Reply to Peter Frost's most recent bizarre attempt at rewriting history (part 1)

Peter Frost has previously claimed:

Anti-racism was neither solely nor primarily a Jewish invention. It initially arose through a radicalization of the abolitionist movement in the early to mid 19th century, its adherents being overwhelmingly of WASP origin. It then fell into decline, largely in response to the failure of black emancipation and the growing influence of Darwinian thinking in the social sciences. It was this half-discredited antiracism that Jewish immigrants, like Franz Boas, encountered in the late 19th century and the early 20th. With the rise of Nazi Germany, antiracism made a resurgence, and Jewish intellectuals certainly contributed to this resurgence for obvious reasons. But it was at all times as much a northeastern WASP cultural trait as a Jewish one.

He's now back with more of this:

How did [Franz Boas's] views on race evolve over the next twenty years? This evolution is described by Williams (1996), who sees his views beginning to change at the turn of the century. After getting tenure at Columbia University in 1899, he became immersed in the elite liberal culture of the American northeast and began to express his views on race accordingly. [. . .]

From 1900 to 1930, Boas seemed to become increasingly liberal in his views on race, but this trend was hesitant at best and reflected, at least in part, a change in the audience he was addressing. As a professor at Columbia, he was dealing with a regional WASP culture that still preserved the radical abolitionism of the previous century. A good example was Mary White Ovington, whose Unitarian parents had been involved in the anti-slavery movement and who in 1910 helped found the NAACP. Boas was also dealing with the city's growing African American community and, through Ovington's contacts, wrote articles for the NAACP. Finally, he was also dealing with the growing Jewish community, who identified with antiracism partly out of self-interest and partly out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture.

It's an outrageous distortion of history to suggest Jews supported antiracism "out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture".

Most northeasterners, of any class, were never abolitionists (antislavery does not equal abolitionist), and even most abolitionists did not advocate anything approaching modern anti-racism.

No major constituency in America denied the existence of biological differences between blacks and whites when Boas immigrated, and advocating such views provided no quick path to social advancement (though obviously, at a deeper level, Boas was no doubt motivated by a desire to eliminate "anti-semitism").

It would have been very strange indeed for a physical anthropologist in 1890s America to outright deny the existence of race or obvious racial differences. What matters is the direction in which Boas differed from his contemporaries. And there's no question Boas was promoting "anti-racism" from the outset. Frost selectively quotes Boas's 1894 address "Human Faculty as Determined by Race", but even the excerpts chosen by Frost should make clear which direction Boas was pushing. Boas was not disinterestedly speaking race realist truth to an anti-racist American establishment, but lecturing Americans that no differences in civilizational potential had been proven to exist between the races of man, and insisting that any mental differences that existed could not be large, as the opening and conclusion make clear:

Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilized man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him. He has transformed inhospitable forests into fertile fields. The mountain fastnesses are yielding their treasures to his demands. The fierce animals which are obstructing his progress are being exterminated, while others which are useful to him are made to increase a thousand fold. The waves of the ocean carry him from land to land and towering mountain ranges set him no bounds. His genius has moulded inert matter into powerful machines which wait a touch of his hand to serve his manifold demands.

What wonder when he pities a people that has not succeeded in subduing nature; who labor to eke a meagre existence out of the products of the wilderness; who hear with trembling the roar of the wild animals and see the products of their toils destroyed by them; who remain restricted by ocean, river or mountains; who strive to obtain the necessities of life with the help of few and simple instruments.

Such is the contrast that presents itself to the observer. What wonder if civilized man considers himself a being of higher order as compared to primitive man; if it is claimed that the white race represents a higher type than all others.

