W.E.B. Du Bois was the seminal figure in modern Reconstruction studies. The brilliant intellectual was one of the most important historians of the American experience. His Black Reconstruction in America took on the many lies and distortions of the Dunning School. He was also a writer, editor, and popular public speaker. This week’s New Yorker has an article on a notable performance of Du Bois in that last role.
If you have ever enjoyed the Bronx Zoo, you were a beneficiary of the good works of wealthy patrician Madison Grant. Mr. Grant helped found the zoo and he ran it for many years. A conservationist, he helped to save the American bison. He created the first American parkway along the Bronx River. He also placed a small African man, a pygmy, in a cage at his zoo and displayed him to the great amusement of New Yorkers.
Grant wrote a book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), that would be admired by Hitler and employed by eugenicists and segregationists to craft anti-miscegenation laws. It was also used to support the 1924 Immigration Act that closed of much of new immigration by Jews, Greeks, Poles, and Russians to the United States.
In his New Yorker article, Ian Frasier writes:
The preposterousness of “The Passing of the Great Race” approaches the sublime. To summarize: according to Grant, all of Western civilization was created by a race of tall, blond, warlike people who ventured down from Northern Europe every so often to help start great cultures, such as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, before retiring into their northern forests. Over time, a lot of these Nordics became “mongrelized” by mixing with “inferior races”…, or else they killed one another off in internecine wars because of their bravery and their love of fighting, as they were doing at that very moment in the Great War. By Grant’s reckoning, the greatest men in Western history had been Nordics. Among the stars he claimed for the team, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Dante all clearly possessed Nordic blood, as he had determined by careful study of the shapes of their heads in busts.
He wrote that a major problem leading to Nordic “mongrelization” was the uncoöperative Nordic women, who had a habit of choosing the wrong men to mate with. Grant himself never married. He conceded, with regret, “It would be in a democracy, a virtual impossibility to limit by law the right to breed to a privileged and chosen few.”
And what was the special attribute the Nordics possessed that made them so unique and sacred? Grant didn’t talk about it much, but it slipped out once in a while. The secret dwelt in a mysterious substance known as “germ-plasm.” Everybody had it, but the Nordics’ germ-plasm was the best. Grant and his co-believers could apparently use phrases such as “our superior germ-plasm” with a straight face.
Sounds a lot like the crazy witches’ brew concocted by modern incels and their Alt-Right fellow travelers.
Anyway, Madison Grant had many followers, but his leading popularizer was a writer with the appropriately Nordic name of Lothrop Stoddard. This fellow, who may never have had an original, let alone coherent, idea in his head, spoke to audience numbering in the thousands about the “germ-plasm” nonsense of his inspiration Grant.
Stoddard did know how to stir up fear, telling his white audiences that there was going to be a race war and the white folks might just lose it. Once defeated, they would be replaced.
Stoddard’s ideas were not marginal. The New York Times wrote of one of his books:
Lothrop Stoddard evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion beneath vast waves of yellow men, brown men, black men and red men, whom the Nordics have hitherto dominated . . . with Bolshevism menacing us on the one hand and race extinction through warfare on the other, many people are not unlikely to give [Stoddard’s book] respectful consideration.
Stoddard contended that while the naturally inferior black race was also naturally happy to be ruled by whites, mixed-race “Mulattoes” like Du Bois insisted on stirring up blacks because they essentially wanted to be white.
Promoters saw big audience interest in a showdown between a black genius and white supremacist who said that genius could only reside in a Nordic mind. So, they arranged a debate between the two men in 1929.
The Chicago audience for The Great Debate was said to number 3,000 to 5,000 people. Ian Frasier describes what happened when the two men spoke:
Du Bois steps to the lectern. He begins by asking what exactly “Negroes” are, what “cultural equality” is, and how anyone can be “encouraged” to seek it. He asks why Negroes or anybody else should not be encouraged to seek cultural equality. He allows that maybe in the past Negroes couldn’t have reached it, but since emancipation they have come wonderfully far, an accomplishment that “has few parallels in human history.” For this they had expected to be applauded, he says; but instead white America feared them and said their advance threatened civilization—as if culture were some fixed quantity, and Negroes’ having more of it would mean less of it for others.
