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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Conquest of the American Continent," Madison Grant presents a meticulous examination of the interplay between race, civilization, and environmental factors in shaping American demographics and policy throughout history. His literary style fuses empirical research with a passionate narrative, reflecting the early 20th-century discourse on eugenics and nationalism. Grant's work must be contextualized within the socio-political climate of Progressive Era America, where themes of social Darwinism were gaining traction, influencing public policy and societal attitudes towards immigration and race. This book serves as both a historical account and a philosophical treatise, challenging readers to consider the implications of territorial expansion on American identity and ethics. Madison Grant (1865-1932) was an influential American conservationist and a key figure in the early eugenics movement. His pedigree as a member of the elite and his experiences as a conservationist shaped his perspectives on race and biology, prompting him to explore the implications of these ideas on the American landscape. Grant's connections with prominent figures of his time provided him access to influential discussions about race, which ultimately informed the controversial views espoused in this work. For readers interested in the intersections of race, history, and American identity, "The Conquest of the American Continent" offers a provocative lens through which to examine the complexities of territorial expansion and its legacies. Grant's insights compel a critical reevaluation of the historical narrative surrounding the American experience, making it essential reading for scholars and laypersons alike.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Conquest of the American Continent
Table of Contents
Introduction
Framing national history as a struggle over who settles, shapes, and ultimately defines a land, this book advances a grand narrative in which American development is interpreted through the ascent, conflict, and supposed capacities of distinct human groups, turning migration and expansion into the central engine of destiny while presenting identity, culture, and power as products of deep lineage and geography rather than contingency or choice, and inviting the reader—often provocatively—to weigh how belonging, boundary-making, and historical memory are forged across a vast, contested continent.
Madison Grant’s nonfiction study The Conquest of a Continent: Or, The Expansion of Races in America appeared in 1933, amid intense early twentieth-century debates about immigration, national character, and social science. Positioned between the world wars and in the shadow of earlier restrictionist policies in the United States, it belongs to a body of writing that sought sweeping explanations for the nation’s past and prospects. Grant writes as a categorizer and synthesizer, proposing an interpretive history of settlement and expansion. The work’s context—when eugenics and racial typologies held broad, if contested, cultural authority—shapes both its arguments and its reception.
As a reading experience, the book is polemical and programmatic rather than dispassionate, presenting a thesis-driven account that links regional development with the claimed traits of populations identified by ancestry. Grant pursues a continental canvas, moving from broad patterns to particular regions, and employs a confident, declamatory voice that aims to persuade by accumulation of examples and categorical summaries. The style is sweeping, prescriptive, and often deterministic. Readers encounter a narrative that treats American history as a long arc of settlement and stratification, organized around typologies that the author presents as explanatory keys to culture, institutions, and social order.
Central themes include migration and the peopling of North America, the formation of regional identities, and the effort to tether cultural outcomes to heredity. The book asks who counts as foundational to the nation and how boundaries—legal, geographic, and social—are drawn and defended. It is preoccupied with hierarchy and selection, offering a framework in which difference is ranked rather than merely described. In doing so, it touches on questions of assimilation, cohesion, and conflict, and it treats the making of the United States as inseparable from the settlement patterns and imagined capacities of groups defined by the author’s racial classifications.
Modern readers will recognize that the book participates in what is now widely understood as scientific racism: it treats race as biologically fixed, employs rigid typologies, and advances normatively loaded claims about human worth and societal fitness. Contemporary scholarship in genetics, anthropology, and history has rejected these premises, and the work’s racial hierarchy is broadly discredited. Yet as a historical artifact, it illuminates the intellectual climate that normalized such arguments and shows how authority, data, and rhetoric can be marshaled to give exclusionary ideas a veneer of objectivity in public debate.
Approached critically, the text offers insight into the entanglement of social science, policy discourse, and national mythmaking in the early twentieth century. It helps explain the genealogy of concepts—race, nation, and civilization—that continue to shape arguments about belonging and identity. Readers may find value in tracing how sweeping narratives convert selective evidence into grand conclusions, and in testing those claims against contemporary interdisciplinary research. The book thus serves as both case study and cautionary example, prompting reflection on how categories are constructed and how they travel into law, education, and collective memory.
For today’s audience, the book matters less as a guide to American history than as a revealing window onto a worldview that once spoke with institutional confidence. It rewards a careful, historically informed reading that distinguishes description from prescription and notes the moral stakes of its classificatory schemes. Expect a forceful, insistent tone; an ambitious, continent-wide scope; and a thesis that invites rebuttal as much as engagement. Whether read as intellectual history or as a document of its era’s anxieties, it presses enduring questions about how stories of origin and destiny are made—and who gets to tell them.
