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THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
BY LOTHROP STODDARD, A.M., PH.D. (Harv.)
AUTHOR OF "THE STAKES OF THE WAR,"
"PRESENT-DAY EUROPE: ITS NATIONAL STATES OF MIND,"
"THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN SAN DOMINGO," ETC.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MADISON GRANT
CHAIRMAN NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY; TRUSTEE AMERICAN
MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY; COUNCILLOR AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY;
AUTHOR OF "THE PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE"
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_All rights reserved_
Published April, 1920
Reprinted June, July, September, October, 1920;
February, 1921
PREFACE
More than a decade ago I became convinced that the key-note of
twentieth-century world-politics would be the relations between the
primary races of mankind. Momentous modifications of existing
race-relations were evidently impending, and nothing could be more vital
to the course of human evolution than the character of these
modifications, since upon the _quality_ of human life all else depends.
Accordingly, my attention was thenceforth largely directed to racial
matters. In the preface to an historical monograph ("The French Revolution
in San Domingo") written shortly before the Great War, I stated: "The
world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind--the 'conflict of
color,' as it has been happily termed--bids fair to be the fundamental
problem of the twentieth century, and great communities like the United
States of America, the South African Confederation, and Australasia regard
the 'color question' as perhaps the gravest problem of the future."
Those lines were penned in June, 1914. Before their publication the Great
War had burst upon the world. At that time several reviewers commented
upon the above dictum and wondered whether, had I written two months
later, I should have held a different opinion.
As a matter of fact, I should have expressed myself even more strongly to
the same effect. To me the Great War was from the first the White Civil
War, which, whatever its outcome, must gravely complicate the course of
racial relations.
Before the war I had hoped that the readjustments rendered inevitable by
the renascence of the brown and yellow peoples of Asia would be a gradual,
and in the main a pacific, process, kept within evolutionary bounds by the
white world's inherent strength and fundamental solidarity. The frightful
weakening of the white world during the war, however, opened up
revolutionary, even cataclysmic, possibilities.
In saying this I do not refer solely to military "perils." The subjugation
of white lands by colored armies may, of course, occur, especially if the
white world continues to rend itself with internecine wars. However, such
colored triumphs of arms are less to be dreaded than more enduring
conquests like migrations which would swamp whole populations and turn
countries now white into colored man's lands irretrievably lost to the
white world. Of course, these ominous possibilities existed even before
1914, but the war has rendered them much more probable.
The most disquieting feature of the present situation, however, is not the
war but the peace. The white world's inability to frame a constructive
settlement, the perpetuation of intestine hatreds, and the menace of fresh
white civil wars complicated by the spectre of social revolution, evoke
the dread thought that the late war may be merely the first stage in a
cycle of ruin.
In fact, so absorbed is the white world with its domestic dissensions that
it pays scant heed to racial problems whose importance for the future of
mankind far transcends the questions which engross its attention to-day.
This relative indifference to the larger racial issues has determined the
writing of the present book. So fundamental are these issues that a candid
discussion of them would seem to be timely and helpful.
In the following pages I have tried to analyze in their various aspects
the present relations between the white and non-white worlds. My task has
been greatly aided by the Introduction from the pen of Madison Grant, who
has admirably summarized the biological and historical background. A
life-long student of biology, Mr. Grant approaches the subject along that
line. My own avenue of approach being world-politics, the resulting
convergence of different view-points has been a most useful one.
For the stimulating counsel of Mr. Grant in the preparation of this book
my thanks are especially due. I desire also to acknowledge my indebtedness
for helpful suggestions to Messrs. Alleyne Ireland, Glenn Frank, and other
friends.
LOTHROP STODDARD.
NEW YORK CITY,
February 28, 1920.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY MADISON GRANT xi
PART I
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
CHAPTER
I. THE WORLD OF COLOR 3
II. YELLOW MAN'S LAND 17
III. BROWN MAN'S LAND 54
IV. BLACK MAN'S LAND 87
V. RED MAN'S LAND 104
PART II
THE EBBING TIDE OF WHITE
VI. THE WHITE FLOOD 145
VII. THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB 154
VIII. THE MODERN PELOPONNESIAN WAR 173
IX. THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY 198
PART III
THE DELUGE ON THE DIKES
X. THE OUTER DIKES 225
XI. THE INNER DIKES 236
XII. THE CRISIS OF THE AGES 299
INDEX 311
MAPS
PAGE
I DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIMARY RACES 14
II CATEGORIES OF WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY 150
III DISTRIBUTION OF THE WHITE RACES 228
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color," following so closely
the Great War, may appear to some unduly alarming, while others, as his
thread of argument unrolls, may recoil at the logic of his deductions.
In our present era of convulsive changes, a prophet must be bold, indeed,
to predict anything more definite than a mere trend in events, but the
study of the past is the one safe guide in forecasting the future.
Mr. Stoddard takes up the white man's world and its potential enemies as
they are to-day. A consideration of their early relations and of the
history of the Nordic race, since its first appearance three or four
thousand years ago, tends strongly to sustain and justify his conclusions.
For such a consideration we must first turn to the map, or, better, to the
globe.
Viewed in the light of geography and zoology, Europe west of Russia is but
a peninsula of Asia with the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea
included. True Africa, or rather Ethiopia, lies south of the Sahara Desert
and has virtually no connection with the North except along the valley of
the Nile.
