by Philipp Blom
This degradation, Sicard believed, was passed on to the next generation, and the solution was therefore not an insistence on greater social justice but a concerted effort to prevent “inferior” men and women from having children. In the United States, where immigration was continually changing the demographic makeup of society through a steady influx of poor arrivals (during this era, often from southern or eastern Europe), the Anglo-Saxon elite did its very best to defend its position and to envision a future created along eugenic—particularly “Nordic”—lines.
The Second International Congress of Eugenics was held in 1921 and hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The list of attendees included Alexander Graham Bell, the congress’s honorary president; Charles Darwin’s son Leonard; future US president Herbert Hoover; Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the museum and president of the congress; and the noted racist author Lothrop Stoddard, whose The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920) was selling strongly a year after publication.
During his opening address, Osborn emphasized the urgency of the task:
I doubt if there has ever been a moment in the world’s history when an international conference on race character and betterment has been more important than the present. Europe, in patriotic self-sacrifice on both sides of the World War, has lost much of the heritage of centuries of civilization which never can be regained. . . . In the United States . . . we are engaged in a serious struggle to maintain our historic republican institutions through barring the entrance of those who are unfit to share the duties and responsibilities of our well-founded government. The true spirit of American democracy that all men are born with equal rights and duties has been confused with the political sophistry that all men are born with equal character and ability to govern themselves and others, and with the education sophistry that education and environment will offset the handicap of heredity.15
At the conference, delegates were alarmed at the sight of a plaster statue labeled as “the average American male.” He was a product of statistics. Derived from data gleaned from US Army recruits during the war, this composite man was anything but heroic; the average American, it seemed, was already genetically a degenerate. His shoulders were narrow and sloping, his figure unathletic, his arms hanging weakly by his sides. He was white, and the very whiteness of the plaster invoked not only the color of his skin but also the marble of Greek sculpture, representing the aesthetic ideal of human development, but this white man, the subliminal message ran, was in no state to defend his wife and children against Stoddard’s rising tide of color, against the hordes of other races coming for them. To drive home the point, the average male was exhibited next to the heroic figure of an idealized Harvard athlete. Something had to be done.
Not so heroic: The “average American male” according to statistical data.
Eugenics spoke to a determination to defend privilege as well as a genuine idea of bettering society and a very American hope of personal and social transformation through technology and a grand narrative of US history. An official poster for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair made this point when it showed the head of a noble white female, clearly inspired by classical Greek sculpture, crowned by a tiara composed of an American eagle and the words “I will” with the year, 1933, next to her superimposed over the face of a Native American chief with feather headdress and the year 1833. The white figure simply effaced her colored American predecessor, and she did so proudly. The legend at the top of the poster read: “A century of progress.” The exhibition also featured a Thrill House of Crime replete with the alleged faces of criminal types such as “coke addict,” “bomber,” “maniac,” and “kidnapper.” From 1934 to 1943, the American Public Health Association regularly invited the German government to present a eugenics exhibition in different parts of the United States.
Not only official exhibitions were used to popularize the eugenics message. With great alliterative aplomb, two women, Mary T. Watts and Florence Brown Sherbon, founded the Fitter Families for Future Firesides contests, in which members of the public could have themselves examined by doctors and compete in categories such as “most perfect baby,” “average family,” or “best couple.”
In the Shadow of the Superman
WHILE EUGENICS enjoyed broad popular support, the ugly ideological concoction that was social Darwinism could be looked at from a more philosophical standpoint, emphasizing Nietzsche’s importance over that of Darwin and culture over biology. Hardly any thinker was immune to this, and no author could avoid dealing with Nietzsche and his legacy in some more or less bastardized form. During his defense of Chicago child murderers Nathan Leopold and Albert Loeb in 1924, only a year before defending John Scopes at the Tennessee “monkey trial,” Clarence Darrow claimed that their crime had been inspired by Nietzsche—a clever move, as after the war all things German were still automatically suspicious. The suspects, law students from wealthy families, had killed a neighborhood boy simply because they were convinced that they were too intelligent and too superior to be caught.
In his summation at the end of the trial, Darrow spoke of how the hearts of men had been “calloused by war” and of a pervasive atmosphere of cruelty that misled his young clients into believing murder to be a glorious act. Speaking of Nathan “Babe” Leopold, the lawyer noted that he was “a boy without emotions, a boy obsessed of philosophy, a boy obsessed of learning.” This learning, however, had led his client astray:
Babe took to philosophy. . . . He became enamoured of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century. A man who probably had made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong . . . a philosopher of what we might call the intellectual cult. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book, “Beyond Good and Evil” . . . a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil; that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman.
