America’s Racialist Moment, Part II:
The Scientific Racialists

Scientific Racialism

Radical Racialism tended to be Southern, Protestant Christian, and rural. It had grown seamlessly out of the pro-slavery arguments before the war. The second movement in American racialism arising in the 1890s, though in practice in substantial agreement with the former, had very different philosophical underpinnings. This is the ideology generally called “Scientific Racialism.” Scientific racialism was Northern, intellectual, and secular. Quite unlike the ideology of the Radicals, the underpinnings of which were essentially Biblical, Scientific Racialism issued from Darwin’s theory of evolution, published just before the War between the States. (Interestingly, the founder of international Scientific Racialism, Joseph Arthur Count de Gobineau, was not a believer in evolution. A devout Catholic, he wrote that, “We are not descended from the ape, but we are headed in that direction!”)

Whereas the Radical Racialists typically had hardscrabble upbringings in the Reconstruction-era rural South, the Scientific Racialists generally had childhoods of privilege in the North of the Gilded Age, childhoods that more often than not culminated in expensive college educations at Harvard and Yale.

Although there were many differences between the two racialist groups, both movements were legitimate, full-fledged participants in the broader reform movement of the time.

Who were the Scientific Racialists? Undoubtedly the foremost among them was Madison Grant, a Yale-educated lawyer, hunting companion to Theodore Roosevelt, and friend of countless other movers and shakers of his day. The other major figures were all friends and associates of Grant. They include the journalist and writer Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, and a writer and explorer who in many ways forms a bridge between the two racialist camps, Earnest Sevier Cox.

Madison Grant

Madison Grant, 1865 - 1937

Grant, the acknowledged leader, may be the most productive forgotten man in American history. He was a New York-born lawyer and big-game hunter who almost single-handedly created both the conservationist movement and the eugenics movement in this country. Even to list the organizations that he founded or chaired, not to mention the innumerable causes that he supported, would take more space than is available here.

Although Madison Grant’s career is an object lesson in what happens when one makes the wrong enemies in America, thanks to a biography by historian Jonathan Spiro Grant is not quite as forgotten now as he once was.

Madison Grant was born shortly after the close of the War between the States in 1865. His father had been a surgeon in the Union Army and late in the war had received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Madison had a privileged childhood, growing up among the elites of Long Island and New York City and studying for a time in Dresden. Yale and Columbia law school awaited him as a young man, and he emerged from them an energetic and enthusiastic man about town. Somewhat curiously for one so urban and urbane, Madison first fell in love with hunting, a pastime he enjoyed with his friend Teddy Roosevelt, another Progressive who came from the same city and the same social class. Together the two started the Boone and Crockett Club, the first of many organizations Grant would found in his lifetime.

Hunting inspired in Grant — and Roosevelt and others in their orbit — a desire to preserve wildlife. This may seem ironic today, especially to non-hunters, but hunters have always been the first to notice declines of species, and the first humans to suffer for it. Grant began a series of campaigns to preserve wild game animals throughout the country: elk, bison, deer, and fowl of all types. Soon this urge to preserve led to the preservation of plant life as well, and Grant helped found the Save-the-Redwoods League. He was instrumental in the growth of Yellowstone National Park and numerous other state and national parks, and he took the lead in founding the Bronx Zoo and the New York Aquarium. This conservationism brought him into conflict with the wealthy and powerful — the railroads and the mining interests, for example — and it clearly established Grant and his followers as turn-of-the-century progressive reformers.

Grant’s efforts on behalf of wildlife and nature conservation were exceeded only by his devotion to preserving the most valuable species of all: his own kind. Grant had grown up with a deep appreciation for the racial stock that had created America. Upon encountering William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe, he began a lifelong study of the European races: the Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. He observed that everywhere the Nordics predominated, the economy was more productive, the society better ordered, the arts more refined. Those areas where Alpines or Mediterraneans were dominant, he found wanting.

His studies led Grant to encourage the continued dominance of Nordic life in America. Along with his many friends and associates who felt the same way, he began to agitate for restrictions on immigration to avoid the swamping of Nordic blood by evidently less desirable races from eastern and southern Europe.

