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THE RISING TIDE OF COLOUR: AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY.
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921. Hardcover, 320 pp. 1921 reprint. Includes pull-out map, index. Surveys the global racial situation after World War I and warns of a coming non-white population explosion, which Stoddard argues will challenge white dominance. He contends that the "world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind" will be a defining issue of the 20th century. Stoddard, regarded as a demographics expert in his time, influenced significant legislation, including America's 1924 Immigration Act. His ideas were taken seriously by the American establishment, with President Warren G. Harding publicly praising the book. The introduction was written by Madison Grant, a prominent eugenicist. Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) was an American historian and eugenicist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. He authored several influential works on race and geopolitics, including The Revolt Against Civilization and The French Revolution in San Domingo. Although now largely discredited for its racist and pseudoscientific content, Stoddard's work is still studied as important original source material for understanding early 20th-century racial thought.
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1924
About the author
T. Lothrop Stoddard
31 books100 followersTheodore Lothrop Stoddard (June 29, 1883 – May 1, 1950) was an American political scientist, historian, journalist, anthropologist, eugenicist, pacifist, and anti-immigration advocate.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 7, 2026
“For a generation Hellas tore itself to pieces in a delirium of fratricidal strife…the ‘peace’ which closed the Peloponnesian War was no peace. It was a mere truce, imposed by the sword and infused with no healing or constructive virtue, the Peloponnesian War was but the first of a war cycle which completed Hellas’s ruin.
“The sentiment of Greek race-unity was destroyed. Having lost its soul, the Greek race soon lost its body as well. Drained of its best strains, the diminished remnant bowed to foreign masters and bastardized its blood with hordes of aliens who swarmed into the land.”
Stoddard likens the Great War to a “modern Peloponnesian War”--the beginning of a suicidal cycle of civilizational destruction. This was more apt than he could have predicted. He wrote Rising Tide in 1920 when the Versailles Treaty signaled more of a disquieting armistice than any real “peace.”
At the same time, after the Great War had devastated Europe, rumblings of revolt against weakened white political control began to sweep the third world and a flood of immigration threatened to crash against the dikes of European and American outposts.
Wherever the white man had imposed the bases of civilization, he had put down tribal war, waged combat against epidemic disease, improved infrastructure and helped minimize the blight of famine. “The consequence was a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion of the colored world now under white political sway…a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands.”
This “rising tide of color” threatened to flood the West and meant that “the whole white race is exposed to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races…There is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the ‘melting-pot.’”
“The maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ is sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the melting-pot is allowed to boil without control…the type of native American of colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
“Civilization of itself means nothing. Civilization is the body; the race is the soul. Let the soul vanish, and the body moulders into the inanimate dust from which it came.”
“It all comes down to a question of self-preservation. And, despite what sentimentalists may say, self-preservation is the first law of nature. To love one’s cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pass that heritage unimpaired to one’s children; to fight, and, if need be, to die in its defense: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth.”
“The sentiment of Greek race-unity was destroyed. Having lost its soul, the Greek race soon lost its body as well. Drained of its best strains, the diminished remnant bowed to foreign masters and bastardized its blood with hordes of aliens who swarmed into the land.”
Stoddard likens the Great War to a “modern Peloponnesian War”--the beginning of a suicidal cycle of civilizational destruction. This was more apt than he could have predicted. He wrote Rising Tide in 1920 when the Versailles Treaty signaled more of a disquieting armistice than any real “peace.”
At the same time, after the Great War had devastated Europe, rumblings of revolt against weakened white political control began to sweep the third world and a flood of immigration threatened to crash against the dikes of European and American outposts.
Wherever the white man had imposed the bases of civilization, he had put down tribal war, waged combat against epidemic disease, improved infrastructure and helped minimize the blight of famine. “The consequence was a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion of the colored world now under white political sway…a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands.”
This “rising tide of color” threatened to flood the West and meant that “the whole white race is exposed to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races…There is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the ‘melting-pot.’”
“The maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ is sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the melting-pot is allowed to boil without control…the type of native American of colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
“Civilization of itself means nothing. Civilization is the body; the race is the soul. Let the soul vanish, and the body moulders into the inanimate dust from which it came.”
“It all comes down to a question of self-preservation. And, despite what sentimentalists may say, self-preservation is the first law of nature. To love one’s cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pass that heritage unimpaired to one’s children; to fight, and, if need be, to die in its defense: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth.”
May 20, 2025
Inspirational. Eye-opening stuff. Real profound. I love that it has all been proven. Amazing read!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews