The contemporary fascination with the Anglo-Saxons’ Teutonic ancestry, with its vigour, might and magnitude, its civilisation and freedom, conveniently came with a clear-cut identity. Teutonic blood, it was believed, gave the British their heroic mien, their noble height, their long, aristocratic faces, their blue eyes and their blonde hair. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, published in 1819, set out the accepted colour-coding of the day. The Saxon hero, Ivanhoe, has fair hair and blue eyes like his Saxon father; his wife, Rowena, is flaxen-haired and blue-eyed; but the beautiful Rebecca, a Jewish woman, has dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. Responding, in the introduction to a later edition, to a reader’s letter asking why Ivanhoe did not marry Rebecca, Scott exposed the unpalatable truth already current in his century: ‘the prejudices of the age rendered such a union almost impossible’. Even in the mild medievalism of Scott’s novels, ugly divisions were evident. Christian could not marry Jew; but more telling, in the rising heat of racialist thought, was the belief that the blonde and fair-skinned should not marry a member of a darker race.89
Race was as important as any religious division. It was believed to determine levels of civilisation, success and power – everything, in other words, by which human beings ranked each other’s affairs. Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Coningsby (1844) described the Saxons as a pure race. ‘You come from the shores of the Northern Sea, land of the blue eye, and the golden hair, and the frank brow: ‘tis a famous breed Openly exalting the Jewish race in his next novel, Tancred (1847), Disraeli also recognised the greatness of England: ‘it is an affair of race.90 A Saxon race . . . has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea to work and order, advances, its state will be progressive . . . All is race; there is no other truth.’91
Nineteenth-century Europeans conceived easily enough of race in terms of colour. Attitudes to people with darker skins were naturally affected by such well-publicised events as the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8 and the Jamaican Revolt of 1865. Misgivings about race were already prompting some Europeans to consider the more subtle gradations of worth believed to exist within the ranks of white men themselves. By the mid-nineteenth century most Victorian commentators agreed that, within Europe, the Teutonic peoples of the north and west were racially superior to the Latin hordes to the south and the Slavonic peoples to the east. The belief in the natural superiority of blonde-haired and blue-eyed northern Europeans was gradually gaining acceptance.
European racialist thought already had a long history. Back in 1799, the appropriately named Charles White in his Account of the Regular Gradation of Man had already singled out the white European as the most beautiful and intelligent of the human race, running on in eulogies about his ‘nobly arched head’ and ‘quantity of brain’, and bounding into flights of ecstasy over fair Teutonic womankind. Many eighteenth-century anthropologists had worked on the ‘chain of being’ in which humans were graded hierarchically from the lowliest creatures, the Negroes, bushmen and aborigines, to the yellow races and Slavs, until they reached the white race, the supreme species. Physical beauty was the most important way of classifying species within this hierarchy, and blonde colouring, supposedly derived from the sun, was believed to be a sign of greatness, together with blue eyes which reflected the sky.
Linguistic origins, too, were traced in an attempt to excavate the foundations of race. Scholars concluded that Sanskrit, as the basis of all Western languages, had been imported from Asia by the migration of Aryan peoples. It was here, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the word Aryan first made its appearance to describe, in the limpid imaginations of the Romantics, a superior people of honour, nobility, courage and beauty who had migrated west with the sun to find their own homeland. In 1855 Comte Arthur de Gobineau, a droopy-eyed aesthete with a weak chin but a volcanic eloquence, made use of linguistic and anthropological theories to spell out his awesome ideas in his ‘Essay on the Inequality of Human Races’. De Gobineau finally anchored the Aryan in European history. He had always been interested in the antiquity and supposedly noble lineage of his own family (plain Arthur Gobineau’s title was spurious) and this gave him a hierarchical outlook on the world which helps to explain his racialism. The Aryan as a beautiful, noble, chivalrous and freedom-loving aristocrat became his particular obsession. With the help of his like-minded friend Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth circle, his message was spread and popularised in Germany. After his death in 1882, de Gobineau’s judgment of the black and yellow races was distorted and turned against the Jew. With an ideal blonde and blue-eyed human stereotype ready to do battle against a chosen public enemy, racialism and nationalism were beginning to fuse in the minds of a small but fiery minority. Yet the blonde Aryan was still no more than a racial myth.
Other racial thinkers took the message further, many of them integrating Darwinism and racism. Darwin himself was no racialist, but his ideas of’natural selection’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ were open to subjective use by zealots who interpreted them as scientific backing for their theories of racial hierarchies. It was around this time that Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, began developing ideas of heredity which were to have an enduring if unintended influence on the blonde-versus-dark racial debate. In his most influential book, Hereditary Genius (1869), he explained how ‘if I had to classify persons according to worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of physique, ability and character’. Galton listed thirteen types of natural ability and classified the men of England accordingly – from judges down to wrestlers. He looked particularly at marriage, and argued that special help should be given to those couples who might produce children of greater than average ‘civic worth’. He believed that the birth-rate of the unfit should be restricted and that of the fit encouraged. For the late Victorians, the concept of planned breeding of humans like that of cows or barley to improve the species had a strong appeal, and in 1885 Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’. By 1900 eugenics had caught the popular imagination. The name Eugene was suddenly fashionable, and eugenics societies and journals sprang up all over Britain. Eugenics had gained both popular and scientific respectability. It was also, like Darwinism, with its ideas of superior and inferior humans, eagerly adopted by the ideologues of Aryan supremacy.
