138. The Passing Of The Great Race: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Passing Of The Great Race 

No discussion of the dreamlike years of overt American scientific racism and schooling 
would be complete without a nod to the ghost of Madison Grant, who has mysteriously 
vanished from the pages of some standard biographical references, though they still carry 
his cousins, Grant the portrait painter and Grant the educator. No matter, I shall tell you 
about him. If you have ever been to the Bronx Zoo 6 you have been a guest of Mr. Grant's 
beneficent imagination, for he was its founder and the founder of its parent, the New 
York Zoological Society. The Bronx Zoo, its fame and good works inspire worldwide 
gratitude. Grant's legacy to us, as free libraries were Carnegie's. 

Grant was a lifelong bachelor, a childless man. Like many people associated with public 
schooling on a policy level, Grant came from a patrician family which had graced society 
from colonial days. No Grant ever held a menial job. Madison Grant was considered a 
leading scientific naturalist of his time. His monographs on the Rocky Mountain goat, the 
moose, and the caribou are little 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 were seen to be clay, radical social action justifying 
continuous intervention could surely bring Utopia within reach, while providing 
expanding opportunities to academics. The academic marketplace eagerly supplied 
evidence that quality was innate to the powerful, and evidence that human nature was 
empty to the rest of us. 

6 As five hundred thousand school trips to date have been. 

Simplified, the belief that human nature could be changed, complicated enormously by a collateral belief 

that there are a variety of such natures, correlated with race and other variables. As I warn elsewhere, these men used the concept "race" in a 
more intimate way than contemporary ears are used to. As Grant would have viewed things, "white" or "Caucasian" is subject to many 
subdivisions, each of which has a value rank. The "great race" in America is Aryan. One very influential tome of the 1920s, for instance, was 
Joseph Widney's two-volume Race Life of the Aryan People. Widney was a founder of the University of Southern California. 

The Poison Of Democracy