The Invisible History of the Human Race (8 page)

Galton’s ideas spread across the world, where they were quickly taken up in the newly energized post–Civil War America. There the egalitarian spirit was utopian but selective: Everyone was equal in the new democracy, except for women, black people, people with disabilities, and the poor.

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Madison Grant was born in 1865 to a family that was well aware of its ancestry. On his mother’s side Grant descended from a Walloon Huguenot who had settled the “New Netherlands” in 1623. Grant’s father was a well-known Newark physician who had many fascinating ancestors, including the Puritan Richard Treat, who settled New England in 1630.

Raised in Murray Hill, Manhattan, Grant was educated by tutors and spent his summers with his three siblings at their grandfather’s Long Island estate. As a teenager he spent four years in Europe receiving a private education and visiting museums. As an adult he became a member of the Society of Colonial Wars, whose exclusive membership was open only to male descendants of high-level participants in the conflicts that took place between 1607 and 1763. Members of the society received a certificate that detailed their family histories, and each year the society published a yearbook that included the genealogies of all its members. Grant was extremely bright, worked hard, and became one of America’s first and most powerful conservationists, as well as its “most influential racist.”

The first biography of Grant, published only in 2009, was a project made difficult by the fact that after he died in 1937, his family destroyed his papers. Grant’s biographer, Jonathan Peter Spiro, spent years combing archives for traces of his subject. He noted that even Grant’s wide circle of friends seemed to have disposed of any documents that mentioned him. Nevertheless, Spiro identified a few key
moments in Grant’s intellectual development.

On his educational tour of Europe Grant visited the Moritzburg Castle, a Baroque hunting lodge. There, Spiro imagines, he was transfixed by the lodge’s extraordinary collection of red deer antlers, which had come from animals hunted three hundred years earlier. In a grand dining hall that can still be visited, the walls are covered with antlers extending two stories high, and at six feet six inches across, one of the pairs on display remains the largest set in the world today. It would have been apparent to Grant that these antlers were all much larger than those sported by most of the deer he had hunted. The red deer, Grant would have concluded, was degenerating.

Another of the privileged societies to which Grant belonged was the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of self-styled adventurers “who believed that the hardier and manlier the sport is, the more attractive it is.” Grant was close to the club’s founder, Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to become the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Grant and the gentlemen of the club spent a great deal of time hunting. Their extensive, intimate contact with wild animals led them to realize that the animals of North America were getting smaller and shrinking in number.

Inspired by his love of nature and his fear that it was being changed forever, Grant exercised his considerable social power to extraordinary ends. He lobbied to save the American bison from extinction. He cofounded a Save the Redwoods League to ensure that the giant California trees were not all chopped down. He was passionate about conserving whales and bald eagles, among other animals, and he was one of the founders of Glacier and Mount McKinley (now Denali) national parks. Grant was also a founder of the New York Zoological Society and the Bronx Zoo. At the turn of the century he was instrumental in the creation of a number of exhibits at the zoo, including one that featured a man from Africa.

Ota Benga was a Mbuti pygmy from the Congo. He was four feet eight inches tall, and his teeth had been filed to points. Even before he crossed paths with Grant, Benga had experienced much tragedy. He was married with two children, but one day when he was hunting, his family was murdered by King Leopold’s Force Publique. Later he was captured by slave traders and purchased by a missionary for a bolt of cloth and a pound of salt. The missionary had come to Africa specifically to acquire a selection of pygmies to display at the St. Louis World’s Fair. After his stint as an exhibit, Ota Benga returned to Africa, but he felt that he no longer belonged there and he went back to America. For a while he was on display at the American Museum of Natural History but soon ended up spending time in the monkey cage at the Bronx Zoo. A sign outside Benga’s display read:

The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.”

Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.

Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the

Kasai River, Congo Free State. South Central Africa,

By Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Exhibited each afternoon during September

Soon after he became a popular public spectacle, a delegation of “colored ministers” from the Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn approached Madison Grant to plead the pygmy’s case. Grant, who was apparently quite charming, reassured them that Benga would soon be leaving and that while he was at the zoo he was helping look after its animals. That afternoon the delegation, accompanied by reporters, returned to the zoo and found Benga locked with a guinea pig in a cage, outside of which hundreds of people stood gawking.

Benga was allowed to walk the grounds but always under the watchful eye of a groundsman and even police. Eventually he was released into the care of the Colored Orphan Asylum and later sent to Virginia, where he made plans once again to return to Africa. But he never went, and after years of working in a tobacco factory, Benga committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart.

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In today’s world, where conservation is considered a necessity and a virtue and racism is regarded as deplorable, Grant is a hard person to understand. But for him, preserving his beloved redwoods and bison, putting human beings on display, and saving the Nordic race were all part of the same package. Grant believed that all these actions were a benevolent form of stewardship.

Historians trace the xenophobia of Grant’s era to the 1880s, when U.S. immigration jumped from 250,000 new people a year to over half a million. Earlier immigrants had been predominately from northern European countries, like Germany, Britain, and Ireland, and it’s true that some of them were less welcome than others. In the 1850s, prejudice against the Irish fueled an anti-immigration movement. But a few decades later, more and more immigrants began to come from the other parts of the continent. The latter groups lacked urban skills and formal education, and they began to fill up the cities of the eastern United States. Contemporaries of Grant wrote about how anarchic it felt to be on the streets of New York, which were filled with crowds of European peasants. Unemployment was rife, and crime and poverty were out of control. The newcomers could not have been more different from Grant and his fellow northern European Americans and seemed to threaten every aspect of Grant’s privileged world. He wrote, “
The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.”

