Of all the clubs and societies that formed a wreath both glittery and gentlemanly around the Manhattan life of Madison Grant, none suited him better than the Half Moon. He enjoyed his rich social life and his many friendships at the Union Club, the Knickerbocker, the University, the Tuxedo, and the Turf & Field. The Society of Colonial Wars, which he had cofounded (its membership closed to those who could not trace their American roots back to 1775 or before), enabled him to confirm his exalted genealogy. His raffish side found him in the company of artists, writers, and fellow-traveling aristocrats at the Century Association, and he could attend to his political passions at meetings of the American Defense Society, whose chairman believed “a widespread conspiracy of revolutionary forces,” led by Republican senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, was plotting to seize control of the federal government. Grant’s interest in environmental issues found a productive outlet among the ninety members of the Boone and Crockett Club, founded by Grant’s fellow club officer Theodore Roosevelt to “promote manly sport with a rifle”; at the American Museum of Natural History, where he served for many years on the executive committee alongside his closest friend, museum president H. Fairfield Osborn; and most especially at the Bronx Zoo—of which Grant was founder, funder, and for decades its guiding spirit.
But the Half Moon Club, named for the ship Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor in 1609, was prepotent: it was social, it was exclusive, it was scientific, and it came to be decidedly political. Conceived by Grant and Osborn in 1906, its membership was confined to twenty-four men. Other charter members included J. P. Morgan Jr. (Osborn’s cousin) and architect Charles F. McKim. Over the next several years they were joined by sculptor Daniel Chester French, who created the Lincoln Memorial; illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose “Gibson Girl” became the Gilded Age’s paradigm of beauty; Nicholas Murray Butler, for forty-six years the president, and the personification, of Columbia University; and others made clubbable by their eminence, their congeniality, and their nearly pure Anglo-Saxon heritage. (The one exception was Serbian American physicist Michael Pupin, who had become well known and wealthy for inventing the device that made long-distance telephony possible.) By the time the Half Moon concluded its final “voyage” (as Grant called their meetings) in 1934, nearly every major figure in the American eugenics movement, and many in the anti-immigration movement, had signed up for the trip.
Grant rode the “voyage” metaphor as far as it could take him. The calligraphed invitations he sent out two or three times a year announced the club’s next “cruise”—in fact a dinner, most often convened at the University Club’s neo-Renaissance palazzo on Fifth Avenue. Members and invited guests were asked to “reserve a cabin” for each cruise, which “set sail” at 7:00 p.m. As host, Grant called himself the “Master Mariner”; the evening’s speaker was the “pilot.” Members—“the crew of the Half Moon”—signed each evening’s program under the heading “adventurers.” Unable to extend the seagoing imagery any further, he came up with no better name for the invited guests than “associate adventurers.” But he did attach a nautical tag to the menus: an evening’s meal that (for one example) ran from beluga caviar through Filet of Flounder Bercy and Squab au Cresson bore the label “Rations.”
Kitted out for each voyage in white tie and tails, the men of the Half Moon and their guests treasured their renown, their exclusivity, and an impressive roster of “pilots.” Sir Ernest Shackleton recounted his adventures in the Antarctic. Prince Albert of Monaco spoke about deep-sea exploration. Hiram Bingham, the explorer who found Machu Picchu, called his talk “To the Lost City of Peru.” But even in the early years, the subject would occasionally veer away from exploration and adventure. In 1908, William Z. Ripley, author of The Races of Europe, came down from Harvard to speak about “The Migration of Races.” And in the spring of 1914, Edwin G. Conklin, a prominent Princeton biologist, gave a talk titled “Through the Channels of Heredity.” Given the topic, Fairfield Osborn asked Grant to invite Charles Davenport to join Conklin’s voyage; Davenport, Osborn said, was “an eminent leader in the eugenics movement in this country.” Overgilding the lily, Osborn also told Grant that Davenport was “Director of the Carnegie Foundation,” which was not remotely correct. His need to explain Davenport’s qualifications suggests that Grant wasn’t yet fully aware of Davenport’s signal importance in the advancement and popularization of eugenic ideas.
Not everyone present that April evening was a eugenicist, nor were they all sworn foes of immigration. One of the invited associate adventurers was the great geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan (he and Conklin had been graduate students together), who would soon declare that he considered much of eugenic science—perhaps even some aspects discussed that night—“reckless” and “unreliable.” Another was Simon Flexner, the son of Jewish immigrants (from Bohemia and Germany) who could trace his own remarkable journey through the melting pot from sixth-grade dropout to his appointment as director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, a position he would hold for three decades. As it happened, the Rockefeller family and its foundation both made occasional contributions to Davenport’s work in Cold Spring Harbor, until Flexner alerted them to scientific holes in the eugenic argument.
