The Two Sides of Madison Grant

Nathan Connolly: Madison Grant is one of the more important figures in American history you’ve probably never heard of. Credited as the savior to some of our most cherished wildlife, Grant was one of the original founders of the conservation movement.

Brian Balogh: But beneath his pioneering theories on conservation lay a dark undercurrent of scientific racism. While Grant devoted his life to preserving bison and other endangered species, he also worked tirelessly to save what he considered the superior human race, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics. Born in 1865 to a wealthy family in Manhattan, Grant spent much of his early adulthood going to elite men’s club and hunting big game.

Jonathan Spiro: He’s the same class as Teddy Roosevelt and drinking and hunting were what men like that, who didn’t have to worry about earning a living, did.

Brian Balogh: Well, some things never change.

Jonathan Spiro: Indeed.

Nathan Connolly: That’s historian, Jonathan Spiro. He says while young Grant was a prolific hunter, he soon underwent a dramatic transformation.

Jonathan Spiro: The more that Grant hunted, the more he noticed that our wildlife population was declining because of unrestricted hunting and because of the encroachments of urban civilization and, to his credit, he was transformed from a rather shallow young man known for his carousing and his hunting into an ardent conservationist. By the 1890s, he would have looked at the bison and realized starkly and to his horror that they were declining precipitously in population. So he concluded that we need to save the bison, and not save the bison so I can hunt them 20 years from now. Save the bison because they have a right to exist.

Brian Balogh: As the bison teetered on the verge of extinction, Grant came up with a plan. He started by lobbying to create a bison refuge in their former habitat.

Jonathan Spiro: In fact, he actually hoped to create four bison refuges purposely separated to ensure that no one calamity or disease would endanger the entire species. So he surveyed all the national forests and hit upon one. It’s called Wichita Mountains National Forest. It’s in Oklahoma, which had great grazing grounds for the southern herd of American bison originally. In 1905, Grant convinced his friend, Teddy Roosevelt, who happened to be president of the United States, to create the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. It’s the nation’s first ever big game refuge.

Jonathan Spiro: William T. Hornaday, the director of the Bronx Zoo, then selected 15 bison from the zoo’s herd. He drove them to Grand Central Station.

Brian Balogh: He didn’t take a cab, did he?

Jonathan Spiro: He did not take a cab. There’s photos of the wagons in which he drove them down to the railroad station.

Brian Balogh: Because it’s hard enough to get a cab in Manhattan, but hailing a cab with a herd of bison, that’s a tough call.

Jonathan Spiro: He gets these bison onto a train and they head out West. It really was a spectacle. Throngs of Westerners would come out along the railroad route to see these bison. Aged Native Americans showed up to see a living bison. They would applaud as the train drove out West. It took them a week. They arrived in Oklahoma. They were released into their new home. To make a long and happy story short, those 15 bison from the Bronx have now grown into a very happy, safe, and prolific herd of 1000 bison.

Brian Balogh: Were there moving-in issues? I mean when you go from the Bronx … I would have trouble going from the Bronx to Oklahoma. Did the bison struggle or did they feel right at home right away?

Jonathan Spiro: There were all kinds of issues, issues with ticks, issues with predators, issues with poachers. These were all issues that Grant and his fellow conservationists had to work out. In fact, it became such a project that Grant decided to create an organization, the American Bison Society, specifically to help the bison acclimate to the new range and to create … Remember, he wanted to create four refuges. So he felt they needed an organization to raise the money to create the three more refuges that they needed.

Jonathan Spiro: William Hornaday was the first president of the American Bison Society. Teddy Roosevelt was the honorary president. They gave lectures. They wrote newspaper and magazine articles extolling the cause of bison preservation. The American Bison Society had a very dramatic logo in which painter, Maxfield Parrish, had this magnificent bull standing proudly on a rocky mound. As a result, the public became actually very aware of the plight of the bison. Donations pour into the Bison Society. The Society reconnoiters possible additional ranges out West. They identified three more possible ranges. They lobby Congress.