Grant rued the fact that Americans had brought their destruction upon themselves: “It was the upper classes who encouraged the introduction of immigrant labor to work American factories and mines. . . . 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.” He likened the situation to the fall of Rome, where the lower classes succumbed first, but the “patricians” were taken down a few generations later.

Still, Grant was born a few years after Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
was published, and while his parents’ generation was deeply shocked by the idea that nature—not God—selected who would live and who would not, Grant was invigorated by the notion that humanity could direct selection by controlling traits passed down in families. Any sheep breeder knows, Grant wrote, that apart from the occasional throwback, black sheep have been bred out of domestic herds by selectively not breeding them.

If all “social failures” were sterilized, Grant argued, humanity could rid itself of the unfit. “
This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem,” he wrote, “and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.” While Grant agreed that the state should nurture the defective individual, it was the state’s duty to ensure that his “line stops with him.”

Even by the standards of his day, the theory of eugenics was shot through with basic illogic. Grant wrote:

The Negroes of the United States while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilization until in the last century they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body politic. These Negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which persisted but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the names of their Masters.

After more than one hundred years of abduction, abuse, and slavery, the absence of a native culture (and, implicitly, records) in the African American population represented for Grant a sign of African inferiority. The key point for him was that the African American adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture proved its superiority.

Similarly, Grant’s eugenics was built on a muddled version of evolution and heredity. These new ideas were being imperfectly applied in a world that had for all of recorded history been committed to the idea that some humans were superior to others. Darwin’s theory, Mendel’s science, and the implicit use of genealogy were never the real problem; it was the way they were used to give long-standing social divisions a scientific rationale. The world in which these men lived was already one of great inequity, where poor people were considered to be poor because of their own inadequacies, not because of society’s. Even Darwin made a distinction between “savage” and “civilized” races, and this was typical for his time.

At the core of Grant’s fears and his ideology was the idea of purity and the way in which it could be tainted. This was a common preoccupation of the day, and it was compounded by the 1918 flu epidemic, which killed twenty-one million people all over the world, creating much anxiety about contagion and hygiene.

The notion of racial purity was enshrined by law in many American states, particularly in the South, where legislation was used to segregate black people on public transportation and in schools, public restrooms, and other public places. In its most extreme version, known popularly as the “one drop” rule, race was reduced to a formula based on parentage, as Grant explained: “
The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” Grant invented the term “the Nordic race” to describe his own blue-eyed, light-haired stock.

In 1916 Grant outlined his philosophies in
The Passing of the Great Race
. The book was translated into German in 1925 and was much quoted by scientists in the eugenics movement there. It was also read by a young Adolf Hitler, who—so goes the story—later wrote a fan letter to Grant to tell him that
The Passing of the Great Race
was his Bible.

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Madison Grant remains the darkest and most disturbing figure of turn-of-the-century American genealogy and eugenics, but the movement didn’t end with him. At the beginning of the twentieth century, eugenics societies in many states were formed to try to influence government and promote the betterment of humanity. The Eugenics Society of America held Fitter Family competitions at state fairs, which families entered by undergoing psychometric, dental, and other examinations and by filling in a Fitter Families examination form listing their “physical, mental or temperamental defects” and their “special talents, gifts, tastes or superior qualities.”

The competitions were a little less stringent than such qualifications might suggest. In Massachusetts in 1925 a family that won the “average family cup” admitted to suffering from myopia but fortunately numbered among their special gifts mathematics, languages, literacy, and golf. The winners received a medal on which the classical, athletic-looking figures of a man and woman in flowing robes stretched out their arms to a naked toddler; above them was the inscription “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

Of course, the celebratory focus on breeding good traits went hand in hand with concerns about not only the flood of bad traits that accompanied the huge influx of immigrants but also the declining rate of childbirth in the middle and upper classes (“
the most valuable classes,” according to Madison Grant). One eugenics poster at a state fair asked: “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle and then leave the
ancestry
of
our
children
to chance, or to ‘blind’ sentiment?”

Certainly the tendency to confuse social conditions with “essential traits” and then give them a biological explanation looked even more scientific when it was placed in a Mendelian framework. A poster about “fit” and “unfit” marriages presented the equation like this:

Pure + Pure: Children Normal,

Abnormal + Abnormal: Children Abnormal

Pure + Abnormal: Children Normal But Tainted,
Some Grandchildren Abnormal

Tainted + Abnormal: Children 1/2 Normal But Tainted,

1/2 Abnormal,

Tainted + Pure: Children 1/2 Pure Normal, 1/2 Normal

But Tainted

Tainted + Tainted Children: Of Every Four, 1 Abnormal,

1 Pure Normal, And 2 Tainted

So closely knit were the ideas of trait selection in humans and in animals that the many subcommittees of the American Breeders Association, whose interests spanned humans and animals, included the Committee for Heredity of Insanity, the Committee for Heredity of Eye Defects, the Committee for Heredity of Criminality, and the Committee for Immigration. The association published a magazine, which in the third issue of 1912 included articles like “Domestication of the Fox,” “The Breeding of Winter Barleys,” and “Heredity of Feeblemindedness.” In a piece titled “A Study in Eugenic Genealogy,” the writer spoke of vigor and virtue as dominant Mendelian traits and weakness and vice as recessive. The journal included detailed family trees to illustrate
the transmission of “defective strains,” which included traits like epilepsy, insanity, juvenile delinquency, and wanderlust/vagabondism.