Still, the Half Moon event had great potential. Consider: Conklin, the evening’s speaker, was about to publish Heredity and Environment in the Development of Man, in which he cited Davenport’s work extensively and warned of the dire “biological consequences” that made “the problem of immigration so serious.” Osborn—Master Mariner for this particular voyage—would for the next two decades steer the engines of science and myth that would become the driving force of the anti-immigration crusade. Davenport was a scientist who gave credibility to the eugenics movement and was in the process of being tugged in the direction of racism. Grant was a racist whose presumptions of scientific authority would complete the picture.
But first, a World War got in the way.
For the American eugenics movement, the immediate effect of the conflict that ignited Europe in the summer of 1914 was the indefinite postponement of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, which was to have taken place in New York, Fairfield Osborn presiding. At the same time, for the immigration restriction movement the war in Europe inserted an unexpected, if temporary, victory into the long line of restrictionist defeats: the flow of immigrants was stanched.
With the first sinking of a British merchant ship in October, German submarines powerfully aggravated the perils of transatlantic crossing. The Hamburg-American Line and other steamship companies saw their fleets dragooned into military service or seized in enemy ports. In the first full year of war, immigration to the United States plummeted nearly 75 percent. But the war was bound to end at some point, and the prospect of swelling masses of refugees in Europe, homeless and in many parts of the continent stateless, loomed large. The intense anti-German feeling that would be unleashed with American entry into the war in 1917 also lay in the future (however near), but the consequences of armed savagery have a way of turning heads and changing minds. More than a year before the United States entered the conflict, even as immigration numbers were dropping radically, the restriction cause found support in surprising places. In the New Republic, which he had cofounded two years earlier, twenty-six-year-old Walter Lippmann described “the sinister effect upon our national life” wrought by immigration. The Harvard-trained son of German Jews, Lippmann believed in “a scientifically managed society run by a public-minded elite,” wrote his biographer Ronald Steel; in this instance he urged that elite to support restriction—an argument that led Joe Lee to send Lippmann a letter welcoming him aboard the restriction express. (He didn’t stay there; Lippmann jumped to the other side as the restrictionists’ arguments became more obtuse and hate-filled.) The war even compelled the conversion of as devoted an advocate of open doors as James Curley, the fiery Bostonian whose speeches against the literacy test had made him a hero to antirestrictionists. (In a single sentence in one congressional speech, Curley had called the test “vindictive,” “insidious,” “iniquitous,” and “barbarous.”) Terrified by the spread of infectious diseases caused by deteriorating conditions in Europe, Curley called for the complete suspension, for five years, of all European immigration.
Undeterred by the war’s deferment of the international congress, American eugenicists instead replaced it with a domestic event. The 1914 Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek had proved such a success that its sponsors, taking their celebration of eugenic doctrine to a national stage, stepped forth with a renewed version in San Francisco, to coincide with the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. As with other world’s fairs of the era—Chicago in 1893, St. Louis in 1904—the Pan-Pacific, conceived to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, seized the nation’s attention. Close to five million Americans viewed the Liberty Bell on its way west for a special appearance at the fair (140,000 turned out for a single six-hour whistle stop in Denver), five million more saw it on the way back home, and during its five months’ residency at the Pan-Pacific nearly two million fairgoers paid it homage.
The starry-eyed optimism and unashamed exuberance of a world’s fair proved an ideal setting for the second Race Betterment Conference. The meeting’s impresario, J. H. Kellogg (of the eponymous corn flakes), was an early devotee of Sylvester Graham (of the eponymous cracker), and eventually extended the latter’s belief in vegetarianism and naturopathic medicine into what Kellogg called “biologic living.” (He also extended his dietary innovations to the invention and promotion of peanut butter.) The sanitarium he built and ran in Battle Creek had become nationally famous by the turn of the century, and after ceding control of the family cereal business to his brother Will in 1905, Kellogg devoted the rest of his long life to evangelizing his esoteric philosophy. An ideology of health built upon various forms of abstinence (not only alcohol and tobacco, but also coffee, tea, condiments, and most dairy products), some singular medical innovations (chiefly “rational hydrotherapy”), and a hopeful dedication to human progress, biologic living fit in to the premises of eugenics as firmly as a plug fits a socket. The world had a desperate need, Kellogg said, for “a real aristocracy made up of Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny.”
In its planning and execution, Kellogg’s conference fit just as neatly into the atmospherics of the fair. Pan-Pacific organizers proclaimed a “Race Betterment and Eugenics Day” and scheduled a “pageant procession” through the fairgrounds featuring what one newspaper called “a company of tall men” joined by “a picked body of soldiers,” as well as a contingent of centenarians and assorted parade floats designed to vivify principles of hygiene and temperance. Press attention for the eugenics conference was keen. Kellogg declared that coverage in “the leading newspapers” added up to “more than a million lines” of copy, a good portion of it devoted to his announcement of the creation of a “Eugenic Registry.” Under the direction of a board that included among its members Charles Davenport, David Starr Jordan, and Luther Burbank, the registry was designed to launch what Kellogg called “the beginning of a new and glorified human race” that would someday inhabit a world where “hospitals and prisons will no longer be needed, and the golden age will have been restored as the crowning result of human achievement and obedience to biologic law.”I He thought a “new species of man” could be created in just six generations.
