142. Industrial Efficiency: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Industrial Efficiency 

After the Civil War, the guaranteed customer was not a thing prudent businessmen were 
willing to surrender. Could there be some different way to bring about uniformity again 
without another conflict? Vast fortunes awaited those who would hasten such a jubilee. 
Consolidation. Specialization. These were the magical principles President Harper was to 
preach forty years later at the University of Chicago. Whatever sustained national unity 
was good, including war, whatever retarded it was bad. School was an answer, but it 
seemed hopelessly far away in 1865. 

Things were moving slowly on these appointed tracks when a gigantic mass of Latin, and 
then Slavic, immigrants was summoned to the United States to labor, in the 1870s and 
afterwards. It came colorfully dressed, swilling wine, hugging and kissing children, eyes 
full of hope. Latin immigration would seem to represent a major setback for the 
realization of any systematic Utopia and its schools. But a president had been shot dead in 
1865. Soon another was shot dead by a presumed (though not actual) immigrant barely 
fifteen years later. Rioting followed, bloody strikes, national dissension. It was a time 
tailor-made for schoolmen, an opportunity to manage history. 

The Americanization movement, which guaranteed forced schooling to its first mass 
clientele, was managed from several bases; three important ones were social settlement 
houses, newly minted patriotic hereditary societies, and elite private schools (which 
sprang up in profusion after 1880). Madison Grant was a charter member of one of the 
patriotic groups, "The Society of Colonial Wars." All compartments of the 
Americanization machine cooperated to rack the immigrant family to its breaking point. 
But some, like settlement houses, were relatively subtle in their effects. Here, the home 
culture was inadvertently denigrated through automatic daily comparison with the 
settlement culture, a genteel world constructed by society ladies dedicated to serving the 
poor. 

Hereditary societies worked a different way: Through educational channels, lectures, 
rallies, literature they broadcast a code of attitudes directed at the top of society. Mainline 
Protestant churches were next to climb on the Americanization bandwagon, and the 
"home-missions" program became a principal gathering station for adoptable foreign 
children. By 1907 the YMCA was heavily into this work, but the still embryonic 
undertaking of leveling the masses lacked leadership and direction. 

Such would eventually be supplied by Frances Kellor, a muckraker and a tremendous 
force for conformity in government schooling. Kellor, the official presiding genius of the 
American-ization movement, came out of an unlikely quarter, yet in retrospect an entirely 
natural one. She was the daughter of a washerwoman, informally adopted out of poverty 



by two wealthy local spinsters, who eventually sent her to Cornell where she took a law 
degree through their generosity. After a turn toward sociology at the University of 
Chicago, Kellor mastered Harper's twin lessons of specialization and consolidation and 
set out boldly to reform America's immigrant families. 

Her first muckraking book, Out of Work, was published in 1904. For the next two years 
she drafted remedial legislation and earned her spurs lobbying. By 1906, she had Teddy 
Roosevelt's personal ear. Six years later, she was head of the Progressive Party's 
publicity department and research arm. Kellor, under William Rainey Harper's 
inspiration, became an advocate of industrial efficiency. She despised waste and disorder, 
urging that "opportunity" be rationalized and put under control — the first hint of School- 
to-Work legislation to follow in the waning decades of the century. Work and licenses 
should be used as incentives to build national unity. Discipline was the ticket, and for 
discipline, carrots were required as well as sticks. 

Charles Evans Hughes, then governor, made Kellor the first woman ever to head a state 
agency, appointing her director of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in New 
York. By 1909, supported by prominent allies, she organized a New York branch of the 
North American Civic League, a Boston-based, business-rostered outfit intended to 
protect the national status quo from various foreign menaces. Under her direction, the 
New York branch developed its own program. It isn't clear how much of the Boston 
agenda they carried on — it had mainly involved sending agents into immigrant 
communities to act as industrial spies and to lead anti-strike movements — but in any case, 
by 1914 Kellor' s group was writing its own menu. 

It opened by demanding centralized federal action: Americanization was failing "without 
a national goal." Her new "Committee for Immigrants in America" thereafter proclaimed 
itself the central clearinghouse to unify all public and private agencies in a national 
spearhead to "make all these people one nation." When government failed to come up 
with money for a bureau, Miss Kellor's own backers — who included Mrs. Averill 
Harriman and Felix Warburg, the Rothschild banker — did just that, and this private entity 
was duly incorporated into the government of the United States! "The Division of 
Immigrant Education," while officially federal, was in fact the subsidized creation of 
Frances Kellor's private lobby. Immigrant education meant public school education, for it 
was to compulsion schooling the children of immigration were consigned, and immigrant 
children, in a reversal of traditional roles, became the teachers of their immigrant parents, 
thus ruining their families by trivializing them. 

When WWI began, Americanization took over as the great national popular crusade. A 
drive for national conformity pushed itself dramatically to the forefront of the public 
agenda. Kellor and her colleagues swiftly enlisted cooperation from mayors, school 
authorities, churches, and civic groups; prepared data for speakers; distributed suggested 
agenda and programs, buttons, and posters; and lectured in schools. When Fourth of July 
1915 arrived, 107 cities celebrated it as "Americanization Day," and the country 
resounded with the committee's slogan "Many Peoples, but One Nation." 



Now Kellor's organization transmuted itself into "The National Americanization 
Committee," shifting its emphasis from education to the breaking of immigrant ties to the 
Old World. Its former slogan, "Many Peoples, But One Nation," was replaced with a 
blunt "America First." In this transformation, children became the sharpest weapon 
directed at their parents' home culture. Kellor called Americanization "the civilian side of 
national defense." She appeared before a group of industrialists and bankers calling itself 
the National Security League to warn of coming peril from subversion on the part of 
immigrants. One of the most distressing anomalies confronting Kellor and the NSL was 
an almost total lack of publicizable sabotage incidents on the domestic front in WWI, 
which made it difficult to maintain the desired national mood of fear and anger. 

There is some evidence American social engineering was being studied abroad. Zamiatin's We, the horrifying scientific dystopia of a world 
government bearing the name "The United State," was published in Russia a few years later as if in anticipation of an American future for 
everyone. 

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