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A STRATEGY TO CONTROL THE TEACHING OF HISTORY The question that arises in Mr. Dodd’s mind is: How would it be possible for anyone to think they could alter life in the United States so it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union and, by implication, with other nations of the world? What an absurd thought that would be – especially in 1954. That would require the abandonment of American concepts of justice, traditions of liberty, national sovereignty, cultural identity, constitutional protections, and political independence, to name just a few. Yet, these men were deadly serious about it. They were not focused on the question of if this could be done. Their only question was how to do it? What would it take to change American attitudes? What would it take to convince them to abandon their heritage in exchange for global union? The answer was provided by the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace, the same group that had been the center of controversy in the 1930s. When Dodd visited that organization and began asking about their activities, the President said, “Mr. Dodd, you have a lot of questions. It would be very tedious and time consuming for us to answer them all, so I have a counter proposal. Why don’t you send a member of your staff to our facilities, and we will open our minute books from the very first meeting of the Carnegie Fund, and your staff can go through them and copy whatever you find there. Then you will know everything we are doing.” Again, Mr. Dodd was totally amazed. He observed that the President was newly appointed and probably had never actually read the minutes himself. So Dodd accepted the offer and sent a member of his staff to the Carnegie Endowment facilities. Her name was Mrs. Catherine Casey who, by the way, was hostile to the activity of the Congressional Committee. Political opponents of the Committee had placed her on the staff to be a watchdog and a damper on the operation. Her attitude was: “What could possibly be wrong with tax-exempt foundations? They do so much good.” So, that was the view of Mrs. Casey when she went to the boardroom of the Carnegie Foundation. She took her Dictaphone machine with her (they used mechanically inscribed belts in those days) and recorded, word for word, many of the key passages from the minutes of this organization, starting with the very first meeting. What she found was so shocking, Mr. Dodd said she almost lost her mind. She became ineffective in her work after that and had to be given another assignment. This is what those minutes revealed: From the very beginning, the members of the board discussed how to alter life in the United States; how to change the attitudes of Americans to give up their traditional principles and concepts of government and be more receptive to what they call the collectivist model of society. I will talk more about what the word collectivist means in a moment, but those who wrote the documents we will be quoting use that word often and they have a clear understanding of what it means. At the Carnegie Foundation board meetings, they discussed this question in a scholarly fashion. After months of deliberation, they came to the conclusion that, out of all of the options available for altering political and social attitudes, there was only one that was historically dependable. That option was war. In times of war, they reasoned, only then would people be willing to give up things they cherish in return for the desperate need and desire for security against a deadly enemy. And so the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace declared in its minutes that it must do whatever it can to bring the United States into war. They also said there were other actions needed, and these were their exact words: “We must control education in the United States.” They realized that was a pretty big order, so they teamed up with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation to pool their financial resources to control education in America – in particular, to control the teaching of history. They assigned those areas of responsibility that involved issues relating to domestic affairs to the Rockefeller Foundation, and those issues relating to international affairs were taken on as the responsibility of the Carnegie Endowment. Their first goal was to rewrite the history books, and they discussed at great length how to do that. They approached some of the more prominent historians of the time and presented to them the proposal that they rewrite history to favor the concept of collectivism, but they were turned down flat. Then they decided – and, again, these are their own words, “We must create our own stable of historians.” They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, “Would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you help them to obtain their doctorates so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world?” And the answer was “Yes.” So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctorate degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their attitudes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing. (In a moment I will explain why London is so significant.) At this meeting, they were told what would be expected if and when they win the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world and was the wave of the future. In other words, in the guise of analyzing history, they would create history by conditioning future generations to accept collectivism as desirable and inevitable.
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