Grant pretended that his science would stand the tests of time, but in practice The Passing of the Great Race had to be revised in successive editions to adjust to the facts of the First World War. The 1918 edition toned down the original’s admiration of Teutons and corrected Grant’s confusion over which numbers in the cephalic index are brachycephalic and which dolichocephalic. Anti-German sentiment also encouraged Grant to alter Ripley’s terminology.15 Ripley had called his three European races Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. In the midst of a conflict pitting Americans against Germans, Grant replaced Teutonic with Nordic, further muddying the racial identity of Germans.*
This question of German racial identity divided two of Grant’s main European influences, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Lapouge, both future Nazi racial godfathers. Originally from England but settled in Germany, Chamberlain was married to the daughter of the nationalist composer Richard Wagner. In his Teutonist, anti-Semitic jeremiad, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) of 1899, Chamberlain praised Germans, ancient and modern.* Dispensing with science to prove Nordic superiority, Chamberlain argued that all the great men of history, including Jesus, were actually Nordic. Of a less mystical and Pan-German völkisch turn of mind than Chamberlain, Lapouge put his faith in the science of the cephalic index, even though his theories led him into a morass of measurements that, amazingly, racial science accepted without a qualm.
Whereas Chamberlain adored all Germans, Lapouge prized the dolichocephalic, blond Nordic he called Homo Europæus, who was hardly the same as modern Germans. Lapouge classified 70 percent of northern Germans as dolichocephalic and only 20 percent as pure Homo Europæus. In southern Germany, he counted 20 percent as dolichocephalic and only 3 percent as pure Homo Europæus. The rest were hopelessly brachycephalic Alpines. Only a few dolicho-blonds still existed in France, he lamented, while—thank heaven—Americans were as Nordic as northern Germans.16† This was supposed to be bad for the French but good for Americans, since Alpines were acquiring a mean reputation.
Grant belonged to the side that made Germans more Alpine than Teutonic or Nordic. For Grant, moderns and ancients were entirely separate populations. Just as modern Greeks were said not to have descended from beautiful ancient Greeks and modern Italians supposedly bore little relationship to imperial ancient Romans, anthroposociologists denied modern Germans any claim to the virtues of “the ancient Teutonic tribes.” This rendered German claims to Teutonic racial identity “one of their [modern Germans’] most grandiose pretensions.”17 Adopting the long-standing assumption that Alpines were slavish but brutal peasants, Grant was going along with prevailing racist orthodoxy to explain how Germans could commit war crimes such as the “rape of Belgium.”*
The answer: Germany was no longer Nordic, but Alpine. Preserving their ideal of Teutons as a progressive and intelligent race, racists redefined Alpines. Unlike the docile, peasant sluggards of old, Alpines now emerged as inherently vicious rapists. This supposed change in German race temperament was thought to date back to the seventeenth century. According to Madison Grant, the Thirty Years’ War killed off Germany’s “finest manhood…the big blond fighting man.” That generation’s bloodletting created a population vacuum, which inferior Alpines, “Wendish and the Polish types,” rushed in to fill.18
What, then, were racial theorists to say about German Americans, who were fast gaining American “old stock” identity? Between 1900 and 1920, Germans never exceeded 4 percent of immigrants to the United States, and their political profile remained low. When German Americans did not rally to Germany’s side in 1914, and the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917, German American newspapers and associations proclaimed their pro-American, anti-German loyalty.19
Even so, during a late 1917–early 1918 bout of anti-German sentiment, German Americans endured a good deal of harassment. Localities and states banned use of the German language, local vigilante groups burned German books, and a German immigrant was lynched in Illinois in 1918. In response to these attacks, many German American newspapers shut down, and churches began to conduct services exclusively in English. By the war’s end, German American institutions had fallen drastically in number and importance, furthering assimilation.20 Germans, whether in Germany or in the United States, did not hold the attention of patrician American racists, who preferred their own version of class analysis.
LIKE SO many hereditarians in this long and dour story, Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) was of old New England stock, apparently sharing an ancestor with the Reverend Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Massachusetts. After a period of study in Dresden, Stoddard graduated from Harvard, read law at Columbia, and then left the legal profession to earn a Ph.D. in history at Harvard. Early on, Stoddard’s instincts warned against the threat posed by people of color. Houghton Mifflin published his Ph.D. dissertation in 1914 as The French Revolution in San Domingo, a work that obsessively chronicles the birth of independent black and brown Haiti by dint of a massacre of all but a score of its whites.21 Stoddard became Madison Grant’s protégé in eugenics, and, in turn, Grant wrote the introduction to Stoddard’s first widely read book, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). At that point, the two focused their demographic anxieties somewhat differently; Grant worried far more about inferior European races, while Stoddard warned of a yellow peril.22
Fig. 23.1. Cover of Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization (1922).
