The Murder of Little Mary Phagan

Phagan-Kean, Mary

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by Ann Hendon

WITH OVER 500 pages, more than twice the length of the first (1987) edition, the newly-revised and expanded second edition of The Murder of Little Mary Phagan is now available for purchase.

The author, Mary Phagan-Kean, states: “This book is the great work of my lifetime, a compelling personal journey, a tale of the shocking sex murder and abuse of my great-aunt, 13-year-old Mary Phagan — and it’s the story that the ADL and other shadowy forces don’t want you to read.”

This is the book that finally and definitively brings the truth about the murder of Mary Phagan by her killer, sweatshop boss and B’nai B’rith official Leo Frank, to light. It’s available now! Click the link or scan the QR code to get your copy at a discount price today.

TODAY let us remember together the death of an innocent girl, little Mary Phagan, who met her death more than a century ago this week. Her rapist and her convicted murderer was her sweatshop boss, Leo Frank, president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith, a fraternal order then central to the Jewish establishment. Ever since the day of his arrest, that same Jewish establishment — working first at a local, then at a national, and then an international, level, worked to get her killer off the hook. There are parallels between sex-exploiter Leo Frank and those who sexually exploit young girls today — and use their ill-gotten billions to escape justice when caught.

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This week marks the 112th anniversary of the sex-murder of a 13-year-old Southern white girl, Mary Phagan, by Jewish B’nai B’rith official Leo Max Frank, on 26 April, 1913. To honor Mary Phagan’s life, and to ensure that the real identity of her killer is never forgotten, despite the massively well-funded campaign to paint him as a “victim of anti-Semitism,” we present a new edition of N. Joseph Potts’ article, originally published in 2021, entitled “Jewish Men Dying in Jail for Ravaging Young Girls: Epstein and Frank.”

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Jewish Men Dying in Jail for Ravaging Young Girls:
Epstein and Frank

THE DEATH in jail of Jeffrey Epstein several years ago recalls a very famous death of another jailed Jewish man charged (and convicted and sentenced) of crimes against a 13-year-old girl in 1913. That case, which involved only one of many rumored similar victims, involved the lethal abuse of a factory worker named Mary Phagan by the manager of the factory, 29-year-old pillar of the Atlanta Jewish community Leo Frank, who, having grown up in Brooklyn, might have seemed rather a “damn Yankee” to at least some of his neighbors. Frank’s victim, unlike any of Epstein’s known victims, was murdered in addition to being raped, and, while Frank was tried and convicted and sentenced to death, his guilt continues to be vigorously contested more than a century later by the successors to the massive and distinctly Jewish campaign to win his exoneration during and after his trial. Indeed, this campaign – to exonerate a Jewish sex killer – has never stopped, even for a moment, for 112 years. Uncounted millions of dollars have been, and are still, being spent to convince you that Leo Frank didn’t do what he did.

The two cases, while they have many and important differences, both involve Jewish men accused of raping underage White girls as well as large and enduring campaigns of national stature to secure their acquittal. In Frank’s 1913 case, America’s (then-smaller, but already powerful) Jewish power structure (which even then included large advertising agencies, public relations firms, and newspapers large and small including the New York Times) mobilized to support his exoneration, stimulated by the notion, perhaps manufactured among the larger and more-influential Jews of the northern United States, that Frank was being discriminated against because he was a Jew in the South, whose Jewish population was then less influential than that of their co-religionists to the north (Frank was, in any case, a “child” of the North, having grown up in Brooklyn). The establishment of the Anti-Defamation League in September 1913 is widely credited to Jewish outrage at Frank’s arrest and conviction for the sex killing of Mary Phagan earlier that year.

Epstein’s case entailed a much-reduced “conviction” and a much-diluted “prison sentence” along with an outrageous “non-prosecution agreement” in what now might be called its first phase, one that might reflect his vastly greater influence (read: wealth) over the juridical apparatus, and no doubt because no one had been found murdered. Frank’s case had only one phase (including appeals that went all the way to the US Supreme Court), but of course did involve a murder, the evidence for which satisfied all the jurors on the case, but has never satisfied the jury of “public opinion” as mediated by the largely Jewish-run mass media.

