Madison Grant Quotes

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

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 the future anthropologists to unravel.

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness.

Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization.

One very important difference between white people and black people is that white people think you are your work...Now, a black person has more sense than that because he knows that what I am doing doesn't have anything to do with what I want to do to what I do when I am doing for myself. Now, black people think that my work is just what I have to do to get what I want." Ms. Madison's perspective criticizes definitions of work that grant White men more status and human worth because they are employed in better-paid occupations. She recognizes that work is a contested construct and that evaluating individual worth by the type of work performed is a questionable practice in systems based on race and gender inequality.

IN 1925, MADISON GRANT’S The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German where it was read by a disgruntled corporal who had recently been sent to prison for his part in a riot against the government in Bavaria: Adolf Hitler. After reading the book, the 36-year-old revolutionary sent a fan letter to Grant: “This book is my Bible,” he wrote. During his nine months in prison, Hitler had read several books by American eugenicists, calling his prison stay “his university.” Hitler would soon launch a national movement that would forever damn the field of eugenics to the lower reaches of hell. But, despite popular belief, what was about to happen in Germany didn’t start on a rallying stand in Munich; it started in a law office in New York City.

To say that Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race had influenced Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf would be an understatement; in some sections, Hitler had virtually plagiarized Grant’s book. For example, in The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote, “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language.

See, for example, Humphreys to Washington, November 16, 1786, PGWCS IV: 373; Linda Grant De Pauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Convention (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 43, where she says the terms were used as “epithets as men discussed the [proposed federal] impost” but were not used to designate parties until September 1787, when “the Constitution became a subject of political controversy”; and also 170, where De Pauw suggests that the terms went back at least to 1785. Madison to Washington, New York, March 3, 1787, PGWCS V: 93, which refers to an “antifederal party” in New York; and also 103, where Humphreys, in a letter to Washington dated March 24, 1787, refers to “foederal” and “antifoederal” parties in Connecticut politics.

As a legal matter, then, the case seemed straightforward enough. But it was also highly political, and it placed the authority of the Supreme Court on the line. Madison was seen as likely to defy a direct order to give Marbury his commission. How could the Supreme Court uphold the rule of law without provoking a confrontation with the executive branch that could leave the Court permanently weakened? Marshall’s solution was to assert the Court’s power without directly exercising it. His opinion for a unanimous Court—speaking in one voice in the new Marshall style, rather than through a series of separate concurring opinions as in the past—held that Marbury was due his commission but that the Court could not order it delivered. That was because the grant of “original” jurisdiction to the Supreme Court in Article III did not include writs of mandamus.

If we went to Les Agarves, which is twice the cost, but about as gourmet as we can get without actually being in France, that would qualify as a special evening out. Ronnie will do it on an anniversary or on a birthday, but I know his true opinion of it is that it’s not worth it. I’ve come to believe his taste buds can’t reach gourmet level so he can’t appreciate the difference. For him, then, it makes little sense. But it’s not only the food that is exquisite; it’s the ambience and the service. You feel you’re special, even if only for one night, one dinner. Ronnie likes to make it seem that only women want this. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not true. It’s certainly true when it comes to his friends or most of the husbands of my girlfriends. It’s almost as if there’s something unmanly about elegance. They’d rather associate themselves with Clint Eastwood than Cary Grant or George Clooney. Eastwood can be tough, virile and dangerous, and be grimy at the same time, except, of course, in a movie like The Bridges of Madison County, but men don’t talk about that film.

Experiments in limiting reproduction to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in mediæval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome social conditions were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life were compelled to seek refuge from the violence of the times in monastic institutions and upon such the church imposed the obligation of celibacy and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes. In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of over three centuries from the years 1471 to 1781, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or imprisonment an average of 1,000 persons annually. During these three centuries no less than 32,000 were burned alive and 291,000 were condemned to various terms of imprisonment and other penalties and 17,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in prison or had fled the country. No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised and if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability took place in northern Italy, in France and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.

More immigrants came into the United States in 1907 alone then entered during the next quarter century. Madison Grant was thrilled. “[This is] one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country,” he said. “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population from being overrun by the lower races.” The director of Ellis Island, the entry point for most European immigrants, commented that immigrants were now starting to look more like Americans.

California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined. So when the Third International Congress of Eugenics gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1932 under the presidency of Charles Davenport, and Davenport asked, ‘Can we by eugenical studies point the way to produce the superman and the superstate?’, it was to California that the superman-worshipping German delegates looked for an answer. One of them, Ernst Rudin of the German Society of Racial Hygiene, was elected to head the International Federation of Eugenics Organisations. Within months, Rudin would be appointed Reichskommissar for eugenics by the incoming Nazi government. By 1934, Germany was sterilising more than 5,000 people per month. The California conservationist Charles Goethe, who like Madison Grant combined a pioneering passion for protecting wild landscapes with an equal passion for sterilising psychiatric patients without their consent, returned from a visit to Germany overjoyed that the Californian example had ‘jolted into action a great government of 60 million people’.

