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

This statement, offensive as it may be to many, was not in any way unusual amongst Yankees of Lovecraft’s class. Let us bypass the flagrant untruth that immigrants have somehow come merely to enjoy the ‘liberties’ carved out by those sturdy Saxons: again Lovecraft’s complete ignorance of the hardships willingly endured by immigrants to establish themselves in the United States has betrayed him into clownish error. The critical term here is ‘assimilation’—the idea that foreign culture-streams should shed their own cultural heritage and adopt that of the prevailing (AngloSaxon) civilization. In Lovecraft’s time it was expected that immigrants would ‘assimilate’; as one modern historian has noted: ‘The predominant expectation [in the early twentieth century] has been that the newcomer, no matter what his place of origin, would conform to Anglo-Saxon patterns of behavior.’⁸ Lovecraft, although on the far right in his views on the First World War and on the League of Nations, was a centrist in the matter of immigrant assimilation.

I have no doubt that Lovecraft approved of the three important immigration restriction laws of the period: those of 1917 (which introduced a literacy test), of 1921 (which limited immigration from Europe, Australia, the Near East, and Africa to 3 per cent of each foreign nation’s population then residing in the United States), and, most significantly, of 1924 (reducing the quota to 2 per cent, but taking as its basis the census of 1890, which had the added effect of radically reducing immigration from eastern and southern Europe, since immigrants from those countries were an insignificant number in 1890). Lovecraft does not mention any of these immigration laws, but his general silence on the matter of foreign incursions in the 1920s (except during his New York period) suggests that he felt this matter had been, at least for the time being, satisfactorily dealt with. Politics during the relatively tranquil and Republican-governed 1920s becomes for Lovecraft less a matter of immediate crises than an opportunity for theoretical speculation. It was during this time that he evolved his notions of aristocracy and ‘civilization’, ideas that would undergo significant modification with the onset of the Depression but retain their fundamental outlines, leading to his piquant evolution of ‘fascistic socialism’.

The late 1910s saw Lovecraft emerge as a towering figure in the tiny world of amateur journalism. Having been elected President for the 1917–18 term, Lovecraft seemed in a good position to carry out his programme for a UAPA that would both promote pure literature and serve as a tool for education. Under the capable official editorship of Verna McGeoch (pronounced Ma-GOO), who held the office for two consecutive terms (1917–19), the United Amateur really did flower into a substantial literary organ.

One idea Lovecraft put forward to encourage amateur activity was the issuing of co-operative papers—papers in which a number of individuals would pool their resources, both financial and literary. He attempted to teach by example by participating in such a journal, The United Co-operative, which published three issues: December 1918, June 1919, and April 1921. Lovecraft had contributions in each issue. Winifred Jackson—with whom Lovecraft had earlier collaborated on two mediocre short stories, ‘The Green Meadow’ and ‘The Crawling Chaos’—was also one of the cooperative editors.

When Lovecraft’s term as President expired in the summer of 1918, he was appointed to his old job of Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism by the new president, Rheinhart Kleiner. For the 1919–20 term Lovecraft held no office. In the summer of 1920, however, he was elected Official Editor, serving for four of the next five years. He was now in still greater control of the editorial content of the United Amateur, and he made the most of it, opening its pages to literary matter by many of his colleagues old and new. Moreover, he wrote editorials for nearly every issue and was also in charge of writing ‘News Notes’ recounting comings and goings of various amateurs, including himself.

The rumblings of discontent from some members became more emphatic around this time. By November 1920 he was having to respond to accusations of ‘excessive centralisation of authority’ (‘Editorial’, United Amateur, November 1920). It is true that for the period 1917-22 a relatively small number of people held office in the UAPA; but it seems as if a certain apathy had set in amongst UAPA members whereby they were content to have these individuals continue holding office year in and year out. Individual papers were declining, and Lovecraft’s own Conservative, because of his other official involvements, appeared only annually in 1918 and 1919, and then ceased altogether until 1923.