Grant Madison. The Passing of the Great Race, or The racial basis of European history

4th revised edition. — New York: Charles Scribner's sons, 1921. — 286 p.The premise of the book is to track the movements of the (mainly) Indo-European (Aryan, in his slightly dated terminology) peoples through ancient and more recent history, thereby showing the unique heritage which descendants of these mystic giants of the past still carry within their veins, albeit in ever decreasing numbers. Of course, despite his insistence on the importance of race, Grant was an anthropologist, so he does never deny the importance of culture either, but he would rather say that race and culture interplays constantly, but where culture can change, race is the constant underlying factor that affects the character culture will take. His phrasing, written as it is in the early 1900's, can be a bit much for those raised in the (hopefully) ethnopluralist terminology of 2012, with his constant (in the first part of the book, at least) hampering on "inferior" and "superior", but one should remember that it was written in a very different age. One may assume he would rather insist on the difference today, which is what is important. Even if a certain people or group should display what could theoretically from a European perspective be couched in such terms, that doesn't really matter, for the fact is, we are all, no matter which ethnic background, carriers of something unique which should be preserved and promoted. He sums it all up on page 27: "Without going into further physical details, it is probable that all relative proportions in the body, the features, the skeleton and the skull which are fixed and constant and lie outside of the range of individual variation represent dim inheritances from the past. Every generation of human beings carries the blood of thousands of ancestors, stretching back through thousands of years, superimposed upon a prehuman inheritance of still greater antiquity and the face and body of every living man offer an intricate mass of hieroglyphs that science will some day learn to read and interpret". Therefore, despite his oft-occurring use of what today clings a bit "racist" in the ears of 2012, the book does have definitive worth as a classic on European racial history.The first section deals with the basis of race as well as Grant's own stances on political issues of the day. These center around the growing numbers of immigrants from non-Nordic Europe. Grant claims that the members of contemporary American Protestant society who could trace their ancestry back to Colonial times were being out-bred by immigrant and "inferior" racial stocks. Grant reasons that America has always been a Nordic country, consisting of Nordic immigrants from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands in Colonial times and of Nordic immigrants from Ireland and Germany in later times. Grant feels that certain parts of Europe were underdeveloped and a source of racial stocks unqualified for the Nordic political structure of the US. Grant is also interested in the impact of the expansion of America's Black population into the urban areas of the North.Grant reasons that the new immigrants were of different races and were creating separate societies within America including ethnic lobby groups, criminal syndicates, and political machines which were undermining the socio-political structure of the country and in turn the traditional Anglo-Saxon colonial stocks, as well as all Nordic stocks. His analysis of population studies, economic utility factors, labor supply, etc. purport to show that the consequence of this subversion was evident in the decreasing quality of life, lower birth rates, and corruption of the contemporary American society. He reasons that the Nordic races would become extinct and America as it was known would cease to exist being replaced by a fragmented country or a corrupt caricature of itself.The second part of the book deals with the history of the three European races: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, as well as their physical and mental characteristics. This part of the book ties together strands of thinking regarding Aryan migration theory, ethnology, anthropology, and history into a broad survey of the historical rise and fall, and expansion and retraction, of the European races from their homelands. It similarly connects the history of America with that of Europe, especially its Nordic nations.