JULY

**28, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

Forefathers' (and Foremothers') Flaws

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law that wasn't repealed until 1965.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."

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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