Grant’s first major written work was The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916. The book went to four quick editions and was a watershed event for both layman and professional. It presented in explicit, forthright language the case for the dominant racial stock in American history and sounded a warning about increased immigration from the margins of Europe.

The attention and interest that Grant generated from this book helped him win a great victory in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which put a stop to almost all of the immigration that Grant had opposed as undesirable.

A campaign later in that decade to similarly limit immigration from Mexico was not successful, however, and the effects of that failure are increasingly felt today. According to Grant’s biographer, “[i]t remained one of the great disappointments of Madison Grant’s life that he had failed to outlaw immigration from Mexico. His friend C. M. Goethe called it ‘a national tragedy’ and a ‘crime,’ and predicted that future generations ‘will rise up and curse us . . . for failing to close . . . that Back Door.’” Though many would more likely curse the Ted Kennedys who gave us the 1965 Immigration Act, Goethe had the right idea.

Until the 1920s, Grant had scarcely considered the potentially far more dangerous implications of the growing Negro and other colored populations domestically and around the world. That warning call was sounded instead by his close friend and colleague, Lothrop Stoddard.

Lothrop Stoddard

Lothrop Stoddard, 1883 -1950

Stoddard, like Grant, had been born to wealth in New York and later educated in the Ivy League (Harvard, Class of 1905). He is best known for his 1920 book The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World-supremacy, for which Grant wrote the introduction. A large part of The Rising Tide has to do with the potentially catastrophic effects of miscegenation on the white race. Stoddard writes:

Two things are necessary for the continued existence of a race: it must remain itself, and it must breed its best. Every race is the result of ages of development which evolves specialized capacities that make the race what it is and render it capable of creative achievement. These specialized capacities (which particularly mark the superior races), being relatively recent developments, are highly unstable. . . . [W]hen a highly specialized stock interbreeds with a different stock, the newer, less stable, specialized characters are bred out, the variation, no matter how great its potential value to human evolution, being irretrievably lost. And, of course, the more primitive a type is, the more [predominant] it is. This is why crossings with the Negro are uniformly fatal.

Earnest Sevier Cox

A personality who serves as a bridge between the Radical Racialists and the Scientific Racialists is Earnest Sevier Cox. Cox was a Tennessean, born in 1880. In the years 1910-15 he traveled extensively throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Returning home, he began giving lectures on the Negro race. In 1916, Senator Vardaman arranged a job for Cox in the Senate office building. Vardaman also suggested he read the newly published Passing of the Great Race; upon reading it, Cox was immediately inspired to begin writing his own book, which would ultimately bear the title White America and become the third important volume in the series begun by Grant and continued by Stoddard.

When White America was published in 1923, Cox paid tribute to both Grant and Stoddard in the introduction. While The Passing of the Great Race had portrayed the threats to Nordic civilization by non-Nordic but otherwise white immigration, The Rising Tide of Color analyzed the threat to the entire white world by the colored races everywhere. And White America described the very immediate threat to America of the domestic Negro population.

Although scorned by many critics, White America established Cox as an authority in the racialist movement. At Grant’s suggestion, Cox put his new influence to work in Virginia, lobbying for a tougher antimiscegenation law. Not only was he successful in securing the law’s passage, but the public relations effort resulted in the founding of dozens of “Anglo-Saxon Clubs” at Virginia college campuses. The Racial Integrity Act, as the new law was called, was a model for other states in the South and Midwest, as well as California.

Immediately after the law’s passage, Grant wrote to Cox and suggested their next step: It was to be nothing less than the wholesale resettlement of blacks to Africa. Though a daunting task, both men believed it could be accomplished given sufficient will. Grant suggested that, to start the ball rolling, Cox should get in touch with Marcus Garvey.

Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey, 1887 - 1940

Marcus Garvey differs from the other racialist outlier discussed here — William Hannibal Thomas — in that Garvey was never critical of his race. Quite to the contrary, he was intensely proud of being black. As James Lubinskas wrote of Garvey in American Renaissance a few years ago, Garvey may even have coined the slogan “black is beautiful.”

