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Unpopular Government

Maine built a stronger case in each successive book, Early History of Institutions (1875) and Early Law and Custom (1883). His magnificent tour de force, Popular Government (1885), smashed the very basis for popular democracy. After Maine, only a fool could believe non-Anglo-Saxon groups should participate as equals in important decision-making. At the same time, Maine’s forceful dismissal of the fundamental equality of ordinary or different peoples was confirmed by the academic science of evolution and by commercial and manufacturing interests eager to collapse smaller enterprises into large ones. Maine’s regal pronouncements were supported by mainstream urban Protestant churches and by established middle classes. Democratic America had been given its death sentence.

Sir Henry’s work became a favorite text for sermons, lectures, Chautauqua magazine journalism and for the conversation of the best people. His effect is reflected symbolically in a resolution from the Scranton Board of Trade of all places, which characterized immigrants as:

The most ignorant and vicious of European populations, including necessarily a vast number of the criminal class; people who come here not to become good citizens, but to prey upon our people and our industries; a class utterly without character and incapable of understanding or appreciating our institutions, and therefore a menace to our commonwealth.

Popular Government was deliberately unpopular in tone. There was no connection between democracy and progress; the reverse was true. Maine’s account of racial history was accepted widely by the prosperous. It admirably complemented the torrent of scientifically mathematicized racism pouring out of M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and virtually every bastion of high academia right through the WWI period and even beyond. Scientific racism determined the shape of government schooling in large measure, and still does.

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