Nordicism is an ideology which views the historical race concept of the "Nordic race" as an endangered and superior racial group. Some notable and influential Nordicist works include Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race (1916); Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853); the various writings of Lothrop Stoddard; Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899); and, to a lesser extent, William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). The ideology became popular in the late-19th and 20th centuries in Germanic-speaking Europe, Northwestern Europe, Central Europe, and Northern Europe, as well as in North America and Australia.
The belief that Nordic ancestry is superior to all others was originally embraced as "Anglo-Saxonism" in England and the United States, "Teutonicism" in Germany, and "Frankisism" in Northern France and Italy.[1][2][3] The notion of the superiority of the "Nordic race" and the superiority of the Northwestern European nations that were associated with this supposed race influenced the United States' Immigration Act of 1924 (which effectively banned or severely limited the immigration of Jews, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans) and the later Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952,[4] and it was also present in other countries outside Northwestern Europe and the United States, such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa.[5][6] By the 1930s, the Nazis claimed that the Nordic race was the most superior branch of the "Aryan race" and constituted a master race (Herrenvolk).[7] The full application of this belief system—the invasion of Poland and further conquest in the pursuit of Lebensraum, 'living space'—was the immediate catalyst for World War II and led directly to the industrial mass murder of six million Jews and eleven million other victims in what is now known as the Holocaust.
The Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (simply meaning "northern") as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined). He defined nordique by referring to a set of physical characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a dolichocephalic skull.[8]
In the mid-19th century, scientific racism developed the theory of Aryanism, holding that Europeans ("Aryans") were an innately superior branch of humanity, responsible for most of its greatest achievements. Aryanism was derived from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race.
Its principal proponent was Arthur de Gobineau in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1855). Though Gobineau did not equate Nordic people with Aryans, he argued that Germanic people were the best modern representatives of the Aryan race. Adapting the comments of Tacitus and other Roman writers, he argued that "pure" Northerners regenerated Europe after the Roman Empire declined due to racial "dilution" of its leadership.
By the 1880s, a number of linguists and anthropologists argued that the Aryans themselves had originated somewhere in northern Europe. Theodor Poesche proposed that the Aryans originated in the vast Rokitno, or Pinsk Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of Ukraine, but it was Karl Penka who popularised the idea that the Aryans had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of light hair and blue eyes.
The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley agreed with him, coining the term Xanthochroi to refer to fair-skinned Europeans, as opposed to darker Mediterranean people, whom Huxley called Melanochroi.[9] It was Huxley who also concluded that the Melanochroi, whom he described as "dark whites", are of a mixture of the Xanthochroi and Australioids.[10]
This distinction was repeated by Charles Morris in his book The Aryan Race (1888), which argued that the original Aryans could be identified by their blond hair and other Nordic features, such as dolichocephaly (long skull). The argument was given extra impetus by the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L’Aryen, in which he argued that the "dolichocephalic-blond" people were natural leaders, destined to rule over more brachycephalic (short-skulled) people.[11]
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also referred in his writings to "blond beasts": lion-like amoral adventurers who were supposed to be the progenitors of creative cultures.[12] In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he wrote, "In Latin malus ... could indicate the vulgar man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from the blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race."[13] However, Nietzsche thought of these "blond beasts" not as a racial type, but as the ideal aristocratic personality, which can appear in any society: "the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need."[14]
By the early 20th century, the concept of a "masterly" Nordic race had become familiar enough that the British psychologist William McDougall, writing in 1920, stated:
Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly—namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterised physically by fair colour of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i.e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type, ... . It is also called the Nordic type.[15]
Nordicists claimed that Nordics had formed upper tiers of ancient civilisations, even in the Mediterranean civilisations of antiquity, which had declined once this dominant race had been assimilated. Thus they argued that ancient evidence suggested that leading Romans like Nero, Sulla and Cato were blond or red-haired.[16][17][18][19]
Some Nordicists admitted that the Mediterranean race was superior to the Nordic in terms of artistic ability. However, the Nordic race was still considered superior on the basis that, although Mediterranean peoples were culturally sophisticated, it was the Nordics who were alleged to be the innovators and the conquerors, having an adventurous spirit that the spirit of no other race could match.
The Alpine race was usually regarded as inferior to both the Nordic and Mediterranean races, making up the traditional peasant class of Europe while Nordics occupied the aristocracy and led the world in technology, and Mediterraneans were regarded as more imaginative.[20]
Opponents of Nordicism rejected these arguments. The anti-Nordicist writer Giuseppe Sergi argued in his influential book The Mediterranean Race (1901) that there was no evidence that the upper tiers of ancient societies were Nordic, insisting that historical and anthropological evidence contradicted such claims. Sergi argued that Mediterraneans constituted "the greatest race in the world", with a creative edge absent in the Nordic race. According to him, Mediterraneans were the creators of all the major ancient civilisations, from Mesopotamia to Rome.
This argument was later repeated by C. G. Seligman, who wrote that "it must, I think, be recognised that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other".[21] Even Carleton Coon insisted that among Greeks "the Nordic element is weak, as it probably has been since the days of Homer ... It is my personal reaction to the living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient world is remarkable, rather than the opposite."[22]
[C]onservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter of either racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country, of a true sentiment which is based upon knowledge and the lessons of history rather than upon the sentimentalism which is fostered by ignorance. If I were asked: What is the greatest danger which threatens the American republic to-day? I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.[20]
— Henry Fairfield Osborn, July 13, 1916
In the United States, the primary spokesman for Nordicism was the eugenicist Madison Grant. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History about Nordicism was highly influential among racial thinking and government policy making.[23]
Grant used the theory as justification for immigration policies of the 1920s, arguing that the immigrants from certain areas of Europe, such as Italians and other Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, represented a lesser type of European and their numbers in the United States should not be increased. Grant and others urged this as well as the complete restriction of non-Europeans, such as the Chinese and Japanese.
