Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,452
By This is the grave of Madison Grant.
A truly horrific American, Grant was born to a rich New York family in 1865. This made him a contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt, born seven years earlier in the same place and class and these two pretty bad people would share a lot of very bad things over a lifetime of badness. Grant spent his early years like his buddy TR–traveling around with his very rich parents, going to the most elite schools, and learning to create a new vision of a masculine American through nature. He went to Yale, graduated in 1887, then went to Columbia Law, but he never practiced much. He was a rich guy who liked the outdoors.
For young men like Grant and Roosevelt, their own generation was largely a failure. These men, and many others of their age and milieu, looked at the Civil War generation (never mind that most of their fathers had bought their way out of the war) as Real Men Who Did Real Things. By this time, the reconciliationist period of Civil War memory was getting under way and so the important experiences–no matter which side you were on–were about white men acting honorably and nobly for their beliefs under tremendous pressure and violence. But their own generation? A bunch of dissolute young men who hung out in the streets and smoked cigarettes and became some functionary in a corporation. How would this prepare the Anglo-Saxon race for the next war? It would not.
And so Grant, along with Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, and many other rich New Yorkers, saw nature as a way to replicate war, or at least the best you could. He was a passionate conversationist, as these other men were. And we benefit from that today. Some of these people–Roosevelt was a good example–focused broadly on conservation laws and such. Others were more about protecting a single place they had learned to love in their travels. So Grinnell is largely responsible for Glacier National Park, including stealing it from the Blackfeet. For Grant, it was preserving the redwood forests of northern California. So it’s easy to see these people as good but it’s also shallow. For if you start investigating the reasons for their interest in conservation, it gets much more disturbing. Hiking, fishing, hunting, and living rough (or “rough” since these dudes often brought servants with them), this was something that needed to be preserved for wealthy Anglo-Saxon white men in order to build up their manhood and prepare for wars that included dominating what today we would call the Global South. Building martial values around white racial superiority was the point and this, as it was the creation of college football, the Marquis of Queensbury rules in boxing, the Boy Scouts, and many other institutions that still play a big role in our lives today. The enemies in this world were not just the corporate leader–though it could be since he would want to despoil those resources for short profit, imagine how a TR would think about a Silas Lapham-type character here–but also Native Americans, Black Americans, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who would use these resources for–*gasp*–subsistence, or in the case of the Native Americans, the same hunting grounds and methods they had used for hundreds of years. This must be stopped if the last wild places were to be saved for the Great Race.
And Madison Grant was obsessed with the idea of the Great Race, which was not just how we define whites today, but northern Europeans. He, Roosevelt, and many of these guys, saw the lower breeding rates of rich women and accused them of “race suicide,” allowing them to be outbred by the Italians and Jews and the like who were destroying America and the western world. So, to speak of Italians here, men like Grant were outraged at their tradition of eating songbirds instead of letting the birds live for the enjoyment of themselves. And of course this had a strong class element as well, since these early conservationists seemingly out of nowhere stopped the long “see it and shoot it” tradition of working Americans’ relationship to the natural world.
As all of this, Grant was a key figure in pushing for hunting laws in New York that created hunting seasons, bag limits, and limits of methods of hunting. While this is all good for preserving wildlife for the future and that needs to be noted, again, we have to explore the actual reasons for these laws and why they were pushed through in order to understand their problematic nature. That is not the same thing as saying we should overturn those laws today. Laws often have unintended consequences and the use of wildlife resources has been significantly democratized over the years. Why would you overturn these laws now? But the idea at the time was to make it so that people who hunted without the license or out of season not only would be breaking the law but would be aggressively policed and often fined or put in jail for it. And since many poor people couldn’t afford the license, assuming they even knew about it, it became another way to privatize resources for the wealthy and police the poors. Grant then went on and co-founded the Save the Redwoods League in 1918 with other super rich people such as Henry Fairfield Osborn.
Grant helped found the Bronx Zoo, the Bronx River Parkway, Glacier National Park, Denali National Park, and headed the American Bison Society. But to be clear, this was all infused with a deeply held set of ideas around eugenics. You simply can’t separate any of these early conservation methods from eugenics. As someone super interested in scientific breeding of animals, he also hoped to breed better humans. He was Secretary of the New York Zoological Society. As such, in 1906, he wanted to put on a further display of apes at the Bronx Zoo. By this, he meant displaying African tribal peoples alongside the apes in their own cages.
So in 1916, Grant decided to put all of this into writing. This became The Passing of the Great Race, far from the only book on eugenics and race theory from Americans, but one of the most famous and influential. It influenced Hitler, among others. Theodore Roosevelt thought it was great. This was an attempt to explore the racial history of Europe based on ideas of “racial hygiene,” He saw the U.S. has having developed out of the great Nordic races, which were being overwhelmed by not only southern Europeans but African-Americans. This meant he was pessimistic about the future of the U.S. unless it adopted strong immigration laws and reinforced the superiority of Anglo-Saxon whites. As this came into the American intellectual world, it was not seen with total regard. Franz Boas loathed it, for example. But Grant then played a critical role in hardening racial law, including the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia, which went further to legislate the one-drop rule.
And to be clear, Roosevelt blurbed the book, calling it “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize.” Hitler wrote Grant a letter, praising the book as “my Bible.”
Am I saying that there is almost no difference between Theodore Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler on race? Yes. And Madison Grant is the connection. I have no idea how Roosevelt would have thought about Hitler in reality–it might have been too much for him. But let’s be clear that they agreed on the basics about race and purity. So did Grant.
Even the environmentalism was infused with all of this stuff. Grant had no interest in anything we might call conservation biology today. He identified himself and his race and his class in the bison and the mountain and the redwood true. Preserving the redwood was preserving the upper racial caste. He didn’t care about worms or grasses or insects. Those were the species to be dominated, the Africans and Latin Americans of the natural world. As Jed Purdy said in a New Yorker article on all this several years ago, “For these conservationists, who prized the expert governance of resources, it was an unsettlingly short step from managing forests to managing the human gene pool.”
Grant died in 1937, ironically without children, since he never married. Race suicide, indeed.
In the aftermath, lawyers for Nazis used The Passing of the Great Race to defend their clients at Nuremberg.
Only in 2021 did the state of California rename the grove of redwoods named for Madison Grant.
Madison Grant is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other conservationists of this extremely problematic ilk, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Russell Burnham is in Three Rivers, California and John Campbell Merriam is in Oakland, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.