The Underground History Of American Education
By John Taylor Gatto
Chapter Eleven
The Struggle for Homogeneity
The thesis I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years
those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum
of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the
schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer
understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That deprived of
their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form
and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the
logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the
development of Western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it
continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it.
I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education.
But I believe the indictment is justified and here is a prima facie case for entering this
indictment.
— Walter Lippmann, speaking before
the Association for the Advancement
of Science,
December 29, 1940
The Struggle For Homogeneity
In 1882, an Atlantic Monthly writer predicted a coming struggle for preservation of the
American social order. European immigrants were polarizing the country, upsetting the
"homogeneity on which free government must rest." That idea of a necessary
homogeneity made it certain that all lanes out of the 1880s led to orthodoxy on a national
scale. There was to be an official American highway, its roadbed built from police
manuals and schoolteacher training texts. Citizens would now be graded against the
official standard, up to the highest mark, "100 percent American."
In the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, the original idea of America as a
cosmopolitan association of peoples, each with its own integrity, gave way to urgent calls
for national unity. Even before WWI added its own shrill hysterics to the national project
of regimentation, new social agencies were in full cry on every front, aggressively taking
the battle of Americanization to millions of bewildered immigrants and their children.
The elite-managed "birth-control" movement, which culminated one hundred years later
in the legalization of abortion, became visible and active during this period, annually
distributing millions of pieces of literature aimed at controlling lower-class breeding
instincts, an urgent priority on the national elitist agenda. Malthus, Darwin, Galton, and
Pearson became secular saints at the Lawrence and Sheffield Scientific Schools at
Harvard and Yale. Judge Ben Lindsey of the Denver Children’s Court, flogging easy
access to pornography as an indirect form of sterilization for underclass men, was a
different tile in the same mosaic, as was institutional adoption. The planned parenthood
movement, in our day swollen to billion dollar corporate status, was one side of a coin
whose obverse was the prospering abortion, birth control, and adoption industries. In
those crucial years, a sudden host of licensing acts closed down employment in a wide
range of lucrative work—rationing the right to practice trades much as kings and queens
of England had done. Work was distributed to favored groups and individuals who were
willing to satisfy screening commissions that they met qualifications often unrelated to
the actual work. Licensing suddenly became an important factor in economic life, just as
it had been in royal England. This professionalization movement endowed favored
colleges and institutes, text publishers, testing agencies, clothing manufacturers, and
other allies with virtual sinecures.
Professional schools—even for bus drivers and detectives—imposed the chastening
discipline of elaborate formal procedures, expensive and time-consuming "training," on
what had once been areas of relatively free-form career design. And medicine, law,
architecture, engineering, pharmacology—the blue-ribbon work licenses—were suddenly
rigorously monitored, rationed by political fortune. Immigrants were often excluded from
meeting these qualification demands, and many middle-class immigrants with a
successful history of professional practice back in Europe were plunged into destitution,
their families disintegrating under the artificial stresses. Others, like my own family,
scrambled to abandon their home culture as far as possible in a go-along-with-the-crowd
response to danger.
One of the hardest things for any present-day reader to grasp about this era was the
brazenness of the regimentation. Scientific management was in its most enthusiastic
public phase then, monumentally zealous, maddingly smug. The state lay under effective
control of a relatively small number of powerful families freed by the Darwinian religion
from ethical obligation to a democratic national agenda, or even to its familiar
republican/libertarian antithesis. Yet those antagonists comprised the bedrock antinomies
of our once revolutionary public order, and without the eternal argument they provoked,
there was no recognizable America.
Eugenics Arrives
Between 1890 and 1920, the percentage of our population adjudged "feeble-minded" and
condemned to institutional confinement more than doubled. The long-contemplated
hygienic form of social control formulated by eighteenth-century German social thinker
Johann Frank, "complete medical policing," was launched with a vengeance. Few
intimidations are more effective than the threat of a stay in an insane asylum. Did the
population of crazies really double in those three decades? The answer given by one
contemporary was elliptically Darwinian: "Marriage of these inferiors is a veritable
manufactory of degenerates." It could no longer go unchecked.
The American Birth Control League left no doubt about its plans. Its position, as
expressed by Yale psychologist Arnold L. Gesell, was that "society need not wait for
perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding upon a course which will
prevent renewal of defective protoplasm contaminating the stream of life." Gesell’s The
Family and the Nation (1909), a thorough product of the new zeitgeist, advocated
"eugenic violence" in dealing with inferiors. According to Gesell, "We must do as with
the feebleminded, organize the extinction of the tribe." [emphases added]
Here was a far different promise of American life, a Connecticut Valley Yale-style
pledge. Yet governors of the Birth Control League 1 were acclaimed heroes in every
progressive assembly. With this thrust, old-line Calvinism converted its theological
elements into scientific truth, supported mathematically by the new Galtonian discipline
of statistics. Yale was the most important command center for the reemergence of old time Puritan religion, now thoroughly disguised behind the language of research
methodology.
The eugenics movement begun by Galton in England was energetically spread to the
United States by his followers. Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely
called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low wage rates to dull the zest for life, and, above all, schooling to dull the mind and debase
the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals, including a
childlessness which could be induced through easy access to pornography.2
At the same
time those deemed inferior were to be turned into eunuchs, Galtonians advocated the
notion of breeding a super race.
Humanist Scott Nearing wrote his masterpiece, The Super Race: An American Problem,
in 1912, just as the drive to destroy an academic curriculum in public schools was
reaching its first crescendo. By "problem," Nearing wasn’t referring to a moral dilemma.
