References and Quotes
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 non-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.
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.