The History of White People (40 page)

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.

L
IKE 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).