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

by Jonathan Peter Spiro

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.”

Genres: History, Race, Eugenics, Science, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics

508 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

Jonathan Peter Spiro is Dean of Humanities & Social Science at Castleton University, Vermont. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley for his work on eugenicist Madison Grant.

Reviews

[Michael Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madison Grant's book was "Hitler's Bible"....

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

===========

More background....

https://historynewsnetwork.org/articl...

==========

The author ran into a problem, perhaps not surprising. Most of the primary source material of Madison Grant, letters, etc. that was in libraries, at universities, was either destroyed by natural disaster (flood) or stolen.

It seems the once direct line from Grant's anti-Semitic, racist pamphlet, "The Passing of the Great Race," to Hitler's Nazism was clearly drawn, then a family member, or someone else close to the situation, wanted to destroy every trace of the connection.

But Grant is back, and his pamphlet---"The Passing of the Great Race"---is available online and is treated as a kind of Bible by white nationalists, as Hitler treated it.

(Note: Grant was an avid conservationist, who was very concerned with the extinction of animal species. But he extended this concern to the white race, fearing that the strong was somehow not prevailing in the Darwinian struggle).

Pictorial overview of the history of eugenics in the U.S.....

https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-t...

================

Richard Spencer profile...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVeZ0...

=============

Background story....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us...

[Matthew Budman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long been fascinated by the eugenics and scientific-racism craze that gripped the American intelligentsia a century ago, with pseudoscientist Madison Grant at the center of it all; I've collected books by Grant and his cohorts for the last two decades. So was pleasantly surprised to discover this volume -- and then was genuinely grateful to find that it's a fantastic work. (I actually wrote the author something of a fan letter immediately upon finishing!)

Spiro puts Grant into context both historically and intellectually, exploring the thinking of the times and its legacy. Perhaps most illuminating are the direct links between, as the subtitle indicates, these men's paired impulses to preserve both the white race and the fauna of America. The work of Grant (and his friend Theodore Roosevelt) to create a national park system and the Bronx Zoo was a product of the same thinking that inspired draconian anti-immigration laws and forced sterilization.

Defending the Master Race is so comprehensive and brightly written and well edited and just plain readable that one of the big New York trade publishers could easily have brought it out and created a real impact . . . but instead it's under the tiny University of Vermont imprint and went mostly unnoticed. A real shame. Spiro has performed a genuine service, in a truly entertaining way, and deserves a much wider readership.

[John Farrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating, often disturbing, book. Madison Grant was an self-styled American aristocrat, Yale man, big-game hunter, conservationist, and scientific racist. Working behind the scenes as if America were an oligarchy, he saved the Redwoods and the bison, developed New York's park system, and founded the Bronx Zoo. He also embraced eugenics, was instrumental in passing restrictive immigration policies and racial purity laws, and influenced Nazi social policy culminating in the elimination of the "feebleminded" and the Holocaust. His masterwork, as it were, was an amateur work of pseudoscience, The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was an unsavory character about whom we learn little personally since his voluminous papers and correspondence was destroyed or has disappeared. The author overcomes this handicap by recounting Grant's life and influence through the organizations he founded and controlled.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unpleasant fucking book. But one that everyone should read. It's the same old crap, year upon year, and no one ever learns anything, and nothing ever changes. Because humans are trash.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

A typically bad book on scientific racism and eugenics. Like most authors, Spiro fails to provide a convincing explanation for the fall of racism. In one chapter it's the mid-1920s and Grant and the scientific racists have total command of WASP opinion; in the next it's still the mid-1920s and their views are debunked and no longer taken seriously. Spiro sees no contradiction in claiming that The Passing of the Great Race was out of step with American public opinion and in claiming pro-eugenic articles in popular media had a great influence. The best explanation he can muster, aside from the evolving views of scientists (in general writing on scientific racism assumes that scientific opinion was in total command of public opinion; Boas & co. won control of scientific opinion through vaguely-explained means, so the general public followed Boas in lockstep), are weak and unsubstantiated claims about Americans getting bored of anti-immigration rhetoric after the Immigration Restriction Act passed and that the Great Migration broke down stereotypes. By stacking Grant's supporters in one chapter and his opponents in another, and never asking how committed the former were or how much they agreed with Grant, Spiro paints a picture of an instant about-turn in American society that is clearly nonsensical. He also makes the classic mistake of assuming everyone with pro-eugenic views shared in Grant etc.'s totalising eugenic philosophy and in assuming forced sterilisation and eugenic motivations for such were inextricably linked.

Unsurprisingly, its attempts to link conservation and eugenics/scientific racism are also extremely weak. Spiro makes limp stabs at linking the two with claims about "dying races" and "naturalness", but these at best are arguments based on rhetoric; that, for instance, two ideologies used the metaphor of disease proves very little. Rather more offensive is the aside that draws a line between the NPS starting to cull elk and the peak of the Holocaust because they both happened in the same year!

There is much more to criticise about the book, such as its inexplicable claim that popular racism is not biologically determinist, to some impressively reaching attempts to link everything eugenicists ever did to the Nazis (particularly inexpliciable is a bit about Francis Galton saying he "kindled the flame" of eugenics), or its ultra-Great Man handling of Boas and Grant, but I do not want to spend more time thinking about this book than I have to.

[Michael Pellagatti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye Opening

This narrative is utterly shocking and revealing in terms of displaying the synchronicity between progressive groups and authoritarian regimes. The history of the United States is indeed racist, but this undoubtedly proves its legacy.

[Gail]

The book interested me because it was framed as how an American influenced Hitler. The book builds through how he became a conservationist and a preservationist and then an advocate of game management. He did a lot for wildlife. So far it seems easy to see how his ideas about eugenics were shaped. He died before WWII and would never see what his ideas indirectly assisted... Some branches of science were then in their infancy and people took an author's ideas as if they were definitely true when they were unproven. Thankfully, I think we've come a long way since then.