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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History," Madison Grant presents a controversial examination of race as a dynamic force shaping European history. Published in 1916, this work employs a blend of historical narrative and pseudo-scientific analysis, reflecting the eugenics movement prevalent in early 20th-century America. Grant's literary style is characterized by a polemical tone, utilizing a mix of sociological argumentation and historical anecdotes, which captivates the reader while simultaneously challenging deeply ingrained societal beliefs. Grant posits that the success of Western civilization is fundamentally tied to the preservation of what he deems the 'Nordic' race, presenting a stark warning against the perceived dangers of racial mixing. Madison Grant, an American lawyer and prominent figure in the eugenics movement, wrote this book within a context marked by a burgeoning interest in racial purity and anthropology. His social standing and involvement with organizations such as the American Museum of Natural History influenced his ideologies, imbuing his arguments with a veneer of scientific legitimacy that would later foster debate and controversy. Grant's perspectives reveal the unsettling intersection of science, ideology, and social policy in the early 20th century. This book is essential for those seeking to understand the historical underpinnings of racial theory and its pervasive influence on modern thought. Although the ideas presented are contentious, they offer a critical lens through which to analyze the social constructs surrounding race. Readers interested in history, sociology, and the evolution of racial ideologies will find Grant's work both provocative and enlightening. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history
Table of Contents
Introduction
A stark manifesto of early twentieth-century scientific racism, this book seeks to explain European history through a rigid hierarchy of supposed races. Its central tension pits an alleged biological destiny against the currents of social change, warning that mixture and migration threaten civilizational achievement. The argument proceeds by treating ancestry as a master key to politics, culture, and power, casting the past as a contest among fixed types. The result is a sweeping, deterministic vision that promises clarity while narrowing complexity. Readers confront a work that presents itself as diagnosis and remedy, asserting that salvation lies in protecting a particular lineage. It is a worldview as confident as it is exclusionary, banking its authority on the rhetoric of science.
The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant is a nonfiction treatise first published in 1916 in the United States. Emerging from the Progressive Era’s eugenics milieu, it attempts to synthesize historical narrative with physical anthropology as it was then conceived. Later revised editions followed in subsequent years. The book does not unfold as a story so much as an argument, organizing examples and sweeping claims to advance its thesis. Its intended scope is continental, ranging across European regions and diasporas, and its assertions are framed as scientific assessments of population history and destiny.
As a reading experience, the work is assertive and taxonomic, proposing to classify European peoples into distinct hereditary types and to interpret culture through biology. Grant links bodily measurements, geographic clustering, and migration patterns to shifts in political power, insisting that long-term outcomes flow from ancestry. The prose is confident, often polemical, and designed to persuade rather than to invite dialogue, creating a mood of urgency about perceived decline. Readers encounter typologies, measurements, and confident inferences that aim to lend authority, while the voice alternates between the register of a survey and that of a manifesto concerned with preservation.
Key themes include racial determinism, the privileging of heredity over environment, and anxiety about demographic change. The book advances a hierarchical view of human variation and treats cultural achievements as the expression of a narrowly defined lineage. It reiterates period assumptions about purity, degeneration, and national character, linking them to policy prescriptions such as selective immigration and differential reproduction. The narrative builds its case by appealing to putative biological permanence and by warning that mixture will erode civilization. In tracing European history through these lenses, it also reveals how categories can be reified and then deployed to sort peoples into fixed ranks.
Today, the book is broadly regarded as a foundational text of scientific racism and eugenics, and its core claims have been discredited by modern genetics and anthropology. Contemporary scholarship emphasizes the social construction of race, the complexity of population histories, and the ethical limits of using biology to explain culture or justify policy. Reading this work now is less about seeking reliable knowledge than about understanding how authority, data, and rhetoric can be assembled to naturalize inequality. It offers a case study in the appearance of science—typologies, confident generalization—masking ideological commitments and political aims that were consequential in their time.
Within its early twentieth-century context, the book participated in transatlantic conversations about heredity, nationhood, and social engineering. It circulated among advocates of eugenics and immigration restriction, and its arguments were invoked in public debates in the United States and beyond. The work exemplifies how intellectual currents flowed between academic discourse, policymaking, and popular media, shaping perceptions of who belonged and on what terms. Recognizing this entanglement helps readers situate the text not as an isolated curiosity but as part of a broader movement that sought legitimacy through science, even as critics contested its premises and communities experienced its harms.
For modern readers, engaging the book critically raises questions that remain urgent: How do ideas about difference acquire the patina of science? What safeguards distinguish inquiry from ideology? The text’s confident essentialism and calculus of worth offer a cautionary lens for evaluating claims about identity, inheritance, and social order. It can spur reflection on the responsibilities of readers and researchers, the interpretive limits of data, and the ease with which fear can be framed as necessity. Approached with care, it becomes a document for learning how past certainties were built—and how to recognize and resist their echoes in the present.