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

When we’re both sated, he covers my belly with the flat of his hand. “I thought I was happy, with there being just the two of us,” he says. “But three is even better.” He looks into my eyes. “What do you think? Boy or girl?” “I have names already picked out for both,” I tell him. He laughs. “So I don’t get a say in any of it?” “Nope.” “So, what will the names be?” His fingers tickle across the baby bump that’s not even evident yet. “Reagan if it’s a girl. Lincoln if it’s a boy.” I stare at him and wait for his response. “Presidents?” “Give them something they have to live up to.” I say with a chuckle. “I’m named after Madison. My grandfather is Grant. “Okay.” “Okay?” Did he seriously just agree with me about something? “Okay,” he says again.

I walk over to her, cupping her face in my hands, and whisper, “I wanted to do a lot more than kiss you. I would have given my last breath to taste you just once.” I smile while my thumbs move on her cheeks. “Granted, I had no blood left in my brain to aid in the decision-making process since it was all in my cock.

Grant argued that America needed to become America again. And that the only way this was going to happen was if we removed the weeds and allowed people of Grant’s race to flourish. A decade later, when Madison Grant’s book was translated into German, no one would embrace his notion of race purity more than a young soldier imprisoned in a fortress in Landsberg.

A library of books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) warned the Americans that they could not safely continue to admit members of inferior races to their country, and asserted that all races were inferior to the glorious Nordic race, whether they were Alpine, Mediterranean, Jewish, black or Oriental.

Luther Martin of Maryland replied that "the states would never give up the power over the militia; and that, if they were to do so, the militia would be less attended to by the general than by the state governments."21 After Gerry warned that granting Congress powers inconsistent with the existence of the states would lead to civil war, Madison rejoined that "as the greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies, it is best to prevent them by an effectual provision for a good militia.

The high brain capacity of the Cro-Magnons is paralleled by that of the ancient Greeks, who in a single century gave to the world out of their small population much more genius than all the other races of mankind have since succeeded in producing in a similar length of time.

fresh cornucopia of “rights.” It provides that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 66 What is enumerated is embodied in the Constitution; what is retained is not. Reservations are not grants of power to deal with what is retained. Put differently, what is retained is excluded from the federal jurisdiction. This is made clear by Madison’s explanation

His bible on the subject was The Passing of the Great Race, a hodgepodge of racist pseudoscience, anti-immigration rants, and archaeological poppycock by a dapper, mustachioed Yale graduate named Madison Grant.

The small birth rate in the upper classes is to some extent offset by the care received by such children as are born and the better chance they have to become adult and breed in their turn. The large birth rate of the lower classes is under normal conditions offset by a heavy infant mortality, which eliminates the weaker children.

Where altruism, philanthropy or sentimentalism intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding, the multiplication of inferior types is encouraged and fostered. Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often result in serious injury to the race.

Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.

It is highly unjust that a minute minority should be called upon to supply brains for the unthinking mass of the community, but it is even worse to burden the responsible and larger but still overworked elements in the community with an ever increasing number of moral perverts, mental defectives and hereditary cripples. As the percentage of incompetents increases, the burden of their support will become ever more onerous until, at no distant date, society will in self-defense put a stop to the supply of feebleminded and criminal children of weaklings.

Those who read these pages will feel that there is little hope for humanity, but the remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

Nationality is an artificial political grouping of population usually centring around a single language as an expression of traditions and aspirations. Nationality can, however, exist independently of language but states thus formed, such as Belgium or Austria, are far less stable than those where a uniform language is prevalent, as, for example, France or England.

It sometimes happens that a section of the population of a large nation gathers around language, reinforced by religion, as an expression of individuality. The struggle between the French-speaking Alpine Walloons and the Nordic Flemings of Low Dutch tongue in Belgium is an example of two competing languages in an artificial nation which was formed originally around religion. On the other hand, the Irish National movement centres chiefly around religion reinforced by myths of ancient grandeur. The French Canadians and the Poles use both religion and language to hold together what they consider a political unit. None of these so-called nationalities are founded on race.