Jewish moguls of Frank’s day such as Albert Lasker saw to it, through vigorous fund-raising campaigns conducted throughout Jewish communities in the North, that his defense was indeed the best that money could buy. Epstein had no need for any such circling of the financial wagons; he was a billionaire in his own right – Jewish legal luminaries such as Alan Dershowitz (who has also been named in lawsuits as one of the men allegedly receiving sexual “services” from Epstein’s stable of teenage sex slaves) figured large in the phalanx ultimately mustered to defend him in the Florida case that led to the “non-prosecution” deal and his sentence to 13 months’ part-time “confinement” in a minimum-security prison (which he was allowed to leave for many hours every day) near his palatial estate in Palm Beach.

Among those ensnared in Epstein’s fiendishly woven net was the United States Attorney for Southern Florida, Alexander Acosta, who arranged for Epstein’s sweetheart deal and convenient conviction on a lesser Florida state charge. Later appointed as Secretary of Labor by President Donald Trump, he subsequently resigned under fire after Epstein was again arrested in July 2019 by the United States Attorney for Southern New York, the locus of yet more of the crimes with which Epstein was charged – all of them involving underage teenage girls.

Epstein’s guilt is not contested, neither as to the ages of his victims, nor even really as to their numbers (apparently something north of dozens). Neither Epstein nor any of his co-conspirators is implicated in any murder, though, unlike Leo Frank.

Frank’s guilt, at least of the murder of Mary Phagan, continues to be very much contested by, among others, the ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz — yes, the very same Harvard Law School professor who has for many years now led the star-studded legal team defending Jeffrey Epstein, the 21st century’s answer to Leo Frank. Naturally, the metaphorical child of the Frank case, the Anti-Defamation League, continues to beat its very loud drum to advance the cause of Leo Frank’s innocence even to the point, in 1986, of securing a kind of posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia, though rather a weak one – basically an apology for having failed to protect its notorious inmate from lynching in 1915 — as it explicitly does not pardon him for the crime of murder.

Frank’s lynching after spending more than two years in prison was the first — and last — lynching of a Jew recorded in the annals of American history. American Jewry had, over the those two years, made the Frank case a cause célèbre, not least in the media, which, even at that early time, were controlled by Jewish interests not only through ownership, such as Adolph Ochs’s New York Times, but through the massive and pervasive influence of large-scale advertisers such as merchandiser Alfred Lasker, whose tentacles reached into the hearts of virtually every newspaper large and small in the United States. Lasker, having taken the cause very much to heart, became the unofficial leader of the campaign in Frank’s behalf, a campaign that may be said to have continued vigorously today — well into its second century.

The Epstein case, unlike the Frank case, did not become a “Jewish” issue despite the Jewishness of Epstein, Epstein’s “patron” Les Wexner, Dershowitz, and many of Epstein’s other defenders. Indeed, Epstein did not, as Frank did with some distinction, take part in Jewish religious or social affairs beyond hobnobbing with ex-prime ministers of Israel and the like. But the ethnic commonality among Epstein and other Jewish men such as Harvey Weinstein and Leon Wieseltier was the subject of a recent article by maverick Jew Gilad Atzmon, volubly countering this non-ethnic quality of l’affaire Epstein. However, the non-ethnicity of the matter has seemingly left the ADL out of this reprise of the case that brought it into existence.

Leo Frank was not as rich as Jeffrey Epstein was (although his wife did come from a wealthy family), so he could not, as Epstein easily did, fund his own high-powered team of defense lawyers. But Frank did indeed enjoy a powerful defense team easily comparable to the one marshaled around Epstein. It was funded by Alfred Lasker and a nationwide fundraising campaign conducted largely through Jewish auspices, such as synagogues and chapters of the B’nai B’rith — of whose Atlanta chapter Frank was president. Indeed, Frank’s team’s successors have managed within the past year to establish Georgia’s first “Conviction Integrity Unit,” which has taken on the task of “revising” certain verdicts, such as that of convicted murderer Wayne Williams, as a kind of cover to prevent the truth – that its real purpose is to get Frank exonerated – from coming out. Unlike also-pardoned ADL benefactor Marc Rich, Leo Frank’s supporters haven’t made large donations to foundations of American presidents, but smaller donations to the foundations and political campaign funds of Georgia and Fulton County politicians may produce the desired effects quite handily. No relatives of Leo Frank are to be found among the public advocates of this campaign, nor any descendant of anyone who knew him. Relatives of Mary Phagan, however, oppose the initiative – and were not consulted in any way about it.

