Physical and psychical disharmonies are common among crosses between Indians, negroes and whites, but where the parents are more closely related racially we often obtain individuals occupying the border-land between genius and insanity. The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History. Grant was a lawyer and wildlife conservationist in New York City who helped found eugenics organizations in the US during the early twentieth century. Francis Galton, the half-cousin of the naturalist Charles Darwin, first coined the term eugenics, Greek for "well-born," in 1883. To imitate or to adopt what others have invented is not genius but mimicry. more details. "The Great Technology Race: Who's Winning,Humans or Machines?" 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. Regarding background, see the articles on Nordicism and Madison Grant. Grant claims that when a person from a supposedly superior race reproduces with a person of a supposedly inferior race, the child is unequivocally a member of the inferior race. Ernest Hemingway might also have alluded to The Passing of the Great Race in the subtitle of his book The Torrents of Spring; A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race. The Passing Of The Great Race(1917) by Madison Grant. In turn, this corruption of society would lead to the subjection of the Nordic community to "inferior" races who would in turn long to be dominated and instructed by "superior" ones utilizing authoritarian powers. The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Bias of European History Madison Grant Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916. According to Grant, significantly increasing the birth rate of superior races is unlikely to succeed due to the difficulty of restricting the right to have children only to people with the most desirable genetics in a democracy. According to Grants history, the greatest cultural achievements in Europe and its former colonies can be attributed to an influx of Nordic blood into a region, while social collapses are due to a loss of Nordic control. 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. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned. The book was translated into several European languages in its day. The Passing of the Great Racehas had many uses over the years. 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. According to Grant, democratic ideals wrongly assume that environmental factors such as education affect human development and achievement rather than heredity. "The Biological Racial State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 19331939." 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. On the other hand, a member of a superior race in bad surroundings may, and very often does, sink to an extremely low level. The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of "Bread and the Circus" - "panem et circenses" - and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Immigration during the First World War declined because ships were allocated to the war effort. Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic subspecies and from nowhere else. The men of Nordic blood to-day form practically all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. 354-360 Document - Excerpt from Madison Grant, The Passing of Great Race (1916 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 The Passing of the Great Race, Grant argues that there are three distinct European races and that the supposedly superior Nordic race is responsible for most notable human achievements and progress. Why, because the information doesn't agree with your (whether you realize it or not) Jewish Marxist world view, which is based on lies and falsehoods, especially the doctrine of so-called "racial equality", of which only exists in a FANTASY WORLD. on May 15, 2008, A related article in the November 2019 Harper's Magazine by Doug Henwood, "To Serve Is To Rule - Why We Miss the WASPs". The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race. The Nordic, in his hypothesis, was "Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. The Alpine, the Mediterranean and the Nordic, which enter into the composition of European populations of to-day and in various combinations comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. He also attributed criticism of the first edition of the book to widespread anti-German sentiment during World War I. Franz Boas, a Jewish immigrant from Germany and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City wrote one of the most critical reviews of The Passing of the Great Race. Grant helped draft the Immigration Act of 1924 that Johnson authored, which established strict quotas for immigration based on nationality. 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. 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. 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. Editions of The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of 4th rev. Such leaders have always been a minute fraction of the whole, but as long as the tradition of their predominance persisted they were able to use the brute strength of the unthinking herd as part of their own force and were able to direct at will the blind dynamic impulse of the slaves, peasants or lower classes. The Passing Of The Great Race : Madison Grant - Internet Archive Such has been the organization of mankind from the beginning, and such it still is in older communities than ours. The fact that the blood shows as "blue" through the fair Nordic skin is also to be taken into account. Date 1916 1916) (25 January 2006 (according to Exifdata)) Source Beginning in 1920, a series of congressional hearings was held to identify problems that immigrants were causing the United States. Buy It Now. Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). From barely-used Formula 1 circuits to shuttered . In fact, it is said that practically every one of the Forty-Niners [people in search of gold] in California was of Nordic type. 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. War is in the highest sense dysgenic rather than eugenic. The effort now being made in America to settle undesirable immigrants on farms may, from the viewpoint of race replacement, be more dangerous than allowing them to remain in crowded Ghettos or tenements. Grant is confident that the American public would agree to sterilize ten percent of the population, beginning with those he calls defectives, including criminals and people with diseases and mental illnesses. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur and our present reliance on the influence of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values. Generally well received at the time in both the popular and scholarly press and going through four editions and multiple reprints, Theodore Roosevelt described The Passing of the Great Race as 'a capital work'. [8], By 1937, the book sold 17,000 copies in the U.S. The book appeared when the anti-German propaganda machine was shifting into high gear, with images of German soldiers raping nuns and bombing cathedrals. The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History Madison Grant C. Scribner's sons, 1922 - Caucasian race - 476 pages 1 Review Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks. Grant argued that negative eugenics was a more practical course of action to pursue in the US because he believed it would be much easier to identify and eradicate the people with the worst genetics than to select a group of people with the best genetics, and restrict the right to have children only to them. Following the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, Grant took an active role in many influential eugenics organizations in the US, including the Eugenics Research Association, The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, the American Eugenics Society, and the International Commission on Eugenics. The most primitive Aryan languages, namely, Lettish, Lithuanian and the recently extinct Old Prussian, are found in this neighborhood and here we are not far from the original Nordic homeland. I started to read to book for the sole purpose of finding intellectual ideas present in the contemporary right-wing terrorism and the growing "eco-fascist" movement, but unfortunately didn't find any, so the book is only valuable as a historical account of early American fascination with eugenics. 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. "Some hundred years after its publication, what strikes me about The Passing of the Great Race is not just its originality - as a racial history, it was the first of its kind - and not just Grant's skill in integrating the most advanced evolutionary science of his day with studies of history and culture. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all "distinctions of race, creed or color," the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo. History. How this scheme of administration will ultimately work out remains to be seen but from a racial point of view it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole. This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Grant, Madison, 1865-1937: The passing of the great race : or, The racial basis of European history / (New York : C. Scribner's sons, 1924), also by Henry Fairchild Osborn (page images at HathiTrust) Grant, Madison, 1865-1937: Report of the Bronx parkway commission, appointed under chapter 669 of the laws of 1906. A.B.S. This new edition supercedes all others in many respects. Madison Grants Passing of the Great Race is a must read for anyone wishing to learn about 20th century racialism. The causal way in which he makes sweeping conclusions about the need to control populations in favor of "the Great Race" is truly scary. It's that he has no *coherent, rational* models to knit everything together, other than his obviously deeply felt prejudices, in all senses of that word. [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. In this manner, Grant appeared to be studiously following scientific theory. Free shipping for many products! The book was a parody of contemporary writers and would thus be referring to them sarcastically as a "great race". anyone who doesnt believe that this book has been the basis for Western policy for the last 75 years either hasnt read it or hasnt turned their head from side to side and looked around. Holocaust Encyclopedia. The rest of the book is where Grant theorized that the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars had decimated the strong Nordic and Teutonic populations of Germany and France, forever changing the demographics, and allowing weak and cowardly men, who had failed to fight, to replace the great bloodlines. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. Grant demonstrated his eclecticism by taking the Anglo-Saxon tradition, borrowing a bit of racial philosophy from one writer, a bit from another, and weaving together a comprehensive view of history. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, Geographical Review, Vol. Cohen, Adam. The section of any community that produces leaders or genius of any sort is only a minute percentage. "Elizabeth Aranda." As the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, Grant argued that immigration quotas at the time needed to be reduced. 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. The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. According to Elizabeth Aranda and Elizabeth Vaquera, who as of 2021, research sociology at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, present day immigration policies in the US still reproduce racial inequalities and result in severe consequences for people of the demographics they target. Madison Grant. This scan is from a reprint printed in the journal of the American Geographical Society. The Nordic realm includes nearly all the northern third of France with extensions into the fertile southwest; all the rich lowlands of Flanders; all Holland; the northern half of Germany with extensions up the Rhine and down the Danube; and the north of Poland and of Russia. The country villages and the farms are the nurseries of nations, while cities are consumers and seldom producers of men. A fantastically "just-so" book: things are ordered exactly as Grant wishes them to be, he just makes up whatever conditions he needs to knit things together. on the Internet. The value and efficiency of a population are not numbered by what the newspapers call souls, but by the proportion of men of physical and intellectual vigor. 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. 