H.P. Lovecraft and Madison Grant died within months of each other in 1937. When they were alive, Grant was vastly more famous than Lovecraft; now, of course, it is reversed. While hardly anyone today knows the name of Madison Grant, Lovecraft’s work is all in print in numerous editions, both his work and life are subjecta of significant study by fans and scholars, and his figure is something of an icon throughout global popular culture.

I have been aware of both men for most of my life. Thanks to a childhood enthusiasm for the writings of Stephen King, I read King’s book about horror, Danse Macabre, quite young, and from it first learned about Lovecraft, though it took a long time for me to learn how to appreciate Lovecraft’s stories. Madison Grant I learned of from my father when we were at a used bookstore in Vermont, where he happened upon a copy of Grant’s long-forgotten 1916 bestseller The Passing of the Great Race for $3 (the price is still written in the book, which I inherited). My father was obsessed with studying Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and he knew that Grant’s book was a particular favorite of Adolf Hitler, a book the Führer described as “my bible”.

John Higham’s 1955 study Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 remains valuable as an investigation of its topic, and Higham attests to Grant’s importance: “The man who put the pieces together was Madison Grant, intellectually the most important nativist in recent American history. All of the trends in race-thinking converged upon him.”

Like Lovecraft, Grant was obsessed with hierarchy and heredity. In his illuminating book Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Jonathan Peter Spiro presents the racial concept of The Passing of the Great Race succinctly: “Grant’s book held that mankind was divided into a series of hierarchically arranged subspecies, with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics at the top of the ethnological pyramid and the other less-worthy races falling into place below the master race.” Grant was a vicious anti-Semite (thus Hitler’s fondness for his writings) but when it came to black people, he often seemed as much befuddled as hateful. Spiro writes: “According to Grant, whites and blacks evolved independently of each other, and only ‘old fashioned’ thinkers still maintained that all humans belonged to the species homo sapiens” (p.242). Grant simply didn’t see black people as human; they were, to him, more like livestock. Though his goals were similarly eliminationist, he didn’t quite hate them in the way he hated Jews; he just didn’t know why they ever aspired to a life better than that of, say, a horse. In his last book, the alternately hilariously absurd and nausea-inducing The Conquest of a Continent, he expressed sadness that evolution had not taken care of African-Americans: “Natural selection … in view of the present vital statistics of the two races, can no longer be relied upon to solve the problem by a gradual elimination of the Negro in America. Comfort has been found in the fall of the ratio of the Negroes to the total population; but their absolute increase goes on just the same.”

Almost all of Grant’s ideas about race, eugenics, and anthropology were borrowed from scientists, intellectuals, and politicians, many of whom were his friends and colleagues. Grant himself was not an originator of ideas, but it wasn’t originality that made him important. He had a singular ability with polemic, an ability to speak to the interests and, especially, the fears of his day. Stephen Jay Gould called The Passing of the Great Race “the most influential tract of American scientific racism.” Grant’s book went through multiple printings in its first year, had a revised second edition by 1918, and had sold a million copies by sometime in the 1920s. Upon receiving the manuscript, Grant’s editor at Scribner’s told Theodore Roosevelt he thought the book to be “one of unusual importance”. That editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, who would go on to publish Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (In fact, Perkins had a house in Windsor, Vermont, about half an hour south of where my father discovered the copy of The Passing of the Great Race that I now own. Vermont, of course, also has some important Lovecraft sites.) As Spiro notes, after the success of Grant’s book, Scribner’s would publish many more books advocating eugenics, including the work of Grant’s close friend Lothrop Stoddard, who, along with Grant, is clearly alluded to in one of Max Perkins’s later projects for Scribner’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Looking at Grant and Lovecraft together shows the extent to which Lovecraft’s passionate racism was reflected in a certain mainstream of American society and culture during most of Lovecraft’s lifetime — importantly, a mainstream of quasi-aristocrats, exactly the class Lovecraft most envied and aspired to. There were people, even among Lovecraft’s friends and correspondents, who worked against the racism of the age, but in putting Grant and Lovecraft together we can see just how deeply certain prejudices not only affected scientific discourse but, in fact, enabled a pose of scientific rationalism. To be a rational, unsentimental person devoted to the truths of scientific inquiry was to be a eugenicist. It remains important to recognize the extent to which racist and xenophobic ideas coursed through the main currents of science during this era, because those ideas still haunt a lot of the ways we talk about heredity, at least in popular culture. 

This brings us back to Lovecraft’s narrators. Referencing an article by Deborah D’Agati on Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, Jeff Lacy and Steven J. Zani write, “Lovecraft’s narrators tend to be very rational. … The narrative voices of these empiricists are often so appropriately dry and objective that readers may forget that there is, in fact, a character with a particular worldview narrating the story.” One of the ways Lovecraft signals that his characters are rational, objective empiricists is by aligning them with ideas of race, heredity, and degeneration that Lovecraft and millions of other people associated with the sciences. 

