1918. Madison Grant (1865-1937, Yale law degree 1890) was a stalwart of the Nativist/Nordicist (see entry) strain of American eugenics during the progressive-era (~1900-1930). His most renowned work, The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History (1916), argued for the preservation of America as a ‘civilization preserve’ for the Nordic race, advocating for immigration only from the founding stock of Anglo-Saxons and other Nordics from north-western Europe. The book was highly influential in both Nazi Germany, and North America.
Grant gained fame as a big-game sportsman and nature conservationist, leading the charge to establish several national parks and wilderness preserves (Engs, 2005, 102-103; Spiro, 2009). Grant insisted that “the Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit,” and rejects the ‘alloying of races’ in the Melting Pot:
"We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to “all distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo." (p. 263)
The 1918 revised and amplified edition of Passing, contains original and updated prefaces by Grant’s life-long collaborator and friend, Henry Fairfield Osborn (the ‘Dean’ of American Anthropology, and president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York), who gives the book his highest praise. Indeed, there are portions of Passing that are verbatim transcriptions of Osborn’s summaries and main points from his Men of the Old Stone Age (1915). Passing went through four editions and thirteen printings by 1936. It was translated into German, and became a sort of template for German race-hygiene texts, such as Hans F.K. Gunther’s Rassenkunde Europas (1926) – translated into English by G.C. Wheeler in 1927 as The Racial Elements of European History (London: Methuen). Gunther was a more prolific author than Osborn and Grant combined, but credits both in this seminal text. (Engs, 2005, 103-104).