Rather, he was simply arguing that only America had the resources to meet the
engineering challenge posed in creating supermen out of genetic raw stock.
1
The early manifestation under Margaret Sanger’s influence of the organization, which eventually changed its name to Planned Parenthood.
2 As mentioned previously, this was Judge Ben Lindsey’s idea; Lindsey was the man often credited with perfecting Children’s Court
procedures, particularly suspension of defendants’ customary legal rights.
Mr. Hitler Reads Mr. Ford
The "visionary" theories soon to be imposed on America belie our myth of the melting
pot as some type of spontaneous sociological force. The two great mass immigration
periods (1848 to 1860 and 1871 to 1914) posed a threat to the course of national
development that was underway. The unique American experience of creating a
particular New World culture was still too green, too recent a historical phenomenon to
tolerate the sophisticated competition of pluralism. A cosmopolitan society like that of
fifth-century Roman England wasn’t possible for America to accept without damaging its
growth.
The possibilities inherent in a bazaar society were at once exciting and anxiety provoking
to Americans, just as they were to Horace Mann. Yet beneath a sophisticated mask and a
veneer of cosmopolite civility certain factions sought release from their uneasy
ambivalence. There was only one realistic solution to human variability, the solution of
the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner (popularly called "The Know Nothing Party"),
"You must be as we are." Those who surrendered to such pressure, as many newcomers
did, were ultimately worse off than those who insulated themselves in ghettos.3
Some pages back I referred to the brazenness of our new social arrangements, a sense of
vulgar pushiness the reader senses radiating from various temples of reform. In some
crazy way the ornamentation of the period carries the flavor of its arrogance. It prepares
us to understand the future—that time in which we now live, our own age where "home
cooking" means commercially homogenized food product microwaved, where an entire
nation sits down each evening to commercial entertainment, hears the same processed
news, wears the same clothing, takes direction from the same green road signs, thinks the
same media-inculcated thoughts, and relegates its children and elders to the same
scientific care of strangers in schools and "nursing homes."
A signpost of the times: in 1920, the Henry Ford Publishing Company distributed 2
million free copies of its recent best seller to all libraries and all schools in the nation.
The book: The International Jew: World’s Foremost Problem. Adolf Hitler was still a
poor war hero, living in Munich with Ernst Hanfstaengel, the half-American Harvard
graduate whose mother was one of the legendary New England Sedgwicks. Hitler had
Hanfstaengel read Ford’s book to him. In the pages of Mein Kampf, Ford is lavishly
praised. Of Ford’s other efforts to define the 100 percent American, at least one more
deserves special mention. Speaking and writing English had very little to do with work
on a Ford assembly line, but Ford decided to make English-language classes compulsory.
The first thing foreign-speaking Ford employees learned to say: "I am a good American."
Ford students were graduated in a musical extravaganza that bears close attention as an
indicator of the American spiritual climate after WWI. A huge black pot took up the
middle of a stage, from which hung a large sign that read "MELTING POT." From
backstage an endless procession of costumed immigrants descended into the pot on a
ladder reaching into its bowels. Each wore a sign identifying his former homeland.
Simultaneously, from either side of the pot two other streams of men emerged, now
converted into real Americans, dressed in identical clothing. Each waved a small
American flag while a brass band played "America the Beautiful," fortissimo. Wives and
children cheered wildly when cue cards were flashed.
It was nothing short of marvelous that world champion Jew-baiter Henry Ford, architect
of the most opulent and sinister foundation of them all,4
major player in the
psychologization of American schooling, was a closet impresario in the bargain! Ford
completed America’s philanthropic circle. Three great private fortunes were to dominate
early twentieth-century public schooling—Carnegie’s, Rockefeller’s, and Ford’s—each
with a stupendous megalomaniac in charge of the checkbook, each dedicating the power
of great wealth not to conspicuous consumption but to radical experiments in the
transformation of human nature. The hardest lesson to grasp is that they weren’t doing
this for profit or fame—but from a sense of conviction reserved only for true believers.
There was no room in America for the faint-hearted. If a man wanted to be 100 percent
American, he had to reject his original homeland. Other Americanizing themes were
heard, too. General Leonard Wood growled that the Prussian practice of "Universal
Military Service" was the best means to make the unassimilated "understand they are
American." By the time I graduated from high school in 1953, universal military training
took me away to Kentucky and Texas, to become an American, I suppose. After
government school, government army, and Anglican Columbia were through with me, I
had lost the map to get back home.
All over the American Midwest, "Fitter Families Competitions" were held at state fairs
and expositions, ranking American families by objective criteria, much as hogs or cattle
are ranked. Winners got wide play in the press, ramming the point home to immigrant
families that the mustard would be cut in the land of the Star-Spangled Banner by
mathematical checklist attention to recipes and rules. After all, God himself had probably
been a research scientist, or so William Rainey Harper, president of the University of
Chicago, declared to the nation.
3
This process of very slow assimilation into settled groups is a pattern everywhere, particularly noticeable
in smaller communities where it may take two or three generations or even longer for a new family to be incorporated into the most intimate
society. Ghettos often serve well as mediators of transition, while the record of professional social agencies in this regard is disastrous.
4 Many people I meet consider the Ford Foundation a model of enlightened corporate beneficence, and although Jesse Jackson’s "Hymietown" remark ended his serious political prospects in America, Ford’s much deeper and more relentless scorn
for those he considered mongrel races and religions, particularly the Jews, has long been forgiven and forgotten. On July 30, 1938, the Hitler
government presented Henry Ford with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. Only three other non-Germans ever got
that honor and Benito Mussolini was one of them.