This Eurasiatic continent has been, perhaps, since the origin of life
itself, the most active centre of evolution and radiation of the higher
forms.
Confining ourselves to the mammalian orders, we find that a majority of
them have originated and developed there and have spread thence to the
outlying land areas of the globe. All the evidence points to the origin of
the Primates in Eurasia and we have every reason to believe that this
continent was also the scene of the early evolution of man from his
anthropoid ancestors.
The impulse that inaugurated the development of mankind seems to have had
its basic cause in the stress of changing climatic conditions in central
Asia at the close of the Pliocene, and the human inhabitants of Eurasia
have ever since exhibited in a superlative degree the energy developed at
that time. This energy, however, has not been equally shared by the
various species of man, either extinct or living, and the survivors of the
earlier races are, for the most part, to be found on the other continents
and islands or in the extreme outlying regions of Eurasia itself.
In other words those groups of mankind which at an early period found
refuge in the Americas, in Australia, in Ethiopia, or in the islands of
the sea, represent to a large extent stages in man's physical and cultural
development, from which the more energized inhabitants of Eurasia have
long since emerged. In some cases, as in Mexico and Peru, the outlying
races developed in their isolation a limited culture of their own, but,
for the most part, they have exhibited, and continue to this day to
exhibit, a lack of capacity for sustained evolution from within as well as
a lack of capacity to adjust themselves of their own initiative to the
rapid changes which modern times impose upon them from without.
In Eurasia itself this same inequality of potential capacity is found, but
in a lesser degree, and consequently, in the progress of humanity, there
has been constant friction between those who push forward and those who
are unable to keep pace with changing conditions.
Owing to these causes the history of mankind has been that of a series of
impulses from the Eurasiatic continent upon the outlying regions of the
globe, but there has been an almost complete lack of reaction, either
racial or cultural, from them upon the masses of mankind in Eurasia
itself. There have been endless conflicts between the different sections
of Eurasia, but neither Amerinds, nor Austroloids, nor Negroes, have ever
made a concerted attack upon the great continent.
* * * * *
Without attempting a scientific classification of the inhabitants of
Eurasia, it is sufficient to describe the three main races. The first are
the yellow-skinned, straight black-haired, black-eyed, round-skulled
Mongols and Mongoloids massed in central and eastern Asia north of the
Himalayan system.
To the west of them, and merged with them, lie the Alpines, also
characterized by dark, but not straight, hair, dark eyes, relatively
short stature, and round skulls. These Alpines are thrust like a wedge
into Europe between the Nordics and the Mediterraneans, with a tip that
reaches the Atlantic Ocean. Those of western Europe are derived from one
or more very ancient waves of round-skulled invaders from the East, who
probably came by way of Asia Minor and the Balkans, but they have been so
long in their present homes that they retain little except their
brachycephalic skull-shape to connect them with the Asiatic Mongols.
South of the Himalayas and westward in a narrow belt to the Atlantic, and
on both sides of the Inland Sea, lies the Mediterranean race, more or less
swarthy-skinned, black-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled.
On the northwest, grouped around the Baltic and North Seas, lies the great
Nordic race. It is characterized by a fair white skin, wavy hair with a
range of color from dark brown to flaxen, light eyes, tall stature, and
long skulls.
These races show other physical characters which are definite but
difficult to describe, such as texture of skin and cast of features,
especially of the nose. The contrast of mental and spiritual endowments is
equally definite, but even more elusive of definition.
It is with the action and interaction of these three groups, together with
internal civil wars, that recorded history deals.
While, so far as we know, these three races have occupied their present
relative positions from the beginning, there have been profound changes
in their distribution.
The two essential phenomena, however, are, first, the retreat of the
Nordic race westward from the Grasslands of western Asia and eastern
Europe to the borders of the Atlantic, until it occupies a relatively
small area on the periphery of Eurasia.
The second phenomenon is of equal importance, namely, the more or less
thorough Nordicizing of the westernmost extensions of the other two races,
namely, the Mediterranean on the north coast of the Inland Sea, who have
been completely Aryanized in speech, and have been again and again
saturated with Nordic blood, and the even more profound Nordicization in
speech and in blood of the short, dark, round-skulled inhabitants of
central Europe, from Brittany through central France, southern Germany,
and northern Italy into Austrian and Balkan lands. So thorough has been
this process that the western Alpines have at the present time no separate
race consciousness and are to be considered as wholly European.
As to the Alpines of eastern and central Europe, the Slavs, the case is
somewhat different. East of a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic
the Nordicizing process has been far less perfect, although nearly
complete as to speech, since all the Slavic languages are Aryan.
Throughout these Slavic lands, great accessions of pure Mongoloid blood
have been introduced within relatively recent centuries.
East of this belt of imperfectly Nordicized Alpines we reach the Asiatic
Alpines, as yet entirely untouched by western blood or culture. These
groups merge into the Mongoloids of eastern Asia.
So we find, thrust westward from the Heartland, a race touching the
Atlantic at Brittany, thoroughly Asiatic and Mongoloid in the east, very
imperfectly Nordicized in the centre, and thoroughly Nordicized culturally
in the far west of Europe, where it has become, and must be accepted as,
an integral part of the White World.
As to the great Nordic race, within relatively recent historic times it
occupied the Grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas eastward to
the Himalayas. Traces of Nordic peoples in central Asia are constantly
found, and when archaeological research there becomes as intensive as in
Europe we shall be astonished to find how long, complete, and extended was
their occupation of western Asia.
During the second millennium before our era successive waves of Nordics
began to cross the Afghan passes into India until finally they imposed
their primitive Aryan language upon Hindustan and the countries lying to
the east.
All those regions lying northwest of the mountains appear to have been
largely a white man's country at the time of Alexander the Great. In
Turkestan the newly discovered Tokharian language, an Aryan tongue of the
western division, seems to have persisted down to the ninth century. The
decline of the Nordics in these lands, however, began probably far
earlier than Alexander's time, and must have been nearly completed at the
beginning of our era. Such blond traits as are still found in western Asia
are relatively unimportant, and for the last two thousand years these
countries must be regarded as lost to the Nordic race.
The impulse that drove the early Nordics like a fan over the Himalayan
passes into India, the later Nordics southward into Mesopotamian lands, as
Kassites, Mitanni, and Persians, into Greece and Anatolia as Achaeans,
Dorians, and Phrygians, westward as the Aryan-speaking invaders of Italy
and as the Celtic vanguards of the Nordic race across the Rhine into Gaul,
Spain, and Britain, may well have been caused by Mongoloid pressure from
the heart of central Asia. Of course, we have no actual knowledge of this,
but the analogy to the history of later migrations is strong, and the
conviction is growing among historians that the impulse that drove the
Hellenic Nordics upon the early AEgean culture world was the same as that
which later drove Germanic Nordics into the Roman Empire.
North of the Caspian and Black Seas the boundaries of Europe receded
steadily before Asia for nearly a thousand years after our era opened, but
we have scant record of the struggles which resulted in the eviction of
the Nordics from their homes in Russia, Poland, the Austrian and east
German lands.
By the time of Charlemagne the White Man's world was reduced to
Scandinavia, Germany west of the Elbe, the British Isles, the Low
Countries, and northern France and Italy, with outlying groups in southern
France and Spain. This was the lowest ebb for the Nordics and it was the
crowning glory of Charlemagne's career that he not only turned back the
flood, but began the organization of a series of more or less Nordicized
marches or barrier states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which have
served as ramparts against Asiatic pressure from his day to ours. West of
this line the feudal states of mediaeval Europe developed into western
Christendom, the nucleus of the civilized world of to-day.
South of the Caspian and Black Seas, after the first swarming of the
Nordics over the mountains during the second millennium before Christ, the
East pressed steadily against Europe until the strain culminated in the
Persian Wars. The defeat of Asia in these wars resulted later in
Alexander's conquest of western Asia to the borders of India.
Alexander's empire temporarily established Hellenic institutions
throughout western Asia and some of the provinces remained superficially
Greek until they were incorporated in the Roman Empire and ultimately
became part of early Christendom. On the whole, however, from the time of
Alexander the elimination of European blood, classic culture, and,
finally, of Christianity, went on relentlessly.
By later Roman times the Aryan language of the Persians, Parthians, and
people of India together with some shreds of Greek learning were about all
the traces of Europe that were to be found east of the oscillating
boundary along the Euphrates.
The Roman and Byzantine Empires struggled for centuries to check the
advancing tide of Asiatics, but Arab expansions under the impulse of the
Mohammedan religion finally tore away all the eastern and southern coasts
of the Mediterranean Sea, while from an Arabized Spain they threatened
western Europe. With the White Man's world thus rapidly receding in the
south, a series of pure Mongol invasions from central Asia, sweeping north
of the Caspian and Black Seas, burst upon central Europe. Attila and his
Huns were the first to break through into Nordic lands as far as the
plains of northern France. None of the later hordes were able to force
their way so far into Nordic territories, but spent their strength upon
the Alpines of the Balkans and eastern Europe.
Eastern Germany, the Austrian states, Poland, and Russia had been Nordic
lands before the Slavs emerged after the fall of Rome. Whether the
occupation of Teutonic lands by the Wends and Slavs in eastern Europe was
an infiltration or a conquest is not known, but the conviction is growing
that, like other movements which preceded and followed, it was caused by
Mongoloid pressure.
That the western Slavs or Wends had been long Nordicized in speech is
indicated by the thoroughly Aryan character of the Slavic languages. They
found in the lands they occupied an underlying Teutonic population. They
cannot be regarded as the original owners of Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, or
other Wendish provinces of eastern Germany and Austria. The Teutonic
Marcomanni and Quadi were in Bohemia long before the Czechs came in
through the Moravian Gate in the sixth century. Pomerania and the Prussias
were the home of Teutonic Lombards, Burgunds, Vandals, and Suevi, while
the Crimea and the northwestern coast of the Black Sea were long held by
the Nordic Goths, who, just before our era, had migrated overland from the
Baltic by way of the Vistula.
No doubt some of this Nordic blood remained to ennoble the stock of the
later invaders, but by the time of Charlemagne, in the greater part of
Europe east of the Elbe, the Aryan language was the only bond with Europe.
When the Frankish Empire turned the tide and Christianized these Wendish
and Polish lands, civilization was carried eastward until it met the
Byzantine influences which brought to Russia and the lands east of the
Carpathians the culture and Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern or Greek
Empire.