Synopsis
The Conquest of a Continent (1933) presents Madison Grant’s account of how distinct human groups settled and shaped North America. He frames the narrative in racial terms, defining what he calls Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean stocks, along with other categories used in his period. Drawing on historical episodes, maps, and population estimates, he links migration streams to regional cultures and institutions. The book proceeds chronologically from indigenous populations and first contacts through colonial settlement, expansion to the Pacific, and the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. Throughout, Grant advances the thesis that America’s development followed the expansion and predominance of particular European-derived groups.
Grant opens with a survey of the aboriginal peoples of North America, describing their geographic distribution, subsistence patterns, and political organization on the eve of European contact. He discusses theories of their origins and the environmental constraints shaping different tribes. The narrative emphasizes the scale of depopulation caused by disease and conflict after contact, and the shifting frontier that followed. He characterizes intermarriage as regionally variable and limited in the areas that later formed the United States. This sets the stage for his contention that the continent, as he describes it, became progressively organized by incoming European settlers and their institutions.
The account turns to early European ventures, contrasting Spanish, French, Dutch, and English approaches. Grant describes Spanish missions and military colonies in Florida and the Southwest, and French trading networks along the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and Mississippi, where alliances and intermarriage with indigenous groups were noted. Dutch and Swedish footholds on the mid-Atlantic rivers receive brief treatment as commercial outposts. He highlights differing settlement densities, land policies, and relations with native peoples, arguing that these patterns shaped long-term regional outcomes. This comparative framing introduces his claim that northern European agricultural colonization ultimately prevailed in the temperate zones of North America.
English settlement is presented by region and founding groups. New England’s Puritans, the Chesapeake’s planters, the Quakers and Dutch of the Middle Colonies, and later streams of Scotch-Irish and Germans are outlined with attention to their cultural traits and frontier roles. Grant classifies these populations within his racial typology, depicting the early American core as heavily Nordic with additional elements from other European strains. He links township institutions, common schools, and civic habits to these settlers, while noting the emergence of distinct colonial societies. By the Revolution, he argues, regional differences were established in economy, religion, and local governance.
After independence, the narrative follows the movement over the Appalachians into the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, accelerated by the Louisiana Purchase and public land policies. Grant describes the pioneer advance, conflicts with native nations, and the rise of river and overland routes to the West, including Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Railroads, homestead laws, and mineral rushes are depicted as catalysts for rapid occupation. The author attributes leadership on the frontier to specific northern European strains and maintains that intermixture with indigenous peoples remained limited in most areas. Settlement, in his telling, consolidated a continental nation framed by northern institutions.
The southern plantation system and slavery are treated as a distinct regional formation. Grant outlines the importation of African slaves, the concentration of Black populations in the coastal and lower southern states, and the economic logic of staple agriculture. He relates sectional tensions to differences in labor systems and, in his schema, to underlying population stocks. The Civil War appears as a turning point, followed by Reconstruction and demographic shifts. The book notes internal migration and urbanization of Black Americans and discusses regional race relations in the late nineteenth century, while asserting that legal and social barriers constrained admixture in the South.
Mid-nineteenth-century immigration receives extended analysis. Grant describes the influx of Irish after the famine, their settlement in eastern cities and canals, and the arrival of Germans, including political refugees, who moved into the Midwest and interior towns. He treats religious, linguistic, and occupational patterns, and the formation of ethnic institutions and local politics. Within his racial framework, he assigns these groups to different European categories and evaluates their assimilation in terms of family structure, education, and residence. Industrialization and the growth of railroads and manufacturing are presented as magnets that transformed the demographic balance of the northern states.
The later wave of arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, along with Jewish immigration, is described in terms of numbers, urban concentration, and labor markets. Grant emphasizes fertility differentials, tenement conditions, and the rise of mass politics in industrial cities. He surveys reactions ranging from cultural reform movements to organized restriction, including Asian exclusion, literacy tests, wartime registration, and quota laws after 1921 and 1924. The book advocates selective immigration policies and population measures aligned with its typology, proposing regional distribution and admission standards. This policy section links demographic trends to the author’s expectations for national institutions and leadership.
The book closes by restating its central proposition: that the historical character of the United States reflects the expansion and predominance of certain northern European founding stocks. Grant argues that future stability depends on conserving this composition through immigration restriction and differential settlement, coupled with attention to birthrates and public policy. He summarizes perceived regional strengths and vulnerabilities and projects long-term consequences of alternative demographic choices. As a whole, the work is presented as a racial interpretation of American expansion, synthesizing exploration, colonization, migration, and law into a single narrative framed by the classifications current when it was written.
