Providence Athenæum Wrestles with Racist and Anti-Semitic Legacy of H.P. Lovecraft

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

GoLocalProv News Team

 

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H.P. Lovecraft Bust PHOTO: Athenæum

One of Providence’s favorite sons, H.P. Lovecraft, is a cult figure -- a celebrated writer who has public squares named in his honor in Providence and his bust on display at the historic Providence Athenæum on Benefit Street. 

How in vogue is Lovecraft? One local beer company produces a beer to celebrate the writer.

However, Lovecraft has a dark legacy of expounding racist and anti-Semitic statements and beliefs.

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Lovecraft was not a creature of an era of global exploration in the 1400s like the controversial Christopher Columbus or an 18th-century slaveholder. Lovecraft was alive and expounding his views in the 20th-century. He died in 1937 during an era of Adolf Hitler - and he wrote glowingly of the Nazi's anti-jew positions.

“We are definitely working on the Lovecraft bust as part of a larger look at our entire public art collection. We recognize the deeply problematic nature of Lovecraft’s views and writings, and have for some time. We must tell the truth, and use the resources we have to educate ourselves and the public about the past,” said Matt Burriesci, Executive Director of the Providence Athenæum.

Lovecraft's Writings

A series published in GoLocal written by Civil Rights leader Ray Rickman comprehensively unveiled Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism. 

“Everyone who writes about H.P. Lovecraft tries to reconcile the visionary pioneer of American horror fiction with the vicious racist. While he was following in the footsteps of Edgar Allen Poe as America’s preeminent writer of macabre, terrifying tales, Lovecraft was also cheering on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and lamenting the massive Jewish conspiracy he believed secretly dominated American arts and culture,” wrote Rickman. “These were not distinct facets of his personality. Instead, the bigotry informed his fiction. Lovecraft’s stories constantly feature cosmic horrors served by grotesque creatures. Those creatures were drawn from his fear of interracial breeding, which he thought would produce deformed, brutish “mongrels” who would plunge humanity into constant chaos.”

As Rickman wrote, "Lovecraft’s brand of racism distinguished between inferior races, like Africans and Latinos, and competent yet alien races, like the Japanese the Jewish population of New York City that he hated. To Lovecraft, the acceptance of either would result in the ruin of Anglo or Teutonic (German) racial purity. This fear of interracial breeding informs much of his fiction writing, with the grotesqueries encountered by Lovecraft’s protagonists representing his fear of a 'mongrelized' human race. The following excerpt from a letter in September of 1933 epitomizes that fear and distinction."

Lovecraft wrote, “The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists—eminent Europeans for whom the prejudice-problem does not exist. But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man’s equal. For the simple fact is, that two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. A normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese, even though they may be his mental and aesthetic superiors; and the normal Jap feels the same way in a crowd of Yankees."

 

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A New Gallery

Lovecraft's expounded so many anti-Semitic comments that one group built a website asking visitors to guess if quotes were said by Adolf Hitler or Lovecraft.

In Providence, the Athenæum is reviewing their historic collection -- which includes Lovecraft. 

"For the last 18 months, we have been in the process of commissioning, designing, and introducing new busts to our collection, which would be the most significant additions to our public art collection in a century.  We had planned to introduce all this in the spring of 2020, but unfortunately the pandemic has delayed it all.  The new busts will be a step in the right direction, but only a step—the process will be ongoing," said Burriesci.

The following is from a letter written in December of 1915. In it, Lovecraft expounds on the horror of New York City compared to Providence’s racially pure East Side, while also discussing the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons and Teutonic (German) people:

“I hardly wonder that my racial ideas seem bigoted to one born and reared in the vicinity of cosmopolitan New York, but you may better understand my repulsion to the Jew when I tell you that until I was fourteen years old I do not believe I ever spoke to one or saw one knowingly. My section of the city is what is known as the East Side (nothing like New York’s East Side) and it is separated from the rest of the town by the precipitous slope of College Hill, at the top of which is Brown University. In this whole locality, there are scarcely two or three families who are not of original Yankee Rhode Island stock — the place is as solidly Anglo-American as it was 200 years ago.

 

Anthenaeum Future of the Bust

The Athenæum said it does not know how the Lovecraft bust will be presented in the future when they reopen.

"I don’t know yet.  There’s an opportunity to reframe it, to tell an honest story about it, to use it to explain much about our culture.  On the other hand, simply displaying it at all— however we contextualize it—could be unjust. What is the best way to be honest, and to serve history? What best serves justice? These are the questions that will guide us, and hopefully, we will arrive at a good decision," said Burriesci. 

The Athenæum has removed its celebration of Lovecraft from its website.

Previously the webpage made no mention of the writers racist and anti-Semitic views -- it stated:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a Providence native, felt inextricably linked to the city where he spent much of his life and derived much of his literary inspiration.

Although Lovecraft was not a member of the Athenæum, he lived half a block from the library, up the hill on College Street. He visited the library frequently and wrote about it in his stories and letters. He called the library “…our old Athenæum, where Poe spent many an hour, and wrote his name at the bottom of one of his unsigned poems in a magazine…” (Letter to James F. Morton, 3 May 1923). Many local landmarks (including the Athenæum), as well as a number of public figures and events from the history of the state, are woven into the plots and settings of his stories such as “The Shunned House” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

The H.P. Lovecraft bronze bust on the main level was created by sculptor Bryan Moore and donated to the Athenæum in August 2013.

 

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