When we analyze this assumption, it will soon be found that the superiority of the civilization of the white race alone is not a sufficient basis for this inference. As the civilization is higher, we assume that the aptitude for civilization is also higher; and as the aptitude for civilization presumably depends upon the perfection of the mechanism of body and mind, the inference is drawn that the white race represents the highest type of perfection. In this conclusion, which is reached through a comparison of the social status of civilized man and of primitive man, the achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded. Furthermore, as the white race is the civilized race, every deviation from the white type is considered a characteristic feature of a lower type. That these two errors underlie our judgments of races can be easily shown by the fact that, other conditions being equal, a race is always described as the lower the more fundamentally it differs from the white race. This becomes clearest by the tendency on the part of many anthropologists to look for anatomical peculiarities of primitive man which would characterize him as a being of lower order, and also by the endeavors of recent writers to prove that there exist hardly any anatomical features of the so-called lowest races which would stamp them as lower types of organisms. Both these facts show that the idea dwells in the minds of investigators that we should expect to find in the white race the highest type of man. [. . .]

Although, as I have tried to show, the distribution of faculty among the races of man is far from being known, we can say this much: the average faculty of the white race is found to the same degree in a large proportion of individuals of all other races, and although it is probable that some of these races may not produce as large a proportion of great men as our own race, there is no reason to suppose that they are unable to reach the level of civilization represented by the bulk of our own people.

Science's review of The Passing of the Great Race

The reviewer is Frederick Adams Woods:

The racial worldview of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's mocking of the ideas of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard in The Great Gatsby recently came up a couple times at Alternative Right. Fitzgerald, however, seems to have been more sympathetic to Tom Buchanan's point of view than he let on in public (continue reading):

Why certain S. Euros obsess about supposed rampant miscegenation by N. Euro women

I think the reasons are obvious.

(1) They desire Northern European women, either because they believe they are more attractive or to raise their status.

(2) They realize they face competition for the minority of exogamous Northern European women from every other non-Northern European group on the planet, and don't like their odds. (Guy White: "I never went to Sweden as a single man, but I doubt it would be easier for me to pick up women there than in Alabama, Italy or New Zealand.")

(3) They believe deprecating Northern European women (and/or Northern European men) improves their chances -- or at least makes them feel better about their lack of success -- with Northern European women.

My information is based upon a three-­and-a-half-year study of the Italian slum district of "Cornerville" in "Eastern City." [. . .] In the social- and ethnic-group cate­gory, the most desirable woman for non-marital sex relations is the girl of old American-stock background, preferably blonde, who has a higher status than the corner boy. Once I was walking through the aristocratic section of Eastern City with a corner boy when we passed a tall and stately blonde, fashionably dressed, and very attractive. My companion breathed deeply as he said: "The old Puritan stock! .... The real McCoy! Wouldn't I like to give her a belt."

The attraction of the native stock is not confined to the lower-class Italian. Mario Martini was born in Cornerville, but as he became successful in business he moved out to a fashionable suburb. He married an Italian girl and raised a family, sending his children to private school. He had many business relations and some social relations with upper-class Yankees. He made a practice of hir­ing only girls of native background for his secretarial work, and on some of his business trips he would take one of these girls along-for sexual as well as secretarial purposes. One of Martini's former secretaries, who told me this story, was a girl of rather plain features, which em­phasizes the prestige of the native back-ground even for a man who was as suc­cessful as Mario Martini.

[WF Whyte. A slum sex code. American Journal of Sociology, 1943]

Compare:

One of the manifestations of this jealousy of the fair skin of the Nordics is shown in those numerous cases where members of the colored races, or even dark-skinned members of the Nordic regard the possession of a blonde woman as an assertion and proof of race equality. This has been true historically since the earliest times. It is more than ever in evidence at the present day.

[Madison Grant. The Conquest of a Continent; or, The expansion of races in America. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. p. 15.]

See also Philip Roth, Eldrige Cleaver, etc.

Patrician Racist

Here is a PDF version of Jonathan Spiro's 998-page doctoral dissertation, Patrician Racist: The Evolution of Madison Grant (on which Spiro's book, Defending the Master Race, is based).

(photo credit)

Ancestry of Madison Grant and others

I've compiled some genealogical data on Madison Grant, Carleton Coon, Carleton Putnam, and Charles Davenport.

