The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

Book by Lothrop Stoddard

The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, is a book about racialism and geopolitics, which describes the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism because of the population growth among people of color, rising nationalism in colonized nations, and industrialization in China and Japan. To counter the perceived geopolitical threat, Stoddard advocated Nordicism, racial segregation, and general racism, restricting non white immigration into white majority countries, restricting immigration of non members of the "Nordic race" to countries primarily containing members of the "Nordic race"; restricting Asian migration to Africa; and slowly giving independence to European colonies in Asia (including the Middle East). A noted eugenicist, Stoddard supported a separation of the "primary races" of the world and warned against miscegenation, the mixing of the races.

In 1920, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy was positively reviewed and recommended by The New York Times: "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". Civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois stated "the Nordic peoples have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern," and in reply to whites' fears of miscegenation declared "Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?" The text is referenced in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby by the antagonist Tom Buchanan who states that he has been reading a book by "Goddard" about how the white race will be "utterly submerged".

Stoddard author claims that there is a perceived threat of non white "races" to the global dominance of the white race, "typified by the Russo Japanese War," which he represents as a struggle of color against white. In addition to Japan he describes a "brown reaction", which he calls "the Mohammedan Revival", taking as exemplary Yahya Siddyk's work "The Awakening of the Islamic Peoples in the Fourteenth Century of the Hegira". He also describes in Africa a movement he calls the "Ethiopian Church", spread by "Afro American Methodist preachers", and "having had a hand in the Zulu rising which broke out in Natal in 1907". The book also warns of the dangers of race mixing and the need for white countries to maintain their racial "purity". The thesis is that due to immigration, white people produce fewer children so as to give them the capital to live in white communities:

"As long as the people of any community are relatively homogeneous, what differences of wealth and social position there may be do not affect the birth rate, or do so only after a considerable time. But put into that community a number of immigrants, inferior mentally, socially, and economically, and the natives are unwilling to have their children associate with them in work or social life. They then limit the number of their children in order to give them the capital or education to enter occupations in which they will not be brought into contact with the new arrivals." Stoddard argues that the increasing population and economic power of non white races, particularly in Asia, will lead to a "collapse of civilization", typified by the situation in Latin America, which he describes as "the mongrel's political ascendancy", saying further that "[t]hese unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters". Stoddard's thesis is that the white race has dominated world affairs for centuries and has created a civilization that is superior to all others.