. . . Babe was obsessed of it, and here are some of the things which Nietzsche taught: Become hard . . . It was not a casual bit of philosophy with [Leopold]; it was his life. He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen. . . . The ordinary commands of society were not for him. Many of us read this philosophy but know that it has no actual application to life; but not he. It became a part of his being. It was his philosophy.16
Darrow had persuaded his young clients to enter a guilty plea, believing that he could save them from the electric chair only if he could avoid a jury trial. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, a sensational victory for the defense counsel, whose clients were clearly guilty of a terrible crime and reviled by the press, which had repeatedly called for their execution. Nietzsche had won the day. The sway this “most original philosopher of the last century” held over their impressionable minds was seen to be so great that they had practically no chance of escaping his enchantment.
If Nietzsche could be portrayed as a corrosive influence on young minds in Chicago, the unfolding debate about values, crisis, and civilization after the war on both sides of the Atlantic would have been unthinkable without his reverberating voice and the inspiration it gave to followers on the European continent. In Germany, Oswald Spengler’s ideas were saturated by Nietzsche, as was the poetry of Stefan George and the novels of Thomas Mann, while the rising revolutionary conservative movement around Adolf Hitler saw itself as an avant-garde of supermen. But the influence went much further. It made itself felt in France as well as in Mussolini’s Italy, from north to south, and from the political right to the far left.
Lone Prophet
ONE OF THE MOST TELLING and perhaps strangest biographies among all of Zarathustra’s followers was that of Oscar Levy, Nietzsche’s chief apostle in Britain and the editor of the
first edition of his collected works in English, who devoted his entire career to translating, writing prefaces for new editions, and generally popularizing Nietzsche. In every way, Levy, a German Jew who had left his native country in 1894 on account of his disgust with Germany’s militaristic culture for the more civilized atmosphere of England, had made it his mission to spread the word in his adopted country, which had traditionally looked askance at continental philosophy in general and at Nietzsche in particular.
For Levy, this healthy empirical skepticism toward the poetic utterings and occasional ravings of Germany’s most German philosopher was simply a challenge to work harder against nearly overwhelming odds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Levy was particularly exercised about Nietzsche’s apparent anti-Semitism, which he had come to share wholeheartedly and with a mixture of self-loathing and megalomania. The Jews, as he believed he understood from Nietzsche, had been the agents of humanity’s greatness and also of its imminent downfall, from which only the Jews could save it.
At the beginning of this extraordinary idea stood, appropriately enough, a conversion, which in Levy’s case had taken place at the British Museum. Surrounded by the great art of previous civilizations—evidence of other ways of seeing the world, of other ideas of beauty and human fulfillment—he felt moved to question the values of his own society: “I have the sudden thought that Monotheism etc. may not be ‘Progress’ after all, as I had been taught in school and life under the (unconscious) influence of Hegel. My Damascus: ‘But then the Jews were wrong!?’ The Chosen People not chosen for Beauty like the Greeks? Only for Morality, and what a Morality: the curses of J. C.!”17
This sudden revelation brought Levy to a position that had strong similarities with that of the eugenicists, if from a philosophical perspective. Christianity had infected the great civilizations of antiquity with what Nietzsche had called the Jewish “slave morality” of guilt and groveling. This had to be reversed. Aiding and supporting “the feeble, commonplace, pitiable, unsound, and helpless” was not doing humanity a favor but only turning it into “a flock of sheep . . . mutually innocuous and useless.” Instead, he believed he had found the answer to the great crisis of civilization in a new aristocracy of Nietzschean supermen, strong, proudly immoral, and weeding out everything that was weak.
Levy had worked tirelessly to pave the way for a wider reception of his idol in Britain, but during the war he had had his right of residence revoked and had been obliged to leave. After a sojourn in Switzerland he had returned, apparently undaunted, in 1920, only to find that most of his former acquaintances were now giving him a wide berth as an enemy alien. In spite of such obstacles, he had plowed on, spreading the gospel of his curious anti-Semitism, which was generous enough to include Christianity and to call for a new, if decidedly idiosyncratic, mission for the Jewish people: “The world still needs Israel, for the world has fallen prey to democracy and needs the example of a people which has always acted contrary to democracy, which has always upheld the principle of race. The world still needs Israel, for terrible wars, of which the present one is only the beginning, are in store for it; and the world needs a race of good Europeans who stand above national bigotry and national hypocrisy, national mysticism and national blackguardism.”18
With his idea of a people faithful to race but disdainful of nationalism, Levy’s moral crusade led him to keep strange company. He admired blatantly racist and virulently anti-Semitic writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, who made use of him without sharing any of his confused but magnanimous feelings toward his fellow humans. Instead, they could quote his tirades about the historical role of the Jews, which still make shocking reading: “We who have posed as the saviours of the world, we, who have even boasted of having given it ‘the’ Saviour, we are today nothing else but the world’s seducers, its destroyers, its incendiaries, its executioners. We who have promised to lead you to a new Heaven, we have finally succeeded in landing you in a new Hell.”19
To Levy this polemic was only the preface to a world revolution led by Jewish intelligence, but to many who read him it was exactly the kind of argument that had been put forward in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and which was being eagerly studied and propagated by politicians such as Adolf Hitler, who had just finished a stint of imprisonment at Landsberg—a valuable pause in his political career that had allowed him to commit his own, remarkably similar ravings to paper, and to posterity, in his notorious Mein Kampf.
