Quote:
Originally Posted by Calenorn
Burroughs was subtle about racial issues. He went as far as he could go and still be able to sell the stories. A white, male protagonist was commercially mandatory. Subsequent Tarzan novels did portray some noble, courageous black characters.
And consider the John Carter novel. It opens as a typical western, but when the protagonist finds himself on Mars, he discovers that the red people have an advanced culture and technology, but the only white creatures in sight are savage, mindless apes!
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Burroughs did clearly believe that Western white civilisation was superior to native indigenous cultures. He also felt that these latter were vulnerable to evil manipulation. However barbaric they seemed, there was no excuse for the outrageous criminality of European societies—crimes against humanity which were exposed by Roger Casement. The following quotation illustrates the intense anger of Burroughs:
“To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State — a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.”
Burroughs takes a similar line in his group of western novels which are written from the standpoint of the Native American. In the Mars novels—which I think are better (IMHO) than the Tarzan sequence, the Black race is the most noble and technologically advanced of all the various Martian cultures. So while Burroughs certainly shared the cultural mind-set which dominated much of his world, I think he also realised some of the ethical failings of that system.