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.
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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