Next came Stoddard’s frenzied contribution to white race theory—really an attack on the working class—The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, in 1922. The Revolt Against Civilization announces its target as communism—the movement of the proletariat—by placing the hammer and sickle on its cover. (See figure 23.1, Revolt against Civilization cover, 1922.) The title page announces the author’s impeccable academic qualifications: “Lothrop Stoddard, A. M., Ph.D. (Harv.).” But open the book, and hordes of vicious, stupid, fast-breeding, Alpine brachy-browns pour out of Stoddard’s mishmash of degenerate-families-Jews-Bolshevism-intelligence-test hereditarianism.
Fig. 23.2. IQ results by class and race, in Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization (1922).
Stoddard brings class into the picture, a category on a par with his idea of race. On the authority of Goddard, Yerkes, and the Army IQ tests, Stoddard declares intelligence to be “predetermined by heredity” and race. Intelligence also accompanies class standing—the higher the class, the higher the intelligence. Of course. In Stoddard’s arrangement, the classification of “Americans” excludes “Italians” and “Colored,” two catchall categories one IQ point apart.23 (See figure 23.2, Stoddard’s IQ results by class and race.)
Stoddard agreed with Grant and the anthroposociologists on the fundamentally determining role of heredity: “Racial impoverishment,” according to Stoddard, is “irreparable.”24 His remedy: eugenic “race cleansing,” mentioned eight times in five pages, “race purification,” and “race perfecting,” through sterilization of the “Under-Man.”25
Nothing if not a vivid writer, Stoddard paints a cinematic word picture of the feebleminded Juke-Kallikak-Polish-Russian-Jewish-French-Canadian-mongrelized-Alpine Under-Man: the Under-Man is in “instinctive and natural revolt against civilization.” The potential for revolt is permanent, but in normal conditions society restrains the Under-Man. Still, “he remains; he multiplies; he bides his time.” In chaotic times such as the postwar present, the Under-Man breaks out, wreaking havoc on civilization, as the Russian revolution proved. “The philosophy of the Under-Man is to-day called Bolshevism,” says Stoddard, and bolshevism is a product of “the Jewish mind.”26 Among white race chauvinists, the belief that Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored—has proved extremely durable.*
Fig. 23.3. “Table II: Percentage of Superiority,” in Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization (1922).
For Stoddard,
the Under-Man is stupid. Americans as a whole might have a mental age of less than fourteen (as Yerkes’s Army IQ tests supposedly revealed), but he makes recent immigrants dumber still. Stoddard’s tables rank immigrants from all parts of Europe to demonstrate their relative capacity. His table showing “Percentage of Superiority” puts the English at the top and the Poles at the bottom. (See figure 23.3, Stoddard, “Table II: Percentage of Superiority.”) As though to prove Italians and Portuguese equally feebleminded, Stoddard compares unidentified IQ test results of American, northern European, Italian, and Portuguese immigrant schoolchildren.27 (See figure 23.4, Stoddard, Comparative IQs.)
Charts, tables, and lurid prose carried Stoddard far in the early 1920s; Horace Lorimer’s editorials in the Saturday Evening Post urged “every American” to read Grant and Stoddard “if he wishes to understand the full gravity of our immigration problems.”28 Lorimer backed up their warnings with Kenneth Roberts’s illustrated articles.
Visual aids played a clinching role in hereditarian literature, starting with Dugdale’s many pages of statistical tables in the 1870s. As print technology improved, magazines increased their use of illustration, with the Saturday Evening Post in the lead. Kenneth Roberts’s anti-immigration articles in the Post exploited the power of images, showing potential immigrants, particularly nameless eastern European Jews, as inherently alien types, not named individuals. (See figure 23.5, Roberts, “A Polish Jew.”)
Fig. 23.4. Comparative IQs, in Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization (1922).
To illustrate a contrast, hereditarians of self-proclaimed Nordic descent proffered their own images. William McDougall, an Englishman teaching at Harvard, asked in the title of his 1921 book Is America Safe for Democracy? Should the wrong kind of immigrants continue to pour into the United States? For McDougall, the answer to both questions was obviously no. As support of his contentions, he offered a photograph of his own five healthy, outdoorsy, dolicho-blond, and presumably tall children.29 (See figure 23.6, McDougall’s children.) They pose in profile, the better to show off the length of their heads. Clearly McDougall was doing his part to counter race suicide.
Fig. 23.5. “A Polish Jew,” in Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home (1922).
Fig. 23.6. William McDougall’s children, in William McDougall, Is America Safe for Democracy? (1921).
AS NOTED, the U.S. Congress had already legislated immigration restriction, and it returned to the issue in 1920, led by Madison Grant’s colleague Harry H. Laughlin, head of the Eugenics Record Office’s research program, who served Congress as an official “expert eugenics agent.” Facing the prospect of renewed immigration, and following continual lobbying by Laughlin, Kenneth Roberts, and other race-minded restrictionists, Congress acted. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 limited each country’s quota of immigrants to 3 percent of that country’s population in the United States in 1910. But with anti-immigrant sentiment running high, temporary measures seemed inadequate to address a permanent threat. Congress began holding hearings on further restricting immigration.
