Re reading "The Guarded Gate," by Daniel Okrent is a reawakening and an illumination.
There were a group of men, who are today relative unknowns, who developed and fostered the idea of a natural aristocracy, and then there is the group of willing buyers of the concept among the famous, who were invariably rich and "well bred."
Of course, the idea of a naturally gifted man who possessed superior powers endowed by God, who was meant to rule over other men, much as man is meant to have dominion over animals, dates back to the sword and the stone and the Arthurian legends. But that was embellished and developed by the Englishman, who heads the list of "unknowns," Francis Galton.
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| Galton |
Galton focused on the idea that you could measure intelligence, as if it were a single trait, like height or weight and then rank people by the number, the IQ. Like the rest of those on this list, he grew up wealthy and believed he was wealthy because he was more intelligent, talented and ambitious than the common man and thus deserved his wealth, as a God given thing. Reading Darwin, he found the concept of heredity, and the idea that IQ could be passed on, as could the lack of it. "Let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best suited to invent and and conform to a high and generous civilization." Thus emerged the idea of genetics, selective breeding extended from the farm to the home. He came up with the word, "eugenics."
Then there was Charles Davenport, an American.
Davenport, also rich, chased after the huge money offered by Carnegie to set up a "laboratory" at Cold Spring Harbor, just down the road from Theodore Roosevelt's place, and he used it to launch the Eugenics Records Office, and "Better Baby Breeding" programs, long before the idea of meritocracy based on IQ testing, it was Davenport's hope to get merit through meticulous breeding of human beings. Qualities like "morality" and high character were breedable.
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| Henry Adams |
Then there was another of the Boston Brahmin class, Henry Adams, who mingled in this crowd. His influence was less direct, but a passage from his book, "The Education" is so ripe, it is important to include, to describe the thinking in which all these men were marinated. Adams describes walking across Boston Common and seeing a man in a long black frock coat of cheap gabardine, untamed beard down to his chest, flakes of dandruff and crumbs intermingled, pockmarked face, framed by side curls to his collar, unbathed, a walking stench, Adams wrote, "A Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow...a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish."
What is so striking is this same revulsion to "the Jew" described by Adams appears, nearly word for word in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," written 18 years later. Same sentiment, same effect, different continent.
Then there was Prescott Hall. Another rich guy.
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| Prescott Hall |
Hall said that immigration was a racial issue at its core, and that immigrants were "toiler, beggar, thief and scum." He wrote to the Boston Herald in 1894, "Shall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood?" He enlisted esteemed folks into his Immigration Restriction League, like Francis Walker who wrote of "the vast masses of filth [who come from] every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe." An antecedent to "shithole countries." Like Mr. Trump, who wonders why more Norwegians don't want to immigrate to America, the IRL argued for a large entry fee which would keep out the scum but not prevent "thrifty Swedes, Norwegians, Germans." Keep out those who live like swine, in "systematic beggary at the doors of the rich...picking over the garbage barrels in our alleys...beaten men from beaten races."
This idea about immigration from the Harvard set was really just an extension of how things operated in their own cloistered world--you don't want anyone allowed in your world who does not have enough money and culture to buy in.
Then there was Madison Grant, who was, in his time semi famous.
Madison Grant wrote the basic textbook of this Harvard/Brahmin attitude for race mixing which formed the fundamental resistance immigration, "The Passing of the Great Race." Grant called Eastern Europeans "half-Asiatic mongrels" and he said "the Catholic Church under Jewish leadership," was directing the end to the great WASP civilization.
Then there was H. Fairfield Osborn.
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| Osborne |
Osborne, who headed the American Museum of Natural Hhistory, which gave a scientific patina to the idea of survival of the fittest and evolution from subhumans (Eastern and Southern Europeans) to the superior Nordic and Anglo Saxon human specimens. He is, in a way, the perfect example of someone who is widely remembered for the good things associated with his works--the Museum of Natural History in New York has delighted and informed generations of wondering children and adults, but the seamy underside, the role it played in "scientifically" arguing for a hierarchy of racial worthiness is not talked about today.
