Madison Grant Saved the Redwoods and Inspired Hitler

The grove around you was saved by a man who also wrote what Adolf Hitler called his Bible.

Madison Grant was born in eighteen sixty-five and died in nineteen thirty-seven. In that span, he co-founded the Save the Redwoods League, helped establish Glacier National Park and Denali National Park, worked to protect the American bison from extinction, and contributed directly to the preservation of the old-growth corridor you are driving through. His record as a conservationist is genuine and extensive.

In nineteen sixteen, two years before he co-founded the League, Grant published a book called The Passing of the Great Race. It argued, with the full apparatus of the scientific establishment of its era, that the Nordic race was superior to all others and that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was diluting what Grant considered the essential American character. It was the most influential American white supremacist text of the twentieth century.

Adolf Hitler read it. In a personal letter to Grant, Hitler called the book his Bible. The book's influence on the intellectual framework of the Third Reich is documented by historians who have traced the genealogy of Nazi racial theory to its American sources. Grant is one of those sources.

The Save the Redwoods League eventually acknowledged this history and removed Grant's name from a grove that had been dedicated to him. California State Parks formally stripped a memorial to Grant at Prairie Creek Redwoods in twenty twenty-one.

The trees did not ask who saved them. The old-growth corridor you are moving through exists because of Grant and the people who worked alongside him. Holding that alongside what Grant believed about human beings is not a rhetorical exercise. It is the actual challenge this history presents. How do we account for what someone built, in full knowledge of what they also destroyed? The forest is real. The harm is real. Neither cancels the other.