Here’s where Tanton’s personal history becomes essential to understanding America’s recent resurgence of immigrant hate. Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people. In 1975, he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and would later, in a letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, a millionaire businessman known for starting a sperm bank for geniuses, clarify his goals. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he asked. “More troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?”
Around this time, a fundamental demographic shift occurred: New births no longer exceeded deaths in the United States. The population should have begun to stabilize, except there was a new form of growth: immigration. The population, then at around 211 million, continued to expand, and many who at first worried for the carrying capacity of the planet became preoccupied with walling off the country and keeping the global population at bay. For Tanton, “population” became a euphemism for “immigration.” With time, “immigrant” would become a euphemism for “nonwhite.” Long before the great replacement theory became a dominant strain among mainstream conservatives — nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans have said the theory had merit — Tanton, while not using those words, began to define the term. We’ve been thinking so much about “how many” come to this country, he would write, it’s time to think about “who.”
When Tanton blended ecology with eugenics and immigration, he was digging up the two-century-old principles of Thomas Malthus, who first theorized that human population growth would lead to poverty and suffering. Tanton drew on the views of some of America’s most influential environmentalists. Sierra Club founder John Muir rhapsodized about the purity of wilderness, supporting the push to protect Yosemite’s lands from the “dirty” influence of the native tribes who inhabited it. In the early 1900s, the conservationist and anthropologist Madison Grant, who helped establish Glacier National Park and the Bronx Zoo, wrote pseudoscientific tomes about the coming extinction of white people. The Nazis used some of the same references, braiding environmental purity and racial purity. Hitler himself is said to have called Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” about European racial superiority, “my bible.”
Tanton resurrected these sentiments and dressed them in liberal arguments about sustainability. It was an environmental appeal he crafted not just in earnest — which he certainly was — but also because he thought it was one of the strongest rationales that the United States should remain predominantly white.