It is widely assumed that Epstein was murdered in jail á la Lee Harvey Oswald, to keep him from dishing the dirt on many powerful people. Frank’s death at the hands of lynchers who extracted him from jail in August 1915 is claimed to have been motivated by “anti-Semitism,” as continually asserted this past century or so by the ADL, other Frank supporters, and their latter-day successors such as Alan Dershowitz.

But that idea also is contested by many researchers, including those as diverse as National Vanguard and the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, publisher and author of record of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews Vol. 3, the Leo Frank Case. This work (long since banned by amazon.com) speculates (pp. 309-330) that the lynch mob might have been encouraged, or covertly orchestrated, by the same (Jewish) parties who had supported and defended Frank’s innocence in the two years preceding the lynching. Why would these same partisans now wish their beneficiary dead? Because he might confess, of course. He was alive, in keeping with their wishes, but still incarcerated, very much against their wishes. And while in prison he might be subject, á la Rudolf Höss of Holocaust fame, to coercion, or even inducements, to confess to the crimes of which he was accused, and perhaps also there were numerous Jewish connections to the illicit sex scene and the trafficking of young girls then called “White slavery” – connections that they much preferred to remain hidden, but that Frank might decide to talk about. This would certainly never do. In fact, Frank nearly died in his cell, as Epstein did in his, after a fellow inmate cut his jugular vein with a butcher knife about one month after his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Perhaps the would-be murderer was committing a din rodef murder – in the Talmud, the killing of someone who is about to inform on a Jew or group of Jews is required – on behalf of Jewish paymasters, not unlike those said to have commissioned Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

Two months elapsed between Governor Slaton’s commutation of Frank’s sentence and the lynchers’ (they called themselves the Vigilance Committee, and were largely composed of prominent businessmen and political and judicial leaders from the Marietta area) carefully arranged transits by car (in 1913! — these were no poor people) of around 150 miles over unpaved roads from Marietta to Milledgeville, where they picked up their hapless victim, and then back again to Marietta, chosen because it was the home town of poor Mary Phagan. None of the participants in the lynching (most well-known and some highly placed) was even charged with the murder of Frank, much less prosecuted.

One wonders if, a hundred or so years from now, the ADL will secure the exoneration of Jeffrey Epstein.

Sure, they’ll claim, as soon as they think it’s safe — those young girls at Epstein’s camera-rigged place were all party-crashing gold-diggers. Epstein just got the rap because he was Jewish. That’s right — just because he was a Jew. A case of obvious anti-Semitism!

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So, this week, the 108th anniversary of Mary Phagan’s murder, let us remember her, honor her, and never forget the inveterate, malicious liars who are always and ever devoted to protecting Jewish killers and Jewish rapists – and even elevating them to the status of “victim of anti-Semitism” – and thereby enabling the Harvey Weinsteins, the Woody Allens, the Allen Ginsbergs, the Leo Franks, and the Jeffrey Epsteins of this world.

by Karl Hess Stegall

On March 11, 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean—the great-niece of young Mary Phagan, whose brutal murder in 1913 at the hands of Leo Frank shocked a nation and shaped its legal and social institutions—appeared on the Stew Peters television program to recount the legacy of a crime that has reverberated through history. Her full interview may be viewed by clicking the video link above.

The trial, conviction, and execution of Leo Frank—a sweatshop owner and official of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith—were not merely the resolution of a terrible crime but the catalyst for the founding of one of the most formidable organizations in modern America: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Established in the wake of Frank’s conviction, the ADL has long positioned itself as a guardian against injustice, yet its function has increasingly become one of suppression, punishing those who dare to expose Jewish abuses of power. With the support of its allies in media, academia, and government, the ADL has, for over a century, insisted upon a revisionist narrative: that Frank was an innocent victim of anti-Semitism. The weight of evidence, however, tells another story—one that cannot be dismissed, for it is inscribed in the thousand-page Brief of Evidence and in the unbroken affirmations of every court that examined the case, from the Grand Jury to the Georgia Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court of the United States—and every level of the justice system between them. Frank, despite his considerable wealth and the defense of the most renowned legal minds of his day, was found guilty in proceedings that withstood the most rigorous scrutiny.