It's well known that Coon and Putnam are cousins, but they're more distantly related than I had believed. Putnam actually appears to share a more recent common ancestor with Madison Grant (Grant and Putnam being sixth cousins via John Baldwin (1640-1702) and Putnam being Coon's 8th cousin once removed via John Putnam (1579-1662), though Coon and Putnam are also related through John Carleton (1637-1667)). I happened to notice Coon is also related to T.S. Eliot and John Archibald Wheeler -- assuming my sources are correct.

This database is not meant to be authoritative. The first few generations should be reasonably accurate. Beyond that I've generally relied on data others have entered at sites like WorldConnect, which I haven't verified (though none of it jumped out as implausible).

Sources: ancestry.com (Census population schedules, passport applications, and so on), familysearch.org, various digitized newspapers, Google, Google Books, etc. Since -- compiling this information primarily for my own amusement -- I was more interested in speed than authoritativeness, I haven't included source citations; but almost every source I used is accessible over the internet. (One exception: Coon's autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries.)

Grant vs. Boas

In case you were wondering, Kevin MacDonald did not ghostwrite the following article. Spiro is Jewish and Patterns of Prejudice is an organ of the "Institute for Jewish Policy Research".

Spiro, Jonathan P. "Nordic vs. anti-Nordic: the Galton Society and the American Anthropological Association," Patterns of Prejudice 36:1 (2002): 35-48.

ABSTRACT Spiro discusses the creation of the Galton Society in 1918 by American eugenicist Madison Grant as an alternative to the American Anthropological Association. On a theoretical level, Grant hoped the Galton Society would uphold the primacy of biological determinism against ‘the culture idea’. On a more personal level, the purpose of the Galton Society was to provide a refuge for native Protestants who feared that the American Anthropological Association had fallen into the hands of the Jews. While the Galton Society flourished initially, by the early 1930s Franz Boas and his disciples had established cultural determinism as the reigning paradigm in American social science, and the Galton Society quietly dissolved itself in 1935.

KEYWORDS American Anthropological Association, antisemitism, eugenics, Franz Boas, Galton Society, Madison Grant, nature–nurture debate, scientific racism

The lifelong hostility between eugenicist Madison Grant (1865–1937) and anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) was the personification if not the core of the nature–nurture debate in the United States. Grant was one of the founders of the conservation movement in America, and worked side-byside with Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the twentieth century to preserve the nation’s natural heritage. Among his many accomplishments, Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, helped to create the Glacier and Denali national parks, and worked tirelessly to protect the whales in the ocean, the bald eagles in the sky and the pronghorn antelopes on the prairie. But Grant was also the prophet of scientific racism and—in geographer Ellsworth Huntington’s phrase—the perennial ‘cheerleader of the Nordics in America’.2 Grant first came to the attention of the reading public in 1916, when Scribner’s and Sons published his bestselling opus, The Passing of the Great Race. [. . .] Passionate, erudite and audacious, The Passing of the Great Race was a tour de force that did for scientific racism what The Communist Manifesto did for scientific socialism. Grant’s book was regularly cited in popular and scholarly works, and the success of The Passing of the Great Race—and Grant’s behind-the-scenes machinations—played a major role in convincing Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s. Grant went on to collaborate with Southern white racists to pass antimiscegenation legislation, and he influenced many states to implement coercive sterilization statutes under which thousands of Americans deemed to be unworthy were sterilized in the 1930s. [. . .]

The American Anthropological Association

Among academics, Boas was practically alone in the mid-1910s in his opposition to Grant. [. . .]