It was only a matter of time before a number of eugenics enthusiasts began making plans to establish new isolated settlements where a better and purer Aryan race could breed without infection from other less able races. In 1886, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, arrived in the jungle of Paraguay with her husband, Bernhard Forster, and a party of fourteen German families of supposedly pure Aryan genetic extraction. They were there to found a colony, New Germany, which would become the core of a new Fatherland and would eventually grow into an empire covering the whole continent. In New Germany, so the theory went, a pure, blonde, blue-eyed race of Aryans would be allowed to breed, unhampered by the germ of Jewry. Eventually they would take their rightful place as the master race.g
Their motives were muddled at best. Forster, an unsophisticated, crudely anti-Semitic unemployed Berlin schoolmaster, believed he might play a part in saving the German race from destruction by the Jews. He also hoped his efforts might curry favour with Richard Wagner, the composer and founder of a powerful nationalistic and anti-Semitic circle at Bayreuth of which he longed to be a part. Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche also mixed social advancement with political motives. Founding a new Aryan colony would in part satisfy her nationalism and her anti-Semitism. It would also, she hoped, help her to achieve her own ambitions to join the Bayreuth circle. They made a vivid pair: both stubborn, snobbish, fantastically egocentric and pedagogic. She was delicately pretty, with a retrousse nose and mousy hair; he was tall, handsome and lavishly bearded, with woolly eyebrows and a wolfish gaze. The colonists had high hopes for their new world. Forster had heard with excited approval rumours of a wild Aryan race somewhere in the interio
r of the South American continent, fleshing out a theory which had long obsessed European explorers. ‘I know not whether to believe the accounts,’ he wrote, ‘widespread but perhaps exaggerated, of a race consisting of wasted, blonde individuals . . . I am not in a position to say what truth there may be in these reports, which I have heard from many sides, but the existence of such a racially distinct group seems indisputable.’92
When the Forsters and their band of immigrants arrived at Asuncion docks in Paraguay on 15 March 1886, their hopes were toweringly high. Each year they envisaged shiploads of new immigrants coming out to join their growing empire. The dream did not turn out quite as planned. A failure to purchase land for the colonists, bad soil, failed crops, corrupt leadership by the Forsters, and a lack of subsequent supporting waves of colonists, led to the dwindling of the colony’s fortunes and eventually to Forster’s suicide. Elisabeth returned to Germany in 1893, having carefully concealed the facts with a face-saving fiction. She was disappointed but not defeated, and on her return threw her energies considerably more successfully into the business of myth-making around her brother, who died in 1900. New Germany still exists in Paraguay, a sad, largely deserted jungle settlement, inhabited by a handful of impoverished blue-eyed and in some cases blonde descendants of the original settlers.
Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche had been accurate in her targeting of the Wagners as the group to which she might hitch her social ambitions. The cult they created at Bayreuth had indeed become a powerful force for the promotion of the Aryan racial myth. The Bayreuth Festival spirit and Wagnerism, born with the premiere of The Ring at Wagner’s new opera house at Bayreuth in 1876, developed almost immediately into something close to a religious cult, with Wagner its high priest and Bayreuth its temple. From its very earliest days, it was nurtured by fanatics and presented as something uniquely German; and before long it was being moulded into a form of cultural nationalism, its operas enlisted to spread patriotic and racialist messages.
Two years after the founding of the Bayreuth Festival, the Bayreuther Blatter newspaper was launched as a vehicle for plugging Wagner’s ideas among his patrons. Soon it was on the ideological rampage, spreading anti-Semitic, xenophobic poison. Wagner’s operas, in particular Parsifal, were interpreted less for their artistic content than for their political imagery of German renewal as a nation purified of Jews, liberals and democrats. The Festspielhaus, the Bayreuth opera house, was described as a ‘glorious Aryan fortress’ and a ‘temple of art for the renewal of Aryan blood, for the awakening of the general consciousness of the Indo-German nation and specifically for the strengthening of a healthy Germanness’. Critics insufficiently appreciative of Wagner’s work were denounced as Jews. Artistic comment as well as performance had become overtly political.
Racialist zealots began recruiting Wagner’s works to their cause. One of them was the fanatical Wagnerian and influential racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the son of a British military family, who in 1908 had married Eva, one of Wagner’s daughters. He was a passionate Germanophile, tall and bony with the craggy brows and ferocious eyes of an obsessive. His great life oeuvre, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, heavily influenced by de Gobineau, was an interpretation of Western history in terms of racial struggle. Naturally, the Aryan race sat at the top of the heap. Published in 1899, at a moment when racialist thought was becoming widespread, the book’s theories of Aryan-German supremacy and the Jewish threat seemed perfectly plausible to the racially insecure. To serious scholars, on the other hand, it was utterly risible. Chamberlain even turned Christ into a blond man with blue eyes, a Nordic carrier of light hailing from Aryan Galilee. His book was referred to as ‘The German Bible’ and was promoted by the All-German League, a group which included large numbers of teachers who spread its message in schools across Germany. An impoverished young Austrian watercolourist named Adolf Hitler was among many to be impressed by Chamberlain’s theories of Aryan supremacy. Thirty-five years later some of them reappeared, slightly refashioned, in Mein Kampf.
