Grant asserts that people from Europe, Africa, and Asia represent different species of humans, while different races within Europe constitute subspecies, or populations with distinct characteristics. I was interested to note the first publish date was 1917 and the book I was reading was reprinted in 1970. An individual of inferior type or race may profit greatly by good environment. [12] Versions of their debates on the relative influence of biological and social factors persist in contemporary anthropology. After seeing the alleged benefits of widespread sterilization, Grant predicts that the American people would willingly agree to sterilize ever-increasing proportions of the community, eventually moving on to those Grant labels as weaklings or worthless race types. Historically significant but very antiquated. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. This is a purely European type, in the sense that it has developed its physical characters and its civilization within the confines of that continent. The book presents Grant's view on Europeans, argued to consist of three branches, namely the Alpine, Nordic and Mediterranean races. Spiro (2009) explains its modest sales by five factors: Grant researched the published scientific literature, especially in anthropology, to support his notions of Nordic racialism. bbbb. The latter is occurring to-day in many parts of America, especially in New England. His fantastical theories espouse the idea that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human beings. "Reviewed Work(s): The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant. In his biography of Grant,Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Jonathan Spiro writes that almost nothing inThe Passing of the Great Raceis original. Rather, the book is a compendium of the work of other scholars, and almost every paragraph can be directly traced back to figures such as the European scientific racists Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other. US Senator David Reed co-sponsored the act, so it is also called the Johnson-Reed Act. The Census Bureau's projections, released today, estimate that minorities will be the majority by 2042, nearly a decade . Publication date 1917 Topics C-DAC Collection digitallibraryindia; JaiGyan Language English. 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. Recent calculations indicate that there are about 90,000,000 of purely Nordic physical type in Europe out of a total population of 420,000,000. In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their blood was quickly and utterly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land. 5 available. Uploaded by [4]:160 This part of the book ties together strands of speculation regarding Aryan migration theory, ethnology, anthropology, and history into a broad survey of the historical rise and fall, and expansion and retraction, of the European races from their homelands. Here we have a selected list of quotes and excerpts that should serve as a nice summary for the entire book. [Nordic] race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. By Terry Gross. "The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value. In contrast, what Galton called negative eugenics programs attempt to prevent the reproduction of people eugenicists judged to be, to use Grants terms, defective and worthless. "Racism, the Immigration Enforcement Regime, and the Implications for Racial Inequality in the Lives of Undocumented Young Adults. andrea@archive.org with a documentary supplement / with prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn. 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"[citation needed] or "Nordic-Atlantean". The work was categorised by the publisher as "science" and so never had a chance at mass popularity. In the US, Grants and other eugenicists vision of negative eugenics was enacted through state laws like the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 that allowed state institutions, such as prisons and asylums for people with mental illnesses, to sterilize people without their consent. "Whose Country is This? Grant complains that recent immigrants to the US are not the strong Nordics who dominated earlier centuries, but are, as he calls them, social discards and weak refugees fleeing persecution. The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History Madison Grant 3.22 126 ratings18 reviews This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. The men who wrote the words, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," were themselves the owners of slaves and despised Indians as something less than human. Born in New York city, he graduated early and with honours from Yale University and subsequently received his law degree from Columbia Law School. He then speculates hereditary links between the proposed Nordic people and the Trojans[4]:159 and between the Prussians and the Spartans. Woods dismissed the unfavorable reviews as likely written by non-Nordic authors who were angry that Grant called them inferior. Grant uses the cephalic index, which is a ratio of skull width to skull length, eye color, hair color, and height to classify people into three European races of Alpine, Mediterranean, and Nordic, the latter of whom he calls the white man par excellence. Furthermore, Grant warns of the dangers of what he calls race suicide, where the superior Nordic race declines in population numbers through low birth rates and frequent wars, while inferior races grow in numbers by having more children and ultimately replace the allegedly superior races. Winston, Andrew S. "The Passing of the Great Race" in, Woods, Frederick Adams. According to Spiro, Grants interest in conservation naturally led to his interest in eugenics, as Grant saw both movements as a way of preserving the old country from threats of extinction. The message was anti-democratic and anti-Christian, which did not sit well with the patriotic public. The final three chapters of part one advocate for preserving the Nordic race through immigration restriction and laws banning marriage between people of different races. A majority must of