A few weeks after Cox and Grant corresponded, Garvey came to Richmond on a national speaking tour. The only white to attend his lecture was Earnest Sevier Cox. Cox introduced himself, gave Garvey a copy of White America, and pledged to help Garvey in his cause. In return, the black crusader included in the next volume of his The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey a full-page ad for Cox’s book. Garvey’s adherents took to White America almost faster than did Cox’s, and the Garveyites in Detroit alone accounted for sales of seventeen thousand copies. In gratitude, Cox dedicated his next work, a pamphlet called Let My People Go, to Garvey. Mrs. Garvey bought a thousand copies.

Marcus Garvey’s alliance with the white racialists rankled the black leadership of the time, of course, and men such as W. E. B. DuBois led a loud chorus of derision, not unlike that that had greeted William Hannibal Thomas.

Like Thomas, Garvey soon ran into legal troubles. He was eventually sentenced to federal prison in Atlanta for mail fraud. His supporters cried foul but Garvey nonetheless had to serve two years before being released, despite the efforts of Cox and others to have him freed. Since Garvey, now a convicted felon, was not a citizen, he was subject to deportation and was soon deported to Jamaica. Marcus Garvey was never allowed to return to the United States, and in his absence his organization eventually disintegrated.

The Flaming Sword

Thomas Dixon does an excellent job of telling the story of Cox and Garvey — and indeed much of the story told here — in his last novel, The Flaming Sword, published in 1939. In this sequel to The Clansman, Dixon treats the period from 1900-1939, which he calls the “Conflict of Color” in America. The Flaming Sword is based on real historical events, among which it describes the publication of The Clansman and the making of The Birth of a Nation. A large part of the story revolves around the theme of the “Negro As Beast” and the white response. Garvey’s and Cox’s repatriation proposals are treated in detail, as well as Garvey’s ultimate fall from grace at the hands of his enemies.

Theodore Bilbo

Theodore G. Bilbo, 1877 - 1947

With the disintegration of the Garvey movement, Cox and Grant decided to seek another, more powerful ally. They found one in Senator Theodore Bilbo, Democrat of Mississippi, like Cox another bridge between the two racialist camps. Bilbo, the son of a Confederate veteran, was born in Mississippi in 1877. In 1910, he teamed up with Jim Vardaman, forming an alliance that dominated Mississippi politics for many years. In 1911, when Vardaman was running for reelection to the US Senate, Bilbo ran for lieutenant governor. Since his and Vardaman’s supporters had been derided as “rednecks,” the crowds at the two candidates’ rallies began to show up wearing red neckties. Both Bilbo and Vardaman won handily.

Theodore Bilbo had an unusual way with words. During that campaign, he described his opponent as “a cross between a hyena and a mongrel . . . begotten in a nigger graveyard at midnight, suckled by a sow, and educated by a fool.”

Bilbo eventually followed his mentor Vardaman to the Senate, where he served three terms. Like Earnest Sevier Cox, who would become his close friend, Bilbo belongs to both the Radical Racialists and the Scientific Racialists. True to his origins as a Racialist Reformer, Bilbo supported Social Security and the whole raft of social legislation that was spawned by the New Deal. A great admirer of Madison Grant, in 1938, while filibustering against a pro-Negro bill, Bilbo quoted at length from both The Passing of the Great Race and White America.

When Cox and Grant approached Bilbo and suggested that he spearhead the repatriation movement, Bilbo readily agreed, and he and Cox worked together to draft a repatriation bill in May 1938. Bilbo’s introduction of the bill on the floor of the Senate occurred in an all-day speech on May 24. He demonstrated in this speech that he had mastered the principles of Scientific Racialism, as he made an impassioned and well-informed case for the resettlement of blacks to Africa. His bill proposed that the new colony be formed out of land that would be provided by Britain and France as payment for their war debts. The cost (estimated in 1938 terms at one billion dollars) would ultimately be recovered by the savings in social welfare payments once the Negroes were relocated. In a light-hearted moment, Bilbo also proposed that Eleanor Roosevelt be sent to Africa as well, there to rule as the “Queen of Greater Liberia”!

