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AFTER PUBLISHING The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant was America’s premier race theorist in a country that was perfectly willing to believe that race was everything. During the next decade, Grant used his influence over Congress to encourage the passage of four immigration laws designed to make America more American. One scholar at the time referred to them as “America’s most ambitious program of biological engineering.”
In 1917—one year after Madison Grant published his book—Congress passed a law banning “all idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons [and] persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority” from entering the country. The bill also mandated a literacy test. During deliberations, one congressman read directly from The Passing of the Great Race. As a consequence, about 1,500 immigrants a year were denied entrance. The tide was turning. And no one was happier than Charles Davenport, who in a letter to Grant urged him to push forward on immigration restriction: “Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races; or will it be a feeble dam, leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to blacks, browns, and yellows.” A hundred years later, Donald Trump said, “People are pouring across our borders, which is horrible. We have to build a wall. I build some of the greatest buildings in the world. Building a wall for me is easy. And it would be a wall. It would be a real wall. Not a wall that people walk over.”
In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which further limited the number of immigrants. One congressman arguing in favor of the bill said, “The issue…is simply this: shall we preserve this country, handed down to us by a noble and illustrious ancestry, for Americans, and transmit it to our posterity as our forefathers intended; or shall we permit it to be overrun and submerged by a heterogeneous, hodgepodge, polyglot, aggregation of aliens, most of whom are the scum, the offal, and the excrescence of the earth.” The year before the Emergency Quota Act passed, about 800,000 immigrants entered the United States; the year after it passed, that number was reduced to 300,000.
In 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act, which imposed more restrictive quotas. Before World War I, as many as a million immigrants entered the United States every year. After 1924, that number was reduced to 20,000—a trickle that even the most ardent eugenicists could live with.
In 1929, Congress passed the National Origins Act, further restricting immigration. Eugenicists had accomplished exactly what they had wanted. More immigrants came into the United States in 1907 alone then entered during the next quarter century. Madison Grant was thrilled. “[This is] one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country,” he said. “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population from being overrun by the lower races.” The director of Ellis Island, the entry point for most European immigrants, commented that immigrants were now starting to look more like Americans.
Perhaps Madison Grant’s most cynical alliance was with Marcus Garvey, an African American. Garvey wanted blacks to take pride in their race, pride in their accomplishments; he didn’t want them to feel compelled to assimilate into society. Garvey condemned interracial marriage, preached racial purity, and yearned for an African homeland. By 1920, when blacks were routinely being lynched in the South, Garvey’s Back-to-Africa campaign had two million members. Where Marcus Garvey sought a homeland for men and women who were treated poorly because of the color of their skin, Grant sought deportation of what he believed to be a subspecies of humans who were poisoning the gene pool. The eugenics movement produced no pairing sadder than this one.
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IN 1925, MADISON GRANT’S The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German where it was read by a disgruntled corporal who had recently been sent to prison for his part in a riot against the government in Bavaria: Adolf Hitler. After reading the book, the 36-year-old revolutionary sent a fan letter to Grant: “This book is my Bible,” he wrote. During his nine months in prison, Hitler had read several books by American eugenicists, calling his prison stay “his university.” Hitler would soon launch a national movement that would forever damn the field of eugenics to the lower reaches of hell. But, despite popular belief, what was about to happen in Germany didn’t start on a rallying stand in Munich; it started in a law office in New York City.
As Hitler sat in Landsberg Prison, he worked on his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The first volume was published in 1925, the next, in 1926. To say that Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race had influenced Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf would be an understatement; in some sections, Hitler had virtually plagiarized Grant’s book. For example, in The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote, “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language.” In 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi Party listed Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading.
Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, Madison Grant, and Adolf Hitler all shared several features: All were, by their definition, Nordic; all believed that Nordics should procreate freely while non-Nordics should be prevented from procreating; and all were childless.
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IN 1933, the year that he came to power, Adolf Hitler passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The list of those to be sterilized was virtually identical to that first generated by the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor. Clinics were established and doctors were fined if they didn’t comply with the law. Within a year, 56,000 Germans had been sterilized; by 1935, 73,000; by 1939, 400,000, dwarfing the number of sterilizations performed in the United States. The procedure was so common that it had a nickname: Hitlerschnitte, “Hitler’s cut.” Americans took note. Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, lamented, “Hitler is beating us at our own game!”