In her interview, Mrs. Phagan-Kean speaks not only of legal documents and court decisions but of personal revelation. She recounts the moment she first discovered her relation to Mary Phagan and the shock of learning that powerful forces had spent more than a century distorting the truth about her great-aunt’s fate. Faced with a campaign that sought to turn a murderer into a martyr, she made the fateful decision to devote her life to setting the record straight.

Significantly, Mrs. Phagan-Kean is no bigot or “anti-Semite.” Indeed, after her father—who served as the leader of the color guard honoring a fallen Jewish airman—became close to the airman’s family, she grew up knowing them only as “grandma” and “grandpa” after the family unofficially adopted hers. That relationship remains unbroken. Her mission, therefore, is not one of blind enmity but of devotion to the truth.

That truth has been hidden and distorted by Frank’s allies, often by dishonest and desperate means. Frank’s defenders, unwilling to accept the weight of evidence against him, engaged in a series of efforts to obscure the facts, including:

• Framing innocent Black men. In their first attempt to divert suspicion, Frank’s defenders sought to implicate night watchman Newt Lee by planting a fake bloody shirt in his home. When that deception failed, they turned to janitor Jim Conley, planting a fake “bloody club” and pay stub in an effort to shift the blame—a campaign that continues into 2025. If Frank were innocent, why would his supporters need to resort to such elaborate crimes?
• Inventing a bite mark hoax. Long after the trial, Frank’s defenders concocted a claim that bite marks had been found on Mary Phagan’s body—marks that supposedly did not match Frank’s dental records. But this assertion collapsed under scrutiny, as the original autopsy made no mention of such wounds, and dental X-ray analysis was not introduced in Georgia courts until seven decades after Frank’s trial.
• Slandering Mary Phagan. In a grotesque reversal of victim and perpetrator, some of Frank’s supporters spread the shameful lie that the 13-year-old girl had enticed him—an act of slander that served only to highlight their desperation.
• Fabricating the myth of an anti-Semitic mob. Frank’s defenders alleged that a frenzied, hate-filled crowd besieged the courtroom, shouting, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” and similar threats. Yet contemporary photographs and newspaper reports contradict this claim, revealing a trial conducted with order and gravity, not with the chaos of racial animus.
• Tampering with historical records. Under the cover of darkness and without the knowledge of the Phagan family, Frank’s defenders clandestinely altered the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s gravesite, replacing the truth with the falsehood of his “innocence.”
• Secret meetings with government officials. Starting in the 1980s, and still happening even in 2025, private discussions continue between Frank’s advocates and officials in Georgia and Fulton County, from which the Phagan family and the public are deliberately excluded. The goal is clear: to obtain an official exoneration for a man whose guilt was established beyond all reasonable doubt.

And this is but a fraction of their elaborate effort to rewrite history.

Mrs. Phagan-Kean announces in this interview that a new and greatly expanded edition of her book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, will be released this year. This updated volume will offer even more evidence—evidence that exposes the deceit, manipulation, and calculated erasures that have defined the defense of Leo Frank for over a century.

History, as the Durants often reminded us, is a battlefield where truth and falsehood wage an unending war. To understand the present, one must understand the forces that have labored, decade after decade, to exonerate a man justly convicted of the rape and murder of a child. It is a struggle not merely for justice in the past but for clarity in the present, for the lessons of history remain the foundation upon which the future is built.

Be sure to share this interview. The forces that shape history are at work even now, and only through knowledge can one resist their distortions.

by John Taylor Gatto

I TAUGHT FOR thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools — with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers — as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness — curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right.

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi-volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong.

Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that “the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim …is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.”

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s.

Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.

That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace “manageable.”

Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a “revolution”engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.” Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.

Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses.

Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose — the actual purpose — of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits — and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit — with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments — clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era — marketing.

Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident.

Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley — who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard — had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned…. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill, “which appeared in the September 2003 issue. To read Gatto’s THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION go here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

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FOR YEARS the Cal State Long Beach community has seen repeated attacks on me. Powerful activist organizations – the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League – have come to campus to condemn me. Several departments at the university have issued public denunciations, and I have been harassed and condemned by individual professors on faculty e-mail lists. Beginning with the current semester, several students have disrupted my classes; they have campaigned to get me fired and have written inflammatory articles in the Daily 49er.