Historical Context
Published in 1933 in the United States, Madison Grant’s The Conquest of the American Continent surveys North American history from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Its geographic canvas stretches from New Spain and New France to the British colonies and the United States, with attention to Canada and the American West. The interwar context—nativist politics, immigration restriction, and the prestige of eugenics—frames the book’s arguments. Written amid the Great Depression and after the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, it interprets settlement and state-building through a deterministic, racialized lens that was influential in elite policy circles of the period.
Early European expansion set the stage: Spanish colonization after 1492 (Hispaniola, Cuba, New Spain), French settlement at Quebec (1608) and along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, and English footholds at Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620). The French and Indian War (1754–1763), ending with the Treaty of Paris (1763), transferred most French territories east of the Mississippi to Britain and Spain. London’s Proclamation Line of 1763 sought to contain settler expansion west of the Appalachians. The book condenses these developments into a narrative of competing “stocks,” portraying colonial rivalries and alliances with Native nations as a struggle for continental dominance.
The nineteenth-century drive west—often encapsulated by Manifest Destiny—most powerfully shapes the book’s framework. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled U.S. territory; the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) mapped routes to the Pacific. Federal power and private capital then converged through land policy and infrastructure: the Indian Removal Act (1830) forced southeastern Native nations from homelands; the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838–1839) killed an estimated 4,000 of roughly 16,000 deportees. The U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding about 525,000 square miles (present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming); the Gadsden Purchase (1853) added 29,670 square miles. The Homestead Act (1862) distributed 160-acre parcels, while the transcontinental railroad’s completion at Promontory Summit, Utah (May 10, 1869), integrated markets and accelerated settlement. Conflict and dispossession intensified: the Plains Wars culminated in the Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890), where U.S. troops killed roughly 250–300 Lakota. The 1890 Census declared the frontier “closed,” formalizing the geographic end of contiguous settlement advance. Grant’s book treats these processes as inevitable and hierarchized, framing expansion, warfare, and removals as expressions of historical necessity rather than contingent policy choices. By aligning state-building with racial competition, it transforms specific acts—treaties, statutes, and military campaigns—into evidence for a deterministic account of continental conquest that mirrors Gilded Age and Progressive Era ideologies.
Immigration and nativism form a central backdrop. Mid-nineteenth-century arrivals from Ireland and German states (1840s–1860s) provoked the Know-Nothing movement (American Party, 1850s). After 1880, growing numbers came from Southern and Eastern Europe, while Asian migration was curtailed by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Geary Act (1892). Federal restriction hardened with the Immigration Act of 1917 (literacy tests, Asiatic Barred Zone), Emergency Quota Act (1921), and Johnson-Reed Act (1924), which instituted national-origin quotas. Grant’s book endorses the restrictionist turn, recasting demographic change as a civilizational problem and using immigration law as validation for his hierarchical schema.
The Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877) reshaped law and citizenship: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery, defined birthright citizenship, and protected voting rights. After the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow regimes spread, enforced by violence and upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). These transformations and retrenchments defined the political order in which western expansion continued. The book refracts this era through a racialist frame, downplaying emancipation’s civic revolution while reading postwar settlement and regional politics as outcomes of supposed “stock” differences rather than institutional choices and power struggles.
The eugenics movement furnished the book’s conceptual apparatus. The Eugenics Record Office (founded 1910 at Cold Spring Harbor) collected pedigrees to justify heredity-based policies; Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907, and by the early 1930s over two dozen states authorized sterilization. Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld Virginia’s statute, while Army Alpha/Beta tests (1917–1918) popularized contested intelligence rankings. International eugenics congresses convened in London (1912) and New York (1921, 1932). Grant, already known for The Passing of the Great Race (1916), extends these ideas in The Conquest, recoding settlement history as a biological saga to bolster contemporaneous restriction and hierarchical governance.
The closing of the frontier and anxieties about national vigor shaped policy and myth. The 1890 Census declared no continuous frontier line, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 thesis argued that frontier conditions forged American institutions. Conservation politics, led by figures like Theodore Roosevelt (Boone and Crockett Club, 1887; Antiquities Act, 1906), reframed land use and national identity. World War I (U.S. entry 1917) intensified “100% Americanism,” while the Red Scare (1919–1920) and the Klan’s 1920s resurgence linked nativism to social control. Grant’s book synthesizes these currents, mixing environmental and demographic metaphors to present nation-building as a selective, exclusionary project.
As a social-political intervention of its time, the book functions less as neutral history than as a brief for demographic engineering. It exposes the era’s entanglement of policy with race science: immigration quotas, removal and allotment policies toward Native peoples, and sterilization laws are rationalized as historical necessities. By translating conquest and exclusion into the language of natural order, it critiques liberal egalitarianism and legitimizes class and racial hierarchies. Read critically, it reveals the major issues of the period—the violence of expansion, the juridical construction of citizenship, and the mobilization of pseudoscience to police boundaries of belonging.
