American Renaissance - 1 - December 2011
The Adventures of Nordic Man
Vol. 22 No. 12
There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.—
Thomas Jefferson
December 2011
American Renaissance
Hilaire Belloc vs. MadisonGrant
by Jared Taylor
Behold, my child, the Nordic man,And be as like him, as you can;His legs are long, his mind is slow,His hair is lank and made of tow.And here we have the Alpine Race:Oh! What a broad and foolish face!His skin is of a dirty yellow.He is a most unpleasant fellow.The most degraded of them allMediterranean we call.His hair is crisp, and even curls,And he is saucy with the girls.— Hilaire Belloc, 1926
P
eople have always been fascinatedby how their group differs fromothers. From the earliest recordsof the ancient Hebrews, Egyptians, orChinese, all peoples have noticed ethnicand racial differences, and have gener-ally looked down on strangers. Thisuniversal sense of differences took a
scientic turn in the late 19th and early20th centuries. Under the inuence of
Darwinism, in particular, Europeansbegan to use physical measurements toclassify groups and individuals.
The science of measuring peoplewas called anthropometry, and the ce- phalic index was considered the singlemost important measurement. Largelyignored today, this is the ratio of skull
width to skull length, rst calculated by
the Swedish anatomy professor AndersRetzius (1796-1860) to classify ancienthuman remains. It was not long beforescientists began to use the cephalic indexto classify living humans.In 1883, the Anthropometric Com-mittee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science publishedthe results of a huge survey devoted to
“dening the facial characteristics of
the races and principal crosses in theBritish Isles.” It is hard to imagine menin white coats crisscrossing the countrymeasuring heads, but that is what theydid. This study made head shape a re-spectable criterion for individual andgroup differences.It was on the basis of British work that William Z. Ripley (1867 - 1941)introduced to Americans the division of whites into Nordic (or Teutonic), Alpine,and Mediterranean subraces, and thecephalic index was the key to tellingthe groups apart. Ripley, who taughtsociology at MIT and anthropology atColumbia, expounded on this in his
very inuential
The Races of Europe: ASociological Study
, published in 1899.Lavishly illustrated with photographs,this was one of the original documentsof American Nordicism. Madison Grant,who did as much as anyone to promote Nordicism in America (see the reviewof his
Conquest of a Continent
, page7) acknowledged a “debt of gratitude”
to Ripley in the introduction to his rst
major book,
The Passing of the Great Race
.Ripley did not stress behavioraldifferences between the subraces, buthe did note that “the aristocracy every-where tends towards the blond and talltype, as we should expect.” His follow-ers expanded—sometimes with consid-erable imagination—on the supposeddifferences between the three groups.Ripley was not the final word onwhite subraces. In Germany, Hans F.K. Günther’s
The Racial Elementsof European History
(translated intoEnglish in 1927) went further, addingthe Dinaric and East Baltic subraces
to Ripley’s basic three, but these ner
subdivisions were never popular amongEnglish-speakers.
Continued on page 3
The cephalic index waslike astrology: religionfor some, amusement forothers.
A Nordic skull: Much longer, front to back, than it is wide.
American Renaissance - 2 - December 2011
Letters from Readers
Sir—I consider myself a good Catho-lic, but I was shocked to learn in the November issue of the way Frank Borzellieri was treated by his church.
I have had little contact with ofcial
church hierarchy, but the Archdioceseof the Bronx seems to have acted withthe dishonesty and cravenness we wouldexpect of a third-rate junior college.The Church must be founded on faith,steadfastness, and honesty. I do not seehow the ogres who threw Mr. Borzellierito the dogs can think of themselves asmen of God.Helen Carter, Mobile, Ala.Sir—In the November issue youreviewed Richard Lynn’s book,
TheChosen People
. The review briey men
-tions the Falasha, a group of Ethiopianswho have been accepted as Jews, andmost of whom now live in Israel under the Law of Return. This law, as its namesuggests, was written to let DiasporaJews—those who are descended from people who once lived in Israel—returnto the modern state.However, the DNA evidence is clear:The Falasha are genetically indistin-guishable from other Ethiopians andare not biologically Jewish. The Falashaclaim to be one of the lost tribes of Is-rael, but they are a convert people.I have never understood why theIsraelis, who are usually very particular about who is a Jew, ever recognizedthis group of Africans as Jews. If Jews
are dened as descended from Jewish
mothers, the Falasha are not Jews. It istrue that DNA testing was not availableat the time of the Israeli government“rescue” operations of 1984, 1985, and1991, when the bulk of the Falasha cameto Israel. Still, it should have been obvi-ous to anyone that they were African andnot Jewish.Prof. Lynn notes that the Falashahave typical sub-Saharan IQs of about70. They also suffer from the usual problems associated with that IQ level:high crime, poverty, illegitimacy, etc.Interestingly, they also identify stronglywith black American hip-hop and thug behavior rather than Israeli popular culture.The Falasha have been nothing but aheadache for Israeli society since their arrival. If DNA testing had been pos-
sible at the time they were rst being
considered under the Law of Return Isuspect they would have been rejected.Tom Colson, Cleveland, OhioSir—I have been enjoying the serieson Francis Galton in “The Galton Re- port.” If there was ever a social scientistwho deserved to be called a genius itwas certainly Galton. His statisticalwork alone would have been enough;correlation and regression to the meanare essential to today’s research.But what perhaps most strikes con-temporary readers is the basic soundnessof his views on intelligence, heredity,and the human condition. He understoodthat human traits are heritable; thatthey are not distributed equally in all populations; and that selective breed-ing changes the frequencies of traits inhumans just as it does in animals. Theentire eugenic movement was built onthese fundamental insights.And then, almost overnight, these im- portant insights were lost. Throughoutthe Western world, social policies arenow based on assumptions that are thevery opposite of Galton’s: that humantraits are controlled by environment;that all groups have identical abilities;and that selective breeding works withanimals but not with humans. Has thereever been such a complete and danger-ous reversal in any other area of humanknowledge? I can think of no other example in history.Of course, Galton’s laws remaintrue, whether we recognize them or not. Policies can ignore them but cannotreverse them. And every day, we payfor our folly.Sarah Wentworth, Richmond, Va.Sir—In the October 2011 issue of AR you are promoting Richard Lynn’s book
Dygenics: Genetic Deteriorationin Modern Populations
. In the second paragraph you write that Professor Lynnthinks evolution has been going on for millions of years. Evolution is only a
theory and not a scientic fact.