Why all this hostility? Fundamentally, I am attacked because I advocate ideas that fly in the face of the conventional wisdom as seen by the academic left that has come to dominate the university.

First and foremost, I am an evolutionary psychologist. On the basis of my understanding of the theory and research in this field, my view is that everyone has ethnic interests – including people of European descent. A great many other identifiable groups in multicultural America have a strong sense of ethnic identity and interest. Quite a few departments on this campus are devoted to strengthening the ethnic identity of non-whites and articulating their interests. But explicit expressions of white European-American identity and interests are condemned as indicating moral turpitude or even psychiatric impairment.

This is a completely unnatural state of affairs – the result of a prolonged assault on the legitimacy of these concepts by politically and ethnically motivated elites that have dominated public discourse on issues of race and ethnicity since before World War II and especially since the 1960s.

I reject labels such as “white supremacist” or “racist” that are routinely bestowed on assertions of white identity and interests as a means of muzzling their expression. Non-Western peoples throughout the world continue to seek political power, and they attempt to control their borders, establish their own cultures and defend their perceived interests. No one would claim that Korea, say, has a moral obligation to import millions of non-Koreans or to change their culture so that the traditional people and culture are pushed aside. Many countries, including Mexico, have excluded immigrants and dealt with them harshly. Israel not only has an identity as a Jewish state, it also rigorously enforces a biological conception of Jewishness as the basis of its immigration policy. Israel has erected an apartheid society on the West Bank and has discriminatory policies against its Palestinian minority within Israel.

Nevertheless, as Joel Kotkin points out in his recent book “The Next Hundred Million”, the U.S. stands poised to add 100 million non-whites by 2050, making the current white majority into a minority and implying a dramatic decline in their political and cultural influence.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, ethnostates are the norm throughout the world. Societies in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand that have been controlled by whites for hundreds of years are the only ones to accept the idea that the ethnic majority has a moral imperative to cede power and become a minority. I view this outcome as the result of competition over the construction of culture in which the legitimate interests of Whites have been compromised. My scholarly book, “The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements” (1998), and much of my subsequent writing, are an attempt to determine how this unnatural state of affairs came about.

The big picture is that the left championed the interests of the working and middle classes of pre-1965 America. Since that time, the left has been strongly identified with massive non-white immigration and multiculturalism – policies that have compromised the interests of the working and middle classes of traditional America, black and white alike.

My main concern is that this upheaval opposes the legitimate interests of the European-descended peoples of the U.S. It’s not about hatred. It’s about seeing legitimate conflicts of interest among different ethnic groups. I was a staunch leftist as a young person. But it’s obvious that the left now stands for policies that are radically opposed to the interests of people like me.

As part of this revolution against pre-1965 America, the left has erected a culture of political correctness in which expressions of ethnocentrism by Europeans are proscribed. Organizations such as the SPLC and the ADL seek to stifle free speech by condemning any hint of ethnocentrism by Europeans – and only Europeans.

Because their point of view is intellectually bankrupt and cannot be rationally defended, the left has repeatedly resorted to force to accomplish its goals. Many European countries and Canada have savage legal penalties that enforce intellectual conformity on these issues. In America the sanctions are more informal – but nevertheless similarly effective. The condemnations of my writing and my affiliations by academic departments, professors and students at Cal State Long Beach are a part of this campaign to shut down free speech on these issues and to make my life as difficult as possible.

America and other Western societies stand to lose much as a result of these transformations. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has shown that increasing ethnic diversity lowers the willingness to contribute to charity or to public goods such as, apropos the current national debate, public health care. Ethnic diversity also increases social isolation and lowers trust both within and between races; it also lowers political participation and lessens confidence in political leaders.

Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by ethnic conflict. The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. My vision of the future of Western societies is that they are well on the road to becoming cauldrons of competing ethnic groups, with chronic divisions over issues like affirmative action, redistribution of wealth and the establishment of public goods like health care – any issue that may be seen as benefiting one ethnic group more than another. In the long run, democratic forms of government and the rule of law are threatened.