«كان أهل الطبقة الراقية في الإغريق ذوي شعر أشقر، أما الطبقات الدنيا فشعورهم سوداء. ويكاد جميع آلهة أوليمبوس يصورون شقرًا، ومن العسير أن نتخيل فنانًا إغريقيًا يرسم فينوس داكنة الشعر. وفي جميع صور الكنيسة اليوم يظهر جميع الملائكة شقرًا، بينما سكان المناطق الأدنى يصورن بلون شديد الدكنة. وتجد في كثير من الأقمشة المزركشة القديمة صورة سيد «إيرل» أشقر الشعر ممتطيًا صهوة جواد، وإلى جانبه فلاح داكن الشعر يمسك باللجام. ولا يتردد أي فنان حين يصور الصلب في أن يحمل اللصين داكنين بالتباين مع شقرة المسيح؛ وفي هذا الأمر شيء أكثر من مجرد الاصطلاح، لأن مثل هذا التقليد الذي يكاد يكون صحيحًا مما نجده عن المسيح يدل على صفاته الجسمية والخلقية الشمالية، ومن المحتمل أن تكون إغريقية.»

Still, the accomplishments of the final two years of Madison’s term can hardly be understated. With the president’s encouragement, men like Dallas, Clay, and Calhoun charted a new course for the nation, to lasting effect. James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, who followed Madison in the presidency, would advocate the same policies. Over the next generation, Clay would place them at the center of the “American System,” his political alternative to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. Eventually, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant would call for internal improvements, a strong monetary system, and industrial protection—ideas that can all be traced to the policy initiatives Madison championed following the War of 1812.

As the American Patriots imagined it, a federal relationship would be a kind of confession of first principles or covenant that would allow states to bind themselves together substantially without entirely subsuming their sundry identities. The federal nature of the American Constitutional covenant would enable the nation to function as a republic – thus specifically avoiding the dangers of a pure democracy. Republics exercise governmental authority through mediating representatives under the rule of law. Pure democracies on the other hand exercise governmental authority through the imposition of the will of the majority without regard for the concerns of any minority – thus allowing law to be subject to the whims, fashions, and fancies of men. The Founders designed federal system of the United States so that the nation could be, as John Adams described it, a “government of law, not of men.” The Founders thus expressly and explicitly rejected the idea of a pure democracy, just as surely as totalitarian monarchy, because as James Madison declared “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.” The rule of the majority does not always respect the rule of law, and is as turbulent as the caprices of political correctness or dictatorial autonomy. Indeed, history has proven all too often that democracy is particularly susceptible to the urges and impulses of mobocracy.

Eugenic rhetoric thus remained dependent on the body exterior as a powerful “material metaphor” for mysterious genetic processes. The desirable stock of the “fit” was imagined in terms of whiteness, beauty, and physical fitness; embodied in the winners of the AES’s “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” competitions; invoked in books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which described the progenitors of good American stock as “splendid conquistadores” of Nordic heritage with “absolutely fair skin” and “great stature”; and visualized in eugenic displays.37

On behalf of the deference under the Administrative Procedure Act, it is said that Congress is not constitutionally barred from authorizing deference—as if Congress can detract from the office of the judges. The office of the judges, however, was an element of the Constitution’s grant of judicial power, and it required the judges to exercise independent judgment in accord with the law of the land. Put another way, when the Constitution authorized judicial power, it took for granted that judges, by their nature, had such a duty.19 This judicial duty was recognized very early, because it was the foundation of what nowadays is called “judicial review.” When writing about the judicial power of North Carolina in 1786, James Iredell explained: “The duty of the power I conceive, in all cases, is to decide according to the laws of the state,” and as “the constitution is a law of the state,” a statute “inconsistent with the constitution is void.” Or as put by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, where “both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case” the court “must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case,” this being “of the very essence of judicial duty.”20 Judicial review, in other words, is entailed by judicial duty—a duty that accompanies judicial power and that requires judges to exercise their own independent judgment in following the law. And another result of this duty is that a mere statute cannot justify the judges in abandoning their independent judgment or in following extralegal rules or interpretations. As if this were not enough, the U.S. Constitution adds that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” If this means anything, it surely requires a judge not to defer to one of the parties, let alone to defer systematically to the government. Nonetheless, on the basis of a mere statute, the judges generally defer. The next step is to examine the varieties

One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul. Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

When Madison began his fight in the House for amendments protecting personal liberties, he was without a single supporter. He intended to convince the great body of Americans who withheld their approval of the Constitution because they felt it should secure them against governmental abuse. When he proposed an amendment on searches and seizures, he opted for granting the maximum protection possible at the time: “The rights of the people to be secured in their persons, their houses, and their other property, from all unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated by warrants issued without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, or not particularly describing the places to be searched, or the persons or things to be seized.” He dropped the questionable “ought not” for the assertive “shall not,” he contributed the significant phrase “probable cause,” and above all, he granted rights to the people, not just restrictions on the government. After deliberations, the House adopted Madison’s wording with only two minor changes: “rights” became “right,” and “secured” became “secure.” The final wording was as follows: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is clear from the writings of our founding fathers that they disagreed with such excessive taxation to redistribute wealth. In the Annals of Congress (House of Representatives, 3rd Congress, 1794), President James Madison is documented as saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.