But it was Jordan, his interest in eugenics only sharpened since his visit with Mary Harriman at Arden back in 1910, whose comments at the conference were more timely and more telling. Jordan had been removed from his Stanford presidency in 1913 (victim of a palace intrigue engineered by university board member Herbert Hoover), and subsequently turned his attention to the cause of world peace. Now, almost exactly one year after the onset of World War I’s unprecedented carnage, he took the platform at the Race Betterment Conference to preach a secular sermon on “Eugenics and War”—to make the case that wars kill off the best, leaving the future to the genetically worst, a result that came to be described as “dysgenic.”
Jordan’s arguments could not have been more thoroughly eugenic had they come from Galton himself. In war, Jordan said, after the “best ones are slaughtered . . . the Nation breeds from the second best,” and in time “a continual killing off at the upper end and a continual breeding from the lower end” will destroy a nation. It happened in Rome, where after centuries of war “only cowards remained,” causing the great empire to plunge into decline and death. The Boston newspaper that had wondered why New England seemed bereft of great figures like Emerson and Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes, said Jordan, could have found the answer etched into the marble tablets on the somber walls of Harvard’s Memorial Hall: the names of the college’s Civil War dead, the fine young lads who never had the chance to sire the great men New England needed today.
“The men that make the Nation, that give it its tone, its quality,” Jordan said, are those of “superior strains—large in bone, large in strength, large in endurance, large in moral character, large in intelligence, large in personality—large in any of the virtues or in any of those things that make man stand out pre-eminently from other men.” Jordan’s belief in those “superior strains” and their current endangerment was not entirely new. He had been giving speeches like this for years, at least as far back as 1909, but the prominent stage of the Pan-Pacific Exposition proved a powerful amplifier.
Elements of Jordan’s reasoning had been floating around in eugenicist circles for decades. Charles Darwin had made similar points. “The finest young men are taken by the conscription or are enlisted,” Darwin had written in 1871, in The Descent of Man. “They are thus exposed to early death during war, are often tempted into vice, and are prevented from marrying during the prime of life. On the other hand the shorter and feebler men, with poor constitutions, are left at home, and consequently have a much better chance of marrying and propagating their kind.”
But Darwin also said it was imperative to extend sympathy to the constitutionally less fortunate; to do otherwise, he insisted, threatened “deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” In the four decades that followed, however, Darwin’s sympathy had been supplanted by a colder calculation, rooted either in the presumed dispassion of scientific and historical analysis that Jordan offered or in the jagged terrain of enmity, contempt, and fear. Or, eventually, both.
The following year J. H. Kellogg picked up where he had left off. Battle Creek was not San Francisco, and the fiftieth anniversary of the sanitarium that had, along with corn flakes, made the small Michigan city famous was not the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Still, for Dr. Kellogg and his Race Betterment Foundation, the sanitarium’s jubilee celebration in October 1916 was a confirming event. Two governors, two U.S. senators, and a fistful of congressmen joined the several hundred invited guests, all of them sanitarium alumni—people who had come to Battle Creek in years past for Dr. Kellogg’s regimen of vegetarianism, whole grains, and enemas.
On the jubilee’s opening night seven bands and twenty-three floats led a torchlight parade two miles long that culminated in a double display of fireworks: first the variety that lit up the evening sky, and then a commemorative oration by the highly combustible William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who had just embarked on a postpolitical career devoted to fighting for alcohol prohibition and against evolution.
Bryan may have been America’s foremost fundamentalist, but his was not the most striking religious address offered during Kellogg’s three-day jubilee. That came from a man who believed in evolution as thoroughly as Bryan did not and who could not have been more different from Bryan in style and substance: Charles Davenport. He titled the speech “Eugenics as a Religion.” It ran through a little Galton, a little history, a few philosophical points, then landed on the one thing he said every religion needed: a creed.
Davenport’s testament of faith began, “I believe in striving to raise the human race, and more particularly our nation and community, to the highest place of social organization, of co-operative work and of effective endeavor.” It concluded with a pledge of commitment to race betterment. And it included this: “I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.” The storm of applause that followed suggested that the world of eugenics was ready for Madison Grant.