An early sign of this dystopian future is that American politics have become increasingly racialized. The Republican Party routinely receives roughly 90 percent of its votes from whites, while overwhelming majorities of non-whites identify with the Democratic Party. There is a palpable rage building in America among the tea partiers and working and middle-class white Americans who want something like the America they grew up in. These people are being pushed out economically and politically. They are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-white private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.

Despite what some of my critics have claimed, I have never advocated violence as a solution to the rapidly diminishing prospects of non-elite white Americans. But we are clearly headed into very dangerous times.

Kevin MacDonald is a psychology professor at CSULB and a member of the American Third Position party.

Read the original editorial in the Daily 49er

LAST WEEK a colleague who has been facing repeated and unfair attacks in the media and the blogosphere (for making arguments that cut against the conventional wisdom) sent around an email asking a number of friends and associates (including me) for advice on how to deal with the attacks. Having been smeared in similar fashion myself, I circulated a list of the lessons I learned from my own experience with “grabbing the third rail.” A few of the recipients thought the list was helpful, so I decided to revise it and post it here. If any readers are contemplating tackling a controversial subject — and I hope some of you will — you’ll need to be ready should opponents decide not to address your arguments in a rational fashion, but to attack your character, misrepresent your position, and impugn your motives instead. If they take the low road, here are ten guidelines for dealing with it. (The advice itself is politically neutral: it applies regardless of the issue in question and no matter which side you’re on.)

1. Think Through Your “Media Strategy” before You Go Public. If you are an academic taking on a “third rail” issue for the first time, you are likely to face a level of public and media scrutiny that you have never experienced before. It is therefore a good idea to think through your basic approach to the media before the firestorm hits. Are you willing to go on TV or radio to defend your views? Are there media outlets that you hope to cultivate, as well as some you should avoid?

Are you open to public debate on the issue, and if so, with whom? Do you plan a “full-court” media blitz to advance your position (an article, a book, a lecture tour, a set of op-eds, etc.), or do you intend to confine yourself to purely academic outlets and let the pundits take it from there? There is no right answer to these questions, of course, and how you answer them depends in good part on your own proclivities and those of your opponents. But planning ahead will leave you better prepared when the phone starts ringing off the hook and there’s a reporter — or even someone like Bill O’Reilly or Jon Stewart — on the other end. Don’t be afraid to listen to professional advice here (such as the media office at your university or research organization), especially if it’s your first time in the shark tank. It’s also a good idea to let your superiors know what’s coming; deans, center directors, and college presidents don’t like surprises.

2. You Have Less Control Than You Think. Although it helps to have thought about your strategy beforehand, there will always be surprises and you will have to think on your feet and improvise wisely. Sometimes real-world events will vindicate your position and enhance your credibility (as the 2006 Lebanon War did for my co-author and myself), but at other times you may have to explain why events aren’t conforming to your position. A vicious attack may arrive from an unexpected source and leave you reeling, or you may get an unsolicited endorsement that validates your views. Bottom line: life is full of surprises, so be ready to roll with the punches and seize the opportunities.

3. Never Get Mad. Let your critics throw the mud, but you should always stick to the facts, especially when they are on your side. In my own case, many of the people who attacked me and my co-author proved to be unwitting allies, because they lost their cool in public or in print, made wild charges and ad hominem arguments, and generally acted in a transparently mean-spirited manner. It always works to your advantage when opponents act in an uncivil fashion, because it causes almost everyone else to swing your way

Of course, it can be infuriating when critics misrepresent your work, and nobody likes to have malicious falsehoods broadcast about them. But the fact that someone is making false charges against you does not mean that others are persuaded by the malicious rhetoric. Most people are quite adept at separating facts from lies, and that is especially true when the charges are over-the-top. In short, the more ludicrous the charges, the more critics undermine their own case. So stick to the high ground; the view is nicer up there.

4. Don’t Respond to Every Single Attack. A well-organized smear campaign will try to bury you in an avalanche flurry of bogus charges, many of which are simply not worth answering. It is easier for opponents to dream up false charges than it is for you to refute each one, and you will exhaust yourself rebutting every critical word directed at you. So focus mainly on answering the more intelligent criticisms while ignoring the more outrageous ones, which you should treat with the contempt they deserve. Finally, make sure every one of your answers is measured and filled with the relevant facts. Do not engage in ad hominem attacks of any sort, no matter how tempting it may be to hit back.

