AS WE HAVE seen, the teachings of Lysenko offer a convenient background for a new and novel type of racism. Whether such a doctrine will develop in Russia, and if so, how much harm it will bring the world, only the future can decide. No such doubt can exist, however, regarding the enormity of crimes which stemmed from Nazi racial theories. Never before in history has evil of such magnitude been so intimately connected with crackpot science.
Antisemitism in Germany, as everyone knows, was much older than the Nazis. Like the antisemitism of other European countries, it has a long and infamous history reaching back into the early Middle Ages. Protestant readers who associate its origin with Medieval Catholicism and the Inquisition may be surprised to learn that in Germany, the first influential and passionate anti-Semite was Martin Luther. His solution of the German “Jewish problem” was a simple one. Drive them out of Germany. “Country and streets are open to them,” he wrote. “. . . They are a heavy burden like a plague, pestilence, misfortune. . . .” For Jews who refuse to leave he recommended, “that into the hands of the young strong Jews and Jewesses be placed flails, axes, mattocks, travels, distaffs, and spindles, and they be made to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their noses as it is put upon the shoulders of the children of Adam.” He further suggested, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire . . . that their houses be broken up and destroyed . . . and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies . . . in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us.”
Intense German nationalism, coupled with the doctrine of a Master Race destined to rule the world, did not come until much later; in fact it had its first theoretical formulation in the philosopher Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, 1807. Oddly enough, the earliest anthropological defense of Nordic superiority was not by a German but by the French nobleman, Comte Joseph de Gobineau. It ran to four volumes, published in 1853-5 (the first volume was translated into English in 1915 under the title, The Inequality of Human Races). Gobineau had little interest in nationalism. His main concern was to combat the notion of democracy which had been made popular by the French Revolution, and to defend the virtues of aristocratic rule. By stirring together a mass of anthropological facts and superstitions, he arrived at a hierarchy of races with the Nordic (tall, blonde, fair-skinned, blue-eyed) at the top and the Negro at bottom.
Gobineau’s views greatly excited Richard Wagner, the composer, and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain was an Englishman, but he had settled in Germany where he became imbued with the growing German sense of destiny. In 1899, he published his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the second great work in the history of the Nordic myth, and a book of tremendous influence on the thinking of German people. In essence, Chamberlain combined Gobineau’s theory of Nordic superiority with German patriotism and vigorous antisemitism.
The third great name in the history of German racism is a full-fledged professional anthropologist, Professor Hans F. K. Günther, of the University of Jena. Throughout the Nazi movement, he was their most distinguished authority on racial questions. It would be foolish, of course, to suppose that men like Günther, or such colleagues in racist anthropology as Ludwig Woltmann and Ludwig Schemann, were responsible for the Nazi crimes against the Jews. Antisemitism had a much deeper root in the cultural paranoia of the Germans. But the books of men like Günther stand as striking testaments to the ease with which a science can be perverted by strong emotional prejudices which a scientist derives not from his subject matter but from cultural forces surrounding him.
Günther admitted Germany was a mixture of races, but he thought it contained a higher proportion of pure Nordics than any other nation. He went to great lengths in his books to explain how a Nordic differs from a member of an inferior race. He keeps himself cleaner, for example. According to Günther, both soap and hairbrush are Nordic inventions. He is more athletic (in the Olympic Games held in Germany in 1936, Hitler was so miffed when Negroes took prizes that he refused to shake hands with them). He prefers the colors blue and pale green. Freckles on Nordic women are acceptable. Günther suspects they are a Nordic trait. But to sing about a “Nut-Brown Maid” is much to be condemned because dark-skinned maids are not Nordic. Nordic women are modest. In contrast to women of other races they keep their legs together when they sit in streetcars. As Wallace Deuel writes in People Under Hitler, from which the above samples are drawn, “Dr. Günther . . . apparently has devoted considerable time to this [streetcar-sitting] problem.”
All racial mixtures are bad, according to Professor Günther. The hope of Germany is to prevent them and to increase the purity of the Nordic strain. Unfortunately, the very virtues of the Nordic are causing his decline. For example, he is very brave, hence more likely to become a soldier and get killed. Being adventurous, he emigrates. Being virtuous, he marries late and has fewer children. And being innocent of guile, he is easily trapped into marrying the “diabolically alluring” women of other races.