In England, Levy’s racial theories met an increasingly frosty reception, and in 1921, only one year after his return to the country he had chosen a quarter of a century earlier, he was deported as an enemy alien by the Home Office, which viewed his enthusiasm for Nietzsche as flagrant pro-German propaganda. Levy was dismayed but not silenced. He protested against his expulsion and was informed that only those Germans who were of unequivocal use to British commerce were allowed to stay. “Alas! I was only the importer of a few new but very odd and doubtful ideas!” he commented. He moved to France and from there back to Germany, where he was to remain until 1933. In 1924 he traveled to Italy to meet Mussolini, his new political idol. “Fascism is not only an antidote, but likewise a remedy against Bolshevism,” he had written in 1921. “For Bolshevism is not so much a revolutionary as a reactionary creed. Bolshevism wishes to put the clock back to the old principles of the French Revolution: it even stands up most shamelessly for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. These ideas, however, have decayed, nay, have become idols which are as good as dead: it is for the new fascistic movement to bury them altogether and to enthrone in their place other ideas and living aspirations for the guidance and progress of mankind.”20
As a writer, Levy received applause almost exclusively from the historically “wrong” side, but when Hitler came to power in 1933 Levy left Germany for France, and finally returned to England on the eve of the Second World War. He was to remain there until his death in 1946. Misguided as he had been about the historic potential of fascism, he was not alone in believing it to be a solution to the malaise of his own day, and it is to his credit that he eventually understood his error. In November 1933, true to his Nietzschean beliefs, he offered a bracing perspective on the ideology of National Socialism that might have surprised its adherents:
The modern Germans are less a civilized than a religious people. Their religion comes, strange to say, right out of the Old Testament. The Chosen Race idea, which is at the root of the German mentality, springs from the soil of Israel. Israel likewise produced, long before Hitler and Göbbels [sic], its “Ahnenprüfer” (ancestor examiners) in the historical figures of Ezra and Nehemia. They forbade all intercourse with foreign women. . . . They, too, were all for the purity of Race, for pride of Race, for power of Race. The Germans, following in their footsteps, do not know how reactionary they are and how akin, spiritually, to those, whom they detest. . . . This Hitlerism is nothing but a Jewish Heresy.21
Debates about Darwin and Nietzsche, about evolution and radical moral doubt, echoed through this deeply unsettled period. They represented the two most important ways to conjure up the spirit of the age and its great ideal: the New Man, the answer to the trauma of the war and the reign of anonymous technology. New Men could be bred selectively, and they could create themselves through an act of heroic self-transcendence. It was a great but ambiguous dream, and the image of this great hero was enlisted to serve ideas on both the right and the left, pursued by scientists and occultists alike, venerated in many forms and rituals. The dream of the New Man was evident in the work of artists and the earnest idealism of nudist associations venerating sun and air, in the public fascination with competitive sport, fashion for new body lines, and scientific advances. But it was an ambiguous dream now, teetering on the verge of nightmare. The experience of the First World War had shown that technological progress was no longer inherently positive, that machines could become malign, and that, like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, humanity could no
longer rid itself of the spirits it had called. The New Man was simultaneously the era’s most potent promise and its greatest threat.
·1926·
Metropolis
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930
Hear the evangel of the new era—
The machine has no inhibitions
Man invented the machine in order to discover himself
Yet I have heard a lady say “Il fait l’amour comme
une machine à coudre,” with no inflection of approval.
—Mina Loy, “The Oil in the Machine,” 1923
IT WAS NOT AN IDEAL START FOR THE US RELEASE OF A MAJOR European movie. “I have recently seen the silliest film,” the review began. “I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier. . . . It is called ‘Metropolis,’ it comes from the great Ufa studios in Germany, and the public is given to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost. It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.”1 The damning review appeared in the New York Times. Its author was none other than a master of science fiction writing, the British novelist H. G. Wells.