The Conquest of the American Continent
INTRODUCTION
The character of a country depends upon the racial character of the men and women who dominate it. I welcome this volume as the first attempt to give an authentic racial history of our country, based on the scientific interpretation of race as distinguished from language and from geographic distribution.
The most striking induction arising through research into the prehistory of man is that racial characters and predispositions, governing racial reactions to certain old and new conditions of life, extend far back of the most ancient civilizations. For example, the characteristics which Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to his heroes and to his imaginary gods and goddesses were not the product of the civilization which existed in his time in Greece; they were the product of creative evolution long prior even to the beginnings of Greek culture and government. This creative principle—the most mysterious of the recently discovered phenomena of evolution, to which I have devoted the researches of nearly half a century—is that racial preparation for various expressions of civilization—art, law, government, etc.—is long antecedent to these institutions.
Ripley missed this point in his superb researches into the racial constitution of the peoples of Europe. Grant partly based his Passing of the Great Race on Ripley's researches, but did not carry out the purely anatomical analysis to its logical end-point, namely, that moral, intellectual, and spiritual traits are just as distinctive and characteristic of different races as are head-form, hair and eye color, physical stature, and other data of anthropologists.
In the present volume, which I regard as an entirely original and essential contribution to the history of the United States of America, Grant goes much further and in tracing back the racial origins of the majority of our people he lays the foundation for an understanding of the peculiar characteristics of American civilization, which, all agree, is of a very new type, something the world has never before seen.
Grant supports Ripley in his distinction between three great European stocks—Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean. He gives very strong additional reasons for one of his own earlier inductions, namely, that the Aryan language was invented by primitive peoples of the Nordic race before its dispersal, in the third millennium B.C., from the Steppe country in the southeast of Russia. This superb and flexible language doubtless aided the Nordic race in its conquest of Europe, in its ever-westward journey across the Atlantic, in its Anglo-Saxon occupation of our continent, in its stamping of Anglo-Saxon institutions on American government and civilization. We all recognize that, like all other languages, Aryan is purely a linguistic and not a racial term, just as French is spoken equally by the Norman Nordics of the north of France, by the Alpines of the center, and by the Mediterraneans of the south.
My faith is unshaken in the ultimately beneficial recognition of racial values and in the stimulating and generous emulation aroused by racial consciousness. Let this stimulation be without prejudice to other racial values—which should be duly recognized and evaluated—values we Anglo-Saxons do not naturally possess. Moreover, I set great store by the great mass of documentary evidence assembled by Grant in the present volume. I think it explodes the bubble, of the opponents of racial values, that they are merely myths. The theme of the present work is that America was made by Protestants of Nordic origin and that their ideas about what makes true greatness should be perpetuated. That this is a precious heritage which we should not impair or dilute by permitting the entrance and dominance of alien values and peoples of alien minds and hearts.
Finally I would like to define clearly my own position on these very important racial questions which arouse so much heat, so much bad feeling, so much misrepresentation. I object strongly to the assumption that one race is "superior" or "inferior" to another, just as I object to the assumption that all races are alike or even equal. Such assumptions are wholly unwarranted by facts. Equality or inequality, superiority and inferiority, are all relative terms. For example, around the Equator the black races and certain of the colored and tinted races are "superior" to the white races and may be capable under certain conditions of creating great civilizations. In a torrid climate and under a burning sun witness the marvellous achievements of the Mediterranean race in Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, Cambodia, and India between 4000 B.C. and 1250 A.D. Or, coming nearer home to the cool mountain regions, witness the great achievements of the Alpine race in engineering, in mathematics, and in astronomy.
It follows that racial superiority and inferiority are partly matters of the intellectual and spiritual evolution which guides one race after another into periods of great ascent too often followed by sad and catastrophic decline. In this as in all other interminglings of science and sentiment, let us not extenuate nor write in malice, but always in broad-mindedness and a truly generous spirit.
It is with the greatest pleasure that I have written a few words endorsing this book as the first racial history of America, or, in fact, of any nation. I stand with the author not only in nailing his colors to the mast but in giving an entirely indisputable historic, patriotic, and governmental basis to the fact that in its origin and evolution our country is fundamentally Nordic.
Henry Fairfield Osborn.
August, 1933.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, the author desires to express his appreciation of the assistance of his research associate, Doctor Paul Popenoe, who collected authorities and statistics during an intensive study lasting over four years.
He also desires to express his appreciation for the sympathy and aid of Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, and of Charles Stewart Davison, Esq. The latter carefully revised the text and made many valuable suggestions.
The author owes a special debt of gratitude to Doctor Clarence G. Campbell for much assistance and to Doctor Harry H. Laughlin for many of the statistics and analyses used in this book. His thanks are due also to Captain John B. Trevor, whose masterly study of the early population has been a great help, as have the studies of Messrs. Howard F. Barker and Marcus L. Hansen. He also wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Mr. A.E. Hamilton.
