155. Unpopular Government: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Unpopular
Government
Maine built a stronger case in each successive book,
Early History of Institutions (1875)
and Early Law and Custom (1883). His magnificent tour de force, Popular
Government (1885), smashed the
very basis for popular democracy.
After Maine, only a fool could believe wow-Anglo-Saxon groups should
participate as equals in important decision- making. At the same time, Maine's forceful dismissal of the
fundamental equality of ordinary or different peoples was confirmed by the academic
science of evolution and by
commercial and manufacturing interests eager to collapse smaller
enterprises into large ones.
Maine's regal pronouncements were supported by mainstream urban Protestant churches and by established middle
classes. Democratic America had been given its death sentence.
Sir Henry's work
became a favorite text for sermons, lectures, Chautauqua magazine journalism and for the conversation of
the best people. His effect is reflected
symbolically in a resolution from the Scranton Board of Trade of all
places, which characterized
immigrants as:
The
most ignorant and vicious of European populations, including necessarily a
vast number of the criminal class;
people who come here not to become good citizens, but to prey upon our people and our
industries; a class utterly without character and incapable of understanding or
appreciating our institutions, and therefore a menace to our commonwealth.
Popular Government
was deliberately unpopular in tone. There was no connection between democracy and progress; the
reverse was true. Maine's account of racial history was accepted widely by the prosperous. It admirably
complemented the torrent of
scientifically mathematicized racism pouring out of M.I. T., Harvard,
Stanford, Yale, and virtually
every bastion of high academia right through the WWI period and even
beyond. Scientific racism determined
the shape of government schooling in large measure, and still does.
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