A Warning From the Past

“… [W]est-central Asia, which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man’s country, is today racially brown man’s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If this portion of Asia, the former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character, what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?”

Of all the threats to the West, Stoddard believed the Japanese were the most serious. He quotes early British envoys who described Japanese as “highly intelligent children” who could quickly acquire Western techniques. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 these “highly intelligent children,” shocked the world by becoming the first non-white nation in modern times to defeat a white nation. Since white hegemony was maintained not by love but by respect and fear, Russia’s defeat by Japan was, in Stoddard’s view, “a body blow to white ascendancy.” 

Japanese writers and government officials were not shy about drawing conclusions from their victory, and soon began turning western ideas of supremacy on their heads. At the outbreak of the First World War, Japanese writer Yone Noguchi wrote that the conflict meant the ruin of whites. “It means the saddest downfall of the so-called western civilization; our belief that it was builded upon higher and sounder footing than ours was at once knocked down and killed; we are sorry that we somehow overestimated its happy possibility and were deceived and cheated by its superficial glory.” 

Stoddard quotes a Japanese imperialist pronouncement written in 1916: “As for America–that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no cohesion, no brains of government … . Well did my friend speak the other day when he called her people a race of thieves with the hearts of rabbits… .

“North America alone will support a billion people; that billion will be Japanese with their slaves. Not arid Asia, nor worn-out Europe (which, with its peculiar and quaint relics and customs should in the interests of history and culture, be in any case preserved), nor yet tropical Africa is fit for our people. But North America, that continent so succulently green, fresh, and unsullied–except for the few chattering mongrel Yankees–should have been ours by right of discovery; it shall be ours by the higher, nobler right of conquest.”

A Burmese journal called Buddhism, wrote that the “yellow peril” was nothing more than an expression of Darwinian superiority. “The West has justified–perhaps with some reason–every aggression on weaker races by the doctrine of Survival of the Fittest; on the ground that it is best for future humanity that the unfit should be eliminated and give place to the most able race. That doctrine applies equally well to any possible struggle between Aryan and Mongolian–whichever survives, should it ever come to a struggle between the two for world mastery, will, on their own doctrine, be the one most fit to do so, and if the survivor be the Mongolian, then is the Mongolian no ‘peril’ to humanity, but the better part of it.”

Threat.

Brown Men

According to Stoddard, the brown man’s land was the Near and Middle East and stretched into northern Africa. Racially it was a jumble, including within its boundaries such groups as largely-white Persians and Turks, largely-black Yemenite Arabs, and Himalayan and Central Asian yellows. With the exception of India, he saw Islam as the great unifying force of this world. In 1920, the brown man’s world was completely controlled by whites, but this did not guarantee permanent white control in the face of rising brown solidarity fueled by what Stoddard called “the Mohammedan Revival.”

Ironically, this revival was aided by Western technology. Newspapers allowed Muslims to communicate with each other across their vast world. A Syrian Christian, Ameen Rihani, characterized that world in a May 1912 article in Forum magazine:

“A nation of 250,000,000 souls, more than one-half under Christian rule, struggling to shake off its fetters…. [A] nation with a glorious past, a living faith and language, an inspired Book, an undying hope, might be divided against itself by European diplomacy but can never be subjugated by European arms… . What Islam is losing on the borders of Europe it is gaining in Africa and Central Asia through its modern propaganda, which is conducted according to Christian methods. … Europe drills the Moslem to be a soldier who will ultimately turn his weapons against her… .”

Though Islam was a growing force, Stoddard did not think the brown threat comparable to the yellow peril. While Japanese talked openly of racial superiority and conquering white lands, the brown revolt against white rule was mainly defensive, showing few signs of expansion. Stoddard saw the brown man as having enough room for his growing population and thought any alliance among the browns would break up after white rule ended. He expected internal warfare among the browns to be constant, and thought a yellow-brown alliance unlikely. Stoddard’s main concern was that resurgent Islam might affect another sphere of white political control: black Africa.

The Dark Continent

Sub-Saharan Africa was the world of the black man. Four-fifths of the world’s 150,000,000 black people lived in Africa in 1920, with the rest scattered in the New World. Africans had suffered from a history of isolation: “Cut off from the Mediterranean by the desert which he had no means of crossing, and bounded elsewhere by oceans which he had no skill in navigating, the black man vegetated in savage obscurity, his habitat being well named the ‘Dark Continent.’” In stark language, Stoddard described blacks as never having developed a civilization and having no history: “Left to himself, he remained a savage, and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed their ideas and altered his blood. The originating powers of the European and the Asiatic are not in him.”