Colonel William Wood, of Quebec, has been of great assistance in the data given regarding the origin of the French "Habitants" in Canada.
The writer is also obligated to Professor E. Prokosch, of Yale University, for his assistance on several critical points.
The American Geographical Society and Mr. Ray R. Platt were instrumental in providing the maps used in this volume and the author takes this opportunity to express his thanks to them both.
I FOREWORD
American public sentiment regarding the admission of aliens has undergone recently a profound change. At the end of the nineteenth century a fatuous humanitarianism prevailed and immigrants of all kinds were welcomed to "The Refuge of the Oppressed[1]," regardless of whether they were needed in our industrial development or whether they tended to debase our racial unity.
The "Myth of the Melting Pot" was, at that time, deemed by the unthinking to be a part of our national creed.
This general attitude was availed of and encouraged by the steamship companies, which felt the need of the supply of live freight. The leading industrialists and railroad builders were equally opposed to any check on the free entry of cheap labor. Restrictionists were active, but in number they were relatively few, until the World War aroused the public to the danger of mass migration from the countries of devastated and impoverished Europe.
As a result of the problems raised by the World War, a stringent immigration law was passed in 1924 and is now in force. This law1 has for its basic principle a provision that the total number of persons allowed to enter the United States from countries to which quotas have been assigned shall be so apportioned as to constitute a cross section of the then existent white population of the United States. This is the so-called National Origins provision[2].
A controversy immediately arose over this new basis, as it was to the interest of every national and religious group of aliens now here to exaggerate the importance and size of its contribution to the population of our country, especially in Colonial times. This was particularly true of immigrants from those nations, such as Germany and Ireland, the quotas of which were greatly reduced under the new law. The purpose of this opposition was to warp public opinion in regard to the merits of various national groups and to exaggerate the non-Anglo-Saxon elements in the old Colonial population.
This book is an effort to make an estimate of the various elements, national and racial, existing in the present population of the United States and to trace their arrival and subsequent spread.
In the days of our fathers the white population of the United States was practically homogeneous. Racially it was preponderantly English and Nordic. At the end of the Colonial period we had a population about 90 per cent Nordic and over 80 per cent British in origin. In spite of the intrusion of two foreign elements of importance, both nevertheless chiefly Nordic, our population and our institutions remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon down to the time of the Civil War. Since that time there has been an ever-increasing tendency to change the nature of this once "American" people into a mosaic of national, racial, and religious groups. The question to what extent this transformation has gone deserves careful study.
The draft lists for the American army in the large cities during the World War showed an amazing collection of foreign names. These lists are most dramatic indications of the substantial modifications of the original Anglo-Saxon character of the population which have occurred. A vivid illustration is found in a war poster issued by an enthusiastic clerk of foreign extraction in the Treasury Department during one of the appeals for Liberty Loans. A Howard Chandler Christy girl of pure Nordic type was shown pointing with pride to a list of names, saying "Americans All." The list was:
DuBoisSmithO'BrienCeikaHauckePappandrikopulousAndrassiVillottoLevyTurovichKowalskiChriczaneviczKnutsonGonzales
Apparently the one native American, so far as he figures at all, is hidden under the sobriquet of Smith, and there is possibly the implied suggestion that the beautiful lady was herself the product of this remarkable mélange.
Similar foreign names are beginning to appear and sometimes predominate in the list of college graduates, successful athletes, and minor politicians. In the words of the late President Theodore Roosevelt, we are becoming a polyglot boarding house.
The modification of the religious complexion of the nation also is very striking. In Colonial times Americans were almost unanimously Protestants. Now the claim is made that one in seven is a Catholic and one in thirty a Jew. To what extent this change is due to immigration and to what extent to the differential birth rate should be carefully considered.
In dealing with racial admixture, we should be certain that we are not considering merely nationality, religion, or language. In popular thought there is such a racial entity as the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, or the Italian. These, however, are not racial, but national terms. In a few cases of still unmixed peoples, like those of Sweden and Norway, nationality, language, religion, and race coincide. But in Germany, for instance, the Germans along the North Sea and the Baltic coasts are Protestant Nordics, while those of Bavaria, of Austria, and of other parts of the south are Catholic Alpines. Italy north of the Apennines is largely Alpine, slightly mixed with Nordic, while Naples and Sicily in the South are purely Mediterranean by race. In France, where there is a mixed Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine population, a single language and an ancient tradition have created an intense unity of national feeling, and in recent decades there has been a marked transfer of political control from the Nordic to the Alpine element, as evidenced by the names and features of the present political leaders. In Belgium there are two languages, in Switzerland four, to say nothing of the medley of languages in the old Austrian Empire. Only in Switzerland is there national unity, in spite of a diversity of tongue.
