Searching for additional dirt... uh... that is to say background on Thomas Carlyle, I came across this book called The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group. And of course then I was up all bloody night wondering whether or not this particular cabal -- for, all conspiracy theorizing aside, such it indeed seems to be -- the "The Carlyle Group," bore any relationship to the Victorian man of letters and all-around racist swine who carried on a 38-year correspondence with my favorite guy to attack ad hominemily, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rely on that, Raplphy boy!

It's a difficult story to tell. And it may be simply my own ignorance that has drawn me on deeper into the welter of hypertextual associations that can in the end -- let's admit it for once -- prove anything one may imagine. Sort of like statistics. Or sufficient quantities of fungible assets.

But in my own defense on this point, I would argue that I was initially led astray by this charming photograph of David M. Levy. And it's not what you're thinking: that I have a thing for guys who look like Harpo Marx. No. It's because he wrote this article I stumbled across called The Secret History of the Dismal Science: Economics, Religion and Race in the 19th Century, which, as it not so coincidentally turns out, has a lot to do with our poster boy for racial swinishness, Thomas Carlyle. Levy also wrote a book on roughly the same set of subjects, titled How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics & the Ur-Text of Racial Politics.

In the "Secret History" article linked above, Levy writes of this nastily disgruntled Charlton-Heston / Jehovah-looking dude...

Carlyle disagreed with the conclusion that slavery was wrong because he disagreed with the assumption that under the skin, people are all the same. He argued that blacks were subhumans ("two-legged cattle"), who needed the tutelage of whites wielding the "beneficent whip" if they were to contribute to the good of society.

Carlyle is hard to take seriously because he is so outrageous. Yet it is important not to underestimate his influence. By laying out the argument against economics in detail, Carlyle revived the pro-slavery movement in mid-19th century Britain. His argument was taken up by calmer critics, who eschewed his polemical excesses while retaining his basic assumptions. For example, W. R. Greg, who together with Francis Galton, founded the eugenics movement...

Aha! Now we're getting somewhere. I've chopped the quote summarily because this seemingly tangential aside really ain't so tangential. This is why I've been searching out everything I can find on Carlyle in the first place. In the Beautiful Mind Garage, no connection is too bizarre to follow up on. So I follow up, what else?

In John Nichol's 1904 biography of Carlyle, there's footnote I found especially interesting, as it speaks to the longtime friendship between Carlyle and Emerson, and the former's indubitable influence of the latter. There's more than you want to know here, I realize, but humor me and pretend you're tracking...

Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'

Now is that nice language? I ask you. But it didn't seem to freak Waldo out too much, as these two continued their Anglo-Saxonizing correspondentification for another 23 years.

Yeah, but so what? Does this prove -- or even suggest -- anything about the purview of that hairy eyeball on the cover of The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group? Dunno. I haven't read the book yet (as if I ever will). However, given the cast of characters it surveys, and some of their shady -- not to mention treacherous -- dealings with certain foreign governments, the following adds a bit of spice. See if you don't agree.

Carlyle died in 1881, but the prestigious Germanophilic scholar's theory of heroes and hero-worship, and his immensely successful multi-volume biography of the heroic Frederick the Great, had left a legacy that reinforced the development of what Fritz Stern has called the 'Germanic ideology'. German critics of modernity, democracy, rationalism, and so-called Jewish materialism saw in Carlyle a kindred spirit, one whose ideas of leadership dovetailed with proto-volkisch calls for a Fuhrer who would rescue Germany from its spiritual decay. In 1875 Carlyle sent a warm congratulatory note to Paul de Lagarde, one of the most prominent of these critics, who was an early articulator of the Fuhrer principle, and who openly advocated the expulsion of Jews from Germany. In the Weimar Republic, Carlyle's On Heroes was re-issued under the imprint of the Diederichs house, one of Germany's most notorious right-wing publishers in the decade before Hitler's seizure of power.

This reception of Carlyle in Germany suggests not that Hitler was the fulfillment of Carlyle, but rather that he was in part the invention of a 'romantic-volkisch' sensibility that had adapted Carlyle for its own purposes. If the public image of Hitler corresponded so closely to Carlyle's hero in the eyes of Nazis and anti-fascists alike, it was because that image was manufactured to correspond to what Carlyle was understood to have written. The term 'public image' is used here pointedly, for it is essential that we distinguish between the Hitler who existed as a person and the Hitler who was sold as a hero to the German people.

from: Hitler and Carlyle's 'Historical Greatness' by Alan Steinweis
source: History Today, 1 June 1995
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1995 History Today Ltd.

Disclaimer: This post is for educational and/or recreational purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.