White Supremacy in "Time" Magazine

Read the description of “The Rising Tide of Color”

I frequently (too-frequently) kill time on Reddit and I came across someone posting a few scans from a discovered copy of the first edition of Time magazine.

I’m a bit of a weird bird in that I like to look at the ads from the nostalgic scans: Were they still giving heroin to cure toothaches? Had newfangled devices like the “ice-box” entered common commercial spheres? So I was struck by the serious looking, “Lothrop Stoddard” and his book “The Rising Tide of Color:”

White world supremacy is in danger. The world-wide ascendancy of the white race, apparently so unshakable, is in reality threatened by the colored races.

So here there we were, in 1923, pushing the “Great Replacement Theory” hokum that today Tucker Carlson pushes on his FoxNews show in the pages of what was to become one of the most important periodicals in American letters. Also note that Stoddard’s work wasn’t published by “Crank’s Press Unlimited: An Anti-Zionist Press,” but rather this was published at Scribner’s, again, one of the most storied brands in American publishing.

Stoddard, for his part, continued extolling white supremacy, eugenics, and even lent to the Nazi propagandist cause the noun untermensch, a term for designating underclasses of humanity as opposed to the ubermensch (i.e. Aryan nordics). It appears that his influence was broken after he debated W.E.B. DuBois in Chicago and was generally laughed out of the room.

Wikipedia notes that after WWII these race-parsing politics were considered too close to Nazi-ism and Stoddard died largely unremarked upon. Pity his ideas didn’t go with him.