16) Madison Grant and environmental eugenics
This is the 16th entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which looks at the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. For a definition of these terms, an intro to the project, and preceding chapters, go here.
The ‘religion’ of eugenics originated in the UK but Britain never passed a law legalizing involuntary sterilization of those deemed unfit. Instead, the UK exported eugenics around the world via events like the first international eugenics congress of 1912. Countries from Brazil to Japan would introduce eugenic laws, and no country was more aggressive in its eugenic policies than the United States, at least until Nazi Germany started to emulate it.
Eugenics was embraced and propagated not just by leading psychologists in American universities, but by the heads of universities, like Charles Eliot at Harvard and David Starr Jordan at Stanford. Eugenics was preached from American pulpits and promoted in ‘fitter families’ contests around the country. And it had a headquarters in the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, which trained 250 eugenic field officers to track down the unfit and trace their family trees for the Office’ vast database.
Thirty US states introduced policies of involuntary sterilization of the unfit, starting with Indiana in 1907, and around 70,000 American citizens were forcibly sterilized. Eugenics was particularly popular in California, which accounted for a third of all sterilizations.
Why was the US so keen on eugenics? We can only speculate. Perhaps the mania for eugenics was connected to the Puritan streak in American culture, which inclines Americans to interfere in each other’s lifestyle choices. Perhaps that same Puritan legacy makes the US prone to collective manias, witch-hunts and moral panics. Eugenics also took off in the US because it fused with scientific racism, and gave a pseudo-scientific legitimacy to old American racial prejudices.
The US, and California in particular, has always been open to new religious movements, and that’s what eugenics was. The American imagination was haunted by the nightmare of degeneration, but also dazzled by the prospect of the evolution of superbeings. As the pioneer of wellness, John Harvey Kellogg, declared: ‘We have wonderful new races of horses, cows and pigs. Why should we not have a new and improved race of men?’ And what better place for the dawning of a new super-race than California?
Finally, eugenics took off in the US because it overlapped with the young conservation movement, and with an American tendency to nature-mysticism. We will examine that overlap in this chapter, looking particularly at the life of Madison Grant, and drawing on the work of his biographer Jonathan Spiro and others who have explored this American brand of eco-fascism.
Gentlemen go hunting
Madison Grant was a wealthy New Yorker from an old American family. He was descended from the first white settlers in North America on both sides of his family, and he was very proud of his family tree. He worked as a lawyer, but really he was a member of the leisure class, and his class’ favourite activity was hunting. Grant reportedly spent at least four months a year hunting big game in remote corners of northern America.
He was a member of an elite hunting society called the Boone and Crockett Club, which was founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1886, and named after the legendary hunters Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. The club gathered in New York for boozy celebrations of their favourite activity. It was more than a sport, it was their cult of rugged masculinity, nature-worship and blood sacrifice. When Theodore Roosevelt left the White House in 1909, for example, he went on a hunting trip to Africa accompanied by friends and family. They killed 11,000 mammals, birds and lizards — Roosevelt and his son alone shot 512 animals, as his scoresheet shows:
But there was a problem. Excessive hunting and logging were threatening their cult. Already by the late 19th century, several species of American fauna had been eliminated, like the great auk and the Carolina parakeet, and other species were nearing extinction, like the grizzly bear, the caribou, the moose, wild turkey, beaver and bison. The nation’s forests were disappearing, its rivers poisoned, its mountains mined, its soil eroding.
Thus the upper-class members of the Boone and Crockett Club became pioneering conservationists, using all their considerable leisure, energy, wealth and political influence to protect their beloved prey and the wild spaces where they hunted. In their minds, they were protecting the spiritual heritage of the nation.
No one was more active in his conservation efforts than Madison Grant. He helped to save the American bison from extinction, he fought to preserve the Californian redwoods, he founded the Bronx Zoo and created the Glacier and Denali National Parks. He also helped to introduce the principle of wildlife and livestock management in national parks, based on the idea that herds needed occasional culling to keep them healthy.
Within the history of the Crockett and Boone Club, you can witness the evolution of the environmental movement in the US — from rich old boys protecting species so they could hunt them, to an understanding of the need for efficient management of natural resources (this was the approach pioneered by Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s head of forestry and a fellow member of the club), to a more spiritual-ecological understanding of the inherent value of the ecosystem and its various species (you find this in the work of Aldo Leopold, also a member of the club).
Environmentalism often overlapped with nature-mysticism (it still does). You see this in the writings of famous early conservationist John Muir, who campaigned for the founding of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks in California. Muir, raised on Wordsworth, felt the Californian Sierras ‘overflowing with the grandeur of God!’ This nature-worship was shared by other early conservationists. Roosevelt, after camping with Muir in Yosemite National Park, said: ‘It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.’
Roosevelt (left) and John Muir in Yosemite
Conservation, racism and eugenics
Several of the pioneering conservationists of the Crockett and Boone club were also leading campaigners for eugenics. Madison Grant, for example, was director of the American Eugenics Society, a founding member of the American arm of the Galton Society, and a member of the International Committee of Eugenics. Gifford Pinchot was a delegate to the first and second International Eugenics Congress, in 1912 and 1921, and a member of the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society from 1925 to 1935. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1913:
Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world! and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.
Conservationists like Madison Grant applied the same ecological thinking to the human species as to any other natural resource — it was a stock that needed to be managed and controlled, for the long-term good of the species and the ecosystem. Grant wrote: ‘the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.’
We saw this way of thinking in the previous chapter, where HG Wells and Julian Huxley called for the scientific management of natural resources including the human species. One finds a similar line of thinking in President Roosevelt’s Natural Conservation Commission of 1909. The Commission had chapters on the efficient long-term management of various natural resources — soil, water, forests, wildlife — and then, in the final chapter, it explored how to manage the ‘national vitality’ of the race. The Commission argued for a range of public health measures, including the ‘unsexing of rapists, criminals, idiots and degenerates generally’.
Protecting the Nordic race
Unlike Wells and Huxley, Grant’s version of eugenics was explicitly and violently racist. In 1916, Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that the ‘Nordic race’ was responsible for most of the achievements of human civilization, including the founding of the United States, but this noble species was now in the process of committing ‘race suicide’ through low birth rates, immigration and miscegenation. The Nordic race needed protecting, just like the bison or the Great Redwood tree. Conservation and racist eugenics were both ‘attempts to save as much as possible of the Old America’, Grant said.
Other American conservationists shared his vision. President Theodore Roosevelt said that preventing ‘race suicide’ was ‘fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country’. Geologist Henry Osborn Sr. wrote: ‘Conservation of that race, which has given us the true spirit of Americanism, is not a matter of racial pride or racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country’.
The link between conservationism and racist eugenics was made clear at the Second Conservation Congress, in 1910. One speaker, Mrs. Scott, the President- General of the Daughters of the American Revolution, insisted:
We, the mothers of this generation — ancestresses of future generations — have a right to insist upon the conserving not only of soil, forest, birds, minerals, fishes, waterways, in the interest of our future home-makers, but also upon the conserving of the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land.
Another link between early conservation and racism can be seen in the history of the Sierra Club, one of the most important environmental organizations in the US. Its founders and early supporters included eugenicists such as Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr and David Starr Jordan; and white supremacists like Joseph Le Conte, who supported the confederacy and argued for the moral legitimacy of slavery (as did Madison Grant).
John Muir himself argued that the Indians of Yosemite should be removed from the park, along with white farmers and miners. In 1894, Muir described the Yosemite Indians as ‘mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous’. They upset the ‘solemn calm’ of the wilderness and ‘seemed to have no right place in the landscape’. In other words, the dirty, noisy natives disturbed the solitary white male’s nature-worship.
Thus we see a difference between the conservationist eugenics of Julian Huxley, HG Wells and other British socialists, and the conservationist eugenics of Madison Grant, who took eugenics in an extremely racist and white supremacist direction.
Grant campaigned to pass three pieces of legislation that dramatically lowered immigration to the US: the literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.
These policies were passed with the help of bogus eugenic science. For example, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 was passed thanks to a study by Carl Brigham, a psychologist at Princeton who developed the IQ test and would later develop the SAT. Brigham claimed his IQ tests proved that the ‘Nordic race’ was the smartest, while other races showed high levels of imbecility, and thus should be kept out of the US. But in fact, his tests examined American cultural literacy with multiple-choice questions like:
Bud Fisher is famous as an — actor — author — baseball player — comic artist
It’s no surprise that new arrivals to the US failed to know who Bud Fisher was. Brigham would later admit his study was flawed. Nonetheless, Madison Grant called the Act ‘one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country’, adding ‘we have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races’.
But Grant didn’t stop there. In 1933, he published The Conquest of a Continent, which claimed to be the first racial history of mankind. Its principal theme, again, was the glorious history and manifest destiny of the ‘Nordic race’, and the need for uncompromising measures to protect its vitality. Grant called for a complete halt to immigration, and the replacement of democracy with a more aristocratic form of government.
Democracy, he wrote, ‘will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types…Mankind emerged from savagery and barbarism under the leadership of selected individuals whose personal prowess, capacity or wisdom gave them the right to lead and the power to compel obedience. Such leaders have always been a minute fraction of the whole…’ Like Nietzsche, Grant believed humanity was naturally divided into a tiny elite of supermen and a mass of submen. For the latter, slavery is actually a kindness, as it introduces a ‘servient race’ to ‘a higher form of civilization’.
Once democracy is disposed of and power is returned to elite, then a far-reaching program of eugenics can be pushed through:
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.
Violent racism is one thing, but calls to replace democracy with aristocracy rarely play well in the US, and the book was a flop. It received a positive review from Aldous Huxley, at least, who declared in New York American that ‘every reader of Mr. Madison Grant’s book must be grateful to him for the way in which he has set forth the facts of American development’.
By that point, the baton had been passed to Nazi Germany, whose eugenics programme took direct inspiration from the US, and particularly from Madison Grant. Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘the highest aim of human existence is . . . the conservation of the race’, sent Grant a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him that ‘the book is my Bible’. The leaders of the Nazi sterilization movement also thanked the state of California, saying without its inspiration ‘it would have been impossible…to undertake such a venture involving some one million people’.
The varieties of eugenics
We’ve looked in this chapter at the overlap between conservation, eugenics, fascism and white supremacy. But as I’ve often emphasized in this project, there are many varieties of eugenics.
By the 1930s, many British eugenicists looked on the United States’ eugenic policies with horror, especially as its scientific racism was being enthusiastically emulated by Nazi Germany. They were giving eugenics a bad name. JBS Haldane wrote: ‘Many of the deeds done in America in the name of eugenics are about as much justified by science as were the proceedings of the inquisition by the gospels.’
The British transhumanists realized that, to save eugenics, it must be distinguished from American and Nazi scientific racism. Julian Huxley was particularly active in opposing race science in the 1930s. In his 1939 pamphlet, ‘Race’ in Europe, he argued that the concept of race makes no biological sense:
How can there be an ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, a ‘German race’, a ‘French race’, and still less a ‘Latin race’ or an ‘Aryan race’? Historically, all the great modern nations are well known to be conglomerations and amalgamations of many tribes, and of many waves of immigration throughout the long periods of time that make up their history… Racialism is a myth, and a dangerous myth.
He proposed a different term — ‘ethnic group’ — to refer to people grouped together by cultural characteristics. After the war, when he was the first president of UNESCO, he commissioned its 1950 statement on race, which further attacked the pseudo-science of racial categories. Angela Saini, author of Superior, a recent book on scientific racism, writes: ‘Whether we realised it or not, all of us thought about race differently after that. Racism was no longer acceptable.’
But although the British transhumanists roundly rejected scientific racism in the 1930s, they remained committed to eugenics, and the idea of managing human evolution. They just discriminated on the grounds of intelligence, not race. And they sometimes advocated a sort of socialist eugenics to make the average human a superbeing.
The 1939 ‘Geneticist Manifesto’, for example, which was signed by Julian Huxley, Herman Muller, JBS Haldane and other left-wing scientists, argued that the best way to improve the genetic stock of the human race was by improving social conditions (as well as birth control, sterilizations, abortions etc). JBS Haldane wrote that the ‘average man or woman’ of the future would be a God. They will
realize all the possibilities that human life has so far shown. He or she will never know a minute’s illness. He will be able to think like Newton, to write like Racine, to paint like the van Eycks, to compose like Bach…We can form no idea whatever of the exceptional men of such a future.
Before we end this first half of the project by examining the Nazis’ spiritual eugenics, we’re going to visit Soviet Russia, to see how the far-left developed its own peculiar brand of spiritual eugenics, one that inspires President Putin today.