Tom Buchanan, "This Man Goddard" and Lothrop Stoddard

Those who have read or watched an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby are likely to remember the figure of Tom Buchanan--the husband of our protagonist and narrator Nick Carraway's cousin Daisy, who plays rather an important part in the book's deceptively simple plot. This Mr. Buchanan is a creature of extreme privilege in the true, socioeconomic, sense of the term, a polo-playing, Hamptons-residing member of the leisure class, unbound but protected, protected but unbound to such a degree that he and Daisy could afford to be utterly "careless" as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" as they "let other people clean up the mess they had made," not they but others always bearing the consequences.

As it happens when we meet Mr. Buchanan he seems to have taken a turn for the pseudo-intellectual to go by his giving Nick, and the reader, a brief lecture about "this man Goddard" and what he had to say regarding the superiority of the Nordic race to which he rather smugly tells them they all belong. As those who happened to read the book in an edition printed for students with footnotes may recall the reference to "this man Goddard" and his book The Rise of the Coloured Empires was apparently a reference to Lothrop Stoddard, author of the then-recent The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), where drawing on the "biological" analysis of race by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) some years earlier he interpreted human history, and the post-World War I crisis of Western imperialism through which he and his readers were living, from the standpoint of the theory. As this allusion implies, Stoddard, and Grant (who was not only an influence on Standard, but actually wrote the introduction to his book), were very well-known and influential figures at the time, such that Adolf Hitler wrote Grant that Passing of the Great Race was his Bible (never mind that Grant rejected the racial categorization "Aryan" as misleadingly linguistic in favor of the more "biological" Nordic, inclined to pacifism out of fear that war was especially damaging to a Nordic race given to "Berserker blood rage," and thought an overwhelmingly Alpine Germany racially inferior to a much more Nordic Britain--and even France--among much else irreconcilable with Nazi ideology). And of course the books and ideas of Stoddard et. al. played their part in politics at home, contributing to the nativist racial hysteria of the 1920s that saw the "Second" Ku Klux Klan wax powerful, and the U.S. government slam the gates shut in immigrants' faces and keep them so for decades.

Of course, it may seem that the theorizing of Mssrs. Stoddard and Grant has since fallen into obscurity--not least because of what their big fan Adolf Hitler did in its name--all as in spite of the resurgence of the far right this past half century, I cannot claim to have noticed anyone calling for renewed attention to those figures, as a great many biological racists continue to find it safer to hide behind "culture" (even as they treat "culture" as so unchangeable it may as well be genetics), and even the avowed biological racists argue for other positions in other ways. Certainly one does not see them worry about the ability of particular races to establish themselves in particular climates in Grant's zoological fashion (i.e. Race A does very well in temperate climes but in the tropics grows indolent and fails to reproduce itself, where it is the opposite with Race B). Nor does one see what was so important in the racism of their time, their conscious sub-division of the White--Caucasian--race into the groupings of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, as they parse the respective merits and demerits of these groups. (Thus did Grant weigh the superior "stamina," "stability and steadiness," and fidelity to country, family, law, "loyalty and truth" that made of Nordics superior fighters and rulers--so long as the "Berserker blood rage" did not get the better of them--against the likelihood of "[t]he Mediterranean race . . . probably [being] the superior . . . in intellectual attainments.") Indeed, the schema itself can seem awkward for today's racist given that not only do these cling to intelligence above all as their justification for their prejudices in a way with which Grant's claims sit uncomfortably (the qualified superiority in "stability and steadiness" by which Grant set so much store would seem cold comfort to today's I.Q. worshippers), but that the Mediterranean category necessarily includes peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that they openly despise so much that they go into paroxysms should anyone point out they are Caucasian at all--and indeed one may reasonably suspect this is the real reason why it is fashionable today to drop the concept of "Mediterranean," and prefer instead of "Caucasian," "European," cutting those groups out of "the club." (Thus have latterday race theorists stood Grant on his head--instead of abandoning a linguistic-cultural category for a biological one, turning back to culture/geography in line with their bigotry of the moment, all as many supposedly all-seeing and knowing "anti-racists" appear either oblivious to or complicit in the far from innocent redrawing of boundaries.)

