Madison Grant, American eugenicist and conservationist, was born and lived in New York City. He was a liberal social Darwinian progressive. In 1916 he wrote "The Passing of the Great Race" an anthropological European history. The book affirmed negative populist American racial concerns that continued American open immigration policy was changing the social character of America with what Grant termed "racially inferior stock" from Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia. He recommended eugenic solutions to "better" American society by restricting the immigration of non-Nordic people, segregating "unfavorable" races in ghettos and using the public health system to accomplish it. Grant wrote "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 one hundred years, 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 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". Grant's leadership of the American Eugenics movement and the Immigration Restriction League led to the closing of open American immigration in 1924 and the shaping of American eugenic, miscegenation and involuntary sterilization laws and policies until the 1970's. His views were popularly received and largely respected by his friends, the leaders and elites of his day, such as Presidents Theodor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and the writer T.S. Eliot. Grant was a founding father of the American conservation movement directly involved in the creation of the Bronx Zoo, Glacier and Denali National Parks, central to the preservation effort for the American Bison and a co-founder of the Save the Redwood League. In 1925 Grant's book, "The Passing of the Great Race", was translated into German. Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that Grant's book "is his bible". Grant's racial theories declined in influence in the U.S. with the great depression and the eventual association with Nazi Germany. Grant's writings helped add to Nazi intellectual justification for the Holocaust advanced by Nazism's ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and were quoted in the defense of Nazi Eugenics physician Karl Brandt's 1946 trial in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Grant never married. He died childless. His significant legacy as a conservationist was eclipsed by his work as a racial eugenicist.