Ideas from eugenics infiltrated all sorts of disciplines and discourses during Lovecraft’s lifetime, from rightwing anti-immigration crusaders to leftwing progressives drunk on utopian ideas of perfecting the species. For all its multi-disciplinary insidiousness, Madison Grant’s type of thinking especially took hold within natural science, conservation, and anthropology. These were disciplines rife with quasi-eugenicist theorizing for decades before Grant got passionate about the subject. 

Grant didn’t make a connection between breeding and humans until he had been working in wildlife conservation for a while. He was, among many other things, the founding father of the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) and one of the more important originators of the idea of wildlife conservation, an idea he had promoted vociferously, primarily as a way to conserve big game for hunting. His achievements in conservation were impressive and important to this day. His social status, wealth, organizational acumen, stubbornness, and energy led him to be able to achieve things few other people would have. It helped, too, that his friend Teddy Roosevelt became President for a few years, and shared his passion for hunting and for conserving nature.

After World War Two, Grant’s name all but got erased from the historical record, despite his considerable influence on the landscape (literally) of American society. With the revelation of his admirer Adolph Hitler’s crimes against humanity, few people wanted to associate themselves with Grant’s memory, even as his ideas continued to stumble around in the haunted house of cultural consciousness. 

Grant proved easy to forget. When he was alive, he did not seek attention for himself. Spiro explains that while Grant had immense influence in the corridors of power and called many of the country’s most powerful people friends, he worked hard to stay in the background himself, preferring to keep his influence quiet. Even after his first book made him famous, he kept away from the publicity machines. After his death, his relatives destroyed all his personal papers. “Moreover,” Spiro writes, “Grant seems particularly cursed by the gods of history. It is somewhat uncanny the number of fluke accidents that have befallen archival collections that we know at one time contained records relating to Grant.” It wasn’t long after his death that Grant’s ideas about races became, in their overt form, anathema, which might explain why, as Spiro says, “an inordinately large number of Grant’s friends destroyed their personal papers. … Equally frustrating — and certainly more morally egregious — is the fact that Grant’s correspondence with certain key figures who did save their papers has nonetheless ‘disappeared’ from the archives. The boxes are there, but nothing is inside them.”

With this decayed, corroded, and corrupted archival record, Madison Grant could be an occult figure from a Lovecraft story, one of those mysterious purveyors of power whose traces have been excised from the records by both deliberate action and strange coincidence. (What if The Necronomicon is not, in fact, an arcane tome … but instead a book called The Passing of the Great Race…)

Like Lovecraft, Grant was not a scientist himself, but drew from the work of biologists and anthropologists. The preface to The Passing of the Great Race was written by his good friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, longtime president of the American Museum of Natural History and co-founder of the American Eugenics Society. Grant was a popularizer and a polemicist, but while scientists may have scoffed at his lack of scholarly rigor, they still agreed with him. The journal Science gave the 1918 edition of The Passing of the Great Race a mixed review, with the criticism being not of the thesis itself, or the idea that “the Nordic race” is in peril, but rather of the haphazard approach and overly pessimistic point of view (the reviewer asserts faith in the effectiveness of eugenics programs). Spiro identifies Grant, Osborn, Harry H. Laughlin, and Charles Davenport as “the Big Four of scientific racism in the United States”. They all worked closely together, and Davenport was a member of the National Academy of Sciences whose 1911 book Heredity in Relation to Eugenics was a popular text in science classes. Like Lovecraft, these men were propelled by a feeling that a great doom lay ahead.

Higham summarizes the ideas that provided the foundation for Grant’s own sense of doom:

Everywhere Grant saw the ruling race of the western world on the wane yet heedless of its fate because of a “fatuous belief” in the power of environment to alter heredity. In the United States he observed the deterioration going on along two parallel lines: race suicide and reversion. As a result of Mendelian laws, Grant pontificated, we know that different races do not really blend. … In short, a crude interpretation of Mendelian genetics provided the rationale for championing racial purity.

What horrified Grant is not far from what horrified Delapore in “The Rats in the Walls”. 

As did many other eugenicists, Grant and Lovecraft both disparaged disagreement as “sentimentalism”, a term rich with implications of soft-mindedness, empty-headedness, and effeminacy. (Ancestor to Trump supporters’ statements about other people’s feelings. Whenever Grant, Lovecraft, et al. describe someone as “sentimental” or a “sentimentalist”, you could replace the term with “snowflake” to get a contemporary resonance.) This idea of sentimentalism connects to the eugenicists’ pose of rationality, a pose that was also enhanced by anti-religious ideas. Both Lovecraft and Grant were anti-Christian for various reasons, Grant primarily because he hated the idea of charity, which he thought allowed the weak to continue when they ought to be left to die. Like Lovecraft, Grant venerated ancient Rome and seemed to see Christianity as an impurity in Roman history, leading to the fall of the empire. “Early ascetic Christianity,” Grant wrote, “played a large part in this decline of the Roman Empire, as it was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek, and lowly, while Stoicism was the religion of the strong men of the time.” Grant seems to prefer the pre-Christian (but not Jewish!) religions: “Christianity was in sharp contrast to the worship of tribal deities which preceded it, and tended then, as it does now, to break down class and race distinctions. Such distinctions are absolutely essential to the maintenance of race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.” In the way that contemporary proselytizing atheists decry Christianity (and religion generally) as unscientific, so, too, did Grant see it as such because it countered the “scientific” laws of social darwinism.