Under Hitler, the rising antisemitism of the German people—greatly stimulated of course by party propaganda, and given “scientific” backing by Professor Günther and other anthropologists—reached a crescendo. Never before in history has a nation set about so coldly and methodically to exterminate a people. There is no need to retell here in more than brief summary the now familiar story of this nightmare horror. A caste system was set up, depending on the amount of one’s Jewish blood, with rigid and complex laws determining who could marry whom. Sex relations between Jews and Aryans were punishable by imprisonment. Even prostitutes were protected by law from “race defilement” by Jewish patrons. Only business contacts between Jews and Aryans were not considered a form of “race shame.” Familiarities such as dancing and playing games were discouraged. Jews were sentenced to prison for kissing Aryan girls even when the girls desired it. “By kissing an Aryan girl, the Jew has insulted not only the girl herself, but also the entire German nation,” the court declared in one such case.
Eventually, as the world knows, Jews were denied the right to work in professions and in business, their property was confiscated, their citizenship removed. In the final hysterical culmination of hate, came the concentration camps, the gas chambers, and the unbelievably sadistic medical experiments.
In this mounting madness, German pseudo-anthropology reached its greatest heights. “The non-Nordic man takes up an intermediate position between the Nordic man and the . . . ape,” wrote Herman Gauch, in his New Elements of Race Investigation, 1934. Here is another typical declaration of “scientific” fact—from an address by Julius Streicher in 1935: “The blood particles of a Jew are completely different from those of a Nordic man. Hitherto one has prevented this fact being proved by microscopic investigation.” Streicher, you recall, edited Der Sturmer, a violent, pornographic hate sheet that specialized in obscene stories about the Jews.
The word “Aryan”, as used by Hitler finally lost all rational meaning. The Japanese, for example, had to be declared Aryan when they became allies. A Nazi journalist happened to have a grandmother who was an American Sioux Indian. In 1938, the Chamber of the Press, after much anthropological deliberation, actually ruled that Sioux Indians were officially Aryan! (No rulings are on record for other Indian tribes).
The outstanding literary expression of the Nazi mythology was, of course, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ranking second was The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a 700-page work for educated Germans by the leading philosopher of Nazism, Alfred Rosenberg. All the usual psychotic elements of the work of an extreme crackpot are in this book. Orthodox anthropology and history are simply brushed aside. The “myth” is the German Nordic’s awareness of his racial purity and his destiny to rule the world. Everything good is labeled “Aryan.” Everything bad stems from Jews, Catholics, Russians, and orthodox Protestants. Even Christ was an Aryan, though his views were quickly corrupted by Jewish influence. It is worth noting that reputable German scholars did not take the book seriously when it appeared. They ignored it. But the book’s influence was enormous.
No nation has been free of the poisons of racism and the United States is no exception. Our greatest sin, of course, is our treatment of our colored people—a sin inextricably bound up with racial pseudo-science. Even in the northern states, today the average white probably thinks of the Negro as slightly inferior by heredity, and in the South it is almost universally believed. In the light of modern anthropology, these views are on a level with the view that the earth is flat, but with one important difference—they are capable of causing infinitely more suffering. When Negroes are given environmental opportunities equal to that of whites, they make the same creative and intellectual achievements. There have been hundreds of carefully controlled research attempts to find a genetic difference between the two races which would justify ranking one above the other. All have failed. George Bernard Shaw summed up the American scene perfectly when he wrote (in Man and Superman) “. . . the haughty American nation . . . makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.”
In the early history of the United States, when racial feelings were the greatest, many books and pamphlets were written to prove the Negro inferior. It is difficult, however, to find a single work of this type that purports to be written by a professional anthropologist. Most of it is religious in character, relying chiefly on the Bible for support. There are many variations, but the basic themes of these shabby works are that God created different races which He did not intend to intermarry, and that the Negroes were ordained a race of servants. This view was held throughout the entire South. “Show me a nigger who can do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb,” John Calhoun once declared, “and I’ll admit he’s a human being.”
It seems impossible now that any intelligent person could have regarded the Negro as a sub-human species, yet this view was by no means uncommon in the South even as late as the early years of this century. In 1867 the Reverend Buckner H. Payne, writing under the pseudonym of “Ariel,” published a booklet (later expanded to a larger work) titled The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status? Payne’s Conclusion was that the Negro is an animal without a soul. It remained, however, for Charles Carroll, a resident of St. Louis, to give this demented theory definitive formulation. His two books on the subject —The Negro a Beast, 1900, and The Tempter of Eve, 1902—set a record in racial literature that probably will never be surpassed.