Theme Song: Your Man – Down With Webster Bling Bling – ALTÉGO Let It All Go – Birdy & RHODES I Think You’re the Devil – Ellee Duke Legendary – Welshly Arms Wonderland – Taylor Swift Skin – Rihanna MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT – Elley Duhé Blue – Madison Beer Devil I Know – Allie X MONEY ON THE DASH – Elley Duhé & Whethan Way Down We Go – KALEO How Do I Say Goodbye – Dean Lewis Do Me – Kim Petras Crying On The Dancefloor – Sam Feldt, Jonas Blue, Endless Summer & Violet Days Wicked – GRANT Love and War – Fleurie Silence – Marshmello (feat. Khalid) Fire on Fire – Sam Smith

[T]he remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit... The individual himself can be nourished, educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism.

War is in the highest sense dysgenic rather than eugenic. It is destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally and physically. For the world's future the destruction of wealth is a small matter compared with the destruction of the best human strains, for wealth can be renewed while these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever.

From a material point of view slaves are often more fortunate than freemen when treated with reasonable humanity and when their elemental wants of food, clothing and shelter are supplied.

[S]peaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church, does not transform a Negro into a white man.

What the Melting Pot actually does in practice, can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican, and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures of races, and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.

Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed the Negro or, for that matter, the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual and not the race that is affected by religion, education and example. Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure or by the slaver’s lash. When the impulse of an inferior race to imitate or mimic the dress, manners or morals of the dominant race is destroyed by the acquisition of political or social independence, the servient race tends to revert to its original status as in Haiti.

Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,” wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.

The only mistake I’ve ever made in my life was to take you and what we had for granted.” He says the words that my heart has secretly wanted to hear.

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God.” James Madison

Madison wasn’t naive enough to believe that citizens’ rights would be secured by virtue of a grant on a piece of parchment. The delegates would need to design a system that would ensure liberty by leveraging man’s weaknesses instead of ignoring them—pitting men against other men and levels and branches of government against one another. These competing institutions under the control of fallen men would keep each other in check, thereby maximizing individual liberties. “This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public,” Madison explained. “We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.” Had the framers crafted a pure democracy, there would have been no safeguards against encroachments on citizens’ unalienable rights. The rights of the minority would have been subject to abuses at the hands of the majority—a concept Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.”41 The delegates’ challenge was to establish a federal government sufficiently strong to protect its citizens from domestic and foreign threats but without enough power to imperil the people’s liberties. Their solution was to build into the Constitution a scheme of governmental powers and limitations. The government would

Getting somebody confirmed to the Supreme Court has never been a slam dunk, in part because the Court’s role in American government has always been controversial. After all, the idea of giving nine unelected, tenured-for-life lawyers in black robes the power to strike down laws passed by a majority of the people’s representatives doesn’t sound very democratic. But since Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court case that gave the Court final say on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and established the principle of judicial review over the actions of the Congress and the president, that’s how our system of checks and balances has worked. In theory, Supreme Court justices don’t “make law” when exercising these powers; instead, they’re supposed to merely “interpret” the Constitution, helping to bridge how its provisions were understood by the framers and how they apply to the world we live in today. For the bulk of constitutional cases coming before the Court, the theory holds up pretty well. Justices have for the most part felt bound by the text of the Constitution and precedents set by earlier courts, even when doing so results in an outcome they don’t personally agree with. Throughout American history, though, the most important cases have involved deciphering the meaning of phrases like “due process,” “privileges and immunities,” “equal protection,” or “establishment of religion”—terms so vague that it’s doubtful any two Founding Fathers agreed on exactly what they meant. This ambiguity gives individual justices all kinds of room to “interpret” in ways that reflect their moral judgments, political preferences, biases, and fears. That’s why in the 1930s a mostly conservative Court could rule that FDR’s New Deal policies violated the Constitution, while forty years later a mostly liberal Court could rule that the Constitution grants Congress almost unlimited power to regulate the economy.

I bought you a gift.” “Wait, what?” I say, and she hands me a white square box. “Oh my God,” Matthew says. “If she proposes to you, I’m going to die, and you’ll never live it down.” “Caroline,” I say, using her name “It’s not a ring,” she says. “And if it was, would you say no?” “Say no,” Matthew says. “Matthew Grant,” my mother says in warning. “Mom,” he says, “don’t even.

measure bound to bring about the more perfect union of which he was now considered a founder. That he was a true hero in the Revolutionary War, I will never deny. That he finally came round to seeing good sense in some matters, I will grant. I can even give grudging admiration for his political genius in wrapping himself in the flag in an attempt to prevent the nation’s disunion. But James Monroe is not now and never was the better man. None of them were. Not Jefferson. Not Adams. Not Burr. Not Madison. Not Monroe.