Synopsis
Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race presents a racial interpretation of European history, aiming to classify the continent’s peoples and trace their historical roles. Written in the 1910s and revised thereafter, the book organizes Europe into three primary racial groups—Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean—defined by physical anthropology. Grant uses measures such as skull shape, stature, pigmentation, and geographic distribution, drawing on contemporary anthropometric studies and maps. He proposes that these biological groupings, rather than nationalities or languages, underlie historical developments. The work’s central thesis is that racial composition decisively influences civilization’s character and fate, and that specific lineages have been diminishing over time.
Grant outlines the Nordic race as tall, long-headed, and light-pigmented, attributing to it leadership and exploratory tendencies; the Alpine as round-headed, stocky, and widely distributed in central Europe; and the Mediterranean as long-headed, darker-pigmented, and prominent in early civilization. He emphasizes that language and culture often cross racial lines and cannot serve as reliable markers of biological ancestry. Using cephalic indices and color maps, he charts the European distribution of these groups and their mixtures. Throughout, he maintains that social institutions and historical outcomes reflect underlying hereditary patterns more than environmental or cultural influences, establishing a framework for the chapters that follow.
Surveying deep prehistory, Grant connects Mesolithic and Neolithic populations to ancestral European types, discussing the spread of agriculture and early settlements. He attributes the rise of Mediterranean coastal civilizations to peoples he identifies as mainly Mediterranean, with later overlays from northern groups. He addresses the advent of Indo-European languages, stressing that linguistic affiliation does not equate to racial identity. Bronze Age movements, trade, and metallurgical advances are described as channels for racial admixture. The narrative sets up a long arc in which migrations, conquests, and population shifts alter the proportions of Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans in different regions, shaping subsequent historical trajectories.
Moving into classical and post-classical eras, Grant interprets the Celtic, Germanic, and related northern peoples as carriers of Nordic traits into western and central Europe. He describes the Roman world as originally Mediterranean in population, later absorbing northern elements through military recruitment, colonization, and settlement. The decline of the Empire and the subsequent migrations are framed as demographic turning points, mixing northern and southern stocks. In this framework, elites and ruling strata in several regions are often characterized as disproportionately Nordic, while rural and urban masses display more mixed or non-Nordic profiles. These patterns, he argues, influence governance, law, and cultural forms.
Grant’s account of medieval and early modern Europe links feudal institutions, knighthood, and territorial consolidation to northern aristocratic lineages. He follows the spread of northern elements through the British Isles, northern France, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany and Scandinavia, while noting Alpine prominence in central uplands and Mediterranean continuity in the south. He interprets the expansion of the Norse, the formation of states, and subsequent cultural developments as reflecting shifts in racial composition. Throughout, he maintains that social hierarchies correlate with hereditary differences, and that repeated waves of conquest, colonization, and settlement alter the balance between Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean populations.
Addressing the modern period, Grant argues that urbanization, industrialization, and warfare disrupted earlier selection pressures. He contends that large-scale conflicts, including the First World War, disproportionately removed individuals from what he identifies as higher-value stocks, while public health measures and social reforms reduced mortality among others, producing what he terms dysgenic trends. He criticizes egalitarian and humanitarian ideas for, in his view, obscuring hereditary differences and encouraging policies that invert natural selection. Differential birth rates, migration to cities, and changing family structures are presented as accelerating the decline of certain lineages and altering Europe’s racial composition.
Grant devotes significant attention to the United States, presenting colonial-era settlement as predominantly northern European and later waves as increasingly southern and eastern European. He describes immigration, urban crowding, and industrial labor patterns as reshaping the nation’s demographic makeup. The book challenges the concept of the melting pot, arguing that assimilation cannot erase hereditary distinctions and that indiscriminate mixture diminishes traits he associates with earlier settlers. He links crime, poverty, and political shifts to demographic change, framing these developments as evidence of underlying racial dynamics. This American case study serves to illustrate, in his view, broader principles about population composition and national outcomes.
From his premises, Grant advances policy recommendations centered on eugenics and immigration control. He calls for restricting or selecting immigration to favor groups he deems compatible with existing populations, for protecting what he considers valuable hereditary lines, and for measures aimed at limiting reproduction among others. He argues that environment cannot substitute for heredity and that social policy should align with biological realities. Proposals include differential immigration quotas, encouragement of certain family formations, and, in some formulations, coercive interventions. He presents these as conservation measures for national vitality, drawing analogies to wildlife and forest management to argue for deliberate stewardship of human populations.
The book concludes by warning that, without deliberate action, the distinctive characteristics he attributes to the Nordic element will wane, leading to a transformation of European and American societies. Grant reiterates that civilizations depend on the continuity of their founding stocks and that historical rises and declines mirror shifts in hereditary composition. He frames his study as a synthesis of anthropology, history, and demography, supported by maps, measurements, and comparative analysis. The overarching message is a call to preserve specific lineages through policy and social norms, presented as essential for maintaining cultural achievements and political institutions in the face of modern demographic change.
Historical Context
Published in New York in 1916, The Passing of the Great Race emerges from the Progressive Era United States, a moment when reform zeal intersected with rising nativism and the prestige of biological determinism. Although the book surveys European prehistory and modern history through a racial lens, its intellectual “setting” is metropolitan institutions—museums, learned societies, and policy committees—centered in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. There, elites debated immigration, public health, and urbanization amid unprecedented mass arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe (1880–1924). The text’s frame reflects a world shaped by industrial capitalism, urban crowding, and anxieties over democracy’s expansion, filtered through transatlantic currents of anthropometry and hereditarian thought.