For years, however, Boas had been diligently training a cadre of professional anthropologists who shared his revulsion at the theories of Grant, so that by the end of the 1910s Boas was surrounded and supported by a growing group of influential scholars well positioned to use their prestige and expertise to join in the assault upon eugenics. Some of the more important anthropologists who received their Ph.D.s from Boas were A. L. Kroeber (who earned his degree in 1901), Robert Lowie (1908), Edward Sapir (1909), Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), Paul Radin (1911), Leslie Spier (1920), Ruth Benedict (1923), Melville Herskovits (1923), Margaret Mead (1929) and Ashley Montagu (1937). With the exception of Kroeber, Benedict and Mead, all were Jews, many were immigrants and several were both. These students of Boas set about devising the intellectual weapons and amassing the ethnographic data they would need to combat the disciples of Grant. And while on a theoretical level the debate between the Grantians and the Boasians pitted the defenders of heredity and biological determinism against the proponents of environment and the primacy of culture, it was difficult not to notice that it was at heart a confrontation between the ethos of native Protestants and the Zeitgeist of immigrant Jews.

Intellectually, the Grant–Boas split was also a disagreement between adherents of polygenesis, obsessed with the classification of races, and adherents of monogenesis, who were fairly certain that races were socially constructed myths. Ideologically, it was a battle between establishment figures who insisted on loyalty to the nation and pluralistic egalitarians who defended the rights of the minority. And, professionally, it was a conflict between an older generation of physical anthropologists (often gentleman amateurs with no academic affiliation or perhaps an association with a museum) and the newer generation of cultural anthropologists (usually trained professionals with fulltime positions in academia).12

The older amateurs were aristocratic WASPs with the money and leisure time to ponder fossils as an avocation, whereas the younger professionals were often the children of Jewish immigrants who saw higher education as a route to social respectability, and jobs in academia as a means of economic survival. The gap between the two sides was all but insurmountable. When the Grantians looked at the cultural anthropologists, they saw a group of bearded (with the exception of Benedict, Mead and Elsie Clews Parsons), Jewish, socialist aliens who lacked any appreciation of the importance of evolution and the laws of biology. [. . .]

The culturalists were well aware that their work was viewed as trivial and unscientific. And their response—with Boas leading the way—was to professionalize their discipline. They understood that, by transforming anthropology from an amateur hobby into a professional vocation, they would garner not only respect but also the academic positions (and the funding) that would then be distributed on the basis of merit rather than through the antisemitic old-boy network. [. . .] They therefore worked to reconstitute the American Anthropological Association, heretofore comprised to a large extent by wealthy, untrained amateurs, into an organization of professionally qualified scholars. [. . .] such was the prestige of Boas that within a few years he was elected president of the AAA, his former students began attaining seats on its governing council, and, by the 1910s, the American Anthropological Association had evolved into a respected society of academic anthropologists, with the Boasians in the majority. They then moved to take control of the Association’s journal (American Anthropologist), and by 1915 [. . .] biological determinism was banished from the pages of American Anthropologist, and the culture idea was well on its way to becoming the predominant thesis in the profession. A bewildered Grant could only observe that these developments ‘confirm me in the belief that you must have at the head of any anthropological work a member of the North European race, who has no bias in favor of helots or mongrels’. [. . .]

The Galton Society

By the end of the 1910s the situation within professional anthropology was no longer tenable. The Boasians were in the saddle, and something had to be done. On 6 March 1918, Madison Grant met with Charles Benedict Davenport and the two men agreed to create a new, racially oriented anthropological organization to rival the culture-ridden American Anthropological Association. Grant decided to name it the Galton Society, in honour of Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.

[. . .] Grant organized the Galton Society at exactly the same time that he organized the Save-the-Redwoods League, and, in the early years, when John C. Merriam was still a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he and Grant synchronized the meetings of the Galton Society with those of the Save-the-Redwoods League so Merriam would have to make only one trip to New York. In fact, the constitution of the Save-the-Redwoods League was modelled on that of the Galton Society, which in turn was modelled on that of the New York Zoological Society (which ran the Bronx Zoo). And why not? All three associations served a common end: one would save the large mammals of North America, the other would save the largest trees, and the third the most advanced race: the Nordics. [. . .]

