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”

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

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