The Origin of Species

In 1848, at the height of the Irish Catholic menace, The American Whig Review published "The Anglo-Saxon Race." That same year The North American Review responded with "The Anglo-Saxon Race." Now the Whig Review stirred the pot with its own spoon, "The Anglo-Saxons and the Americans." Interest in the topic wouldn’t quit, perhaps because The Origin of Species finally placed consideration of racial matters in public attention. Racial fervor was still at white heat in 1875 when a popular book, The Anglo-Saxon Race: Its History, Character and Destiny, traveled with Chautauqua to every corner of the nation.

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.