A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The United States has never been an especially fertile soil for socialism or Communism, but there have been occasions when they have been a little less unpopular than usual. Socialism had done reasonably well in the first two decades of the century: the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World), founded in 1905, was gaining influence in its support of strikes by a variety of labour unions, and Eugene V. Debs won nearly a million votes in 1912 as a third-party candidate. But in the period immediately after the First World War, with its ‘Red Scare’ and virulent suppression of all radical groups, socialism was forced underground for nearly a decade.

The depression led to a resurgence in which socialists teamed with labour to demand reforms in working conditions. The socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas polled a little less than 900,000 votes in 1932—not a very large figure, but a larger one than he achieved during any of his other campaigns. A wide array of intellectuals were also in support of socialism (of either a moderate or a Marxist variety) or outright Communism.

And yet, the shift for Lovecraft was in many ways very slow, even grudging at the outset. It seems jointly to have been the result of observation of the increasingly desperate state of affairs engendered by the Depression and of more searching thought on what could be done about it. President Hoover’s staunch belief in voluntarism had made him unwilling to permit the government to give direct relief to the unemployed. Even Roosevelt was only just radical enough to advocate policies that kept the country from total economic collapse, and it was really the Second World War that pulled the United States and the world out of the depression.

What really concerned Lovecraft is not the welfare of the general populace but the civilization-ending revolution this populace could cause if it is not appeased. For after all, ‘All that I care about is the civilisation’:

The maintenance of

[a] high cultural standard is the only social or political enthusiasm I possess … In effect, I venerate the principle of aristocracy without being especially interested in aristocrats as persons. I don’t care who has the dominance, so long as that dominance remains a

certain kind of dominance, intellectually and aesthetically considered.² Up to the last few years of his life, Lovecraft believed that only a socially recognized aristocracy could ensure such a condition— either through actual patronage of the arts or through a general climate of refined civilization that would axiomatically be regarded as a condition toward which all society would aspire. Revolution of any kind was the last thing he wanted, and this is why he loathed Bolshevik Russia to the end of his days—because it had fostered a cultural

destruction that was in no way necessary to the economic reform that its leaders were claiming as their paramount goals. It would take some years for Lovecraft to modify his position on aristocracy, but that modification was finally articulated in 1936:

what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system … a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.³

During the early years of the Depression Lovecraft actually fancied that the plutocracy—now about the only thing equivalent to an aristocracy in the United States—might itself adopt the mores of a true aristocracy. But in the course of time he saw the error of his ways and discarded this approach to the solution of the problem.