146. Exclusive Heredity: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

146. Exclusive Heredity: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Exclusive Heredity 

 

      At the end of the nineteenth century, an explosion in the creation of exclusive hereditary  societies took place which couldn't have been predicted from the course of the American  past. These peculiar clubs constituted the most flagrant leading edge of a broad-based  movement to erect nothing less than a coherent national upper class whose boundary was  drawn in bloodlines. This might be better understood as an early manifestation of the  genetically charged environment of American life at the advent of the twenty- first  century. This social enclosure movement produced orthodox factory schooling for the  masses as one of its very first policy thrusts. It produced the licensing phenomenon which  echoed the traditional right of English kings to confer a living on some loyal subjects by  reserving good things for them which are denied to others. We have been wrestling with     many other aspects of class- and caste-based government and society ever since we came  out of this period.  

 

     Evidence that this movement was organized to concentrate power within a Brahmin caste  stratum is caught by the sudden ostracism of Jews from the ranks of America's leading  social clubs in the decade and a half directly following Herbert Spencer's visit to  America. This was far from business as usual. Jesse Seligman, a founder of New York's  Union League Club, was forced to resign in 1 893 when his

son was blackballed by the  membership committee. Joseph Gratz, president of the exclusive Philadelphia Club  during the Civil War, lived to see the rest of his own family later shunned from the same  place. The Westmoreland in Richmond boasted a Jewish president in the 1870s, but soon  afterwards began a policy of rigid exclusion; The University Club of Cincinnati broke up  in 1 896 over admission of a Jewish member. The point is whatever was wrong with Jews  now hadn't been wrong earlier. Who was giving the orders to freeze out the Jews? And  why? 

 

      The striking change of attitude toward Jews displayed by Bostonian blue blood and  author Henry Adams is a clue to where the commands might have originated, since the  Adams family can be presumed to have been beyond easy intimidation or facile  persuasion. Adams'1890 novel Democracy illustrated the author's lifelong acceptance of  Jews. Democracy featured Jewish characters as members of Washington society with no  ethnic stigma even hinted at. In 750 intimate letters of Adams from 1858 through 1896,  the designation "Jew" never even occurs. Suddenly it shows up in 1896. Thirty-eight  years of correspondence without one invidious reference to Jews was followed by  twenty-two years with many. After 1 896 Adams seemed to lose his faith entirely in the  Unitarian tradition, becoming, then, a follower of Darwin and Spencer, a believer in  privileged heredities and races. H.G. Wells' The Future in America (1906) called  attention to the transformation the English writer witnessed on a visit to this country:  "The older American population," said Wells, "is being floated up on the top of this  immigrant influx, a sterile aristocracy above a racially different and astonishingly fecund  proletariat...." That fecundity and that racial difference dictated that a second American  Revolution would be fought silently from the Atlantic to the Pacific about a century ago,  this time a revolution in which British class-based episcopal politics emerged victorious  after a century and a quarter of rejection. 

 

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