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. Charles Scribners Sons in New York City, New York, published the volume. Like the seagoing vessels, they traveled a fluid sea. This same Nordic element, everywhere the type of the sailor, the soldier, the adventurer and the pioneer, was ever the type to migrate to new countries, until the ease of transportation and the desire to escape military service in the last forty years reversed the immigrant tide. Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most desirable, encounter great difficulties. Equality in their minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea. He reasons that the Nordic races would become extinct and the United States as it was known would cease to exist, being replaced by a fragmented country, or a corrupted caricature of itself. I was interested to note the first publish date was 1917 and the book I was reading was reprinted in 1970. Outdated, full of Nordic Rassenkunde, but somehow appealing within its mythology. 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. [PDF] The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European [17], expansion of the U.S. Black population into the urban areas of the North, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, "Embryo Project Encyclopedia: The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History (1916), by Madison Grant", "Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth", "A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race", "Overview of U.S. White Supremacist Groups", "Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots", "Book Review: Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race&oldid=1142611861. DescriptionPassing of the Great Race - Map 4.jpg "Present Distribution of the European Races", map from American eugenicist Madison Grant's1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The book elaborates Grant's interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, which he sees as revolving chiefly around "race" rather than environment. Get help and learn more about the design. Although fundamentally flawed - very refreshing! In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant calls on the US to enact an extensive eugenics program. Historically significant but very antiquated. 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 Fhrer himself raved aboutThe Passing, calling it my Bible, and it was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in defense of Hitlers personal physician to show that specifically American theories of white racial superiority supported the crimes against humanity with which he was chargedforced sterilization, for instance, or unnecessary and experimental surgery performed without anesthesia. Grant claimed that the Nordic race was at risk of extinction and advocated for the creation of laws in the US to decrease the population of people he considered inferior. We have shown that the Mediterranean race entered Europe from the south and forms part of a great group of peoples extending into southern Asia, that the Alpine race came from the east through Asia Minor and the valley of the Danube and that its present European distribution is merely the westernmost point of an ethnic pyramid, the base of which rests solidly on the round skulled peoples of the great plateau of central Asia. Even those rulers who most abused this power put down with merciless rigor the antisocial elements, such as pirates, brigands or anarchists, which impair the progress of a community, as disease or wounds cripple an individual. The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 racist and pseudoscientific [1] [2] book by American lawyer, self-styled anthropologist, and proponent of eugenics, Madison Grant (1865-1937). The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language, but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest. Critics warned that Grant used uncritical circular reasoning. "The Passing of the Great Race" at 100 Bunk - Bunk History As a result, Grant believes that democracies that average people run are less efficient than aristocracies ruled by men qualified by noble birth. ", Woods, Frederick Adams. His desirable characteristics of a people "family life, loyalty, and truth" were claimed to be exclusive products of the "Nordic race". The "Proto-Nordic" human, Grant reasoned, probably evolved in "forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia" (p.170). He then speculates hereditary links between the proposed Nordic people and the Trojans[4]:159 and between the Prussians and the Spartans. The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of European History Boas critiqued Grants misconceptions about heredity, such as his assumption that physical traits such as skin color operated according to simple Mendelian genetics, as well as his refusal to consider the effect of environment on physical traits used for racial classification. Grant claims that the members of contemporary American Protestant society who could trace their ancestry back to Colonial times were being out-bred by immigrant and "inferior" lower-class White racial stocks. Historically, topically, and geographically, Grant's magnum opus covers a vast amount of ground, broadly tracing the racial history of Europeans from prehistoric times to the . After the US Supreme Court upheld sterilization laws as constitutional in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, thirty states passed similar laws, leading to as many as 70,000 forced sterilizations that disproportionately affected poor women of color according to journalist and lawyer Adam Cohen. 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). It really deserves one star for it's completely irrational and misguided claims about racial taxonomies, its pseudo-science and its historical inaccuracies. The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History This is what education or opportunity does for a community; it permits in these rare cases fair play for development, but it is race, always race, that produces genius. A huge inspiration to me, although I cannot recommned it to other readers. He primarily focuses on the Nordic race, its characteristics, and how it has fell from dominance in Europe. In fact, the primary achievement of this arcane, humorless book may be simply that it was so influential despite borrowing so heavily from other writers whose work Grant digested. 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.
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