The act was not overturned until the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. web pages The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. [citation needed], Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. In the introduction to the fourth edition published in 1921, Grant states that his original purpose for writing The Passing of the Great Race, making Americans aware of his race concept and the alleged need for segregation, had been accomplished because the books publication encouraged the US to adopt restrictive immigration laws. [13], Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from East Asia and Southern Europe; he also advocated efforts to purify the American population though selective breeding. The essential character of all these racial mixtures is a lack of harmony - both physical and mental - in the first few generations. Historically significant but very antiquated. 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. An amazing book and should be read by all especially white teenagers and young adults. "Whose Country is This? Grant viewed the immigration into the US of different groups as not beneficial. According to Grants biographer Jonathan Spiro, Grants book synthesized a range of racist and pseudoscientific eugenics claims in prose that was accessible to the public. 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 gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State. 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. Instead, what strikes me is that Grant stood steadfastly and openly as an Anglo-Saxon willing and ready to defend his people, culture and class. In contrast, Grant claims that Nordics are superior soldiers, sailors, and explorers, but above all, they are skillful leaders. My favorite personally is his cover for the 2012 edition of Madison Grant's The Passing of The Great Race, with a foreword by none other than Jared Taylor, with his name printed on the front cover. The Passing of the Great Race Or the Racial Basis of European History was written by Madison Grant, American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist. European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race; yet race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. Search the history of over 797 billion Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most desirable, encounter great difficulties. The result would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races. Want to Read. Starting from the now-discredited assumption that Europeans, Africans, and Asians are distinct groups, Grant believed that Europeans, while overall allegedly superior to Africans and Asians, could be further classified into distinct races. 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. ", Woods, Frederick Adams. It is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. In his biography of Grant,Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Jonathan Spiro writes that almost nothing inThe Passing of the Great Raceis original. Rather, the book is a compendium of the work of other scholars, and almost every paragraph can be directly traced back to figures such as the European scientific racists Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Date 1916 1916) (25 January 2006 (according to Exifdata)) Source Condition: Brand new. 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. In the chapters "Race and Habitat" and "The Competition of Races," Grant considers how natural selection occurs in humans of the modern world through disease and competition. The Passing of the Great Racehas had many uses over the years. The salvation of humanity will then lie in the chance survival of some sane barbarians who may retain the basic truth that inequality and not equality is the law of nature. This something which we call "genius" is not a matter of family, but of stock or strain, and is inherited in precisely the same manner as are the purely physical characters. Anthropologist Franz Boas called The Passing of the Great Race a modern retelling of works by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even though Grant does not explicitly cite them. The ideal in eugenics toward which statesmanship should be directed is, of course, improvement in quality rather than quantity. 4th rev. He also assisted in the passing and prosecution of several anti-miscegenation laws, notably the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in the state of Virginia, where he sought to codify his particular version of the "one-drop rule" into law. The first section deals with the basis of race as well as Grant's own stances on political issues of the day (eugenics). The book received positive reviews in the 1920s, but Grant's popularity declined in the 1930s. The proportion of men of pure type of each constituent race to the mixed type is also a powerful factor. In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education and integrity. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are purely Nordic and yearly contribute swarms of a splendid type of immigrants to America and are now, as they have been for thousands of years, the chief nursery and broodland of the master race. The native Americans [American Nordics] are splendid raw material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness. Beginning in 1920, a series of congressional hearings was held to identify problems that immigrants were causing the United States. Be the first to write a review. It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. The book was a parody of contemporary writers and would thus be referring to them sarcastically as a "great race". True aristocracy or a true republic is government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any population. Boas characterized The Passing of the Great Race as dangerous, dogmatic, inconsistent, and built on observations selected to justify Grants own prejudice. The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History A. K. History Nature IN this work Mr. Grant takes up a theme which was broached by Dr. Gustav Retzius in his Huxley lecture to the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1909. Grant uses the cephalic index, which is a ratio of skull width to skull length, eye color, hair color, and height to classify people into three European races of Alpine, Mediterranean, and Nordic, the latter of whom he calls the white man par excellence. 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. Many reviewers acknowledged a number of scientific flaws, and some recognized that few ideas presented in The Passing of the Great Race were novel. He then speculates hereditary links between the proposed Nordic people and the Trojans[4]:159 and between the Prussians and the Spartans. Additionally, a 1921 article by then Vice President Calvin Coolidge published in Good Housekeeping echoed many of the ideas presented in The Passing of the Great Race, as Coolidge called for immigration restriction and condemned interracial marriages. 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. The German translation of The Passing of the Great Race also influenced the eugenics programs and genocide that Hitler and Nazi Germany committed. With the support of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who later served as the twenty-sixth President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, Grant co-founded the New York Zoological Society in 1895 and the Bronx Zoo in 1899 to promote wildlife conservation and the study of animals. This new edition supercedes all others in many respects. From barely-used Formula 1 circuits to shuttered . Firstly, it comes with a number of enhancements that will be found in no other edition, including: an introductory essay by Jared Taylor (of American Renaissance), which puts Grant's text into context from our present-day perspective; a full complement of editorial footnotes, which correct and update Grant's original narration; an expanded index; a reformated bibliography, following modern conventions of style and meeting today's more demanding data requirements. 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. 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. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. ", Peake, H.J.E. 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. Francis Galton, the half-cousin of the naturalist Charles Darwin, first coined the term eugenics, Greek for "well-born," in 1883. Women in all human races, as the females among all mammals, tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits of the past of the race. I read this more because I heard it was the book that most influenced Hitler and I was wondering what would influence him.