In addition to Galtons eugenics works, Grant drew from earlier attempts to classify humans into hierarchies according to race. The act was not overturned until the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. These moral and physical characters are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one race than in another. A huge inspiration to me, although I cannot recommned it to other readers. 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. While reading it, you should take into consideration the era of which it was written, for many of his points or examples are now obsolete. Even after the statute was passed, Grant continued to be irked that even a smattering of non-Nordics were allowed to immigrate to the country each year. The theory and the book were praised by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis, so much so that the it was the first foreign book published by the Nazis[clarification needed] after they came to power.[3]. It's not that he doesn't know historical facts (in part), and it's not that he doesn't know anthropological facts (in part). In. 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. The Passing of the Great Race draws so heavily on Ripleys data that the book is one of only two references explicitly noted by Grant in his introduction to the first edition. Human society is like a serpent dragging its long body on the ground, but with the head always thrust a little in advance and a little elevated above the earth. The former catastrophe happened in the declining days of the Roman Republic and the south Italians of to-day are very largely descendants of the nondescript slaves of all races, chiefly from the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, who were imported by the Romans under the Empire to work their vast estates. The result would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races. When individuals of perfect blond type occur, as sometimes in Greek islands, we may suspect a recent visit of sailors from a passing ship but when only single characters remain spread thinly, but widely, over considerable areas, like the blondness of the Atlas Berbers or of the Albanian mountaineers, we must search in the dim past for the origin of these blurred traits of early invaders. 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. It was tried two thousand years ago by Augustus and his efforts to avert race suicide and the extinction of the old Roman stock were singularly prophetic of what some far seeing men are attempting in order to preserve the race of native Americans of Colonial descent. She is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type and heredity alone is the medium through which she acts. Along with Lothrop Stoddard, Grant was probably the single most influential creator of the national mood that made possible the immigration control measures of 1924. "Johnson, Albert." The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture. Slaves began to be imported into Italy in numbers in the second century B. C. to work the large plantations - latifundia - of the wealthy Romans. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant calls on the US to enact an extensive eugenics program. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of . This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic. This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. Galton and other proponents of eugenics advocated to restrict reproduction to improve the human species through selective breeding. US Senator David Reed co-sponsored the act, so it is also called the Johnson-Reed Act. On the other hand, a member of a superior race in bad surroundings may, and very often does, sink to an extremely low level. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France. The fact that this sort of pseudoscience still informs some peoples opinions today is pathetic. 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. Be the first to write a review. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.". The good people of the heroic Nordic race, he cried, were always at risk of subversion by their darker-skinned inferiors, even in the land of Horatio Alger, where heredity, with enough sweat from ones brow, was not supposed to trump environment or self-determination. Philanthropy and noble purpose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the document which to-day constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. In America we find another close parallel in the Civil War and the subsequent granting of citizenship to Negroes and to ever increasing numbers of immigrants of plebeian, servile or Oriental races, who throughout history have shown little capacity to create, organize or even to comprehend Republican institutions. His fantastical theories espouse the idea that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human beings. According to Woods, Grant published a fourth revised edition in 1921 that included a 176-page documentary supplement containing notes and references for some of his claims to assuage mounting criticism from scientists regarding his lack of citations. I read this more because I heard it was the book that most influenced Hitler and I was wondering what would influence him. The publisher marketed The Passing of the Great Race as a scientific book, but according to a review by Frederick Adams Woods, Grant intentionally wrote the book without any footnotes or in-text citations to make it more accessible and interesting to the public. Such has been the organization of mankind from the beginning, and such it still is in older communities than ours. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre.. The result is a total lack of continuity of purpose, an intermittent intellect goaded into spasmodic outbursts of energy. Grant reasons that the new immigrants were of different races and were creating separate societies within America including ethnic lobby groups, criminal syndicates, and political machines which were undermining the socio-political structure of the country and in turn the traditional Anglo-Saxon colonial stocks, as well as all Nordic stocks. Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic subspecies and from nowhere else. Then, if the strain survives, it is by the slow reversion to one of the parent types - almost inevitably the lower. He specifically promotes the idea of the Nordic race as a key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book is The Racial Basis of European History. 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. Despite Boass objections, many scientists praised The Passing of the Great Race, particularly for its value in communicating racial science to the public. 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. 