Thomas F. Bertonneau

(Continued from part I) Like The French Revolution in San Domingo, Stoddard's next bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920), would owe its popularity to the author's knack for conveying a sense of disaster, either historical, as in the case of San Domingo, or on the temporal horizon -- a looming severe change in the order of existence that bodes ill for the intended audience. In The Rising Tide, however, the intimation of threat finds melioration in a utopian vision of averted disaster. And in his utopianism, Stoddard definitely appealed to the progressive segment of the American audience of the day.

Insofar as people today remember Massachusetts-born T. Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) at all, they remember him vaguely as a once-popular writer-journalist who had the bad taste to address forthrightly matters of race and immigration, as those topics concerned American national policy, in the decades before the Great Depression. People over 40 who read the footnotes while studying English might recall that F. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to Stoddard obliquely in The Great Gatsby conflating his name with that of his contemporary Madison Grant. A few people might further connect Stoddard with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. Stoddard lobbied for it, another black mark against his name by contemporary standards.

The wispy image of Stoddard will therefore suggest to most people, should it improbably appear to them, that the man belongs on the distinctly politically incorrect side of right attitudes and behaviors; they will adjust their emotions accordingly. Yet Stoddard contributed his considerable cachet to such causes as Pacifism and Eugenics, having been allied in the latter project with that distinctly Leftwing notable Margaret Sanger; he saw himself, in part, as an American Friedrich Nietzsche, rather as Fitzgerald saw himself as an American Oswald Spengler. In a recent VDARE article, Robert Locke protested cautiously against the existing caricature of Stoddard, reminding readers that Stoddard once exercised considerable authority as a public intellectual.