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classics of their kind, still consulted. Men and women related to Grant have been directors of
American society since the Age of the Mathers.
Grant was deeply disgusted by the mixing of European races underway here; he believed the
foundation of our national and cultural life lay in racial purity and backed this opinion with action.
It is hardly possible to believe some of this attitude didn’t enter into the museum’s presentation of
data and even into those hundreds of thousands of school field trips. In Grant’s competent hands,
the boldness and sweep of old Anglo-Saxon tradition was fused into a systematic worldview, then
broadcast through books and lectures to the entire planet. His magnum opus appeared in 1916
bearing the epic title The Passing of the Great Race, with an introduction by Museum of Natural
History luminary Henry Fairfield Osborn—a man who wrote one of the texts I used myself as a
junior high school student.
The Passing of the Great Race warns that the ruling race of the Western world is beginning to
wane because of a "fatuous belief" that environment can alter heredity. 7 The clear connection to
the predestination canon of Calvin and to the great Norse tradition of implacable Fate is
unmistakable. Grant’s own genealogy came from both these strains in European history. Whatever
else he was, Grant was neither dull nor commonplace. Using Darwin and Mendelian genetics to
support his argument, Grant said flatly that different races do not blend, that mixing "gives us a
race reverting to the more ancient and lower type." A "cross between any of the three European
races and a Jew is a Jew."
Grant argued that culture is racially determined. Alpines have always been peasants,
Mediterraneans, artists and intellectuals; but "the white man par excellence" was the Nordic
blonde conqueror of the North: explorers, fighters, rulers, aristocrats, organizers of the world. In
early America the stock was purely Nordic, but now swarming hybrids threatened it with
destruction except in a few zones of racial purity like Minnesota.
Madison Grant felt democracy as a political system violated scientific facts of heredity the same
way Christianity did, by favoring the weak. This led inexorably to biological decadence. Even
national consciousness might confuse one’s rational first loyalty, which had to be race. This was
the codex of the Bronx Zoo’s founder. Six years after its publication, The Passing of the Great
Race was still in print and Grant’s New York Zoological Society more respectable than ever.
Eventually Margaret Mead was beneficiary of considerable patronage from Grant’s Museum of
Natural History, as indeed the whole shaky new community of anthropological thought became.
Although Mead’s work appears to contradict Grant’s, by the time the academic world began to
push the relativism of Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other interpreters of primitive culture, a double
standard had settled in on intellectual life in the United States and Europe.
For those whose status was secured by birth, theories of inherited quality were available. For the
great mass of others, however, the body of theory which paid off in foundation grants, the one
driving modern political and economic development, was that corpus of studies exploring the
notion of extreme plasticity in human nature, a pliability grading into shapelessness. If mankind
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