And so the Boasian capture of the American Anthropological Association had been countered by the formation of the Galton Society. At a meeting of the Society in 1925, psychologist William McDougall of Harvard University summed up the situation neatly. On one side of the nature–nurture debate were the sentimental sociologists, egalitarian Bolshevists and intellectual Jews, all of whom were ‘biased against racial psychology’ and permitted the emotional appeal of humanitarianism to stand ‘in place of truth’. On the other side were the ‘serious’ students of race, such as Grant, Stoddard and Huntington, who recognized ‘the reality’ of inequality and stood for ‘the importance of preserving racial distinctions in their purity’.26 It was clear to McDougall and his auditors which faction had right—and science—on its side. [. . .]

‘A historical footnote’

By the early 1920s the members of the Galton Society were confident that they had stemmed the environmentalist tide, and that Franz Boas—as Henry Fairfield Osborn put it—had been relegated to ‘a comparatively obscure and uninfluential position’.38 Madison Grant and the eugenicists now turned their attention to the legislative arena, where they led successful campaigns for immigration restriction, sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws.

But, in the meantime, Boas continued to churn out the cohort of Ph.D.s who soon comprised the majority of professional anthropologists in the United States. They rapidly moved into, and took over, all the major anthropology departments in the country, where they in turn trained the succeeding generation of scholars dedicated to the culture idea. As a result, academic anthropologists hostile to the Galton Society soon set editorial policy for the profession’s journals and dominated the membership of its professional organizations.

Beginning in the late 1920s Boas and his disciples published to academic and popular acclaim a body of work—including Boas’s Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), Margaret Mead’s The Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Melville Herskovits’s The American Negro (1928), Robert Lowie’s Are We Civilized? (1929), Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and Otto Klineberg’s Race Differences (1935)—that cumulatively served to validate cultural anthropology as a viable field and to establish cultural determinism as a legitimate alternative to hereditarianism. ‘There is no doubt’, an alarmed Madison Grant told Osborn upon witnessing all this activity, ‘that there is an organized anti-Nordic conspiracy’.39 To which Osborn could only affirm: ‘There is undoubtedly a conspiracy of the radicals against the whole Nordic and racial theory.’40

Grant and Osborn had every reason to worry. The Boasian point of view, limited to a handful of (primarily Jewish) cultural anthropologists at the end of the First World War, soon began to influence not just other anthropologists but other social scientists as well. And, as a result, by the beginning of the 1930s the culture idea was becoming the reigning paradigm in American social science. [. . .]

Grant admitted that ‘the future looks ominous’, but in his book The Alien in Our Midst (1930) he gamely tried to rally the partisans by insisting that they had on their side ‘the increasing force of science, of eugenics, and of an ever-widening acceptance of the fact that heredity and not environment dominates in the evolution and development of man’.43 Anthropologist (and loyal member of the Galton Society) T. Wingate Todd seconded Grant’s words, and bravely predicted in 1932 that the Grantian form of anthropology ‘is going to be more than ever significant in arranging the affairs of the future, and the Galton Society will have a great mission’.44 Grant and Todd, of course, were deluded. The future belonged to the environmentalists. The Galton Society quietly dissolved in 1935, and ‘the anthropological idea of culture’, writes George Stocking,

became in time part of the vernacular of a large portion of the American public. . . . By the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal’.45

Newsweek alarmed about dysgenics

For wildlife:

Researchers see 'evolution in reverse' as hunters kill off prized animals with the biggest antlers and pelts.

Some of the most iconic photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the first conservationists in American politics, show the president posing companionably with the prizes of his trophy hunts. An elephant felled in Africa in 1909 points its tusks skyward; a Cape buffalo, crowned with horns in the shape of a handlebar mustache, slumps in a Kenyan swamp. In North America, he stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and elk, which he called "lordly game" for their majestic antlers. What's remarkable about these photographs is not that they depict a hunter who was also naturalist John Muir's staunchest political ally. It's that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare.

Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers. Africa and Asia still have elephants, but Roosevelt would have regarded most of them as freaks, because they don't have tusks. Researchers describe what's happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

[. . .]

Tusked elephants, like the old dominant males on Ram Mountain, were "genetically 'better' individuals," says Festa-Bianchet. "When you take them systematically out of the population for several years, you end up leaving essentially a bunch of losers doing the breeding."

[Lily Huang. It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny. NEWSWEEK. Published Jan 3, 2009. From the magazine issue dated Jan 12, 2009]

This is not the first time someone's made this sort of observation.

At the age of sixteen, Madison was sent to the German city of Dresden, where for the next four years European tutors provided him with the best possible classical education. During this tie he managed to travel to every country in Europe (where he visited all the zoos and most of the natural history museums of the continent) and throughout North Africa and the Middle East as well. But his most significant visit was to Moritzburg, the baroque hunting lodge just outside Dresden, where my guess is that Grant found himself transfixed by the extensive collection of red deer antlers. The trophies--which had been collected three hundred years earlier--were impressively large, and the more the young student stared at them the more troubled he became. At some point, it occurred to him what was amiss: antlers of that size simply did not exist anymore on living European deer. Grant realized that, contrary to the Victorian understanding of evolutionary progress, the red deer had been getting smaller and smaller over the years. The species was actually degenerating.

Furthermore, Grant's naturalistically inclined mind apparently put together what he knew of the geographic range of the red deer, along with the sizes of the various specimens he had encountered in the wild, and he instantly envisioned a perfect continuum: At the far eastern edge of the red deer's range (in the Caucasus) the animal was almost as large as it had been in the sixteenth century. But toward the west (in the Carpathians) the deer began to diminish in size. Even farther west (in Saxony) the stags were smaller still, and at the far western limit of the animal's range (in Scotland) the red deer had shrunk to their smallest proportions.

Grant reasoned that this decline in size was indubitably the result of trophy hunting. Trophy hunters, of course, target the largest bulls with the finest antlers, which leaves the breeding to the inferior males. As one moves from east to west across Europe, the human population increases, as does the number of hunters, and the inevitable result is an ever-greater decline across space, and over time, in the size and vigor of the deer stock. In other words, as human civilization advanced, the deer declined. And Grant was struck by the fact that if the trend were to continue, the red deer would diminish in size and vitality to the point where ultimately the species would not be able to survive in the wild.

[Jonathan Spiro. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Vermont: 2008. pp. 7-8.]

[source]

I don't foresee Newsweek opening their pages to consideration of human dysgenic breeding trends any time soon. Madison Grant, of course, wasn't so limited.

Indeed, wherever one looks in the world, the Nordics appear to be an endangered species. [. . .] The demographic decline of the European Nordics is hastened by the fact that they are currently killing each other off in the fratricidal Great War, which is nothing less than "class suicide on a gigantic scale."

[. . .]

Even in North America, the habitat to which they are so well acclimated, the Nordics are passing from the scene. "Survival of the fittest," after all, means the survival of the type best adapted to prevailing environmental conditions. In colonial times, the environment that confronted the settlers was an untamed continent, and survival entailed clearing the forests and fighting the Indians--tasks for which the Nordics were eminently suited. But the United States has changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing society, and "the type of man that flourishes in the fields is not the type of man that thrives in the factory." The truth is that the dark, little immigrant can operate a machine and navigate a sweatshop far better than "the big, clumsy, and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat, and air, and cannot live under Ghetto conditions." It is with great pain that Grant is forced to admit that, "from the point of view of race," the environment of his homeland is leading to the "survival of the unfit."

Little wonder that America patricians are refusing to bring children into a society where they must compete with the Italians, the Slovaks, and the Jews. And, as with the Red Deer of Moritzburg Castle, when the fittest males do not breed, the result is racial degeneration. The old-stock American is "withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed."

[. . .]