“WARM-HEARTED, SYMPATHETIC AND HELPFUL, [Madison] Grant was born in 1865 for the very evident purpose of originating the New York Zoological Society in 1895.” The author of those words, William T. Hornaday, had good reason to admire Grant: Hornaday was the director of the Zoological Society and its prize property, the Bronx Zoo, for thirty years. Zoo employees were similarly admiring. They once gave the man who conceived the zoo—and, for four decades, served it with generosity, loyalty, and unstinted energy—a silver cup honoring “heaven-sent Madison Grant.”
The Bronx Zoo may be Grant’s most visible monument, but it’s hardly his only one, not even in New York. Eager to make the zoo accessible by automobile, Grant was the driving force behind construction of the verdant Bronx River Parkway, a pioneering piece of urban design. At the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan’s West Side, a Grant’s caribou (Rangifer tarandus granti) today stands stuffed and proud in the Hall of North American Mammals. Across the continent in northern California, in a redwood grove ninety miles south of the Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge, the world’s fifth-tallest tree looms over a dedicatory plaque at its base: a memorial salute to the three men who saved this extraordinary natural specimen and thousands of others like it—Carnegie Institution president John C. Merriam; Fairfield Osborn; and the man who initiated the effort to protect the redwoods, Madison Grant. Horace M. Albright, one of the organizers (and later the second director) of the National Park Service, needed just eight words to summarize Grant’s devotion to the wild world: “No greater conservationist than Madison Grant ever lived,” he said.
Nor no greater foe of immigration.
There was no contradiction in Grant’s utter dedication to the preservation of America’s natural environment and his perfervid opposition to immigration. He was, in his own skewed and unseemly way, an idealist. He believed in the America of his forefathers—a glorious nation, pure and bountiful and uncorrupted. People from southern and eastern Europe were as dangerous as the commercial interests who trained their covetous eyes on forests that could be felled and on mountaintops that could be mined.II Like so many other anti-immigration activists, Grant was by many measures a progressive, suspicious of large corporations and repelled by machine politics. In 1894 he worked for the successful reform campaign of New York mayoral candidate William L. Strong, who appointed Grant’s friend Theodore Roosevelt police commissioner. Devoted to Roosevelt, Grant supported the ex-president’s third-party candidacy in 1912. He even had a personal fondness for Theodore’s distant presidential cousin, and though Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned in a political direction he couldn’t abide, Grant didn’t let that soil their friendship or his acknowledgment of what he called Roosevelt’s “great achievements.” Nor did Roosevelt turn on him, even after the blossoming of Grant’s reputation as a xenophobe and anti-Semite. Their letters to each other were addressed with the most intimate salutation employed by men of their time and class: “My dear Madison,” “My dear Frank.”
Meeting Madison Grant for the first time, someone who knew nothing of his views of race and ethnicity couldn’t help being drawn to this tall, handsome, and elegant man (“a lighthouse of fashion,” said a friend). Gifted with an agile wit, a charming smile, and a sonorous voice, he was as personable in social settings as he was savage in his pursuit of an ethnically pristine America. Grant’s amiable self-confidence came across not as arrogance but as a kind of gentle and genteel purity. When he visited Andrew Carnegie to ask for a $100,000 donation to fund pensions for the Bronx Zoo staff, Carnegie told him to count him in for $10,000. Grant politely declined the donation; it simply wouldn’t do. As he left the room, an abashed Carnegie called him back and said he was good for the full $100,000.
One of Grant’s many admirers said he had “all the independence of a well-groomed musketeer.” Financially, that independence was never in question. Although he didn’t inherit his mother’s fortune until he was fifty—it was a brimming pot of real estate gold that produced an annual income (in 2019 dollars) of roughly $600,000—Grant sailed through his first five decades on a cushion of wealth embodied in the family’s Long Island summer place, Oatlands. There, a crenellated castle built by his maternal grandfather sat amid a lush, parklike paradise of espaliered pear trees, enormous rhododendrons, and imported cedars that eventually became the Belmont Park racetrack. Never married, Grant did not move out of the family’s city home on East Forty-Ninth Street until he was past sixty. Even then, the bonds of kinship held him close: Madison and his brother DeForest took connecting apartments one block east, on Park Avenue. Madison also took along his six personal servants.
Like many of his social class in that era, Grant benefited from an education both private and personal, supervised by tutors at home and amplified by frequent European trips (he recited the Iliad while sitting with his father “on the crumbling walls of Troy,” a friend said). He spent several years of his adolescence studying amid the baroque splendor of Dresden (a common educational destination for wealthy young men in the latter half of the nineteenth century, among them Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Robert Ward of the Immigration Restriction League). Then came Yale and Columbia Law School, and a few years of legal practice, before he abandoned his career for an undiluted dedication to the preservation of America’s natural wonders and, soon enough, its undiluted bloodstream.
