The Passing of the Great Race

The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 book of scientific racism by American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant. Though influential, the book was largely ignored when it first appeared; it went through several revisions and editions, but was never a best seller. Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority and argues for a strong eugenics program.

Grant's proposal to create a strong eugenics program for the "Nordic" population to survive was repudiated by Americans in the 1930s and Europeans after 1945. It is considered one of the main works in the 20th century tradition of scientific racism and has been described as "The Manifesto of Scientific Racism".

The book is organized into two sections:

The first section deals with the basis of race as well as Grant's own stances on political issues of the day (eugenics). These center around the growing numbers of immigrants from non-Nordic Europe. Grant claims that the members of contemporary American Protestant society who could trace their ancestry back to Colonial times were being out-bred by immigrant and "inferior" racial stocks. Grant reasons that America has always been a Nordic country, consisting of Nordic immigrants from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands in Colonial times and of Nordic immigrants from Ireland and Germany in later times. Grant feels that certain parts of Europe were underdeveloped and a source of racial stocks unqualified for the Nordic political structure of the U.S. Grant is also interested in the impact of the expansion of America's Black population into the urban areas of the North.

Grant reasons that the new immigrants were of different races and were creating separate societies within America including ethnic lobby groups, criminal syndicates, and political machines which were undermining the socio-political structure of the country and in turn the traditional Anglo-Saxon colonial stocks, as well as all Nordic stocks. His analysis of population studies, economic utility factors, labor supply, etc. purports to show that the consequence of this subversion was evident in the decreasing quality of life, lower birth rates, and corruption of the contemporary American society. He reasons that the Nordic races would become extinct and America as it was known would cease to exist, being replaced by a fragmented country, or a corrupted caricature of itself.

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