143. High-Pressure Salesmanship: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
High-Pressure
Salesmanship
In 1916, the year of Madison Grant's
Passing of the Great Race, Kellor published
Straight America. In it she called for universal military service,
industrial mobilization, a continuing
military build-up, precisely engineered school curricula, and total Americanization, an urgent package to
revitalize nationalism. America was not yet at
war.
President Wilson was at that time reading
secret surveys which told him Americans had
no interest in becoming involved in the European conflict. Furthermore,
national sympathy was swinging away from
the English and actually favored German victory
against Britain. There was no time to waste; the war had to be joined at
once. John Higham called it "an
adventure in high pressure salesmanship."
Thousands of agencies were in some measure
engaged: schools, churches, fraternal
orders, patriotic societies, civic organizations, chambers of commerce,
philanthropies, railroads, and
industries, and — to a limited degree — trade unions. There was much duplication, overlapping, and pawing of the
air. Many harassed their local school
superintendents.
At the end of 1917, Minnesota's legislature
approved the world's first secret adoption
law, sealing original birth records forever so that worthy families who
received a child for adoption — almost
always children transferred from an immigrant family of Latin/Slav/Alpine peasant stripe to a family
of northern European origins — would not
have to fear the original parents demanding their child back. The
original Boston adoption law of 1848 had
been given horrendous loopholes. Now these were sealed sixty- nine years later.
Toward the end of the war, a striking event,
much feared since the Communist
revolutions of 1848, came to pass. The huge European state of Russia
fell to a socialist revolution. It was
as if Russian immigrants in our midst had driven a knife into our national heart and, by extension, that all
immigrants had conspired in the crime. Had all our civilizing efforts been wasted? Now
Americanization moved into a terrifying phase in response to this perceived threat from outside.
The nation was to be purified before a red
shadow arose here, too. Frances Kellor began to actively seek assistance
from business groups to build what she
called "the new interventionist republic of America." (emphasis added)
At
an unpublicized dinner meeting at Sherry's Restaurant near Wall Street in
November 1918, Frances Kellor addressed
the fifty largest employers of foreign labor, warning them that Americanization had been a failure —
that really dangerous times were ahead with
Bolshevik menace concealed in every workplace. Kellor proposed a
partnership of business and social work
to "break up the nationalistic, racial groups." The easiest way
to do that was to weaken close family
life. Miss Kellor, whose upbringing had itself been an ambiguous one, was the perfect person to lead
such a charge.
At
the Wall Street meeting, plans were laid for a semi-secret organization of Americanizers to be formed out of interested
volunteers from major industrial
corporations. An impressive amount of money was pledged at the initial
meeting, the story of which you can
follow in John Higham's classic account of our immigration years, Strangers in the Land. "The
Inter-Racial Council" presented the external aspect of an eclectic public-spirited enterprise — it
even recruited some conservative immigrant
representatives as members — but, in fact, it was controlled by Kellor's
backers.
The IRC acted both as intelligence
gathering office and propaganda agency. In its first year of existence, Kellor put together an
association of advertisers to strong-arm the
immigrant press into running anti-radical propaganda. Using this muscle,
immigrants could be instructed from far
away how to think and what to think about, while remaining unaware of the source of instruction because
immediate pressure came from a familiar
editor. Advertising revenue could be advanced, as well as withdrawn,
providing both carrot and stick, the
complete behavioral formula.
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.
A New Collectivism
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