Grant argued the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements (he lists Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci as examples of Nordics). Admixture was "race suicide" and unless eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by inferior races. Future president Calvin Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides."[24] Grant argues that Nordics founded the United States and the English "language", and formed the ruling classes of ancient Greece and Rome. An analysis performed by Grant alleges that Northwestern Europeans are less criminal than Southern and Eastern Europeans (see also Race and crime).[25]
The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law by President Coolidge. This was designed to reduce the number of immigrants from Southern Europe, Southeast Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, exclude Asian immigrants altogether, and favour immigration from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, while also permitting immigration from Latin America.
The spread of these ideas also affected popular culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald invokes Grant's ideas through a character in part of The Great Gatsby, and Hilaire Belloc jokingly rhapsodized the "Nordic man" in a poem and essay in which he satirised the stereotypes of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans.[26]
In Germany the influence of Nordicism remained powerful – it became known there as "Nordischer Gedanke" (Nordic thought).
This phrase, coined by the German eugenicists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, appeared in their 1921 work Human Heredity, which insisted on the innate superiority of the Nordic race.[27]Adapting the arguments of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and others to Darwinian theory, they argued that the "Nordic" qualities of initiative and will-power identified by earlier writers had arisen from natural selection, because of the tough landscape in which Nordic peoples evolved. This had ensured that weaker individuals had not survived.
By the early 19th century, Nordicism was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer attributed cultural primacy to the white race:
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.[28]
The eugenicist Madison Grant argued in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and that admixture was "race suicide".[29] In this book, Europeans who are not of Germanic origin but have Nordic characteristics such as blonde/red hair and blue/green/gray eyes, were considered to be a Nordic admixture and suitable for Aryanization.[30]
This argument derived from earlier eugenicist and Social Darwinist ideas. According to the authors, the Nordic race arose in the ice age, from:
quite a small group which, under stress of rapidly changing conditions (climate, beasts of the chase) was exposed to exceptionally rigorous selection and was persistently inbred, thus acquiring the peculiar characteristics which persist today as the exclusive heritage of the Nordic race ... Philological, archaeological and anthropological researches combine to indicate that the primal home of the Indo-Germanic [i.e. Aryan] languages must have been in Northern Europe.[31]
They went on to argue that "the original Indo-Germanic civilisation" was carried by Nordic migrants to India, and that the physiognomies of upper-caste Indians "disclose a Nordic origin".[32][33][34][35]
By this time, Germany was well-accustomed to theories of race and racial superiority due to the long-standing influence of the Völkisch movement, with its philosophy that Germans constituted a unique people, or Volk, linked by common blood. While Volkism was popular mainly among Germany's lower classes and offered a romanticised version of ethnic nationalism, Nordicism attracted German anthropologists and eugenicists.
Hans F. K. Günther, one of Fischer's students, first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (1927).[36] He became the most influential German in this field; his Short Ethnology of the German People (1929) was very widely circulated.
In his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Race-Lore of the German Volk), published 1922, Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race and Dinaric race to Ripley's categories.[37] He used the term "Ostic" instead of "Alpine".[37] He focused on the races' supposedly distinct mental attributes.
Günther criticised the Völkish idea, stating that the Germans were not racially unified, but were actually one of the most racially diverse peoples in Europe. Despite this, many Völkists who merged Völkism and Nordicism, most notably the Nazis, embraced Günther's ideas.[38][39]
Nazi Germany promulgated Nordicism based on the idea of a superior Germanic people or Aryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. These notions of Aryan racial superiority ("Aryanism") were developed in the 19th century, maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" that was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race", Slavs, and Gypsies, who they associated with "cultural sterility".[citation needed]
To preserve the Aryan race or Nordic race, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later additionally forbidding Slavs and Romani. The Nazis used the Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behavior.[40] Nazi ideals were combined with a eugenics program that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of Untermenschen ("subhumans"): Jews, Slavs, and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.[41][42][43][44][45]
According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6,000 neo-Nazis.[46]
Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race.[47] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany and later attracted a strong following in the Reich,[48] emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.[49]
The pessimism of Gobineau's message did not lend itself to political action because he did not believe that humanity could be saved from racial degeneration.[50] However, writing in April 1939, Rowbotham declared: "So after nearly a hundred years, the fantastic pessimistic philosophy of the brilliant French diplomat is seized upon and twisted to the use of a mystic demagogue who finds in the idea of the pure Aryan an excuse for thrusting civilization dangerously near back to the Dark Ages."[51]
His racist ideology, through rooted in social and political concerns and though claiming to explain the nature of society itself, could not on his own terms effect any transformation. But Gobineau unfortunately failed to realize the degree to which such a theory—whatever his own view of its impotence—might be capable of use and adaptation by others to affect society and history. His work would in time be plundered by racists with an interest in preaching explicitly reformatory doctrines.[52]
As Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies, by promoting the Nordic theory that regarded Nordics as the "master race," a race which was superior to all other races, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans),[53] he used the racial term Untermensch from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man (1922).[54][55][56] An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "colored" peoples to white civilization, and wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920.
In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."[57] German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s. Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models; race-based U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nazis' two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.[58]
Adolf Hitler read Human Heredity shortly before he wrote Mein Kampf (published 1925–1926); he regarded it as scientific proof of the racial basis of civilisation.[59] The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg also repeated Human Heredity's arguments in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).[