The nucleus of Russia was organized in the ninth century by Scandinavian
Varangians, the Franks of the East, who founded the first civilized state
amid a welter of semi-Mongoloid tribes. How much Nordic blood they found
in the territories which afterward became Russia we have no means of
knowing, but it must have been considerable because we do know that from
the Middle Ages to the present time there has been a progressive increase
in brachycephaly or broad-headedness, to judge from the rise in the
percentage of round skulls found in the cemeteries of Moscow and elsewhere
in Russia.
Such was the condition of eastern Europe when a new and terrible series of
Mongoloid invasions swept over it, this time directly from the centre of
Asia.
The effect of these invasions was so profound and lasting that it may be
well to consider briefly the condition of eastern Europe after the
elimination of the Nordics and its partial occupation by the so-called
Slavs. Beginning with Attila and his Huns, in the fourth century, there
was a series of purely Mongoloid tribes entering from Asia in wave after
wave.
Similar waves ultimately passed south of the Black and Caspian Seas, and
were called Turks, but these were long held back by the power of the
Byzantine Empire, to which history has done scant justice.
In the north these invaders, called in the later days Tatars, but all
essentially of central Asiatic Mongol stock, occupied Balkan lands after
the expansion of the south Slavs in those countries. They are known by
various names, but they are all part of the same general movement,
although there was a gradual slowing down of the impulse. Prior to Jenghiz
Khan the later hordes did not reach quite as far west as the earlier ones.
The first wave, Attila's Huns, were followed during the succeeding
centuries by the Avars, the Bulgars, the Hunagar Magyars, the Patzinaks
and the Cumans. All of these tribes forced their way over the Carpathians
and the Danube, and much of their blood, notably in that of the Bulgars
and Magyars, is still to be found there. Most of them adopted Slavic
dialects and merged in the surrounding population, but the Magyars retain
their Asiatic speech to this day.
Other Tatar and Mongoloid tribes settled in southern and eastern Russia.
Chief among these were the Mongol Chazars, who founded an extensive and
powerful empire in southern and southeastern Russia as early as the eighth
century. It is interesting to note that they accepted Judaism and became
the ancestors of the majority of the Jews of eastern Europe, the
round-skulled Ashkenazim.
Into this mixed population of Christianized Slavs and more or less
Christianized and Slavized Mongols burst Jenghiz Khan with his great
hordes of pure Mongols. All southern Russia, Poland, and Hungary collapsed
before them, and in southern Russia the rule of the Mongol persisted for
centuries, in fact the Golden Horde of Tatars retained control of the
Crimea down to 1783.
Many of these later Tatars had accepted Islam, but entire groups of them
have retained their Asiatic speech and to this day profess the Mohammedan
religion.
The most lasting result of these Mongol invasions was that southern Poland
and all the countries east and north of the Carpathians, including Rumania
and the Ukraine, were saturated anew with Tatar blood, and, in dealing
with these populations and with the new nations founded among them, this
fact must not be forgotten.
The conflict between the East and the West--Europe and Asia--has thus
lasted for centuries, in fact it goes back to the Persian Wars and the
long and doubtful duel between Rome and Parthia along the eastern boundary
of Syria. As we have already said, the Saracens had torn away many of the
provinces of the Eastern Empire, and the Crusades, for a moment, had
rolled back the East, but the event was not decided until the Seljukian
and Osmanli Turks accepted Islam.
If these Turks had remained heathen they might have invaded and conquered
Asia Minor and the Balkan States, just as their cousins, the Tartars, had
subjected vast territories north of the Black Sea, but they could not have
held their conquests permanently unless they had been able to incorporate
the beaten natives into their own ranks through the proselytizing power of
Islam.
Even in Roman times the Greek world had been steadily losing, first its
Nordic blood and then later the blood of its Nordicized European
population, and it became in its declining years increasingly Asiatic
until the final fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium once fallen, the Turks advanced unchecked, conquering the Alpine
Slav kingdoms of the Balkans and menacing Christendom itself.
In these age-long conflicts between Asia and Europe the Crusades seem but
an episode, although tragically wasteful of Nordic stock. The Nordic
Frankish nobility of western Europe squandered its blood for two hundred
years on the desert sands of Syria and left no ethnic trace behind, save,
perhaps, some doubtful blond remnants in northern Syria and Edessa.
If the predictions of Mr. Stoddard's book seem far-fetched, one has but to
consider that four times since the fall of Rome Asia has conquered to the
very confines of Nordic Europe. The Nordicized Alpines of eastern Europe
and the Nordicized Mediterraneans of southern Europe have proved too
feeble to hold back the Asiatic hordes, Mongol or Saracen. It was not
until the realms of pure Nordics were reached that the invaders were
turned back. This is shown by the fact that the Arabs had quickly mastered
northern Africa and conquered Spain, where the Nordic Goths were too few
in number to hold them back, while southern France, which was not then,
and is not now, a Nordic land, had offered no serious resistance. It was
not until the Arabs, in 732, at Tours, dashed themselves to pieces against
the solid ranks of heavy-armed Nordics, that Islam receded.
The same fate had already been encountered by Attila and his Huns, who,
after dominating Hungary and southern Germany and destroying the
Burgundians on the Rhine, had pushed into northern France as far as
Chalons. Here, in 376, he was beaten, not by the Romanized Gauls but by
the Nordic Visigoths, whose king, Roderick, died on the field. These two
victories, one against the Arab south and the other over the Mongoloid
east, saved Nordic Europe, which was at that time shrunken to little more
than a fringe on the seacoast.