Eugenic practices rose to mainstream popularity during a time of great panic about immigration in the United States, and so it is no surprise that Grant and Lovecraft both detested immigration and entwined their overall racism with anti-immigrant ideas. Their descriptions of a New York ravaged by degenerates are similar. Here is a paragraph from The Passing of the Great Race:

As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races, and he cannot compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.

Here’s Lovecraft, from “The Horror at Red Hook”:

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. … From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. … The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook’s legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand.

Overall, Lovecraft and Grant’s fears were the same. (Since neither Lovecraft nor Grant hid what they feared, I don’t think there is great need here to go into more detail about this, but for explorations of these fears in Lovecraft through a variety of lenses, see writings by Timothy H. Evans, Mitch Frye, James Goho, Brooks Hefner, Bennett Lovett-Graff, Jed Mayer, Jay McRoy, César Guarde Paz, Sophus A. Reinert, and Benjamin M. Welton.)

I have not encountered evidence that Lovecraft read Grant’s work, but I would be surprised if he were not at least generally familiar with it, given its prominence in American culture during the years of Lovecraft’s writing career. In his comprehensive biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence, S.T. Joshi discounts the similarities between the two, for a few reasons: Lovecraft’s racism was certainly well established before the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, Grant was more consistently committed to a tripartite Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean idea of race in Europe than Lovecraft was, and there’s very little direct evidence of which racist tracts Lovecraft read other than Walter Benjamin Smith’s The Color Line (mentioned in a poem he dedicated to Smith. He also owned the book Immigrant Races in North America by Peter Roberts, which is primarily taxonomic and informational rather than polemical). However, it is clear from Lovecraft’s letters that he and Grant were drawing from the same well.

Because Grant was mostly unoriginal in his concepts and also highly influential through his popularization of those concepts, it is impossible to say that echoes of Grant in Lovecraft are evidence of direct influence. Lovecraft read about the work of some contemporary anthropologists and biologists, and many of the people he drew his ideas from were people Grant had read or who, in many cases, provided direct consultation to him. Chronicling the changes Grant made for the 1918 edition of Passing of the Great Race, Spiro writes: 

He numbered among his correspondents scores of scientists in the United States and Europe who were enthusiastic about the book and anxious that it be as accurate as possible. Scholars like John Beddoe, James Breasted, Henri Breuil, A. C. Haddon, T. Rice Holmes, Harry H. Johnston, Sir Arthur Keith, John Dyneley Prince, Sir William Ridgeway, G. Elliot Smith, William J. Sollas, H. G. F. Spurrell, and A. S. Woodward were continually updating Grant on issues of ethnographic significance, and he included their corrections in the revised document. Theodore Roosevelt also had a number of suggestions he wanted Grant to incorporate into the second edition, and he corresponded with Grant for many months about possible alterations.

A few of those names appear in Lovecraft’s letters (and in 1919 he published a memorial poem to Roosevelt). 

The clearest influence of Grant’s ideas on Lovecraft may be in the use of the word Nordic. The term seems to have originated with the Russian-French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (1852-1918), who, Geoffrey G. Field writes, “referred to a race nordique as early as 1900″. Deniker had debates with William Z. Ripley, an economist and racist who taught at MIT, Columbia, and Harvard and whom Spiro identifies as a likely influence on Grant’s turn from working on conservation activities to working to promote eugenics. Ripley’s 1899 book The Races of Europe classified Europeans into three races: Alpine, Mediterranean, and Teutonic. Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race kept the three categories, but renamed Teutonic into Nordic, perhaps the first time the term was used in this way in English, and certainly the reason the term became a popular synonym for Ripley’s “Teutonic” and Gobineau’s “Aryan”. Lovecraft used the terms “Teutonic” and “Aryan” throughout his life, but “Nordic” became a favorite word of praise from the early 1920s onward, probably for a similar reason to Grant’s even fuller use of it in the 1918 second edition of his book: the U.S. entered the World War in 1917, Germany was the enemy, and any praise of “Teutonic” qualities seemed in bad taste.

It doesn’t much matter whether Grant himself directly influenced Lovecraft. Madison Grant and H.P. Lovecraft bathed in the same swamp.