H. P Lovecraft And The Eugenics Movement

H.P Lovecraft work was greatly influenced by the Eugenics movement in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. Eugenics ideals can be seen throughout his works such as “The Call of Cathulu” and “The Dunwich Horror”.
H.P Lovecraft writing embodies the appalling aspects of society during his time. For him the real monsters and true horror lies with the decline of the white race and an increase in people of color. His beliefs are in line with the eugenics movement, which is the scientific belief that it is possible to control the breeding of the human population so you can weed out the undesirable traits, basically to make a superior race.
The explicitness of Eugenic ideals can be viewed in his work called “The Horror of Red Hook”

(1927). He describes the people living in Red Hook, which is a dominantly immigrant area as a mixture of dirty people who are poor. Those people are “Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements” and he compares the increase of their population to the declining population of Scandinavian and Americans. This is Lovecraft’s actual fear displayed into his story. This decline of the white race is the embodiment of what the Eugenics movement was against. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith in 1925, Lovecraft said he was inspired by the gangs and evil looking foreigners seen everywhere in New York, for his story in Red Hook (1). He compares the noise around him to babe, which is a biblical story. In the story of babe, the people try to climb their way into heaven and god spites those people in a way they can no longer be able to communicate with each other. This is a comparison to Red Hook because it has such diverse people so it sounds like gibberish when people speak. Lovecraft actually lived in New York and the diversity of it was not to his liking.
The term Eugenics was first coined by Sir Francis Galton, in 1883, in Heredity Genius, it was to encourage selective breeding in order to ensure the superior race breeds more in order to improve human genetics. He and others like him attributed intelligence, sexuality, poverty, and crime to heredity. The hub of the Eugenic movement was the Eugenics Record Office located in New York, which was also where Lovecraft lived (2). The work of Eugenic Record Office was viewed as scientific fact and is now heavily discredited. Their work falls underneath scientific racism, social Darwinism, and cultural elitism, which is present in Lovecraft’s work. (paper slip you gave us) The American Breeder society was heavily intertwined with the Eugenic Record Office in New York. They said how we allow the races to mix without knowing if some races are weaker then others and can “breed out some of the most desirable and distinctive characteristics of the aryo-german race”(from my other class). The breeder society has a fear of mixing races and how it would affect the aryo-german race, which is Lovecraft’s fear. The American Breeder society goes on to say “the aryo-german race, which took possession of this continent, assumed dominion over it and planted in its civilization, institutions, and ideals, is not in danger of being obliterated if the present influx of immigrant … allowed to go checked.” Lovecraft held these views and it can be seen in his work, he refers to foreigners as evil looking in his letter to Clark Ashton Smith about Red Hook.
In this era people were categorized into fit and unfit by using racial science.

The upper class was dominantly white because they were more intellectual due to heritability. This higher level of intellect made them higher up in the racial hierarchies. The eugenicist did not take into account institutional racism as being a factor or privilege. The American Eugenic Association and Eugenic Record Office used pedigrees of feebleminded people and people who had illnesses to show it was dominantly the none white race to have these characteristics making them unfit. In Lovecraft’s work we have primitive (unfit) v. intellectual (fit). In “The Dunwich Horror” he describes the people who are unfit to live in the backwaters of New England. These people formed their own race which has “mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding… intelligence is woefully low…viciousness… incest, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity.” (3)The way Lovecraft describes these primitive people is they same way the American Eugenics Association categorized the people who were unfit to breed. The hero in the text is Henry Armitage who had a degree from Princeton and John Hopkins (3). He is the embodiment of intellect and also a white male who would fall into the category that the American Eugenics Association would encourage to breed. In “The Call of Cathulu” we see again this view of intellectual v. primitive. The intellect was the granduncle George Gammell Angell who was a

professor in Brown University, which is a prestige’s institute. He is described as man who held “authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums”(4). The way he describes primitive is by calling Esquimaux “degenerates… whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness” (4). It is clearly seen the difference between his view of intellect(fit) v. primitive (unfit). The intellect is always a white male who is well educated who is portrayed as the hero and the primitive is a member of another race that is viewed as barbaric. Logistically the way Lovecraft describes people the intellect would always be ideal to breed and the primitive shouldn’t be allowed to breed so they can be removed from society.
In “The Call of Cathulu” it is distinctly visible Lovecraft’s xenophobic/racist view.

He describes Cathulu followers from all around the world. Cathulu is supposed to be this dark being that embodies evil. Lovecraft says they are from South America, India, Philippines, Levantines, Ireland, Africa, Esquimo and Haiti. He describes Haiti as having voodoo orgies and compares voodoo to dark magic. He says in America there are people practicing voodoo in New Orleans wooden swamps and calls them diabolic and compares it to the blackest of the African voodoo circle. He says this “evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men”. He describes people of all ethnicities as following this evil practice, but excludes white men. Meaning he associates foreigners as wicked and his own race as pure. Even though in Europe, people were said to practice witchcraft. He goes on to describe these followers as being “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.” The vocabulary that Lovecraft decides to use is very offensive. He characterizes all mixed people as mentally aberrant, thereby degrading them. Furthermore, he refers to these people as “hybrid spawns” and “mongrel”, as well. Hybrid spawn are people who are mixed and come from evil and a mongrel is a mixed dog that you

can’t identify their breed. In addition, he uses the offensive term “mulattoes”, which is a person who is mixed as black and white and “negroes”. He refers to the cult being deeper then “negro fetichism”, which translates to a African American fetishizing this cult. Lovecraft’s word choice throughout “The Call of Cathulu” is very offensive toward anyone who is not white. This falls into line with the Eugenics beliefs, which were against immigration.
In “The Dunwich Horror” there is Ableism /racist language used by Lovecraft. He associates Indians as people who practice evil magic by calling upon forbidden shapes to come from the ground. Lavinnia is part of this family that emits evilness and she is a deformed albino. Albinism and deformities falls underneath as a genetic disorder, which eugenicist wanted to breed out. In addition, she has an unchecked sexuality; she wonders the woods naked, in addition, to not knowing who is Wilbur’s father or even caring. Promiscuity was also associated with race in Eugenic statistics and as a characteristic that should be weeded out. Her son Wilbur is described as a “black brat” multiple times. Lovecraft specifies the color of the boy’s skin and associates it with the term brat. In addition, the black boy is described as “almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears.” By referring him to as goatish looking, he is associating the boy with the devil. Having fuller lips and kinky hair are both physical attributes associated with black people. However, Lovecraft associates these features as animalistic, which dehumanizes black people. In addition, by referring to the boy as chinlessness it means he lacks character. Lovecraft goes further to dehumanize black people by referring to the way Wilbur walks as gorilla like. There has been a very racial association between black people and apes. By referring to black people as apes it means they have not evolved enough from the human ancestors making them less human. Lovecraft could have chosen any animal to describe the way Wilbur walked, however he explicitly choose an ape. The rhetoric Lovecraft decide to use targets albinos and black people, which were both groups of people targeted by the Eugenic movement in America.