Marcus Garvey applauded the speech from exile, and Bilbo’s plan and some 50,000 signatures from Garvey’s followers were delivered to Washington. Senate support was lacking, however, and Bilbo had to withdraw the bill. He tried again the next year, with the retitled “Greater Liberia Bill.” This time, 2.5 million signatures were obtained in support but the Senate balked again. The outbreak of World War II forced Bilbo to withdraw his bill a second time, but he vowed to re-introduce it when the war was over.

Bilbo was unable to get the bill back to the Senate until 1947, and by then the world, and America, had changed. Bilbo was now under extreme pressure from his enemies. He died later that year as his bill was languishing once again, effectively ending the possibility of repatriation as a solution to the Negro problem.

Bilbo did however leave behind an important book in the tradition of The Passing of the Great Race and White America. Entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo’s book — whose introduction was written by Earnest Sevier Cox — displays surprising scholarship for a professional politician.

Today the book is still a very useful compendium of period racialist thought and contains numerous anecdotes about the early racialist struggle in Mississippi. Among its more interesting discussions is Bilbo’s counterattack on the man most responsible for the eclipse of Scientific Racialism: Professor Franz Boas.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas, 1858 - 1942

Bilbo devotes an entire chapter to Boas. He writes:

A naturalized citizen of the United States, Professor Boas did everything in his power to destroy the racial ideals of the Nation which he took for his own. When he arrived on these shores, from the heart of Germany at the age of twenty-one, he saw what the white race had accomplished in the new world. . . . [F]or some reason which has never been publicized, this German Jew, a newly-arrived immigrant, wanted to destroy the racial stock which had carved this mighty Nation out of a wilderness.

Franz Boas was born in 1858 in Westphalia to a Jewish family with socialist leanings. Believing that he could rise higher in his chosen academic field in the United States, he emigrated to this country in 1887. He soon obtained a professorship in anthropology at Columbia University and for the next forty years trained an organized cadre of followers who proceeded to march through the universities spreading the Boasian gospel of egalitarianism and environmentalism.

Boas was a dedicated enemy of the Scientific Racialist community and of Madison Grant in particular from the start. The two seldom mentioned one another by name but the subtext of their arguments and counterarguments over the years is filled with veiled references to one another.

In the beginning of their decades-long feud, the well-connected, well-bred, and well-financed Grant had the upper hand. The alien Boas was a rather lonely specialist in the none-too-highly-regarded upstart science (some called it a pseudo-science) of cultural anthropology. In those days the “real” anthology was physical anthropology, and that was the province of the Scientific Racialists.

Yet with the dogged perseverance of the zealot, Boas continued to lecture, to write, and to convert student after student who passed through the Columbia anthropology department. One of his first publications was a paper claiming that skull shape — long one of the defining racial characteristics for the Scientific Racialists — was determined by environment, not heredity. The food a person ate, the home he grew up in, the school he attended — a thousand environmental factors — determined his skull shape, not his race, which for Boas did not exist.

In 2002, researchers at the University of Tennessee and Penn State, after working with Boas’s own data, published an article refuting Boas’s contention. They concluded that heredity was the cause of skull shape after all. Even if this refutation had com e in Boas’s lifetime, it is doubtful that he would have acknowledged it. Unaffected by criticism, he continued to spoon-feed environmentalism and antiracism to a seemingly endless series of graduate students. The catalog of scholars who received their Ph.D.s from Boas reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century anthropologists, primarily because, like Boas, they had a talent for marketing themselves to the public. The list includes A. L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Ashley Montague, and many others. Most were immigrants; the vast majority were Jews.

The Boas school maintained a steadfast opposition to the hereditarians. Although the Boasians’ field, cultural anthropology, was viewed as scientifically suspect by physical anthropologists, they diligently earned their degrees (most often conferred by their mentor himself) and proceeded to establish themselves in newly created anthropology departments around the country.

Eugenics

Grant and his allies had meanwhile been developing and expanding the science of eugenics, first propounded by Francis Galton in 1865. The Galton Society was formally created in Madison Grant’s New York City office on April 2, 1918. Its founders included a number of Grant’s associates and fellow members of other organizations, such as the Boone and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological Society. They included, aside from Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Lothrop Stoddard, Charles Davenport, William K. Gregory, John C. Merriam, and Edward L. Thorndike.