The only countertestimony came at the behest of New York’s liberal Jewish congressman Emanuel Celler, who represented a heavily immigrant district. And even that was rushed and qualified. Herbert S. Jennings, a biology professor at Johns Hopkins, had studied with Charles Davenport at Harvard and, as a graduate student, had even rented a room in Davenport’s house. Repeatedly postponed until November 1923, Jennings’s testimony on Laughlin’s materials showed that the region sending the most people into insane asylums was not any place in southern or eastern Europe; it was Ireland—now nestled within the Nordic fold.30
Paying Jennings no heed, the immigration committee passed its draconian measure. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, aimed particularly at Italians and Jews, limited immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 census, which had been taken before the great southern and eastern European increase. These quotas remained in force until 1965. Looking back, the commissioner general of immigration credited Roberts’s articles and books and the Saturday Evening Post’s coverage of the immigration issue as definitive in persuading Congress to curtail immigration.31
IN THE early 1920s Americans at the summit of American politics and industry popularized the science of white alien races. In “Whose Country Is This?” (1921), Vice President Calvin Coolidge spoke to readers of Good Housekeeping—the most popular American women’s magazine in the era—warning that the United States must allow only the right sort of immigrant in, one with “a capacity for assimilation” to the America of the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, Harvard College. The wrong sort, who comes expressly to “tear down,” must be barred by limitations according to “racial tradition or a national experience.” Coolidge mixes up races, nationalities, and politics in a manner thoroughly characteristic of the times, inveighing against racial “deterioration” from the mixing of peoples of divergent races, that is, Italians and Jews: “we must face the situation unflinchingly…[not be] so sentimental…. There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons.”32 In October of the following year, President Warren G. Harding recommended Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color by name in a speech, bolstering its esteem.
The Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer had already been pushing the work of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard and publishing Kenneth Roberts’s reports on immigration as a national catastrophe. In 1924 Lorimer upped the ante with a series of articles on new immigrants from Europe by Stoddard, who wrapped himself in the mantle of science by importing entire hunks of Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, complete with Ripley’s photos of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean racial types, cephalic indices, and Grant’s ridiculous maps of the European races, showing Germany with alternating Nordic and Alpine stripes. Stoddard located “the racial factor” as the root cause “of the world’s problems.”33 “Racial” as in Europeans and Japanese. Building on this published onslaught of Nordic chauvinism, real life added the specter of a newly invigorated Ku Klux Klan.
The original Ku Klux Klan, founded after the Civil War as an antiblack, anti-Republican militia, had withered during Reconstruction under federal antiterrorist prosecution. However, the hysteria of the First World War years gave it a new foundation in 1915 on Stone Mountain, Georgia. This new Klan of the 1920s cast a wider net than the old, no longer limiting its attacks to black people with political ambitions. In the 1920s its five million members—spread from Maine to Oregon and from Indiana to Florida—took out after “Katholics, Kikes, and Koloreds,” or, less poetically and more accurately, after Catholics, Jews, black people, foreigners, organized labor, and the odd loose woman.34 In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 police and sheriff’s deputies joined Klansmen in a pogrom against African Americans, destroying homes, businesses, and lives in an attack hardly mourned as an assault on Americans. It was as though black Americans constituted some kind of alien race living outside the category of Americans. Thinking along Klan lines was just that widespread.
Klansmen came very close to taking over the Democratic Party in the ten-day-long Democratic presidential nominating convention in New York City in 1924. With Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Catholic grandson of immigrants, one of the two most likely nominees (the other was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, the Georgian William McAdoo), anti-Catholic, pro-Klan delegates blocked the incorporation of an anti-Klan plank in the party platform.* McAdoo forces fought the anti-Klan plank with the support of William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate, a fight that included Bryan’s kneeling in prayer for unity on the convention floor.35 By the end, a New York Times editorial lamented, “The Southern States have lifted up their hand against Governor Smith not on personal but on religious grounds…. They are against him simply and solely because he is a Catholic, and because the Klan has made itself such a political power in their States that they dare not go against its command to exclude Catholics from public office in the United States.”36 The fo
llowing year witnessed the spectacle of thousands of Klansmen in full hooded regalia marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
For Coolidge, Harding, and others of their ilk, race and nation equaled political ideology, with the right races and nations assimilating into middle-class, Anglo-Saxon America, and the alien races and nations kicking up sand in their demands for workers’ rights. Coolidge extended the peril across the generations: “The unassimilated alien child menaces our children” just as surely “as the alien industrial worker…menaces our industry.”37 From father to son and mother to daughter, alien races remained alien.
THE EARLY 1920s also witnessed the most brazen anti-Semitic publications, coming not from some weird fringe but from Henry Ford, the heroic symbol of American industry and an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits.38 Ford embodied twentieth-century American technological progress as the “Flivver King,” who was mass-producing Model T automobiles for the great American middle class. By the end of 1913, his Dearborn, Michigan, assembly line had produced 500,000 cars.39 A self-proclaimed pacifist, Ford had attempted to end the war by sponsoring a hastily organized “peace ship” to Europe in 1915.40 By then he had also embraced a notion gaining credence in Europe, the belief that “the Jew” had caused the war. That conviction moved Ford to create a means of publicizing this idea in the form of a newspaper that came in every new Model T automobile.
The History of White People Page 32