Racial Suicide
Francis Amasa Walker, president of M.I.T., first declared in 1891 what was soon to
become an upper-class mantra: Anglo-Saxons were quietly committing "racial suicide."
The insult of competing with Latin/Slav/Celtic folkways seemingly discouraged
reproduction among families of the old stock. After that bombshell, an orchestrated
campaign of scientific racism swept the United States and didn’t flag in public energy for
forty long years. Racial suicide was the Red Scare, Fifth Column, and AIDS epidemic of
its day all rolled into one. In the long history of manufactured crises, it ranks up there
with the Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the gasoline shortage of 1973,
the Asian economic miracle, and corporate downsizing as a prime example of modern
psychological management of public opinion. The racial suicide theme sounded at
exactly the moment public schooling was transforming itself into forced government
schooling.
The American campaign against racial suicide enlisted great scientists of the day to
produce a full library of books, scientific journal articles, popular magazine pieces,
legislation, lectures, and indirect school curricula. It caught the attention of the entire
civilized world, including Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan. Both sent official study
delegations to America to observe the resourcefulness of this new industrial utopia in
purging itself of its original democratic character. It is as if there exists some tacit
understanding on the part of mainstream scholarship and journalism to steer clear of the
shoals of this period, but even an amateur like myself finds enough to indicate that racial
suicide provided a leading motive to justify the radical shift of American society toward
well-schooled orthodoxy. What is intriguing in light of the relative amnesia concerning
these connections is the sheer quantity of the damning data. Genetic experimentation,
once teased from its hiding holes, is revealed as a master political project of the twentieth
century with the United States, Germany, and England its enthusiastic sponsors. Data
gathered in school surveys and social experimentation with children have been important
sources of grist for this initiative.
M.I.T.’s Walker got an intellectual boost from activities of the influential American
sociologist Edward A. Ross, who explained to the American Academy of Political and
Social Science exactly how unchecked Asiatic immigration would lead to the extinction
of the American people. Higher races, he said, will not endure competition from lower
ones. After that, even Teddy Roosevelt was issuing marching orders to Anglo-Saxon
mothers, asking well-bred ladies to mobilize their loins in an effort to arrest the suicidal
decline. Breed as if the race depended on it, said Roosevelt. Eugenics had openly become
national politics for the first time in America, but hardly the last.
Harper’s Weekly chastised Roosevelt, saying mere exhortation would have no effect as
long as immigration continued to reduce the native birthrate by insulting our best
breeders. From 1905 to 1909 at least one major popular magazine article on the subject
appeared every single month. Books warned that race suicide would "toll the passing of
this great Anglo-Teuton people," giving the nation over to Latins, Slavs, or worse, Jews
and other Asiatics.
Meanwhile, the long-ignored genetic work of monk Gregor Mendel was conveniently
rediscovered, adding more fuel to the fires of racial thinking. Here, presumably, a humble
man of God showed mathematically that something caused transmission of characteristics
from generation to generation, independent of any effect of nurture or education. Horse,
dog, and rose breeders had empirically derived these insights a thousand years before
Mendel, but credit passed to science for the "discovery."
Into the center of this racial excitement strode the formidable figure of Sir Francis
Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, in line of descent from Malthus,5
possessor of
incredible intellectual ability and indefatigable energy, a man of great personal wealth, a
knight of the realm. Galton preached improvement of the human breed with evangelical
fervor, demanding a policy of biological positivism which would produce the same
genetic dividends that were being reaped by positivism in the hard sciences of chemistry
and physics. The "eugenics movement," as it was now called, would save us socially by
manipulating the best to breed (positive eugenics) and encouraging the worst to die out
(negative eugenics). School would have a major role to play in this. Race-improvement
was in the air, its method compounded out of state action and forced schooling.
Galton’s inspiration and plenty of American money—much of it Andrew Carnegie’s and
Mrs. Averill Harriman’s—opened the first racial science laboratory in the world in Cold
Spring Harbor, Long Island, in 1904. And kept it open for thirty-five years, until Hitler’s
invasion of Poland made discretion seem the wiser part of zealotry for the moment at the
Carnegie Corporation. In 1939, it was quietly shut down. The last president at the Cold
Spring Harbor facility was M.I.T. president Vannevar Bush, often called "The Father of
the Atomic Bomb." Eugenic thinking injected energy into the exploding "mental
hygiene" movement, too. Word went out to the recently erected national network of
hospitals that it was okay to begin sterilizing mental defectives. This green light came
complete with legislative licenses to decide who those defectives were—and freedom
from any legal jeopardy.
A scholarly book from M.I.T. created intellectual havoc in the year 1899 and long
afterwards, lending maximum credibility to the eugenicist agenda. The Races of Europe
was written by brilliant economist William Z. Ripley; it armed the racial-suicide crowd
and its companion group of enthusiasts, the racial-science crowd, with information that
Europe was divided into three races, easily distinguishable from one another by physical
measurements. First, a race of blonde long heads (the Teutons); second, a central race of
stocky round heads (the Alpines); and third, a southern race of slender, dark long heads
(the Mediterraneans). Here, finally, was a way to distinguish reliably among the qualities
of old immigration and new! Ripley took the 28-year-old Darwinian concept of
"reversion" and charged it with new energy.
Was it possible, Ripley asked, that promiscuous breeding of Nordic peoples with
Southern Europeans could doom the New England Anglo-Nordic stock? Incipient race
suicide could be dealt with only by legislation. Education should be employed to raise the
current immigrant’s "standard of morality," making him more tolerable to society. That
would help. But nothing could be done about reversion. Subspecies of men could not be
allowed to couple with 100 percent American female breeding stock.