The American eugenics movement, rising from the 1900s to the 1930s, is the book’s most immediate context. Francis Galton coined “eugenics” in 1883; in the United States, Charles B. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910, with Harry H. Laughlin serving as its superintendent. Indiana enacted the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907; by 1930, more than 30 states had sterilization statutes, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld such laws in Buck v. Bell (1927). New York’s scientific scene—anchored by the American Museum of Natural History, which hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921 under Henry Fairfield Osborn—gave the movement public authority. Grant’s book distilled this milieu into a sweeping call for “Nordic” preservation, endorsing segregation, immigration restriction, and selective breeding as public policy.
Immigration restriction crystallized eugenic and nativist ideas into law. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) supplied a vast statistical rationale for ranking immigrant “stocks,” favoring older Northern and Western European sources over newer Southern and Eastern European arrivals. Congress overrode President Wilson’s veto to enact a literacy test in 1917; the Emergency Quota Act (1921) capped national-origin inflows at 3% of each group’s 1910 U.S. population. The Johnson–Reed Act (1924) tightened quotas to 2% of the 1890 census, set an overall cap near 150,000 annually, barred most Asian immigration, and created the U.S. Border Patrol. Laughlin served as the House committee’s “expert eugenics agent,” and legislators, including Rep. Albert Johnson and Sen. David Reed, cited eugenic literature. Grant’s text, widely circulated among restrictionists, furnished language and typologies used to legitimize the quota regime.
World War I (1914–1918) and its aftermath supplied urgency to demographic anxieties. Europe lost roughly 9 million soldiers, and the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic killed tens of millions worldwide, accelerating fears of population decline among elites. The United States’ entry in 1917 intensified conscription, surveillance, and suspicion of “enemy aliens.” After the Armistice, the 1919 Red Scare and Palmer Raids linked radicalism to immigrants, while the reborn Ku Klux Klan (from 1915) grew to millions of members in the early 1920s. Grant’s book interprets the war as dysgenic selection and frames postwar turbulence as validation for defensive, heredity-based nation-building, urging the protection of a purported “Nordic” core against dilution.
The work draws on 19th- and early 20th-century racial science. Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) elaborated hierarchical “Aryan” narratives. Anthropologists such as Joseph Deniker and William Z. Ripley (The Races of Europe, 1899) partitioned Europeans into “Nordic,” “Alpine,” and “Mediterranean” types, often using Anders Retzius’s cephalic index. During World War I, Robert M. Yerkes’s Army Alpha/Beta tests (1917) and Henry H. Goddard’s immigration testing were misused to rank groups by innate intelligence. Grant borrows these schemes and data points, presenting cranial metrics and test results as objective evidence for European racial stratification and for policy prescriptions privileging Northern Europeans.
Jim Crow segregation and racial violence formed a domestic backdrop. After Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), most states enforced segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. The Great Migration, beginning around 1916, reshaped cities, while the Red Summer of 1919 saw deadly riots, including Chicago (July–August 1919), where 38 people were killed and hundreds injured. Public spectacles that naturalized hierarchy, such as the 1906 display of Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo under director William T. Hornaday, drew protests from Black clergy in New York. Grant, a leader in New York’s elite conservation and museum networks, inhabited institutions implicated in such racial displays; his book echoes contemporaneous fears of “race mixing” and urban demographic change.
The book’s transatlantic afterlife intersected with German racial nationalism. A German translation appeared in 1925, circulating among scholars and ideologues aligned with Hans F. K. Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) and, later, Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930). Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf (1925), praised the United States’ 1924 quota law as a model of racial statecraft, and Nazi jurists studied American sterilization statutes before enacting the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Grant’s Nordicism resonated with these currents, helping to normalize biological racism across the Atlantic even as scholars increasingly challenged its premises.
As a social and political critique, the book consolidates elite anxieties into a program that portrays mass immigration, urban democracy, and racial egalitarianism as civilizational threats. It exposes how policymaking in the 1910s–1920s could rely on pseudo-scientific metrics to naturalize hierarchy, legitimizing coercive interventions such as quotas and sterilization. Its arguments illuminate class-inflected fears of social disorder—coded as heredity—and the fusion of conservationist language with reproductive politics. By insisting that citizenship be tethered to lineage, it critiques inclusive democracy while revealing the era’s structural injustices: racial segregation, xenophobia, and unequal access to rights masked as “biological” necessity.
The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history
PREFACE
European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race; yet race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government.
Quite independently and unconsciously the author, never before a historian, has turned this historical sketch into the current of a great biological movement, which may be traced back to the teachings of Galton and Weismann, beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century. This movement has compelled us to recognize the superior force and stability of heredity, as being more enduring and potent than environment. This movement is also a reaction from the teachings of Hippolyte Taine among historians and of Herbert Spencer among biologists, because it proves that environment and in the case of man, education, have an immediate, apparent and temporary influence, while heredity has a deep, subtle and permanent influence on the actions of men.
