154. The Lost Tribes: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Lost Tribes 

As the exciting intelligence from Germany traveled through America, it encountered 
resistance, for America was a region where class lines were still elastic, based on 
accomplishment and worldly success, not upon guarantees cemented in blood. Yet the 
tide was running toward a different form of reckoning. Horace Bushnell, famous 
Congregationalist pastor of Hartford (where the city park is named for him) thundered 
from his pulpit in 1837 that noble Anglo-Saxon blood must be preserved against 
pollution. By 1843, the big book in Unitarian Boston was The Goths in New- England. 
German schooling seemed right for us because we were Germans! Germany held answers 
for the grandchildren of Englishmen, who had been Germans long ago. 

In 1848, at the height of the Irish Catholic menace, The American Whig Review published 
"The Anglo-Saxon Race." That same year The North American Review responded with 
"The Anglo-Saxon Race." Now the Whig Review stirred the pot with its own spoon, "The 
Anglo-Saxons and the Americans." Interest in the topic wouldn't quit, perhaps because 
The Origin of Species finally placed consideration of racial matters in public attention. 
Racial fervor was still at white heat in 1875 when a popular book, The Anglo-Saxon 
Race: Its History, Character and Destiny, traveled with Chautauqua to every corner of the 
nation. 

The writings of William Henry Poole showed the Saxon race to be the lost tribes of 
Israeli To this day, most American Jews are unaware that a number of old-family Anglo- 
Saxons still consider themselves to be the real Jews — and the nominal Jews impostors! 
Between 1833 and 1852 Franz Bopp published book after book of his spectacular 
multivolume work Comparative Grammar, which drove any lingering skeptics to cover. 
The Aryans were real. Case closed. 

Whatever guardian spirit watches over such things assigned to Sir Henry James Sumner 
Maine, English comparative jurist and historian, the task of presenting Aryan tribal 
character and tying it to contemporary Anglo-Saxons. Maine graduated from Cambridge 
in 1844 with the reputation of being the most brilliant classical scholar of all time — 
Michael Jordan of legal history. His Ancient Law (1861) earned him a world-class 
reputation in one stroke. In a series of magnificent literary studies which followed, he 
brought to life the ancient world of Germania with singular felicity and power. Anglo- 
Saxons and Aryans lived again as one people. 

In the crucial year which saw Darwin's Descent of Man published, Maine's spectacular 
Village Communities in the East and West showed the world the rough-hewn genius of 
the primitive Anglo-Saxon world. Maine reiterated his contention that stranger-adoption 
was among the critical discoveries which led to Anglo-Saxon greatness. This message 



fell on particularly fertile ground in a New England whose soil had been prepared for this 
exact message by centuries of reading The New England Primer, with its grim warning 
that children are only loaned to their parents. 

And what a message Maine carried — society thrived when children were detached from 
their own parents and cultures! It was a potent foundation on which to set the institution 
of forced schooling. Appearing shortly after the radical Massachusetts adoption law 
intended to disassemble Irish immigrant families, Maine silenced the new institution's 
critics, paving the way for eventual resignation to long-term school incarceration, too: 

The part played by the legal fiction of adoption in the constitution of primitive society 
and the civilization of the race is so important that Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his 
Ancient Law, expresses the opinion that, had it never existed, the primitive groups of 
mankind could not have coalesced except on terms of absolute superiority on the one 
side, and absolute subjection on the other. With the institution of adoption, however, one 
people might feign itself as descended from the same stock as the people to whose sacra 
gentilica it was admitted.... 

(Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 1th ed., "Adoption") 

In a grand stroke, Sir Henry provided enlightened justification for every form of synthetic 
parenting social engineers could concoct, including the most important, mass forced 
schooling. 

Unpopular Government