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The Rockefeller Report

The Gary tale is a model of how managed school machinery can be geared up in secret without public debate to deliver a product parents don’t want. Part One of the Gary story is the lesson we learned from the impromptu opinion poll of Gary schooling taken by housewives and immigrant children, a poll whose results translated into riots. Having only their native wit and past experience to guide them, these immigrant parents concluded that Gary schools were caste schools. Not what they expected from America. They turned to the only weapon at their disposal— disruption—and it worked. They shrewdly recognized that boys in elite schools wouldn’t tolerate the dumbing down their own were being asked to accept. They knew this would close doors of opportunity, not open them.

Some individual comments from parents and principals about Gary are worth preserving: "too much play and time-wasting," "they spend all day listening to the phonograph and dancing," "they change class every forty minutes, my daughter has to wear her coat constantly to keep it from being stolen," "the cult of the easy," "a step backwards in human development," "focusing on the group instead of the individual."1 One principal predicted if the plan were kept, retardation would multiply as a result of minimal contact between teachers and students. And so it has.

Part Two of the Gary story is the official Rockefeller report condemning Gary, circulated at Rockefeller headquarters in 1916, but not issued until 1918. Why this report was suppressed for two years we can only guess. You’ll recall Mayor Hylan’s charge that the Rockefeller Foundation moved heaven and earth to force its Gary Plan on an unwitting and unwilling citizenry, using money, position, and influence to such an extent that a New York State Senate Resolution of 1916 accused the foundation of moving to gain complete control of the New York City Board of Education. Keep in mind that Rockefeller people were active in 1915, 1916, and 1917, lobbying to impose a Gary destiny on the public schools of New York City even after its own house analyst pointed to the intellectual damage these places caused.

The 1916 analytical report leapfrogged New York City to examine the original schools as they functioned back in Gary, Indiana. Written by Abraham Flexner,2 it stated flatly that Gary schools were a total failure, "offering insubstantial programs and a general atmosphere which habituated students to inferior performance."3 Flexner’s analysis was a massive repudiation of John Dewey’s shallow Schools of Tomorrow hype for Gary.

Now we come to the mystery. After this bad idea crashed in New York City in 1917, the critical Rockefeller report held in house since 1916 was issued in 1918 to embarrass critics who had claimed the whole mess was the idea of the Rockefeller project officers. So we know in retrospect that the Rockefeller Foundation was aware of serious shortcomings before it used its political muscle to impose Gary on New York. Had the Flexner report been offered in a timely fashion before the riots, it would have spelled doom for the Gary Plan. Why it wasn’t has never been explained.

The third and final part of the Gary story comes straight out of Weird Tales. In all existing accounts of the Gary drama, none mentions the end of Superintendent Wirt’s career after his New York defeat. Only Diane Ravitch (in The Great School Wars) even bothers to track Wirt back home to Gary, where he resumed the superintendency and became, she tells us, a "very conservative schoolman" in his later years. Ah, what Ravitch missed!

The full facts are engrossing: seventeen years after Wirt left New York City, a government publication printed the next significant chapter of the Wirt story. Its title: Hearings, House Select Committee to Investigate Certain Statements of Dr. William Wirt, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session, April 10 and 17, 1934. It seems that Dr. Wirt, while in Washington to attend a school administrators meeting in 1933, had been invited to an elite private dinner party at the home of a high Roosevelt administration official. The dinner was attended by well-placed members of the new government, including A.A. Berle, a famous "inner circle" brain-truster. There, Wirt heard that the Depression was being artificially prolonged by credit rigging, until little people and businessmen were shaken enough to agree to a plan where government must dominate business and commerce in the future!4

All this he testified to before Congress. The transformation was to make government the source of long-term capital loans. Control of business would follow. Wirt testified he was told Roosevelt was only a puppet; that his hosts had made propaganda a science, that they could make newspapers and magazines beg for mercy by taking away much of their advertising; that provided they were subservient, leaders of business and labor would be silenced by offers of government contracts for materials and services; that colleges and schools would be kept in line by promises of federal aid until such time as they were under safe control; and that farmers would be managed by letting key operators "get their hands in the public trough."

In the yellow journalism outburst following Wirt’s disclosure, Berle admitted everything. But he said they were just pulling Wirt’s leg! Pulling the leg of the one-time nationally acclaimed savior of public education. Time magazine, The New York Times, and other major media ridiculed Wirt, effectively silencing him.

Of Wirt’s earlier New York foray into the engineering of young people, New York City mayor Hylan was quoted vividly in The New York Times of March 27, 1922:5

The real menace to our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation.... It has seized in its tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection.... To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests.

Like many of the rest of you, I was conditioned early in adult life to avoid conspiracy talk and conspiracy takers by the universal scorn heaped upon the introduction of such arguments into the discourse. All "responsible" journalistic media, and virtually all of the professoriate allowed public access through those media, respond reflexively, and negatively, it seems, to any hint of a dark underside to our national life. With that in mind, what are we to make of Mayor Hylan’s outburst or for that matter, the statements of three senators quoted later on this page?