necessity be inferior to a picked minority and it always resents specializations in which it cannot share. The Nordic, in his hypothesis, was "Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. The Passing of the Great Race had such widespread influence that popular sources such as F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel The Great Gatsby and the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post referenced the book. [8], By 1937, the book sold 17,000 copies in the U.S. Women in all human races, as the females among all mammals, tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits of the past of the race. Coolidge, Calvin. Eye color is of very great importance in race determination because all blue, gray or green eyes in the world to-day came originally from the same source, namely, the Nordic race of northern Europe. xxviii "The Passing of the Great Race," in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow-Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the "Melting Pot" theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. Part one, "Race, Language, and Nationality," is composed of seven chapters that detail Grants racial theories and advocate for eugenics programs such as forced sterilization and strict laws against marriage between people of different races. Osborn was a paleontologist and president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and one of Grants closest friends. "Whether or not one agrees with his theories, Madison Grant's work continues to remind us of the genuine, time-less issues at stake beneath the day-to-day political rhetoric of our times. The essential character of all these racial mixtures is a lack of harmony - both physical and mental - in the first few generations. By allowing only people who they believed to be of good stock to have children, eugenicists claimed that governments could eradicate disease and disability and curb overpopulation. Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human "races". The male in his individual development indicates the direction in which the race is tending under the influence of variation and selection. "Dr. Elizabeth Vaquera." in English - 4th rev. 1923, C. Scribner's sons. Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). 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 first three chapters trace the history of prehistoric peoples in Europe. Gobineaus 1853 Essai sur l'ingalit des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races), written in France, asserted that all humans could be categorized as one of three races, white, black, or yellow, and that a racial subgroup of Aryans existed within the white race that were superior to all other races and largely responsible for all major advancements in history. Kurtagi published his art on many volumes of far-right books. "[1], "Madison Grant (1865 - 1937) was an American lawyer, historian, physical anthropologist, conservationist, and eugenicist. Buy It Now. Instead, he argues that sterilization programs for people of inferior genetics are much better suited to protect people of the Nordic race in the US. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Interesting efforts to improve the quality as well as the quantity of the population, however, will probably be made in more than one country after the war [World War I] has ended. "U.S. Immigration Timeline." An amazing book and should be read by all especially white teenagers and young adults. He marshals an impressive amount of facts and scholarship to an entirely useless aim. Due to a planned power outage on Friday, 1/14, between 8am-1pm PST, some services may be impacted. 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. 2, No. One of the curious effects of democracy is the unquestionable fact that there is less freedom of the press than under autocratic forms of government. So long as there is in the world a freely breeding stock or race that has in it an inherent capacity for development and growth, mankind will continue to ascend until, possibly through the selection arid regulation of breeding as intelligently applied as in the case of domestic animals, it will control its own destiny and attain moral heights as yet unimagined. The preface of the book is written by Jared Taylor, editor of the magazine American Renaissance, among other positions. His most renowned work, The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History (1916), argued for the preservation of America as a 'civilization preserve' for the Nordic race, advocating for immigration only from the founding stock of Anglo-Saxons and other Nordics from north-western Europe. Galton and other proponents of eugenics advocated to restrict reproduction to improve the human species through selective breeding. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. True aristocracy or a true republic is government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any population. The section of any community that produces leaders or genius of any sort is only a minute percentage. Adolf Hitler referred to The Passing of the Great Race as his Bible, and during the Nuremberg Trials in the 1940s, Nazi leaders who were prosecuted for war crimes committed during World War II presented the book as evidence that eugenics did not solely originate in Germany but rather had deep roots in the United States. The fact that the blood shows as "blue" through the fair Nordic skin is also to be taken into account. It may be latent through several generations of obscurity and then flare up when the opportunity comes. May 14, 2019. It forms the substratum of the population of Greece and of the eastern coast of the Balkan Peninsula.")[5]. more details. This book should be mandatory reading for all white people--especially those of school age, and double especially, by those attending Marxist indoctrination centers in colleges and universities. It was to be expected that there would be bitter opposition to those definitions of race which are based on physical and psychical characters that are immutable, rather than upon those derived from language or political allegiance, that are easily altered.