''The Red Napoleon'' is a 1929 novel by
Floyd Gibbons
Floyd Phillips Gibbons (July 16, 1887 – September 23, 1939) was the war correspondent for the ''Chicago Tribune'' during World War I. One of radio's first news reporters and commentators, he was famous for a fast-talking delivery style. Floyd ...
predicting a
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...
conquest of Europe and
invasion of America. The novel contains strong
racial
A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 1500s, when it was used to refer to groups of variou ...
overtones such as expressed fear of the
yellow peril
The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror and the Yellow Specter) is a racial color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world. As a psychocultural menace from the Eastern world ...
and of inter-racial breeding. However, the characters expressing these views are exposed in the text as being bigoted and ill-informed, as is one of the main U.S. character's views of the Soviet Union's free-love-but-with-male-accountability laws.
''The Red Napoleon'' was published in 1929 and projects the next few years. In it,
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
is killed by an assassin in 1932. A
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
leader takes over and starts a massive military buildup based on the immense human population of Asia. In 1933 the Red Army invades
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
.
[ ] After conquering all of Europe later that same year, Red Napoleon's massive multi-racial army attempts to invade the U.S. but is repelled through canny use of the U.S.'s comparatively slender military resources, including airfields in
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
, at the time of writing under U.S. control, and through grit and determination. At the book's end the narrator, a newspaperman like the author himself, interviews the imprisoned Red Napoleon, who defends his policy of
non-racialism
Non-racialism, aracialism or antiracialism is a South African ideology rejecting racism and racialism while affirming liberal democratic ideals.
History
Non-racialism became the official state policy of South Africa after April 1994, and it is en ...
, of inter-mixing the races of the world, saying it must be the way of the future.
John Gardner in his afterword to the 1976 edition stated:
"What Gibbons is saying from behind the fortress-wall of his trash-writer gimmicks, is serious and convincing: white superiority on this planet is finished, and, worse, if we refuse to meet the
Third World
The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Western European nations and their allies represented the " First ...
halfway - refuse to shuck off the racial prejudice that has been a standard feature of our character from the beginning - we face virtual extermination...
Gibbons found himself in a curious position
hen he wrote Red Napoleon in the 1920s.. Everything he believed most profoundly - and believed to be a matter of life and death - would be anathema to his readers. Not only would the vast majority of his readership find his visionary slogan ridiculous - "We recognize but one race - the HUMAN RACE" - they would find it grossly evil...
o Gibbons made every one of the novel's favourable characters into thorough-going bigots..."
while, Gardner points out, all the evil done by the novel's main antagonist Karakhan of Kazan "has been done before by white against nonwhites... even the novel's sympathetic characters can at least glimpse the reason" for his actions -a history of being "renters and hopeless wage slaves ... [is] some reason for revolution...
Out of the cheapest and ugliest cliches of the trash literature of his time, Gibbons has shaped an ironic satire of capitalist America's greed and foolhardy racism." (p. 378-81)
Publication history
''The Red Napoleon'' first appeared as an illustrated 18-part serial in ''
Liberty
Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom.
In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society fr ...
'' magazine, from April 6 through August 3, 1929.
In August 1929, the novel was published in hardcover by the new New York firm of
Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith.
In 1976, the novel was reissued by the
Southern Illinois University Press
Southern Illinois University Press or SIU Press, founded in 1956, is a university press located in Carbondale, Illinois, owned and operated by Southern Illinois University.
The press publishes approximately 50 titles annually, among its more tha ...
, part of their Lost American Fiction series, with an afterword by
John Gardner.
Popular Library
Popular Library was a New York paperback book company established in 1942 by Leo Margulies and Ned Pines, who at the time were major pulp magazine and newspaper publishers. The company's logo of a pine tree was a tribute to Pines, and another ...
published the mass market counterpart in 1977.
See also
*
Invasion literature
Invasion literature (also the invasion novel) is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel first was recognized as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella '' The ...
References
External links
"Mongol Hordes Take Manhattan: Before there was Red Dawn, there was Red Napoleon" by J.M. Berger ''Foreign Policy'', November 21, 2012
{{DEFAULTSORT:Red Napoleon, The
1929 American novels
Invasion literature
1929 speculative fiction novels