146. Exclusive Heredity: The Underground History of Ameicen Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Exclusive Heredity 

At the end of the nineteenth century, an explosion in the creation of exclusive hereditary 
societies took place which couldn't have been predicted from the course of the American 
past. These peculiar clubs constituted the most flagrant leading edge of a broad-based 
movement to erect nothing less than a coherent national upper class whose boundary was 
drawn in bloodlines. This might be better understood as an early manifestation of the 
genetically charged environment of American life at the advent of the twenty- first 
century. This social enclosure movement produced orthodox factory schooling for the 
masses as one of its very first policy thrusts. It produced the licensing phenomenon which 
echoed the traditional right of English kings to confer a living on some loyal subjects by 
reserving good things for them which are denied to others. We have been wrestling with 



many other aspects of class- and caste-based government and society ever since we came 
out of this period. 

Evidence that this movement was organized to concentrate power within a Brahmin caste 
stratum is caught by the sudden ostracism of Jews from the ranks of America's leading 
social clubs in the decade and a half directly following Herbert Spencer's visit to 
America. This was far from business as usual. Jesse Seligman, a founder of New York's 
Union League Club, was forced to resign in 1 893 when his son was blackballed by the 
membership committee. Joseph Gratz, president of the exclusive Philadelphia Club 
during the Civil War, lived to see the rest of his own family later shunned from the same 
place. The Westmoreland in Richmond boasted a Jewish president in the 1870s, but soon 
afterwards began a policy of rigid exclusion; The University Club of Cincinnati broke up 
in 1 896 over admission of a Jewish member. The point is whatever was wrong with Jews 
now hadn't been wrong earlier. Who was giving the orders to freeze out the Jews? And 
why? 

The striking change of attitude toward Jews displayed by Bostonian blue blood and 
author Henry Adams is a clue to where the commands might have originated, since the 
Adams family can be presumed to have been beyond easy intimidation or facile 
persuasion. Adams'1890 novel Democracy illustrated the author's lifelong acceptance of 
Jews. Democracy featured Jewish characters as members of Washington society with no 
ethnic stigma even hinted at. In 750 intimate letters of Adams from 1858 through 1896, 
the designation "Jew" never even occurs. Suddenly it shows up in 1896. Thirty-eight 
years of correspondence without one invidious reference to Jews was followed by 
twenty-two years with many. After 1 896 Adams seemed to lose his faith entirely in the 
Unitarian tradition, becoming, then, a follower of Darwin and Spencer, a believer in 
privileged heredities and races. H.G. Wells' The Future in America (1906) called 
attention to the transformation the English writer witnessed on a visit to this country: 
"The older American population," said Wells, "is being floated up on the top of this 
immigrant influx, a sterile aristocracy above a racially different and astonishingly fecund 
proletariat...." That fecundity and that racial difference dictated that a second American 
Revolution would be fought silently from the Atlantic to the Pacific about a century ago, 
this time a revolution in which British class-based episcopal politics emerged victorious 
after a century and a quarter of rejection. 

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