The Passing of the Great Race
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The Passing of The Great Race; or, The racial basis of European history was an influential book of scientific racism written by the American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant in 1916. The book was very influential in United States during the interwar period, going through many reprintings and selling 16,000 copies in the United States alone by 1937. The book put forward Grant's theory of Nordic superiority and argued for a strong eugenics program in order to save the waning "Nordics" from "worthless race types".
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[edit] Contents
Grant's book was organized into two parts. The first part dealt with the basis of race as well as Grant's own stances on political issues of the day. These centered around the growing problem of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, areas that were underdeveloped and a source of lesser racial stock, as well as the expansion of America's Negro population. Grant outlined his claim that the upper classes of American society, as well as all Americans who could trace their ancestry back to Colonial times whether poor or rich, were being outbred by immigrant and inferior racial stocks. Grant reasoned that America has always been a Nordic country, consisting of Nordic immigrants from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands in Colonial times and of Nordic immigrants from Ireland and Germany in later times. The new immigrants, however, were of different races and were creating separate societies within America, and that soon the traditional Anglo-Saxon colonial stocks, as well as all Nordic stocks, would become extinct and America as it is known will cease to exist. The second part of the book dealt with the history of the three European races: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, as well as their physical and mental characteristics.
[edit] Nordic theory
Grant's book was an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of the world. 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". The book itself elaborated Grant's interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, which he saw as revolving chiefly around the idea of "race", specifically the idea of the Nordic race — the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. 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. 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 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.
Nordic theory, in Grant's formulation, was 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 (who inhabited Scandinavia, northern Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Flanders, parts of northern France, and northern Poland), Alpines (whose territory stretched from central France through Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria, southern Germany, southern Poland, central Russia, and into Central Asia), and Mediterraneans (who inhabited southern France, the Iberian peninsula, southern Italy, Greece, and parts of Wales).
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." 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, 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." Grant categorized the Alpines as being the lowest of the three European races, with the Nordics as the pinnacle of civilization.
The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north. The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known, and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned.
Grant allowed Mediterraneans to have abilities in art, as quoted above, but later in the text remarked that true Mediterranean achievements were only through admixture with Nordics:
This is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycensean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State. To what extent the Mediterranean race entered into the blood and civilization of Rome, it is now difficult to say, but the traditions of the Eternal City, its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as the Roman ideals of family life, loyalty, and truth, point clearly to a Nordic rather than to a Mediterranean origin.
Grant's intellectualized ideas of Nordic and Caucasian superiority stem from ideas of Social Darwinism, a popular philosophy at the time that claimed that the fittest humans should enhance and perfect their genes through selective breeding while the unfit should not be permitted to breed at all, thus allowing the further evolution of the species. Originally conceived by the Englishman Herbert Spencer, this built on Darwin's theory of evolution, which included acknowledgement of differences in intelligence between individual humans as well as the different human races. Grant, as well as others, claimed that the Caucasian races, in addition to their obvious cultural superiority, respresent the highest pinnacle of evolution and are superior in intelligence as well.
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."
He additionally was involved in many debates over the discipline of anthropology against the anthropologist Franz Boas, whom he reputably would not shake hands with on account of the latter's being Jewish, 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.
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 doctored 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.
[edit] Reception and influence
The book was well-received by 1920's American society. Grant instantly became an icon of popular culture, and the superiority of the Nordic Race became ingrained in the minds of both the scientific establishment and in society in general. Nordicist theory, however, had fallen out of favor in the United States by the mid 1930's. In Germany, on the other hand, it was at the peak of its power during the '30's due to the Nazis' obsession with the blonde, blue-eyed Aryan ideal. Hitler had read Grant's book and wrote a letter to him stating that it was "his Bible". The Nazis used Grant's ideas about eugenics to justuify compulsory sterilization, and used his ideas about Nordic superiority to justify programs such as Heinrich Himmler's Lebensborn Society, which existed to preserve typical Nordic genes, such as blonde hair and blue eyes, by sheltering blonde, blue-eyed women and subjecting them to breeding programs. All this was related to Grant's claim that the Nordic Race is in danger of being outbred by inferior racial stocks.
Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920's 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).
Even before the rise of Nazism, Grant's concept of "race" lost favor in the USA in the polarizing political climate after the first World War, including the Great Migration and the Depression. The influx of African-Americans into the Northern states in this time resulted in a "flattening" of racial categories into what eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard named as "bi-racialism" — an absolutist black/white distinction maintained by declaring all mixed-race people to be considered "black". This required the abandonment of Grant's gradations of "white" in favour of the one drop theory — which was embraced by white supremacists and black nationalists alike.
[edit] References
- Guterl, Matthew Press. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
- Spiro, Jonathan P. "Patrician racist: The evolution of Madison Grant." Ph.D. diss., Dept. of History, University of California, Berkeley (2000).
