137.
Racial Suicide: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Racial
Suicide
Francis
Amasa Walker, president of M.I.T., first declared in 1891 what was soon to become an upper-class mantra: Anglo-Saxons
were quietly committing "racial suicide." The insult of competing with
Latin/Slav/Celtic folkways seemingly discouraged reproduction among families of the old stock.
After that
bombshell, an orchestrated campaign of scientific racism swept the United
States and didn't flag in public energy for
forty long years. Racial suicide was the Red Scare, Fifth Column, and
AIDS epidemic of its day all rolled into
one. In the long history of manufactured crises, it ranks up there with the Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, the
Gulf of Tonkin, the gasoline shortage of 1973,
the Asian economic miracle, and corporate downsizing as a prime example
of modern psychological management of
public opinion. The racial suicide theme sounded at exactly the moment public schooling was
transforming itself into forced government
schooling.
The American campaign against racial
suicide enlisted great scientists of the day to
produce a full library of books, scientific journal articles, popular
magazine pieces, legislation, lectures,
and indirect school curricula. It caught the attention of the entire civilized world, including Imperial Germany
and Imperial Japan. Both sent official study
delegations to America to observe the resourcefulness of this new
industrial Utopia in purging itself of
its original democratic character. It is as if there exists some tacit understanding on the part of mainstream
scholarship and journalism to steer clear of the shoals of this period, but even an amateur
like myself finds enough to indicate that racial suicide provided a leading motive to justify
the radical shift of American society toward
well-schooled orthodoxy. What is intriguing in light of the relative
amnesia concerning these connections is
the sheer quantity of the damning data. Genetic experimentation, once teased from its hiding holes, is
revealed as a master political project of the twentieth century with the United States, Germany, and
England its enthusiastic sponsors. Data
gathered in school surveys and social experimentation with children have
been important sources of grist for this
initiative.
M.I.T.'s Walker got an intellectual boost from
activities of the influential American
sociologist Edward A. Ross, who explained to the American Academy of
Political and Social Science exactly how
unchecked Asiatic immigration would lead to the extinction of the American people. Higher races, he
said, will not endure competition from lower
ones. After that, even Teddy Roosevelt was issuing marching orders to Anglo-Saxon mothers, asking well-bred ladies to mobilize
their loins in an effort to arrest the suicidal
decline. Breed as if the race depended on it, said Roosevelt. Eugenics had
openly become national politics for the
first time in America, but hardly the last.
Harper's Weekly chastised Roosevelt, saying
mere exhortation would have no effect as
long as immigration continued to reduce the native birthrate by
insulting our best breeders. From 1905
to 1909 at least one major popular magazine article on the subject appeared every single month. Books warned
that race suicide would "toll the passing of this great Anglo-Teuton people," giving
the nation over to Latins, Slavs, or worse, Jews and other Asiatics. Meanwhile, the long-ignored genetic work of
monk Gregor Mendel was conveniently
rediscovered, adding more fuel to the fires of racial thinking. Here,
presumably, a humble man of God showed
mathematically that something caused transmission of characteristics from generation to generation, independent of
any effect of nurture or education. Horse,
dog, and rose breeders had empirically derived these insights a thousand
years before Mendel, but credit passed
to science for the "discovery."
Into the center of this racial excitement strode
the formidable figure of Sir Francis
Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, in line of descent from Malthus,
5 possessor of incredible intellectual
ability and indefatigable energy, a man of great personal wealth, a knight of the realm. Galton preached
improvement of the human breed with evangelical
fervor, demanding a policy of biological positivism which would produce
the same genetic dividends that were
being reaped by positivism in the hard sciences of chemistry and physics. The "eugenics movement,"
as it was now called, would save us socially by
manipulating the best to breed (positive eugenics) and encouraging the
worst to die out (negative eugenics).
School would have a major role to play in this. Race-improvement was in the air, its method compounded out of
state action and forced schooling.
Galton's inspiration and plenty of American
money — much of it Andrew Carnegie's and
Mrs. Averill Harriman's — opened the first racial science laboratory in
the world in Cold Spring Harbor, Long
Island, in 1904. And kept it open for thirty-five years, until Hitler's invasion of Poland made discretion seem
the wiser part of zealotry for the moment at the Carnegie Corporation. In 1939, it was quietly
shut down. The last president at the Cold
Spring Harbor facility was M.I.T. president Vannevar Bush, often called
"The Father of the Atomic
Bomb." Eugenic thinking injected energy into the exploding "mental hygiene" movement, too. Word went out to
the recently erected national network of hospitals that it was okay to begin
sterilizing mental defectives. This green light came complete with legislative licenses to decide
who those defectives were — and freedom
from any legal jeopardy.
A scholarly book from M.I.T. created
intellectual havoc in the year 1899 and long
afterwards, lending maximum credibility to the eugenicist agenda. The
Races of Europe was written by brilliant
economist William Z. Ripley; it armed the racial-suicide crowd and its companion group of enthusiasts, the
racial-science crowd, with information that
Europe was divided into three races, easily distinguishable from one
another by physical measurements .
First, a race of blonde long heads (the Teutons); second, a central race
of stocky round heads (the Alpines); and
third, a southern race of slender, dark long heads (the Mediterraneans). Here, finally, was a
way to distinguish reliably among the qualities
of old immigration and new! Ripley took the 28-year-old Darwinian
concept of "reversion" and
charged it with new energy.
