White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - Madison Grant, Hitler, Eugenics, Immigration Restriction

[appalachiablue]

- 'WHITE NATIONALISM’S DEEP AMERICAN ROOTS,' A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it. By Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, April *2019. - Excerpts, Ed.

.. The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. It’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a NYT interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the US. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the US elite who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th c. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers and several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was blue blood Madison Grant, author of a 1916 book called 'The Passing of the Great Race' which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe. His purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s.

His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Madison Grant.

Most Americans quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of 'Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant' (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because it was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology...
- More, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/
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- MADISON GRANT (Nov. 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, anthropologist, writer, and zoologist known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist, an advocate of scientific racism, and as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the Progressive Era. As a eugenicist, Grant was the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a work espousing scientific racism, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and the early development of the white genocide conspiracy theory. As a conservationist, Grant is credited with the saving of many species of animals, founding environmental and philanthropic organizations and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

Grant was the author of the once much-read book 'The Passing of the Great Race'(1916), an elaborate work of racial hygiene attempting to explain the racial history of Europe. The most significant of Grant's concerns was with the changing "stock" of US immigration of the early 20th c. (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a "racial" interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization. Similar ideas were proposed by prehistorian Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant promoted the idea of the "Nordic race", a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia, as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was the racial basis of European history.

As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and "worthwhile race types" conducive to Nordic society:

- "A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. 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. 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." -

In the book, Grant recommends segregating "unfavorable" races in ghettos, by installing civil organizations through the public health system to establish quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields. He states the expansion of non-Nordic race types in the Nordic system of freedom would actually mean a slavery to desires, passions, and base behaviors. 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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Fitzgerald's Gatsby

Took Grant's fame away - but noted his book.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” says Tom. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of The Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard? . . . Well it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved. . . .It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things. . . .The idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

Whatever it's faults or pluses - his for that matter - Fitzgerald leaned into all of the stereotypes of the time - and the worst one? The worst character?

Was the man who worships Grant aka Goddard.

[appalachiablue]

2. Foul, bunk science, Scott and others, even progressives of course.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. He was so close

Yet on the periphery to the elites on Long Island - he done 'told on them'.