A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished. The spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1857– 1942), but I find virtually no mention of him in any of Lovecraft’s letters or essays. The intelligentsia—among whom Lovecraft surely would have wished to number himself—had also largely repudiated racist assumptions in their political and social thought. Indeed, such things as the classification of skulls by size or shape—which Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard waste much time debating in their letters of the 1930s—had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century.

And yet, ugly and unfortunate as Lovecraft’s racial views are, they do not materially affect the validity of the rest of his philosophical thought. They may well enter into a significant proportion of his fiction (miscegenation and fear of aliens are clearly at the centre of such tales as ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, and ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’), but I cannot see that they affect his metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, or even his late political views in any meaningful way. These views do not stand or fall on racialist assumptions. I certainly have no desire to brush Lovecraft’s racism under the rug, but I do not think that the many compelling positions he advocated as a thinker should be dismissed because of his clearly erroneous views on race.

If Lovecraft’s racism is the one aspect of his thought that has been subject to the greatest censure, then within that aspect it is his qualified support of Hitler and his corresponding suspicion of Jewish influence in America that has—again justifiably—caused even greater outrage. He argued the matter at length with J. Vernon Shea in the early 1930s, and the late date of this discussion emphatically refutes the claims of many of Lovecraft’s apologists that he somehow ‘reformed’ at the end of his life and shed many of the beliefs he had spouted so carelessly in his Conservative essays twenty years before. Some of his comments are acutely embarrassing:

[Hitler’s] vision is of course romantic & immature, & coloured with a fact-ignoring emotionalism … There surely is an actual Hitler peril—yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man’s basic urge … I repeat that there is a great & pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism—racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, & an escape from the absurdities of Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it & starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!¹⁹

These points are elaborated at great length in this and other letters. According to Lovecraft, Hitler is right to suppress Jewish influence in German culture, since ‘no settled & homogeneous nation ought (a) to admit enough of a decidedly alien race-stock to bring about an actual alteration in the dominant ethnic composition, or (b) tolerate the dilution of the culture-stream with emotional & intellectual elements alien to the original cultural impulse’. Hitler is, Lovecraft believes, wrong in the extremism of his hostility toward anyone with even a small amount of Jewish blood, since it is culture rather than blood that should be the determining criterion.

The whole question of American and British support for Hitler is one that has received surprisingly little scholarly study. Certainly, Lovecraft was not alone among the intellectual classes prior to 1937 in expressing some approbation of Hitler; and just as certainly, Lovecraft cannot possibly be thought to be of the same stripe as the American pro-Nazi groups in the United States, much less such organizations as the Friends of the New Germany or the GermanAmerican Bund, who generally attracted a small number of disaffected German-Americans and were even operated for the most part by German Nazis. Lovecraft cannot even be lumped indiscriminately with the common run of American anti-Semites of the 1930s, most of whom were extreme political conservatives who sought to equate Jewishness with Bolshevism. My feeling is that Lovecraft came by his overall economic and political views, as well as his racial stance, by independent thought on the state of the nation and the world. His beliefs are so clearly and integrally an outgrowth of his previous thinking on these issues that the search for some single intellectual influence seems misguided.