2016 marks a century since the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, a book described by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould as "the most influential tract of American scientific racism."Its author, Madison Grant, a genteel dabbler with impeccable . In the introduction, Grant expresses that his goal in the book is to explain European history in terms of race, or physical and mental characteristics that he claims are inherited and unchangeable. ed., with a documentary supplement, with prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Advanced embedding details, examples, and help. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. In most cases the blood of pioneers has been lost to their race. In the French Revolution the majority, calling itself "the people," deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type and something of the same sort was in a measure done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands, with a resultant loss to the growing nation of good race strains, which were in the next century replaced by immigrants of far lower type. The Nazi Gestapo referred to Jews in hiding as "U-Boats" to survive under the Third Reich. Both divided mankind into primarily three distinct races: Caucasoids (based in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia), Negroids (based in Sub-Saharan Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Central and Eastern Asia). The passing of the great race: or, The racial basis of European history. Of course, after reading this, it was hard to really take anything he had to say seriously. The first method was adopted by the Spartans, who had for their national ideals military efficiency and the virtues of self-control, and along these lines the results were completely successful. Ripley examined correlations between geography and measurements of the human body, called anthropometric data. A disturbing book to read when considering that Madison Grant was a strong influencer of the early eugenicists in the USA (Davenport most specifically) and that his unscientific musings on the use of skulls shape and language as evidence of racial superiority and weakness. The words "that all men are created equal" have since been subtly falsified by adding the word "free," although no such expression is found in the original document and the teachings based on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and amaze the men who formulated the Declaration. Know your enemy. "White Nationalisms Deep American Roots.". According to reviews of the early editions, the publication of The Passing of the Great Race caused a sensation and instigated debate in the academic and public spheres. 5 (Nov., 1916), pp. 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. By Terry Gross. The Nordic, in his hypothesis, was "Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. And, secondly, great care has been placed on producing an aesthetically appealing volume, graphically and typographically, as befits a classic text ultimately arguing for quality rather than equality. Particularly striking about Grant is his lack of originalityhis skill at reproducing as his own the conventional wisdom of white supremacy. The term "Caucasian race" has ceased to have any meaning except where it is used, in the United States, to contrast white populations with Negroes or Indians or in the Old World with Mongols. "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 Passing of the Great Racehas had many uses over the years. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. Cover of the 2012 Wermod & Wermod-edition, http://shop.wermodandwermod.com/the-passing-of-the-great-race.html, http://www.wermodandwermod.com/authors.html, http://en.metapedia.org/m/index.php?title=The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race&oldid=466031. History In 1916, eugenicist Madison Grant [4] published the book The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History, hereafter The Passing of the Great Race, where he claimed that northern Europeans, or Nordics, are biologically and culturally superior to the rest of humanity. Furthermore, the AAPA stresses genetic differences among humans are not fixed along racial lines in a way that would justify classifying humans into different biological groups. Copyright Arizona Board of Regents Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/, The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, https://experts.uoguelph.ca/andrew-winston, https://cisneros.columbian.gwu.edu/elizabeth-vaquera, http://sociology.usf.edu/faculty/earanda/, https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/J/JOHNSON,-Albert-(J000114)/, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/us/times-appointment.html, https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/immigration-united-states-timeline, https://www.unzcloud.net/PDF/PERIODICAL/NewRepublic-1917jan13/28-30//, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.39871, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/, https://archive.org/details/DefendingTheMasterRaceConservationEugenicsMadisonGrantJonathanSpiro2008/mode/2up, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-biological-state-nazi-racial-hygiene-1933-1939. In the Europe of to-day the amount of Nordic blood in each nation is a very fair measure of its strength in war and standing in civilization. From barely-used Formula 1 circuits to shuttered . Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human "races". The book is mostly based on obsolete evolutionary and genetic concepts (hereditary mental and physical characteristics preserved through copulation in the same racial groups ) and a rather chaotic description of cultural influences through the history of mankind. The moral tendency of the heredity interpretation of history is for our day and generation and is in strong accord with the true spirit of the modern eugenics movement in relation to patriotism, namely, the conservation and multiplication for our country of the best spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical forces of heredity; thus only will the integrity of our institutions be maintained in the future. This importation of slaves and the ultimate extension of the Roman citizenship to their manumitted descendants and to inferior races throughout the growing Empire and the losses in internal and foreign wars, ruined the state. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization. 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. 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. Grant is also deeply opposed to the prospect of Black Americans obtaining any semblance of equality, for he states that they are only valuable so long as they are subservient to Whites. 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. I was interested to note the first publish date was 1917 and the book I was reading was reprinted in 1970. The tendency in a democracy is toward a standardization of type and a diminution of the influence of genius. Hitler quotes Grants book in his speeches and even sent Grant a letter where he referred to it as his Bible.
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