Madison Grant
Madison Grant was an American eugenicist and conservationist who wrote The Passing of the Great Race and other eugenics propaganda books and led several eugenicist groups. His advocacy supported the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly reduced or eliminated immigration from non-Northwestern European countries and sterilization laws enacted in the United States. Scholars have claimed the Nazi regime in World War II-era Germany drew inspiration from Grant’s views. 1 2
Contents
The National Park Service’s profile on Madison Grant describes him as having a “troubling legacy,” referencing both his involvement in the eugenics movement and his support of conservation efforts, including the protection of various forests and endangered animals. 2
Background
Born in New York in 1865, Madison Grant grew up in an affluent family and started his own law practice after graduating from Columbia College, now Columbia University. He is said to have spent most of his time big game hunting and socializing within “exclusive New York society clubs.” 3
As an avid hunter, Grant also became a prominent conservationist, leading him to be close friends with President Theodore Roosevelt and one of the original members of the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation advocacy organization. He was a member of the Republican Party’s northeast-based Progressive wing, which sought to address social issues such as urban crowding and the use of natural resources with government action. 4
Despite being behind the expansion of the national park system and helping prevent the extinction of multiple native species to North America, Grant’s legacy as an environmentalist activist is overshadowed by his involvement in the eugenics movement. 2 His most infamous book, The Passing of the Great Race, uses pseudoscience to argue that the northwestern Europeans who were the first Europeans to settle in the United States are genetically superior to other races, including those from Southern Europe. Grant attempted to popularize the sterilization of various races, disabled people, and criminals. He also advocated for restricting immigration from everywhere other than northwestern Europe and promoted the eugenics movement. 1
Eugenics Groups
As a result of Madison Grant’s study of the ideas of Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, he founded the Galton Society in 1918 to perform research on the pseudoscientific ideas associated with eugenics. 5 In 1883, Francis Galton had coined the term eugenics to describe the practice of improving human genetics by preventing those deemed genetically inferior from reproducing. 6
In 1922, Grant founded the Eugenics Committee of the United States, a lobbying group that advocated for eugenics policy that sought to “Save America” from “race suicide” that it claimed would result from criminals, “unfit individuals,” and immigrants procreating in America. It shared board members with the American Birth Control League, a predecessor organization to Planned Parenthood. 5 The Eugenics Committee lobbied in support of immigration restrictions of so-called “lesser races” that led to Congress enacting a literacy test in 1917, an emergency racial quota in 1921, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which strictly restricted immigration from countries outside northwestern Europe. 7
Grant was a board member of the Eugenics Research Association, which held an annual conference of eugenicists. The Eugenics Record Office was a Long Island-based eugenics group that was financed by the Rockefellers and the Carnegie Institute. 5
The Passing of the Great Race
The Passing of the Great Race is Madison Grant’s most well-known book. It is a collection of white-supremacist anthropological theories that are presented as scientific. It was highly influential in the eugenics movement. Adolf Hitler is said to have once referred to it as his “bible.” Margaret Sanger includes Grant’s book in her reading list of books that justify sterilization and eugenics. The book was influential in passing anti-immigration legislation, most notably the Immigration Act of 1924. 8
In the book, Grant wrote that as opposed to the “Nordic” people, “genetically inferior” immigrants were the cause of social problems. He argued that “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.” He further argued, “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.” 9 2