154. The
Lost Tribes: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
The
Lost Tribes
As the exciting intelligence from Germany
traveled through America, it encountered
resistance, for America was a region where class lines were still
elastic, based on accomplishment and
worldly success, not upon guarantees cemented in blood. Yet the tide was running toward a different form of
reckoning. Horace Bushnell, famous
Congregationalist pastor of Hartford (where the city park is named for
him) thundered from his pulpit in 1837
that noble Anglo-Saxon blood must be preserved against pollution. By 1843, the big book in
Unitarian Boston was The Goths in New- England. German schooling seemed right for us because we were Germans! Germany held answers for the grandchildren of Englishmen, who had been Germans long ago.
Unitarian Boston was The Goths in New- England. German schooling seemed right for us because we were Germans! Germany held answers for the grandchildren of Englishmen, who had been Germans long ago.
In
1848, at the height of the Irish Catholic menace, The American Whig Review
published "The Anglo-Saxon
Race." That same year The North American Review responded with "The Anglo-Saxon Race." Now the
Whig Review stirred the pot with its own spoon, "The Anglo-Saxons and the Americans."
Interest in the topic wouldn't quit, perhaps because The Origin of Species finally placed
consideration of racial matters in public attention. Racial fervor was still at white heat in 1875
when a popular book, The Anglo-Saxon
Race: Its History, Character and Destiny, traveled with Chautauqua to
every corner of the nation.
The
writings of William Henry Poole showed the Saxon race to be the lost tribes
of Israeli To this day, most American
Jews are unaware that a number of old-family Anglo- Saxons still consider themselves to be the
real Jews — and the nominal Jews impostors!
Between 1833 and 1852 Franz Bopp published book after book of his
spectacular multivolume work Comparative
Grammar, which drove any lingering skeptics to cover. The Aryans were real. Case closed.
Whatever guardian spirit watches over such
things assigned to Sir Henry James Sumner
Maine, English comparative jurist and historian, the task of presenting
Aryan tribal character and tying it to
contemporary Anglo-Saxons. Maine graduated from Cambridge in 1844 with the reputation of being the most
brilliant classical scholar of all time —
Michael Jordan of legal history. His Ancient Law (1861) earned him a
world-class reputation in one stroke. In
a series of magnificent literary studies which followed, he brought to life the ancient world of Germania
with singular felicity and power. Anglo-
Saxons and Aryans lived again as one people.
In the crucial year which saw Darwin's
Descent of Man published, Maine's spectacular
Village Communities in the East and West showed the world the rough-hewn
genius of the primitive Anglo-Saxon
world. Maine reiterated his contention that stranger-adoption was among the critical discoveries which led
to Anglo-Saxon greatness. This message
fell on particularly fertile ground in a New England whose soil had been
prepared for this exact message by
centuries of reading The New England Primer, with its grim warning that children are only loaned to their
parents.
And
what a message Maine carried — society thrived when children were detached
from their own parents and cultures! It
was a potent foundation on which to set the institution of forced schooling. Appearing shortly after
the radical Massachusetts adoption law
intended to disassemble Irish immigrant families, Maine silenced the new
institution's critics, paving the way
for eventual resignation to long-term school incarceration, too:
The part played by the legal fiction of
adoption in the constitution of primitive society and the civilization of the race is so
important that Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his
Ancient Law, expresses the opinion that, had it never existed, the
primitive groups of mankind could not
have coalesced except on terms of absolute superiority on the one side, and absolute subjection on the other.
With the institution of adoption, however, one
people might feign itself as descended from the same stock as the people
to whose sacra gentilica it was
admitted.... (Encyclopedia Britannica,
1 1th ed., "Adoption")
In
a grand stroke, Sir Henry provided enlightened justification for every form of
synthetic parenting social engineers
could concoct, including the most important, mass forced schooling.
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