155. Unpopular Government: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

155. Unpopular Government: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Unpopular Government 

 

    Maine built a stronger case in each successive book, Early History of Institutions (1875)  and Early Law and Custom (1883). His magnificent tour de force, Popular Government  (1885), smashed the very basis for popular democracy. After Maine, only a fool could  believe wow-Anglo-Saxon groups should participate as equals in important decision-  making. At the same time, Maine's forceful dismissal of the fundamental equality of  ordinary or different peoples was confirmed by the academic science of evolution and by  commercial and manufacturing interests eager to collapse smaller enterprises into large  ones. Maine's regal pronouncements were supported by mainstream urban Protestant  churches and by established middle classes. Democratic America had been given its  death sentence.  

 

     Sir Henry's work became a favorite text for sermons, lectures, Chautauqua magazine  journalism and for the conversation of the best people. His effect is reflected  symbolically in a resolution from the Scranton Board of Trade of all places, which  characterized immigrants as:  

 

The most ignorant and vicious of European populations, including necessarily a vast  number of the criminal class; people who come here not to become good citizens, but to  prey upon our people and our industries; a class utterly without character and incapable     of understanding or appreciating our institutions, and therefore a menace to our  commonwealth.  

 

     Popular Government was deliberately unpopular in tone. There was no connection  between democracy and progress; the reverse was true. Maine's account of racial history  was accepted widely by the prosperous. It admirably complemented the torrent of  scientifically mathematicized racism pouring out of M.I. T., Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and  virtually every bastion of high academia right through the WWI period and even beyond.  Scientific racism determined the shape of government schooling in large measure, and  still does.