Lodge imported Le Bon’s racial history wholesale into Senate restriction debates

Evidence

To support this view, Lodge went far beyond his American contemporaries in the direction of a racial philosophy of history. During a summer in France in 1895, he happened upon a new book by Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples. Le Bon was a poetic social psychologist, an enemy of democracy, and a man who lived in dread of an imminent socialist revolution. His book treated nationalities as races and races as the substrata of history. Only through crossbreeding, according to Le Bon, could a race die or miss its destiny. He saw little hope for continental Europe but thought that the English, alone among European races, had kept their purity and stability. Lodge took these ideas back to the United States and repeated them practically verbatim on the floor of the Senate in 1896 in leading the fight for the literacy test. Without restriction of the new immigration, he warned, America’s fixed, inherited national character would be lost in the only way possible—by being “bred out.” — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 844

Categorization

• QUESTION: Lodge found Le Bon by ‘happening upon’ him in France — worth checking whether the influence flowed the other direction or via shared circles.
• XREF: The ‘bred out’ fear of mixture destroying national character is the race-specific inflection of the generic enemy-threat — bears on whether the category reverts or stays racialized.