Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of madison grant $EFENDINGß THEß-ASTERß2ACE jonathan peter spiro 2009 Contents Madison Grant: The Consensus ix Introduction xi part i. the evolution of scientific racism Chapter 1. Big-Game Hunter 3 Chapter 2. The Bronx Zoo 31 Chapter 3. From Conservation to Preservation 52 Chapter 4. Wildlife Management 73 Chapter 5. From Mammals to Man 88 Chapter 6. The Eugenics Creed 117 part ii. conserving the nordics Chapter 7. The Passing of the Great Race 143 Chapter 8. Grant’s Disciples 167 Chapter 9. Creating the Refuge 196 Chapter 10. Culling the Herd 234 Chapter 11. Saving the Redwoods 266 part iii. extinction Chapter 12. Nordic and Anti-Nordic 297 Chapter 13. The Empire Crumbles 328 Chapter 14. The Ever-Widening Circle: The Third Reich 355 Epilogue. The Passing of the Great Patrician 384 Appendix A: Organizations Served by Madison Grant in an Executive Capacity 391 Appendix B: The Interlocking Directorate of Wildlife Conservation 392 Appendix C: Selected Members of the Advisory Council of the ECUSA 394 Appendix D: Selected Members of the Interlocking Directorate of Scientific Racism 395 Key to Archival Collections 397 Notes 401 Works Cited 443 Index 467 Madison Grant The Consensus 1940s “The high priest of racialism in America.” Gunnar Myrdal 1950s “Intellectually the most important nativist in recent American history.” John Higham 1960s “The nation’s most influential racist.” Mark Haller 1970s “The dean of American racists.” Ethel W. Hedlin 1980s “The most famous of the new scholars of race.” Page Smith 1990s “One of the nation’s foremost racists.” Steven Selden 2000s “The great patriarch of scientific racism.” Matthew Guterl Introduction At the conclusion of World War II, the American Mili- tary Tribunal at Nuremberg indicted Major General Karl Brandt of the Waffen-SS for conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Brandt had been Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and the most im- portant medical authority in the Third Reich. The speci- fic crimes charged in the case of United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. fell into three categories: 1. Implementing a “euthanasia” program in which the sick, the aged, the mentally ill, and the mem- bers of racial minorities were secretly executed in gas chambers. 2. Murdering concentration camp prisoners for the express purpose of collecting their skulls for research. 3. Performing medical experiments on defenseless death camp inmates against their will. These experiments involved sterilizing healthy men and women; forcing subjects to ingest lethal amounts of poison or seawater; performing muti- lating and crippling bone, muscle, and nerve oper- ations; and exposing inmates to typhus, malaria, yellow fever, mustard gas, smallpox, burning phosphorus, freezing temperature, high altitude, and epidemic jaundice. In his defense, Brandt introduced into evidence a book published in Munich in 1925 that had vigorously advo- cated and justified the elimination of inferior peoples. Brandt highlighted for the court excerpts from the book that called on the state to destroy sickly infants and ster- ilize defective adults who were of no value to the commu- nity. Little wonder that upon reading the book, the Führer himself had announced: “This book is my Bible.” The American judges at Nuremberg were well aware that Brandt’s defense ex- hibit was actually the German translation of a work originally published in the United States in 1916: The Passing of the Great Race, written by the prophet of sci- entific racism in America, Madison Grant. Grant’s book held that mankind was divided into a series of hierarchically arranged subspecies, with the blond- haired, blue-eyed Nordics at the top of the ethnological pyramid and the other, less-worthy races falling into place beneath the master race. In the 1920s and 1930s, it had been quite common for congressmen to read aloud from Grant’s book in the U.S. Capitol to argue for restricting the immigration of the “infe- rior” non-Nordic races and even to justify the lynching of African Americans. The Nuremberg judges therefore had to come to terms with the discomfiting irony that the Nazi doctor was tracing the roots of the Third Reich’s eugenics program to a best-selling book by a recognized American scholar. The tribunal nonetheless found Dr. Brandt guilty and sentenced him to death—and the world seemingly passed the same judgment on the philoso- phies espoused in The Passing of the Great Race. In fact, the very name of Madi- son Grant was consigned to the ash heap of history after World War II. But Grant and his ideas have been resurrected in the twenty-first century, where they simmer just below the surface of respectable society and inspire—and are promulgated on the websites of—various white-power groups and anti- immigration organizations. There was a time, however, when Grant and his theories were accorded much greater respect. During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Grant was an important