Not a threat.

Europeans took root in Africa–at both the northern and southern extremes–in a way they never did in Asia. Over a million Europeans–mostly French–settled in Algeria and Tunisia, and a million and a half Dutch and English in South Africa. With white control firmly established in these areas, the main question for Africa was whether whites could maintain their hold on the inner continent. This would depend on how well they contained the spread of Islam. According to Stoddard, the continent would fall either to white Christians or Islamic browns; Africans themselves would never be masters in their own house.

Stoddard believed the black man’s lack of originality and history made him particularly susceptible to outside ideas and people. Africans readily accepted the religions of both browns and whites, but since blacks were a naturally warlike people, they would be more inclined to accept Islam than Christianity. Islam had not yet penetrated below the equator and Stoddard praised the efforts of Christians to convert blacks:

“In so far as he is Christianized, the negro’s savage instincts will be restrained and he will be predisposed to acquiesce in white tutelage. In so far as he is Islamized, the negro’s warlike propensities will be inflamed, and he will be used as the tool of Arab Pan-Islamism seeking to drive the white man from Africa and make the continent its very own.” 

Stoddard warned that “Pan-Islamism, once possessed of the Dark Continent and fired by militant zealots, might forge black Africa into a sword of wrath, the executor of sinister adventures.”

For Stoddard, the real value of Africa lay in its rich raw materials. He believed the European powers were well aware of the brown threat  and was confident they could control the spread of Islam. Moreover, whites continued to settle in Africa, making more and more of it “white man’s country.” The real danger to white control lay in potential weakness and discord within the white world itself. 

Red Men

By “red men” Stoddard meant the American Indians of Central and South Ame-rica. In his view they accounted for about two-thirds of the population of this area with whites and “near-whites” comprising about ten percent. Stoddard contrasted the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish with the settling of North America by the British. The British undertook a genuine migration, bringing families who meant to stay, whereas Spanish men came alone to the New World for treasure and adventure and mated with Indian women. Their “mestizo” offspring were sometimes joined–primarily in Brazil–by the mulatto offspring of whites and black slaves. “Zambos” were the result of black-Indian mixing.

  As long as the colonies were held by Spain, Latin America had a system of white rule, and what Stoddard calls an “idle and vapid” white governing class at least formally forbade miscegenation. After the revolutions against Spain, which Stoddard called a white civil war, there was massive racial change. The white rulers were decimated by the revolutions and their ranks were further depleted by the large number of loyalists who returned to Spain. Non-whites, many of whom had fought for the revolutionaries, wanted their share of power and the result was a long series of coups, revolutions and wars that resulted in a worsening of conditions in most of Latin America. 

Stoddard praised Chile, Argentina and Uruguay as mostly-white nations that encouraged European immigration. He particularly singled out Chile for its social and political stability as well as its racial consciousness: “The country was settled by a squirearchy of an almost English type. This ruling gentry jealously guarded its racial integrity. In fact, it possessed not merely a white but a Nordic race-consciousness.”  Stoddard was optimistic about these areas of South America since white immigration–mostly German–seemed to be strengthening their already strong white identities. The rest of Latin America seemed doomed to endless cycles of anarchy, tyranny and revolution. 

While Stoddard saw little of value in the red man’s land, he did think it important to keep Asians out. He noted that the Japanese had targeted Latin America for expansion, and quotes a Japanese he identifies only as Count Osuma as saying, “South America, especially the northern part, will furnish ample room for our surplus.” In fact, during this period Japan was trying to strengthen relations with Mexico by posing as a counter-balance to the hated “gringo.” 

Stoddard predicted the red man’s land, like Africa, would eventually be controlled by outsiders, white or Asian. The other races were out of contention because: “The Indian is patently unable to construct a progressive civilization. As for the negro, he has proved as incapable in the New World as in the Old.” Again, as in Africa, whites had the advantage over Asians. With strongholds to the north and south and with increased European immigration, white hegemony in Latin America was secure unless “internecine discord,” robbed whites of their vigor.

“The Swarming of the Whites”

Like Madison Grant (see AR, December 1997), Stoddard divided whites into Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans. While he considered them all sound stock, in his view, the Nordic had made the race great. He argued that traditionally it was Nordics who repelled Asiatic invasions of Europe after Alpines or Mediterraneans had been defeated. 

Possible threat.

“… [H]is inherent racial aptitudes had been stimulated by his past. The hard conditions of medieval life had disciplined him to adversity and had weeded him by natural selection. The hammer of Asiatic invasion, clanging for a thousand years on the brown-yellow anvil, had tempered the iron of Europe into the finest steel. The white man could think, could create, could fight superlatively well. No wonder the redskins and negroes feared and adored him as a god, while the somnolent races of the Farther East, stunned by this strange apparition rising from the pathless ocean, offered no effective opposition.