All the pieces were now in position for full-scale national hysteria to commence, an era
of sanctions buttressed by the authority of peerless scientific experts. American society
would require harsh discipline after the Prussian fashion in order to meet this challenge.
Thanks to men like Ripley, the experts could apply such discipline with an exalted sense
of mathematical righteousness. The first requirement would be to force the dangerous
classes into schools. Laws were on the books, time to enforce them.
A covert American sterilization program managed by trusted administrators in the brand
new hospital network took place during the same years that forced schooling was being
brought along. This sterilization initiative occasionally broke silence in highly specialized
journals whose reader discretion was taken for granted. Thus Charles V. Carrington,
writing in the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science (July 1910),
reported on two interesting cases of successful involuntary sterilization. One involved an
"epileptic masturbator" who, after vasectomy, "ceased masturbating altogether." The
other was a black man also given to masturbation and general deviltry. After sterilization,
he became "a strong, well-developed young Negro, nicely behaved, and not a
masturbatory sodomist," Carrington reported. Surgical intervention as social policy was
given its precedents in America long before the Nazi era.
Advocates of Yaleman Gesell’s "eugenic violence" offensive against the underclasses
swung from every point on the scientific compass. William McDougall, the eminent
social psychologist, announced himself a champion of Nordic superiority; Ellsworth
Huntington, prominent Yale geographer, wrote The Character of Races, showing that
only one race had any real moral character. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president and
founder of the American Museum of Natural History, gave the "Address of Welcome" to
the Second International Congress of Eugenics; Osborn’s close friend Lothrop Stoddard
wrote The Revolt Against Civilization: Menace of the Underman; and psychologist James
McKeen Cattell, a force in the rise of standardized testing, wrote to Galton, "We are
following in America your advice and example."
The famous humanitarian anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber remarked acidly to a
newsman that anti-eugenic protests came only from the "orthodoxly religious," rarely
from the enlightened camp of science. So there it was. Keep them all in mind: Kroeber,
Gesell, Ripley, McDougall, Huntington, Osborn, great scientific humanist names whose
work underscored how important a role forced schooling was designed to play. Scientific
studies had shown conclusively that extending the duration and intensity of schooling
caused sharp declines in fertility—and sterility in many. Part of school’s stealth
curriculum would be a steady expansion of its reach throughout the century.
Two more examples will drive home the relentlessness of this long scientific campaign
against American tradition. J.B.S. Haldane, a distinguished Fabian geneticist from
England, issued a lurid warning about what might happen if blonde women bred with
human demi-apes like Italians, Jews, and other kinds of retrograde biology: "A new type
of submen, abhorred by nature, ugly as no natural product is ugly" would emerge. The
new hypothesis held that female offspring of such unions would be too repulsive to look
upon.
In Daedalus, or Science and the Future, Haldane said there were really only four
fundamental biological innovations of prehistory: 1) Domestication of animals; 2)
Domestication of plants; 3) The use of fungi for the production of alcohol; 4) The
invention of frontal copulation "which altered the path of sexual selection, focused the
attention of man as a lover upon woman’s face and breasts, and changed our ideal of
beauty from the steatopygous Hottentot to the modern European, from the Venus of
Brassempouy to the Venus of Milo."
All evolution might be in jeopardy if there were no more pretty faces to look at, this was
the thesis. Today, there is an aura of the absurd to these assertions, but it would be well to
reflect on the institutional world that emerged from the other end of this same forge, for it
is the new moral world you and I live in, a fully scientized and organized society,
managed by the best people—people who prefer to remain out of sight of the hoi polloi,
segregated in their own in walled villages and other redoubts.
5 Not quite as sinister as it sounds. Virtually all distinguished English names bear a family relationship to one another; its privileged classes, like
those of other nations like Germany (or Japan) constitute a protected breeding stock in which intermarriage is not just common, but de rigeur,
one might say with only a trace of mischief. Indeed, in a genealogy text whose title I’ve long forgotten, I learned from the author (alas
forgotten, too) that two thirds of all American presidents stood in an easily traceable family relationship to one another. See Chapter Twelve for
more enlightenment on this score. Or simply ponder the meaning of this: After the 2004 presidential nominations have been decided, if Senator
Kerry of Massachusetts is the Democratic nominee and George W. Bush the Republican, then five presidential terms in a row will have been
served by men with a Yale degree when the eventual victor’s term is complete! And three if those terms will have featured a president who was
a member, while at Yale, of a tiny secret society, Skull & Bones, which only accepts fifteen members a year. On this score, either Bush or
Kerry will serve equally well as both are Yale graduates and both Skull & Bones initiates.
The Passing Of The Great Race
No discussion of the dreamlike years of overt American scientific racism and schooling
would be complete without a nod to the ghost of Madison Grant, who has mysteriously
vanished from the pages of some standard biographical references, though they still carry
his cousins, Grant the portrait painter and Grant the educator. No matter, I shall tell you
about him. If you have ever been to the Bronx Zoo 6
you have been a guest of Mr. Grant’s
beneficent imagination, for he was its founder and the founder of its parent, the New
York Zoological Society. The Bronx Zoo, its fame and good works inspire worldwide
gratitude. Grant’s legacy to us, as free libraries were Carnegie’s.
