150. Organizing Caste: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

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.  

 

     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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