In Grant’s social world his views were no secret; he felt no need to conceal them. “His was not a nature to forgo a thrust for fear of a riposte,” his friend the mammologist H. E. Anthony once said. This obdurate candor was put to a test when Grant was nominated for membership in the Century Association in 1912. Endorsing his friend’s candidacy in a letter to the club’s admissions committee, Fairfield Osborn first recounted some of Grant’s accomplishments as a conservationist and the breadth of his interests as an amateur scholar. Then he turned to his character. He said Grant was “a gentleman and an agreeable companion,” but he did add a sentence acknowledging what members of the committee likely knew: “Mr. Grant has a very positive way of expressing himself,” wrote Osborn, “and his strong views on certain questions, like Catholicism and the Hebrew race, have made him some enemies.”
Not enough enemies, however, to keep Grant out of the Century, where he remained a member for the next twenty years, nor to embarrass his fellow crusaders or dim their undying ardor. “In the tundras of the north,” a particularly word-drunk associate would write in tribute to Grant after his death in 1937, “where the sun gods are on guard, men will gather around the flame in the soapstone and tell tales” of the man who tried to “save our land from alien hordes.”
Madison Grant’s relatives destroyed a lifetime’s mountain of mail and memoranda after his death; he wanted no letters to survive. He also had no wish to tell his own story himself. “I have no present intention of writing an autobiography,” Grant told Zoological Society director William Hornaday, when he was in his sixties. “It is too much trouble and, besides . . . the things of real interest and importance would probably have to be omitted.” No one, not even Grant’s superb biographer, Jonathan Spiro, could possibly decode this cryptic reference.
But the “strong views” Osborn mentioned in his letter to the Century’s admissions committee are preserved in the files of Grant’s many correspondents and in a few other venues beyond the reach of his drive to obliterate his intimate past. The Jews of the Lower East Side, Grant told Elihu Root, were a “curse . . . draining off into this country [from] the great swamp” of Jewish Poland. The Bolshevists, he wrote in the introduction to an associate’s book, had “Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners.” Trying to persuade Theodore Roosevelt to support the literacy test, he expressed his doubts whether the “dwarfed and undersized Jews,” who were “totally unfit physically,” had “the moral courage for military service.” The United States was fast becoming “a dumping ground for Italians,” he wrote in a magazine article. That was around the same time he offered his only criticism of his intellectual progenitor, the archracist Count Gobineau. Though he was “a pioneer in race eugenics,” wrote Grant, Gobineau was “greatly impaired by his devotion to the Papacy.”
Jews may have attracted more of his venom than Catholics, but Grant didn’t really see them as separate threats, leaping to new imaginative heights when he warned the essayist and novelist John Jay Chapman of the threat posed by “the Catholic Church under Jewish leadership.” The two groups, he believed, were cut from the same genetic cloth: southern and eastern Europeans, he insisted, were “half-Asiatic mongrels.” In his desperate wish to rinse any stain from the reputations of great men, Grant, though an atheist himself, felt the need to insist that Jesus wasn’t Jewish—in fact, he argued, Christ was crucified because he wasn’t Jewish.III And in the difficult case of Christopher Columbus, he made an argumentative leap that carried him far beyond the boundaries of any known logic: “Columbus, from his portraits and from his busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic.”
Five critical words in that sentence reveal the underlying foundations of Grant’s polemics. That four-word jaw-dropper at the sentence’s heart—“whether authentic or not”—showed his unembarrassed willingness to invent evidence where none existed. And the resounding word right before the period—“Nordic”—was the Grant invention on which he built his fame and his influence.
In historian John Higham’s phrase, Grant was “the man who put the pieces together.” The pieces were eugenics and xenophobia; the resulting amalgam was scientific racism as a political creed. Grant’s assembly of those pieces no doubt accelerated that April 1914 evening at the Half Moon, when heredity was the topic and Edwin Conklin, Charles Davenport, and Fairfield Osborn were parties to the discussion. So was the fabulously wealthy Moses Taylor Pyne, who spent most of his life pouring his enormous inherited fortune (sugar, banking, railroads) into the treasury of Princeton University, which he loved deeply and at length; he sat on its board for thirty-six years and never missed a meeting. Pyne also played a significant role in the development of the university’s distinctive “collegiate Gothic” architectural style, which Princeton’s supervising architect described as a response to “the call of inextinguishable race memory” and an expression of “ethnic continuity.” (The university’s president at the time agreed. Princeton’s architecture “declared and acknowledged our derivation and lineage,” said Woodrow Wilson.) The handsome Princeton dormitory bearing Pyne’s name was not terribly far from the Osborn Clubhouse—a facility for Princeton athletes built with funds provided by Pyne’s fellow member of the Class of 1877. Pyne had sponsored Madison Grant’s candidacy for membership in the Century Association that Fairfield Osborn had endorsed. The three men formed a tidy triangle of shared interests.
