“[BIOLOGIST LOUIS] Agassiz wrote: ‘Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.’

“The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters. Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: ‘Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.’ The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “‘atomic disintegration. … Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis.

“The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the ‘revolution.’ These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The tatterdemalion “‘armies’’ may excite our mirth, but the battles are real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B. Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: ‘Most of the countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease, civilization recedes, and the jungle advances.’’! Of course, under these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best, degenerates at an ever-quickening pace. Peaceful effort of any sort appears vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by violence and extortion.”

— Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, (Charles Scribner and Sons, 1921), p. 120

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