Then Hitler moved from sterilization to murder. Handicapped children in hospitals were starved, injected with lethal drugs, or—in a tribute to ancient Sparta—exposed to the cold. Initially, only grossly deformed newborns were killed. Then killing of the unfit extended up to 3 years of age, then 8, then 12, then 16. Then the definition of “handicapped” broadened to include anyone with an incurable disease or with learning difficulties. Even chronic bedwetters were at risk. Under the auspices of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, Germany’s euthanasia program soon extended to the elderly, infirm, insane, and incurably ill. More than 70,000 German adults were killed, initially by lethal injection, and eventually by mobile gas chambers that traveled from clinic to clinic. German physicians sanctioned each and every one of the killings. (When Karl Brandt was tried for war crimes in Nuremberg, and later sentenced to death, he offered The Passing of the Great Race as an exhibit in his defense.) Adolf Hitler’s Germany had become the embodiment of “the reign of doctors” that Carrie Buck’s lawyer had predicted during his pleadings before the United States Supreme Court.
In 1935, Adolf Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their rights as citizens as well as outlawing sexual relationships or marriage between Jews and Aryans. The Eugenics Record Office praised the Nuremberg Laws as sound science. Eventually, Jews were segregated into ghettos and sent to concentration camps for what Hitler termed Die Endlösung—the “final solution.” “We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew,” he said. At least six million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, and “mental defectives” were murdered. Madison Grant’s “race suicide”—a fear that his Nordic race would be diluted out by inferior races—had become ethnic genocide. “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” said Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy führer.
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AMERICAN EUGENICISTS EMBRACED Hitler’s efforts. Both the Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation supported a German scientific establishment committed to sterilization and euthanasia. Indeed, IBM provided machinery to help the Nazis sort out family pedigrees to determine who was Jewish and who wasn’t.
Eugenical News, the official voice of the American eugenics movement, wrote, “[M]ay we be the first to thank this one man, Adolf Hitler, and to follow him on the way towards biological salvation and humanity.”
On February 12, 1935, C. M. Goethe, a member of the board of trustees of a eugenics group called the American Betterment Foundation, wrote a letter to a foundation worker: “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in his epoch-making program. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
Editorials in mainstream scientific publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Public Health, and the New England Journal of Medicine also supported the efforts of Adolf Hitler, the world’s most effective eugenicist.
To be fair, American eugenicists had yet to observe or to frankly imagine the horrors exacted behind the walls of German concentration camps. When they did, eugenics would become an obscenity. But before that could happen, one more scene had to play out near a small industrial town in southern Poland: Auschwitz. Here, between May 1943 and January 1945, eugenics made its fanatical last stand.
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IN THE 1940s, Germany’s most influential eugenics scientist was Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, head of anthropology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Dahlem. Verschuer studied Jews. Much to Hitler’s delight, Verschuer found that Jews suffered disproportionally from a variety of diseases including diabetes, flat feet, deafness, and nervous conditions. In 1936, Verschuer’s findings were reported and praised in Eugenical News.
To Verschuer and the Nazis, Jews weren’t an ethnic group; they were a biological entity, one that could be distinguished from the general population by their physical characteristics. One Verschuer protégé charged with determining characteristics that were uniquely Jewish was an eager young doctor who studied dimples, jawlines, and ear dimplings. His name was Josef Mengele.
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MENGELE WAS BORN ON March 16, 1911, to a wealthy family in Günzburg, Germany, that made farm machinery. (Today, the company is the third largest manufacturer of threshers in Germany; all equipment still proudly bears the name MENGELE.) After receiving his medical degree from the University of Frankfurt in 1938, Mengele traveled to the front, eventually returning to Germany to further his eugenic studies. On May 30, 1943, he arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where more than 100,000 prisoners awaited him.
When Jews were first lined up on the unloading docks at Auschwitz, they invariably heard the following command from German officers walking up and down the lines: Zwillinge! Zwillinge! (“Twins! Twins!”). Because twins were genetically identical, they were perfect for genetic studies. Mengele wanted to find ways to build a master race: one free of disease and capable of transmitting the best Aryan traits. In the two years he was at Auschwitz, he studied 1,500 pairs of twins. His fellow officers called them “Mengele’s Children.”