Du Bois points out that such a view imagines culture as if it were material goods, the best of which belong to only the few who have leisure to enjoy them; and then these people begin to see the universe as made specially for them, and elect themselves as the “Chosen People”; and then they think that if the darker races come forward they “are going to spoil the divine gifts of the Nordics.” But there is no scientific proof that modern culture came from Nordics, or that Nordic brains are better. “In fact,” Du Bois says, “the proofs of essential human equality of gift are overwhelming.”
He says that if Nordics believe themselves to be superior, and do not want to mingle their blood with that of other races, who is forcing them? They can keep to themselves if they wish. He begins to thunder:
But this has never been the Nordic program. Their program is the subjection and rulership of the world for the benefit of the Nordics. They have overrun the earth and brought not simply modern civilization and technique, but with it exploitation, slavery and degradation to the majority of men. . . . They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: “You shall not marry our daughters!”
The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?
Du Bois says that what black, brown, and yellow people do want is to have the barriers to equal citizenship torn down—“the demand is so reasonable and logical that to deny it is not simply to hurt and hinder them, it is to fly in the face of your own white civilization.” He scores the senselessness of racial categories, in which a mixed-race person like himself could as easily be considered a Nordic as a Negro. The hypocrisy gets worse, he says, when America, “a great white nation with a magnificent Plan of Salvation,” tosses out Christian behavior in dealing with issues of race: “The attacks that white people themselves have made upon their own moral structure are worse for civilization than anything that any body of Negroes could ever do.”
Then he asks the world of white supremacy a practical question: If it really intends to keep other races in subjection—can it? The white exploiters can’t even get along among themselves, as was demonstrated by the recent war, which was “a matter of jealousy in the division of the spoils of Asia and Africa, and by it you nearly ruined civilization.”
Stoddard goes next. Having been praised by the moderator for his courage in appearing in a venue where Du Bois has so many supporters, Stoddard begins, “Nothing is more unfortunate than delusion. The Negro has been the victim of delusion ever since the Civil War.” He does not warn the audience against being swept away by his mulatto opponent, nor does he say (as he has already written elsewhere) that white Americans would rather see themselves and their children dead than mix with black people. Du Bois is surprised by the weakness of his performance, and later attributes it to Stoddard’s being too cautious to state frankly what he believes.
Stoddard outlines a solution, which he calls “bi-racialism”—a “separate but equal” setup, which he says will be based not on any inherent inferiority but merely on racial “difference.” He says that white people don’t want to mix with Asians, either, although they don’t find Asians inferior—just “different.” He uses the famous metaphor of the hand, first proposed by Booker T. Washington—that “in all things purely social [the races] can be as separate as the fingers; yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
The defining moment of the debate occurs as Stoddard describes how bi-racialism will provide each race with its own public sphere. The Forum Council later printed the debate in a small book, which records the moment. Stoddard says:
The more enlightened men of southern white America . . . are doing their best to see that separation shall not mean discrimination; that if the Negroes have separate schools, they shall be good schools; that if they have separate train accommodations, they shall have good accommodations. [laughter]
There is just that one bracketed word, “laughter.” The transcription is being polite. Blacks who had moved to Chicago from the South knew the Jim Crow cars. The absurd notion that Jim Crow cars were anything except horrible—dirty, crowded, inconvenient, degrading—got a huge laugh. As the reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American put it:
A good-natured burst of laughter from all parts of the hall interrupted Mr. Stoddard when, in explaining his bi-racial theory and attempting to show that it did not mean discrimination, said that under such a system there would be the same kind of schools for Negroes, but separate, the same kind of railway coaches, but separate. . . . When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter.
Du Bois, in his rebuttal, says the reason that Stoddard does not understand why the audience laughed is that he has never ridden in a Jim Crow car. He adds, “We have.” Stoddard, when his turn comes again, scolds the audience, saying that real progress is being made in bi-racialism, and “that you have something that you cannot laugh down, that you cannot sneer at, that you cannot be cynical about.” But it is too late; he is fighting a rear-guard action. Du Bois ends by wondering whether the mistake that white supremacists make is believing that civilization is a gift bestowed by an élite, and not derived from “the masses of ordinary people.” With the moderator’s final thanks, the event tapers off in politeness, obscuring the fact that Stoddard has been more or less laughed off the stage.
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