Grant was a lifelong bachelor, a childless man. Like many people associated with public
schooling on a policy level, Grant came from a patrician family which had graced society
from colonial days. No Grant ever held a menial job. Madison Grant was considered a
leading scientific naturalist of his time. His monographs on the Rocky Mountain goat, the
moose, and the caribou are little classics of their kind, still consulted. Men and women
related to Grant have been directors of American society since the Age of the Mathers.
Grant was deeply disgusted by the mixing of European races underway here; he believed
the foundation of our national and cultural life lay in racial purity and backed this opinion
with action. It is hardly possible to believe some of this attitude didn’t enter into the
museum’s presentation of data and even into those hundreds of thousands of school field
trips. In Grant’s competent hands, the boldness and sweep of old Anglo-Saxon tradition
was fused into a systematic worldview, then broadcast through books and lectures to the
entire planet. His magnum opus appeared in 1916 bearing the epic title The Passing of the
Great Race, with an introduction by Museum of Natural History luminary Henry
Fairfield Osborn—a man who wrote one of the texts I used myself as a junior high school
student.
The Passing of the Great Race warns that the ruling race of the Western world is
beginning to wane because of a "fatuous belief" that environment can alter heredity. 7
The
clear connection to the predestination canon of Calvin and to the great Norse tradition of
implacable Fate is unmistakable. Grant’s own genealogy came from both these strains in
European history. Whatever else he was, Grant was neither dull nor commonplace. Using
Darwin and Mendelian genetics to support his argument, Grant said flatly that different
races do not blend, that mixing "gives us a race reverting to the more ancient and lower
type." A "cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew."
Grant argued that culture is racially determined. Alpines have always been peasants,
Mediterraneans, artists and intellectuals; but "the white man par excellence" was the
Nordic blonde conqueror of the North: explorers, fighters, rulers, aristocrats, organizers
of the world. In early America the stock was purely Nordic, but now swarming hybrids
threatened it with destruction except in a few zones of racial purity like Minnesota.
Madison Grant felt democracy as a political system violated scientific facts of heredity
the same way Christianity did, by favoring the weak. This led inexorably to biological
decadence. Even national consciousness might confuse one’s rational first loyalty, which
had to be race. This was the codex of the Bronx Zoo’s founder. Six years after its
publication, The Passing of the Great Race was still in print and Grant’s New York
Zoological Society more respectable than ever. Eventually Margaret Mead was
beneficiary of considerable patronage from Grant’s Museum of Natural History, as
indeed the whole shaky new community of anthropological thought became. Although
Mead’s work appears to contradict Grant’s, by the time the academic world began to
push the relativism of Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other interpreters of primitive culture, a
double standard had settled in on intellectual life in the United States and Europe.
For those whose status was secured by birth, theories of inherited quality were available.
For the great mass of others, however, the body of theory which paid off in foundation
grants, the one driving modern political and economic development, was that corpus of
studies exploring the notion of extreme plasticity in human nature, a pliability grading
into shapelessness. If mankind were seen to be clay, radical social action justifying
continuous intervention could surely bring utopia within reach, while providing
expanding opportunities to academics. The academic marketplace eagerly supplied
evidence that quality was innate to the powerful, and evidence that human nature was
empty to the rest of us.
6 As five hundred thousand school trips to date have been.
7
Simplified, the belief that human nature could be changed, complicated enormously by a collateral belief
that there are a variety of such natures, correlated with race and other variables. As I warn elsewhere, these men used the concept "race" in a
more intimate way than contemporary ears are used to. As Grant would have viewed things, "white" or "Caucasian" is subject to many
subdivisions, each of which has a value rank. The "great race" in America is Aryan. One very influential tome of the 1920s, for instance, was
Joseph Widney’s two-volume Race Life of the Aryan People. Widney was a founder of the University of Southern California.
The Poison Of Democracy
The spring used to classify the U.S. population in an unprecedented and very radical way
as WWI. Prior to the war, eugenicists evaluated racial and national groups by comparing
numbers of one group or another on "lists of distinction,"8
but they had no way of
penetrating the secret inner spaces of consciousness. On the verge of the world war the
new social discipline of psychology, struggling to attain a status of hard science, claimed
to be able to change all that. It boasted of a power to go deep into the hidden regions of
the brain. The new techno-miracle of the day was the invention of a mysterious
"intelligence test," an "IQ" score which allegedly could place secrets of intellectual power
at the disposal of managerial science.
The just assembled American army of WWI was soon subject to mass intelligence
measurement under the direction of Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American
Physiological Association, an organization recently invented by Wundtian protégé G.
Stanley Hall. Results published after the war showed remarkable correlation with similar
tests on American school children. While Yerkes was reporting these findings to the
National Academy of Sciences, famous psychologist Dr. William McDougall was
summarizing the civilian studies for the general public in his book, Is America Safe for
Democracy? Latins and Slavs in fair mental competition scored significantly lower than
native whites, he said. How, then, could they be given a vote equal to white men?
McDougall claimed that hard data unmistakably revealed that a racial interpretation of
history was the correct one. In his book A Study of American Intelligence, psychologist
Carl Brigham concluded in 1923 that "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group
over Alpine, Mediterranean and Negro groups has been demonstrated."
After 1922, racism was a truth of science. Word quickly spread into every corner of
Europe; but particularly in defeated Germany, ancient Teutonic barrier against Slavic
incursion, these new truths were enthusiastically discussed. General agreement confirmed
Nordic superiority. The popular writer Kenneth Roberts (Northwest Passage) took up the
cry. One of America’s foremost novelists, he lectured American book dealers from the
pages of the specialist journal Bookman that "the Alpine school of fiction" spread the
poison of democracy through the whole culture. School texts were appropriately adjusted.
