Lothrop Stoddard
2,415 words
Lothrop Stoddard
The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922
Over a century after its publication in 1922, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization still provides an excellent primer for Dissident Right metapolitics. On nearly every page Stoddard offers clear and logical reasons for the sheer necessity of race realism, white ethnocentrism, and eugenic policies.
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14 comments
This is an enlightening review. As a relative newcomer to race realism, sometimes it feels like I’m living in the early Renaissance, when classical knowledge once again made its way into intellectual circles in Europe. Except that now the knowledge recovered is Darwinian rather than classical, and it only lay buried for decades instead of centuries. So many important texts from the early 20th century–such as Stoddard’s–were hidden under mountains of nonsensical verbiage promoting blank-statism and egalitarianism. Now that the genie is being let out of the bottle, let’s hope it leads to an actual rebirth of white civilization.
Thanks, Derek. Fortunately these documents are not difficult to find. You can download the pdf for free. Pretty sure there aren’t many lost documents of this nature. They’re just hidden among so much ideological clutter, as you point out.
Great article! I wonder if pornography would fall somewhere in “the glorification of the primitive.” 🙃
I think Stoddard would classify porn as moral degeneracy rather than glorifying the primitive. But the two-might be related
According to Kevin MacDonald Stoddard lectured on the Jewish Question at the Army War College through the early 1930s. But that around 1938 he was told to cut that part of his lectures.
I did not know that. Did he write any of that down? I know he wrote a book about his time in Nazi Germany called Into the Darkness. CC review: https://counter-currents.com/2021/11/lothrop-stoddards-into-the-darkness-part-1/
“I did not know that. Did he write any of that down?”
Not that I know of. I got the information from a review that Kevin MacDonald wrote about the book The Jewish Threat:
“The new climate can also be seen in the fact that Lothrop Stoddard stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s.”
TOQ-Kevin MacDonald-Bendersky BR-Vol 1 No 2
More from Kevin MacDonald’s review of The Jewish Threat:
The new climate can also be seen in the fact that Lothrop Stoddard stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s, but continued to advocate eugenics and was sympathetic to Nazism in the late 1930s because it took the race notion seriously. By 1940, the tables had turned. Anti-Jewish attitudes came to be seen as subversive by the government, and the FBI alerted military intelligence that Lothrop Stoddard should be investigated as a security risk in the event of war (p. 280).
From Bendersky’s perspective, these changes are due largely to the triumph of science: “Not only was Stoddard’s racial science erroneous, it was —— despite his assertions to the contrary —— out of step with the major trends in science and scholarship” (p. 262). What Bendersky does not note is that the “scienitific” refutation of the ideas of Stoddard and the other Darwinian theorists was entirely due to a political campaign waged in academic social science departments by Franz Boas and his students and sympathizers. The political nature of this shift in intellectual stance and its linkage to Jewish academic ethnic activists has long been apparent to scholars. (Degler, 1991; Frank, 1997; MacDonald 1998/2001; Stocking 1968, 1989.)
Hi Douglas
OK I finally went over Bendersky’s “The Jewish Threat” directly. He says that LS was an influential writer in the 1920s and 1930s, especially upon the officer corps of the US military. Of course, LS was a prominent racialist. He also publicly recognized the Jewish link to Bolshevism. He had an interest in the perceiving the biological root of Jewish behavior which led him to discuss various Jewish anthropological types and traits in his books and essays. According to Bendersky, LS was most concerned by the threat Jews posed to American cultural coherence. Yet Bendersky claims the LS “eschewed the entire Jewish question in his lectures of the late 1930.”
I think what happened was LS said positive things about Nazi Germany in the late-1930s (especially in regards to their eugenics and racial purity policies) and acted as an apologist for fascism, and FDR wanted to clamp down on that. The government was prepared to arrest him and others in the event of war if they didn’t shut up. But the question remains whether FDR targeted him solely for being pro-German or also because of his ‘anti-Semitism.’ It’s also unclear whether LS had “eschewed the Jewish question” on his own volition, or because he was forced to by FDR. Bendersky isn’t clear on that, unfortunately.
I guess I will have to acquire copy of a Lothrop Stoddard biography to find out and review it here at CC!
“But the question remains whether FDR targeted him solely for being pro-German or also because of his ‘anti-Semitism.’ ”
I think his book Into The Darkness is what got him hot water. Essentially it is very positive about Germany.
I have never read Stoddard but will purchase this book ASAP. I was at first puzzled by the cautionary note that seemed to pervade this essay, especially heard in your second caveat, but then I came to the realization that you might be fearful that Stoddard’s position on intelligence would alienate readers.
However, when I read these two sentences you quoted from Stoddard’s book (despite their contextual application to the envy that gives rise to communism) I thought they described the black population perfectly:
Why should he work for a higher civilization, when even the present civilization is beyond his powers? What the Under-Man wants is, not progress, but regress—regress to more primitive conditions in which he would be at home.
Gold!!!
Thank you, Jocelynn. Your realization was correct. As I was reading it, I realized that a hostile reviewer could easily quote Stoddard out of context and make him seem much more of an elitist than he was. Although, Revolt is a great work, I do wish Stoddard had made this a little clearer.
I also recommend Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo, which I reviewed last year for CC.
The screeching by the matttoidal of “progressive” really means regressive, a nonstop trending towards decline where everything everywhere every year gets broker, crueler, dumber, uglier, and crazier. In that pic Stoddard looks a bit like Chud the Builder.
“In that pic Stoddard looks a bit like Chud the Builder.” My goodness, you are correct.
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