94. The
German/American Reichsbank:The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archve.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.
14.
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.
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