But, of course, there is hope, and it is provided by the new faith of eugenics. Unfortunately, so long as the United States is a democracy, it will be extremely difficult to enact a eugenic program. Ever since "the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics" inflicted on us "the dogma of the brotherhood of man," Americans have had a perverse fondness for democracy. The consequences of republican government were not overly detrimental as long as the electorate was predominantly Nordic. But in the late nineteenth century the country had permitted the beaten men of beaten races to enter its portals, and then carlessly granted political rights to these incoming "plebeians." The effect of universal suffrage has been to secure "the transfer of power . . . from a Nordic aristocracy to lower classes predominantly of Alpine and Mediterranean extraction." And it is difficult to see how the enfranchised "helots," indoctrinated by "the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development," will ever allow the government they now control to enact eugenic measures.

[Spiro. pp. 153-155]

Madison Grant biography due out later this year

The University Press of New England website contains the following listing:

Defending the Master Race
Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
Jonathan Spiro

Not in stock
Available: November 2008

University of Vermont Press
University Press of New England
512 pp. 32 illus. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4”
History / Nature

$39.95 Cloth, 978-1-58465-715-6

A historical rediscovery of one of the heroic founders of the conservation movement who was also one of the most infamous racists in American history

Scholars have labeled Madison Grant everything from the “nation’s most influential racist” to the “greatest conservationist that ever lived.” His life illuminates early twentieth-century America as it was heading toward the American Century, and his legacy is still very much with us today, from the speeches of immigrant-bashing politicians to the international efforts to arrest climate change. This insightful biography shows how Grant worked side-by-side with figures such as Theodore Roosevelt to found the Bronx Zoo, preserve the California redwoods, and save the American bison from extinction. But Grant was also the leader of the eugenics movement in the United States. He popularized the infamous notions that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics were the “master race” and that the state should eliminate members of inferior races who were of no value to the community. Grant’s behind-the-scenes machinations convinced Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s, and his influence led many states to ban interracial marriage and sterilize thousands of “unworthy” citizens. Although most of the relevant archival materials on Madison Grant have mysteriously disappeared over the decades, Jonathan Spiro has devoted many years to reconstructing the hitherto concealed events of Grant’s life. His astonishing feat of detective work reveals how the founder of the Bronx Zoo wound up writing the book that Adolf Hitler declared was his “bible.”

JONATHAN SPIRO is a professor of history at Castleton State College in Vermont.

Nelson Rosit reviewed Spiro's PhD thesis Patrician Racist: The Evolution of Madison Grant--which likely overlaps almost entirely with the forthcoming book--for The Occidental Quarterly last year.

Spiro teaches history at Castleton State College in Vermont. Patrician Racist is his doctoral dissertation, submitted as part of a PhD program in history at the University of California, Berkeley. It is available in a variety of formats from UMI Dissertation Service of Ann Arbor, Michigan. While readily accessible, such manuscripts have several drawbacks. They lack the production quality that a major book publisher would provide. In this case there is some bleed through in text, the photographs are of poor quality, and of course, there is no index. Another disadvantage is that this two-volume, 950 page dissertation never had the benefit of professional editing, which would have trimmed off some fat without losing any of the meat.1

The questions of form are less problematic than reservations about the author’s frame of reference. Spiro is a liberal and a Jew writing about a man he perceives to be an elitist and an anti-Semite. His ideology and ethnicity have prejudiced his account. Spiro is not out to do a hatchet job on Grant. As a scholar he is too sophisticated for that, and to Spiro’s credit he is upfront about his biases. His perspective, however, leaves him with a blind spot and he claims he cannot understand Grant’s motives. Because he is at variance with his subject, Spiro resorts annoyingly often to a sarcastic and facetious brand of humor that can wear on the reader.

