From “Wild Things: Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos”, an article by David Samuels in the June 2012 Harper’s. The Madison Grant discussed below was the founder of the Bronx Zoo.
---- I spend a month or so during the winter in the zoo library, perusing ancient leather-bound volumes of the New York Zoological Society’s minutes dating back to 1895. I have made a big point of needing to visit the library, and now that I have finally gained access I read more or less randomly in the zoo’s collections, unsure of what exactly I am looking for. After a few weeks of this, I realize that a mustachioed young man is peering out at me from an old oil portrait. Fogged and cracked by time, the subject of the portrait is of no great importance, the librarian assures me. After some additional research, I discover that the subject of the portrait is Madison Grant. In addition to his work at the zoo, Grant also spearheaded notable campaigns to preserve bison, redwoods, whales, and bald eagles, and to create Glacier and Denali National Parks in Alaska, efforts that led him to be generally credited as one of the fathers of the conservation movement in America. Since Grant appears in the Zoological Society’s records as a controlling presence from the date of its founding in 1895 until his death in 1937, on the eve of the Second World War, the placement of his portrait in a restricted space—and apparently nowhere else in the zoo—is puzzling. Curious, I locate Grant’s first published article, “The Vanishing Moose, and Their Extermination in the Adirondacks,” which ran in The Century Magazine the year before the New York Zoological Society was founded. “The old order of things has largely passed away,” Grant writes, with a clubman’s mix of doom-laden apprehension and awestruck admiration for the purity of a bygone age, “but we are yet within sight of the primeval state of a savage and beautiful wilderness, and can obtain some idea of what this country once was by the untouched or only partly mutilated corners that remain. The end, however, is near. . .” In “The Origin and Relationship of the Large Mammals of North America”, published in 1904, the year he climbed the Statue of Liberty to look out over New York Harbor with Beebe, Grant began to expand his arguments about endangered animal populations in order to arrive at some more general maxims that might also be applied to humans. While not all North American animals came from the Old World, Grant noted, “the predominating types undoubtedly did.” In order to save as much as possible of the old America, he wrote in a letter to Hornaday, it was necessary to obtain “absolutely pure full blooded stock.” He further emphasized in a letter to another colleague, “It is of the utmost importance to preserve all remnants of the American bison without any cross-breeding.” The first concrete application of Grant’s theoretical interests to actual human beings came in 1906, with the arrival of an African pygmy named Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo. Brought to the United States by the American explorer and collector Samuel Verner, who obtained him from local captors in the Congo in exchange for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth, Ota Benga was “employed” at the zoo in a capacity that involved his being dressed in white trousers and a khaki coat, and presented to the public for viewing. On Sunday, September 16, 40,000 people went to the zoo, and everywhere Ota Benga went that day, the New York Times reported, crowds pursued him, “howling, jeering, and yelling.” The newspaper reported that “some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.” When a group of colored ministers protested against what they viewed as Grant and Hornaday’s degrading treatment of the pygmy, the Times haughtily protested, “It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies . . . are very low in the human scale.” In March 1916, Grant’s pygmy, who had since moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he was called Otto Bingo and sent to work in a tobacco factory, went behind a stable and then shot himself in the heart with a borrowed gun. In that same year, Scribner’s published what was almost immediately hailed as Grant’s masterwork, “The Passing of the Great Race”, or “The Racial Basis of European History”. The book was edited by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor and friend of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. After reading the manuscript of the book, in which Grant applied twenty years of thinking and writing about animal populations at the Bronx Zoo to human populations, Perkins recommended it to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, claiming that it was a work of great and lasting importance. “The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats,” Grant wrote. Mocking the idea that environment, education, and opportunity could alter heredity, Grant expressed his great disgust for Negroes and issued dire warnings about the Jewish immigrants, whose “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.” Unchecked immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, and southern Italians, he warned, had turned New York City into a “cloaca gentium,” producing racial horrors that future anthropologists would find impossible to unravel. Grant’s solution to such horrors lay in the application of the theories of “scientific management” of wildlife populations he had developed to the germplasm of the United States and other endangered Western countries. Eugenics laws, he explained, could pertain 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.” In addition to saving the political and social structures and values that had made America great, banning the mass immigration of undesirables was the only way to save the native wildlife of America from destruction. Grant promoted his version of applied racism through his own writings, as well as through a spidery network of research programs sponsored by major American foundations and universities. These programs, run by the country’s leading scientists and promoted by some of its most powerful legislators, had a decisive and entirely regrettable influence on the racial attitudes and immigration laws of 1920s and ’30s America. Grant also served as a primary conduit between American eugenicists and their colleagues in Europe. Having read The Passing of the Great Race in Germany, Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant, proclaiming, “The book is my Bible,” a sentiment that was shared by many of the leading intellectuals and scientists of the Third Reich, who expressed Grant’s vision in ever-more-horrifying forms. The suggestion that any connection exists between Madison Grant’s murderous racial theories and his conservationist achievements would appall any gentle-minded environmentalist of I today. Yet the connection is clearly there. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