Men like Professor Lynn who pro-mote eugenics want to breed the posi-tive and oppose the negative. They failto realize that it takes different kinds of people, both positive and negative, tomake the world possible. The positiveexists by contrast with the negative. If they take away the negative they takethe positive with it. It is like wanting the positive terminal of a battery without thenegative terminal.What traits does he want to breed; afootball player who tackles an opponentand breaks bones to score points or acompassionate man who helps another in need? There is no IQ-type test for compassion. Nor is there is an IQ-typetest for creativity.Eugenicists are monsters scheming tomake a sociological nightmare for theworld. God help us.David C. Susanj, Pittsburgh, Penn.
American Renaissance - 3 - December 2011
The passion for anthropometry led toattempts to distinguish between all indi-viduals on the basis of measurements of
skulls, ngers, feet, forearms, etc. and
the ratios between these measures. In1883, the Frenchman Alphonse Bertilloneven introduced a relatively success-ful system that used measurements toidentify people, especially criminals.“Bertillonage,” as it was called, had a brief vogue before it was replaced by
ngerprinting. The public, however, was
taken with the cephalic index, whichwas easy to measure and said to havegreat meaning. Nordicists put great stock in theindex. Blond hair and blue eyes were promising signs of Nordicism, but not
denitive. The true sign of the Nordic
was to have a head that was considerablylonger, front to back, than it was wide. InBritain and the United States, calliper-ing people’s heads and working out theindex (the diagrams on this page showwhere to measure) became a fad. Some people took it seriously but for many it was a parlor game. Itwas like astrology: religionfor some, amusement for others.One person who had agood laugh at the wholething was Hilaire Belloc(1870 - 1953), a Catholictraditionalist who was one
of the most prolic British
writers of the early 20thcentury. His best knownwritings are satirical po-ems for children, but hisadult work is suffusedwith a love for Europeand the Catholic Church:“Europe is the faith, andthe faith is Europe.” He despisedand feared Islam and was by no meansa racial egalitarian, but he had no sym- pathy for invidious distinctions amongEuropeans. In his 1926 collection,
Short Talks With the Dead
and Other Essays
,he wrote the poem on page 1 and thesatire on Nordicism that follows. Nordicism did not survive the SecondWorld War. It became too closely as-sociated with German Aryanism to berespectable in England or America. To-day, it is widely dismissed as nonsense.Even the distinguished anthropologistCarleton Coon (1904 - 1981), who battled the tide of racial egalitarianism
during the 1960s, dened Nordicism as
“the misuse of racial terminology for po-litical purposes, based on the unprovedassumption that Nordics are superior inmental and moral attributes to membersof other races.”Perhaps it really is all nonsense,though northern Europeans seem to dif-fer from southerners in both appearanceand temperament, and it would seemunlikely that if European groups haveconsistent differences in skull shapethere would be no differences insidethe skull. Science is not likely to look closely into this question, however, andthere are other group differences that arefar more worthy of study.The interest in Nordicism was never-theless an important stage in the racialthinking of our people. Both Belloc, wholaughed at it, and Grant, who promotedit, are still worth reading today.
Continued from page 1
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American Renaissance
Jared Taylor, Editor
Caroline LeBlanc, Assistant Editor
Henry Wolff, Web Site Editor
The Cephalic Index(C.I.) formula:
C.I. = [Head width (eu-eu) x100]/ Head length (g-op)
For width, measure from eu to eu.For length, measure from g to op.
Cephalic IndexSkull Shape
55.0 to 59.9
ultradolichocephalic
60.0 to 64.9
hyperdolichocephalic
up to 70.0
chamaecephalic
up to 74.9
dolichocephalic
70.1 to 75.0
orthocephalic
over 75.0
hypsicephalic
75.0 to 79.9
mesocephalicover 80.0brachycephalic
85.0 to 89.9
hyperbrachycephalic
90.0 to 94.9
ultrabrachyhcephalic
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201112 American Renaissance
American Renaissance, December 2011. The Adventures of Nordic Man; Talking (and Singing) of the Nordic Man; Nordic Man Comes to the New World; The Galton Report; Les Tuniques Bleues; O Tempora, O Mores!; Letters
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