Madison Grant, eugenicist, leader of the immigration restriction movement and proponent of the theory of Nordic superiority, died at his home Sunday at the age of 71.
Mr. Grant was an official of a number of movements for closing America’s doors to immigrants. In a book published in 1933. “The Conquest of a Continent or the Expansion of Races in America,” he said the Polish Jews, actually non-Europeans with probably not a drop of the old Hebrew blood, came in a “tumultuous and frantic invasion” to the United States.
To preserve the “Nordic strain” Mr. Grant urged a rigid system of national origin quotas, suspension of naturalizations for a generation and registration of the entire population to prevent illegal immigration.
A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review section said: “Substitute Aryan for Nordic and a good deal of Mr. Grant’s argument would lend itself without much difficulty to the support of some recent pronouncements and proceedings in Germany…”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
