The Racial Worldview of H. P. Lovecraft
HP Lovecraft Quotes on Race
hp lovecraft
1. That the maintenance of civilisation today rests with that magnificent Teutonic stock which is represented alike by the two hotly contending rivals, England and German, as well as by Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, is as undeniably true as it is vigorously disputed. The Teuton is the summit of evolution.
2. The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government.
3. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights.
4. Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
5. True, some of the Jews were intelligent; in fact there were some very brilliant
scholars among them; but how could a child used to other children like himself find anything in common with hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens? Repulsion was instinctive—I never denied the mental capacity of the Jew; in fact I admire the race and its early history at a distance; but association with them was intolerable. Just as some otherwise normal men hate the sight or presence of a cat, so have I hated the presence of a Jew.
6. It was the Teutonic might of Charles Martel that drove the Saracen Semite
out of Gaul.
7. As to races, I deem it most proper to recognise the divisions into which nature has grouped mankind. Science shows us the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan over all others, and it therefore becomes us to see that his ascendancy shall remain undisputed. Any racial mixture can but lower the result.
8. Whether I have ever beheld any place of equal putrefaction remains to be seen—at present I find it hard to conceive of anything more utterly and ultimately loathsome than
certain streets of the lower east side where Kleiner took Loveman and me in April 1922. The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.
9. Can you imagine anything more magnificent than the wholesale slaughter of the Indians — a very epick–by our New-England ancestors in the name of the lamb?
10. Our province is to found the cities and conquer the wilderness and people the waste lands–that, and to assemble and drive the slaves, who tell us stories and sing us songs and paint us pretty pictures. WE ARE THE MASTERS.
11. Tracing the career of the Teuton through medieval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not his making.
12. Englishmen and Germans are blood brothers, descended from the same stern Woden-worshipping ancestors, blessed with the same rugged virtues, and fired with the same noble ambitions. In a world of diverse and hostile races the joint mission of these virile men is one of union and cooperation with their fellow Teutons in defense of civilization against the onslaughts of all others.
13. … so that wherever the Wandering Jew wanders, he will have to content himself with his own society till he disappears or is killed off in some sudden outburst of mad physical loathing on our part. I’ve easily felt able to slaughter a score or two when jammed in a N.Y. subway train.
14. New England is by far the best place for a white man to live, and some of the northern parts are still astonishingly American.
15. In general, America has made a fine mess of its population, and will pay for it in
tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.
16. Nordic and Jew, culturally, can never meet on common ground because each one cordially hates what is sacred to the other.
17. Does anybody fancy for a moment that a Nordic race could be knocked about for two millennia by its neighbors? God! They’d either die fighting to the last man, or rise up and wipe out their would-be persecutors off the Earth!!!
18. Aryans, as Aryans, will always feel a deep-seated and uneasy dislike toward Jews, as Jews; and the introduction of a large Jewish element into the social, intellectual, aesthetic life of a community can only result in the maintenance of two separate streams without contact.
19. Semitism has never done anything save harm us when forced upon us or adopted by accident.
20. Let us preserve and glory in our own inherited Western life and impulses and standards, and let us resist to the death any attempt at fastening to our body of national custom any feeling or feature aside from that which we legitimately derive from the tall, fair Aryans who begat us and who founded our English civilisation and Anglo-American nation.
21. But let us swear by the living God, as we respect ourselves as free Northern white men, that they shall lay not a hand on our institutions, and inject not an ideal of theirs into the massed inheritance which is ours. To the Jew we must say, “live your own life, here or elsewhere; but remember that you live among Aryans, who are not to be disturbed.”
22. Then let us show our physical power as men and Aryans, and conduct a scientific wholesale deportation from which there will be neither flinching nor retreating.
23. Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place, during which I think the virtual destruction of Japan will have to be effected in the interests of European safety. The more numerous Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation, for their numbers are amazing. But that is all too far ahead for consideration today.
24. As for the question of superiority & inferiority—when we observe the whole animal kingdom & note the vast differences in capacity betwixt different species & sub-species within various genera we see how utterly asinine & hysterically sentimental is the blanket assumption of idealists & other fools that all the sub-species of Homo-sapiens must necessarily be equal.