In America the events of the last hundred years, especially the vast tide of immigration, have greatly impaired our purity of race and our unity of religion and even threatened our inheritance of English speech. If our English language is saved it will be due in no small degree to the growing world power of the language itself and of its literature, as well as to the world-wide ocean commerce of Great Britain and her overseas empire.
In the United States today this unity of language is vigorously opposed by the foreign-language press. In all probability, however, this foreign press is doomed to die out as the older generation of immigrants passes from the scene. The fact that this non-English press represents a score or more of different languages makes it impossible for it in the long run to oppose successfully the English language.
In Canada the fact that the French language is officially recognized in Quebec and, for that matter, in the Parliament at Ottawa, makes the problem there more difficult. It may be here noted that the French language as spoken in Quebec is sneered at and ridiculed by the European French. The use of French speech in Quebec, like the attempted use of Erse in Ireland and Czechish in Bohemia, is merely serving to keep those speaking such language out of touch with modern literature and culture.
The absurdity of attempting to revive an obsolete language such as Erse is shown by its lack of literature of modern type. Sir Harry H. Johnston once said to the author that Erse was a perfectly good language, except for two facts—first, that nobody could pronounce it and, second, that nobody could spell it.
In Louisiana French is still spoken by the Creoles of New Orleans and by the French and Negro mixture called "Cajans." This linguistic diversity will in due course of time also disappear. More serious is the retention and use in New Mexico of the Spanish language by its Mexican-Indian population. Few people know that New Mexico is officially bi-lingual. Sooner or later this must be stopped, as it has greatly hindered the development of the State.
As to race, as distinct from language, religion, and nationality, we must consider our country today as being in large part a heterogeneous mixture of racial groups and individuals. Since America's first duty is to herself and to the people already here, she must weigh the effect upon the present, as well as upon the future, of such racial admixture as has already occurred and which promises to spread indefinitely.
A striking example of this was shown during the Washington Bicentennial in 1932, when some historians, in their efforts to placate the assertive groups of aliens in our midst, endeavored to show the existence in the colonies of substantial groups of these same aliens. For instance, they claimed that most of the Revolutionary personages of Irish descent were the same as the South Irish Catholics of today. That is wholly error. The so-called "Irish" of the Revolution were Ulster Scots either from the Lowlands of Scotland or from North England, who came to the colonies by way of the North of Ireland after having lived there for two or three generations. These Ulster Scots were reinforced by Protestant English who emigrated from Leinster and both were widely removed, religiously and culturally, from the South Irish Catholics, who did not come to this country in any numbers until the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840's drove them across the seas.
To take an example: In the Convention of 1787, which formulated the Constitution, certain individuals were put down as "Irish." These were Protestant Ulster Scots. In the Senate of today, a few of the senators are put down as "Irish." These are South Irish Catholics. To use the same term for these two different types of population is erroneous. They were widely separated religiously, racially, and culturally. The same thing is true of that part of our population which was referred to as "French." The French of the American Revolution and of our Constitutional Convention were Huguenot French, who, though few in numbers, took a prominent part in public affairs at the time of the Revolution. They were, for the most part, Nordic and were English-speaking. They were a distinguished group which had nothing whatever in common with the "Habitant" French of Quebec, who are Catholic Alpines. To call them both "French" is erroneous. A similar, but less marked distinction, exists between the North Germans and the Palatines, and they both differ from the South Germans in America, who are mostly Catholic Alpines.
In this connection it should be clearly understood that in discussing the various European races we are concerned only with such individuals of those races as came to America, and not with the populations which remained in the original homeland.
In Colonial times the Anglo-Saxon American avoided the danger arising from intermarriage with natives, which ruined the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World and threatened the destruction of the French colonies in Quebec. There was some crossbreeding between Englishmen and Indian squaws along the frontier, but the offspring was everywhere regarded as an Indian, just as a mulatto in the English colonies was regarded as belonging to the Negro race. This racial prejudice kept the white race in America pure, while its absence and the scarcity of white women ultimately destroyed European supremacy in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
At the time of the settlement of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the Roman Church was dominant. Its chief motive was to save souls for heaven rather than to perpetuate the control of Europeans. That church, therefore, favored marriage of the Europeans, Spaniard and Portuguese, with the native women and considered the children to be white. The same was true of the mixtures of French and Indians in Quebec, and the church recognized the resulting half-breed offspring as French and not native.
This policy of the church was aided by the lack of race dignity which is even today found sometimes among the French, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese. For example, in the South of Portugal there was a large Negro slave element introduced in the sixteenth century which is now absorbed into the surrounding population. Similar conditions exist in South Italy, where there is a substantial Negroid element, probably descended from the Negro slaves introduced by the Romans from Africa some two thousand years ago.