Given these flaws, why bother considering Patrician Racist? Although not the ideal biographer for Madison Grant, there is no denying that Spiro is a first-class researcher. A true archival athlete, Spiro consulted no fewer than 112 archive collections, and his bibliography fills thirty-two closely spaced pages. He needed to cast a wide net because Grant is not an easy biographical subject. He wrote no memoirs and his family destroyed his personal papers after his death. Much of his correspondence to colleagues has also been destroyed or gone missing. In addition, though Grant was an activist, he was not a self-promoter, and usually worked out of the limelight. So Spiro “scoured the newspapers of Grant’s time and the memoirs of his peers to glean any and all mentions of Grant, and combed through the correspondence of hundreds of his colleagues attempting to decipher the occasional reference to him.”2 There are, of course, Grant’s published works, the records of his many organizations, and his achievements in environmental and racial preservation. It is largely through his work that we can get to know and appreciate Madison Grant.

[. . .]

Grant was a scholar, but his greatest achievements came as an activist. The Passing of the Great Race was criticized in some academic reviews for its lack of footnotes and sweeping generalizations. The format and style were intentional. Grant’s goal was to attract the widest possible readership so as to influence American public opinion. The most important policy change Grant and his colleagues (Spiro calls them Grantians) wanted was tighter restrictions on immigration. The First World War had restricted immigration from 1914 to 1919. Now millions from war-ravaged Europe were poised to immigrate to the United States.23 While the restrictions of the 1920s aimed at Southern and Eastern Europeans Spiro believes their main intent was to halt the influx of Jews into America. Jews were so closely identified with Bolshevism at the time that opposition to their immigration was based as much on ideological as racial grounds.

Not surprisingly, when immigration legislation was introduced to Congress in 1920 Jews were the most vocal opponents. Boas led the opposition in academia, while Representatives Isaac Siegel, Samuel Dickstein, Adolph Sabath, and freshman Emanuel Celler were the chief adversaries in Congress.24 Striking a contemporary note, Gedalia Bublick, editor of the Jewish Daily News, complained to the House Immigration Committee that the legislation was a product of “race hatred.”25 Spiro comments that some Jewish leaders resorted to the “if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em” strategy during the racially conscious 1920s. Jews would oppose immigration from Asia in the hope that “the old-stock Americans would permit them to join the Nordics in a coalition known as ‘the white race.’”26

Restrictive legislation was passed in 1921 and 1922, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the annual total of immigrants to 165,000, mostly from Northern and Western Europe. The act did not apply to the Western Hemisphere. Grant and his colleagues rejoiced, but did not rest on their laurels. There was still the issue of Latin American immigration, the millions of nonwhites already in the country, and the need for a eugenics program.27 Spiro dates America’s high-water mark for scientific racism to 1924. It is quite remarkable how quickly this movement collapsed during the next decade and a half. The author devoted an entire chapter “The Empire Crumbles,” to analyzing the decline of racial consciousness. As with the immigration fight, Spiro highlights the role of Jews, in this case academics, who successfully discredited the belief in hereditary racial differences. Boas, of course, was among this number. So was Jacques Loeb, another Jew from Germany, as well as Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits, Alexander Weinstein—the list goes on and on.

[. . .]

Hardcore Grantians will want to read Spiro’s biography. This dissertation is an impressive research effort, and they will learn a lot about their champion. Others may want to wait to see if the text is released by a book publisher. [See above.] It is sadly indicative of our times that no European-American historian felt the need or had the courage to write the biography of America’s premier racialist. If Patrician Racist becomes the definitive biography of Madison Grant, then it will be part of the valedictory for white America. My hope is that in twenty or thirty years a more sympathetic scholar will write the definitive biography of Grant. By that time European-Americans should be able to fully appreciate the greatness of Grant. He was truly prescient, seeing clearly the dangers confronting both his race and the physical environment that sustains that race. More important, he accepted personal responsibility for saving both. The fact that his efforts met with mixed results was not the fault of his intelligence or energy, but was due to the shortsightedness of his fellow Americans and the strength of the forces arrayed against him.

Rosit's misgivings are probably warranted. But compared to the typical liberal or Jewish writer on "scientific racism", Spiro is the picture of objectivity. Unless something goes terribly wrong during editing, Defending the Master Race should be worth the read.