“Thus began the swarming of the whites, like bees from the hive, to the uttermost ends of the earth. And, in return, Europe was quickened to intenser vitality. Goods, tools, ideas, men: all were produced at an unprecedented rate. So, by action and reaction, white progress grew by leaps and bounds. … For four hundred years the pace never slackened, and at the close of the nineteenth century the white man stood the indubitable master of the world.”

The thought that this supremacy could end, “never entered the head of one white man in a thousand,” wrote Stod-dard. Indeed, in 1920 whites were the most numerous race on earth. Comprising one-third of humanity, they occupied 40 percent of the globe, and controlled 90 percent. He called white expansion “the most prodigious phenomenon in all recorded history. … Never before has a race acquired such combined preponderance of numbers and dominion.” Though most whites could not foresee it, Stoddard warned that hegemony was about to be challenged. 

Only white solidarity could stop the rising tide of color, but the First World War destroyed this solidarity and showed the colored world that whites were vulnerable through internal discord. Just as the Peloponnesian War was the suicide of  Greek civilization (“the saddest page in history,” writes Stod-dard) the Great War threatened to mark the end of white supremacy.

Not a threat.

Plugging the Dikes

Though Stoddard did not advocate outright abandonment of the outer dikes, he did not consider them necessary for white survival. The question of retention would turn on economic, political and strategic considerations. In the case of Asia, he urged whites to face the inevitable: “White men must get out of their heads the idea that the Asiatics are “inferior.”. . . Men worthy of independence will sooner or later get it… . Let us not exhaust ourselves by stubborn resistance in Asia which in the end must prove futile.”

The inner dikes were the frontiers of the white world marked not by boundary stones but flesh and blood: “They are the true bulwarks of the race, the patrimony of future generations who have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man’s land. Ill will it fare if ever our race should close its ears to this most elemental call of the blood.” 

The inner dikes could be breached by  war, trade, or immigration. Japan showed in the Russo-Japanese War that it was a military power. Also, it and other Asian nations were in the process of industrializing and could potentially threaten the West through trade. As they prospered they would look for new areas for their surplus population, including Australia and the United States. The only thing to stop this immigration was the will of whites. If this will ever faltered or was weakened by internal discord, the inner dikes would be flooded by people seeking the better living conditions offered by the West. This is why Stoddard saw the First World War as such a bad omen (he also noted that each side used colored troops from the colonies to fight fellow whites).

Though he feared that whites were “ill-prepared” to stop the rising tide of color, he still hoped they would rediscover that race is destiny. It was due to their unique genetic heritage that whites could rule the world and create a great civilization, and it was impossible to have the civilization without the race. “For white civilization is today conterminous with the white race… . It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe and America. Not today, not tomorrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed.” 

Warnings, Heeded and Ignored

Lothrop Stoddard was not alone in warning the West. The early 20th century saw the publication of several major books on the importance of race. Among these were: Mankind at the Crossroads by E.G. Conklin (1914), The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916) and Race and National Solidarity by Charles Josey (1923) (reviewed in AR, August 1992). The May 7, 1921 Saturday Evening Post carried an editorial on immigration that said, “Two books in particular that every American should read if he wishes to understand the full gravity of our present immigration problem: Mr. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Dr. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color… . These books should do a vast amount of good if they fall into the hands of readers who can face without wincing the impact of new and disturbing ideas.”

Initially some leaders were ready to heed the warnings. Congress passed the Johnson Act of 1924, which effectively ended non-white immigration. Stoddard testified at the congressional hearings. Also, the new science of eugenics was becoming well accepted. Stoddard was in charge of publicity for the Second Eugenics Congress of 1921, which was chaired by Madison Grant and held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (see AR, February, 1997, for an account of the respectability and broad popularity of the early eugenics movement).

Despite these early successes, subsequent leaders ignored Lothrop Stoddard’s warnings. Twenty years after The Rising Tide of Color was published, Europe again erupted into civil war. Nazi Germany allied with the dreaded Japanese, who made good on their threat to attack the United States. Eugenics was soon linked to Adolph Hitler and concentration camps. Europe gave up her Asian colonies and soon all of Africa was freed. The supposedly permanent white colonies in Algeria and Tunisia were betrayed in the 1960s and Rhodesia and South Africa collapsed soon after. Australia abandoned her “whites-only” immigration policy in the 1970s and the United States and Canada put in motion immigration policies which, if not reformed, will make whites a minority by mid-century. Even Europe, the heart of the white world, faces massive Third-World immigration and high fertility rates combined with below-replacement white birth rates.

