Lovecraft’s Vicious Legacy as a Racist—Part 1

Monday, January 15, 2018

Ray Rickman, Special Contributor

 

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Everyone who writes about H.P. Lovecraft tries to reconcile the visionary pioneer of American horror fiction with the vicious racist. While he was following in the footsteps of Edgar Allen Poe as America’s preeminent writer of macabre, terrifying tales, Lovecraft was also cheering on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and lamenting the massive Jewish conspiracy he believed secretly dominated American arts and culture. These were not distinct facets of his personality. Instead, the bigotry informed his fiction. Lovecraft’s stories constantly feature cosmic horrors served by grotesque creatures. Those creatures were drawn from his fear of interracial breeding, which he thought would produce deformed, brutish “mongrels” who would plunge humanity into constant chaos.

Where Shakespeare used violent storms to signal turmoil in a nation’s leadership, Lovecraft used diversity to show that a neighborhood was infested by cultists and monsters. In “The Horror at Red Hook,” Lovecraft’s hero is horrified by the diversity of the titular Brooklyn neighborhood. Whether the “unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet” or the “squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door,” the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan inhabitants were a macrocosm of the horror lurking in Red Hook. Fittingly, the victims in that tale were “blue-eyed Norwegians” menaced by the sinister, diverse newcomers.

Lovecraft was hardly unique in these beliefs. Despite Northerners’ best attempts to view racism as a uniquely Southern artifact, prejudice flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line. Lovecraft may have expressed his views more brutally than many contemporaries, but his opinions were hardly an aberrant outlier among Providence’s gentry or the nation’s upper class. Indeed, Lovecraft’s three decades as a writer, roughly from 1905-1935, overlap with the low point of post-Civil War race relations.

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Through this period, the nation was riven by racial conflict, as the influx of European immigrants and the migration of African Americans from South to North brought long-simmering prejudice to a violent boil. In the first decade of the 1900s, immigration reached a record high of nine million newcomers, with a 22% the workforce – and 38% of the urban workforce – foreign-born by 1913. Lovecraft  believed these trends would cause America to be overrun by inferior races, foreigners, and, worst of all, “mongrelized” by interracial marriage. His writings, like almost every aspect of politics and culture, reflected this racial conflict.

Race riots were commonplace in this time period, regularly enveloping American cities in smoke and flame as gangs of marauding whites razed African American neighborhoods to avenge imagined slights. In the summer of 1919, 940 African Americans were killed in riots in over three dozen cities. In Norfolk, Virginia, a mob attacked a gathering of African American veterans. In Omaha, Nebraska, some 10,000 white rioters destroyed over 1,000,000 of property while lynching an African American man arrested on suspicion of murdering a white woman. The worst violence that summer was in Chicago, where a week-long riot, triggered by white beachgoers pelting an African American swimmer with rocks, killed 38 people and injured over 500.

1915 saw the premier of Birth of a Nation, a film glamorizing slavery and the Ku Klux Klan and portraying African Americans as sexually aggressive, animalistic beasts. Three years earlier, Lovecraft had published a poem dramatizing God’s creation of dark-skinned people, who, according to Lovecraft, He meant as a bridge between human and beast. The film was a cultural phenomenon, grossing over fifty million dollars at a time when movie tickets cost ten cents. President Woodrow Wilson screened the film at the White House, around the same time he was segregating the federal workforce, going so far as to install separate bathrooms for whites and minorities in most federal buildings.

Birth of a Nation was so powerful a culture force it inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. While the first Klan was only active in the South, the new Klan had chapters throughout the country. In Rhode Island, it had 21,000 members committed to opposing African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and anyone else who threatened their vision of a white, Protestant, Northern European nation. They were a powerful political force, successfully lobbying the legislature in 1922 to punitively regulate Catholic schools. Despite their involvement in conventional politics, the Rhode Island Klan was quick to violence if the legislature was not responsive, as a Woonsocket newspaper reporter learned when he was beaten and branded while trying to cover a Klan meeting.

Nationwide, the Klan was one of the most powerful organizations in the country, numbering over 4 million members. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, the delegates voted down a resolution condemning the Klan. That night, tens of thousands of Klansmen burned a massive cross to celebrate their victory and send a message to the party not to nominate Al Davis, a Catholic, for President.

The Klan represented middle-class racism, but the sentiment flourished among the upper class too, just with a veneer of scientific respectability. The pseudoscience of eugenics – breeding humans like cattle to eliminate “defective” disabilities – was immensely popular during this period, counting Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, and social activists like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, as fervent adherents.

A hierarchy of racial ability – with Anglos and Germans on top; Italians, Irish, Poles, and other ethnic Europeans in the middle; and Africans and Latinos on the bottom – was another popular pseudoscience in the early 1900s. A bestselling book in 1920, Rise of the Colored Empires, warned that “colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.” H.L. Mencken, the nation’s most popular newspaper columnist (who Lovecraft would try to emulate in his self-published political journal) opposed lynching and excoriated the Ku Klux Klan as violent low-class rabble. He also vehemently opposed civil rights for minorities because “the Negro brain is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort.”

This was the America that read Lovecraft when he was writing – a nation frightened of diversity, where shopkeepers and scientists alike were secure in their knowledge that the Anglo or German Protestant was the finest specimen of humanity. Lovecraft’s letters, even more than his fiction, show someone terrified of diversity and supremely confident of his racial superiority. India was held up as an example of a country that was ruined by diversity. The harm to India caused by allowing interracial relationships was so severe that “extirpation and fumigation would seem to be about the only way to make Hindoostan fit for decent people to inhabit.” In other words, India could only be fixed by killing the vast majority of its people.

Lovecraft’s beliefs were vicious and violent even for his time, but they were hardly unique. The following excerpts from his writings show a man who rejects diversity and equality, instead believing in his unparalleled racial superiority. READ PART 2 ON TUESDAY

 

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