The Past is a Foreign Country

A recurring series featuring old things that look utterly alien today

While leafing through old copies of Time, I got back to the very first issue, published March 3, 1923. I stopped abruptly when I saw a full-page ad.

The handsome devil featured in the ad looks like a star of the silent movies but he is, in fact, the American journalist and historian Lothrop Stoddard. If you’re unfamiliar with the intellectual climate of the first third of the 20th century, you probably haven’t read his name before. And yet, it may seem familiar. Slightly. For a reason you can’t identify.

If so, you likely have hazy memories of reading The Great Gatsby — and a scene in which Lothrop Stoddard and his most famous book appear.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well 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.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was the word we —”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

The garbling of the name — it’s Stoddard, not Goddard — is deliberate. As is the muddled title, which should actually be The Rising Tide of Color. The Great Gatsby was published only a few years after The Rising Tide of Color and Scott Fitzgerald could be sure that his readers knew Lothrop Stoddard’s name and the title of his most famous book. So Fitzgerald is portraying Tom Buchanan — born to wealth, smug, irresponsible — as a poseur who fancies himself something of an intellectual. Exactly the sort of person who would read Lothrop Stoddard.

So who was Stoddard? It’s all explained in the ad.

Lothrop Stoddard was an apostle of eugenics and white supremacy.

Note that I am not using the latter term in its recently fashionable sense as a synonym for “racism.” Stoddard very explicitly analyzed America and the world in racial terms, with a racial hierarchy dominated by “Nordics” or “the white man,” a hierarchy he labelled “white supremacy.” And he warned, as the ad puts it, that “white world supremacy is in danger.”

Stoddard’s audience was enormous. And enormously influential. As the ad mentions, President Warren Harding was a fan. And the “Lord Northcliffe” the ad mentions was Alfred Harmsworth, the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror who was, in many ways, the British William Randolph Hearst.

The ad also mentions that Stoddard’s work is “appearing in translation on the Continent.” Indeed, it was. And it found an eager audience.

In The Revolt Against Civilization, published in 1922, Stoddard coined the term “Under-Man” to describe racially inferior sorts. It is apparently a play on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Super-Man.” Translated into German, it became Untermensch. And that is the chilling word which the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg used to label those the Nazis intended to eliminate from their “racially healthy” society. Untermensch became the key term in the Nazi vocabulary of mass murder.

And Rosenberg explicitly credited it to Lothrop Stoddard.

I’m sure, when it appeared in 1923, this ad was mundane, just another page in a magazine. But today? It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes the past really is a distant and inscrutable land.