Madison Grant on The Melting Pot Hypothesis

For some time I have been wanting to share some more extracts from Madison Grant’s seminal work “The Passing of the Great Race.” Today I have gathered together several sections which serve to shine light on the common misapprehensions held be people today involving race, multi-racial societies, and more specifically the disappearance of the White man.

  1. The Myth of the Half-Breed

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“What the melting pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquistadors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.

It must be borne in mind that the specialisations which characterise the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalised or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalised and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races (Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean) and a Jew is a Jew.

In the crossing of the blond and brunet elements of a population, the more deeply rooted and ancient dark traits are prepotent or dominant. This is matter of every-day observation and the working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by religious beliefs. Nature cares not for the individual nor how he may be modified by environment. She is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type and heredity alone is the medium through which she acts.”

p.15

2. There is no integration or mixing; there is only replacement of the White man

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“For reasons already set forth there are few communities outside of Europe of pure European blood. The racial destiny of Mexico and of the islands and coasts of the Spanish Main is clear. The white man is being rapidly bred out by Negroes on the islands and by Indians on the mainland. It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf states, perhaps, also the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley must be abandoned to Negroes. This transformation is already complete in Haiti and is going rapidly forward in Cuba and Jamaica. Mexico and the northern part of South America must also be given over to native Indians with an ever thinning veneer of white culture of the “Latin” type.

In Venezuela the pure whites number about one percent of the whole population, the balance being Indians and various crosses between Indians, Negroes and whites. In Jamaica the whites number not more than two per cent, while the remainder are Negroes or mulattoes. In Mexico the proportion is larger, but the unmixed whites number no more than twenty percent of the whole, the others being Indians pure or mixed. These latter are the “greasers” of the American frontiersman.

Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed the Negro or, for that matter, the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual and not the race that is affected by religion, education and example. Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure or by the slaver’s lash.

When the impulse of an inferior race to imitate or mimic the dress, manners or morals of the dominant race is destroyed by the acquisition of political or social independence, the servant race tends to revert to its original status as in Haiti.

Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.

In the Argentine white blood of the various European races is pouring in so rapidly that a community preponderantly white, but of the Mediterranean race, may develop, but the type is suspiciously swarthy.

In Brazil, Negro blood together with that of the native inhabitants is rapidly overwhelming the white Europeans, although in the southern provinces German immigration has played an important role and the influx of Italians has also been considerable.

In Asia, with the sole exception of the Russian settlements in Siberia, there can be and will be no ethnic conquest and all the white men in India, the East Indies, the Philippines and China will leave not the slightest trace behind them in the blood of the native population. After several centuries of contact and settlement the pure Spanish in the Philippines are about half of one percent (this group is now extinct). The Dutch in their East Indian islands are even less, while the resident whites in Hindustan amount to about one-tenth of one percent. Such numbers are infinitesimal and of no force in a democracy, but in a monarchy, if kept free from contamination, they suffice for a ruling caste or a military aristocracy.

Throughout history it is only the race of the leaders that has counted and the most vigorous have been in control and will remain in mastery in one form or another until such time as democracy and its illegitimate offspring, socialism, definitely establish cacocracy and the rule of the worst and put an end to progress. The salvation of humanity will then lie in the chance survival of some sane barbarians who may retain the basic truth that inequality and not equality is the law of nature.”

p. 65-68

 

3. The Truth behind the Country of Immigrants and the “Black” US Population

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“The Negroes of the United States while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilisation until in the last century they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body politic. These Negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which persisted but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the names of their masters just as to-day the German and Polish Jews are assuming American names. They came for the most part from the coasts of the Bight of Benin, but some of the later ones came from the southeast coast of Africa by way of Zanzibar. They were of various black tribes but have been from the beginning saturated with white blood.

Looking at any group of Negroes in America, especially in the North, it is easy to see that while they are all essentially Negroes, whether coal-black, brown or yellow, a great many of them have varying amounts of Nordic blood in them, which has in some respects modified their physical structure without transforming them in any way into white men. This miscegenation was, of course, a frightful disgrace to the dominant race but its effects on the Nordics has been negligible, for the simple reason that it was confined to white men crossing with Negro women and did not involve the reverse process, which would, of course, have resulted in the infusion of Negro blood into the American stock.

The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony and owing to the current ignorance of the physical bases of race, one often hears the statement made that native Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin. (Here when Grant uses the term native Americans, he is referring to the European colonists)

This is not true.

At the time of the Revolutionary War the settlers in the thirteen colonies were overwhelmingly Nordic, a very large majority being Anglo-Saxon in the most limited meaning of that term. The New England settlers in particular came from those counties of England where the blood was almost purely Saxon, Anglian, Norse and Dane. The date of their migration was earlier than the resurgence of the Mediterranean type that has so greatly expanded in England during the last century with the growth of the manufacturing towns.

New England during Colonial times and long afterward was far more Nordic than old England; that is it contained a smaller percentage of small, Pre-Nordic brunets. Anyone familiar with the native New Englander knows the clean cut face, the high stature and the prevalence of grey and blue eyes and light brown hair and recognises that the brunet element is less noticeable there than in the South.”

p.70-72

 

4. The Decline of the West and the White Man’s Search for Place in the New World

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School children from the London Olympic Boroughs, 2012.

“The native Americans (white colonists) are splendid raw material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this primary law of nature. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogenous people and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigour of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labour market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

When the test of actual battle comes, it will, of course, be the native American who will do the fighting and suffer the losses. With him will stand the immigrants of Nordic blood, but there will be numbers of these foreigners in the large cities who will prove to be physically unfit for military duty.

As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.

One thing is certain: in any such mixture, the surviving traits will be determined by competition between the lowest and most primitive elements and the specialised traits of Nordic man; his stature, his light coloured eyes, his fair skin and light coloured hair, his straight nose and his splendid fighting and moral qualities, will have little part in the resultant mix.

The “survival of the fittest” means the survival of the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, which to-day are the tenement and factory, as in Colonial times they were the clearing of forests, fighting Indians, farming the fields and sailing the Seven Seas. From the point of view of race it were better described as the “survival of the unfit.”

p.77-79

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