Thus the racial history of Europe, which forms the author’s main outline and subject and which is wholly original in treatment, might be paraphrased as the heredity history of Europe. It is history as influenced by the hereditary impulses, predispositions and tendencies which, as highly distinctive racial traits, date back many thousands of years and were originally formed when man was still in the tribal state, long before the advent of civilization.
In the author’s opening chapters these traits and tendencies are commented upon as they are observed to-day under the varying influences of migration and changes of social and physical environment. In the chapters relating to the racial history of Europe we enter a new and fascinating field of study, which I trust the author himself may some day expand into a longer story. There is no gainsaying that this is the correct scientific method of approaching the problem of the past.
The moral tendency of the heredity interpretation of history is for our day and generation and is in strong accord with the true spirit of the modern eugenics movement in relation to patriotism, namely, the conservation and multiplication for our country of the best spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical forces of heredity; thus only will the integrity of our institutions be maintained in the future. These divine forces are more or less sporadically distributed in all races, some of them are found in what we call the lowest races, some are scattered widely throughout humanity, but they are certainly more widely and uniformly distributed in some races than in others.
Thus conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country, of a true sentiment which is based upon knowledge and the lessons of history rather than upon the sentimentalism which is fostered by ignorance. If I were asked: What is the greatest danger which threatens the American republic to-day? I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.
July 13, 1916.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
History is repeating itself in America at the present time and incidentally is giving a convincing demonstration of the central thought in this volume, namely, that heredity and racial predisposition are stronger and more stable than environment and education.
Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes, as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe. In a recent journey in northern California and Oregon I noted that, in the faces of the regiments which were first to leave for the city of New York and later that, in the wonderful array of young men at Plattsburg, the Anglo-Saxon type was clearly dominant over every other and the purest members of this type largely outnumbered the others. In northern California I saw a great regiment detrain and with one or two exceptions they were all native Americans, descendants of the English, Scotch and north of Ireland men who founded the State of Oregon in the first half of the nineteenth century. At Plattsburg fair hair and blue eyes were very noticeable, much more so than in any ordinary crowds of American collegians as seen assembled in our universities.
It should be remembered also that many of the dark-haired, dark-eyed youths of Plattsburg and other volunteer training camps are often three-fourths or seven-eighths Nordic, because it only requires a single dark-eyed ancestor to lend the dark hair and eye color to an otherwise pure Nordic strain. There is a clear differentiation between the original Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean strains; but where physical characters and characteristics are partly combined in a mosaic, and to a less degree are blended, it requires long experience to judge which strain dominates.
With a race having these predispositions, extending back to the very beginnings of European history, there is no hesitation or even waiting for conscription and the sad thought was continually in my mind in California, in Oregon and in Plattsburg that again this race was passing, that this war will take a very heavy toll of this strain of Anglo-Saxon life which has played so large a part in American history.
War is in the highest sense dysgenic rather than eugenic. It is destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally and physically. For the world’s future the destruction of wealth is a small matter compared with the destruction of the best human strains, for wealth can be renewed while these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever. In the new world that we are working and fighting for, the world of liberty, of justice and of humanity, we shall save democracy only when democracy discovers its own aristocracy as in the days when our Republic was founded.
December, 1917.
CHARTS AND MAPS
CHARTS
Chronological Table
Pages
132
–133
Classification of the Races of Europe
Facing page
123
Provisional Outline of Nordic Invasions and Metal Cultures
Facing page
191
MAPS
Maximum Expansion of Alpines with Bronze Culture, 3000–1800 B. C.
Facing page
266
Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic Nordics, 1800–100 B. C.
Facing page
268
Expansion of the Teutonic Nordics and Slavic Alpines, 100 B. C.–1100 A. D.
Facing page
270
Present Distribution of European Races
Facing page
272
INTRODUCTION
The following pages are devoted to an attempt to elucidate the meaning of history in terms of race; that is, by the physical and psychical characters of the inhabitants of Europe instead of by their political grouping or by their spoken language. Practically all historians, while using the word race, have relied on tribal or national names as its sole definition. The ancients, like the moderns, in determining ethnical origin did not look beyond a man’s name, language or country and the actual information furnished by classic literature on the subject of physical characters is limited to a few scattered and often obscure remarks.
Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them at sharp angles and correspond closely with the divisions of social cleavage. The great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that of socialism, for it naturally tends to reduce the relative importance of environment. Those engaged in social uplift and in revolutionary movements are therefore usually very intolerant of the limitations imposed by heredity. Discussion of these limitations is also most offensive to the advocates of the obliteration, under the guise of internationalism, of all existing distinctions based on nationality, language, race, religion and class. Those individuals who have neither country, nor flag, nor language, nor class, nor even surnames of their own and who can only acquire them by gift or assumption, very naturally decry and sneer at the value of these attributes of the higher types.
Democratic theories of government in their modern form are based on dogmas of equality formulated some hundred and fifty years ago and rest upon the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development. Philanthropy and noble purpose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence[1], the document which to-day constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. The men who wrote the words, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” were themselves the owners of slaves and despised Indians as something less than human. Equality in their minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea. The words “that all men are created equal” have since been subtly falsified by adding the word “free,” although no such expression is found in the original document and the teachings based on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and amaze the men who formulated the Declaration.
