ku klux klan

"If you are a blond, you belong to the best people in the world, but it's all over with you! Your forebears committed the fatal mistake of intermingling with inferior brunettes, and as a result the great qualities of the blond race, which gave the world the highest type of culture, have been sadly undermined and the predominant traits of the brunettes are asserting themselves more and more until their complete triumph is foreshadowed, especially in the United States."

Thus begins an October 22, 1916, New York Times feature article based on the newly published book The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, who "in more scientific language" warns of the end of the blond race at the hands of brown-haired whites and, worse, of those with brown hair and dark skin. According to Grant, the problem of Nordic peoples was that they did not enjoy the cold and preferred the heat and sunny warmth of the south, but were only able to subsist in the tropical regions as owners of the land instead of working it. The inhabitants of India still spoke the Aryan language but their blood had lost the quality of the conqueror. Grant, in one of his more moderate conclusions, discovered that the solution lay in the practices of the past: "No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and the invaders bring their own women with them... It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf States, perhaps, also the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley must be abandoned to Negroes."