143. High-Pressure Salesmanship: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

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