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.
9.
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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