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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