In response to the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month, President Donald Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides. On many sides.” Trump’s failure to directly condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis came on the heels of his travel ban on people from seven Muslim-predominant countries, and his desire to build a wall on our southern border to keep out the “bad hombres.”
Though it has dominated headlines, few are noticing that identical events followed a book published 100 years ago. It was arguably the most dangerous scientific treatise ever written. And in it is the one phenomenon that ties all of these events together.
In 1916, Madison Grant, a New York City conservationist and lawyer, published The Passing of the Great Race. It was an extension of popular eugenic theories first proposed by Francis Galton, a British scientist and half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that selective breeding shouldn’t be limited to animals. He argued that if we could breed faster horses, we should be able to breed better people, too. He claimed that traits like intelligence, loyalty, bravery, and honesty were also inherited.
In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant took Galton’s theories one step further. Using population movements, facial features, and pseudoscience, Grant argued that undesirable traits were passed not only from one family member to another, but within certain ethnic backgrounds and religious groups.
America, he argued, was committing “race suicide.” No longer were immigrants coming from “desirable” parts of northwestern Europe like the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany; they were coming from lesser countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. First published in the spring of 1916, The Passing of the Great Race was reprinted in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1930, 1932, and 1936, selling more than a million copies—arguably, one of the most popular scientific tracts in history.