European thought in the late nineteenth century was slowly being coloured by a small but relentlessly building tide of racialism. But Europe was by no means alone in this. In America, racial ideas were being imported directly from Western Europe and were developing to suit local conditions. America turned out to be a perfect breeding ground. Ever since the seventeenth century, white Americans, finding evidence of God’s approval in the survival and prosperity of their tiny colonies, had cultivated the idea that they were a ‘chosen people’. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, virtually all American settlers had come from northern or western Europe and considered themselves Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic in origin.
By the early nineteenth century, the colonists’ determined drive westwards towards the Pacific was being presented as a mirror of the ancient mythical westward movement of blonde Aryan peoples following the path of the sun. When the ‘children of Adam’, many of them German, Danish and Swedish immigrants, finally arrived on the Pacific coast in 1846, their achievement was vigorously celebrated in the American Senate as one of the greatest events in the history of the world. Their triumphant ‘circumambulation of the world’ as the vanguard of the Aryan race was hailed across America and Europe, putting them ‘in sight of the eastern shore of that Asia in which their first parents were originally planted’. That many of these ‘children of Adam’ fitted the stereotypical picture of the racial ideal bolstered white America’s self-image further. Everywhere they looked, Americans saw Aryan progress and Aryans in charge. It is not altogether surprising that Aryan purity was becoming accepted as a source of white America’s success.
By the 1850s America’s Aryans were finding abundant proof of their superiority: in their growing material wealth, in their successful revolution against Britain, and in an economic growth spurt that had astonished the world. The presence of large numbers of blacks, Indians and Mexicans also meant that white American populations were receptive to ideas of racial hierarchies. As in Europe, such concepts were no longer restricted to an educated minority. By the turn of the century, the ideas of a succession of philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and straightforward eccentrics had begun to reach a wider mass audience, promoting the idea that the blonde and blue-eyed ruled the world.
g In 1871 the German Anthropological Society had carried out a survey of over 75,000 Jewish schoolchildren and found that 11 per cent were pure blondes, 42 per cent black-haired and 47 per cent mixed. The results were not, of course, well received. Although they should have silenced the racialists on the black and white categorisation of pure Jews and Aryans, the ideology of pure racial breeds had already been steeped in myths and stereotypes too long for abandonment and the concept of a racial enemy was too convenient to be easily discarded.
11
Body Politics
In 1898, Havelock Ellis, a British sexologist by profession, began a truly eccentric survey of the hair colour of the eminent men and women represented over six hundred years of British histoiy in the National Portrait Gallery. For two years this tall, strikingly bearded fanatic wandered the galleries in his plus fours and long woolly socks with a step-ladder and magnifying glass, examining hair lines, roots, eyebrows and eye colour. ‘I cannot regret the hours spent in the company of so many wise and noble and gracious personages’, he later wrote. After many more months of analysis, he came up with an ‘index of pigmentation’ in which he ranked the eminent persons into sixteen groups in descending order of blondeness. His work, published in the Monthly Review in 1901 under the title ‘The Comparative Abilities of the Fair and the Dark’, was a remarkable, if unedifying, piece of fantasy which perfectly complemented its times.
Top of the table were the political reformers and agitators. ‘These are not persons who reach the House of Lords,’ Ellis informed his audience. ‘Their opinions are too radical . . . but they possess in an extreme degree the sanguine irrepressible energy, the great temporal ambitions, the personal persuasive force,
the oratorical aptitudes that in a minor degree tend to mark the class that rises to the aristocracy . . .’ Ellis wrote lengthy explanations of the (rather poor) middle ranking achieved by the royal family (seventh after political reformers, sailors, men of science, soldiers, artists and poets), putting their lack of blondeness down to the intermixture with darker foreign royal stock’. The low position of the hereditary aristocracy (ranked twelfth) was also explained by infusions of foreign blood, and because ‘peers have been in a position to select as wives . . . the most beautiful women, and there can be little doubt that the most beautiful women, at all events in our own country, have tended more to be dark than to be fair. This is proved by the low index of pigmentation of the famous beauties in the Gallery.’ Dark hair was clearly still considered, by eccentric sexologists at least, as the acme of feminine beauty in 1901
It was a tour de force of capillary extrapolation. Three years later, he expanded his extraordinary data and theories in his book A Study of British Genius, naming in an appendix the eminent men and women of an updated survey. Among those included in the fair category, his restless ruler types, he named Addison, Arkwright, Congreve, Frobisher, Gordon, Newton, Peel, Ruskm, Shelley, Smollett, Thackeray and Turner. Not even a snigger greeted its publication.
On Blondes Page 14