Still, if much that Grant and Stoddard taught has been discarded even by those who might be most expected to be attracted to their thinking, these ideas did not simply vanish from the world in 1945, something of their thought enduring, such that reading those authors we encounter alongside the apparent relics of another time a great deal that is familiar in our own time. Not the least of this is the way that standing behind their deep racism was an even deeper hatred of human equality generally, of egalitarianism as such, with all this even clearer when I turned to Stoddard's subsequent book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (1922), and its explanation of revolution. As Stoddard had it revolution was a matter of the biologically inferior lower orders in society, which bear the burdens of civilization's complexity without partaking of its benefits, and finding the burden heavier than they were willing to bear, rebelled against civilization itself and smashed it--this all that he could see in the history of political revolution. Meanwhile it never seemed to occur to Stoddard that, even if one accepted his view (which I do not hesitate to dismiss as nonsense), one way to safeguard civilization might be to do what could be done to lighten the burden on those lower orders, and give them a share in the benefits, precisely because this went so much against the grain of his hatred of equality, which was if anything deepened by the revolution which weighed most on his mind in that period, the "ten days that shook the world." Likewise there is Stoddard's reaction to the then-recent invention of the I.Q. test, specifically his evident ecstasy at having a seemingly scientific way of "proving" the superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others in line with his "scientific" conceptions, thus also "proving" the undesirability of letting in more immigrants and the necessity of persons deriving from the country's "better" stocks to, even at the cost of sacrifices of personal comfort, raise larger families.

There is also the matter of the authors' prejudices against specific groups. There is the characterization of Latin America as the zone of the "Red" man, with the region's disorders a supposed warning to the world of the dangers of racial mixture, a process in which the virtues of the constituent elements fall by the wayside, while retaining only the weaknesses of the races mixed together, compounded by the lower mental stability that must go with the dissonances that go with there being two different human natures in the same person. There is his consideration of the Islamic world, which he acknowledged (with rather more forthrightness than today's racist) was not a racial group, with members of every race, and much of it undeniably White in any phenotypic sense (Stoddard specifically acknowledged that "Persians and Ottoman Turks, are largely white")--yet at the same time insisting that the Islamic religion hopelessly sundered even the (fairly considerable) White portion of the Islamic world from the rest of the (otherwise generally Christian) White race, even as this religiosity somehow did not divide them from the religiously far more removed Hindus of South Asia, such that he lumped Islam, and Hinduism, together in a "Brown Race," all as he made an exception for the (White) "Browns" of Northwest Africa," which he held would be brought back into the Western world's fold by the colonization of their region. (In short, biological race was everything, except when it wasn't--though there were exceptions to that too, which he apparently made less for any really convincing reason about Islam somehow being less of a divider between Northwest Africans and White Westerners than because he hoped Western colonization of the Maghreb would be a success, which was more plausible if the "natives" could be assimilated.) Stoddard's treatment of Russia was comparable. He regarded it as another part of the White world sundered from it by a non-biological factor, the Communist revolution that terrified and disgusted him more than anything else, though of course in light of his theory of revolution he discussed that revolution as consequence as well as cause of the event. Thus he made much of the Russian people's supposed inferior, unfitted-for-civilization nature ("Russian folk nature . . . made up chiefly of primitive racial strains, some [of them, like] the Tartars and other Asiatic nomad elements . . . distinctly 'wild' stocks which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilization")--and actually tried to use Leo Tolstoy to "prove" it! (Yes, Stoddard actually caps that particular pile of incoherence by quoting chunks of War and Peace to show that that man of immense culture, one of the most accomplished literary figures of the epoch, is evidence of the Russian people being less capable of civilization than other peoples, and especially the "truly" White.)

All of this remains very much with us, be it the racist's very often having a hatred of equality running deeper even than their racism, or the perversion of the tool that is the I.Q. test into the cult of the I.Q. test so hellbent on justifying societal inequality through reference to supposed innate differences in talent, and the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, nationalistic attitude that has indeed enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. One does not have to strain to hear the echo of the theorizing of this generation of "scientific" racists in the present-day mainstreaming of theories of a "Great Replacement" and calls that people of the "right" backgrounds sacrifice everything else for the sake of larger families. So too the North American racial irrationality toward Latin America that has a particularly ironic expression in the United States regarding residents of that region who are in ancestry, phenotype and culture indisputably Caucasian, White, European, Western or whatever else your preferred term as other and less than that, such that so much is made of categories like "Hispanic," and "true White" means "Non-Hispanic White." So does it also go with the equation of Muslims with a "Brown Race," such that if religious bigotry is not always synonymous with racism "Islamophobia" and racism are virtually inseparable, as bespoken by how a Western news media ever true to the tradition of Julius Streicher tirelessly depicts Muslims as Der Sturmer caricatures, with any exception that somehow enters into public apprehension an anomaly that must be explained away at once, and due solely to similarity to the stereotype in phenotype or dress Hindus and Sikhs end up victims of anti-Islamic hate crimes, with few even remarking the bigot's confusion (distinctions among the "Browns" not worth bothering with in their view). And so has it been in regard to Russia, with anti-Slavic and anti-Asiatic racism part of the Anti-Communist package, all as in a geopolitical contest with even a Russia under a ferociously Anti-Communist leadership Western intellectual orthodoxy has not hesitated to resurrect the relevant prejudices. The result is that while reading Stoddard and Grant is far from enlightening in the conventional sense of the term knowledge of their noxious work can and does illuminate some of the sources of the poison of our politics today.