Charles Scribner, Class of ’75, had no buildings named after him, only a room in the university’s library. But he did have a publishing house—he was one of the two Charles Scribner’s Sons commemorated in the firm’s official name—and by May of 1916, almost exactly two years after the Half Moon dinner, Madison Grant had completed a book he called The Passing of the Great Race. By the time Osborn wrote to Charles Scribner to urge him to read Grant’s “very suggestive study” about “the part that the three dominant races of Europe have taken in history,” the publisher was predisposed toward it. Scribner already knew about the manuscript—he’d had the opportunity to discuss it with Pyne and Grant at the Half Moon’s spring 1916 dinner. He was eager to read it.
By early June, Grant had finished his revisions. Before the month was over Scribner accepted his book and sent Grant a contract. He also turned the manuscript over to a young editor, recently promoted from the firm’s advertising department, who ushered it into print in a bare five months. The rest is history—and anthropology, and ethnology, and genetics, almost all of it pathologically distorted.
The essence of the manuscript that excited Scribner and his colleagues is the notion of the “Nordic” as “the white man par excellence,” member of a genuine “master race” facing extinction. Employing the concept of three European races that had been elucidated by William Z. Ripley in 1899, Grant refined it by judging each not simply by physical characteristics—head shape, height, skin coloring—but qualitatively, the Nordic prevailing in nearly all respects over the lesser Alpine and Mediterranean. (Another tweak was a tacit acknowledgment of the intensifying anti-German feeling as the United States stood on the brink of World War I: “Nordic” was Grant’s substitution for Ripley’s “Teutonic.”) “These races,” Grant wrote, “vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual, and spiritual attributes are . . . transmitted unchanged from generation to generation.” These attributes were, in a Mendelian sense, unit characters. And in a Galtonian, eugenic sense, they were sabotaged by careless breeding across “racial” lines. It was a distortion of both Ripley and Galton, but at the same time it was a hugely significant leap: eugenic concern about inferior individuals could be applied with equal conviction to inferior races.IV
Grant described the Nordics—fundamentally, the people of northern Europe and the British Isles—as “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats.” They dominated the other races by right. “Most ancient tapestries,” he wrote, “show a blond earl on horseback and a dark haired churl holding the bridle.” Tall, fair, and blue-eyed, blessed with “a narrow and straight nose,” the Nordic male (he hardly mentions women at all) was noted as well for bravery, chivalry, and “race pride.” The Mediterraneans may be superior in the arts, he acknowledged, but “the Nordic invaders of Italy had absorbed the science, art, and literature of Rome,” and therefore could be granted full credit for “the splendid century that we call the Renaissance.” Despite the noisome presence of all those dark little southern Italians—corrupted, he believed, with African blood, dangerous because of their “political incapacity and ready resort to treason”—Nordic dominance “persists to this day, and is the backbone of modern Italy.” Anything of value in Italy quite clearly arrived with those Nordic invaders: “Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type.”
How did Grant know this? Partly from his great faith in his “close inspection of busts or portraits.” He also may have picked it up out of admiration for Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose similar alchemical skills had turned Marco Polo, Francis of Assisi, and Galileo into Germans. But Grant also drew upon an acrid hash of human history just as tendentious (and even more arcane) than his genetic postulates. “In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their blood was quickly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land.” In France “the process of exterminating the upper classes was completed by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, [which] are said to have shortened the stature of the French by four inches; in other words, the tall Nordic strain was killed off in greater proportions than the little brunet.” Like David Starr Jordan, Grant believed World War I to be dysgenic, gravely imperiling what he variously called “the fighting Nordic element,” “the tall Nordic strain,” or “the blond giant,”V and thereby leaving “the little dark man” victorious. And for those without Grant’s presumed familiarity with less well known “races,” he reached beyond even remotely familiar groups into the almost comically obscure. He expounded on the migrations and linguistic paths of Dravidians and Esths and Tchouds. He dilated on intermarriage in the Solutrean Period. He explained how the Visigoths and the Jutes, the Varangians and the Suevi, and innumerable, unknowable, and improbable others “swept through history.” How could such apparent erudition not be impressive?
Grant’s variations on the racial past, which took up more than half of the book, were interpretations either historical (even if he was no historian) or anthropological (he was even less an anthropologist), both offered in service of a single, dominant theme: desolation lay in wait for the Nordics. The invasion of America by lesser tribes had placed the blade of a knife against the Nordic throat. “These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; and they are beginning to take his women,” he wrote. And that same native American, by adopting the “suicidal ethics” of open immigration, is welcoming the “exterminati[on of] his own race.”