It will be necessary for the reader to divest his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man, is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language. Furthermore, race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.
The antiquity of existing European populations, viewed in the light thrown upon their origins by the discoveries of the last few decades, enables us to carry back history and prehistory into periods so remote that the classic world is but of yesterday. The living peoples of Europe consist of layer upon layer of diverse racial elements in varying proportions and historians and anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent strata and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types.
Aboriginal populations from time immemorial have been again and again swamped under floods of newcomers and have disappeared for a time from historic view. In the course of centuries, however, these primitive elements have slowly reasserted their physical type and have gradually bred out their conquerors, so that the racial history of Europe has been in the past, and is to-day, a story of the repression and resurgence of ancient races.
Invasions of new races have ordinarily arrived in successive waves, the earlier ones being quickly absorbed by the conquered, while the later arrivals usually maintain longer the purity of their type. Consequently the more recent elements are found in a less mixed state than the older and the more primitive strata of the population always contain physical traits derived from still more ancient predecessors.
Man has inhabited Europe in some form or other for hundreds of thousands of years and during all this lapse of time the population has been as dense as the food supply permitted. Tribes in the hunting stage are necessarily of small size, no matter how abundant the game and in the Paleolithic period man probably existed only in specially favorable localities and in relatively small communities.
In the Neolithic and Bronze periods domesticated animals and the knowledge of agriculture, although of primitive character, afforded an enlarged food supply and the population in consequence greatly increased. The lake dwellers of the Neolithic were, for example, relatively numerous. With the clearing of the forests and the draining of the swamps during the Middle Ages and, above all, with the industrial expansion of the last century the population multiplied with great rapidity. We can, of course, form little or no estimate of the numbers of the Paleolithic population of Europe and not much more of those of Neolithic times, but even the latter must have been very small in comparison with the census of to-day.
Some conception of the growth of population in recent times may be based on the increase in England. It has been computed that Saxon England at the time of the Conquest contained about 1,500,000 inhabitants, at the time of Queen Elizabeth the population was about 4,000,000, while in 1911 the census gave for the same area some 35,000,000.
The immense range of the subject of race in connection with history from its nebulous dawn and the limitations of space, require that generalizations must often be stated without mention of exceptions. These sweeping statements may even appear to be too bold, but they rest, to the best of the writer’s belief, upon solid foundations of facts or else are legitimate conclusions from evidence now in hand. In a science as recent as modern anthropology, new facts are constantly revealed and require the modification of existing hypotheses. The more the subject is studied, the more provisional even the best-sustained theory appears, but modern research opens a vista of vast interest and significance to man, now that we have discarded the shackles of former false viewpoints and are able to discern, even though dimly, the solution of many of the problems of race. In the future new data will inevitably expand and perhaps change our ideas, but such facts as are now in hand and the conclusions based thereupon are provisionally set forth in the following chapters and necessarily often in a dogmatic form.
The statements relating to time have presented the greatest difficulty, as the authorities differ widely, but the dates have been fixed with extreme conservatism and the writer believes that whatever changes in them are hereafter required by further investigation and study, will result in pushing them back and not forward in prehistory. The dates given in the chapter on “Paleolithic Man” are frankly taken from the most recent authority on this subject, “The Men of the Old Stone Age,” by Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn and the writer desires to take this opportunity to acknowledge his great indebtedness to this source of information, as well as to Mr. M. Taylor Pyne and to Mr. Charles Stewart Davison for their assistance and many helpful suggestions.
The author also wishes to acknowledge his obligation to Prof. William Z. Ripley’s “The Races of Europe,” which contains a large array of anthropological measurements, maps and type portraits, providing valuable data for the present distribution of the three primary races of Europe.
The American Geographical Society and its staff, particularly Mr. Leon Dominian, have also been of great help in the preparation of the maps herein contained and this occasion is taken by the writer to express his appreciation for their assistance.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FOURTH REVISED EDITION
The addition of a Documentary Supplement to the latest revision of this book has been made in response to a persistent demand for “authorities.”
The author has endeavored to make the references and quotations in this Supplement very full and, so far as possible, interesting in themselves as well as entirely distinct from the text, which stands substantially unchanged, and the authorities quoted are not necessarily the sources of the views herein expressed but more often are given in support of them. The contents of the book, since its first appearance, have had the advantage of the criticism of virtually every anthropologist in America and in England, France and Italy—many of whom have furnished the author with valuable corroborative material. Some of this material appears in the notes, but accessible authorities and the classical writers have been given the more prominent place. The supplement covered, as first prepared, substantially every statement in the book, but much was afterward omitted because it would seem that some things could be taken without proof.
“The Passing of the Great Race,” in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow-Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot[2]” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.
Another of the results has been the publication in America and Europe of a series of books and articles more or less anthropological in character which have sustained or controverted its main theme. The new definition of race and the controlling rôle played by race in all the manifestations of what we call civilization are now generally accepted even by those whose political position depends upon popular favor.
