Madison Grant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - View original article

Madison Grant
Madison Grant.jpg
Madison Grant in the early 1920s
Born(1865-11-19)November 19, 1865
New York City, New York, United States
DiedMay 30, 1937(1937-05-30) (aged 71)
New York City, United States
Cause of death
Resting place
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York
NationalityUnited States
Alma materYale University (B.A.),
Columbia Law School
Known forEugenics, Scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race
Home townNew York City
ParentsGabriel Grant, Caroline Manice
Jump to: navigation, search
Madison Grant
Madison Grant.jpg
Madison Grant in the early 1920s
Born(1865-11-19)November 19, 1865
New York City, New York, United States
New York City, United States
Cause of death
Resting place
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York
NationalityUnited States
Alma materYale University (B.A.),
Columbia Law School
Known forEugenics, Scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race
Home townNew York City
ParentsGabriel Grant, Caroline Manice

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.


Early life[edit]

Grant was born in New York City, New York to Gabriel Grant, a well-known physician and American Civil War surgeon, and Caroline Manice. Madison Grant's mother was a descendant of Jesse De Forest, the Walloon Huguenot who in 1623 recruited the first band of colonists to settle in New Netherland. On his father's side, Madison Grant's first American ancestor was Richard Treat, dean of Pitminster Church in England, who in 1630 was one of the first Puritan settlers of New England. Grant's forebears through Treat's line include Robert Treat a colonial governor of New Jersey, Robert Treat Paine (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), Charles Grant (Madison Grant's grandfather who served as an officer in the War of 1812) and Gabriel Grant (father of Madison), a prominent physician and the health commissioner of Newark.[1] Dr. Gabriel Grant was awarded the congressional medal of honor for his service in the Civil War organizing the Second New Jersey volunteers.[2] Grant was a lifelong resident of New York City.

Grant was the oldest brother among four siblings. The children's summers, and many of their weekends, were spent at Oatlands, the beautiful Long Island country estate built by their grandfather DeForest Manice in the 1830s.[3] As a child he attended private schools and traveled Europe and the Middle East with his father. He attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887. He received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist. He never married and he had no children. He first achieved a political reputation when he and his brother, De Forest Grant, took part in the electoral campaign of New York mayor William Lafayette Strong in 1894.

Nordic theory[edit]

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race[4] in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of Europe. Coming out of Grant's concerns with the changing "stock" of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a "racial" interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization.

Similar ideas were proposed by Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant promoted the idea of the "Nordic race"[5]—a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia—as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and "worthwhile race types" conducive to Nordic society:

"Maximum Expansion of Alpines" — Map from Passing of the Great Race showing the "essentially peasant" Alpine migrations into Europe.
"Present Distribution of the European Races" (1916) — Grant's vision of the status quo, with the Nordics in red, the Alpines in green, and the Mediterraneans in yellow.

In the book, Grant recommends segregating "unfavorable" races in ghettos by installing civil organizations through the public health system to establish quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields.[citation needed] He states the expansion of non-Nordic race types in the Nordic system of freedom would actually mean a slavery to desires, passions, and base behaviors.

In turn, this corruption of society would lead to the subjection of the Nordic community to "inferior" races who would in turn long to be dominated and instructed by "superior" ones utilizing authoritarian powers. The result would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races and both in turn would be subjected by a new ruling race class.

Nordic theory, in Grant's formulation, was similar to many 19th century racial philosophies which 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 (who inhabited Northern Europe and other parts of the continent), Alpines (whose territory included central Europe and parts of Asia), and Mediterraneans (who inhabited Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East).

In Grant's view, Nordics probably evolved in a climate which "must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year's food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer. Such demands on energy, if long continued, would produce a strong, virile, and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment."[7] The "Proto-Nordic" human, Grant reasoned, probably evolved in eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, before migrating northward to Scandinavia.

The Nordic, in his theory, was Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. "It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature, and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair."[8] Grant categorized the Alpines as being the lowest of the three European races, with the Nordics as the pinnacle of civilization.




Grant also considered North Africa as part of Mediterranean Europe:

Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians.[11]

Yet, while Grant recognized Mediterraneans to have abilities in art, as quoted above, later in the text he pondered if the Mediterranean achievements in civilization were due to Nordic's original ideals and structure:


According to Grant, Nordics were in a dire state in the modern world, where because of their abandonment of cultural values rooted in religious or superstitious proto-racialism, they were close to committing "race suicide" by miscegenation and by being out-bred by inferior stock who were taking advantage of the transition.

