Not if we can help it. –BOD, EAU
“Civilization’s gone to pieces,”he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around abottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’vegotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empiresby this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, andeverybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the whiterace will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’sbeen proved.”
He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsbydoesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring adifferent set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone infeeling besieged. The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-worldanalogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby.Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. Herefers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycleof ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting.The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distributionof “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is auniversal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”
As briefs for racial supremacy go, The Rising Tide of Coloris eerily serene. Its tone is scholarly and gentlemanly, its hatredrationalized and, in Buchanan’s term, “scientific.” And the book washardly a fringe phenomenon. It was published by Scribner, alsoFitzgerald’s publisher, and Stoddard, who received a doctorate inhistory from Harvard, was a member of many professional academicassociations. It was precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man ofBuchanan’s profile—wealthy, Ivy League–educated, at once pretentiousand intellectually insecure—might have been expected to bring up incasual conversation.
As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limitedsocial mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audiencehad nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhereabove the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to anyimmediate danger to their class’s political and cultural power than tothe perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whitenessthat sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned.