Social Engineering
An Education Fit for Workers and Soldiers
Prussian Educational System and Pestalozzi
In 1788, Comte de Mirabeau declared that Prussia was an appropriate place for a potential revolution, led by the German Illuminists.[291] While a terrorist-type revolution erupted in Paris (1789), revolutionary social engineering ideas spawned in Prussia. German rulers and innovative civil servants made numerous changes. They introduced religious tolerance and improved the conditions of the poor. Despite these improvements, enlightened despots withheld political freedoms and refused to restrain their political powers. Representative government, to address the needs of the masses, was obviously absent. The noblemen owned Prussia’s great estates and the commoners were subordinates. Britain’s enlightened despots demanded absolute respect and obedience, bordering on reverence, from their subjects.[292]
In 1791, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) wrote On the Limits of State Action in defense of the Enlightenment. Friedrich Schiller, who had close Illuminati associations, influenced Humboldt and they maintained an ongoing correspondence.[293] Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, his brother, were educated at Göttingen, a haven for Illuminati recruitment. Wilhelm helped shape the new morality through the educational system of a new Europe after the French Revolution. Alexander, later the Grand Master of the Society of Natural Scientists, traveled throughout the world and guided natural science into new paths.
Wilhelm Humboldt endorsed Count Mirabeau’s state-managed education policies, all without parental interference. Mirabeau, a member of the Society of Thirty,[294] and instrumental in the Jewish emancipation, now supported the emancipation of children from their parents. In Discourse on National Education, he wrote, “Education will be good to the extent that it suffers no outside intervention; it will be all the more effective, the greater the latitude left to the diligence of the teachers and the emulation of their pupils.” Thus, Humboldt asked the State to “safeguard the rights of children against their parents” so that “parental authority does not exceed normal bounds.”[295]
The Prussian monarchy expected strict obedience from citizens. Rhetoric about individual rights and a reformed legal code only increased the authoritarian power of the state, enforced by the military.[296] During the eighteenth century Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz, Prussian reformer and Minister of Justice, attempted to replace the local control of education with a centralized, uniform state system. Zedlitz and Moses Mendelssohn were colleagues.[297] The state tried to seize control of local education using the 1794 Prussian General Land Law wherein all schools and universities automatically became state institutions.[298]
In 1782, Swiss-born Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), a member of the Helvetian Society, the Illuminati initiated him into their ranks where his code name was Alfred, after the Anglo-Saxon king, known for restoring learning and education. Pestalozzi, considered the father of modern education, was one of several educators who joined the Order. Weishaupt sought individuals who would develop educational reforms designed in conformance with his Illuminati objectives. In 1783, Pestalozzi co- founded the Zurich branch of the Order, and co-founded, with Johann Heinrich Rahn, a society for intellectuals, actually an Illuminati front.[299]
After evaluating other schools and meeting Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried Herder in Leipzig in 1792, Pestalozzi formulated his own teaching methods. He established a school in 1799 and in 1801, wrote How Gertrude Teaches Her Children describing his methods. Shortly, almost 200 books advocated his teaching techniques. In 1805,
hemovedtoYverdon,setupaschoolandtaughtthereuntil1825.[300] HisstudentsincludedHippolyteLeon Denizard Rivail, Charles Badham, Johann Friedrich Herbart (a student at Göttingen, 1801-1809), Johannes Ramsauer, Delbrück, Blochmann, Carl Ritter and Friedrich Fröbel, who all became educators and promoted his methods. Pestalozzi frequently employed Ramsauer as his private secretary and worked him from early morning until night.[301] He certainly exposed his students to numerous Illuminati policies, whether they later affiliated with the secret society or not.
Many internationally prominent people visited the Pestalozzi school in Switzerland and praised his methods including Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, allegedly a member of the Illuminati.[302] Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (known as Talleyrand), Count Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias, Frederick William III (1770-1840), Alexander 1 of Russia, and Anne Louise Germaine de Staël were all interested in his educational reforms.[303]
Napoleon crushed Frederick William III’s Prussian army despite the best efforts of the Hessian soldiers. France’s nationalistic mentality and a better-developed strategy won the Battle of Jena (October 14, 1806). French soldiers out-maneuvered the Prussian professionals who were slower to comprehend and react to the situation and had a weaker command structure. Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote Addresses to the German Nation to arouse the Germans during Napoleon’s French occupation of 1807. He decried the pathetic state of education and claimed it contributed to their defeat. He laid out a state-sponsored educational program.[304] His Addresses prompted Prussian officials to adopt Pestalozzi’s teaching system, which did not jeopardize the elite class structure.[305] Fichte used Pestalozzi’s ideas as the entire basis for German national education.[306] Author John Taylor Gatto, with reference to Fichte’s tome said, “Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism.”[307] The teachers would advocate and thereby institutionalize a disproportionate devotion to the state.
Prussia initiated “free” compulsory education for the primary grades, an eight-year course of study, for all children between five and thirteen which provided the rudimentary skills required for a developing industrialized world – reading, writing, and arithmetic. Students also received strict instruction in ethics, duty, discipline, and obedience. Affluent parents sent their children to private preparatory schools for four additional years whereas the general population lacked the opportunity for a secondary education.[308] The Prussian oligarchy inculcated social obedience through indoctrination so that every citizen viewed their leaders as consistently making correct decisions. The teachers taught the young men to have an undeviating loyalty to the government in preparation for military service. Fichte said, “The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”[309]
Prussian officials, after the military defeat at Jena, were motivated to reorganize their school system to educate both the rich and poor, intellectually and morally. Beginning on February 28, 1809, Humboldt headed the culture and education department at the Ministry of the Interior. He intended, through education, to elevate the state. In 1808, Johann Heinrich Ludwig Nicolovius and Johann Wilhelm Süvern of the Prussian educational administration awarded scholarships to young teachers to study Pestalozzi’s methods in Yverdon. Thereafter, they used and disseminated his academic ideas as the heads of teacher training seminaries or staff members of such institutions. On March 25, 1809, Humboldt wrote to his superiors and pledged to give Pestalozzi’s method his undivided support.[310]
University of Berlin and Göttingen
In 1810, the Prussian government founded the Humboldt Universität in Berlin (University of Berlin), an
immediate haven of radical intellectualism.[311] In the early 1800s, U.S. politicians and educators were impressed with the paternalistic educational system, designed to produce obedient, subservient citizens. Their superiors sent young Harvard professors, particularly Unitarians, to the University of Göttingen and Berlintostudyreligiousliberalismandsecularscholarship.[312] NumerousfutureU.S.politiciansstudiedat Göttingen. Edward Everett went there in 1815; George Ticknor, George Bancroft and Joseph G. Coggswell followed. John Lothrop Motley studied there from 1831-33, and at the University of Berlin. U.S. students attended these universities in a steady stream over the next century.[313] Lionel Nathan de Rothschild went to Göttingen. Motley, a Harvard graduate, reportedly became good friends with Otto von Bismarck, a 33rd degree Freemason, at Göttingen. Motley was a member of the Institut de France, created on October 25, 1795 by former members of the Masonic lodge Les Neuf Sœursand fashioned after the Masonic-based Royal Society of London. Motley defended and gave sustenance to Lincoln’s war fervor and advocated Lincoln’s drive towards statism.[314]
In 1810, Humboldt hired Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland as chair of “special pathology and therapy” and as the first dean of medicine at the University of Berlin. Hufeland participated in the planning of the new medical faculty. He had attended Göttingen where he studied clinical medicine under Gottlieb Richter who advocated smallpox vaccines despite the death rate resulting from the inoculations. He treated and befriended Wieland, Herder, Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, all of whom had close Illuminati connections.[315] Hufeland joined the Order following his introduction to Freemasonry at Göttingen in 1783. He worked with Adolph Knigge and Adam Weishaupt. He promoted educational reform and pediatrics as a special field of medicine. He wrote Good Advice for Mothers in 1799 and the Medical Handbook in 1836.[316]
Friedrich Fröbel, a Pestalozzi student who also studied at Göttingen, established the first kindergarten in Prussia on June 28, 1840. Margarethe Meyer and her sister Bertha, daughters of Heinrich Meyer, a prosperous Jewish merchant, attended Fröbel’s lectures beginning in 1849. Bertha spent two years opening kindergartens in Prussia. After the 1848 revolution, many revolutionaries relocated to England and then to the U.S. Bertha introduced her sister to Carl Schurz and they were soon married. In 1851, Bertha and her husband opened the England Infant Garden in Tavistock Place. She opened a kindergarten inManchesterin1859andoneinLeedsin1860.[317] CarlandMargaretheleftfortheU.S.in1854.
Margarethe Schurz opened the first kindergarten in the U.S. in Watertown, Wisconsin. Yale-educated Henry Barnard visited Bertha Ronge, Schurz’s sister, in London in 1854 and then began promoting her Fröbel-based kindergarten philosophy through lectures. He implemented the kindergarten program when he became the first U.S. Commissioner of Education (1867–1870). He worked with Horace Mann, a Freemason and another individual who influenced U.S. education. Elizabeth Peabody, a devotee of Goethe and Hegel, heard a lecture, met Margarethe Schurz and soon started a kindergarten in Boston, which influenced the development of kindergartens in New England.[318] The Dwight family, of Yale University, funded Mann, who advocated mandatory school and once remarked – “School is the cheapest police.” Mann promoted his ideas to the Boston School Committee. Others shared his sentiments regarding compulsory education including people with such prominent names as—Sears, Pierce, Harris, Stowe, and Lancaster, all involved in creating universal school systems for the industrial powers.[319]
Edward Everett, a Boston native, studied theology after graduating from Harvard in 1811. He was ordained the pastor of Boston’s Brattle Street Unitarian Church in 1814. He soon left and joined Harvard’s staff where he had a special arrangement to travel to Europe for additional training before beginning his Harvard teaching assignment. He reportedly studied twelve to fourteen hours a day at the University of Göttingen, an Illuminati breeding ground, where he received a Ph.D. in 1817, the first American to receive that honor.[320] Eventually, 10,000 of America’s wealthiest families sent their sons to
obtain Ph.D. degrees in Prussian universities. John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. studied at Göttingen beginning in 1856. Globalists, like Morgan, use both the left and the right dialectic; they fund both sides, often at the same time.[321]
Pestalozzianism Comes to America
In 1818 Robert Owen, the acknowledged father of English Socialism, visited Pestalozzi and advocated his methods in Britain and the U.S. William Maclure, a wealthy Philadelphia scientist who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1796 endorsed Pestalozzi’s methods.[322] Owen enlisted Maclure’s assistance in perpetuating his teaching methods in the U.S. Maclure’s protégé, Marie Fratageot, opened a school in Philadelphia.[323] Maclure offered to pay all of Pestalozzi’s expenses to immigrate to America to establish his school system but Pestalozzi felt he was too old and did not speak English so he rejected the offer. But, at Maclure’s urging, Joseph Neef (born Näef), a Pestalozzian teacher in Paris, came to the U.S. in 1806 and established schools in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. Neef also participated in Owen’s communitarian experiment at New Harmony.[324] In 1808, Neef published a Sketch of a Plan and Method of Education, the first American manual on the system of industrial education.[325]
In 1819, John Griscom wrote A Year in Europe, which received praise from Thomas Jefferson and other intellectuals. Griscom applauded the Prussian system. William Woodbridge wrote letters to the American Journal of Education in which he praised Pestalozzi for his teaching methods. Henry Dwight wrote Travels in North Germany in 1825, which praised the new Prussian teacher seminaries where prospective teachers “were screened for correct attitudes toward the State.”[326]
In 1830, the French Government sent Victor Cousin to study Prussia’s educational system. He had previously lived in Germany, had studied German philosophy, and was friends with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In 1832, he published a two-volume report, which was readily accepted. In 1834, individuals translated the portion pertaining to the Prussian primary schools into English and titled a Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia. The U.S. educator, J. Orville Taylor said, “The volume should be welcomed by every American citizen.” Thereafter, editors republished the report in New York in 1835 with a preface by Taylor.[327]
Taylor admitted that part of the system was incompatible to “the spirit and feelings of the American people” or “their form of government” but still gave a glowing recommendation despite those issues. He did not feel that the foundational political differences between Prussia and the U.S. should “prevent Americans from benefiting by the example set by Prussia.” Cousin wrote, “The fact that the Prussian government is an absolute government in no way vitiates the value of the excellent law on education adopted in 1819.” The U.S. abandoned national rivalries and cultural differences and systematically and gradually imposed an educational system designed to develop an acquiescent uncomplaining citizen.[328]
By the early 1800s, Ohio was wealthy and progressive. Ohio citizens had already considered establishing a public school system. In December 1837 Calvin E. Stowe, husband of Harriet Stowe and professor at Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary, spoke before the Convention of Teachers at Columbus. He promoted Cousin’s ideas and advocated their acceptance, not only in Ohio but also in America. Individuals published his speech as The Prussian System of Public Instruction and Its Applicability to the United States with an introduction, “The truths brought out by Professor Stowe shall rescue this nation from the reproachful superiority of the monarchies and despotisms of Europe, and secure to our republic the triumphs of universal education.” Stowe claimed the “enlightened and patriotic citizens of Ohio and other western states” should benefit from Prussia’s experience.[329]
Stowe’s report was printed and distributed to every school district in Ohio under the direction of the legislature. Stowe was more interested in Prussia’s primary schools rather than the secondary schools,
inaccessible to most students. Individuals reprinted his report in Boston under the direction of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and in New York, Pennsylvania, and several other states.[330] Many individuals embraced the Prussian system. William Pierce, a Unitarian minister living near Rochester, New York, hurriedly left his ministry during the anti-Masonic commotion prior to the first Jackson election. His critics claimed he had concealed an Illuminati lodge within his church. He took all of his Illuminati paraphernalia and headed to Michigan where he soon organized the first State Superintendency of Education modeled after the Prussian system.[331]
Stowe advised, “Changes must be made slowly, the people must be prepared and educated for these changes, but the public men of Ohio have shown their readiness to further this good work.”[332] Ohio’s Governor Joseph Vance (1836-1838), a top level Freemason, promoted Prussia’s school system to the state legislature.[333] Two Freemasons preceded Vance as governor of Ohio, Duncan McArthur (1830- 1832)[334] and Robert Lucas (1832-1836).[335] The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, student testing, classification for job placement, a national controlled curriculum and a mandatory kindergarten.
In 1819, Everett began teaching at Harvard and editing North American Review, founded in Boston in 1815, the nation’s leading literary magazine. By 1818, the magazine focused on issues such as improving society and enhancing the culture. It advocated the improvement of education, especially reforms within the secondary schools. Additionally, the magazine emphasized that well-educated experts should manage the U.S. government. Contributors included numerous New Englanders – John Adams, George Bancroft, Nathaniel Bowditch, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis Cass, Edward T. Channing, Caleb Cushing, Henry Dana, Sr., Alexander Hill Everett and his brother, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks and George Ticknor.
Citizens elected Everett to the U.S. House of Representatives (1825-1835). He returned to Massachusetts in 1836. Citizens then elected him as governor where he made significant changes in education. Everett, as governor, implemented the Prussian education system. He sought to transform Massachusetts into a public education laboratory. He created a state board of education to scrutinize schools and advocated the creation of schools to train teachers. He signed a law making it mandatory for all children under the age offifteentoattendthreemonthsofdayschool.[336] EverettreturnedtoHarvardasaprofessoranduniversity president (1846-1849). He resigned from Harvard and became a confidential advisor to Secretary of State Daniel Webster. In October 1850, he drafted the Hülsemann note for Webster to present to the Chargé d’affaires in Washington D.C. in defense of President Taylor sending an agent to observe the activities of the Hungarian revolutionaries.[337] There was a huge influx of poor Irish Catholics into Massachusetts due to Ireland’s famine. In 1852, with Horace Mann’s support, Everett fully adopted the Prussian educational system in Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter, New York’s governor instituted the system in twelve New York schools on a trial basis.
Robert Owen, a Utopian Socialist
Equality, as the founders viewed it, was not a government guarantee of equality of outcome but rather political equality. “Social and economic inequality within a free market society is a natural outcome of ability and effort.” The Marxists want mandatory equality, a very attractive option for the less fortunate. However, collectivist systems operate to enrich the rich and further impoverish the poor.
With the exception of Robert Owen (1771-1858), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not have a high opinion of utopian socialists. Owen, a native of Wales, fused individual powers into a social and cultural collective power through the total reorganization of the family structure. Engels found Owen’s proposals as “the most practical and most fully worked out.”[338] The alternative version of the theory “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” reads as equal obligation to labor, equal right in the product. Engels describes this rule, in a reference to Owen, as one feature of “the most clear-cut
communism possible.”[339] Morris Hillquit, a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and leading labor lawyer in New York City, in speaking of Owen, said, “He now arrived at the ultimate and logical deduction from that theory that an equal degree of morality and happiness presupposes equality in all material conditions of life. Owen had developed from a mere philanthropist into a full-fledged Communist.”[340]
Socialism and Communism are effective vehicles for gradually imposing the dictatorial Illuminati agenda. Author Robert Freedman, referring to the Enlightenment, often associated with the Illuminati, wrote, “We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools, and by open, hearty behavior, show, condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel.” The Enlightenment influenced three middle class utopians, the Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, François Fourier, and Robert Owen. They viewed their mission as the universal enlightenment of humankind.[341]
Robert Owen settled in Manchester, England in 1787 where he worked for a wholesale draper. The word draper is an obsolete term for a wholesaler or retailer of cloth, mainly for clothing. While English writers and scholars focused on the French Revolution, he concentrated on the industrial transformation in Manchester and devised a plan to implement societal change by non-aggressive, more subtle tactics than the forceful tactics that the people behind the Paris mobs staged.[342] By 1793, Owen was prominent in the growing textile industry and had numerous local connections therein. He attended his first meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on October 4, 1793.[343] The Society, possibly an Illuminati front, was popular with Manchester’s textile industrialists,
Owen presented at least four papers before the Society, one on improvements in the cotton trade, the business that Nathan Rothschild would engage in when he moved to Manchester a few years later.[344] Owen and Thomas Walker, a leading cotton merchant and political reformer, were both members of an elite steering committee for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. By the time Owen began attending society meetings, Thomas Cooper, the future South Carolina Secessionist agitator was getting ready to go to America. However, for a short period they knew each other and might have shared similar views. Owen, a Utopian Socialist, developed his ideas of a “New View of Society” and a theoretical framework for education, which he introduced at New Lanark, after taking over the management of the Scottish mills in January 1800.[345] New Lanark was about 1.4 miles from Lanark, in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.
In 1795, Mayer A. Rothschild hired a French citizen, Seligmann Geisenheimer, an “Enlightenment” Jew, as his chief bookkeeper. He spoke five languages fluently, was a Freemason and a disciple of the philosophies of Moses Mendelssohn, the father of European Communism, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), a member of the Illuminati and the architect of modern education.[346] Mayer Rothschild’s father hoped that his son would be a rabbi but Mayer. Though he was devoted to the Talmud, he chose to be a merchant and moneychanger.[347] Mayer and his son Salomon (initiated into Freemasonry on June 14, 1809)[348] had membership in the illuminated Frankfurt Judenloge, along with other local Jews with the surnames of Adler, Speyer, Reisse, Sichel, Ellison, Hanau, Goldschmidt and Geisenheimer, Rothschild’s new chief bookkeeper. One of the lodge’s founders, in addition to Geisenheimer, was Isaac Hildesheim, a merchant in English textiles. James Mayer Rothschild of the Paris branch of the banking family was a 33rd degree Freemason allied with the French Supreme Council.[349]
Rothschild and his new bookkeeper, Geisenheimer promoted public education which would provide a uniform education for each student. Wealthy families enrolled their children in private schools outside of the ghetto but poorer families relied on their own teaching abilities, augmented by a religious education under the direction of the local rabbi. Geisenheimer and Rothschild established the Philantropin, a school
for Jewish children, ostensibly to “spread the love of mankind.” Despite the appeal of free education, some parents opposed the idea of relinquishing their children to other people for instruction. Orthodox rabbis bitterly opposed this new educational approach. Rothschild and Geisenheimer modeled their scholastic program after Pestalozzi, a member of the Illuminati and the father of modern education. They also “enlightened” the children with the socialist ideas of Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Moses Mendelssohn. Mayer’s eldest son financially supported the school throughout his life.[350]
Robert Owen, by now a wealthy Manchester industrialist, visited some of the best experimental schools – Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi at Yverdon, Switzerland and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg at Hofwyl, Switzerland. Owen sent his sons, Robert Dale and William to Fellenberg, a Pestalozzi disciple. Several Swiss reformers and two American reformers, John Griscom and William Maclure visited Owen’s community at New Lanark to view the results of his ideas.[351] Owen published A Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment in 1812. Nicholas I (1796-1855) who ruled Russia (1825-1855), sympathetic to the peasants, visited New Lanark to evaluate Owen’s socialistic schemes.[352]
On August 27, 1806, Owen with John Walker, his associate and translator were bound for conferences in Frankfurt and Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, where he would present his socialistic community ideas to the European monarchs. Festivities began in Frankfurt, with lavish dinners, conferences, and receptions. On September 7, 1806, Owen met Friedrich von Gentz, a Freemason who facilitated the Frankfurt events, at a dinner given by Bethmann Brothers Bank. Two brothers, Johann Philipp Bethmann and Simon Moritz Bethmann established the Gebrüder Bethmann Bank using an inheritance from their uncle who had raised them after the death of their father. Gentz, speaking for the bankers, said, “We do not want the mass to become wealthy and independent of us. How could we govern them if they were?” Attendees included political representatives and bankers from Prussia, Austria and other independent German states. Participants included Prince Klemens Metternich, Karl August von Hardenberg, Ioannis Kapodistrias, and bankers, John Parish, Simon Moritz von Bethmann and Mayer A. Rothschild, who may have already embraced Illuminism and was promoting an equal education by means of a public school, as advocated by Pestalozzi.[353]
Rothschild attended Owen’s presentation, to hear his ideas about societal change. Owen had sufficient copies of his philosophical work, New View of Society, published in German, French and English. His objectives were to present “the most important truths for man to know in order that nations might be peacefully reformed and united under the new system.” In Frankfurt, he was more moderate than in previous presentations. He did not attack religion, priests, marriage, private property, or lawyers but elaborated on the production advantages of the new “mechanical power,” the industrial age technology, a conduit to further riches, for the wealthy, of course. The existing capital system, with increased production and unequal distribution, limits benefits, which create social unrest. Consequently, he advocated a system of shared equality. However, instead of revolution, certain prominent individuals couldsubtlypersuadethepeople.[354] TheycouldimposeCommunismwithoutforce.
Owen stressed the importance of early (pre-school, kindergarten), even infant education. He used Pestalozzi’s methods in his Institute for the Formation of Character, established in New Lanark on January 1, 1816. He believed that children should be well adjusted and happy, which according to him, meant docile, a word that recurs in much of his writing.[355] Part of Owen’s utopian philosophy incorporated Pestalozzi’s system of education. His son Robert Dale Owen wrote Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (1824).
Owen, even as optimistic as he was, recognized that a community of equality, based on lofty and liberal principles, could only emerge after years of educational training in the principles of the new world order.
Owen claimed that skilled teachers could gradually wean students away from “the errors and prejudices that had existed since the time of Adam.” People would have to abandon the ideas and associations of the selfish individual system before they could participate in a community like his.[356]
Owen, in an effort to bring his socialism to the U.S., paid $132,000 for land and $50,000 for livestock, tools, and merchandise for his New Harmony, Indiana project. He gave a speech before the U.S. Congress explaining this new way of life where people could live and work together without the normal human foibles and exploitations. About a thousand people joined him at New Harmony on the Wabash River. Author and poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), an advocate of the Owen community and one of Lincoln’s most effective sanitizing biographers, wrote in Abe Lincoln, the Prairie Years that when Lincoln heard about the New Harmony project, his heart lit up.[357]
Author Al Benson Jr. points out that Sandburg failed to mention that Owen was an avid Socialist and that the group in New Harmony was practicing socialism. Sandburg was married to schoolteacher, Lillian Steichen, also an ardent socialist. Carl Sandburg was a secretary (1910-1912) to Milwaukee’s socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, the first Socialist mayor of a major city. Sandburg campaigned for presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs during one of the many times that Debs ran for the U.S. presidency. Therefore, given Sandburg’s own socialist sympathies, there was good reason for him to omit all information about the “great emancipator’s” prodigious socialist tendencies and policies. Sandburg produced a six-volume biography on Lincoln.[358]
Robert Owen gave a speech in New Harmony on July 4, 1826, in which he referred to the American Revolution as the first opportunity to use political power to attack the “trinity” of evils, “private or individual property, absurd and irrational systems of religion, and marriage, founded on individual property combined with some one of these irrational systems of religion.” Ultimately, to appease the growing number of critics, he suggested that people adopt a universal “Rational Religion” founded on the idea that “truth is nature, and nature God; that God is truth, and truth is God.”[359]
During the 1820s and 1830s, Owen inspired the founding of approximately nineteen co-operative colonies. In the 1840s, Albert Brisbane, Charles Fourier’s U.S. disciple, experienced the hopeful beginning and the discouraging ending of over forty Fourierist phalanxes (a utopian community organized on proto-communist Fourierist principles). Socialist experiments flourished sporadically over a period of forty years as an alternative to the problems of inequitable production and distribution resulting from monopoly capitalism. With every industrial crisis and the failure of trade unions to make material differences, people sought a solution. After Lincoln’s War, labor conditions and living standards for farmers and workers declined.[360] The “order out of chaos” advocates were simply moving the U.S. populace closer to socialism without mentioning the consequences. Socialism, then and now, appeals to workers who are struggling to maintain their families and households during economic depressions.
Friedrich Engels’ (1820-1895) father, a German textile manufacturer, sent his son to Manchester in 1842 to learn business management in his father’s factory, Ermen and Engels. Manchester was a part of Lancashire, the textile center of England.[361] On November 16, 1842, on his way to England, Engels stopped at the Rheinische Zeitung (founded January 1, 1842) to meet Karl Heinrich Marx for the first time. Both Marx and Engels were children of privilege who devised a pattern to implement socialism despite human will.[362] Because of Engels’ observations over the next two years, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels, who had studied Hegel’s philosophy, associated with trade unionists, Chartists, and Socialists, including Robert Owen’s followers. Engels met Owen and wrote articles for his newspaper, the New Moral World.[363]
Engels and Marx both studied Weishaupt and Illuminism. Engels described Owen as “a man of almost sublime, childlike character, one of the few born leaders of men.” He added, “Every social movement
and real advance in England on behalf of the workers links with the name of Robert Owen.” The Owenites had a significant presence in Manchester. By 1850, they built the Hall of Science at Campfield at a cost of £7,000 where socialists presented lectures on a regular basis.[364]
Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, emigrated to the U.S. and ultimately settled in New York City and established his own Hall of Science in a ramshackle old church in New York City in April 1829.[365] He advocated his father’s ideas in the U.S., supported Susan B. Anthony, and associated with British Illuminist Frances “Fanny” Wright, an avowed atheist who had arrived in the U.S. in 1818 and promoted her philosophies throughout the country from 1820 to 1835.
Owen wrote Moral Physiology, the first book in the U.S. to advocate birth control via coitus interruptus. He and Wright conducted a series of lectures on social reform at the Hall of Science. They collaborated with two brothers, George Henry and Frederick W. Evans who arrived in New York in 1820 from Britain. Together, they published the Working Man’s Advocate, the Daily Sentinel and Young America all of which were very popular. Young America promoted “Equal rights for women with men in all respects,” and “Abolition of chattel slavery and of wages slavery.”[366] They began promoting equal rights for women in 1825, which became part of Ezekiel Williams’ platform when he ran for governor.[367]
Wright and Owen co-edited the newspaper, Free Enquirer in New York City. In 1829, Wright was the featured speaker at a secret Illuminati meeting in New York and addressed issues such as equal rights, atheism, and free love. She advocated the establishment of a Women’s Auxiliary of the Illuminati. The speakers informed the attendees about the Illuminati’s international movement in which people would know the proponents as Communists. Their foundational philosophy was the fomentation of warfare and chaos to induce the masses to accept a one-world government. People would be so exhausted and demoralized by revolution that when the Illuminati promised peace, people would embrace the idea of regulated order.[368]
Robert Dale Owen was instrumental in the development of an early socialistic labor movement and the early women’s movement. The socialist movement produced several influential writers who addressed economic issues. Langdon Byllesby (1789-1871) wrote Observations of the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth, which he published in New York in 1826. Thomas Skidmore wrote The Rights of Man to Property in 1829. Both writers were Utopian Socialists. Their analysis of the modern industrial system and the effects on labor clearly spelled out the concepts of modern socialism.[369]
About 600 newspapers in various parts of country endorsed these philosophies. Robert Dale Owen used the media publicity to elevate himself into politics. He served in the Indiana House of Representatives twice (1835–1838; 1851–1853). Residents elected him to Congress (1842-1847) during which time he drafted the legislation to establish the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. As a member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention, he was instrumental in enacting the provisions for woman’s rights and initiated the free-school system in Indiana.
Horace Greeley arrived in New York in 1831. He and Langdon Byllesby promoted the Owenite Socialistic Community system. Greeley, in his lecture Social Architects and Byllesby’s Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth both advocated Robert Owen’s economic views. Greeley knew him. In 1848, the elderly Owen went to Paris during the 1848 Revolution to assist Louis Blanc and others in the development of Political Socialism. A few weeks prior to his death, he attended the convention of the Social Science Association in Liverpool.[370] In 1851, Greeley celebrated Owen’s 80th birthday with him and other friends at the Colbourne Hotel in London. Owen was a devout Socialist until he died on November 17, 1858.
Before Marx, there was Roosevelt
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