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. By 1937 the book had sold 16,000 copies in the United States alone. 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". Stephen Jay Gould described The Passing of the Great Race as "The most influential tract of American scientific racism."[citation needed] Grant's work was embraced by proponents of the National Socialist movement in Germany; Passing was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that, "The book is my Bible."[13]

Grant's work, while a subject of popular discussion in the United States from the 1910s through the 1930s, was often attacked by scientists. who believed it to be little more than racism by an amateur in the fields of history and anthropology. It is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States. One of his long-time opponents was the anthropologist Franz Boas. Grant disliked Boas and for several years tried to get him fired from his position at Columbia University.[14][15] Boas and Grant were involved in a bitter struggle for control over the discipline of anthropology in the United States while they both served (along with others) on the National Research Council Committee on Anthropology after the First World War.

Grant represented the "hereditarian" branch of physical anthropology at the time, despite his relatively amateur status, and was staunchly opposed to and by Boas himself (and the latter's students), who advocated cultural anthropology. Boas and his students eventually wrested control of the American Anthropological Association from Grant and his supporters and used as a flagship organization for his brand of anthropology. In response Grant founded the Galton Society with American eugenicist and biologist Charles B. Davenport in 1918 as an alternative to Boas.[16]

Immigration restriction[edit]



Conservation efforts[edit]







“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read “The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.”








Throughout the book Tom espouses Goddard's racial theories; the narrator calls Tom's focus on Goddard's ideas "pathetic."[19]

Grant left no offspring when he died in 1937 of nephritis. Several hundred people attended Grant's funeral,[13] and he was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York. He left a bequest of $25,000 to the New York Zoological Society to create "The Grant Endowment Fund for the Protection of Wild Life", left $5,000 to the American Museum of Natural History, and left another $5,000 to the Boone and Crockett Club.

Passing of the Great Race was lauded by Adolf Hitler, who in the early 1930s wrote a 'fan letter' to Grant in which he called the book "his Bible".[20] At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant's Passing of the Great Race was introduced into evidence by the defense of Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich or at least indicate that they were not ideologically unique to Nazi Germany.

Grant's works of "scientific racism" have been cited to demonstrate that many of the genocidal and eugenic ideas associated with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in fact that many of them had origins in other countries including the United States.[21] As such, because of Grant's well-connectedness and influential friends, he is often used to illustrate the strain of racist-based eugenic thinking in the United States which had some influence until the Second World War. Because of the use made of his eugenics work by the policy-makers of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has been somewhat ignored and obscured as many organizations, (such as the Sierra Club) with which he was once associated want to minimize their connections with him.[13]

Grant was mentioned in Anders Behring Breivik's 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, in which Breivik argued for the preservation of the Nordic race whilst criticizing miscegenation.[22]




See also[edit]


  1. ^ Zubrin, Robert (2012). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. Encounter Books, p. 57.
  2. ^ Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, by Jonathan Peter Spiro, pp. 6-7.
  3. ^ Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, by Jonathan Peter Spiro, p. 7.
  4. ^ Lindsay, J. A. (1917). "The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History," The Eugenics Review 9 (2), pp. 139-141.
  5. ^ Alexander, Charles C. (1962). "Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth," Phylon 23 (1), pp. 73-90.
  6. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), p. 46.
  7. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), pp. 152-153.
  8. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), p. 150.
  9. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), p. 198.
  10. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), p. 198.
  11. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), pp. 137-138.
  12. ^ The Passing of the Great Race (1916), p. 139.
  14. ^ Petit, Jeanne D. (2010). The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literary Test Debate. University of Rochester. p. 165. ISBN 978-1-58046-348-5. Retrieved 26 June 2011. 
  15. ^ Winfield, Ann Gibson (2007). Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory. Peter Lang. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-8204-8146-3. 
  16. ^ Spiro 2002
  17. ^ Tucker, William H. (2007). The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9. Lay summary (4 September 2010). 
  19. ^ Fitzgerald's private opinion, however, seems to have been remarkably similar to Tom Buchanan's point of view: "In May 1921, soon after his unhappy first visit to Europe, he wrote to Edmund Wilson:

    God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it's a shame that England and America didn't let Germany conquer Europe. It's the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. (Letters 326)

    Fitzgerald recognized the racism implicit in these possibly jocular statements and seemed to abhor it. "My reactions," he wrote "were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish." Yet he continued in the same vein as previously: "I believe at last in the white man's burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art!" And so on". — Margolies, Alan (1997). "The Maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald." Twentieth Century Literature, 43 (1), pp. 75-93. Also see Slater, Peter Gregg (1973). "Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby," Twentieth Century Literature, 19 (1), pp. 53-62; Dekker, Jeffrey Louis (1994). "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties," Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28 (1), pp. 52-71; Bender, Bert (1998). "'His Mind Aglow': The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Other Works," Journal of American Studies, 32 (3), Part 1, Cambridge University Press, pp. 399-420.

  20. ^ Arnold, Kathleen R. (2011). Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 227. ISBN 0313375224.
  21. ^ Edwin Black: War Against the Weak. Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Four Walls Eight Windows: 2003, pp. 259, 273, 274-275, 296
  22. ^ 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.
  23. ^ Reprinted in The National Geographic, Vol. XXXVII, January/June, 1920.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]