and admired figure who played a prominent role in several mainstream causes in the United States. Grant, for instance, was the leader of the eugenics movement, and in addition to convincing Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s, his influence was crucial in the passage by a majority of the states of coercive sterilization statutes, by which tens of thousands of Americans deemed to be unworthy of procreation were sterilized from the 1930s to the 1970s. Grant also cooperated with southern white racists during this period to ban miscegenation, and he worked with northern black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey to repatriate America’s Ne- groes back to Africa. What is especially fascinating (or some might say distressing) is that even as Madison Grant sought to eliminate inferior races, he endeavored to preserve for posterity our nation’s natural beauty, and along with his friend Theodore Roosevelt he became one of the founders of the conservation movement. Among his many accomplishments, Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, fought for strict gun-control laws, built the Bronx River Parkway, helped to create Glacier and Denali National Parks, and worked tirelessly to protect the whales in the ocean, the bald eagles in the sky, and the pronghorn antelopes on the prairie. xii Introduction In commemoration of his conservation efforts, the world’s tallest tree, located in northern California, was dedicated to Madison Grant in 1931. During the course of his life, Grant worked closely and became friends with a wide array of figures, including powerful politicians (e.g., Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt), important naturalists (Gifford Pin- chot, C. Hart Merriam, George Bird Grinnell), famous explorers (Carl Akeley, Lin- coln Ellsworth, Admiral Peary), major philanthropists (Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), and leading scientists (Robert M. Yerkes, Ed- ward L. Thorndike, and George Ellery Hale). And none of them thought that conservationism was incompatible with scientific racism. Grant dedicated his life to saving endangered fauna, flora, and natural resources; and it did not seem at all strange to his peers that he would also try to save his own endan- gered race. As Grant once explained to paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn: conservation and eugenics were two sides of the same coin, as both were “at- tempts to save as much as possible of the old America.”1 It seems odd, at first glance, that a figure as diverse and influential as Madi- son Grant has not yet been the subject of a biography. Conservationists, of course, are more than a little reticent to acknowledge that one of our progeni- tors was a proto-Nazi. But even books on the history of the eugenics movement, nativism, immigration, or anti-Semitism—which almost always assert that Grant was one of the foremost racists in American history—usually devote just one or two paragraphs to his deeds. And it is always essentially the same one or two paragraphs: frankly, every scholar seems to be copying every previous scholar, in a scribal chain stretching back to the original obituary of Grant that ap- peared in the New York Times in 1937. The main reason for the dearth of scholarship on Grant is that relatives de- stroyed his personal papers after his death in 1937. As this was a man who wrote hundreds of thousands of letters to scores of important persons during his life- time, the loss to historians was immeasurable. It does not help that Grant shunned publicity and almost always refused requests from the press for inter- views. Also, he never deigned to write his memoirs. When his friend William T. Hornaday urged him to write an autobiography, Grant declined on the grounds that “it is too much trouble and besides,” he added mysteriously, “the things of real interest and importance would probably have to be omitted.”2 Moreover, Grant seems particularly cursed by the gods of history. It is some- what uncanny the number of fluke accidents that have befallen archival collec- tions that we know at one time contained records relating to Grant. (One archive, for example, had a flood in which only the Grant documents, stored on the bottom shelves of the basement, suffered damage. In another archive, a well-meaning intern threw out a stack of letters from Grant that she mistakenly thought were copies of originals.) In addition, an inordinately large number of Grant’s friends destroyed their personal papers. (Congressman Albert John- Introduction xiii son, for instance, who was the political leader of the immigration restriction movement and a close associate of Grant, burned his papers when he retired, thus eliminating a treasure trove of material on immigration restriction in gen- eral, and Madison Grant in particular.) Equally frustrating—and certainly more morally egregious—is the fact that Grant’s correspondence with certain key figures who did save their papers has nonetheless “disappeared” from the archives.