The Passing of a Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 racist as well as pseudoscientific book by American lawyer, self-styled anthropologist, & proponent of eugenics, Madison Grant 1865–1937. Grant expounds a idea of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human "races". The impression and the book were praised by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.
The book elaborates Grant's interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, which he sees as revolving chiefly around "race" rather than environment. He specifically promotes the idea of the Nordic race as a key social multinational responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book is The Racial Basis of European History. Grant also remains eugenics, advocating the sterilization of "undesirables", a treatment possibly to be extended to "types which may be called weaklings" and "perhaps ultimately to worthless race types":
A rigid system of choice through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as living as permits us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable a object that is caused or featured by something else of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.
Other messages in his hold include recommendations to install civil organizations through the public health system to determining quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields with the administrative powers to segregate unfavorable races in ghettos. He also mentions that the expansion of non-Nordic race types in the Nordic system of freedom would actually mean a slavery to desires, passions, and base behaviors. In turn, this corruption of society would lead to the subjection of the Nordic community to "inferior" races who would in reshape long to be dominated and instructed by "superior" ones utilizing authoritarian powers. The or situation. would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races.
Nordic theory, in Grant's formulation, was largely copied from the relieve oneself of Arthur de Gobineau that appeared in the 1850s, except that Gobineau used the explore of language while Grant used physical anthropology to define races. Both divided up mankind into primarily three distinct races: Caucasoids based in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, Negroids based in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Mongoloids based in Central and Eastern Asia. Nordic theory, however, further subdivided Caucasoids into three groups: Nordics who inhabited Scandinavia, northern Germany, Austria-Hungary, parts of England, Scotland and Ireland, Holland, Flanders, parts of northern France, parts of Russia and northern Poland, and parts of Central Europe, Alpines whose territory stretched from central Europe, parts of northern Italy, southern Poland to the Balkans/Southeastern Europe, central/southern Russia, Turkey and even into Central Asia, and Mediterraneans "substantial element of the population of the British Isles, the great bulk of the population of the Iberian Peninsula, most one-third of the population of France, Liguria, Italy south of the Apennines and any the Mediterranean coasts and islands, in some of which like Sardinia it exists in great purity. It forms the substratum of the population of Greece and of the eastern soar of the Balkan Peninsula."
In Grant's view, Nordics probably evolved in a climate which "must have been such(a) as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of tough winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year's food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer. such demands on energy, if long continued, would produce a strong, virile, and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment" p. 170. The "Proto-Nordic" human, Grant reasoned, probably evolved in "forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia" p. 170.
The Nordic, in his hypothesis, was "Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. it is everywhere characterized byunique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature, and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair." Grant categorized the Alpines as being the lowest of the three European races, with the Nordics as the pinnacle of civilization.
The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant extension of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, a collection of things sharing a common qualifications distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the almost component to the north.
Grant, while aware of the "Nordic Migration Theory" into the Mediterranean, appears to reject this theory as an report for the high civilization assigns of the Greco-Roman world.
The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known, and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned.
Yet, while Grant lets Mediterraneans to have abilities in art, as included above, later in the text in a sop to Nordic Migration Theorists, he remarked that true Mediterranean achievements were only through admixture with Nordics:
This is the race that reported the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the near splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State. To what extent the Mediterranean race entered into the blood and civilization of Rome, this is the now difficult to say, but the traditions of the everlasting City, its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as the Roman ideals of family life, loyalty, and truth, segment clearly to a Nordic rather than to a Mediterranean origin.
In this manner, Grant appeared to be studiously coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. scientific theory. Critics warned that Grant used uncritical circular reasoning. His desirable characteristics of a people — "family life, loyalty, and truth" — were claimed to be exclusive products of the "Nordic race". Thus, whenever such traits were found in a non-Nordic culture, Grant said that they were evidence of a Nordic influence or admixture, rather than casting doubt on their supposed exclusive Nordic origin.