150. Organizing Caste: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Organizing Caste 

In Darwin's second important book, The Descent of Man, the fate in store for those 
liberal societies which allow mongrelization of the racial stock was made clear. They 



would fall prey to the ruthlessly evenhanded workings of evolution and devolve through 
reversion. The lesson of Descent was not lost on Boston, New York, Philadelphia, 
Chicago, or San Francisco. In one brief instant the rationale for a caste system was born 
and accepted. No merit system ever after could seriously breach the hereditarian barrier 
any more than it could budge the "scientific" bell-curve barrier. A biological basis for 
morality had been established. 

One of the hundred new hereditarian societies (all survive, by the way) was "The Aztec 
Club of 1847," cherishing those who participated in the Mexican War as commissioned 
officers, and their descendants. The Aztec Club actually anticipated the intense 
hereditarian period by a few years and so may be considered a pioneer. Had you been an 
Aztec at the founding dinner in 1880, you would have been at a table with President 
Grant and Jefferson Davis, as well as a fraternity of names engraved in legend. Presidents 
Taylor and Pierce and Generals Lee and Pickett were dead, or they would have been 
there, too. The Aztec Club of 1847. Not a single public schoolteacher of the nearly 3 
million in the United States has ever been on its rolls, I'm told. Are we in the presence 
here of some higher truth? 

The Society of California Pioneers was another of these new hereditarian bodies which 
came to exist in the narrow zone of time just before effective mass compulsion schooling. 
This particular society celebrates "those memorable pioneers whose enterprise induced 
them to become the founders of a new State." I don't think you ought to summon up a 
mental picture of some grizzled prospector to fit that enterprise. Leland Stanford's family 
better fits the bill. 

Here is a baker's dozen of other outfits to allow you to see more clearly the outlines of 
the new society rising like an English phoenix out of the ashes of our democratic 
republic: 

The Order of Americans of Armorial Ancestry 

The Society of Mayflower Descendants 

The Society of Americans of Royal Descent 

The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers 

The Women Descendants of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery 

The Order of the First Families of Virginia 

The Order of the Crown of Charlemagne 

The Order of the Three Crusades, 1096-1 192 

The Descendants of Colonial Governors 

The Society of the Cincinnati 

The Society of Founders of Norwich, Connecticut 

The Swedish American Colonial Society 

The Descendants of Colonial Clergy 

The popular leviathans of this confederation of special blood were the National Society 
of the Sons of the American Revolution, which enrolled eleven of the next twelve 
presidents as members (Nixon was eligible but declined), and its sister society, the 
D.A.R. 



The yeast of Latin, Slavic, and Celtic immigration falling on the dough of Darwinism 
provoked the great families of the United States into building a ruling caste with a shared 
common agenda, a program for national and international development, and a schedule of 
social regulations to be imposed gradually on the future. If you can't deduce that program 
for yourself as it employs mass schooling, you might wish to write the Society of the 
Cincinnati for enlightenment. The sudden appearance of these associations, excluding 
from membership all non-Aryan immigrants, provides us with a sign this new caste had 
consciousness of itself as a caste. Otherwise, development would have been more 
gradual. It marks a great dividing line in American history. As the hereditarian wave 
rolled up the beach, even you could have designed the schools it was going to need. 

One thing missing from the Utopia of diverse hereditarian groups which were gathering — 
the scientific racists, the private clubs, schools, churches, neighborhoods, secret societies 
like Bones at Yale or Ivy at Princeton, special universities which served as a later stage in 
the elite recruitment and production cycle, 3 etc. — was a grand secular myth. Something 
less creepy than a naked assertion of successful protoplasm climbing up biological 
ladders out of the primordial slime was necessary to inspire the exclusive new 
establishment that was forming. Some stirring transcendental story to complete the 
capture and inspiration of the ruling-class mind. 

Such a thing had to be found and it was. The creation myth of American caste would 
appear unexpectedly in the form of an ancient language uniting the powerful classes of 
the United States into a romantic band of spiritual brothers, a story to which we turn next. 

3 Earlier I gave you a list of the inner-circle private boarding schools, the central ones of the 289 thatmatter most in the calculus of class. This 
seems as good a time as any to give you an inner circle of American colleges and universities. The sanctum of social power is found at these 
schools: Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Duke, Cornell, Stanford, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, 
University of California (Berkeley), University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, Williams, 
Amherst, Colgate, and a tie between Boston College and Boston University. There are other knots of power, but if training of national 
leadership is the relevant issue, not the training of minds willing to serve as instruments of a national leadership, then the twenty I've taken are 
the heart of the heart of caste in America, much as the Monongahela Valley was the heart of the heart of libertarian America. 

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