Lothrop Stoddard:
A Prophet We Should Study

2,207 words

We can’t say we weren’t warned. Around the time of the First World War, when Europe ruled nearly every part of the Earth, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard wrote a series of highly regarded books and articles about the global racial situation that argued European global rule was coming unglued. Stoddard, a Harvard-educated scholar, was also pro-white figure; he was consequently memory-holed by the establishment after World War II and his death in 1950. It’s precisely because of this we need to continue listening to his words.

Everything that Stoddard wrote has stood the test of time. His division of European races into what he called Nordics in northern Europe and Mediterraneans in Southern Europe are reaffirmed by recent DNA studies. He correctly predicted that Yugoslavia would fall apart in Racial Realities in Post-War Europe, a resurgence of Islam in The New World of Islam, and hostilities between America and Japan two decades before those became reality in The Rising Tide of Color. He also predicted the geopolitical situation which has come to be called “The Clash of Civilizations.”

Stoddard’s clairvoyance is best exemplified with raw imagery.

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, A Proud Yankee

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was born in 1883 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1905, Boston University in 1908, and then received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 1914. His first book, The French Revolution in San Domingo, was his doctoral dissertation. He was accused of being in the KKK in 1923 by Hearst’s International. I don’t know if this is true or not, but the expose shows that white advocates were under pressure from the mainstream even then; he also received death threats over the phone. He was a member of the board of the American Birth Control League and other organizations like the American Historical Association.

Stoddard was from a prominent New England family. His immigrant ancestor was Anthony Stoddard, father of the Puritan minister Solomon Stoddard. He was also related to Sir George Downing, for whom Downing Street in London is named, and Jonathan Edwards, the minister who preached the famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Theodore’s father was John Lawson Stoddard, who wrote and lectured on his travels and also wrote hymns and poetry. His mother, Mary Brown, was born in Maine. Stoddard men frequently married women with esteemed families as well – many were physicians. Theodore’s direct ancestors were New England thinking men, not soldiers or pioneers. A look at his family tree also shows a pattern of his male ancestors marrying older than the norm.

Stoddard, curiously, has no official biography despite his prominence. I gleaned information about his life from biographies of his white advocate colleagues, written by authors hostile to white advocacy, as well as from snippets available on the internet. I don’t know if he has a collection of papers anywhere.

As a result of not having a book-length biography from a sympathetic or fair-minded author, there is no philosophical exploration of why, exactly, a wealthy person from such a prominent family, in a mostly white part of the country, would become a racial advocate. Stoddard’s “redpilling” moment is a big mystery. I can only remark that it is common for successful people of that time to be advocates for their own kind. I’ll attempt to argue that Stoddard arrived at his point of view through rational study, and that his conclusions are not too far removed from the intellectual trends of New English “Yankee” culture. Additionally, Stoddard involved himself in the Protestant intellectual civil war between Fundamentalists and non-Fundamentalists. This historical rift is of importance, as it was both a distraction from white advocacy and white advocacy by other means.

The Basic Cultural Ideas of Puritan New England

Lothrop Stoddard’s clergy family had an outsized influence on ideas within American culture generally. New England was founded by a specific sub-segment of English culture usually known as the Puritans. Puritans were passionately convicted radical Protestants who sought to eliminate lingering Roman Catholic traditions in the Church of England. The New England colonists made Puritanism the official religion of all their territories save Rhode Island. The religion of Puritanism still exists today, albeit rebranded as Congregationalism.

