217. Propaganda: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Propaganda
To get where we got, public imagination
had to be manufactured from command centers, but how was this managed? In 1914 Andrew Carnegie, spiritual
leader of the original band of
hard-nosed dreamers, gained influence over the Federal
Council of Churches
by extending heavy subsidies to
its operations. And in 1918 Carnegie endowed a meeting in London of the American Historical
Association where an agreement was made to rewrite American history in the interests of
social efficiency. Not all leaders were of a single mind, of course. History isn't that simple. Beatrice Webb,
for instance, declined to accept
financial aid from Carnegie on her visit, calling him "a
reptile" behind his back; the high-
born Mrs. Webb saw through Carnegie's pretensions, right into the
merchant-ledger of his tradesman
soul. But enough were of a single mind it made no practical difference.
On July 4, 1919, the
London Times carried a long account reporting favorably on the propaganda hydra growing in the United
States, without identifying the hand of Carnegie in its fashioning. According to the paper, men "trained
in the arts of creating public good
will and of swaying public opinion" were broadcasting an agenda
which aimed first at mobilizing
world public opinion and then controlling it. The end of all this effort was already determined, said the Times —
world government. As the newspaper set down the specifics in 1919, propaganda was the fuel to drive
societies away from their past:
Efficiently organized
propaganda should mobilize the Press, the Church, the stage, and the cinema. Press into active service
the whole educational systems of both countries. ..the homes, the universities, public and
high schools, and primary schools. ..histories. ..should be revised. New books should be added,
particularly to the primary schools.
The same issue of the
London Times carried a signed article by Owen Wister, famous author of the best-selling novel The
Virginian. Wister was then on the Carnegie payroll. He pulled no punches, informing the upscale British
readership, "A movement to correct
the schoolbooks of the United States has been started, and it will go
on."
In March 1925, the
Saturday Evening Post featured an article by a prominent Carnegie official who stated that to bring about
the world Carnegie envisioned, "American labor will have to be reduced to the status of European
labor." 7 Ten years later, on December 19, 1935, the New York American carried a long article about
what it referred to as "a
secret Carnegie Endowment conference" at the Westchester Country
Club in Harrison, New York.
Twenty-nine organizations attending each agreed to authorize a nationwide radio campaign managed and coordinated
from behind the scenes, a campaign to commit the United States to a policy of internationalism. The group
also agreed to present
"vigorous counter-action" against those who opposed this
country's entrance into the League
of Nations. Pearl Harbor was only six years away, an international showcase
for globalism without peer. 8
Soon after this
conference, almost every school in the United States was provided with full-size color maps of the world and
with League of Nations literature extolling the virtues of globalism. That's how it was done. That's how it
still is done. Universal schooling
is a permeable medium. There need not be conspiracy among its internal personnel to achieve astonishingly
uniform results; multiply this tactical victory thousands of times and you get where we
are. Today we call the continuation of this particular strand of leveling "multiculturalism" —
even though every particular culture it
touches is degraded and insulted by the shallow veneer of universalism
which hides the politics of the
thing.
If the article were
written today, the magnitude of reduction would be to an Asian or "global"
standard, I would imagine. Just
how wide a gulf there is between propaganda and reality where economic
globalism is the issue can
be gathered from a front-page article in the World Business section of
March 7, 2003 New York Tines detailing Australia's "12th consecutive year of economic expansion" in the
face of the dismal performance of other industrialized economies. Australia's
secret, according to the text of
"Australia keeps Bypassing Pitfalls of Global Economy," is that
Australia's economy is not export-dependent, "domestic consumers are
the main pillar of the
economy."
Freud's Nephew
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