Carroll held the view that the Negro was created along with the animals as a higher ape, and for the purpose of providing Adam and his descendents with servants to perform tasks of manual labor around Eden. He possessed a mind, in common with other mammals, but not a soul. The “Serpent” who tempted Eve was in reality a Negro maidservant. The age-old problem of where Cain got his wife is solved neatly. Cain married a Negro—the first example in history of the heinous crime of amalgamation of man and beast. All the races except the white are hybrid products of mixtures between the race of Adam and Negroid animals.b
Do these hybrid offspring have souls? There is no indication Carroll even considered this a perplexing question. They do not, he declares. “Man cannot transmit to his offspring by the Negro,” he writes, “the least vestige of the soul creation. Hence, no mixed blood has a soul.” (Italics his.) Brilliant intellectual achievements by mulattos do not bother Carroll. “The mere fact that Alexandre Dumas possessed a fine mind is no evidence that he possessed a soul.”
If the red, yellow, and brown races, and all individuals who have a red, yellow, or brown ancestor do not have souls, then why bother sending missionaries to preach the Gospel to them? Like many crackpot scholars, Carroll maintains a striking consistency with his premises. The Lord never intended the Gospel to be preached to these half-breeds, he argues. That it is being done only indicates how sinful and corrupted and “negroized” modern churches have become. In fact almost all the ills which beset mankind since the Fall can be traced to a failure to recognize the bestial character of all peoples except the pure white descendants of Adam.
Carroll writes well. He quotes from eminent anthropologists. He reproduces tables of brain weights, and so on, designed to give “scientific” proof of his views. Ten illustrations in his earlier book are vicious caricatures of Negroes, contrasting them with pictures of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and white men and women. There is nothing to indicate Carroll considers himself in any way “prejudiced.” He is merely a humble “worker for the Lord,” in the great cause of expelling the “Negro from his present unnatural position in the family of men, and the resumption of his proper place among the apes.” He speaks of his opponents as “little narrow-minded bigots,” ignorant alike of both Scripture and modern science. A portrait of the author, in one of his books, shows him to be an intelligent looking man with dark hair and eyes, and a black mustache and beard. Apparently his first book sold fairly well because a minister named William G. Schell felt obliged to publish a reply in 1901 titled Is the Negro a Beast?
Of course no one in the South today, let us hope, believes the Negro lacks a soul. But many of Carroll’s anthropological arguments are still used in religious writings to prove the Negro’s inferiority. The most common one is the fact that the Negro brain is, on the average, slightly smaller than the white’s. But so is the white’s slightly smaller than the Eskimo, Polynesian, American Indian, and Japanese brain, not to mention the brain of two African tribes, the Kaffir and the Amaxosa. Even Neanderthal man had a larger brain than the modern white!
These variations in physical anthropology mean, of course, absolutely nothing as far as mental capacities are concerned. Yet an incredible amount of supposedly scientific works have been devoted to nonsense of this sort. In 1871, for example, Paul Broca, a French anthropologist with a broad skull, wrote five volumes to prove that the broader the head the better the brain, and that the French have particularly broad heads.
The widespread folk belief among ignorant whites that colored people are anatomically closer to the monkey than other races is totally without foundation. Every race has certain characteristics similar to those of apes, and it is always easier to see these traits in some other race than your own. The Negro’s thick lips, kinky hair, and small amount of body hair all mark him as further removed from the ape than a Caucasian. Apes have thin lips, straight hair, and lots of body hair.
The resemblance of whites to chimps forms an important part of a book which had considerable vogue in England and the United States when it first appeared in 1924. It was called The Mongol in our Midst, and was written by a physician named Francis G. Crookshank. The last edition, published in 1931, runs to 539 pages, with many amusing photographs. There are three major branches of the human race, Crookshank argues—White, Oriental, and Negro. The White branch is closely related to the chimpanzee, the Oriental to the orangutan, and the Negro to the gorilla. Because of breeding among races, there are occasional atavistic throw-backs—the Mongolian idiot indicates “orangoid” ancestors, the microcephalic and the schizophrenic are throw-backs to “chimpanzoid” relatives, and the Ethiopian idiot is a “gorilloid” type. Needless to say, all this is pseudo-science of the purest sort.