Congregationalist thought can be described as vanilla Protestantism. Each congregation is self-governing. Most of the Church’s theology was developed by John Calvin, whose key premise was the Doctrine of Predestination. According to Calvin, God knew would be saved and who would not be saved from the beginning of creation. Those saved were called “The Elect.” The religion was fatalist. The only way someone could show they were among “The Elect” was to be healthy and prosperous. New Englanders thus worked hard every day. They also had a sense of “chosenness” about themselves. The work-hard aspect of New England’s culture has come to be called the Protestant Work Ethic, although I suspect that this work ethic is more a racial trait developed by those with European hunter-gatherer DNA. One needs to innovate and produce to survive the northern winters.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century faded into memory, the grandchildren of the Puritans began to reconsider the Doctrine of Predestination and the concept of the Trinity. As a result, the Unitarian and Universalist denominations developed in New England out of the Congregationalist Church. The Unitarians and Universalists eventually merged again, creating a religion similar to that of the Quakers but with Puritan roots. When Congregationalism and Unitarianism split apart, there was no society-wide trauma in New England akin to what happened in Germany after Luther. The split was so long in coming that few were truly upset when it finally happened. For example, President John Adams became a Unitarian, but his son President John Quincy Adams remained a Trinitarian Congregationalist; there was no bitter falling-out over this. The church the Mayflower Pilgrims founded even became a Unitarian-Universalist Church.

In the early 19th century, the New England states ceased having an official religion. The population didn’t become atheistic as a result; rather, a great many new religious movements developed, including Mormonism and its offshoots, Seventh Day Adventists, Transcendentalists, a flurry of Evangelical sects, and Christian Scientists. According to the information I’ve found on Stoddard, he was an agnostic, a lifelong practicing Unitarian, and a Christian Scientist until his wife died from untreated cancer in 1940. I don’t know how true any of this is and I don’t know the order in which Stoddard embraced or left these views. Most of the available literature on Stoddard emphasize he was a lifelong Unitarian.

The Unitarian-Universalist belief system is a broad spirituality that has a great deal of room for the concepts of scientific humanism, and in 1926, Stoddard wrote a book called Scientific Humanism that explained his philosophy. Like his racial ideas, the themes of Scientific Humanism still pass the test of time. Stoddard argued that although Americans were surrounded with comfortable amenities that were the results of scientific endeavor, most of the population remained influenced by emotionalism and backwards thinking:

The amount of disguised emotion today masquerading as thought is literally astounding.  Nowhere do we see it more plainly than in the current tendency to “think in phrases”; in other words, to avoid thinking by embracing some clever catchword or resounding “principle” which seems to settle the question and bring conviction to perplexed souls.  This is a very insidious evil, because it so subtly debauches the intellect and kills creative thought…This is a sloganized age; an age of searching, not for solutions of social problems, but…”solving words”…Solomon could control the evil spirits because he knew the right names for all of them.  Address an evil spirit by the right name and you’ve got him. And this age is obsessed with the idea that social evils will yield to the same treatment.

The Scopes Monkey Trial 

Scientific Humanism was written partially as a response to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial held in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, on the question of whether or not it was illegal to teach evolution in public schools.  Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution called into question the creation story in the Book of Genesis, and those American Protestants that chose to believe the creation story over the ideas of science became known as Fundamentalists. In retrospect, it is clear that the Fundamentalists in the 1920s were fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The Scopes Monkey Trial was an optics disaster for the Fundamentalists. They went underground and didn’t re-emerge until the 1970s, with the so-called Religious Right entering politics, when the Carter administration backed a case, Green v. Connally, which would have denied tax exempt status to religious schools that did not integrate. By the time of the Carter administration, it was clear to all that the “civil rights” revolution was a disaster that empowered black criminality, and religious schools were a refuge from that crime wave. The Religious Right quickly gained traction as an important base of the Republican Party by 1980.

However, there were lingering divisions between the fledgling Religious Right and the Unitarian-Universalist Protestant Left. Issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and birth control created cultural split among whites that was, and is, difficult to bridge and not helpful for advancing white interests. Stoddard, for example, supported birth control and abortion as a way to keep down non-white demographic expansion. The Religious Right, however, abandoned their hitherto pro-abortion stance in the 1970s. Stoddard sought to reduce non-white birthrates and increase white birthrates, especially for high IQ whites. Stoddard, therefore, was one of the very first to correctly identify the situation that we call today “The Great Replacement.” Not only did he predict this pressing demographic crisis, he also prophesied conflict between Japan and the United States and the future aggression of a rising Islamic world.  He also pointed out the split between liberal progressive whites and Fundamentalists. It is this latter split that is not healed, and these continuing divisions don’t help white wellbeing – but there is hope. Identifying the problem is the first step in solving it. Were it not for Stoddard, we may not have known there was ever a problem in the first place.