On W. E. B. Du Bois’s birthday, revisit Ian Frazier on Du Bois’s great comic victory over a white supremacist in 1929, when white supremacists were not often the subjects of jokes.
all clearly possessed Nordic blood, as he had determined by careful study of the shapes of their heads in busts.
He died in 1937. Soon the war put his love of the Nazis in a new light, and years of almost no public mention followed. But, as dependable old hatreds are rising up again, Grant has become more current. An excellent and unsparing biography, “,” by Jonathan Peter Spiro, came out in 2009. And earlier this year Daniel Okrent published “
In smaller letters, the ad asked, “Has the Negro the Same Intellectual Possibilities As Other Races?” and below that the answer “Yes!” appeared with a photograph of Du Bois, who would be arguing the affirmative. Alongside the answer “No!” was a photograph of Lothrop Stoddard, a writer, who would argue the negative. In the picture, Stoddard projects a roguish, matinée-idol aura, with slicked-down hair and a black mustache.
For Stoddard, the pivotal event of recent history was the Russo-Japanese War. By his reckoning, the defeat of a “white” country by a “colored” country in 1905 had opened the door to disaster. At some point after his Haiti book came out, he read “The Passing of the Great Race,” and it changed his life. Combining Grant’s view of the besieged and noble Nordics with his own ideas about nonwhite peoples, he predicted an imminent worldwide uprising against the “Nordic race.
Stoddard admitted to reading Du Bois’s books, and once went so far as to say that he treasured them in his library. He seems to have taken a kind of negative inspiration from Du Bois. On the first page of “The Souls of Black Folk,” published in 1903, Du Bois wrote, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” On page 1 of “The French Revolution in San Domingo,” Stoddard wrote, in 1914, “The ‘conflict of color’ . . .
Tickets for the debate sold for fifty or seventy-five cents. The crowd numbered five thousand, four thousand, or three thousand, according to different counts. Du Bois, in a letter to his wife, Nina, said that hundreds could not get in. The Chicago, the city’s leading black newspaper, ran a photo that showed a packed hall—floor seating, and a wraparound balcony—with an American-flag-draped stage. “It was a great occasion,” Du Bois wrote to Nina.
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: 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.
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.
Stoddard had his dignity to think of. In 1929, white supremacists were not often the subjects of jokes. Look through anthologies of humor pieces from the period, and you will not find parodies of nuts like him and Grant, although you will find dialect pieces making fun of blacks. Du Bois knew that the racists would be unintentionally funny onstage; as he wrote to Moore, Senator Heflin “would be a scream” in a debate.
Stoddard died in 1950, at the age of sixty-six. Like Grant, he was mostly forgotten. Flacking for the Nazis turned out to be a bad career move. But a ghostly image of him survives, in the early pages of “.” Nick Carraway, the narrator, has just remet Tom and Daisy Buchanan, his old friends. They are at dinner when something Nick says gets a rise out of Tom:
The American Museum of Natural History is directly across the Park from 960 Fifth Avenue, so I wandered over to it. Grant was a longtime trustee of the museum, and I thought it might still hold a few traces of him. In the Hall of North American Mammals, I located the Grant caribou—two males with large antlers, standing on the tundra in Alaska. Metal letters on a baseboard say “Gift of Madison Grant.” Two young guys, one with a ponytail, noticed me looking and asked me who Madison Grant was.