“ White supremacy Challenged”: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of color
One hundred years ago today … One of the most influential and mainstream documents of US racism ever was out from Charles Scribner’s Sons and available in NYC bookstores, one of the Times’ “most important recent books.”
Dust jacket, first edition of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920. Wikicommons.
The book came with a map showing how the races of various colors were threatening white supremacy.
"Distribution of the primary races" from Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920). Wikicommons.
One of the unnerving things, in retrospect, is just how mainstream it was. For example, reading the detailed summary and review in the Tribune, it becomes apparent that even readers who sided against Stoddard took his ideas seriously. The review is posted here in its entirety. We urge you to read it, to see how one hundred years ago, a white author could make a living in the US writing about how the Nordic race–white northern Europeans–was going to lose its rightful place at the top of civilization if it is not careful, subsumed by the “colored races,” especially the people of Japan, China, and the “Mahometan countries.”
New York Tribune, 2 May, 1920, p. 93.
Stoddard’s book is famously described, thinly veiled, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1924). Fitzgerald and Stoddard shared a publisher: Scribner’s.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, MAY 2, 2020.
TAGS: racism, white supremacy, Lothrop Stoddard, Scribner’s,