Was it possible, Ripley asked, that
promiscuous breeding of Nordic peoples with
Southern Europeans could doom the New England Anglo-Nordic stock?
Incipient race suicide could be dealt
with only by legislation. Education should be employed to raise the current immigrant's "standard of
morality," making him more tolerable to society. That would help. But nothing could be done about
reversion. Subspecies of men could not be
allowed to couple with 100 percent American female breeding stock.
All the pieces were now in position for
full-scale national hysteria to commence, an era of sanctions buttressed by the authority of
peerless scientific experts. American society
would require harsh discipline after the Prussian fashion in order to
meet this challenge. Thanks to men like
Ripley, the experts could apply such discipline with an exalted sense of mathematical righteousness. The first
requirement would be to force the dangerous
classes into schools. Laws were on the books, time to enforce them.
A covert American sterilization program
managed by trusted administrators in the brand
new hospital network took place during the same years that forced
schooling was being brought along. This
sterilization initiative occasionally broke silence in highly specialized journals whose reader discretion was taken
for granted. Thus Charles V. Carrington,
writing in the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science
(July 1910), reported on two interesting
cases of successful involuntary sterilization. One involved an "epileptic masturbator" who, after
vasectomy, "ceased masturbating altogether." The other was a black man also given to
masturbation and general deviltry. After sterilization, he became "a strong, well-developed
young Negro, nicely behaved, and not a
masturbatory sodomist," Carrington reported. Surgical intervention
as social policy was given its
precedents in America long before the Nazi era.
Advocates of Yaleman Gesell's
"eugenic violence" offensive against the underclasses swung from every point on the scientific
compass. William McDougall, the eminent
social psychologist, announced himself a champion of Nordic superiority;
Ellsworth Huntington, prominent Yale
geographer, wrote The Character of Races, showing that only one race had any real moral character.
Henry Fairfield Osborn, president and
founder of the American Museum of Natural History, gave the
"Address of Welcome" to the
Second International Congress of Eugenics; Osborn's close friend Lothrop
Stoddard wrote The Revolt Against
Civilization: Menace of the Underman; and psychologist James McKeen Cattell, a force in the rise of
standardized testing, wrote to Galton, "We are following in America your advice and
example."
The
famous humanitarian anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber remarked acidly to a newsman that anti-eugenic protests came only
from the "orthodoxly religious," rarely from the enlightened camp of science. So
there it was. Keep them all in mind: Kroeber,
Gesell, Ripley, McDougall, Huntington, Osborn, great scientific humanist
names whose work underscored how
important a role forced schooling was designed to play. Scientific studies had shown conclusively that extending
the duration and intensity of schooling
caused sharp declines in fertility — and sterility in many. Part of
school's stealth curriculum would be a
steady expansion of its reach throughout the century.
Two
more examples will drive home the relentlessness of this long scientific
campaign against American tradition.
J.B.S. Haldane, a distinguished Fabian geneticist from England, issued a lurid warning about what
might happen if blonde women bred with
human demi-apes like Italians, Jews, and other kinds of retrograde
biology: "A new type of submen,
abhorred by nature, ugly as no natural product is ugly" would emerge.
The new hypothesis held that female
offspring of such unions would be too repulsive to look upon.
In Daedalus, or Science and the Future,
Haldane said there were really only four
fundamental biological innovations of prehistory: 1) Domestication of
animals; 2) Domestication of plants; 3)
The use of fungi for the production of alcohol; 4) The invention of frontal copulation "which
altered the path of sexual selection, focused the attention of man as a lover upon woman's face
and breasts, and changed our ideal of
beauty from the steatopygous Hottentot to the modern European, from the
Venus of Brassenpouy to the Venus of
Milo."
All
evolution might be in jeopardy if there were no more pretty faces to look at,
this was the thesis. Today, there is an
aura of the absurd to these assertions, but it would be well to reflect on the institutional world that
emerged from the other end of this same forge, for it is the new moral world you and I live in, a
fully scientized and organized society,
managed by the best people — people who prefer to remain out of sight of
the hoi polloi, segregated in their own
in walled villages and other redoubts.
5 Not quite as sinister as it sounds.
Virtually all distinguished English names bear a family relationship toone
another; its privileged classes, like
those of other nations like Germany (or Japan) constitute a protected
breeding stock in which intermarriage is not just common, but de rigeur, one might say with only a trace of mischief
Indeed, in a genealogy text whose title I've long forgotten, I learned from the
author (alas forgotten, too) that two
thirds of all American presidents stood in an easily traceable family
relationship to one another. See Chapter Twelve for more enlightenment on this score. Or simply
ponder the meaning of this: After the 2004 presidential nominations have been
decided, if Senator Kerry of
Massachusetts is the Democratic nominee and George W. Bush the Republican, then
five presidential terms in a row will have been
served by men with a Yale degree when the eventual victor's term is
complete! And three if those terms will have featured a president who was a member, while at Yale, of a tiny secret
society, Skull & Bones, which only accepts fifteen members a year. On this
score, either Bush or Kerry will serve
equally well as both are Yale graduates and both Skull & Bones initiates.
The
Passing Of The Great Race
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