By far the most persuasive of the racist writers in the United States were two lawyers—Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Their works came closer than any others to the writings of Nazi anthropologists. Both men accepted the myth of Nordic superiority, and warned against the degeneration of our Nordic strain by racial mixing with alien types. It is significant that in one of Günther’s books, pictures of Grant and Stoddard appear with those of Gobineau and Chamberlain as the four great defenders of the Nordic ideal. The picture of Grant is a photograph of a bronze bust—probably to conceal the fact that he had a swarthy (i.e., non-Nordic) complexion.
Grant, who died in 1937, was a New York attorney, amateur zoologist, and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History. His two chief works on race problems are The Passing of the Great Race, 1916, and The Conquest of a Continent, 1933. Both books have introductions by the distinguished geologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to the everlasting embarrassment of Osborn’s admirers.
The best way to characterize Grant’s two books is by saying that they are eloquent attacks on the lines graven at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
. . . Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
Grant believes that America was originally settled by a racially pure strain of Protestant Nordics (This has been questioned by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka in his study, The Old Americans, 1925). Unfortunately, Grant continues, this superior stock, capable of carrying America to great heights, is rapidly being “debased” by a flood of immigrant “aliens.” As a result, we are rapidly becoming a nation of hybrids—a “racial chaos” such as existed in Rome before it fell. Fortunately we are still 70 percent Nordic and 80 percent Protestant. If we can only put a stop to these “alien invasions,” Grant writes, we may still grow in vigor and fulfill our destiny.
All racial inter-breeding, Grant thinks, is bad. “It must be borne in mind, that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of relatively recent developments, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”
The above statements have, of course, not the slightest scientific foundation. They are in the realm of folk beliefs, as mythological as the superstition that a “black baby” may be born to a white couple if one of the parents has a slight trace of Negro blood.
That the Negro is the lowest in the racial hierarchy is a fact Grant takes for granted. “. . . Evidence does exist,” he writes, “to show that the intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has. . . .” Even the mulatto who has enough white blood to “pass,” still has “intellectual and emotional traits” which “may insidiously go back to his black ancestry, and may be brought into the White race in this way.”
“The Southerners understand how to treat the Negro,” Grant declares, “with firmness and with kindness—and the Negroes are liked below the Mason and Dixon lines so long as they keep to their proper relations to the Whites. . . .” Grant’s solution of the “Negro problem” is to enact rigid state laws against intermarriage (we now have them in thirty states, by the way, many of which also prohibit White-Mongolian marriages), do everything possible to prevent social mixing, and finally, give the Negro birth control information so he will stop breeding so rapidly.
Lothrop Stoddard, another American attorney (with a Ph.D. from Harvard) holds substantially the same views as Grant. His best-known work, The Rising Tide of Color, was published in 1920 by Scribners. As the title suggests, the colored races (black, yellow, brown, and red) are rising like a great tide which threatens to engulf the superior whites. Like King Canute, Stoddard writes, the white man “seats himself upon the tidal sands and bids the waves be stayed. He will be lucky if he escapes with wet shoes.”
Race, according to Stoddard, is the very “soul” of a culture. Civilization is merely the body. “Let the soul vanish,” he says, “and the body moulders. . . .” What causes the race soul to vanish? Interbreeding. All racial mixtures are bad, and particularly bad when inferior races are involved. The more primitive the race, Stoddard contends, the more dominant its genes. “That is why crossings with the Negro are uniformly fatal.”
“If the present drift be not changed,” he continues, “we whites are all ultimately doomed. . . . And that would mean that the race obviously endowed with the greatest creative ability, the race which had achieved most in the past and which gave the richer promise for the future, had passed away, carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which the realization of man’s highest hopes depend. A million years of human evolution might go uncrowned, and earth’s supreme life-product, man, might never fulfill his potential destiny.”
It is astonishing how often that word “destiny” appears in the writings of men who assume their own race to be superior to all others. If the United States is to fulfill its destiny, Stoddard argues, it must somehow build “dikes” against the rising color tide. This can be done only if whites acquire a “true race-consciousness” and recognize the supreme importance of preserving superior hereditary strains.
