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Encyclopedia > Nordic race
Nordic theory (or Nordicism) was a theory of race prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It drew on the dominant anthropological model of the day which divided European peoples into three sub-categories of the Caucasian race: the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean races. The Nordic race was thought to be prevelant in northern Europe and Scandanavia, especially among speakers of the Germanic languages, and was characterised by tall bodies, long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. The Alpine race was thought to predominate in central Europe, and was characterised by tallish bodies and comparatively round skulls. The Mediterranean race was thought to be prevelant in southern Europe and, sometimes, parts of North Africa, and was characterised by dark hair and swarthy complexion (according to some theorists of this period this was due to racial mixing with African peoples).
Among many white supremacists in Europe and the USA, the Nordic race came to be thought of as the most advanced of human population groups, hence its equation in Nazi ideology with the so-called Aryan master race. In the USA, the primary spokesman for "Nordicism" was the eugenicist Madison Grant, who used it as a justification for anti-immigration policies of the 1920s, arguing that the immigrants from Southern and Eastern European represented an "inferior" type of of European and should hence be restricted. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, or a Racial Basis of European History about Nordicism was highly influential among racial thinking, government policymaking, and even on popular culture ( F. Scott Fitzgerald invokes Grant's ideas through a character in part of The Great Gatsby). Grant argued that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, that "admixture" was "race suicide", and that unless various eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by the "inferior" races. Nordicism was a particular type of white supremacism, one which did not recognize all degrees of "white" as being equal. Italians, Slavs, the Irish, and Jews were among those considered significantly inferior to the Nordics.
The fact that Mediterranean peoples were responsible for the most important of ancient civilisations was a problem for those who promoted the merits of the Nordic race. Giuseppè Sergi's influential book The Mediterranean Race (1901) argued that this race's mixed character gave it its creative edge. Grant's speculative approach to this problem was to claim that many of the achievements of Mediterranean culture were really the result of Nordic genes which had entered into the Mediterranean gene pool after ancient invasions by northern peoples.
In the USA, though, this concept of "race" lost favor in the polarizing political climate after the first World War, including the Great Migration and the Depression. The influx of African-Americans into the Northern states in this time resulted in a "flattening" of racial categories into what racial theorist and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard named as "bi-racialism"—the hard black/white distinction which abandoned Grant's gradations of "white"—which was embraced both by white supremacists and black nationalists alike. Among the latter were Marcus Garvey, and, in part, W.E.B. Du Bois, at least in his later thought.
But at the same time as the theory was losing favor the USA, it was vastly influential in Germany, with the ascent of Adolf Hitler, who sometimes tended to merge the terms "Nordic" and " Aryan". Grant's book was the first non-German book to be translated and published by the Nazi Reich press, and Grant proudly displayed to his friends a letter from Hitler claiming that the book was "his Bible." The Nazi state used such ideas about the differences between European races as part of their program of Racial Hygiene and various discriminatory and coercive policies which culminated in the Holocaust. Ironically, in Grant's first edition of his popular book, he classified the Germans as being primarily Nordic, but in his second edition, published after the USA had entered WWI, he had re-classified the now enemy power as being dominated by "inferior" Alpines. Hitler himself was later to downplay the importance of Nordicism for this very reason. The standard tripartite model placed most of the population of Hitler's Germany in the Alpine category, especially after the Anschluss. By 1939 Hitler abandoned Nordicist rhetoric in favour of the idea that the German people as a whole were united by distinct 'spiritual' qualities.
After the second World War, the categorization of peoples into "superior" and "inferior" groups fell even further out of political and scientific favor. The tripartite subdivision of "Caucasians" into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean groups persisted into the 1960s, notably in Carleton Coon's book The Origins of Race (1962), but eventually became obsolete.