25. That the maintenance of civilisation today rests with that magnificent Teutonic stock which is represented alike by the two hotly contending rivals, England and German, as well as by Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, is as undeniably true as it is vigorously disputed. The Teuton is the summit of evolution.
26. As for this flabby talk of an “Americanism” which opposes all racial discrimination—that is simply goddamned bull****!
27. Wherever superior races have absorbed large doses of inferior blood, the results have been tragic. Egypt is one case–& India presents a still more loathsome extreme. The Aryans in India were too late in establishing their colour-based caste system, so that today the culture of the Hindoo is probably the most thoroughly repulsive on our planet. The more one learns about India, the more one wants to vomit.
28. No impartial friend of civilisation can help seeing, as Hitler does, that contemporary culture is in a state of vast rottenness—with weak, unhealthy concepts flourishing like weeds & constantly imperiling our survival against external foes & internal dissension.
29. The systematic effort of our Allied nations to reduce a normal & largely 50-50 war to the status of an unprecedented & final “moral crusade” with Germany in the role of leper & antichrist was a piece of morbid, shrill effeminacy which reeks of the stink of modern decadence.
30. Incidentally—the ancient gentlewoman who lives downstairs in this house (a Yankee teacher of German, & life-long Germanophile, who—though the daughter of a Baptist minister—became an ardent Catholic a decade ago) has just returned from a three-months’ tour of Germany & Austria, & finds that the morale & general condition of Germany are infinitely better than they were last year.
31. No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically
different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses.
32. What we can do is to discourage the increase of their numbers by placing the heaviest possible penalties on miscegenation, and arousing as much public sentiment as possible against lax customs and attitudes—especially in the inland South—at present favouring the melancholy and disgusting phenomenon.
33. Our whole system of values differs utterly and irreconcilably from the Jewish system, even though (and this is what obscures the real problem) our absurd pretence at harbouring the silly, alien, decadent Jewish by-product called Christianity makes us pretend to endourse the Hebrew slave-psychology.
34. If a group of us is weak, it fights until it is either free or dead. It is never broken or cowed. It may die and vanish, but it never lives to be kicked around.
35. Galpinius and I have been discussing democracy a lot lately, and we agree that it is a false idol — a mere catchword and an illusion of inferior classes, visionaries, and dying civilisations.
36. The blood of a million men is well shed in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it is not at all important why it was shed.
37. How I spit upon this rotton age with its feeble comforts and thwarted energies — its Freuds and Wilsons, Augustines and Heliogabali,–rabbles and perversions!
38. Before we have literature we must have life — bold, colourful, primitive, and picturesque.
39. As for the negro question—I think that intermarriage ought to be banned in view of the vast number of blacks in the country.
40. Nothing but pain and disaster can come from the mingling of black & white, & the law ought to aid in checking this criminal folly.
The Racial Worldview of H. P. Lovecraft, Part 1
H. P. Lovecraft
1,087 words
Edited by A. Trumbo
Editor’s Note:
The purpose of these writings is to provide a genuine look into the racial Weltanschauung of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). I have drawn my data from the five volumes of The Selected Letters 0f H. P. Lovecraft, published by Arkham House in 1965. The authors who compiled this great collection–August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei–were friends and correspondents of Lovecraft’s. The preface (Selected Letters, vol. 1) states: “We have made no alteration or changes in the text reproduced. We present them as he (H. P. L.) wrote them.” Here I present the racial intellect of Mr. Lovecraft in his own words, written by his own hand.
Nov. 25, 1915
I can sympathize with Morton in many ways. I am not an orthodox disciple of religion, but I deem it dangerous to tamper with any system so manifestly beneficial to morality. Whatever may be the faults of the church, it has never yet been surpassed or nearly equalled as an agent for the promotion of virtue. And the same thing applies to our present social system. It has its defects, but is evidently a natural growth, and better fitted to preserve an approximate civilization than any Utopian scheme conjured up over night by some artificially thinking radical. As to races, I deem it most proper to recognise the divisions into which nature has grouped mankind. Science shows us the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan over all others, and it therefore becomes us to see that his ascendancy shall remain undisputed. Any racial mixture can but lower the result. The Teutonic race, whether in Scandinavia, other parts of the continent, England, or America, the cream of humanity, and its wanton and deliberate adulteration with baser material is even more repulsive to consider than the elaborately staged racial suicide now being conducted, wherein Germanic and Britannic Teutons are striving to annihilate each other instead of uniting against the Mongol-tainted Slav or menacing Oriental.
