Stoddard, T. Lothrop 1883–1950

In the opening pages of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel about wealthy “careless people,” the character Tom Buchanan is depicted as an arrogant, immoral bully and a white supremacist. “Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” he asks the novel’s narrator, noting that “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.” While Buchanan might have been a product of Fitzgerald’s imagination, every well–informed reader at the time recognized his comment as a reference to The Rising Tide of Color against White World–Supremacy by T. Lothrop Stoddard.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Stoddard was descended from a prominent New England family that traced its roots back to colonial America. His father, John Lawson Stoddard, had traveled throughout the world and become a household name in the United States due to his popularity as a speaker on the exotic sights of far–off lands (his lectures are still available).

A lawyer and historian with a doctorate from Harvard, Lothrop Stoddard earned his own reputation as one of the racist intelligentsia in the first half of the twentieth century, second in importance only to the eugenicist Madison Grant. These nativists, who tended to be from Brahmin backgrounds that emphasized the importance of “good breeding,” were concerned about the flood of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. A number of them, including Stoddard, testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in the hearings leading to passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. Some of these activists were naturally drawn to the eugenics movement, which concluded that the peoples of northern Europe who had settled the United States were genetically superior to the more recent arrivals, and they became well known as authorities in the field, despite having no formal scientific training. Stoddard himself was a member of the Galton Society, an organization of racial determinists formed as an alternative to the American Anthropological Association, which was perceived as increasingly dominated by Jews and Bolsheviks.

While Stoddard was one of the most prominent racial propagandists, the belief in the fundamental importance of race in human affairs and national well–being was commonplace at the time. Popular magazines as well as a number of academics and intellectuals expressed concern over the presence of so many hyphenated Americans and encouraged a view of racial competition in which whites in general and Nordics in particular had to act out of racial solidarity.

Among the many books Stoddard wrote, The Rising Tide of Color was by far the most influential. Published in 1920, it offered a view of World War I as “a headlong plunge into race suicide” that pitted whites against each other and fractured their racial solidarity, much to the advantage of the colored world, which watched from the sidelines with “the light of undreamed–of hopes” in their eyes. Although Stoddard regarded the Nordics as far superior to the other European subraces (the Alpines and Mediterraneans) he nevertheless found it imperative for these three groups to unite in the face of the threat posed by other races, and from the “yellow race” in particular. Stoddard dismissed blacks as inferior savages, and it was “Asiatics” whom he perceived as whites’ most serious competitors in the struggle to control Africa and “mongrel–ruled” Latin America. Among the Asiatics, Stoddard believed that the Japanese were the greatest danger, having already defeated “one of the great white Powers” in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904. However, he saw an additional threat to whites emerging from the Great War: The leaders of Bolshevism, “the traitor within the gates,” were attempting to foment a race war as a tactic in its assault on civilization by urging “discontented colored men” throughout the world to seek revenge. In The Revolt against Civilization, published in 1922, Stoddard elaborated on Bolsheviks as comprising hereditary defectives led by alienated Jews.

As the passage from Gatsby suggests, The Rising Tide of Color was well known and widely cited at the time. An editorial in the Saturday Evening Post recommended that “every American should read” the book, and in a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, President Warren Harding cited Stoddard’s book as evidence that the race issue in the United States was only a “phase” of a problem that the whole world had to confront.

Stoddard also viewed the “Jewish Question” as a matter of race, which led him to propose the Khazar theory of Jewish racial background, which posits that modern Jews are not descended from the ancient Hebrews. Instead this pseudo–anthropological approach (which is still promoted by neo–Nazi groups) maintains that the Jews were originally a tribe of nomadic Semites, and that they intermingled genetically with many other peoples during their sojourns. Eventually, two subgroups emerged: the Sephardim around the Mediterranean, and the Ashkenazim in eastern Europe. The Sephardim, the “aristocracy of Jewry,” were characterized by a slender build, finely–cut features, and a generally “harmonic’’(i.e., racially unmixed) make–up. The first Jews to come to America were nearly all Sephardim, according to Stoddard. In contrast, he claimed, the Ashkenazim—who had immigrated only recently but in very large numbers, so that they now constituted some 90 percent of the American Jewish population—were short, thick–set, and coarse–featured, reflecting their greater “mixture of diverse bloods,” especially with the Khazars of southern Russia, whose fusion with the Jews was responsible for the profound differences, not only in physical appearance but also in temperament and mentality, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Thus, the traits of the Ashkenazim were incompatible with traditional American ideals and values.

In 1940—before implementation of the Final Solution but well after the Jews had been herded into ghettos and their property confiscated by the Third Reich— Stoddard traveled through Germany, observing daily life and meeting with the Nazi regime’s leading scientists and top officials, including Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler himself. In the published account of his experiences, Into the Darkness, Stoddard concluded that both Mein Kampf and the Nazi state were based on sound eugenic principles. Inside Germany, he reported, the Jewish problem was regarded as a passing phenomenon, and more attention was being paid, properly, to regeneration of the Germanic stock, which had lost some of its finest racial elements because of the Great War and the reduced birth rate during the postwar depression.

During the interwar period, Stoddard’s books were standard reading at military institutions such as the Army War College, the Navy War College, and the Army Industrial College, and Stoddard himself was often asked to lecture to their students on topics such as race and world affairs. Ironically, just before the entry of the United States into World War II, Stoddard’s name was placed on a list of persons to be investigated by army intelligence in case of war.

In the early twenty–first century, Stoddard’s ideas are still praised, and his books promoted, by numerous contemporary organizations with racist or neo–Nazi sympathies, such as National Alliance, Stormfront, and American Renaissance.