each participant argued opposite views on the question, “Shall the Negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality?” The debate, like Stoddard himself, has largely faded from American memory.
The Second Ku Klux Klan
William Joseph Simmons had refounded the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. By 1921, the Klan had adopted modern organizational structures and procedures, including the use of the Southern Publicity Association to manage recruitment. Simmons was not a very effective organizational leader, but the leaders of the Association filled in the skills Simmons lacked. In 1923, a group led by Hiram Evans, a Texas dentist, bounced Simmons out of his position as Imperial Wizard.
In 1925, there were at least 2.5 million active members of the Ku Klux Klan. The second Klan was its apex of power, having influenced the election of governors in Alabama, California, Oregon and Indiana, as well as up to 75 Congressional representatives.
Stoddard was attracted to the Klan, and they to him. Stoddard was a thought leader with a highly compatible view on race. Stoddard was given a leadership position in the Massachusetts Klan, and his book was promoted by other Klan members as a “scientific” theory supporting their views.
Eugenics
Stoddard was also naturally attracted to the eugenics movement, which was then running quite strong in America. It is a chapter in American history that many Americans would rather not read, but it is vital that we do so.
Simply put, eugenics was a thought cluster aimed at selectively breeding people as a farmer would selectively breed livestock. A major division within eugenics was between positive eugenics, which was content to promote intermarriage between the “best” males and females (however “best” was to be defined), and negative eugenics, which sought to actively discourage or even prevent the “inferior” persons from reproducing. This latter approach included forced sterilization; a Virginia state statute allowing compulsory sterilization was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1927. In the majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Nazi German leaders learned from the American eugenics movement, although it was never their sole source. There was a flourishing eugenics movement in Europe, and it fit with their own racial predispositions. The Germans took negative eugenics to a whole new level with their industrial scale campaigns against those they considered unfit.
When Americans found positive evidence of the Nazi extermination campaigns, the reputation of eugenics in America was destroyed. The entire history of American eugenics went straight down the memory hole.
Stoddard Marches On
It’s hard to kill an idea, and the ideas promoted by Stoddard and his compatriots have never died, just gone underground. They can be summoned by the right secret incantation at any time.
Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.
— Donald Trump, December 2023.
Many commentators made the immediate and obvious comparison to Nazi racial ideology, as did President Biden. But there is no need to cross the Atlantic to look for the roots of such statements. The antecedents are available right here in America, if one knows where to look.
Clause 61: The Pushback Blog 