5. Influencing the racialist policies of white supremacy that engulfed the West during the first half of the twentieth century, Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a leading source for theories of Nordic superiority and a core text of American nativists
One of the foremost works of the twentieth century concerning scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant, published in 1916, became a leading source for those who subscribed to theories of Nordic superiority. Claiming the original colonial inhabitants of North America – white Protestants – were being out-bred by inferior racial stocks, Grant contended the United States’ success and greatness stemmed from its Nordic ancestry and was being undermined by competing socio-political systems being introduced by lesser races.
Predicting that without action to avert this crisis the Nordic race would be made extinct, Grant provided a detailed history of the three classifications of European races: Nordic, Alpine, and the Mediterranean. Connecting separate schools of thought regarding the superiority of Aryans, Grant’s work became central to pseudoscientific theories of racial supremacy. Supporting the compulsory sterilization of “undesirables” and “weaklings”, the book received positive reviews, a wide readership in the United States, and would later influence the racialist beliefs and policies of leading members of the Nazi Party in Germany. Adopted in particular by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn Society was founded in 1935 to preserve the purist Nordic genes from infection with inferior racial-genetic traits.