One of the unfortunate results of racial mixture, or miscegenation between diverse races, is disharmony in the offspring, and the more widely separated the parent stocks, the greater is this lack of harmony likely to be in both mental and physical characters. Herbert Spencer, in response to a request for advice, writing in 1892 to the Japanese statesman, Baron Keneko Kentaro, stated this biological fact very clearly when he said:
"To your remaining question respecting the intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is 'now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians' and which you say is 'one of the most difficult problems,' my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the intermarriages of human races and by the interbreeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is inevitably a bad one in the long run.... When, say of the different varieties of sheep, there is an interbreeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one—there arises an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings—the Eurasians in India, the half-breeds in America, show this. The physiological basis of this experience appears to be that any one variety of creature in course of many generations acquires a certain constitutional adaptation to its particular form of life, and every other variety similarly acquires its own special adaptation. The consequence is that, if you mix the constitution of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither—a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions whatever. By all means, therefore, peremptorily interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners."
The relative diminution of Anglo-Saxon blood in America and the present check to the expansion of the British Empire are due partly to a curious sentimental quality of the Anglo-Saxon mind, the effect of which is almost suicidal.
It is a striking fact that tragic and even fatal consequences may arise from the noblest motives. The abolition of the obsolete institution of slavery occupied the minds of some of the best men of the nineteenth century and serfdom was only stamped out finally at immense cost to the finest elements of our Anglo-Saxon stock. Looking back over these events at a distance of a half-century there appear many considerations which were neglected by those who were too close to the conflict to see into the future. Let us consider the consequences in the world at large of the abolition of slavery and of the breaking down of the barrier maintained by that institution between the Whites and the Blacks.
For instance, in the British Empire, the abolition of slavery a hundred years ago contributed in large part to the decline and finally to the almost complete disappearance of pure Nordic blood in the West Indies, where previously there had been rich and flourishing colonies of white men employing black slaves.
In South Africa the revolt and outtrekking of Boers beyond the Vaal River were due largely to the abolition of slavery and to the sentimental treatment of the slaves by the Home Government. The passions engendered at that time ultimately led to two bloody and useless wars between the Nordic peoples of South Africa.
Other European nations suffered similarly from the abolition of slavery in their American colonies. Undiluted white blood has almost disappeared in Jamaica and Puerto Rico, while the natives of the Virgin Islands are nearly all Negroes and Mulattoes.
The most tragic result of the loss of White control of the Blacks was shown in the history of Haiti and Santo Domingo. The freeing of the slaves and the disturbances resulting from the French Revolution had as a consequence the massacre or exile of practically every white person in the island. The French doctrinaires were responsible to some extent for this. Even Lafayette was President of the "Société des Amis des Noirs." Today the black inhabitants of this great island have reverted almost to barbarism.
The islands and coasts of the entire Caribbean Sea with much of the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico are fast becoming Negro Land and apparently in the near future the European element will be more and more in a hopeless minority.
In the United States we have a startling example of the effect of sentimentalism upon Nordic survival. The North was entirely right in endeavoring to keep slavery out of Kansas and the new States of the West, to that extent avoiding the color problem there. The sentimental interference with slavery, however, on the part of the Northern Abolitionists helped to precipitate the bloody Civil War and to destroy a very large portion of the best stock of the nation, especially in the South. The Southerners also were greatly to blame for their utter folly in seceding as a means of maintaining their peculiar institution, as they termed it.
If the question of slavery had been left alone, the issue of the preservation of the Union would have been postponed for at least a generation. In time the overwhelming numbers and wealth of the North would have made any serious question of secession an absurdity. As a consequence of the Civil War hundreds of thousands of men of Nordic stock were cut off in the full vigor of manhood, who otherwise would have lived to propagate their kind and populate the West. Besides this, slavery as an institution was outside of the pale of civilization long before the Civil War and it would have been peacefully abolished in a few decades through economic causes.
The Blacks themselves were raised by slavery from sheer savagery to a feeble imitation of white civilization, and they made more advance in America in two centuries than in as many thousand years in Africa. The presence of slaves, however, was injurious to the Whites. Serfdom has been a curse wherever it has flourished in the New World and it has had a profoundly demoralizing effect on the masters.
American democracy at the start rested on a base of population that was, as already said, homogeneous in race, religion, tradition, and language, and in a relative equality of wealth. All these features are things of the past and democracy has virtually broken down in spite of the fatuous ecstasy which characterizes the utterances of sentimentalists, who even claimed that the World War was fought "to make the World Safe for Democracy."