Mengele’s studies began by taking the children to Barrack 14, Camp F, the “Twin Camp.” There he would strip them naked, take photographs, and carefully measure and record every possible physical characteristic. Then he put a syringe into their veins to test their blood, and needles into their backs to test their spinal fluid. Later, he performed a series of experiments that brought eugenics to its final, hideous end. When he found one twin who sang well and another who didn’t, Mengele operated on their vocal cords; one of the brothers never spoke again. He forced twin girls to have sex with twin boys to see if they would produce twins. To create Aryan features artificially, he injected a Nordic blue dye into the eyes of children, leaving many blind. He took one hunchbacked child and connected the veins in his wrists to the veins of his twin; then he connected them back-to-back. He wanted to see if he could transmit the misshapen spine from one child to another; following the surgery, the children couldn’t stop screaming in horror. Their mother, who was able to procure a lethal dose of morphine, killed them both. Mengele thought that two Romany twins were infected with tuberculosis; when other German physicians in the camp disagreed, Mengele brought the children into a back room, shot them in the neck with his pistol, and performed an autopsy. “Yes, I dissected them while they were still warm,” he told his colleagues, who had been right about their diagnosis. He infected children with typhus and tuberculosis to determine their susceptibilities to disease and performed mismatched blood transfusions to see what would happen. Mengele gave children electric shocks to see how much pain they could endure. He burned 300 children alive in an open fire. When children had heterochromatic eyes, he killed them and sent their eyes to Verschuer in packages marked, WAR MATERIALS: URGENT. Mengele asked one mother to tape up her breasts to see how long her newborn could survive without food. He dissected a one-year-old while the child was still alive. When the nightmare finally ended, fewer than 200 of the 3,000 children put into Mengele’s care survived. And not a single piece of recognizable information was obtained. Josef Mengele and Adolf Hitler showed exactly what could happen when eugenics was put into the hands of narcissistic sadists with absolute power.
After the war, Mengele, who would later be called the Angel of Death, fled to Argentina, then Paraguay, then Brazil, where he drowned in São Paolo at the age of 68. Mengele saved the records from his experiments, certain that someday he would be hailed as a groundbreaking scientist. American eugenicists didn’t share Mengele’s sense of pride. After the war, the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor destroyed all of its records.
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IN 1952, a group of anthropologists, sociologists, geneticists, and psychologists gathered at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to put an end to Madison Grant’s notion that race determined character and to the madness that it had wrought. They issued the following statements:
1. All men belong to the same species: Homo sapiens.
2. Race is not a biological reality but a social myth; the term should be dropped in favor of ethnic group.
3. There is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics or intellectual capacity or that there is any connection between the physical and mental characteristics of human beings.
Although The Passing of the Great Race is still propagated by neo-Nazis and white supremacists on their websites, the book has now passed into history, unknown to most young students.
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MADISON GRANT DIED ON May 30, 1937, at the age of 72. As famous as he was in his time, his name has virtually disappeared. But it hasn’t completely disappeared. Grant’s name is still prominently displayed on a plaque at the base of the world’s tallest living tree: the Founders’ Tree in Redwood National Park. In 1991, the park’s director, Donald Murphy, received an angry letter from a visitor, demanding that the plaque be removed and that the park stop honoring this loathsome man. Murphy wrote back: “[Madison] Grant was a creature of the nineteenth century and, as with many of his life contemporaries, he held beliefs that most of us, hopefully, find both absurd and abhorrent today. The sad truth is that [Grant] probably did not think too differently than many others who have been ‘honored’ for some historical role unrelated to the issue of race. I’m not sure that society can or should conduct a wholesale revision of history because the people of the past did not have a late-twentieth century vision of fairness and equality. As director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, I don’t ordinarily wear my ethnicity on my sleeve, so to speak, but in respond
ing to your concerns I feel compelled to note that as an African American I think I have a personal perspective on the pain and suffering, the hurt and disappointment of racism.”
Donald Murphy ended his letter with a statement that could itself have been put onto a plaque and nailed to the base of that tree. “Harmony among peoples comes from the true principles and attitudes of the present,” he wrote, “not from purging the past.”
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THE LESSON HERE IS little harder to describe but no less poignant: Beware of scientific biases that fit the culture of the time—beware the zeitgeist.
Imagine that a study has just been published in a prestigious medical journal claiming that a certain constellation of genes predisposes to violent behavior, like rape and murder. And that people living in Mexico are more likely to carry these genes. In all likelihood, several Republican presidential candidates of 2016 would have enthusiastically embraced this study. Now they would have had clear scientific evidence supporting what they had been saying all along—we need to restrict Mexican immigration and build a great wall to keep the Mexicans out; if not, a group of genetically inferior people will invade our country.
Although this might sound far-fetched, it’s exactly what happened in 1916 with the publication of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. As a consequence, immigration slowed to a trickle. People then and now seem perfectly willing to ignore the fact that we all come from a common ancestor and are far more alike than different. There is no Nordic or Aryan or Mexican or Muslim or Syrian race. There’s only one race: the human race.
When Lillian Hellman refused to participate in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the 1950s, her letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee contained a now famous quote: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Hellman’s comment should serve as a warning for all those who try to shoehorn scientific evidence into their cultural or political biases—advice that, as we’ll discuss in the last chapter, remains unheeded today.
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