It was to be expected that there would be bitter opposition to those definitions of race which are based on physical and psychical characters that are immutable, rather than upon those derived from language or political allegiance, that are easily altered.
To admit the unchangeable differentiation of race in its modern scientific meaning is to admit inevitably the existence of superiority in one race and of inferiority in another. Such an admission we can hardly expect from those of inferior races. These inferior races and classes are prompt to recognize in such an admission the very real danger to themselves of being relegated again to their former obscurity and subordinate position in society. The favorite defense of these inferior classes is an unqualified denial of the existence of fixed inherited qualities, either physical or spiritual, which cannot be obliterated or greatly modified by a change of environment. Failing in this, as they must necessarily fail, they point out the presence of mixed or intermediate types, and claim that in these mixtures, or blends as they choose to call them, the higher type tends to predominate. In fact, of course, the exact opposite is the case and it is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other. The result is a total lack of continuity of purpose, an intermittent intellect goaded into spasmodic outbursts of energy. Physical and psychical disharmonies are common among crosses between Indians, negroes and whites, but where the parents are more closely related racially we often obtain individuals occupying the border-land between genius and insanity.
The essential character of all these racial mixtures is a lack of harmony—both physical and mental—in the first few generations. Then, if the strain survives, it is by the slow reversion to one of the parent types—almost inevitably the lower.
The temporary advantage of mere numbers enjoyed by the inferior classes in modern democracies can only be made permanent by the destruction of superior types—by massacre, as in Russia, or by taxation, as in England. In the latter country the financial burdens of the war and the selfish interests of labor have imposed such a load of taxation upon the upper and middle classes that marriage and children are becoming increasingly burdensome.
The best example of complete elimination of a dominant class is in Santo Domingo. The horrors of the black revolt were followed by the slow death of the culture of the white man. This history should be studied carefully because it gives in prophetic form the sequence of events that we may expect to find in Mexico and in parts of South America where the replacement of the higher type by the resurgent native is taking place.
In the countries inhabited by a population more or less racially uniform the phenomenon of the multiplication of the inferior classes fostered and aided by the noble but fatuous philanthropy of the well-to-do everywhere appears. Nature’s laws when unchecked maintain a relatively fixed ratio between the classes, which is greatly impaired in modern society by humanitarian and charitable activities. The resurgence of inferior races and classes throughout not merely Europe but the world, is evident in every despatch from Egypt, Ireland, Poland, Rumania, India and Mexico. It is called nationalism, patriotism, freedom and other high-sounding names, but it is everywhere the phenomenon of the long-suppressed, conquered servile classes rising against the master race. The late Peloponnesian War in the world at large, like the Civil War in America, has shattered the prestige of the white race and it will take several generations and perhaps wars to recover its former control, if it ever does regain it. The danger is from within and not from without. Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.
One of the curious effects of democracy is the unquestionable fact that there is less freedom of the press than under autocratic forms of government. It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France. In the United States also, during the war, we were unable to obtain complete measurements and data, in spite of the self-devotion of certain scientists, like Drs. Davenport, Sullivan and others. This failure was due to lack of time and equipment and not to racial influences, but in the near future we may confidently expect in this country strenuous opposition to any public discussion of race as such.
The rapidly growing appreciation of the importance of race during the last few years, the study of the influence of race on nationality as shown by the after-war disputes over boundaries, the increasing complexity of our own problems between the whites and blacks, between the Americans and Japs, and between the native Americans and the hyphenated aliens in our midst upon whom we have carelessly urged citizenship, and, above all, the recognition that the leaders of labor and their more zealous followers are almost all foreigners, have served to arouse Americans to a realization of the menace of the impending Migration of Peoples through unrestrained freedom of entry here. The days of the Civil War and the provincial sentimentalism which governed or misgoverned our public opinion are past, and this generation must completely repudiate the proud boast of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in “race, creed, or color,” or else the native American must turn the page of history and write:
PART IRACE, LANGUAGE AND NATIONALITY
IRACE AND DEMOCRACY
Failure to recognize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater distinction between race and language and the easy assumption that the one is indicative of the other have been in the past serious impediments to an understanding of racial values. Historians and philologists have approached the subject from the viewpoint of linguistics and as a result we are to-day burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, the Caucasian and, perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the Celtic race.
Man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe not in kind but only in degree of development and an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge of other mammals, especially the primates. Instead of such essential training, anthropologists often seek to qualify by research in linguistics, religion or marriage customs or in designs of pottery or blanket weaving, all of which relate to ethnology alone. As a result the influence of environment is often overestimated and overstated at the expense of heredity.
The question of race has been further complicated by the effort of old-fashioned theologians to cramp all mankind into the scant six thousand years of Hebrew chronology as expounded by Archbishop Ussher[3]. Religious teachers have also maintained the proposition not only that man is something fundamentally distinct from other living creatures, but that there are no inherited differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.
It is, therefore, necessary at the outset for the reader to appreciate thoroughly that race, language and nationality are three separate and distinct things and that in Europe these three elements are found only occasionally persisting in combination, as in the Scandinavian nations.