It was in those “suicidal ethics” that Grant found the eugenic punch line to his polemic—a punch line that, in a way, granted special status to all those stunted, dark-haired Alpine and Mediterranean “churls”: “Whether we like to admit it or not,” he wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and the negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”
Grant’s book didn’t cite Henry Cabot Lodge, who, when he introduced the literacy test back in 1896, had invoked both Nordic imagery (“They came upon Europe in their long, low ships . . .”) and the dangers of diluting the American bloodstream (“if a lower race mixes with a higher, history teaches us the lower will prevail”). But on the last page of Passing, Grant forcefully made Lodge’s central point even more clearly than Lodge ever had: “The maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ ” he concluded, is “sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.”
THE PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE is not mentioned in A. Scott Berg’s prizewinning biography of the great editor Maxwell Perkins, who was a thirty-one-year-old junior editor when Charles Scribner handed him Grant’s manuscript in the summer of 1916. Neither is Grant himself mentioned, even though Perkins was Grant’s editor for the original edition and three later revisions of Passing. Nor was his encounter with Grant a momentary involvement that Perkins soon outgrew. Seventeen years after their first collaboration—after Perkins had won his enduring reputation as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor and Ernest Hemingway’s—the two men came together for another book, The Conquest of a Continent, that was even more extreme in its defense of America’s “purity of race” and “Nordic nobility.”
In 1916 Perkins was only beginning to get enthusiastic about Grant’s mash-up of the eugenic theories of Galton, the ethnic categorizations of Ripley, and the immaculate racism of Gobineau and Chamberlain. Just out of Harvard in 1907, he had taught English to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland at a Boston settlement house. He had found his way to Scribner’s through an introduction provided by his Harvard teacher, the Brahmin archconservative Barrett Wendell, who introduced the young man to Charles Scribner with the most exalted of Boston accolades: “I have known and admired all four of his grandparents.” Now, at the start of what would become the most storied career in American publishing history, he was steering into print a volume that would brand Scribner’s as the publishing home for many of America’s leading proponents of scientific racism. Perkins was editor to many of them.
Perkins and his colleagues launched Passing as “a history of Europe written in terms of the great biological movement which may be traced back to the teachings of Galton.” A publicity brochure described Grant as a “scientist, savant, traveler, and trained observer [who] is exceptionally qualified for this work.” By contributing the book’s preface, Fairfield Osborn lent his reputation as a scientist, as a museum director, and as the author of several popular books to his old friend. A promotional piece mailed to the membership of the Immigration Restriction League asserted that “the inrush of lower races is threatening the very blood of our country,” and, to press the point, offered this pointedly italicized warning: “These races will not be raised to our standards; we will sink to their standards.” A Scribner mailing to the firm’s individual customers described Grant’s book as a “scientific” study of the threat “from [the] unchecked influx of non-Nordic races.”
Then as now, publishers do not customarily disassociate themselves from the views of provocative authors when they publish their books, but they often construct a wary hedge (“In his sure-to-be-controversial book . . .”). The marketing effort emanating from the fourth floor of the firm’s Fifth Avenue “cathedral of books” didn’t even hint that others might disagree with Grant and his racial fantasies. The men of Scribner’s were all in.
Less than two weeks after Charles Davenport swore his oath to the eugenically inspired restriction of immigration in Battle Creek, The Passing of the Great Race got its public liftoff courtesy of the New York Times, which unfurled a strutting two-page spread in its Sunday magazine. The reader could slog through the piece—largely a dutiful précis of the book’s contents—or simply pick up all the relevant signals from its visual presentation. A schematic map of Europe showed the early “expansion of the Nordics.” On the facing page, another map revealed the more recent “encroachment of Mediterraneans and Alpines on Nordics.” A rather forbidding photograph of Grant loomed over both, beneath the headline WILL THE BRUNETTE RACE ELIMINATE THE BLOND? (Grant was neither—he was unheroically bald, with gray temples). High starched collar, opulent mustache exquisitely trimmed, no hint of his customary playful half smile or the ironic glimmer that usually played in his eyes (though black-and-white printing didn’t reveal it, they were brown, and not the blue he so idealized)—Grant looked stern, assured, even imperial: a man prepared to rule over both maps.
The first meaningful ripples of response to the book came from his friends and associates. One, from his longtime friend and fellow clubman Theodore Roosevelt, was particularly gratifying: “The book is a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize,” the ex-president wrote. “It shows an extraordinary range of reading and a wide scholarship . . . and all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing it.” Grant and his publisher were grateful in return, and with the ex-president’s permission used his words to tout subsequent printings of Passing.
Reviews were prominent, but mixed. The New-York Tribune called the book “a remarkable study, of direct bearing upon one of the greatest problems of the future of our country,” and in Boston the Transcript couldn’t contain itself: “This is a book to be read and considered by thinking men among us . . . a warning which should be heeded before it is too late . . . [Grant’s] earnestness and profound learning attest its importance.” But in London the Times Literary Supplement flatly dismissed Grant’s evidence as “incorrect,” and in American academic journals even somewhat sympathetic scholars were distressed by its “debatable assumptions,” “questionable evidence,” and “extreme statements.” Nonetheless, the very same writers noted the book’s “dignity and coherence,” and said it “should be studied by all who are interested in the future of our country.” Their reaction was a suggestion of the power of the distorting lens that many in the era’s academic establishment looked through: bad scholarship alone was not enough to discredit a claim to virtue.
