Evolutionary Racism-Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan was once one of my heroes, and his adventures top my list of manly models
When I was young, an Olympic swimming champion named Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in a series of twelve B&W movies, made between 1932 and 1948. (Weissmuller won Olympic medals for his adopted country, the United States, in swimming and water polo in 1924 and 1928.) Those I saw were based on the first several of the 24 books by Edgar Rice Burroughs that featured Tarzan of the Apes. Like my older brothers, I was captivated by this clever muscular hero who could and did move fluidly between the society of the Great Apes and that of rich Americans and British aristocracy.
Little did I know. I was but a child.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American with many generations of history, but his American aristocracy had with deep roots in Britain. He published Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, and continued his Tarzan franchise until 1965, apparently proud of his success at writing pulp fiction, which included several other series.
This was an era in which Darwinian evolution had challenged the biblical creation account. Darwin chose to use the term “race” over “subspecies” to define variations within species. Kipling had written about the White Man’s Burden among the black races in India (my attempt at portraying contemporary views, not my own). The Scopes “Monkey” Trial would take place in 1925. Eugenics was de rigeur, with Margaret Sanger gaining influence, and the Nazi “purification” attempt, which would murder six million Jews and other “less desirable” humans, was evolving from Friedrich Nietzsche’s (d. 1900) ideas of Übermensch. Superman (né Kalel) was on his way to Earth from his home planet, Krypton, to arrive in America in the late 1930s.
Africa had not been explored—H.M. Stanley had found David Livingstone, the Christian missionary/explorer of East Africa (d. 1874) as part of the culture of the time. Adventurers and traders heard rumors from the jungles of the African interior of huge animals (which some have identified from sketches as certain dinosaurs but, for what are considered obvious reasons, discounted entirely; we won’t go there) as well as of great apes. Darwin and Leakey (not the Christian missionary, but his Cambridge- or Oxford-educated son) had decided already that the missing link between apes and humans was to be found in Africa. It was not until the 1930s that gorillas were “first seen” (i.e., by White men), making King Kong a reasonable extension (or maybe, stretch) of the expanding field of knowledge, and great movie material. Perhaps those Great Apes would prove to be that missing link, or at least prove the existence of a missing link.
Rousseau had brought current (well anyway, into Enlightenment thinking, a century or so before) the ancient Greco-Roman tale/theme of feral humans raised to noble results and purposes by wild animals, and Kipling brought that theme into the twentieth century with Mowgli in his Jungle Tales. Society, so the thinking went, was corrupt, but humans are basically good, and one raised in the savage purity derived from freedom from corrupt and corrupting society must be superior physically, mentally, and in every other way, most likely.
Within this environment, and particularly before World War I challenged the assumed reality, at the time Tarzan of the Apes was published, it appeared obvious, particularly to the elites of the aristocracy and to those—even commoners—who aspired to commune with them, that not only was the White race superior to Black races, which included in British vernacular African and Asian races—not subspecies, remember! (Please wait until you have read the rest of this essay before you even think that I am advocating that viewpoint), but the apex of the White races was the pure English aristocratic nobility. Burroughs’s direct traceable descendency on both sides of his family from the English may or may not have had anything to do with this particular element of his viewpoint, but I consider it worth mentioning.
So in Tarzan of the Apes Burroughs places a noble (members of the peerage, nobility by birth) English husband and wife aboard a sailing ship caught in a storm that drives them onto the West African coast. All of the crew is lost (or rows away—ignoble chickens!) before the wreck, and only Lord and Lady Greystoke make it ashore, alive. They build a treehouse for safety, and furnish it with books they salvage. Their son, the young Lord Greystoke, is born there in Africa, but both parents die shortly after that, of the horrific diseases that kill all the society-weakened White people who come to Africa. Not to be pedantic, but remember, the baby is heir to the highest apex of social, aristocratic, and physical evolution, and within hours of the parents’ death a group of Great Apes invades the treehouse, and one, whose own son just happens to have died tragically within the prior few hours, is seized by her primitive motherly instincts. She pities the baby human. Despite the ugliness of this hairless babe, the Great Ape takes him as her own, and her primitive grief compels her to care for and defend him for years instead of the months her own Great Ape son would have needed to reach maturity.