Roberts identified himself, as you may already have guessed, as 100 percent Nordic.
Now intelligence tests were huckstered in school district after school district; fortunes
accrued to well-placed pedagogical leaders and their political allies. Every child would
now be given a magical number ranking it scientifically in the great race of life. School
grades might vary according to the whim of teachers, but IQ scores were unvarying, an
emotionless badge of biological honor or shame, marking innate, almost unchanging
ability. Millions of tests administered annually to primary and secondary students would
prove the "value rank" of the American peoples. Mental ages were dutifully entered on
permanent record cards with as much assurance as Horace Mann, Barnas Sears,
William Torrey Harris, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall had accepted skull maps drawn
by their favorite phrenologists.
Every day science seemed to make it clearer and clearer that forcing everyone to fit the
Anglo-Saxon mold was indeed doing humanity a mighty favor. If children couldn’t be
biologically Anglo/Nordic, they could be so acculturated at least partly that way, through
regular drill. After all, hadn’t psychology proven how malleable human nature was?
Henry Fairfield Osborn stepped forward from his duties at the American Museum of
Natural History to announce portentously that Christopher Columbus—always a choking
point (as a Latin) for America’s cultural leadership—was actually Nordic.
8 An invention of Galton.
The American Protective League
By the first year of WWI, American political leadership was ferreting out disloyalty and
enforcing scientific conformity. Any number of private and secret societies appeared to
forward this cause. The "Anti-Yellow Dog League" was one of these, composed of
schoolboys above the age of ten, who searched out disloyalty each day from one of its
thousand branches nationwide, barking like German shepherds when a disloyal yellow
dog, otherwise someone looking like you or me, was flushed from cover and branded.
Schools enthusiastically cooperated in "Dog Hunts," as they were called.
The U.S. Justice Department secretly empowered private associations as volunteer spyhunters. One, the American Protective League (APL), earned semi-official status in the
national surveillance game, in time growing to enormous size. Founded by a Chicago
advertising man, the APL had twelve hundred units functioning across America, all
staffed by business and professional people. It was a genuine secret society replete with
oath and rituals. Membership gave every operative the authority to be a national
policeman. The first location placed under surveillance in every neighborhood was the
local public school. Assignments were given by the old (Federal) Bureau of Investigation
and by the War Department’s Intelligence Division to report on "seditious and disloyal"
conversation. From the authorized history of the APL comes this specimen case:
Powers County, Colorado: investigated fifty cases of mouth-to-mouth propaganda, a
notable cause being that of a German Lutheran minister who refused to answer the
questions as to which side he wished to win the war. He asked for time. The next day he
declared very promptly that he wanted the United States to win. He was instructed to
prove this by preaching and praying it in private as well as in public, which he agreed to
do.
The APL checked up on people who failed to buy Liberty Bonds. It spotted violators of
food and gasoline regulations, rounded up draft evaders in New York, disrupted Socialist
meetings in Cleveland, broke strikes, threatened union men with immediate induction
into the army. The attorney general of the United States reported to Congress, "It is safe
to say never in history has this country been so thoroughly policed." (emphasis added)
Nor, he might have added, the training of the young so well regulated.
Guaranteed Customers
Prior to 1860 Americans didn’t demand a high level of national solidarity—a loose sort
of catch-as-catch-can unity satisfied the nation in spite of the existence even then of
patriotic special interest groups like Know-Nothings. Neither by geography, culture,
common experience, or preference was the United States naturally a single country
although it did possess a common language. But conformity had been ordered by
corporate and banking interests from the Northeast, so one country it would become.
Stupendous profits accrued to these interests from the Civil War, and its great lesson of
national regimentation into squads, platoons, brigades, companies, regiments, and army
corps was not lost on the winners. Warfare by its nature forces men to wear "value-ranks"
openly for all to see, forces everyone to subordinate themselves to higher ranks, and
higher ranks to subordinate themselves to invisible orders. War conditions men to rule
and to be ruled. Modern war creates a society far different in type and scale from the
ragged and bizarre individuality which emerged out of the American Revolution. With
everyone dressing alike, eating alike, and doing everything else alike, maximum profit
can be derived from the use of mass-production machinery in an ideal environment where
the goods of production are swiftly wasted, and military "consumers" are literally
forbidden the right to refuse to consume! A soldier must wear his uniform, eat his food,
fire his rifle. To guaranteed customers through psychological drills is the very essence of
the corporate world about to come into being.
Industrial Efficiency
After the Civil War, the guaranteed customer was not a thing prudent businessmen were
willing to surrender. Could there be some different way to bring about uniformity again
without another conflict? Vast fortunes awaited those who would hasten such a jubilee.
Consolidation. Specialization. These were the magical principles President Harper was to
preach forty years later at the University of Chicago. Whatever sustained national unity
was good, including war, whatever retarded it was bad. School was an answer, but it
seemed hopelessly far away in 1865.
Things were moving slowly on these appointed tracks when a gigantic mass of Latin, and
then Slavic, immigrants was summoned to the United States to labor, in the 1870s and
afterwards. It came colorfully dressed, swilling wine, hugging and kissing children, eyes
full of hope. Latin immigration would seem to represent a major setback for the
realization of any systematic utopia and its schools. But a president had been shot dead in
1865. Soon another was shot dead by a presumed (though not actual) immigrant barely
fifteen years later. Rioting followed, bloody strikes, national dissension. It was a time
tailor-made for schoolmen, an opportunity to manage history.
