We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Plenty of our founding fathers were plenty afraid of the lower classes. Gouverneur Morris (a less-lauded founding father) wrote that if they gave votes to people without property "they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them." John Adams was worried that there would be civil unrest caused by people getting the poors all worked up about their alleged new rights; the rich, he argued, are people too, who should not suffer violent social upheaval. Adams wrote that the poor were "destined for labour" while "the rich, by advantage of education, independence and leisure are qualified for superior stations." He did not write suggestions for making those advantages available to all.
In this Adams was in tune with the southern states, where colonists had come to establish a new sort of aristocracy, with the same social levels found back in Europe.
By the mid-19th century, of course, these ideas about who was or was not entitled to treatment as a human being (let alone an equal one) were well under way. We remember Stephen Douglasa as that guy Abraham Lincoln debated, but oh boy-- he had some thoughts. Phillips-Fein points out that, like many, Douglass was okay with a variety of laws because he did not believe different races were equal. It's a point worth remembering today-- the idea of the Rule of Law, that the same rules should apply to everyone, only makes sense if you believe that all people are equal, that nobody is any better than anyone else.
Phillips-Fein spends some time with William Graham Sumner, a popular Yale professor who pushed hard for the intellectual arguments for inequality. His ideas were influential then and recognizable today.
Central to his principles was an absolute rejection of empathy, sympathy, and social obligation. For Sumner, the central fact of life was competition, and the winners deserved and in fact needed to have control over the economic resources of society.
The social Darwinists rejected any and all attempts to equalize society, labeling such efforts as "evil socialism" and an attempt to buy the votes of the undeserving. Wrote Sumner in 1883
[A] drunkard in the gutter is where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.
The fact that someone had great wealth was proof they deserved it. Folks like Sumner thought hierarchy was an essential part of liberty, just as modern anti-democrats argue that people are most free when they are allowed to remain in their proper place (see also: every argument saying women lost liberty when they entered the workplace instead of staying home).
Not all of these folks rejected any social obligation. Phillips-Fein offers Andrew Carnegie as an example of someone who believed that the different classes had an obligation to each other-- but they still needed to stay in their proper place. Not a way of thinking that has disappeared; think Betsy DeVos and her belief that students should get the education that is a good fit for them, i.e. best suited for their class in life.
And religious folks were right there with these ideas. Phillips-Fein cites a sermon from Baptist preacher Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, in which he points out that we should sympathize with "God's poor" but still remember that "there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else."
The dawn of the 20th century saw the rise of what Phillips-Fein calls utilitarian racists. There was a tremendous fear of the country being "polluted" and "corrupted" by many immigrants of the wrong sort. "They were not only committed to segregation," she writes, "but obsessed with law and order and afraid of immigration, especially of Eastern European Jews and Italians." Journalist Theodore Lothrod Stoddard (whose mother had pulled him out of public school to keep him away from mill workers' children) wrote about the threat of the "Under-Men."
He and others railed against the romantic fantasy of equality and egalitarianism, a fiction being used by evil conspirators who wanted to use it to seize power. Popular eugenicist Madison Grant wrote "The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Stoddard, in his hugely popular 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization, explained that the reason race mattered was because it assigned people their proper place in the economic hierarchy. Democracy, he would later point out, was never intended for a nation "breeding freely" with the wrong sorts of people. In another piece of writing, he was still more blunt.
Our Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal; this is not true. It says this is self-evident; this is absurd.
None of these racist anti-democrats, she points out, were fringe thinkers. Stoddard was a best-selling author. Others were what we would now call "thought leaders." It may be that only the rise of Hitler and German Nazism tarnished their ideas enough to shut them up, for a while.
In the post-war country, Phillips-Fein turns to corporate anti-democrats like the influential Frederick Winslow Taylor, the man who brought "efficiency" to the industrial world. Taylor's whole approach rested on inequality, on the idea that some people were to be the brains of a company, while others needed to take their place as meat widgets on the factory floor, supervised and micro-managed and surveilled so that the machinery of the factory could run smoothly. They were Lessers in the same way that Amazon warehouse workers are Lessers today, their humanity ignored so that they can give their sweat and blood to the company (cheaply).
Thus setting the stage for her chapter "Market and Meritocracy," in which we find that maybe we can find some Betters in unexpected places. Let's give students a Scholastic Aptitude Test so we can further sort the deserving from the undeserving. Once again, some folks decide the purpose of education is to sort the deserving meritorious from the undeserving chaff so we can get the deserving up into the higher classes where they belong. Wrote John Gardner, who headed up the Carnegie Corporation (Andrew's philanthropic outfit) and would later be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Johnson, "Every educational system is, among other things, a device for sorting people out."
And of course here comes our old friend Milton Friedman, whose assertion is that the free market is an excellent mechanism for sorting the deserving winners from those who deserve to be on the bottom. I've discussed these ideas at length elsewhere.
Bringing us up to the technocrats, and we are all living through their ideas about equality. As Phillips-Fein explains it. "Society would--they argue--be less chaotic, more orderly, more just, were it governed by an all-powerful CEO, a businessman-king, in a manner similar to the revolutionary start-ups of Silicon Valley."
It's a model reminiscent of the reformster wave of twenty-ish years ago, and it also fits MAGA and their devotion to Emperor Dear Leader.
There's a lot to absorb from Phillips-Fein's book, which is both comforting and alarming-- we are not living through something brand new, but by the same token, there's no future in which it is eradicated forever. We have been fighting for the most basic premise of our country for 250 years, and it has never gone away. It is one of the central ironies for a country chock full of ironies-- a major portion of our citizenry and leaders simply reject one of the premises on which the country was founded.
Given this 250-year-old debate, it is no wonder that settling on and pursuing a clear mission for schools remains outside of our grasp. Are all of our students deserving of the same worth and regard, or are they best served by a system that fits them for a particular role that suits their future status. Do we need to provide the best possible education for every child, or do we need to provide the education that best sorts them out and prepares them for their proper place in life? Schools live down hill from the culture, and the culture can't decide what it believes, and all that contention flows right into schools. I know what I believe about the equal value of all humans, but this book is a reminder of the many ways my countrymen have--and continue to-- disagree with me.
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