How slender the thread and how easily snapped, had the event of either day
turned out otherwise! Never again did Asia push so far west, but the
danger was not finally removed until Charlemagne and his successors had
organized the Western Empire.
Christendom, however, had sore trials ahead when the successors of Jenghiz
Khan destroyed Moscovy and Poland and devastated eastern Europe. The
victorious career of the Tatars was unchecked, from the Chinese Sea on the
east to the Indian Ocean on the south, until in 1241, at Wahlstatt in
Silesia, they encountered pure Nordic fighting men. Then the tide turned.
Though outnumbering the Christians five to one and victorious in the
battle itself, the Tatars were unable to push farther west and turned
south into Hungary and other Alpine lands.
Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe
escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which
fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible
motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China,
central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in
China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants
slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in
Khorasan, the "Garden of Asia," the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after
Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell
every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once
populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland
were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the
consequence that progress was retarded for centuries.
Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of
Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern
Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of
western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics
went down in rout.
On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern
civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east
collapsed under the invasions.
Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or
submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever
westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the
Nordics came to bay--the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was
more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at
Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe.
One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast
was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never
before known even in the days of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.
With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and
inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire
world under European domination.
* * * * *
While in the mediaeval conflicts between Europe and Asia the latter was the
aggressor, the case was otherwise in the early wars between the Nordic and
the Mediterranean peoples. Here for three thousand years the Nordics were
the aggressors, and, although these wars were terribly destructive to
their numbers, they were the medium through which classic civilization was
introduced into Nordic lands. As to the ethnic consequences, northern
barbarians poured over the passes of the Balkans, Alpines, and Pyrenees
into the sunny lands of the south only to slowly vanish in the languid
environment which lacked the stimulus of fierce strife with hostile nature
and savage rivals.
Nevertheless, long before the opening of the Christian era the Alpines of
western Europe were thoroughly Nordicized, and in the centuries that
followed, the old Nordic element in Spain, Italy, and France has been
again and again strongly reinforced, so that these lands are now an
integral part of the White World.
In recent centuries Russia was again superficially Nordicized with a top
dressing of Nordic nobility, chiefly coming from the Baltic provinces.
Along with this process there was everywhere in Europe a resurgence among
the submerged and forgotten Alpines and among the Mediterranean elements
of the British Isles, while Bolshevism in Russia means the elimination of
the Nordic aristocracy and the dominance of the half-Asiatic Slavic
peasantry.
* * * * *
All wars thus far discussed have been race wars of Europe against Asia, or
of the Nordics against Mediterraneans. The wars against the Mongols were
necessary and vital; there was no alternative except to fight to the
finish. But the wars of northern Europe against the south, from the racial
point of view, were not only useless but destructive. Bad as they were,
however, they left untouched to a large extent the broodland of the race
in the north and west.
Another class of wars, however, has been absolutely deadly to the Nordic
race. There must have been countless early struggles where one Nordic
tribe attacked and exterminated its rival, such as the Trojan War, fought
between Achaeans and Phrygians, both Nordics, while the later Peloponnesian
War was a purely civil strife between Greeks and resulted in the racial
collapse of Hellas.
Rome, after she emerged triumphant from her struggle with the
Carthaginians, of Mediterranean race, plunged into a series of civil wars
which ended in the complete elimination of the native Nordic element in
Rome. Her conquests also were destructive to the Nordic race; particularly
so was that of Caesar in Gaul, one of the few exceptional cases where the
north was permanently conquered by the south. The losses of that ten-year
conquest fell far more heavily upon the Nordic Celts in Gaul and Britain
than on the servile strata of the population.
In the same way the Saxon conquest of England destroyed the Nordic
Brythons to a greater degree than the pre-Nordic Neolithic Mediterranean
element. From that time on all the wars of Europe, other than those
against the Asiatics and Saracens, were essentially civil wars fought
between peoples or leaders of Nordic blood.
Mediaeval Europe was one long welter of Nordic immolation until the Wars of
the Roses in England, the Hundred Years' War in the Lowlands, the
religious, revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars in France, and the ghastly
Thirty Years' War in Germany dangerously depleted the ruling Nordic race
and paved the way for the emergence from obscurity of the servile races
which for ages had been dominated by them.
To what extent the present war has fostered this tendency, time alone will
show, but Mr. Stoddard has pointed out some of the immediate and visible
results. The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic, the
Alpines and Mediterraneans being effective precisely to the extent in
which they have been Nordicized and vitalized.
If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should
ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It
would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population, where worth
and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a
new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance.
Such a catastrophe cannot threaten if the Nordic race will gather itself
together in time, shake off the shackles of an inveterate altruism,
discard the vain phantom of internationalism, and reassert the pride of
race and the right of merit to rule.
The Nordic race has been driven from many of its lands, but still grasps
firmly the control of the world, and it is certainly not at a greater
numerical disadvantage than often before in contrast to the teeming
population of eastern Asia.
It has repeatedly been confronted with crises where the accident of
battle, or the genius of a leader, saved a well-nigh hopeless day. It has
survived defeat, it has survived the greater danger of victory, and, if it
takes warning in time, it may face the future with assurance. Fight it
must, but let that fight be not a civil war against its own blood kindred
but against the dangerous foreign races, whether they advance sword in
hand or in the more insidious guise of beggars at our gates, pleading for
admittance to share our prosperity. If we continue to allow them to enter
they will in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding.
