Madison Grant

Madison Grant (1865-1937) was an American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist.

Notably the author of the popular The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of the world, an early racialist work expositing Nordic theory, and was the first non-German book ordered to be re-printed by the Nazis when they took power in Germany. Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that "The book is my Bible," and indeed it contains explicit advocating for an extermination plan of "undesirable" traits and races (including the Jews) from the human gene pool:

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit -- in other words social failures -- would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

Other messages in his work include recommendations to install a dictatorship, the segregation of unfavorable races in ghettos, that freedom is actually slavery, and that "inferior" races were actually longing to be dominated and instructed by "superior" ones. The book was immensely popular and went through multiple printings in the United States, and was translated into a number of other languages, notably German in 1925.

Nordic theory, in Grant's formulation, was a similar to many 19th century racial philosophies in that it divided the human species into primarily three distinct races: Caucasoids (based in Europe), Negroids (based in Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Asia). Nordic theory, however, further subdivided Caucasoids into three groups: Nordics (whom evolved in what is now Scandinavia and Britain), Alpines (Central and Eastern Europe), and Mediterreneans (Southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula). The harsh conditions at the top of the world caused humans there to evolve better brains and better morals than the rest of the human species, so Grant's formulation went (they also exclusively developed blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, in his theory). Nordics were, in his mind, responsible for all of the truly important achievements of civilization.

But what about non-Nordic achievements? How to explain the Greeks and the Romans? Grant had an answer for this in the Viking raids. If any people succeeds, or if any other civilization in the world seems to develop fair skin or hair, Grant said it is safe to assume that breeding with Nordics had taken place a few decades hence.

According to Grant, Nordics were in a dire state in the modern world, where they were close to committing "race suicide" by being out-bred by more inferior stock. Nordic theory was strongly embraced by the racial hygiene movement in Germany in the early 1920s and 1930s, however they typically used the term "Aryan" instead of "Nordic", though the principal Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, preferred "Aryo-Nordic" or "Nordic-Atlantean".

Acting as an expert on world racial data, Grant also provided doctored statistics for the Immigration Act of 1924 to set the quotas on immigrants from less-desirable countries. Even after passing the statute, Grant continued to be irked that even a smattering of non-Nordics were allowed to immigrate to the country each year.

Grant was a close friend of many U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and also was an avid conservationist. He is credited with saving many natural species from extinction, and co-founded the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1918. He is also credited with helping develop the first deer hunting laws in New York state, legislation which spread to other states as well over time. He is also the creator of wildlife management and as a member of the New York Zoological Society lobbied to put an African from the Congo on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo (Ota Benga). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he served on the boards of many eugenic and philanthropic societies. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald featured a reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby when one of his characters was reading a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Passing of the Great Race (Grant) and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (Stoddard). "Everybody ought to read it," the character explained, "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

Grant's conservationism and his eugenics are not unrelated: both are hallmarks of the early 20th-century Progressive movement, and both assume the need for various types of stewardship over their charges. Grant viewed the Nordic race lovingly as he did any of his endangered species, and considered the modern industrial society as infringing just as much on its existence as it did on the redwoods. Like many eugenicists, Grant saw modern civilization as a violation of "survival of the fittest," whether it manifested itself in the overlogging of the forests, or the survival of the poor via welfare or charity.

Grant left no offspring when he died in 1937.

External link

• The Passing of the Great Race (http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/madgrant_intro.html), by Madison Grant