Madison Grant

BA, Yale University LLB, Columbia University

In 1924, imprisoned for leading the failed coup d’état known as the Beer Hall Putsch, corporal Adolf Hitler passed his time working on Mein Kampf and reading inspirational books by American eugenicists. Among his favorites was The Passing of the Great Race, written by Madison Grant eight years earlier. The corporal even wrote the author a fan letter. “The book,” said Hitler, “is my Bible.”^*

Grant was a well-known eugenicist and conservationist,^* but he was not a scientist. What credibility he had derived solely from his upper-class pedigree, his Ivy League education, and his inherited wealth.^* Described by a contemporary as “the most lordly of patricians,” Grant practiced law for a couple of years, but, realizing he had more important things to accomplish, and with no need for an income, he stopped working and devoted the rest of his life to his two hobbyhorses. And to schmoozing^* with like-minded aristocrats at his exclusive Manhattan clubs, the Century, Tuxedo, University, Knickerbocker, and Union.

The “great race” in his book’s title does not refer to a slapstick automobile competition from New York to Paris featuring an epic pie fight, alas. Rather, it refers to the “race”* of which Grant believed himself to be an upstanding member. If you’re thinking this must be “white,” well, sure, but it’s more complicated—and exclusive—than that. Mr. Grant, you see, had carefully read The Races of Europe by William Z. Ripley, which preposterously posited that there were three European races: Teutonic, Mediterranean, and Alpine. Grant changed Teutonic to “Nordic,” crowned it the race of “the white man par excellence,” and whined in the pages of his masterwork that the inferior types streaming into the United States from Mediterranean and Alpine locales were intermarrying with the good, pure Nordic people and diluting their grade-A blood. Not to mention the catastrophe that the Jew and Negro vermin were bringing down on the nation.

The solution? In harmony with others who shared his beliefs, Grant advocated keeping the bad ones out with a “Nordics Only” immigration policy and sterilizing many of the bad ones who had already slipped in. And was he ever strict! “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life,” he wrote, “tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants^* and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.” Grant also, quite logically, suggested the creation of special zones—call them “ghettos” or “concentration camps”—for the confinement of loser genes and those who carry them.

It’s difficult for us, a century later, to understand that Grant and the others who spouted off like this were, in their day, progressives, attempting to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, their concept of “the world” was cartoonishly narrow.* To them “the world” meant “the good people” or “people like us” or “the Nordics.” Everyone else was—not to put too fine a point on it—an unfit mongrel subhuman.

Add to this what we’ll call their genetic hubris—pride in their own chromosomal endowments coupled with the belief that they, the cream of humanity, the holders of prestigious degrees, the scientists, finally had more influence over evolution than natural selection itself—and the relationship between eugenics and conservation is clear: conservation was to the various species of the natural world what eugenics was to the human species. Both were about tailoring the landscape, in the broadest sense of the word, to the tastes of their class.

Which meant preserving certain animals (mainly big ones like bison and bear), plants (big trees like the California redwoods), and humans (Nords) while expressing no interest in the less “aristocratic” varieties (squirrels, pachysandra, Alpiners, Mediterraneans, the dark skinned… ). In this, Grant was not so much an outlier as a blustery mouthpiece for the received wisdom of his tribe. As another tribe member, Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard BA), gushed in a letter to Grant that The Passing of the Great Race was “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people^* most need to realize.” The passage was excerpted and splashed on the cover of the book’s next edition.

In fairness—and we’re nothing if not fair—Madison Grant was instrumental in the founding of a number of important American institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Save the Redwoods League, Glacier and Denali National Parks, and the American Bison Society. For these he deserves a soupçon of praise, especially since today these organizations back away from mentioning his name as if doing so would infect them with Zika.

His batshit racial prescriptions for the nation, on the other hand, fell short of expectations. Wouldn’t it be fun to dig Grant up, breathe life into him for a few hours, drag his sorry zombie ass to the Museum of Natural History, and torture him by sticking him in a diorama for busloads of multihued schoolkids to gawk at?