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. Your Family Tree
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