It seems strange that this so-called liberal point of view is so short-sighted that we have in our midst today organizations and groups who, with the best intentions, are encouraging the Negro within and the black, brown, and yellow men without, to dispute the dominance over the world at large of Christian Europeans and Americans. Throughout the world, there has gone forth a challenge to white supremacy and this movement in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere has been fostered by the Christian missionaries. It has even gone so far that it is openly stated that any assertion of race supremacy, or even discussion of race distinctions in this country, should be suppressed in the interests of the spread of Christianity in foreign countries—notably Japan. In the long run, however, these doctrines will work great injury to the Protestant churches if they persist in taking an anti-national point of view. While many of the individual ministers are well-meaning and kindly, their education is undeveloped in world affairs and their advice in such matters, on which they are uninstructed, is often very dangerous.
Sentimental sympathy for other races of mankind is manifest today all over the world, but especially among Anglo-Saxons[1q]. It received a great impetus from President Wilson's doctrine of the right of Self Determination. The fruits of this doctrine can be seen in the rise of so-called nationalism everywhere, as in Ireland, Bohemia, Poland, Egypt, the Philippines, China, and India.
The racially suicidal result of all this is the undermining of the control of the Nordic races over the natives. The upper classes and, in many cases, the peasantry in eastern Germany, for example, are Nordics. One of the tragic consequences of the World War was the taking of political power in this region from the Nordics and transferring it, under the guise of democratic institutions, to Alpine Slavs. In Soviet Russia, also, through the massacre and exile of the Nordic upper classes, political power has passed into the hands of Alpines, exactly as in France during the Revolution the Alpine lower classes destroyed the Nordic nobility and assumed control of the state. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which followed killed off an undue proportion of Nordics in France and are said to have greatly shortened the stature of the French soldiers.
The revolt against European control, especially in the Orient, is becoming more and more pronounced. As said above it has been encouraged unintentionally by the missionaries, who, in educating the natives, succeed only in arousing them to assert their equality with the European races. Probably the greatest tragedy in the world today is the corrosive jealousy of the fair skin of the white races felt by those whose skin is black, yellow, or brown. The world will hear more of this as the revolt of the lower races spreads.
One of the manifestations of this jealousy of the fair skin of the Nordics is shown in those numerous cases where members of the colored races, or even dark-skinned members of the Nordic race regard the possession of a blonde woman as an assertion and proof of race equality. This has been true historically since the earliest times. It is more than ever in evidence at the present day.
All the foregoing points to the value of a critical consideration of the racial composition of the original thirteen colonies and an analysis of the situation as it is today.
1 This bill was framed and passed through the efforts of Honorable Albert Johnson of Washington. "A new Declaration of Independence," it has been happily called.
II THE CRADLE OF MANKIND
Man is an immensely ancient animal.[2q] Over a million years have elapsed since he first made fire and more millions since he became a bipedal prehuman. He left the forests, at the latest, at the end of the Miocene, not less than seven million years ago and ventured out into the plains of Central Asia as a savage, powerful, clever biped, hunting in packs, or by sheer wit securing his prey single handed by pitfalls and other devices, the invention of which marks the development of growing intelligence.
Man's initial differentiation from his simian ancestry probably began when he came down from the trees and began to walk erect. The hand was then liberated from its use as an instrument of locomotion and was devoted primarily to defense, attack, discovery, and invention. It is by means of the opportunities afforded by the hand that the human brain has evolved into man's most important factor in racial survival.
Clear evidence of man's remote arboreal ancestry is offered by his stereoscopic or double-eyed vision. The great majority of ground animals, especially those living in the forest, have eyes on the sides of their heads; but in man's arboreal ancestors, by the recession of the intervening nasal and facial bones, the eyes were brought around to the front of the face. The resulting stereoptic vision enabled him to judge distance far more accurately than most mammals. Such power of determining distance is of course vital to an arboreal animal. Failure to judge accurately the length of a leap from branch to branch would be fatal.
One often hears it stated that man has lost his sense of smell; but this sense was probably never better developed within the human period than it is now. In the trees a sense of smell is not of much value. The monkey can sit on a branch and jabber with impunity at the leopard on the ground below. To forest animals, like the deer or boar, however, the sense of smell is the surest protection against attack and is much more highly developed than the sense of sight, which latter is often quite feeble. In fact, in the thick jungle it is almost useless (and at "black night" completely so).
Eurasia, where it is probable that mankind originated, was the greatest land mass on the globe in Tertiary times. Modern Europe and North Africa formed relatively small peninsulas in the extreme west of this Tertiary land mass. It is probably from Eurasia that man spread out to the uttermost parts of the habitable globe, carrying with him his language and such cultural features as had developed at the time of each successive migration. No race or language or cultural invention seems to have entered Eurasia from adjoining land areas. All went out. None came in. While the original center of dispersal of the Hominidæ[3] or human family was probably Eurasia, it was at a later date also the center of the evolution of the higher types of man.