To realize the transitory nature of political boundaries one has but to consider the changes which have occurred during the past century and as to language, here in America we hear daily the English language spoken by many men who possess not one drop of English blood and who, a few years since, knew not one word of Saxon speech.
As a result of certain religious and social doctrines, now happily becoming obsolete, race consciousness has been greatly impaired among civilized nations [1q]but in the beginning all differences of class, of caste and of color marked actual lines of race cleavage.
In many countries the existing classes represent races that were once distinct. In the city of New York and elsewhere in the United States there is a native American aristocracy resting upon layer after layer of immigrants of lower races and these native Americans, while, of course, disclaiming the distinction of a patrician class and lacking in class consciousness and class dignity, have, nevertheless, up to this time supplied the leaders in thought and in the control of capital as well as of education and of the religious ideals and altruistic bias of the community.
In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education and integrity. How this scheme of administration will ultimately work out remains to be seen but from a racial point of view it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.
The tendency in a democracy is toward a standardization of type and a diminution of the influence of genius. A majority must of necessity be inferior to a picked minority and it always resents specializations in which it cannot share. In the French Revolution the majority, calling itself “the people,” deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type and something of the same sort was in a measure done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands, with a resultant loss to the growing nation of good race strains, which were in the next century replaced by immigrants of far lower type.
In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him. We are now engaged in destroying the privilege of wealth; that is, the reward of successful intelligence and industry and in some quarters there is developing a tendency to attack the privilege of intellect and to deprive a man of the advantage gained from an early and thorough classical education. Simplified spelling is a step in this direction. Ignorance of English grammar or classic learning must not, forsooth, be held up as a reproach to the political or social aspirant.
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, but as long as the tradition of their predominance persisted they were able to use the brute strength of the unthinking herd as part of their own force and were able to direct at will the blind dynamic impulse of the slaves, peasants or lower classes. Such a despot had an enormous power at his disposal which, if he were benevolent or even intelligent, could be used and most frequently was used for the general uplift of the race. Even those rulers who most abused this power put down with merciless rigor the antisocial elements, such as pirates, brigands or anarchists, which impair the progress of a community, as disease or wounds cripple an individual.
True aristocracy or a true republic is government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any population. Human society is like a serpent dragging its long body on the ground, but with the head always thrust a little in advance and a little elevated above the earth. The serpent’s tail, in human society represented by the antisocial forces, was in the past dragged by sheer strength along the path of progress. Such has been the organization of mankind from the beginning, and such it still is in older communities than ours. What progress humanity can make under the control of universal suffrage, or the rule of the average, may find a further analogy in the habits of certain snakes which wiggle sideways and disregard the head with its brains and eyes. Such serpents, however, are not noted for their ability to make rapid progress.
A true republic, the function of which is administration in the interests of the whole community—in contrast to a pure democracy, which in last analysis is the rule of the demos or a majority in its own interests—should be, and often is, the medium of selection for the technical task of government of those best qualified by antecedents, character and education, in short, of experts.
To use another simile, in an aristocratic as distinguished from a plutocratic or democratic organization the intellectual and talented classes form the point of the lance while the massive shaft represents the body of the population and adds by its bulk and weight to the penetrative impact of the tip. In a democratic system this concentrated force is dispersed throughout the mass. It supplies, to be sure, a certain amount of leaven but in the long run the force and genius of the small minority is dissipated, and its efficiency lost. Vox populi, so far from being Vox Dei, thus becomes an unending wail for rights and never a chant of duty.
Where a conquering race is imposed on another race the institution of slavery often arises to compel the servient race to work and to introduce it forcibly to a higher form of civilization. As soon as men can be induced to labor to supply their own needs slavery becomes wasteful and tends to vanish. From a material point of view slaves are often more fortunate than freemen when treated with reasonable humanity and when their elemental wants of food, clothing and shelter are supplied.
The Indians around the fur posts in northern Canada were formerly the virtual bond slaves of the Hudson Bay Company, each Indian and his squaw and pappoose being adequately supplied with simple food and equipment. He was protected as well against the white man’s rum as the red man’s scalping parties and in return gave the Company all his peltries—the whole product of his year’s work. From an Indian’s point of view this was nearly an ideal condition but was to all intents serfdom or slavery. When through the opening up of the country the continuance of such an archaic system became an impossibility, the Indian sold his furs to the highest bidder, received a large price in cash and then wasted the proceeds in trinkets instead of blankets and in rum instead of flour, with the result that he is now gloriously free but is on the highroad to becoming a diseased outcast. In this case of the Hudson Bay Indian the advantages of the upward step from serfdom to freedom are not altogether clear. A very similar condition of vassalage existed until recently among the peons of Mexico[6], but without the compensation of the control of an intelligent and provident ruling class.
In the same way serfdom in mediæval Europe apparently was a device through which the landowners repressed the nomadic instinct in their tenantry which became marked when the fertility of the land declined after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Years are required to bring land to its highest productivity and agriculture cannot be successfully practised even in well-watered and fertile districts by farmers who continually drift from one locality to another. The serf or villein was, therefore, tied by law to the land and could not leave except with his master’s consent. As soon as the nomadic instinct was eliminated serfdom vanished. One has but to read the severe laws against vagrancy in England just before the Reformation to realize how widespread and serious was this nomadic instinct. Here in America we have not yet forgotten the wandering instincts of our Western pioneers, which in that case proved beneficial to every one except the migrants.
While democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side, an aristocracy may be equally injurious whenever, in order to purchase a few generations of ease and luxury, slaves or immigrants are imported to do the heavy work. It was a form of aristocracy that brought slaves to the American colonies and the West Indies and if there had been an aristocratic form of governmental control in California, Chinese coolies and Japanese laborers would now form the controlling element, so far as numbers are concerned, on the Pacific coast.
It was the upper classes who encouraged the introduction of immigrant labor to work American factories and mines and it is the native American gentleman who builds a palace on the country side and who introduces as servants all manner of foreigners into purely American districts. The farming and artisan classes of America did not take alarm until it was too late and they are now seriously threatened with extermination in many parts of the country. In Rome, also, it was the plebeian, who first went under in the competition with slaves but the patrician followed in his turn a few generations later.
The West Indian sugar planters flourished in the eighteenth century and produced some strong men; to-day from the same causes they have vanished from the scene.
During the last century the New England manufacturer imported the Irish and French Canadians and the resultant fall in the New England birth rate at once became ominous. The refusal of the native American to work with his hands when he can hire or import serfs to do manual labor for him is the prelude to his extinction and the immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.
Thus the American sold his birthright in a continent to solve a labor problem. Instead of retaining political control and making citizenship an honorable and valued privilege, he intrusted the government of his country and the maintenance of his ideals to races who have never yet succeeded in governing themselves, much less any one else.
Associated with this advance of democracy and the transfer of power from the higher to the lower races, from the intellectual to the plebeian class, we find the spread of socialism and the recrudescence of obsolete religious forms. Although these phenomena appear to be contradictory, they are in reality closely related since both represent reactions from the intense individualism which a century ago was eminently characteristic of Americans.
IITHE PHYSICAL BASIS OF RACE
In the modern and scientific study of race we have long since discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden somewhere in Asia, to spread later over the earth in successive waves.
It is a fact, however, that Asia was the chief area of evolution and differentiation of man and that the various groups had their main development there and not on the peninsula we call Europe.
Many of the races of Europe, both living and extinct, did come from the East through Asia Minor or by way of the African littoral, but most of the direct ancestors of existing populations have inhabited Europe for many thousands of years. During that time numerous races of men have passed over the scene. Some undoubtedly have utterly vanished and some have left their blood behind them in the Europeans of to-day.
We now know, since the elaboration of the Mendelian Laws of Inheritance[4], that certain bodily characters, such as skull shape, stature, eye color, hair color and nose form, some of which are so-called unit characters, are transmitted in accordance with fixed laws, and, further, that various characters which are normally correlated or linked together in pure races may, after a prolonged admixture of races, pass down separately and form what is known as disharmonic combinations. Such disharmonic combinations are, for example, a tall brunet or a short blond; blue eyes associated with brunet hair or brown eyes with blond hair.
The process of intermixture of characters has gone far in existing populations and through the ease of modern methods of transportation this process is going much further in Europe and in America. The results of such mixture are not blends or intermediate types, but rather mosaics of contrasted characters. Such blends, if any, as ultimately occur are too remote to concern us here.
The crossing of an individual of pure brunet race with an individual of pure blond race produces in the first generation offspring which are distinctly dark. In subsequent generations, brunets and blonds appear in various proportions but the former tend to be much the more numerous. The blond is consequently said to be recessive to the brunet because it recedes from view in the first generation. This or any similar recessive or suppressed trait is not lost to the germ plasm, but reappears in later generations of the hybridized stock. A similar rule prevails with other physical characters.
In defining race in Europe it is necessary not only to consider pure groups or pure types but also the distribution of characters belonging to each particular subspecies of man found there. The interbreeding of these populations has progressed to such an extent that in many cases such an analysis of physical characters is necessary to reconstruct the elements which have entered into their ethnic composition. To rely on averages alone leads to misunderstanding and to disregard of the relative proportion of pure, as contrasted with mixed types.
Sometimes we find a character appearing here and there as the sole remnant of a once numerous race, for example, the rare appearance in European populations of a skull of the Neanderthal type, a race widely spread over Europe 40,000 years ago, or of the Cro-Magnon type, the predominant race 16,000 years ago. Before the fossil remains of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon races were studied and understood such reversional specimens were considered pathological, instead of being recognized as the reappearance of an ancient and submerged type.
These physical characters are to all intents and purposes immutable and they do not change during the lifetime of a language or an empire. The skull shape of the Egyptian fellaheen, in the unchanging environment of the Nile Valley, is absolutely identical in measurements, proportions and capacity with skulls found in the pre-dynastic tombs dating back more than six thousand years.
There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do even more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the amphitheatre. Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.
Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation. In 1910, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration Commission gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and did have a round skull child; but a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of American institutions as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child whose skull was appreciably longer; and that a long skull south Italian, breeding freely, would have precisely the same experience in the reverse direction. In other words the Melting Pot[5] was acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.