Freed from the shackles of corrupt society, Tarzan, as his adoptive mother names him in the primitive language of the Great Apes, learns the ways of the Great Apes. Since as a British noble he has evolved far above the Great Apes, he excels physically on their diet of insects and raw meat, climbs trees and learns to use his knife, and eventually becomes leader of the Great Apes tribe. He finds his way back to the treehouse his human parents built and uses the books they left (some with pictures, which help) to learn to read and understand English. In this first, and in subsequent books, Tarzan establishes relationships with Black African tribes, which are the next step up the evolutionary ladder (not my interpretation, but Burroughs spells it out in several contexts). When, eventually, White European explorers arrive, Tarzan gets along with them, meets and happily takes Jane as captive/mate. (She is apparently taken with the noble, superior Tarzan even before she learns who he is or of his great fortune that conveniently awaits in England.) Over the course of the novels, Tarzan moves up and down the evolutionary chain (again, Burroughs describes it as such). He retains the nobility of a British aristocrat as well as of a superior member of Great Apes society and of Black African tribal society.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Burroughs strongly supported eugenics and scientific racism. His views held that English nobles made up a particular heritable elite among Anglo-Saxons. Tarzan was meant to reflect this, with him being born to English nobles and then adopted by talking apes (the Mangani). They express eugenicist views themselves, but Tarzan is permitted to live despite being deemed "unfit" in comparison, and grows up to surpass not only them but black Africans, whom Burroughs clearly presents as inherently inferior, even not wholly human. In one Tarzan story, he finds an ancient civilization where eugenics has been practiced for over 2,000 years, with the result that it is free of all crime. Criminal behavior is held to be entirely hereditary, with the solution having been to kill not only criminals but also their families. Lost on Venus, a later novel, presents a similar utopia where forced sterilization is practiced and the "unfit" are killed. Burroughs explicitly supported such ideas in his unpublished nonfiction essay I See A New Race. Additionally, his Pirate Blood, which is not speculative fiction and remained unpublished after his death, portrayed the characters as victims of their hereditary criminal traits (one a descendant of the corsair Jean Lafitte, another from the Jukes family).[43] These views have been compared with Nazi eugenics (though noting that they were popular and common at the time), with his Lost on Venus being released the same year the Nazis took power (in 1933).[44] Source: Wikipedia “Edgar Rice Burroughs,” taken June 16, 2024
I read at least part of one other series of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels. This series was set on Mars, and portrays another variation on the same theme of racial superiority/inferiority, tied inextricably with evolutionary dogma.
Little did I know. I was but a child. I have since become a Christian and recognize the poison in these views. Burroughs describes some aspects of manliness and heroism in terms that beg for emulation. But Tarzan’s qualities, the nobility of his character as portrayed, are fiction. Perhaps it is accurate to aver that God allows us to know something of greatness of character and performance as reflections of what a world conforming to His plan and purpose would look like. That is a justification for having heroes, people we look to who do and have done great things despite being otherwise schmucks. We can see the good, the just, the righteous, while we turn our focus away from the imperfections, even the wrongs, that people do and have done throughout history: this is so we can concentrate on and pursue the good, truth, justice. This is an incentive toward and recognition of the possibility of pursuing the good, but recognizing God as the source and instigator and judge of what counts as good.
Interesting review of Burroughs. I didn't realize his English elite heritage, nor did I recognize the evolution or racism in his Tarzan books, although I only read a couple. Basically for me it was just a good story and a good movie. As a boy I tried swinging through the trees a few times but didn't get very far. I tried to read his Venus but got bored and never finished it. I seem to remember reading that he was diagnosed as insane at some point.