In Lovecraft I think the racism fuels something remarkable (an argument for another day I suspect). In Campbell I think it is a terrible influence. I can enjoy Who Goes There, or Twilight...but his emphasis on physiogonomy, ideals of male beauty and his extrapolation of a seemingly perfect now into forever always struck me as mildly ludicrous. I suspect he could have been a much better writer if he wasn't hung up on that rubbish.
Racism as a concept that needed a word was barely present in the early 60s [1], until then it was completely normal and expected by everyone. Bus desegregation wasn't until 1956. "I Have a Dream" was 63. Blacks couldn't vote until 1965. We might find it surprising now, but if he had written about an integrated community then, readers would have been shocked.
Now, for us, it serves as a valuable window into past culture. On a similar note, Roddenberry's Star Trek was 1966 - featuring aliens and--more shocking: Russians--cooperating. They received flak for that but HE was visionary.
1. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=racism&year_st...
To be even more specific, you have authors who worked directly with Campbell during that time saying that they knew that he was racist and that it was wrong.
This idea that racism was normal and not remarkable in 1960s is a pernicious fiction that is promulgated by racists and their apologists. If you feel that this is an unfair inference about you, I would recommend you spend some time with history and get caught up.
It almost seems like we are witnessing another backwards swing currently.
I think we are currently seeing an attempt to swing things backward, which is why I think it's important to speak up against that.
Frederick Douglass, 1852
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/douglass.htm
(I don't know his works well, I just searched and read...1 of them)
To select an example from popular culture: the musical "South Pacific" (1949) contains a strong and explicit anti-racist message [1]. John Campbell reflected the racist views of a fairly large segment of the American society of his day. But there was already a large, and growing, part of society that rejected these views.
It is often unhelpful to apply modern-day standards to historical figures. But Campbell is from a time and place where racism was already recognized as an evil to be fought. He has no excuse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pacific_(musical)#Race
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Blacks could and did certainly vote long before then. Blacks, for example, voted immediately after the Civil War. It wasn't until the end of the Reconstruction Era and the repeal of most of the Enforcement Acts that blacks were deliberately disenfranchised by state governments run by racist whites.
To give another example, he rejected a story by Samuel R. Delany in 1967 - https://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html :
> ... with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . .
But he was a racist all his life. You ever wonder why the 'Golden Age' SF almost all has white men as the main character, with humans almost always winning over aliens? It's in part because his big influence on SF caused his racism to permeate the stories I read and enjoyed as a kid.
Here's a paraphrase from Asimov (Campbell, btw, felt that Jews were a superior species of human), quoted at https://andrewhickey.info/2017/08/09/the-prometheans-wheels-... :
> Campbell’s racist views had a stifling effect on his writers even in the 1940s – Asimov said that one reason his stories never featured aliens was because Campbell would always insist that humans were superior to aliens, because he couldn’t cope with a worldview where white American men weren’t the best, so the left-leaning Asimov just didn’t write stories with aliens in, to avoid the problem.
Heinlein's 1941 "Sixth Column" was an idea originally developed by Campbell. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Race :
> The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success."