94. The German/American Reichsbank: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The German/American Reichsbank 

Sixty years later, amid a well-coordinated attempt on the part of industrialists and 
financiers to transfer power over money and interest rates from elected representatives of 
the American people to a "Federal Reserve" of centralized private banking interests, 
George Reynolds, president of the American Bankers Association, rose before an 
audience on September 13, 1909, to declare himself flatly in favor of a central bank 
modeled after the German Reichsbank. As he spoke, the schools of the United States 
were being forcibly rebuilt on Prussian lines. 

On September 14, 1909, in Boston, the president of the United States, William Howard 
Taft, instructed the country that it should "take up seriously" the problem of establishing 
a centralized bank on the German model. As The Wall Street Journal put it, an important 
step in the education of Americans would soon be taken to translate the "realm of theory" 
into "practical politics," in pedagogy as well as finance. 

Dramatic, symbolic evidence of what was working deep in the bowels of the school 
institution surfaced in 1935. At the University of Chicago's experimental high school, the 
head of the Social Science department, Howard C. Hill, published an inspirational 
textbook, The Life and Work of the Citizen. It is decorated throughout with the fasces, 
symbol of the Fascist movement, an emblem binding government and corporation 
together as one entity. Mussolini had landed in America. 

The fasces are strange hybridized images, one might almost say Americanized. The 
bundle of sticks wrapped around a two-headed axe, the classic Italian Fascist image, has 
been decisively altered. Now the sticks are wrapped around a sword. They appear on the 
spine of this high school text, on the decorative page introducing Part One, again on a 
similar page for Part Two, and are repeated on Part Three and Part Four as well. There 
are also fierce, military eagles hovering above those pages. 



The strangest decoration of all faces the title page, a weird interlock of hands and wrists 
which, with only a few slight alterations of its structural members, would be a living 
swastika. 1 The legend announces it as representing the "united strength" of Law, Order, 
Science, and the Trades. Where the strength of America had been traditionally located in 
our First Amendment guarantee of argument, now the Prussian connection was shifting 
the locus of attention in school to cooperation, with both working and professional 
classes sandwiched between the watchful eye of Law and Order. Prussia had entrenched 
itself deep into the bowels of American institutional schooling. 



Interestingly enough, several versions of this book exist — although no indication that this is so appears on the copyright page. In one of these 
versions the familiar totalitarian symbols are much more pronounced than in the others. 



Chapter Eight 



A Coal-Fired Dream World