Lothrop Stoddard - Biography

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 argued that 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.