A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 4

      Controlling the Working People With False Information 

   Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck. 
   In those years after the Civil War a man named Russell Conwell, a graduate of Yale Law School, a minister, and author of best-selling books, gave the same lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," more than five thousand times to audiences across the country, reaching several million people in all. His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, if people looked closely enough, were "acres of diamonds." A sampling : 

     I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich . . . The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly . . . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. 
   . . . I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins . . . is to do wrong . . . let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings . . . 

    Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. 
   The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent ; they trained the middlemen in the American system --- the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians----those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
   In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority.  A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote :"The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent ; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."
   Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained to the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education : 

     The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.  

     Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says : "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental." 

   This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said :"One who studies the educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fitfor the life of civilized society."
   It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part ofthe century, school officials --- not teachers --- were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."
   Against this gigantic organization of knowledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience, there arose a literature of dissent and protest, which had to make its way from reader to reader against great obstacles. Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States , but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monopolized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problems of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations : 


 It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised ; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share . . . This association of poverty with the progress is the great enigma of our times. . . There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment ; an increased bitterness among the working classes ; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution . . . The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism . . . 

   A different kind of challenge to the economic and social system was given by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, who wrote, in simple, intriguing language, a novel called Looking Backward, in which the author falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000, to find a socialist society in which people work and live cooperatively. Looking Backward, which described socialism vividly, lovingly, sold a million copies in a few years , and over a hundred groups were organized around the country to make the dream come true. 
   It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants' struggles of the period of 1830--1877. They were nationwide movements,  more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air. 
   In the 1880sand 1890s, immigrants wrer pouring in from Europe at a faster rate than before. They all went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Now there were not so many Irish and German immigrants as Italians, Russians, Jews, Greeks ----people from Southern and Eastern Europe, even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers. 

              TO BE CONTINUED. STAY TUNED.