The great hope of the future here in America lies in the realization of
the working class that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal,
whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe
or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose
standards of living the white man cannot compete. In this country we must
look to such of our people--our farmers and artisans--as are still of
American blood to recognize and meet this danger.
Our present condition is the result of following the leadership of
idealists and philanthropic doctrinaires, aided and abetted by the
perfectly understandable demand of our captains of industry for cheap
labor.
To-day the need for statesmanship is great, and greater still is the need
for thorough knowledge of history. All over the world the first has been
lacking, and in the passions of the Great War the lessons of the past have
been forgotten both here and in Europe.
The establishment of a chain of Alpine states from the Baltic to the
Adriatic, as a sequel to the war, all of them organized at the expense of
the Nordic ruling classes, may bring Europe back to the days when
Charlemagne, marching from the Rhine to the Elbe, found the valley of that
river inhabited by heathen Wends. Beyond lay Asia, and his successors
spent a thousand years pushing eastward the frontiers of Europe.
Now that Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and
Chinese executioners, is organizing an assault upon western Europe, the
new states--Slavic-Alpine in race, with little Nordic blood--may prove to
be not frontier guards of western Europe but vanguards of Asia in central
Europe. None of the earlier Alpine states have held firm against Asia, and
it is more than doubtful whether Poland, Bohemia, Rumania, Hungary, and
Jugo-Slavia can face the danger successfully, now that they have been
deprived of the Nordic ruling classes through democratic institutions.
Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in
England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white
man to share his blood with, or intrust his ideals to, brown, yellow,
black, or red men.
This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing
folly will be the white man himself.
MADISON GRANT.
NEW YORK, March 1, 1920.
_PART I_
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD OF COLOR
The man who, on a quiet spring evening of the year 1914, opened his atlas
to a political map of the world and pored over its many-tinted patterns
probably got one fundamental impression: the overwhelming preponderance of
the white race in the ordering of the world's affairs. Judged by accepted
canons of statecraft, the white man towered the indisputable master of the
planet. Forth from Europe's teeming mother-hive the imperious Sons of
Japhet had swarmed for centuries to plant their laws, their customs, and
their battle-flags at the uttermost ends of the earth. Two whole
continents, North America and Australia, had been made virtually as white
in blood as the European motherland; two other continents, South America
and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even
huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the
white man's abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves
to the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man's imperial
sway, and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed
the white man's will.
Beside the enormous area of white settlement or control, the regions under
non-white governance bulked small indeed. In eastern Asia, China, Japan,
and Siam; in western Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia; in Africa,
Abyssinia, and Liberia; and in America the minute state of Haiti: such was
the brief list of lands under non-white rule. In other words, of the
53,000,000 square miles which (excluding the polar regions) constitute the
land area of the globe, only 6,000,000 square miles had non-white
governments, and nearly two-thirds of this relatively modest remainder was
represented by China and its dependencies.
Since 1914 the world has been convulsed by the most terrible war in
recorded history. This war was primarily a struggle between the white
peoples, who have borne the brunt of the conflict and have suffered most
of the losses. Nevertheless, one of the war's results has been a further
whittling down of the areas standing outside white political control.
Turkey is to-day practically an Anglo-French condominium, Persia is
virtually a protectorate of the British Empire, while the United States
has thrown over the endemic anarchy of Haiti the aegis of the _Pax
Americana_. Study of the political map might thus apparently lead one to
conclude that white world-predominance is immutable, since the war's
ordeal has still further broadened the territorial basis of its authority.
At this point the reader is perhaps asking himself why this book was ever
undertaken. The answer is: the dangerous delusion created by viewing world
affairs solely from the angle of politics. The late war has taught many
lessons as to the unstable and transitory character of even the most
imposing political phenomena, while a better reading of history must bring
home the truth that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics, but
race. The reader has already encountered this fundamental truth on every
page of the Introduction. He will remember, for instance, how west-central
Asia, which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man's country,
is to-day racially brown man's land in which white blood survives only as
vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If this portion of Asia, the
former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the
white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character,
what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the
present world-order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?
The force of this query is exemplified when we turn from the political to
the racial map of the globe. What a transformation! Instead of a world
politically nine-tenths white, we see a world of which only four-tenths at
the most can be considered predominantly white in blood, the rest of the
world being inhabited mainly by the other primary races of
mankind--yellows, browns, blacks, and reds. Speaking by continents,
Europe, North America to the Rio Grande, the southern portion of South
America, the Siberian part of Asia, and Australasia constitute the real
white world; while the bulk of Asia, virtually the whole of Africa, and
most of Central and South America form the world of color. The respective
areas of these two racially contrasted worlds are 22,000,000 square miles
for the whites and 31,000,000 square miles for the colored races.
Furthermore it must be remembered that fully one-third of the white area
(notably Australasia and Siberia) is very thinly inhabited and is thus
held by a very slender racial tenure--the only tenure which counts in the
long run.
The statistical disproportion between the white and colored worlds becomes
still more marked when we turn from surveys of area to tables of
population. The total number of human beings alive to-day is about
1,700,000,000. Of these 550,000,000 are white, while 1,150,000,000 are
colored. The colored races thus outnumber the whites more than two to one.