Sometimes I think of racial combinations as chemical reactions; for instance, I believe that certain stocks have greater assimilative powers than others. The Gallo-Basque stock with Latin [Roman] infusion, which constitutes the bulk of the French population, is much more receptive to alien blood than is our colder and more Teutonic stock.
Dec. 6, 1915
And the more I study the question, the more firmly am I convinced that the one supreme race is the Teuton. Observe the condition in the British Isles. The English are wholly Teutonic, and therefore dominant. The southern Scotch and eastern Irish are also of that blood–they certainly surpass their fellows to the north and west. The Welsh, who have no Teutonic blood, are of little account. Had it not been for the Teutonic infusion at the beginning of the Dark Ages, southern Europe would have been lost. Who were these early French kings and heroes that founded French civilization? Teutons, to a man! . . . Who were the Normans? Teutons of the North. It is pitiful to me to hear apostles of equity pipe out that other races can equal this foremost of all–this successor to the Roman race in power and virility.
June 4, 1916
The Providence Journal has virtually declared war on Germany, and has well-nigh exhausted Roget’s Thesaurus in looking for adjectives wherewith to denounce th’ embattled Goth; but the editor scarce dares breathe a word against the slippery sons of Saint Patrick who violate American neutrality just as flagrantly as any German ever did, and who have been consistently doing so for many century. These migrated Micks have not scrupled to use the United States so far as they can as a weapon against their lawful King and Empire, and the “Sinn Fein,” revolt is not the only one financed largely with American-gathered capital.
Dec. 23, 1917
As the general situation, it seems very encouraging just now. It may take a second war to adjust things properly. I tremble to think of the possibilities of the Russian collapse which may open resources of a vast country to the enemy. If the predicted Western drive of the Huns succeeds, the war is virtually lost. There is something the matter with the morale of the more polished nations–they need a little more brutality of the old Teutonic sort. No army can win without a certain savage lust of combat, and this spirit is being undermined with the current cant about democracy, idealism, and all that sort of rot. The issues should be made clearer–the first fight is not in the interests of a coming millenium of social reform; it is for the hearth and home-for existing institutions against a perilous invasion of an unnatural culture. Racial factors are also united against us. For all our Roman civilization, the enemy has a preponderance of superior blood. If all the Allied nations were as thoroughly Teutonic as Prussia, the end would be nearer and happier. Nothing can withstand the might of the Teuton–he is the logical successor of the Roman in power. Teutonic blood snatched Britain from the Celt and made England the greatest force in all civilization. Teutonic blood conquered the Western wilderness and gave America an instant place amongst the great nations of the globe. But this blood has become so extensively and tragically diluted, that the non-German Teutons may well look with concern to their future. The grotesque fallacy of the “Great American Melting Pot” may yet be brought home to the people in one of the most tear-stained pages of their history. Germany herself has set a truer valuation on the importance of unmixed blood, but may yet come to grief through the absorption of Slavic elements. The course of Germany during the last half-century has been one of curiously mixed merit. Certain scientific and philosophical developments have been marvellous, yet they have been conjoined to a brutality and narrowness of vision which threaten the development of civilization. The pan-Teutonic ideal, attainable only by a complete and amicable co-operation between Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races, has been fallaciously subordinated to a petty pan-Germanic ideal which is bringing about the virtual suicide of the Teutonic race, and driving the Anglo-Saxons and Germans into equally unnatural alliances with alien races. The Saxon has his Hindoos and Moors, and the German his Turks. Progress is at a standstill, and everything human is lost in a mad scramble for a material victory. Even a recurrence of the Dark Ages is not possible–a recurrence which will leave the Teutonic race so depleted numerically that the world’s future is seriously threatened. Wilhelm, Wilhelm! What has thou wrought?