36 Facts About Madison Grant

Madison Grant was an American lawyer, zoologist, anthropologist, and writer known for his work as a conservationist, eugenicist, and advocate of scientific racism.

Madison Grant played an active role in crafting immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.

Madison Grant was born in New York City, the son of Gabriel Madison Grant, a physician and American Civil War surgeon, and Caroline Manice.

Madison Grant's mother was a descendant of Jesse de Forest, the Walloon Huguenot who in 1623 recruited the first band of colonists to settle in New Netherland, the Dutch Republic's territory on the American East Coast.

Madison Grant attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887.

Madison Grant received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist.

Madison Grant first achieved a political reputation when he and his brother, DeForest Grant, took part in the 1894 electoral campaign of New York mayor William Lafayette Strong.

Madison Grant was a friend of several US presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

Madison Grant is credited with saving many species from extinction, and co-founded the Save the Redwoods League with Frederick Russell Burnham, John C Merriam, and Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1918.

Madison Grant is credited with helping develop the first deer hunting laws in New York state, legislation which spread to other states as well over time.

Madison Grant was a developer of wildlife management; he believed its development to be harmonized with the concept of eugenics.

Madison Grant helped to found the Bronx Zoo, build the Bronx River Parkway, save the American bison as an organizer of the American Bison Society, and helped to create Glacier National Park and Denali National Park.

Madison Grant was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts and Sciences in 1929.

In 1931, the world's largest tree was dedicated to Madison Grant, Merriam, and Osborn by the California State Board of Parks in recognition for their environmental efforts.

Madison Grant was an early member of the Boone and Crockett Club since 1893, and he mobilized its wealthy members to influence the government to conserve vast areas of land against encroaching industries.

Madison Grant was the head of the New York Zoological Society from 1925 until his death.

Madison Grant was generally indifferent to forms of animal life that he did not regard as aristocratic, and assigned such a hierarchy to humans as well.

Madison Grant viewed the Nordic race as he did any of his endangered species, and considered the modern industrial society as infringing just as much on its existence as it did on the redwoods.

Madison Grant was the author of the once much-read book The Passing of the Great Race, an elaborate work of racial hygiene attempting to explain the racial history of Europe.

The most significant of Madison Grant's concerns was with the changing "stock" of American immigration of the early 20th century, Passing of the Great Race was a "racial" interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization.

Madison Grant promoted the idea of the "Nordic race", a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia, as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history.

Madison Grant's work is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States.

Madison Grant disliked Boas and for several years tried to get him fired from his position at Columbia University.

Boas and Madison Grant were involved in a bitter struggle for control over the discipline of anthropology in the United States, while they both served on the National Research Council Committee on Anthropology after the First World War.

Madison Grant represented the "hereditarian" branch of physical anthropology at the time, despite his relatively amateur status, and was staunchly opposed to and by Boas himself, who advocated cultural anthropology.

Madison Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as well as the complete end of immigration from East Asia.

Madison Grant advocated efforts to purify the American population through selective breeding.

Madison Grant served as the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 to his death.

Historians invariably style Madison Grant a conservative, because he was a blueblood clubman from a patrician family, and his best- known work, The Passing of the Great Race, is a museum piece of scientific racism.

Leonard wrote that Madison Grant opposed war, had doubts about imperialism, and supported birth control.

Leonard's view that eugenicists such as Madison Grant were conservatives is an outlier, however.

Madison Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America, especially in New York.

Tom Buchanan, a fatuous Long Island aristocrat married to Daisy, was reading a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", blending Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.

Madison Grant left no offspring when he died in 1937 of nephritis.

Madison Grant left a bequest of $25,000 to the New York Zoological Society to create "The Grant Endowment Fund for the Protection of Wild Life", $5,000 to the American Museum of Natural History, and another $5,000 to the Boone and Crockett Club.

At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, three pages of excerpts from Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race were introduced into evidence by the defense of Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich, or at least indicate that they were not ideologically unique to Nazi Germany.