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.
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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