Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

by Kevin MacDonald

  The result was an effective alliance between elite intellectuals of Ivy League-educated, Puritan-descended extraction with rural Whites in the south and west to prevent America’s being overwhelmed by immigration. “Whenever the northeastern ‘WASP’ elite make common cause with their less prestigious but more numerous provincial kin, Anglo-Protestant ethnic nationalism revives.”[676] This alliance, lasting until the passage of the 1965 immigration law which opened up immigration to all peoples, indicates that despite the liberal strands of WASP culture, change may occur if liberal, cosmopolitan views are seen as resulting in negative consequences—if the nineteenth-century optimism of immigrants being “just like us” is proven to be unwarranted. Similarly in the present era, American Whites are coalescing in the Republican Party, not on the traditional basis of social class, but as a result of a common racial/ethnic identity and increasing skepticism about the benefits of immigration.

  The increased pessimism over cosmopolitan views can be seen in the comments of a Congregationalist minister who noted in 1885 that

  Political optimism is one of the vices of the America people. … We deem ourselves a chosen people, and incline to the belief that the Almighty stands pledged to our prosperity. Until within a few years probably not one in a hundred of our population has ever questioned the security of our future. Such optimism is as senseless as pessimism is faithless.[677]

  Optimistic, laissez-faire attitudes diminished, and Protestant thinkers started to take the side of labor rather than capital because of a felt need for social cohesion. By the 1890s the need for immigration restriction was “universally accepted”[678] among Baptists, and similar trends were apparent in other Protestant sects, even including the elite and liberal-tending Congregationalists. True to their universalist proclivities, Protestants did not oppose immigration until they realized that the new immigrants were not susceptible to conversion.

  Kaufmann notes that business interests remained opposed to immigration restriction, but he fails to mention the very strong role that Jewish organizations played in delaying immigration restriction until the 1920s—long after popular opinion favored for it.[679] Of all the groups affected by the immigration legislation of 1907, Jews had the least to gain in terms of numbers of possible immigrants, but they played by far the largest role in shaping the legislation.[680] In the subsequent period leading up to the relatively ineffective restrictionist legislation of 1917, when restrictionists again mounted an effort in Congress, “only the Jewish segment was aroused.”[681] Writing in 1914, sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue:

  Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission’s bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains.[682]

  Largely as a result of this activism, including access to the media and a well-funded pro-immigration infrastructure, an effective immigration restriction bill was only enacted in 1924, even though by 1890 there was popular support for such a measure. During this interval, 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States,[683] including around 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe.

  Kaufmann attributes the rise in restrictionist sentiment to Social Gospel concerns among religious people: The Social Gospel movement

  galvanized the process of ethnic closure by concentrating Protestant minds on this-worldly social factors such as the rise of the industrial city, capital-labor conflict and the need for legislation—forces they had traditionally been loath to consider.”[684]

  But he also attributes it to the realization that the new immigrants would not convert to Protestantism and to the rise of race theories, although he doesn’t really discuss the latter.

  The lack of emphasis on race theories is a major omission because these theories had widespread acceptance among well-educated Americans with positions in academia and the media. Beginning around 1900 racial theories based on Darwinism rather than religion held the academic high ground.

  When [Franz] Boas began his work in America, evolutionism was the dominant (even “hegemonic”) paradigm in anthropology, sociology, and political economy. Intellectuals of the political left were as invested in evolutionism as were those on the right … . In addition to evolutionism, racial determinism and Social Darwinism were also in the ascendance … and these touched the emotions and socioeconomic interests of American and European elites even more. This was the era of the passage of Jim Crow laws, racial segregation. and anti-black and antiforeigner agitation. Despite their entrenched status in American and European intellectual and political life, however, Boas, a new immigrant, virtually alone, started to combat all of these from the very beginning of his career, drawing upon his view of humanity and on his science. Were these not political acts?[685]

  Indeed they were political acts, and their influence has had a profound effect on academic theories of race and culture and hence on the decline of White America.[686]

  The prominence of Darwinian theories of race was not confined to the United States. Such theories were influential among intellectuals in Europe as well, including Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gustave Le Bon, Herbert Spencer and a large number of Jewish racialist theorists mostly associated with Zionism.[687]

