Madison Grant - Legacy

Legacy

Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America, especially in New York. Grant's conservationism and fascination with zoological natural history made him very influential among the New York elite who agreed with his cause, most notably Theodore Roosevelt. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald featured a reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan, the husband of Daisy Buchanan, the novel's principal woman character, was reading a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Passing of the Great Race (Grant) and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (Stoddard; Grant wrote the introduction to Stoddard's book). "Everybody ought to read it", the character explained, "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." Throughout the book Tom espouses Goddard's racial theories confusedly; the narrator calls Tom's focus on Goddard's ideas "pathetic."

Grant left no offspring when he died in 1937 of nephritis. Several hundred people attended Grant's funeral, and he was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York. He left a bequest of $25,000 to the New York Zoological Society to create "The Grant Endowment Fund for the Protection of Wild Life", left $5,000 to the American Museum of Natural History, and left another $5,000 to the Boone and Crockett Club.

Passing of the Great Race was lauded by Adolf Hitler, who in the early 1930s wrote a 'fan letter' to Grant in which he called the book "his Bible". At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant's Passing of the Great Race was 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.

Grant's works of "scientific racism" have been cited to demonstrate that many of the genocidal and eugenic ideas associated with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in fact that many of them had origins in other countries including the United States. As such, because of Grant's well-connectedness and influential friends, he is often used to illustrate the strain of racist-based eugenic thinking in the United States which had some influence until the Second World War. Because of the use made of his eugenics work by the policy-makers of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has been somewhat ignored and obscured as many organizations, (such as the Sierra Club) with which he was once associated do not generally want to overstress their connections with him.

Grant was mentioned prominently in Anders Behring Breivik's 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, in whiclh Breivik argued for the preservation of the Nordic race whilst criticizing miscegenation.