The Americanization movement, which guaranteed forced schooling to its first mass
clientele, was managed from several bases; three important ones were social settlement
houses, newly minted patriotic hereditary societies, and elite private schools (which
sprang up in profusion after 1880). Madison Grant was a charter member of one of the
patriotic groups, "The Society of Colonial Wars." All compartments of the
Americanization machine cooperated to rack the immigrant family to its breaking point.
But some, like settlement houses, were relatively subtle in their effects. Here, the home
culture was inadvertently denigrated through automatic daily comparison with the
settlement culture, a genteel world constructed by society ladies dedicated to serving the
poor.
Hereditary societies worked a different way: Through educational channels, lectures,
rallies, literature they broadcast a code of attitudes directed at the top of society. Mainline
Protestant churches were next to climb on the Americanization bandwagon, and the
"home-missions" program became a principal gathering station for adoptable foreign
children. By 1907 the YMCA was heavily into this work, but the still embryonic
undertaking of leveling the masses lacked leadership and direction.
Such would eventually be supplied by Frances Kellor, a muckraker and a tremendous
force for conformity in government schooling. Kellor, the official presiding genius of the
Americanization movement, came out of an unlikely quarter, yet in retrospect an entirely
natural one. She was the daughter of a washerwoman, informally adopted out of poverty
by two wealthy local spinsters, who eventually sent her to Cornell where she took a law
degree through their generosity. After a turn toward sociology at the University of
Chicago, Kellor mastered Harper’s twin lessons of specialization and consolidation and
set out boldly to reform America’s immigrant families.
Her first muckraking book, Out of Work, was published in 1904. For the next two years
she drafted remedial legislation and earned her spurs lobbying. By 1906, she had Teddy
Roosevelt’s personal ear. Six years later, she was head of the Progressive Party’s
publicity department and research arm. Kellor, under William Rainey Harper’s
inspiration, became an advocate of industrial efficiency. She despised waste and disorder,
urging that "opportunity" be rationalized and put under control—the first hint of School to-Work legislation to follow in the waning decades of the century. Work and licenses
should be used as incentives to build national unity. Discipline was the ticket, and for
discipline, carrots were required as well as sticks.
Charles Evans Hughes, then governor, made Kellor the first woman ever to head a state
agency, appointing her director of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in New
York. By 1909, supported by prominent allies, she organized a New York branch of the
North American Civic League, a Boston-based, business-rostered outfit intended to
protect the national status quo from various foreign menaces. Under her direction, the
New York branch developed its own program. It isn’t clear how much of the Boston
agenda they carried on—it had mainly involved sending agents into immigrant
communities to act as industrial spies and to lead anti-strike movements—but in any case,
by 1914 Kellor’s group was writing its own menu.
It opened by demanding centralized federal action: Americanization was failing "without
a national goal." Her new "Committee for Immigrants in America" thereafter proclaimed
itself the central clearinghouse to unify all public and private agencies in a national
spearhead to "make all these people one nation." When government failed to come up
with money for a bureau, Miss Kellor’s own backers—who included Mrs. Averill
Harriman and Felix Warburg, the Rothschild banker—did just that, and this private entity
was duly incorporated into the government of the United States! "The Division of
Immigrant Education," while officially federal, was in fact the subsidized creation of
Frances Kellor’s private lobby. Immigrant education meant public school education, for it
was to compulsion schooling the children of immigration were consigned, and immigrant
children, in a reversal of traditional roles, became the teachers of their immigrant parents,
thus ruining their families by trivializing them.
When WWI began, Americanization took over as the great national popular crusade. A
drive for national conformity pushed itself dramatically to the forefront of the public
agenda. Kellor and her colleagues swiftly enlisted cooperation from mayors, school
authorities, churches, and civic groups; prepared data for speakers; distributed suggested
agenda and programs, buttons, and posters; and lectured in schools. When Fourth of July
1915 arrived, 107 cities celebrated it as "Americanization Day," and the country
resounded with the committee’s slogan "Many Peoples, but One Nation."
Now Kellor’s organization transmuted itself into "The National Americanization
Committee," shifting its emphasis from education to the breaking of immigrant ties to the
Old World. Its former slogan, "Many Peoples, But One Nation," was replaced with a
blunt "America First." In this transformation, children became the sharpest weapon
directed at their parents’ home culture. Kellor called Americanization "the civilian side of
national defense." She appeared before a group of industrialists and bankers calling itself
the National Security League to warn of coming peril from subversion on the part of
immigrants. One of the most distressing anomalies confronting Kellor and the NSL was
an almost total lack of publicizable sabotage incidents on the domestic front in WWI,
which made it difficult to maintain the desired national mood of fear and anger.
9
There is some evidence American social engineering was being studied abroad. Zamiatin’s We, the horrifying scientific dystopia of a world
government bearing the name "The United State," was published in Russia a few years later as if in anticipation of an American future for
everyone.
High-Pressure Salesmanship
In 1916, the year of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, Kellor published
Straight America. In it she called for universal military service, industrial mobilization, a
continuing military build-up, precisely engineered school curricula, and total
Americanization, an urgent package to revitalize nationalism. America was not yet at
war.
President Wilson was at that time reading secret surveys which told him Americans had
no interest in becoming involved in the European conflict. Furthermore, national
sympathy was swinging away from the English and actually favored German victory
against Britain. There was no time to waste; the war had to be joined at once. John
Higham called it "an adventure in high pressure salesmanship."
