Madison Grant, All-American white supremacist

Yesterday on FB I posted a quote from the biography of Theodore Roosevelt that I'm reading, to wit:

A NYC newspaper editor had this to say about a certain politician: "Stop [him] talking! Why, you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it." 

The editor then went on to say, "But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant—inflexible honesty, absolutely fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it."

And I asked—the initial observation of course bringing to mind Trump, but the subsequent characterization reminding us of anyone but—whether any of my readers had a guess as to who was being described?

My friend the writer BK Loren got it right off, with the added comment that Roosevelt "also leaned heavily white supremacist." She wrote, "I wonder if most people know that about him? He and Madison Grant ☞ saved the redwoods at least partially because they thought they represented the superior white race. The book Madison wrote was used by Hitler and Anders Breivik to justify their heinous acts." And she referred me to an essay (from 2015) by Duke University law professor Jedidiah Purdy, "Environmentalism's Racist History," discussing Grant.

This particular Grant is not mentioned in either volume one or two of the book I'm reading; maybe he's in volume three, but maybe too he slipped under the biographer, Edmund Morris's radar. That series was published between 1979 and 2010, and Morris no doubt had to jettison just as much juicy material as he kept, TR being rather larger than life. But perhaps he didn't run into Grant, or didn't consider him worthy of mention? 

In the FB discussion, herpetologist Harry Greene jumped in to cite a more recent (June 26 repost) profile of Grant, by Richard Conniff, "The All-American White Supremacist Role Model." 

I am posting all this because I want to read both those commentaries, and what better place to store the links—and potentially find them again!—than here.

I will also say that TR, at the very least (I have no opinion of Grant yet), was a man of his time and class. Which is not to excuse him for having white supremacist, entitled beliefs. He was certainly a (white) American exceptionalist, yet his biography also shows ways in which his thoughts evolved and changed. And we do have to thank him for championing our environment, even if one reason for his doing so is anathema today. 

As for Trump,  Conniff comments, "The difference between Madison Grant & Donald Trump? Grant at least accomplished some good in his life, as a wildlife conservationist, before turning utterly bad."

And . . . I'm glad now to have discovered Conniff's Substack. It looks like it has all sorts of interesting reads.