The Galton Society held a series of International Eugenics Congresses — in 1912, 1921, and 1932. The story of these conferences and indeed the history of the eugenics movement are too rich and too detailed to relate here. Jonathan Spiro’s biography of Grant devotes much detail to both. The controversy surrounding the publication of Grant’s last important work, The Conquest of A Continent, is a telling incident from the movement’s latter years. By 1933, the tide of color revealed by Stoddard and Cox had risen high enough for Madison Grant to realize the imminent danger. This inspired one last, desperate appeal on behalf of the Nordic people — and indeed all of the white races. The Conquest of a Continent is Grant’s paean to the race that created America, the country he loved, and an explicit warning of the growing biological threat to that same country and race.

When The Passing of the Great Race had appeared in 1920, it was controversial, drawing criticism from groups like the NAACP, but there was little in the way of organized opposition. By 1933, the situation had changed dramatically, and the publication of The Conquest of a Continent brought Boas and his group out in force. Boas’s friend and associate, Richard E. Gutstadt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, organized a campaign among the Jewish press to “[stifle] the sale of this book . . . [to] sound the warning to other publishing houses against engaging in this type of venture.”

Thanks to this kind of opposition the book, though an extraordinary work, had little impact. It should be noted that The Conquest of a Continent hardly mentioned the Jews.

What Went Wrong

Toward the end of his biography of Grant, Spiro asks what ultimately caused the collapse of the Scientific Racialist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. He answers with a list of no fewer than ten possible causes. While some of them are more convincing than others, foremost among them, in this author’s opinion, are (1) the concerted efforts by the Jewish Boasians, who never let up on their attacks and their derision of the racialists; (2) the “guilt by association” incurred by the racialists when a number of their German allies were discredited — and in some cases hanged — as Nazis; and (3) the simple fact that so many — an overwhelming percentage, actually — of the hereditarians were unmarried and died without heirs. If ever a movement was literally stillborn, it was the Scientific Racialist/eugenics movement.

And so, they all soon began to die out. Osborn died in 1935 and Grant in 1937. Ben Tillman was gone by 1918, Vardaman passed away in 1930, Thomas Dixon in 1946, and Theodore Bilbo in 1947. Only Earnest Sevier Cox lived long enough to see the end game, when segregation was finally abolished. He lived on until 1966.

On the other side, Franz Boas died in 1942, while making a speech on the need to keep fighting “racism.”

A Final Word

Since in many ways our story begins with the War between the States, the epic struggle between white men over the black man, it would be appropriate to close by quoting from a work relating to that war. It comes from a biography that attempts to apply the structure of racial history that Madison Grant developed in Passing of the Great Race. Published in 1923, Jefferson Davis, President Of The South, by Hamilton J. Eckenrode, the official historian of the state of Virginia, is an explicit attempt, as the author says, to “apply anthropological science to American history.” Most interesting to today’s racial-minded readers is the final chapter, entitled “The Moral.” Here Eckenrode explains his view of the racial meaning of the war and the implications of its outcome. The following short excerpt is remarkable in the poignancy of the author’s tone and the Grantian pessimism it conveys:

The South fought for the race which has made the world what it is, for the agricultural organization of life, for political conservatism, for social order. . . . Between two groups of Nordics fighting a mighty fight was this difference-that one fought for the Nordic race, the other against it. . . . The chief result of the Civil War was the ruin it brought on the Nordic race in America. . . . In the more than half century since the great struggle, immigration has swamped [us]. The New England of today . . . contains a thin Nordic upper class and a mass of factory workers of almost wholly non-Nordic stock. . . . [T]he South [too] is changing, and the time must come when it, like the rest of the country, will be largely non-Nordic.

But what has Jefferson Davis to do with all this? Much. The Southern Confederacy was, essentially, a protest against modernity. It was . . . the effort of the Nordic race to save itself. If it had succeeded, there would have been a new chapter in history. . . . Success depended . . . on Jefferson Davis. He failed . . . and with him faded the last hope of the Nordic race.

We can only hope that Professor Eckenrode was mistaken.