[From "The Intellectual Counterattack on Caste"]

I haven’t been completely inert over the past few months

I have resumed my research into late 19th century / early 20th century intellectual history. I traced the roots of our current cultural decline back to this period a few years ago

There is a tendency in our circles to blame everything on the Jews or to blame it all on the Yankees or to blame it all on liberalism. We should take a closer look though at the Northern WASP elite who triumphed in the War Between the States and who ruled the country until around the Great Depression. They were the ones who fumbled the ball and lost control of America in the days of Madison Grant

How? Why?

The following excerpt comes from the chapter “The Intellectual Counterattack on Caste” in E. Digby Baltzell’s book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America

“The rise of the New Social Science paralleled the development of the Social Gospel, Settlement House and political reform movements during the closing decades of the nineteenth century[…]
It is important to emphasize the fact that most of the prominent leaders of the New Social Science, like the leaders of the Social Gospel and Settlement House movements, came from within the old stock and Protestant establishment

I’m sure many of our readers are familiar with Franz Boas and the contribution that he made in anthropology in the shift away from hereditarianism and toward cultural relativism. Boas was hardly alone in sowing the seeds that undermined hereditarianism and Victorian morals though

Note: Baltzell was a sociologist, historian and a cheerleader for the decline of his own social class. If you read his book, you will get a lot of insight into how WASPs lost control of America