Madison Grant
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Madison Grant (1865 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 polices in the United States.As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations, and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.
Nordic theory
Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of Europe. This early racialist work expositing Nordic theory was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power in Germany, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant, "The book is my Bible". Grant also was an avid eugenicist, advocating the extermination of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" 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.
Other messages in his work include recommendations to install a dictatorship and to segregate unfavorable races in ghettos, and that freedom is actually slavery and "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. By 1937 the book had sold 16,000 copies in the United States alone.
The Nordic, in his theory, was
"Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, blondness, wavy hair, blue 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."
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". Stephen Jay Gould described The Passing of the Great Race as
"The most influential tract of American scientific racism."
Immigration Restriction and Quotas
Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from East Asia and Southern Europe; he also advocated efforts to purify the American population though selective breeding.
He served as the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 to his death. Acting as an expert on world racial data, Grant also provided statistics for the Immigration Act of 1924 to set the quotas on immigrants from certain European 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. He also assisted in the passing and prosecution of several anti-miscegenation laws, notably the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in the state of Virginia, where he sought to codify his particular version of the "one-drop rule" into law.
Grant was a close friend of many U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and also was an avid conservationist.
Conservation
He is credited with saving many natural species from extinction, and cofounded the Save-the-Redwoods League with John C. Merriam and Henry Fairfield Osborn 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 was also the creator of wildlife management, helped to found the Bronx Zoo, build the Bronx River Parkway, save the American bison as an organizer of the American Bison Society, and helped to create Glacier National Park and Denali National Park.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he served on the boards of many eugenic and philanthropic societies, including the board of trustees at the American Museum of Natural History, a director of the American Eugenics Society, vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, a founding member of the Galton Society, and one of the eight members of the International Committee of Eugenics. He was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts and Sciences in 1929. In 1931, the world's largest tree (in Dyerville, California) was dedicated to Grant, Merriam, and Osborn by the California State Board of Parks in recognition for their environmental efforts. A species of caribou was named after Grant as well (Rangifer tarandus granti, also known as Grant's Caribou). He was a member of the Boone and Crockett Club (a big game hunting organization) since 1893, where he was friends with president Theodore Roosevelt.
Grant's interests in conservationism and eugenics were not unrelated. 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 over-logging of the forests, or the survival of the poor via welfare or charity.
Legacy
Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America, especially in New York. Grant's conservationism and fascination with zoological natural history made him very influential among the New York elite who agreed with his cause, most notably Theodore Roosevelt. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald featured a reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan 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; Grant wrote the introduction to Stoddard's book). "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."
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 (it seemed to have had little effect, as Brandt was sentenced to death).
Grant's works of scientific racism are often cited by scholars 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 the United States. As such, because of Grant's well-connectedness and influential friends, he is often used to contradict the idea that the U.S. did not have its own history of racism, eugenics, and the popularity of quasi-Fascist ideals.
Quote:
"Grant, like his friends and fellow conservationists Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, the force behind the founding of Glacier Park, connected hunting with saving the white race from self-destruction. All of these men believed that "white" people were imperiled from the forces of mongrelization and immigration in the modern era. They feared white women having sex and therefore children with lesser peoples, such as Italians and Jews, not to mention blacks."
"Contrary to what we might think today, not one of Grant's powerful friends disowned him or even distanced themselves from his book. Rather, they continued to work with him on conservationist and anti-immigrant campaigns. They stayed close to him because they agreed with him. They believed that the Anglo race was in peril and that the nation needed immigration reform to stop the white race from becoming permanently diminished with undesirable blood."
"Grant went on to publish a sequel to 'Passing of the Great Race' in 1933. Entitled 'The Conquest of a Continent', Grant wished for the creation of a separation nation for blacks in order to protect white blood from their taint, though he knew that the realities of the American South made this impossible. At the very least, he wanted stricter anti-miscegenation laws, the promotion of contraception among blacks so they stop breeding, and extremely strict legal segregation."
"Among Grant's other fine accomplishments was his time as the head of the New York Zoological Society, where he worked to have a Congolese pygmy man placed on display with the apes."
http://alterdestiny.blogspot.com/200...ogging_07.html
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Most Influential American Thinker of the Past Century: MADISON GRANT 
