The origins of Trump’s “genes” obsession

Donald Trump started his week on the campaign trail Monday talking about the “bad genes” carried by immigrants — just one of many comments he’s made in recent months that align genetic makeup with essential value as a human being. On Friday, he traveled to Colorado, a state not even in contention this cycle, to whip up anti-immigrant fervor that he’s long stoked. 

It should all make us realize that just as our national heroes have much to teach us about America’s past, so too do the once-famous names we have chosen to forget; names like Madison Grant, one of the leading racial and political propagandists in our nation’s history.

Grant was an aristocrat from New York who worked at the cutting edge of the eugenics movement by penning “The Passing of the Great Race” which became, in the words of his biographer Jonathan Spiro, “the Bible of Scientific Racism.” When it comes to the influencers who molded our nation’s racial consciousness and public policies, Grant and his movement have few equals during the first half of the 20th Century. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, racial scientists labored to transform the myths of the age of slavery and the more modern racist fictions of the Ku Klux Klan into scientifically verified facts. Grant and his eugenicist comrades strove to make America’s public policies as brutal as the racial science’s coldhearted facts.

For eugenicists, everything traced back to one’s genes, and their policies proved as classist as they were racist. No provisions for the poor were to be provided, for destitution was demanded to drive inferior people to productivity. Deep investment in public education was seen as a waste of public resources and segregation was demanded as a necessity for national survival. Most importantly, no tolerance for immigrants could be allowed, for they would threaten the blood of “the master race” and the genetic fabric that undergirded America’s exceptionalism 

It was a message that took our nation by storm throughout the 1920s, inspiring the work of forced sterilization, radicalizing our nation’s segregationist policies through “one-drop” rules, robbing vulnerable people of governmental provisions and protections and nearly eliminating immigration from the 1920s through the mid-1960s. All of these dehumanizing policies were sold under the banner of “science” and harmonized with the nation’s racist fears of criminally inferior people.

In the following decade, the eugenic gospel would set the world on fire through one of Madison Grant’s most famous fans. “The book,” wrote Adolf Hitler to Madison Grant, “has become my bible.” From slavery, through the Trail of Tears, and the lethal employment of segregation, Hitler long admired America’s racial politics. But what Hitler received from Grant’s writing as he studied in Landsberg Prison was the theories behind the policies in the form of a one-volume synthesis of the long, varied, and often conflicting history of the racial sciences accessible to the common reader. Essential to the theory in “The Passing of the Great Race” was the explicit prioritization of protecting racial purity over and against the protection of democracy. Grant played an indispensable role in helping to create the intellectual framework that justified the rise of the National Socialist Project. And under the leadership of Grant’s pupil, Berlin and Nuremburg committed themselves to learning the racial lessons supplied by Birmingham and New York. Germany and America were never identical twins—but the family resemblance often proves eerie.

Yet, since Germany learned so much from America, to truly understand Trump and the forces that continue to make him a unique and generational threat to the future of democracy in America, no transatlantic trip to Europe is needed. The truth is that for the past decade, Trump has given a platform for America’s most deeply-seated racist and classist convictions and fears. His playbook is cut from Madison Grant’s American-made eugenical cloth. Like Grant, Trump has committed himself to making America’s racism more explicit, transparent, and politically powerful. Like Grant, Trump has weaponized his racial fears to war against democracy itself and our nation’s most vulnerable people. Like Grant, the cruelty was and is the point.

As we stand weeks away from selecting our nation’s next president, we do well to remember the haunted history that we have buried for far too long. History, at its best, is not a weapon for the work of national shame or self-hate. The point of opening the caskets of our forgotten history is to foster the self-understanding necessary to empower the work of creating a future that upholds the democratic creed that “all men are created equal.” This week Donald Trump reminded voters once again that democracy’s creed is not his creed. Donald Trump’s creed comes not from our nation’s founding documents but from the “bible of scientific racism” penned by the eugenicist Madison Grant.