Lothrop Stoddard

Lothrop Stoddard
Born	June 29, 1883(1883-06-29) Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
Died	May 1, 1950(1950-05-01) (age 66) United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Scientist, historian, journalist, anthropologist, eugenicist

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (June 29, 1883 – May 1, 1950) was an American historian, journalist, racial anthropologist, eugenicist, political theorist and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are cited by historians as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.

Biography

Stoddard was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1883. He attended Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in 1905, and studied Law at Boston University until 1908. Stoddard received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1914. He published many racialist books on what he saw as the peril of immigration, his most famous being The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In this book he presented a view of the world situation pertaining to race focusing concern on the coming population explosion among the "colored" peoples of the world and the way in which "white world-supremacy" was being lessened in the wake of World War I and the collapse of colonialism.

Stoddard's analysis divided world politics and situations in to "white," "yellow," "black," "Amerindian," and "brown" peoples and their interactions.

Stoddard argued race and heredity were the guiding factors of history and civilization, and that the elimination or absorption of the "white" race by "colored" races would result in the destruction of Western civilization. Like Madison Grant (see The Passing of the Great Race), Stoddard divided the white race into three main divisions: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. He considered all three to be of good stock, and far above the quality of the colored races, but argued that the Nordic was the greatest of the three and needed to be preserved by way of eugenics.

It was claimed in Matthew Pratt Guterl's 2004 book, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) that Grant's racial theory would fall out of favor in the U.S. in favor of a model closer to Stoddard's. (Guterl 2004).

This claim is however untrue, as Stoddard kept closely to the position adopted by Grant in all his works, including Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood in which he wrote:

"We want above all things to preserve America. But "America," as we have already seen, is not a mere geographical expression; it is a nation, whose foundations were laid over three hundred years ago by Anglo-Saxon Nordics, and whose nationhood is due almost exclusively to people of North European stock—not only the old colonists and their descendants but also many millions of North Europeans who have entered the country since colonial times and who have for the most part been thoroughly assimilated. Despite the recent influx of alien elements, therefore, the American people is still predominantly a blend of closely related North European strains, and the fabric of American life is fundamentally their creation."

In addition, with reference to the 1924 Immigration Act, Stoddard wrote:

"It is perfectly true that our present immigration policy does (and should) favor North Europeans over people from other parts of Europe, while it discriminates still more rigidly against the entry of non-white races. But the basic reason for this is not a theory of race superiority, but that most fundamental and most legitimate of all human instincts, self-preservation —rightly termed "the first law of nature."

In the same book, he said that "The cardinal point in our immigration policy should, therefore, be to allow no further diminution of the North European element in America's racial make-up."

Grant also wrote the introduction to Stoddard's book "The Rising Tide of Color"

Some predictions made in The Rising Tide of Color were accurate, while other were not. Accurate ones — not all of which were original to Stoddard or predicated on white supremacy — include Japan's rise as a major power; a war between Japan and the USA; a second war in Europe; the overthrowing of European colonial empires in Africa and Asia; the mass migration of non-white peoples to white countries; and the rise of Islam as a threat to the West because of Muslim religious fanaticism (Stoddard was an Islamic scholar and published the book The New World of Islam in 1921).

An allusion to the book occurs in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan, the husband of Daisy Buchanan, the novel's principal woman character, is reading a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard." Throughout The Great Gatsby, Tom confusedly espouses Goddard's racial theories; the narrator calls Tom's focus on Goddard's ideas "pathetic."

Stoddard was appointed to the Board of Directors of the American Birth Control League, a forerunner to Planned Parenthood by Margaret Sanger. He was also a member of the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Academy of Political Science. Stoddard was a lifelong Unitarian and Republican. During his lifetime, he engaged W. E. B. Du Bois in debate on white supremacy and its assertion of the natural inferiority of "colored" races.

In The Revolt Against Civilization (1922) he put forward the theory that civilization places a growing burden on individuals, leading to a growing underclass of individuals who cannot keep up, and a 'ground-swell of revolt'. Stoddard advocated immigration restriction and birth control legislation in order to reduce the numbers of the underclass while promoting the growth of the middle and upper classes. He believed social progress was impossible unless it was guided by a "neo-aristocracy" made up of the most capable individuals and reconciled with the findings of science rather than based on abstract idealism and egalitarianism.

Stoddard authored over two dozen works, most related to race and civilization, echoing the themes of his previous works about the dangers of "colored" peoples against "white" civilization. He was also an enthusiastic stamp collector.

World War II

During World War II he spent 4 months as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance in Nazi Germany. He wrote Into the Darkness (1940) about his experiences there. Among other events, the book describes interviews with such figures as Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley and Fritz Sauckel He got preferential treatment by Nazi officials compared to other journalists. For example the Propaganda Ministry insisted that NBC's Max Jordan and CBS's William Shirer use Stoddard to interview the captain of the Bremen.

In The Rising Tide of Color Stoddard blasted the ethnic supremacism of the Germans, blaming the "Teutonic imperialists" for the outbreak of the First World War. He opposed what he saw as the disuniting of White/European peoples through intense nationalism and infighting.^{[citation needed]}

Between 1939 and 1940, Stoddard stayed for several months in Germany, later publishing a memoir on his experiences there titled Into the Darkness. One day he visited the Hereditary Health Supreme Court in Charlottenburg, an appeals court that decided whether people would be forcibly sterilized. After having observed several dysgenics trials at the court, Stoddard stated that the eugenics legislation of Nazi Germany was "being administered with strict regard for its provisions and that, if anything, judgments were almost too conservative", and that the law was "weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way". Goddard was taken aback by the forthrightness of the Nazis' anti-Jewish views, foreseeing that the "Jewish problem" would soon be settled "by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich".

After World War II, Stoddard's theories were deemed too closely aligned with those of the Nazis and he suffered a large drop in popularity. His death in 1950 from cancer went almost entirely unreported, despite his previously broad readership and influence.

Partial bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• The French Revolution in San Domingo. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
• Present-day Europe, its National States of Mind. New York: The Century Co., 1917.
• Stakes of the War. New York: The Century Co., 1918.
• The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920. ISBN 4-87187-849-X
• The New World of Islam. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921.
• The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922.
• Racial Realities in Europe. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924.
• Social Classes in Post-War Europe. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
• Scientific Humanism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.
• Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927.
• The Story of Youth. New York: Cosmopolitan book corporation, 1928.
• Luck, Your Silent Partner. New York: H. Liveright, 1929.
• Master of Manhattan, the life of Richard Croker. Londton: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931.
• Europe and Our Money. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932
• Lonely America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1932.
• Clashing Tides of Color. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935.
• Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, inc., 1940.

Works online

• The French Revolution in San Domingo (1914) via Google Books
• The New World of Islam (1921)
• The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1922 edn.) via Google Books
• The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man (1922) via Google Books; also available at: http://users.mo-net.com/mlindste/revltciv.html
• Into the Darkness (1940)
• as promoted in New York Tribune (Nov 2 1922)

References

• Guterl, Matthew Pratt. 2004. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Fant, Jr. Gene C. (2000) "Stoddard, Lothrop", American National Biography Online.