# Lothrop Stoddard **Theodore Lothrop Stoddard** (1883–1950) was an American writer, historian and eugenicist, with a Harvard AB (1905) and a Harvard PhD in history (1914). Stoddard was the popularizer rather than the researcher — the figure who moved eugenic and racial-hierarchy claims out of the journals and onto the bestseller lists. *The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy* (1920), with an introduction by [[Madison Grant]], recast global politics as a demographic contest that white populations were losing; it is a direct ancestor of [[Great Replacement Theory]]. *The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man* (1922) applied the same logic domestically, using the World War I army mental-test results as evidence of internal decay. Its coinage "Under-Man" was later taken up by Nazi theorists as *Untermensch*. It was Stoddard's rendering of that army data that [[Walter Lippmann]] took as his target in [[The Mental Age of Americans]], the opening article of the [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]] — Lippmann's example of a technical artifact being retailed "by the credulous to the gullible." Stoddard's books were standard references in the immigration-restriction lobbying that produced the [[Immigration Act of 1924]]. [[Warren G. Harding]] cited his racial theories in a 1921 speech. He belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and the American Eugenics Society and sat on the board of the American Birth Control League. That combination is a reminder that 1920s eugenics was a mainstream reform network, not a fringe. In 1939–40 he worked as a journalist in Nazi Germany under favorable treatment. He met [[Adolf Hitler]], interviewed [[Heinrich Himmler]], and wrote approvingly of the Nazi hereditary-health courts. His reputation did not survive the war, and his death in 1950 went nearly unremarked. ## Downstream Stoddard's frame of a demographic contest that white populations are losing, told as a story of birth rates and borders, returned a century later as [[Great Replacement Theory]]. The vocabulary changed, but the structure of the argument did not. See also: [[Eugenics]], [[Scientific Racism]], [[Eugenics Timeline]].