Just as Stoddard feared, the rising tide of color is swamping the West. Ironically, it is not the “yellows” who are displacing whites so much as the “reds,” “browns”and blacks, from whom Stoddard expected no real challenge. But just as he predicted, white disunity and loss of will are the culprits, not the inherent dynamism of non-whites. We still have time to rebuild the inner dikes–but only if we rekindle the will to do so.

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was born in 1883 in Brookline, Massachusetts. His lineage stretched back to 17th century Massachusetts, where Solomon Stod-dard held a pastorate in North-ampton, Massachusetts. An only child, Stoddard attended Harvard, where he studied history, government and European languages. He graduated magna cum laude in 1905 and traveled in Europe before entering law school. Admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1908, he went back to Harvard to train for a career as an advisor on world affairs, and received his Ph.D. in 1914. His doctoral thesis was published that year as The French Revolution in Santo Domingo, and described the slaughter of whites by black slaves (with the help of French Jacobins) in what is now Haiti. To him the event marked, “the first great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality.” After receiving his Ph.D. he became foreign affairs editor for World’s Work magazine and then turned his attention to writing books on race and civilization. 

The Rising Tide of Color (1920) was the most successful of Stoddard’s fifteen books. In 1921 he released The New World of Islam, which further documented the spread of that religion. The Revolt Against Civilization (1922) dealt with the Bolshevik attempt to raise the “underman.” In it Stoddard displayed a hierarchical view not only of races but of individuals. He called for a “neo-Aristocracy” to usher in a progressive era based on biological realities and the findings of science. Racial Realities in Europe (1924) was a detailed comparison of the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean stocks of Europe. Stoddard’s ultimate solution to social problems was eugenics, which he discussed in Scientific Humanism (1926). He was a frequent contributor to Margaret Sanger’s journal The Birth Control Review–a fact often pointed out by Sanger’s current critics. 

Although others were also writing books on race at this time, Stoddard seemed to have had an especially profound influence. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, “… the peculiar pungency of his style, the global breadth of his vision and his pose of informed expertise made Stoddard an influential propagandist. Invitations to congressional hearings, praise from President Harding, and many favorable reviews of his books, all suggest that Stoddard was important in rationalizing for his country its new immigration laws.” 

After passage of the 1924 immigration restrictions, he wrote two more books on race. Reforging America (1927) emphasized the importance of white solidarity in building a European America. Clashing Tides of Color (1935) revisited some of the themes of his most successful work.  In it he wrote, “ ‘The Rising Tide’ has risen portentously, these past fifteen years. Only instead of roaring in like a tidal bore up an estuary, it has become more like a rip-tide–a confused welter of swirling eddies and choppy waves dashing against one another as well as against the confining shores.” Stoddard wrote that he underestimated the impact “Western machine civilization” would have on Asia. He thought the prospect of all-out race war between whites and Asians was diminishing because of antagonisms among Asians caused by Western imports like nationalism and Communism. But whites were not to let down their guard: “That does not mean that Asia’s desire to end Western supremacy has abated. It merely means that the struggle has become much more complex.”

The outbreak of World War II took Stoddard to Germany where he was correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance from 1939-1940. He interviewed Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and part of his Goeb-bels interview was published in the January 22, 1940 issue of Time. After returning to the U.S. he wrote Into the Darkness (1940), described by the Dictionary of American Biography as “a fair and honest appraisal of the Nazi state, but not without hints of admiration for Hitler’s eugenic experiments.” After the war he became an editorial writer and foreign affairs expert for the Washington Star. 

Though Lothrop Stoddard is now almost always remembered as a “racist” and “white supremacist” he seems to have thought of himself primarily as a foreign affairs expert. A lifelong Unitarian and Republican, Stoddard was also a member of the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Academy of Political Science. He died of cancer in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1950 at the age of 66. The New York Times ran an eight-sentence obituary that did not even mention The Rising Tide of Color. According to the Dictionary of American Biography (written in the 1970s), “Obituaries were rare and perfunctory: the findings of science and the sordid realities of Hitler’s Germany had discredited the racial and social views that Stoddard had proclaimed.” 

A reprint of The Rising Tide of Color can be ordered from National Vanguard Books, Box 330, Hillsboro, WV 24946 for $12.95 postage paid. A complete scanned version is available at www.melvig.org/rtc_toc.html. 

Original article

(Posted on October 14, 2005)

Comments

Post a Comment