Jonathan Spiro: Madison Grant, Hornaday lobby Congress. By the time of the First World War, Congress in fact had established three more bison ranges, one in Montana, one in South Dakota, one in Nebraska. Those are the first four bison refuges. They are national treasures.

Brian Balogh: By now there were enough bison to actually populate them.

Jonathan Spiro: Well, they were still being populated by bison from either zoos or private collections. Madison Grant insisted on absolutely pure-blooded bison. Most bison that you would just find in the wild had by now mated with cows. They were called cattaloes, and he didn’t want to save that species. He wanted actual bison. But that’s how they saved the bison. There were 500 bison left when he started, and today there’s 500,000 bison. It’s one of the great conservation efforts in world history.

Brian Balogh: It’s a remarkable story. But there was a phrase that you used, “His fascination with pure-blooded,” that I want to return to because he felt that way about human beings as well. Am I wrong?

Jonathan Spiro: In 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. It’s one of the most influential books of the 20th century because it employed the latest findings of science to claim that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, that’s a term invented by Madison Grant, the Nordics are the master race. But of course, the book is entitled The Passing of the Great Race.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Jonathan Spiro: That’s because Grant claims that the Nordics are becoming extinct, the great race is passing. How could the master race be dying out? Because in 1916, the Nordics in America are being swamped by millions of inferior immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who were predominately Catholic and worst of all, as far as Madison Grant is concerned, Jews.

Brian Balogh: Right. My relatives.

Jonathan Spiro: And my relatives. Grant felt he must warn his fellow Nordics that we must prevent these inferior immigrants from polluting our purer blood or the great race is going to pass.

Brian Balogh: Jonathan, did he draw upon his understanding of the principles of conservation in saving the bison in order to come to this conclusion about humans?

Jonathan Spiro: Absolutely. Grant learned from his work in conservation that, first of all, one of the worst things you can do is introduce non-native species into North America because they’ll take over and drive out the native-born species.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Jonathan Spiro: You can see that Jews, in his mind, are like weeds being introduced to North America and they’re going to drive out the native Nordics.

Brian Balogh: As historians, we’re not supposed to jump ahead, but I got to ask you whether a guy like Hitler picked up on this kind of thinking?

Jonathan Spiro: Sadly and tragically, yes. In 1924, Hitler read a German translation of The Passing of the Great Race, [German 00:24:12], and learned from this respected American conservationist that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, which in Germany they call Aryans are the master race and that the dark-haired, dark-eyed Jews are the lowest of the races. Hitler declared, “Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race is my Bible.” Not surprisingly therefore, most of the leaders of the Nazi party read it.

Jonathan Spiro: At the Nuremberg war trials after World War II when the US put the surviving leaders of the Third Reich on trial, the Nazi defendants entered The Passing of the Great Race as a defense exhibit to justify their policy of anti-Semitic genocide.

Brian Balogh: So how do you square, let’s call it, the overlap between some conservationist thought and eugenic thought?

Jonathan Spiro: Well, we’re speaking in 2019 where, to be blunt, conservationism good, racism bad. That, of course, is not how they viewed these things back at the turn of the 20th century. Madison Grant was hardly the only conservationist who was a racist in those days. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, John Muir comes to mind, most of Grant’s peers were active in both the conservation movement and the eugenic movement, which was the movement to implement scientific racism.

Jonathan Spiro: I am an historian. I can attempt to put myself in the shoes of historical actors. I can empathize with the fact that the members of the eastern aristocracy in 1900 were deeply anxious that they were losing their hold over America. Their reactionary response was to desperately try to preserve the best and largest and oldest and most magnificent of our endangered native species. In the case of fauna, that means save the American bison. Flora, the gigantic redwoods, people, the superior Nordics. It was clear to Grant at least that just as the noble bison were going extinct, so too were the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, and it was his duty to save them.

Brian Balogh: Jonathan Spiro is dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Castleton University. He’s also the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant.