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Your Family Tree
In 1896, Latin and Slavic immigration exceeded in body count for the first time the numbers
arriving from the ancient lands of the Anglo-Saxons. In certain circles that was deemed a
catastrophe second only to the Deluge. This moment had been anticipated for years, of course,
and protections for good blood, or "the gene pool" as some preferred to call it, were popping like
corn in the form of exclusionary associations you’ve seen and others like them. This was
defensive. But other implements of war were being fashioned, weapons of offensive capability,
social engines like modern factory schools, standing armies, social work empires designed to
remake incoming aliens into shapes more agreeable to the spirit of the "Great Race," a term I’ll
explain in a moment. This machinery was grinding out "Americanized" Americans by 1913, just
sixty-two years after the Know-Nothing Party of Massachusetts invented the term.
New hereditary societies took a leading hand in Americanization. So did important monied
interests. Chicago financial power got the Children’s Court idea rolling at the beginning of the
twentieth century, just as Boston railroad, mining, and real estate interests had initiated the
compulsion school idea in the nineteenth. The Children’s Court institution was nationalized
rapidly, a most effective intimidation to use against uncooperative immigrants. Such courts soon
displayed a valuable second side, supplying children to the childless of the politically
better-connected sort with few questions asked. The similarity of this transfer function to the
historic "Baby Trains" of Charles Loring Brace’s "Children’s Aid Society" fifty years earlier
wasn’t lost on the new breed of social engineer graduating from the right colleges in 1900.
These new activist graduates, trained in the Chicago school of sociology and its anthropological
variants by Ross, Cooley, Boas, and other seminal figures, had little sentimentality about
individual destinies or family sovereignty either. All thought in terms of the collective
improvement of society by long-range evolution. In the short run all were environmental
determinists who believed protoplasm was wonderfully malleable, if not entirely empty.
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.
As late as 1929, even with Mein Kampf in bookstalls telling the story of Aryans past and present,
David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, published his own guide to good blood, Your Family
Tree. It provided in painstaking detail the descent of America’s new industrial aristocracy, from
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