The Descent of Man

In the crucial year which saw Darwin’s Descent of Man published, Maine’s spectacular Village Communities in the East and West showed the world the rough-hewn genius of the primitive Anglo-Saxon world. Maine reiterated his contention that stranger-adoption was among the critical discoveries which led to Anglo-Saxon greatness. This message fell on particularly fertile ground in a New England whose soil had been prepared for this exact message by centuries of reading The New England Primer, with its grim warning that children are only loaned to their parents.

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.

In 1898 the D.A.R., best known of all hereditarian societies, began issuing scientifically designed propaganda lectures on American history and government. By 1904, the Society of Colonial Dames was preparing school curriculum. In the same year, the Sons of the American Revolution distributed millions of pieces of historical interpretation to schools, all paid for by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Social Register, founded 1887, quickly became a useful index for the new associational aristocracy, bearing witness to those who could be trusted with the exciting work underway. Tiffany’s started a genealogy department in 1875 to catch the first business from elites made edgy by The Descent of Man and, as the century ended, genealogical reference books— the Gore Roll, Boston’s American Armoury and Blue Book, and more—came tumbling off the assembly line to assist Anglo-Saxons in finding each other.

To realize the tremendous task Fabians originally assigned themselves (a significant part of which was given to schooling to perform), we need to reflect again on Darwin’s shattering books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), each arguing in its own way that far from being blank slates, children are written upon indelibly by their race of origin, some "favored" in Darwin’s language, some not. A powerful public relations initiative of recent years has attempted to separate Darwin from "social Darwinism," but it cannot be done because Darwin himself is the prototypical social Darwinist. Both books taken together issued a license for liberal upper classes to justify forced schooling. From an evolutionary perspective, schools are the indoctrination phase of a gigantic breeding experiment. Working-class fantasies of "self-improvement" were dismissed from the start as sentimentality that evolutionary theory had no place for.