When I wrote here about The Great Gatsby, I called attention to the scene, early in the book, wherein Tom Buchanan "violently" interjects into a polite, vapid conversation some reflections on his recent reading material:
"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 Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
"Well, it's a fine book and everyone 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."
A bully and a dope, and the theme of intellectual and moral vacancy is thus nakedly displayed on page 17 of my paperback edition. Now comes Ian Frazier, in the current New Yorker, to explain that this incident from the novel wasn't wholly invented. Here is his account of The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History," by Madison Grant, published in 1912:
The preposterousness of "The Passing of the Great Race" approaches the sublime. To summarize: according to Grant, all of Western civilization was created by a race of tall, blond, warlike people who ventured down from Northern Europe every so often to help start great cultures, such as ancient Egypt, and Rome, before retiring into their northern forests. Over time, a lot of these Nordics became "mongrelized" by mixing with "inferior races" (Grant's books cannot be described without the use of many quotation marks), or else they killed one another off in internecine wars because of their bravery and their love of fighting, as they were doing at that very moment in the Great War. By Grant's reckoning, the greatest men in Western history had been Nordics. Among the stars he claimed for the team, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Dante all clearly possessed Nordic blood, as he had determined by careful study of the shapes of their heads in busts.
"All scientific stuff," as Tom says. Grant had a popularizer, Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard Ph.D. in history whose life had been changed by reading The Passing of the Great Race. He did for Grant what Huxley did for Darwin, which included traveling around defending the theories of the Great Man. Stoddard wrote his own book, The Rising Tide of Color, and it seems to be the one Fitzgerald had in mind when he had Tom expatiate on a book called The Rise of the Coloured Empires. Note that the author's name, "this man Goddard," is an amalgamation of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. The kicker is that Charles Scribner's Sons was the publisher of both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lothrop Stoddard. It shows how respectable Stoddard's views were, and also that Fitzgerald, in one of the great American books, aimed a sharpened dart at his own meal ticket. It doesn't make you love The Great Gatsby and its author less.
Frazier's whole article is engrossing, not least on Stoddard's evangelizing itinerary. He debated W.E.B. Du Bois on the question "Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?" (the poster shown above was publicity for the event) and lectured at Tuskegee University on the superiority of the Nordic race. Hitler wrote a fan letter to Madison Grant after reading in translation The Passing of the Great Race.
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