Yellow peril, red scare: race and communism in National Review

ABSTRACT

Print media has had a profound impact on shaping conservative ideology, political practice, and racial boundary making. While scholarship on US conservatism contributes important elements of its economic, political, and social philosophy by highlighting the role of racialization within the black/white binary, little attention has been historically paid to other forms of racialization within US conservatism. Through a discourse analysis of National Review from 1955 to 1975, I offer a corrective by examining how racial tropes are used to reinforce the conservative political project of anti-communism. These racialized tropes highlight how National Review characterized East Asian nations as uncivilized and savage, and thus poised for communist exploitation. I explain how yellow peril discourse was linked to communist infiltration amongst US conservative writers.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialization
• conservatism
• anti-communism
• yellow peril
• media
• National Review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the second chapter of Sax’s The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), the character Nyland Smith writes to Dr Petrie:

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel and cunning of the entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (Rohmer [1913] 2012, 17)

The character of Fu Manchu set the standard for early and mid-twentieth-century depictions of Asian leaders as despotic, totalitarian, cunning, and unpredictable.

2. It is worth noting that through adherence to social traditionalism, state’s rights, and anti-communism, National Review sought to articulate conservative positions that aimed at thwarting advancements in domestic civil rights as well as decolonial movements internationally. During the period between 1955 and 1975, National Review actively minimized international claims of independence and supported apartheid and right-wing dictatorships (Bjerre-Poulsen 2002; Dudas 2017; Judis 1988).

3. This mode of thinking and bringing together different views was best exemplified in Frank S. Meyer’s idea of “fusionism” where, Meyer and Buckley sought to use National Review to bring together traditionalist conservatism with libertarianism. By bridging this gap, Meyer and Buckley argued conservatism could strengthen its’ anti-communist stance. For Meyer in particular, this “dialectical synthesis” of libertarianism and traditionalism attempted to find a common thread – anti-communism – that made these spheres of conservatism “accept, to a large degree, the ends of the other” (Meyer 1962; see also Diamond 1995, 31).

4. As of 2014, The National Review has at least 140,000 dedicated magazine subscribers. This does not include website readership. While one can argue that major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal have greater total readership, The National Review is still the most widely read conservative news source. See “National Review Demographics”, accessed at: http://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/NR_MediaKit_2014_B.pdf.