Country of Lords

The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson's famous proclamation that "all men are created equal." But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality itself. Again and again, influential Americans have asserted a fundamental inequality among human beings, arguing that the social, economic, and racial hierarchies in which some groups of people rule over others are not only natural but good. In Country of Lords acclaimed historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces this argument for inequality through six vivid archetypes. She discusses the natural aristocrats, such as John Adams, who feared the tumult of too much democracy; the social Darwinists, led by Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who blamed the poor for their own miseries; those who preached a gospel of production, including Henry Ford, who wanted an industrial hierarchy in