Another fact of capital importance is that the great bulk of the white
race is concentrated in the European continent. In 1914 the population of
Europe was approximately 450,000,000. The late war has undoubtedly caused
an absolute decrease of many millions of souls. Nevertheless, the basic
fact remains that some four-fifths of the entire white race is
concentrated on less than one-fifth of the white world's territorial area
(Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000
souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect four-fifths of
the white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races
eleven times its numerical strength.
As to the 1,150,000,000 of the colored world, they are divided, as already
stated, into four primary categories: yellows, browns, blacks, and reds.
The yellows are the most numerous of the colored races, numbering over
500,000,000. Their habitat is eastern Asia. Nearly as numerous and much
more wide-spread than the yellows are the browns, numbering some
450,000,000. The browns spread in a broad belt from the Pacific Ocean
westward across southern Asia and northern Africa to the Atlantic Ocean.
The blacks total about 150,000,000. Their centre is Africa south of the
Sahara Desert, but besides the African continent there are vestigial black
traces across southern Asia to the Pacific and also strong black outposts
in the Americas. Least numerous of the colored race-stocks are the
reds--the "Indians" of the western hemisphere. Mustering a total of less
than 40,000,000, the reds are almost all located south of the Rio Grande
in "Latin America."
Such is the ethnic make-up of that world of color which, as already seen,
outnumbers the white world two to one. That is a formidable ratio, and its
significance is heightened by the fact that this ratio seems destined to
shift still further in favor of color. There can be no doubt that at
present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white.
Treating the primary race-stocks as units, it would appear that whites
tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in sixty years, blacks
in forty years. The whites are thus the slowest breeders, and they will
undoubtedly become slower still, since section after section of the white
race is revealing that lowered birth-rate which in France has reached the
extreme of a stationary population.
On the other hand, none of the colored races shows perceptible signs of
declining birth-rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available
subsistence. Such checks as now limit the increase of colored populations
are wholly external, like famine, disease, and tribal warfare. But by a
curious irony of fate, the white man has long been busy removing these
checks to colored multiplication. The greater part of the colored world is
to-day under white political control. Wherever the white man goes he
attempts to impose the bases of his ordered civilization. He puts down
tribal war, he wages truceless combat against epidemic disease, and he so
improves communications that augmented and better distributed
food-supplies minimize the blight of famine. In response to these
life-saving activities the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept
the colored races from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions
comparable with the death-rate of white countries. But to lower the
colored world's prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. The
consequence is a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion
of the colored world now under white political sway. In fact, even those
colored countries which have maintained their independence, such as China
and Japan, are adopting the white man's life-conserving methods and are
experiencing the same accelerated increase of population.
Now what must be the inevitable result of all this? It can mean only one
thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus
colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. Remember that these
homelands are already populated up to the available limits of subsistence.
Of course present limits can in many cases be pushed back by better living
conditions, improved agriculture, and the rise of modern machine industry
such as is already under way in Japan. Nevertheless, in view of the
tremendous population increases which must occur, these can be only
palliatives. Where, then, should the congested colored world tend to pour
its accumulating human surplus, inexorably condemned to emigrate or
starve? The answer is: into those emptier regions of the earth under white
political control. But many of these relatively empty lands have been
definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage. The
upshot is that the rising flood of color finds itself walled in by white
dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain deluge
with its dusky waves.
Thus the colored world, long restive under white political domination, is
being welded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of
self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the
dominant white man, and in the fire of a common purpose internecine
differences tend, for the time at least, to be burned away. Before the
supreme fact of white political world-domination, antipathies within the
colored world must inevitably recede into the background.
The imperious urge of the colored world toward racial expansion was well
visualized by that keen English student of world affairs, Doctor E. J.
Dillon, when he wrote more than a decade ago: "The problem is one of life
and death--a veritable sphinx-question--to those most nearly concerned.
For, no race, however inferior it may be, will consent to famish slowly in
order that other people may fatten and take their ease, especially if it
has a good chance to make a fight for life."[1]
This white statement of the colored thesis is an accurate reflection of
what colored men say themselves. For example, a Japanese scholar,
Professor Ryutaro Nagai, writes: "The world was not made for the white
races, but for the other races as well. In Australia, South Africa,
Canada, and the United States, there are vast tracts of unoccupied
territory awaiting settlement, and although the citizens of the ruling
Powers refuse to take up the land, no yellow people are permitted to
enter. Thus the white races seem ready to commit to the savage birds and
beasts what they refuse to intrust to their brethren of the yellow race.
Surely the arrogance and avarice of the nobility in apportioning to
themselves the most and the best of the land in certain countries is as
nothing compared with the attitude of the white races toward those of a
different hue."[2]
The bitter resentment of white predominance and exclusiveness awakened in
many colored breasts is typified by the following lines penned by a brown
man, a British-educated Afghan, shortly before the European War.
Inveighing against our "racial prejudice, that cowardly, wretched
caste-mark of the European and the American the world over," he exultantly
predicts "a coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and
America. You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia
Holy War, a gigantic day of reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and
Tamerlane--who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears.