5. Explain to Your Audience What Is Going On. When refuting bogus charges, make it clear to readers or viewers why your opponents are attacking you in underhanded ways. When you are the object of a politically motivated smear campaign, others need to understand that your critics are not objective referees offering disinterested commentary. Be sure to raise the obvious question: why are your opponents using smear tactics like guilt-by-association and name-calling to shut down genuine debate or discredit your views? Why are they unwilling to engage in a calm and rational exchange of ideas? Let others know that it is probably because your critics are aware that you have valid points to make and that many people will find your views persuasive if they get a chance to judge them for themselves.

6. The More Compelling Your Arguments Are, The Nastier the Attacks Will Be. If critics can refute your evidence or your logic, then that’s what they will do and it will be very effective. However, if you have made a powerful case and there aren’t any obvious weaknesses in it, your adversaries are likely to misrepresent what you have said and throw lots of mud at you. What else are they going to do when the evidence is against them?

This kind of behavior contrasts sharply with what one is accustomed to in academia, where well-crafted arguments are usually treated with respect, even by those who disagree with them. In the academic world, the better your arguments are, the more likely it is that critics will deal with them fairly. But if you are in a very public spat about a controversial issue like gay marriage or abortion or gun control, a solid and well-documented argument will probably attract more scurrilous attacks than a flimsy argument that is easily refuted. So be prepared.

7. You Need Allies. Anyone engaged on a controversial issue needs allies on both the professional and personal fronts. When the smearing starts, it is of enormous value to have friends and associates publicly stand up and defend you and your work. At the same time, support from colleagues, friends, and family is critical to maintaining one’s morale. Facing a seemingly endless barrage of personal attacks as well as hostile and unfair criticisms of one’s work can be exhausting and dispiriting, which is why you need others to stand behind you when the going gets tough. That does not mean you just want mindless cheerleaders, of course; sometimes allies help us the most when they warn us we are heading off course.

One more thing: if you’re taking one a powerful set of opponents, don’t be surprised or disappointed when people tell you privately that that they agree with you and admire what you are doing, but never say so publicly. Be realistic; even basically good people are reluctant to take on powerful individuals or institutions, especially when they might pay a price for doing so.

8. Be Willing to Admit When You’re Wrong, But Don’t Adopt a Defensive Crouch. Nobody writing on a controversial and contested subject is infallible, and you’re bound to make a mistake or two along the way. There’s no harm in admitting to errors when they occur; indeed, harm is done when you make a mistake and then try to deny it. More generally, however, it makes good sense to make your case assertively and not shy away from engaging your critics. In short, the best defense is a smart offense, even when you are acknowledging errors or offering a correction. For illustrations of how my co-author and I tried to do this, see here: http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/setting_the_record_straight.pdf , and here http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a908660944&db=all , and here http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0047.pdf.

9. Challenging Orthodoxy Is a Form of “Asymmetric Conflict”: You Win By “Not Losing.” When someone challenges a taboo or takes on some well-entrenched conventional wisdom, his or her opponents invariably have the upper hand at first. They will seek to silence or discredit you as quickly as they can, so that your perspective, which they obviously won’t like, does not gain any traction with the public. But this means that as long as you remain part of the debate, you’re winning. Minds don’t change overnight, and it is difficult to know how well an intellectual campaign is going at any particular point in time. So get ready for an emotional roller coaster-some days you might think you’re winning big, while other days the deck will appear to be stacked against you. But the real question is: are you still in the game?

The good news is that if you have facts and logic on your side, your position is almost certain to improve over time. It is also worth noting that a protracted debate allows you to refine your own arguments and figure out better ways to refute your opponents’ claims. In brief, think of yourself as being engaged in a “long war,” and keep striving.

10. Don’t Forget to Feel Good about Yourself and the Enterprise in Which You Are Engaged.Waging a battle in which you are being unfairly attacked is hard work, and you will sometimes feels like Sisyphus rolling the proverbial stone endlessly uphill. But it can also be tremendously gratifying. You’ll wage the struggle more effectively if you find ways to keep your spirits up, and if you never lose sight of the worthiness of your cause. Keeping your sense of humor intact helps too; because some of the attacks you will face ar bound to be pretty comical. So while you’re out there slaying your chosen dragon, make sure you have some fun too.

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