One element must be fundamental in this new attitude, Stoddard insists, and “that element is blood. It is clean, virile, genius-bearing blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity, which, in anything like a favorable environment, will multiply itself, solve our problems, and sweep us on to higher and nobler destinies.”
In 1935, Scribners published another book by Stoddard on the same theme, Clashing Tides of Color. The “rising tide” has now become a “rip-tide—a confused welter of swirling eddies and choppy waves dashing against one another.” He finds the new racial doctrines of the Nazis “hard to evaluate,” but quotes favorably from the Nazi anthropologist, Günther. Stoddard’s latest book, published in 1940 by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, is a description of his trip to Germany shortly before the United States entered the war. Titled Into the Darkness, it is mildly critical of Hitler’s racial and eugenics program, but on the whole gives the impression that the author is not unsympathetic with many of Hitler’s racial aims.
Stoddard is not, of course, a trained anthropologist. Like Grant, he is a lawyer writing of topics about which he has only a novice’s understanding. This lack of scientific background is even more characteristic of the authors of less sophisticated racist works—Charles W. Gould’s America: a Family Matter, 1920; Earnest S. Cox’s White America, 1923; James D. Sayers’ Can the White Race Survive?, 1929; The Right to be Well Born, 1917, by a millionaire horsebreeder in Lexington, Ky., William E. D. Stokes; and numerous British works of similar theme such as James H. Curle’s Our Testing Time, 1926.
That none of these writers has status as a “scientist” is a point in the nation’s favor. It indicates that as intense and pervasive as our racial feelings are among the general population—and especially among the poorly educated—we are still far from the Nazi state on such matters. No recognized professors of anthropology are giving scientific sanction to racial hatreds, and the acceptance of racist books by leading publishers has virtually ceased since 1935.
The most violent antisemitic propaganda in America has always come from our scientific illiterates. A major source for the racial lies which these people spread is the well-known forgery, The Protocols of Zion. The Protocols are a crude, incoherent work purporting to be the minutes of a series of secret meetings at which Jewish leaders plot to control the world. Actually, they are copied from a French work by Maurice Joly, published in 1865, which attacked the rule of Napoleon III. Joly’s book had nothing whatever to do with Jews. Yet in spite of the fact that this forgery was completely exposed as early as 1921, the Protocols continue to turn up wherever anti-Jewish movements get underway. The Nazi philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, published them in 1923 with an elaborate commentary. At the moment, they are still being circulated in the United States by professional antisemites.
One curious work by an American, Samuel Roth (a New York City publisher of semi-erotica), is worth mentioning briefly. Titled Jews Must Live, and sub-titled, “An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization,” it has the questionable distinction of being the most antisemitic work ever penned by a native Jew. An appendix is headed “Do the Jews emit a peculiar odor?” The author’s answer is yes. Roth published the book himself (all of his books are published by himself) in 1934. It had few sales in the United States, but was widely reprinted in Germany and by Nazi organizations in other countries. (Roth’s latest book, The Peep-Hole of the Present, 1945, outlines a new system of philosophy and physics. The work is so obscure, confused, and badly proofread, however, that it was impossible to understand it well enough to include it in the chapter on Einstein’s opponents, where it properly belongs.)
If the reader is quick to smile at the folly of anyone who takes such nonsense seriously, let him pause to reflect a moment on how widespread in the United States are racial superstitions not one whit less absurd. During World War II, the Red Cross was forced by public pressure to maintain separate banks of blood plasma, one donated by whites and one by Negroes, although the plasma was identical. Every pair of drinking fountains in the South—one labeled “White” and the other “Colored”—stands as a shameful monument to the persistence of crackpot racial views.
Everyone remembers the parable of the Good Samaritan. Few realize, however, that the reason Jesus chose the Samaritan as an example of the true “neighbor” to be loved, was that in ancient Jerusalem Samaritans were the despised minority. Substitute “Negro” for “Samaritan” and you begin to understand the parable in the way it was understood by Christ’s listeners.
“Be beautiful, be natural, and be like God,” the Nazi Streicher once declared. “National Socialism restitutes the divine order and therefore works at the order of our Lord,” said Dr. Walter Gross, leader of Hitler’s Office for Race Politics. It would be difficult to find a greater blasphemy in the history of Christendom than the coupling of racial pseudo-science with the name of the Nazarene who taught a doctrine of universal love and compassion.