Then there was Albert Johnson, of the House Immigration Committee. He decried the "approaching extinction of the Mayflower Descendants" and crafted legislation in the House Committee on Immigration to stop all immigration for two years, to meet the "Emergency!" He did bend to the Brahmin set, by allowing them their house servants, who were allowed to immigrate to work in the vast homes of the rich, as an exception to immigration barriers. And he ran into problems excluding all non white immigrants over the definition of who is White. In 1922 Supreme Court case settled the matter, by saying that for non native born people, citizenship was open only to Whites or to African Americans born here (acknowledging the 14th amendment). Thus the Indian plaintiff, who was neither Black nor White, was excluded. America was for the Whites, and, grudgingly, for the Black Americans brought in as slaves and grandfathered in.
Then there was Eugen Fischer.
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| Fischer: going where his creed led him |
Perhaps my favorite among the non famous mopes is Eugen Fischer who said, "What Darwin was not able to do, genetics has achieved. It has destroyed the equality of Man." He was much loved by the Nazis.
So through launching a think tank, The Cold Spring Harbor enterprise, the publication of a widely read book, "The Passing of a Great Race," and by conversations over dinner and in clubs and at camp outs and all those means by which this group of Gilded Age men communicated, these men and their disciplines were able to gain access to men with power, men who were positions to place ideas into action.
It is the famous men who came under the spell of these obscurities who pushed their ideas into the public space and eventually, public policy.
Most of these folks are remembered today for the positive things they did, but they each went to the dark side and that side has been neglected, or some would say concealed from the history books.
Maxwell Perkins.
Perkins is remembered as the brilliant editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and literary prizes for editing are named after him, but he was at the same time publishing "The Passing of the Great Race" and other tracts vilifying all that is not WASP, and extolling the virtues of what Hitler called the "Aryans." He was in that polite, deeply antisemitic, racist caste. He presented the attractive, clean face to the world which obscured the frothing, snarling and hideous thoughts behind it.
Margaret Sanger.
Sanger is remembered and celebrated as an early feminist, who fought for contraception and abortion as a right women ought to enjoy, but she was happy to sell abortion as a means of controlling the reproduction of Blacks, mentally impaired and other impure elements in America. She was not coy about selling abortion as a way to control the population of Blacks and the underclass.
And, of course, Henry Ford.
Ford, wrote "The International Jew" and was obsessed with Jews as forming a world wide conspiracy, and was informed by the previously mentioned mob. His greatest fan was Hitler, who showered awards upon him, had his framed portrait on his wall and Hitler noted, with great satisfaction, the denial of entry of the ship St. Louis loaded with Jews fleeing the Gestapo and their subsequent return to the concentration camps. Hitler said, "Well, the United States won't have them. Why should we? We'll dispose of them as we see fit."
Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt was well embedded with the entire mob. He called unfettered immigration to America, "Racial suicide." He invited a black man to have dinner at the White House, which almost cost him the whole former Confederacy in the next election, but he was of that rich class of folks who did not see themselves as racist, antisemitic or anything other than simply the elect.
And then there was Adolph Hitler, who was the ultimate expression of the thinking these men promulgated.
So, the "Crisis on the Border," the interminable clips on FOXNEWS of dark skinned South Americans headed up the Panama isthmus, and Central American gang members, and Mexican rapists headed toward Texas and the talk of American blood being poisoned, and of vermin streaming across the border is nothing new.
It makes all those suckered White guys in the sports bars, who never wanted to get into Harvard, feel like they are members of an elite, the White American elite. And they can sing along with Lee Greenwood,
And I'm proud to be an AmericanWhere at least I know I'm freeAnd I won't forget the men who diedWho gave that right to meAnd I'd gladly stand up next to youAnd defend Her still today'Cause there ain't no doubtI love this landGod Bless the U.S.A.
And listening to them, Mr. Trump will recall John McCain, the sucker who got captured, and he'll know what Trump chumps do not, that he is in the long line of rich guys who have convinced the little guy he loves them.
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