You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be
taught with the whirring swish of the sword when it is red."[3]
Of course in these statements there is nothing either exceptional or
novel. The colored races never welcomed white predominance and were always
restive under white control. Down to the close of the nineteenth century,
however, they generally accepted white hegemony as a disagreeable but
inevitable fact. For four hundred years the white man had added continent
to continent in his imperial progress, equipped with resistless sea-power
and armed with a mechanical superiority that crushed down all local
efforts at resistance. In time, therefore, the colored races accorded to
white supremacy a fatalistic acquiescence, and, though never loved, the
white man was usually respected and universally feared.
During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, to be sure,
premonitory signs of a change in attitude began to appear. The yellow and
brown races, at least, stirred by the very impact of Western ideas,
measured the white man with a more critical eye and commenced to wonder
whether his superiority was due to anything more than a fortuitous
combination of circumstances which might be altered by efforts of their
own. Japan put this theory to the test by going sedulously to the white
man's school. The upshot was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, an event the
momentous character of which is even now not fully appreciated. Of course,
that war was merely the sign-manual of a whole nexus of forces making for
a revivified Asia. But it dramatized and clarified ideas which had been
germinating half-unconsciously in millions of colored minds, and both Asia
and Africa thrilled with joy and hope. Above all, the legend of white
invincibility lay, a fallen idol, in the dust. Nevertheless, though freed
from imaginary terrors, the colored world accurately gauged the white
man's practical strength and appreciated the magnitude of the task
involved in overthrowing white supremacy. That supremacy was no longer
acquiesced in as inevitable and hopes of ultimate success were confidently
entertained, but the process was usually conceived as a slow and difficult
one. Fear of white power and respect for white civilization thus remained
potent restraining factors.
Then came the Great War. The colored world suddenly saw the white peoples
which, in racial matters had hitherto maintained something of a united
front, locked in an internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it
saw those same peoples put one another furiously to the ban as
irreconcilable foes; it saw white race-unity cleft by political and moral
gulfs which white men themselves continuously iterated would never be
filled. As colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked
into each other's eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The
white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and
shattered. And--fear of white power and respect for white civilization
together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia
ran the sibilant whisper: "The East will see the West to bed!"
The chorus of mingled exultation, hate, and scorn sounded from every
portion of the colored world. Chinese scholars, Japanese professors, Hindu
pundits, Turkish journalists, and Afro-American editors, one and all
voiced drastic criticisms of white civilization and hailed the war as a
well-merited Nemesis on white arrogance and greed. This is how the
Constantinople _Tanine_, the most serious Turkish newspaper, characterized
the European Powers: "They would not look at the evils in their own
countries or elsewhere, but interfered at the slightest incident in our
borders; every day they would gnaw at some part of our rights and our
sovereignty; they would perform vivisection on our quivering flesh and cut
off great pieces of it. And we, with a forcibly controlled spirit of
rebellion in our hearts and with clinched but powerless fists, silent and
depressed, would murmur as the fire burned within: 'Oh, that they might
fall out with one another! Oh, that they might eat one another up!' And
lo! to-day they are eating each other up, just as the Turk wished they
would."[4]
The Afro-American author, W. E. Burghardt Dubois, wrote of the colored
world: "These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of
humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and
not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight, and the War of the
Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet
seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget."[5]
"What does the European War mean to us Orientals?" queried the Japanese
writer, Yone Noguchi. "It means the saddest downfall of the so-called
western civilization; our belief that it was builded upon a higher and
sounder footing than ours was at once knocked down and killed; we are
sorry that we somehow overestimated its happy possibility and were
deceived and cheated by its superficial glory. My recent western journey
confirmed me that the so-called dynamic western civilization was all
against the Asiatic belief. And when one does not respect the others,
there will be only one thing to come, that is, fight, in action or
silence."[6]
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIMARY RACES]
Such was the colored world's reaction to the white death-grapple, and as
the long struggle dragged on both Asia and Africa stirred to their very
depths. To be sure, no great explosions occurred during the war years,
albeit lifting veils of censorship reveal how narrowly such explosions
were averted. Nevertheless, Asia and Africa are to-day in acute ferment,
and we must not forget that this ferment is not primarily due to the war.
The war merely accelerated a movement already existent long before 1914.
Even if the Great War had been averted, the twentieth century must have
been a time of wide-spread racial readjustments in which the white man's
present position of political world-domination would have been sensibly
modified, especially in Asia. However, had the white race and white
civilization been spared the terrific material and moral losses involved
in the Great War and its still unliquidated aftermath, the process of
racial readjustment would have been far more gradual and would have been
fraught with far fewer cataclysmic possibilities. Had white strength
remained intact it would have acted as a powerful shock-absorber, taking
up and distributing the various colored impacts. As a result, the coming
modification of the world's racial equilibrium, though inevitable, would
have been so graduated that it would have seemed more an evolution than a
revolution. Such violent breaches as did occur might have been localized,
and anything like a general race-cataclysm would probably have been
impossible.
But it was not to be. The heart of the white world was divided against
itself, and on the fateful 1st of August, 1914, the white race, forgetting
ties of blood and culture, heedless of the growing pressure of the colored
world without, locked in a battle to the death. An ominous cycle opened
whose end no man can foresee. Armageddon engendered Versailles; earth's
worst war closed with an unconstructive peace which left old sores
unhealed and even dealt fresh wounds. The white world to-day lies
debilitated and uncured; the colored world views conditions which are a
standing incitement to rash dreams and violent action.
Such is the present status of the world's race-problem, expressed in
general terms. The analysis of the specific elements in that complex
problem will form the subject of the succeeding chapters.