Does the United States Have Its Own Traditions for Admirers of the Racial Policies of the Third Reich to Draw On?
Important books that still define the framework of discussion for debate on race and the Jewish Question in an American context include The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, which predicted the collapse of White world empires and of colonialism, because of the population growth among colored peoples. The scientific racism that Stoddard was an exponent of advocated a eugenic separation of the primary races of the world.
Stoddard was a prolific writer on racial and cultural topics. Most of his works are as relevant today as when they were written.
Though I consider The Conquest of a Continent his most important work, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race was lauded by Adolf Hitler, who in the early 1930s wrote a 'fan letter' to Grant in which he called the book "his Bible". During the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant's Passing of the Great Race was introduced into evidence by the defense attorney of Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich or at least indicate that they were not ideologically unique to the Third Reich..
Grant's works on scientific racism have been cited to demonstrate that many of the eugenic ideas associated with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in fact that many of them had origins in other countries, including the United States.
Because of Grant's well-connected status and influential friends, he is often used to illustrate the strain of racist-based eugenic thinking in the United States that had great influence up until the era of the Second World War. Because of the use made of his eugenics work by the policy-makers of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has been ignored and obscured by many organizations (such as the Sierra Club) with which he was once associated, who now want to minimize their connections with him.
As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of undesirable traits and worthless race types from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and worthwhile race types conducive to White society:
"A rigid system of selection 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 well as enable 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 solution 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."
Eugenics, the social movement seeking to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization, based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish between superior and inferior elements of society, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to its involvement in World War II.
Eugenics was practised in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany. U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter. There was a consensus between Nazi race policies and those of eugenicists in other countries, including the United States. Eugenicists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.
Both Hans GĂĽnther and Alfred Rosenberg were profoundly influenced by the eugenics movement and the aforementioned authors.