  This Darwinian intellectual framework became the target of an ascendant Jewish intellectual elite beginning with Boas’s pioneering work. The following is a comment on the intellectual milieu of U.S. military officers in the early twentieth century:

  Christianity was a deeply embedded aspect of the culture of the Northern Europeans, but it played a remarkably small role in the battles with the emerging Jewish elite. Far more important for framing these battles were Darwinian theories of race. The early part of the twentieth century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races—that races differed in intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in competition with each other for supremacy. Schooled in the theories of Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Pratt Fairchild, William Ripley, Gustav Le Bon, Charles Davenport, and William McDougall, this generation of U.S. military officers [and other American elites] viewed themselves as members of a particular race and believed that racial homogeneity was the sine qua non of every stable nation state. They regarded their racial group as uniquely talented and possessed of a high moral sense. But, more importantly, whatever the talents and vulnerabilities of their race, they held it in the highest importance to retain control over the lands they had inherited as a result of the exploits of their ancestors who had conquered the continent and tamed the wilderness. And despite the power that their race held at the present, there was dark foreboding about the future, reflected in the titles of some of the classic works of the period: Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under‑Man.[688]

  Bluebloods like Henry Cabot Lodge and Madison Grant who descended from the Puritans were extolling the virtues of Northern Europeans and funding the movement to end immigration—a battle that ended with the ethnically defensive immigration law of 1924 which was based on an ethnic status quo as of 1890. A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard, Vice President of the Immigration Restriction League and descendant of Puritans, opposed the nomination of Louis Brand
eis as a Supreme Court Justice because of Brandeis’ ardent Zionism; he also supported quotas on Jewish students (15 percent—generous given that Jews comprised 5 percent of the population); he also supported racial segregation, and he opposed homosexuality.

  Ideas of eugenics, racially motivated pacifism, and belief in the power of international financiers were entirely respectable at the time. In his biography of Henry Ford, Neil Baldwin recounts Ford’s journey to the West Coast in 1915 to attend a “Race-Betterment Conference” in San Francisco.[689] The event attracted the economic and intellectual elite of the day. Speakers included Luther Burbank, the renowned plant breeder, David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford and a prolific writer on cultural issues, and Charles Eliot, president of Harvard. Attendees included renowned inventor Thomas Edison, and millionaires such as John Harvey Kellogg (founder of the eponymously named cereal company) and Harvey Firestone (founder of the eponymously named tire company).

  Anti-Jewish attitudes were common among this elite. Ford financed The International Jew (discussed below), a series of essays originally published from 1920–1922 which focused on describing Jewish behavior and documenting Jewish influence. Ford became a leader of the peace movement during World War I, stating to another peace activist that “German-Jewish bankers caused the war.”[690] Jordan was a eugenicist who advocated peace for racialist reasons—that war decimated strong people from the gene pool. Jordan, writing in 1912, also developed the view that financial manipulators, mainly Jews, were driving Europeans to war. He described an “unseen empire” of international finance, largely composed of Jewish banking firms originating with the Rothschilds. Behind these firms were Jewish families “allied to one another by so many close ties of blood, marriage, and business” including Bischoffheim (France), Bleichröder (Germany), Camondo (Italy), Goldschmid and Stern (England, Portugal), Günzberg (Russia), Hirsch and Wertheimer (Austria), Cassell (Europe, Egypt), Sassoon (“Rothschilds of the Orient), Mendelssohn and Montefiore (Australia).[691]

  Kaufmann’s lack of discussion of the eclipse of racial Darwinism is a major omission because the defeat of racial Darwinism was a major thrust of Jewish intellectual and political movements, particularly Boasian anthropology:

  [The defeat of the Darwinians] had not happened without considerable exhortation of ‘every mother’s son’ standing for the ‘Right.’ Nor had it been accomplished without some rather strong pressure applied both to staunch friends and to the ‘weaker brethren’—often by the sheer force of Boas’s personality.[692]

  By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish. Based on Boas’s views of cultural relativism (which eventually morphed into the view that race was nothing more than a social construct with no biological basis), these theorists promoted cultural pluralism in academia. As Gelya Frank noted, cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate.[693]

  Ford’s The International Jew contains interesting material on the rise of Jewish influence which I find credible.[694] Public criticism of Jewish influence was becoming off-limits:

  There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word ‘Jew,’ or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper … . There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it in the hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence … . The principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature, music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult place has been rather neatly negotiated.[695]

  Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish Question in the United States or anywhere else must be fully prepared to be regarded as an Anti-Semite, in high-brow language, or in low-brow-language, a Jew-baiter … . The press in general is open at this time to fulsome editorials in favor of everything Jewish … while the Jewish press, which is fairly numerous in the United States, takes care of the vituperative end.[696]

  Joseph Bendersky’s The ‘Jewish Threat’: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army includes valuable information on the decline of racialist ideas. The tide against the intellectual basis of ethnic defense turned in the 1930s. “Nazi racial ideology was under attack in the press as pseudo‑science and fanatical bigotry.”[697] By this time, Jews had a powerful position in the media, including ownership of several large, influential newspapers (New York Times, New York Post, New York World, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Record and Pittsburgh Post‑Gazette), radio networks (CBS, the dominant radio network, and NBC), and all of the major Hollywood movie studios.[698]

  It is remarkable that the word ‘Nordic’ disappeared by the 1930s although the restrictionists still had racialist views of Jews and themselves.[699] By 1938 eugenics— a commonly held perspective among all political persuasions earlier in the century—was “shunned in public discourse of the day”[700] because of its associations with National Socialism.

  The racialist views that were common in the 1920s persisted among American military officers well into the 1930s. A 1938 talk by General George van Horn Moseley’s on eugenics and its implications for immigration policy caused a furor when it was reported in the newspapers. Moseley was charged with anti‑Semitism, although he denied referring to Jews in his talk. The incident blew over, but “henceforth, the military determined to protect itself against charges of anti‑Semitism that might sully its reputation or cause it political problems ... . The army projected itself as an institution that would tolerate neither racism nor anti-Semitism.”[701]

  Moseley himself continued to attack the New Deal, saying it was manipulated by “the alien element in our midst”[702]—obviously a coded reference to Jews. This time he was severely reprimanded, and the press wouldn’t let it die. By early 1939, Moseley, who had retired from the army, became explicitly anti-Jewish, asserting that Jews wanted the U.S. to enter a possible war with Germany and that the war would be waged for Jewish hegemony. He accused Jews of controlling the media and having a deep influence on the government. In 1939, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Jewish complicity in communism and praised the Germans for dealing with the Jews properly.[703]

  But his testimony was beyond the pale by this time. As Bendersky notes, Moseley had only articulated the common Darwinian worldview of the earlier generation, and he had asserted the common belief of an association of Jews with communism. These views remained common in the army and elsewhere on the political right, but they were simply not stated publicly. And if they were, heads rolled and careers were ended.

  The new climate can also be seen in the fact that Lothrop Stoddard stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s but continued to advocate eugenics and was sympathetic to National Socialism because it took the race notion seriously. By 1940, the tables had turned. Anti-Jewish attitudes came to be seen as subversive by the government, and the FBI alerted military intelligence that Lothrop Stoddard should be investigated as a security risk in the event of war.[704]

  From Bendersky’s perspective, these changes are due largely to the triumph of science: “Not only was Stoddard’s racial science erroneous, it was—despite his assertions to the contrary—out of step with the major trends in science and scholarship.”[705] What Bendersky does not note is that the “scientific” refutation of the ideas of Stoddard and the other Darwinian theorists was entirely d
ue to a political campaign waged in academic social science departments by Franz Boas and his students and sympathizers. The political nature of this shift in intellectual stance and its linkage to Jewish academic ethnic activists has long been apparent to scholars.[706]

  This is an excellent example of how academia is a major power center. Boas’s activism resulted in anti-Darwinian ideas being promulgated as scientifically sound by the elite media and disseminated to educated people in universities. As John Higham noted, by the time of the final victory in 1965, which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that “it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon.”[707]

  The demise of Darwinism had major implications because it removed the only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan ideology and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of an intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to conservative religion and the popular attitudes of the less educated. These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectuals who quickly became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US—especially the media and the academic world.