AP Photo
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in 1934
A couple of years ago, when I was researching the 1970s just-transition legislation to protect loggers who’d lost their jobs when the Redwood National Park was expanded, I read up on the origins of the park, which dated back to the 1917 founding of the Save the Redwoods League. Turned out that the founder of the league was none other than Madison Grant, who one year earlier had authored The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that America was threatened by non-Nordic immigrants such as Jews and Southern and Eastern European Catholics and Slavs, not to mention African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Grant’s book, like D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, reinvigorated both racism and nativism, and laid the foundations for a reborn Klan, which in the 1920s focused much of its hatred on Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks. It provided the pseudo-scientific call for ending immigration from any place but Protestant Northwest Europe, and Congress did just that in 1924, in a law that wasn’t repealed until 1965. It also inspired such European anti-Semites as the young Adolf Hitler.
I was reminded of Grant’s bifurcated legacy over the past week by the Sierra Club’s acknowledgment and repudiation of its founder’s, John Muir’s, racism, and by Planned Parenthood’s acknowledgment and repudiation of the racist eugenics of the great birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. What the stories of all three of these deeply flawed pioneers illustrate is how pervasive bigotry was among Americans of their eras, and not just among the general public but particularly among educated elites, among whom the nonsense of eugenics was believed to provide a scientific confirmation of racial bias. The burning crosses that popped up in nearly every city visited by Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith—a Catholic—during his 1928 campaign had their elite equivalent in Ivy League universities’ opposition to admitting Jews and people of color and—oh yes, them—women.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that even the signal advances this nation has made in progressive causes have often owed their success to individuals who also partook in, and sometimes championed, their time’s prevailing biases. That was no less true in 1917 than it was in 1776; it’s almost surely, and sadly, a constant of human existence. The broader a legacy’s scope, the more imperfect, and in some instances appalling, its history is likely to be. Columbus may have been a “flop,” as Saul Bellow wrote in the closing passage of The Adventures of Augie March, but that “didn’t prove there was no America.”