Thousands of agencies were in some measure engaged: schools, churches, fraternal
orders, patriotic societies, civic organizations, chambers of commerce, philanthropies,
railroads, and industries, and—to a limited degree—trade unions. There was much
duplication, overlapping, and pawing of the air. Many harassed their local school
superintendents.
At the end of 1917, Minnesota’s legislature approved the world’s first secret adoption
law, sealing original birth records forever so that worthy families who received a child
for adoption—almost always children transferred from an immigrant family of
Latin/Slav/Alpine peasant stripe to a family of northern European origins—would not
have to fear the original parents demanding their child back. The original Boston
adoption law of 1848 had been given horrendous loopholes. Now these were sealed sixty nine years later.
Toward the end of the war, a striking event, much feared since the Communist
revolutions of 1848, came to pass. The huge European state of Russia fell to a socialist
revolution. It was as if Russian immigrants in our midst had driven a knife into our
national heart and, by extension, that all immigrants had conspired in the crime. Had all
our civilizing efforts been wasted? Now Americanization moved into a terrifying phase in
response to this perceived threat from outside. The nation was to be purified before a red
shadow arose here, too. Frances Kellor began to actively seek assistance from business
groups to build what she called "the new interventionist republic of America." (emphasis
added)
At an unpublicized dinner meeting at Sherry’s Restaurant near Wall Street in November
1918, Frances Kellor addressed the fifty largest employers of foreign labor, warning them
that Americanization had been a failure—that really dangerous times were ahead with
Bolshevik menace concealed in every workplace. Kellor proposed a partnership of
business and social work to "break up the nationalistic, racial groups." The easiest way to
do that was to weaken close family life. Miss Kellor, whose upbringing had itself been an
ambiguous one, was the perfect person to lead such a charge.
At the Wall Street meeting, plans were laid for a semi-secret organization of
Americanizers to be formed out of interested volunteers from major industrial
corporations. An impressive amount of money was pledged at the initial meeting, the
story of which you can follow in John Higham’s classic account of our immigration
years, Strangers in the Land. "The Inter-Racial Council" presented the external aspect of
an eclectic public-spirited enterprise—it even recruited some conservative immigrant
representatives as members—but, in fact, it was controlled by Kellor’s backers.
The IRC acted both as intelligence gathering office and propaganda agency. In its first
year of existence, Kellor put together an association of advertisers to strong-arm the
immigrant press into running anti-radical propaganda. Using this muscle, immigrants
could be instructed from far away how to think and what to think about, while remaining
unaware of the source of instruction because immediate pressure came from a familiar
editor. Advertising revenue could be advanced, as well as withdrawn, providing both
carrot and stick, the complete behavioral formula.
A New Collectivism
By 1919 a deluge of state legislation appeared, specifically designed to counteract
rampant Bolshevism. Idaho and Utah established criminal penalties for failure to attend
Americanization classes. Fifteen states ordered English to be the only language of
instruction in all schools, public and private. Nebraska demanded that all meetings be
conducted in English. Oregon required every foreign language publication to display
prominently a literal English translation of its entire contents. In 1922, Oregon outlawed
private schools for elementary school children, a decision reversed by the Supreme Court
later in the Pierce vs. Society of Sisters case (1925).
At the same time, or just a bit later, a new biology began to emerge—a molecular vision
of life under the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation, a vision in which scientific
interventions could and should be used deliberately, by the best people, to control
biological and social evolution. With Rockefeller as a principal engine, the shared social
view of corporate thinkers was comprehensively imposed, bit by bit, on academic
science. Elite universities, with Caltech as leader, became sites for implementation of the
Rockefeller project. It was, in the words of Lily Kay in (The Molecular Vision of Life), "a
potent convergence of social agendas and scientists’ ambitions."
Eugenic goals played a significant role in conception and design of the new Rockefeller
biology, to such a point that open discussion of purposes had eventually to be kept under
wraps as a political liability, particularly when the great dictators of Europe appeared to
be taking some of their cues from America. Molecular biology promised a politically
safer, and even a more certain path to an eventual utopia of social planning by elites, and
one now properly "scientific," completely free of the embarrassing candor of eugenic
selection.
The experience of these times gave reformers a grand taste for blood. Government
intervention everywhere was proclaimed the antidote for dissent. Intervention took many
unexpected shapes. For instance, the "Athlete’s Americanization League" agitated
intensely to provide free sports equipment for every public school with its battle cry:
"Sports are the logical antidote for unrest." By the time national passion cooled, in every
nook and cranny of American life new social organizations with powerful government or
private sponsorship flourished. All fed on intervention into families for their
nourishment, all clamored to grow larger, all schemed to produce political testimony of
their value. A new republic was here at last, just as Herbert Croly 10 had announced, and
government school was to be its church.
10The new republic we were driving toward, according to Croly, bore little resemblance to either a republic
or a democracy. It was to be an apolitical universe, a new utopia of engineers and skilled administrators, hinted at by Bellamy, spun out further
by Veblen in The Engineers and the Price System, and The Theory of Business Enterprise. A federal union of worldwide scope was the target, a
peculiar kind of union of the sort specified in Cecil Rhodes’ last wills, which established the Rhodes Scholarships as a means to that end.
Politics was outdated as a governing device. Whatever appearances of an earlier democratic republic were allowed to survive, administrators
would actually rule. A mechanism would have to be created whereby administrators could be taught the new reality discreetly so that continuity
and progress could be assured. De Tocqueville’s nightmare of an endlessly articulating, self-perpetuating bureaucracy had finally come to life.
It was still in its infancy, but every sign pointed to a lusty future.
next 261s
Daughters of the Barons of Runnemede
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