Two pieces in leading opinion journals formed a symmetrical frame for the book’s reception. One, unsigned, appeared in The Nation, the venerable weekly then owned by Oswald Garrison Villard—pacifist, suffragist, cofounder of the NAACP, grandson of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and hardly the archetype of the progressive xenophobe. But you wouldn’t know it from the editorial on Passing. “Madison Grant has brought to bear distinct qualities of originality, conviction, and courage” in his book. Its few mistakes or overstatements were “humanly natural accompaniments” to such a “pioneer presentation.” It was “admirable,” it was “intelligent,” and it presented “an historical concept of truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.”
The New Republic, however, proved eager to answer Grant’s arguments, in the process rendering them limp and inconsequential. In its selection of a reviewer, the magazine brought out the heavy artillery: Franz Boas. His review of Passing, titled “Inventing a Great Race,” was unrelenting, a tightly argued and authoritative critique punctuated by a series of sledgehammers. The book was built on “fallacies,” and Boas enumerated them. He said its concept of heredity was “faulty,” and explained its errors. The book’s analysis was constructed “naively,” its evidence was “haphazard,” its historical reconstructions “fanciful,” its opinions “dangerous.” Because “a man so eminent” as Fairfield Osborn had lent his credibility to the book with his enthusiastic preface, the dangers were compounded. Boas tore apart the accuracy of Grant’s maps. He ridiculed his linguistic analyses. He hardly paused to take a breath.
Grant could not have been surprised, or even upset. One of his most enthusiastic boosters, biologist Frederick Adams Woods of MIT, would obligingly note that most of Passing’s negative reviews were “signed by persons of non-Nordic race.” (Woods’s own theories included the notion that the Nordic mind was biologically incompatible with Bolshevism.) The ease with which Grant and his followers batted away criticism of the book, it seemed, was itself biological.
The Passing of the Great Race was a modest commercial success. Max Perkins assured Grant that it was “undoubtedly one of the most successful books addressed to the thoughtful public” published in 1916, but its real impact lay a few years in the future. The war had not only put the brakes on immigration, it soon focused the nation’s attention not on the foreigners who had earlier clamored at the gates but on those whom American troops were battling in the trenches of northeastern France. A more successful edition published a few years after the war brought Grant the sort of popular acclaim he cherished—for instance, the letter from a newspaper publisher and politician from Portland, Oregon, who attributed his recent stock market successes to Passing: as a result of following its “first principles,” Leslie M. Scott explained in a letter to Grant, he no longer invested in securities issued by “any but members of the ‘great race.’ ” Now, that was an endorsement! Grant was so pleased he forwarded Scott’s letter to Osborn.
Yet even in 1916, the publication of The Passing of the Great Race put the bridge connecting the anti-immigration movement to the eugenicists firmly in place. In his preface, Osborn said the eugenic view of race that informed every page of Passing “is not a matter either of racial pride or racial prejudice. It is a matter of love of country . . . based upon knowledge and the lessons of history.” A letter Grant received from a man he had met two years earlier at a Half Moon dinner expressed his own love of country. Action was imperative, wrote Charles Davenport. He wanted to know “what can be done to secure our nation” from the “threatening danger” of unchecked immigration.
I. Kellogg had ready access to his Eugenic Registry Board: Jordan, Davenport, and Burbank periodically put themselves under Kellogg’s care at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as did several other eugenicists and their supporters, including Irving Fisher and Madison Grant.
II. At times Grant could sound like an impassioned twenty-first-century environmental activist, as in this excerpt from an article he wrote in 1925: “We have killed all the wild game animals, we have cut down most of the forests, we have exhausted vast areas of virgin soil, we have polluted our streams and are destroying our coast fisheries, we have torn open the sides of the mountains for minerals, and are digging up our coal and draining off our oil at a prodigious rate.” He blamed it all on an unholy amalgam of corporate greed and cheap immigrant labor.
III. Jews and Jewishness plagued Grant even at home: however proud he was of his many hunting trophies, he regretted the “Jewish cast of nose” that taxidermists gave his moose heads.
IV. Grant had a peculiar notion of how interracial breeding—really, breeding of any kind—actually worked. He was relieved, he wrote, that most white-black miscegenation took place in the coupling of a white man with a black woman, for “the reverse process would, of course, have resulted in the infusion of negro blood into the American stock.”
V. These were all echoes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s descriptions of the Teutonic ideal: “the golden hair . . . the gigantic stature . . . the lofty countenance . . .”