151. Your Family Tree: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Your
Family Tree
In 1896, Latin and Slavic immigration
exceeded in body count for the first time the numbers arriving from the ancient lands of the Anglo-Saxons.
In certain circles that was deemed
a catastrophe second only to the Deluge. This moment had
been anticipated
for years, of course, and protections
for good blood, or "the gene pool" as some preferred to call it, were popping like corn in the
form of exclusionary associations you've seen and others like them. This was defensive. But other implements
of war were being fashioned,
weapons of offensive capability, social engines like modern factory
schools, standing armies, social
work empires designed to remake incoming aliens into shapes more agreeable to the spirit of the
"Great Race," a term I'll explain in a moment. This machinery was grinding out
"Americanized" Americans by 1913, just sixty-two years after the Know-Nothing Party of
Massachusetts invented the term.
New hereditary
societies took a leading hand in Americanization. So did important monied interests. Chicago financial
power got the Children's Court idea rolling at the beginning of the twentieth century, just
as Boston railroad, mining, and real estate interests had initiated the compulsion school idea in the
nineteenth. The Children's Court
institution was nationalized rapidly, a most effective intimidation to
use against uncooperative
immigrants. Such courts soon displayed a valuable second side, supplying children to the childless of the
politically better-connected sort with few questions asked. The similarity of this transfer
function to the historic "Baby Trains" of Charles Loring Brace's "Children's Aid
Society" fifty years earlier wasn't lost on the new breed of social engineer graduating from the right
colleges in 1900.
These new activist graduates, trained in
the Chicago school of sociology and its
anthropological variants by Ross, Cooley, Boas, and other seminal
figures, had little sentimentality
about individual destinies or family sovereignty either. All thought in terms of the collective improvement of
society by long-range evolution. In the short run all were environmental determinists who believed protoplasm
was wonderfully malleable, if not
entirely empty.
In 1898 the D.A.R.,
best known of all hereditarian societies, began issuing scientifically designed propaganda lectures on
American history and government. By 1904, the Society of Colonial Dames was preparing school curriculum. In the
same year, the Sons of the
American Revolution distributed millions of pieces of historical
interpretation to schools, all
paid for by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Social Register, founded
1887, quickly became a useful
index for the new associational aristocracy, bearing witness to those who could be trusted with the
exciting work underway. Tiffany's started a genealogy department in 1875 to catch the first business
from elites made edgy by The
Descent of Man and, as the century ended, genealogical reference books —
the Gore Roll, Boston's American
Armoury and Blue Book, and more — came tumbling off the assembly line to assist Anglo-Saxons in finding
each other.
As late as 1929, even
with Mein Kampf in bookstalls telling the story of Aryans past and present, David Starr Jordan, president
of Stanford, published his own guide to good blood, Your Family Tree. It provided in painstaking detail
the descent of America's new
industrial aristocracy, from monarchs of great Aryan houses. Abe
Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, and
John D. Rockefeller, said Jordan, came out of the house of Henry I of France; Ulysses S. Grant was in a line
from William the Conqueror; Coolidge and
Shakespeare descended from Charlemagne. William Howard Taft, J. P.
Morgan, and Jordan himself from
King David of Scotland! So it went. 4 Was this all just simple amusement or did the game have some
implications for the rest of us not so blue- blooded? Who were these fabulous Aryans the scholars were
talking about? What was this
"Great Race"? The answers were to prove both fabulous and chilling.
4.
The Crane plumbing family rejected the coat of arms suggested for them, a hand
gripping the handle of a toilet chain with the motto "Apres moi le deluge."
The
Fatal Sound Shift
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