Don’t expect me to answer that question for you. But do take a deep breath and make the effort to read Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, written back in the 17th century but easily located in every library of any size in the United States, for some enlightenment in your ruminations.6

During the crucial years of the school changeover from academic institution to behavioral modification instrument, the radical nature of the metamorphosis caught the attention of a few national politicians who spoke out, but could never muster enough strength for effective opposition. In the Congressional Record of January 26, 1917, for instance, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon entered these words:

they are moving with military precision all along the line, to get control of the education of th e children of the land. [p.1001 →]

Senator Poindexter of Washington followed, saying:

The cult of Rockefeller, the cult of Carnegie [...] is just as much to be guarded against in the educational system of the country as a particular religious sect.[p.1001 →]

And in the same issue, Senator Kenyon of Iowa related:

there are certain colleges in this country that have sought endowments, and the agent of the Rockefeller Foundation or the educational board had gone out and examined the curriculum of these colleges and compelled certain changes [...] It seems to me that it is one of the most dangerous things that can go on in a Republic to have an institution of this power apparently trying to shape and mold the thought of the young people of the country.[p.1002 →]

Senator Works of California added:

these people [...] are attempting to get control of the whole educational work of this country. [p.1005 →]

If it interests you, take a look. It’s all in the Congressional Record of January 26, 1917.7

  1. [Hazard]

    Paraphrased from The Great School Wars:

    A mother whose child had been in PS45 in the Bronx, the first to be reorganized, complained in a letter to a newspaper that her child changed classes every forty minutes and had to wear her coat all day to avoid losing it; she claimed that the child spent the day listening to a phonograph, taking photographs, sitting in assembly, dancing, or in similar nonacademic activities. At the term’s end, said the mother, she transferred her child to another school and found that she was a full term behind in her studies.[p.256 →]
    A reporter, Thomas S. Baker, visited the schools in Gary and came back with impressions that reflected popular anxieties about the tendencies of progressive education. While acknowledging that the townspeople of Gary were very proud of their schools, the writer was critical of what appeared to be the “cult of the easy.” The aim of the system “is to allow the child to study those things which he likes to learn in the manner in which he likes to learn them.” He reported that business letters from manufacturers were held up as examples of good writing; this was evidence, he thought, that the Gary schools were overly utilitarian. He wondered whether this “pursuit of happiness” could “make hard-working and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men.” [p.256 →]
    A school principal commented that he believed the Gary plan a step backward educationally because it focused on the group rather than the individual. The plan had nothing to offer educationally, he warned. It was “simply a departmental schedule so drawn as to accommodate two groups of classes in one building.” It creates such a huge educational machine that “the individual is lost.” The principal becomes a business manager, and “the school becomes an educational factory.” He predicted that if the plan were adopted throughout the city, problems of retardation and overage would multiply as a result of the minimal contact between teachers and pupils.![p.256 →]↩
  2. [Gatto]

    A man considered the father of twentieth-century American systematic medicine and a longtime employee of the Rockefeller Foundation.↩

  3. [Hazard]

    Flexner's report, The Gary Schools, A General Account, takes an overall positive tone and congratulates the schools for taking a bold progressive view on education and trying something new, but basically only has negative stuff to report about the object level aspects of how the school was run and the achievement of the students. Some quotes:

    Not even in those branches to which Gary has given impetus and development-the so-called special activities-has a high or even satisfactory standard been reached. An excellent spirit pervaded the playgrounds, gymnasiums, shops, laboratories, and household arts departments. But high-even satisfactory-standards of workmanship did not rule. Some boys and girls did well; some did ill; concerted effort to procure generally good work, conscientious insistence upon excellent performance are only spasmodically in evidence.[p.261 →]
    Attention has been called to the ways in which pupils participate in responsible activities-record keeping, etc. Such participation is admirably calculated to give a flavor of reality to school life. What ought, however, to be a credit item is converted into a debit because the absence of proper accountability results in slipshod work that must do the pupils positive damage. Records characterized by poor spelling, arithmetical inaccuracies, and grave omissions pass unchallenged. Not only is the immediate educative effect lost, but the child tends to become habituated to inferior performance. Thus, once more sound conception is frustrated by ineffective execution.[p.261 →]

    Though the Gary schools themselves didn't really do any testing, Flexner administered various standardized tests as part of his inspection and found that the kids typically did 20% worse than the national average on any given subject.↩

  4. [Hazard]

    Before testifying to congress, Wirt was disseminating this story via pamphlets, America Must Lose: by a "planned economy", a stepping stone to regimented state.↩

  5. [Hazard]

    This is a widely cited Hylan quote, but I haven't been able to track down a document that has the exact wording. Closest I've found is Hylan Adds Pinchot to Presidency List; Foresees a Revolt where he expresses very directly the underlying sentiment, just without the octopus imagery.↩

  6. [Hazard]

    Gattos seems to be commenting on how Hobbe's mentions conspiracies, or "secret cabals", as one of many pedestrian perils a would-be sovereign should be guarding against.↩

  7. [Hazard]

    This discourse was prompted by reports that various $1/year "honorary" employees of the Bureau of Education were abusing their ability to get government documents mailed freely to get privately funded non-official material stamped with the Bureau seal of approval and distribute them for free. It was alleged but never investigated that many of the companies paying the actual salaries of these $1/year employees were Rockefeller and Carnegie shell corps. The most interesting and substantive part of this discussion was a memorandum submitted to the record which detailed examples of Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations influencing the hiring and policy in important universities around the country. An excerpt:

    Professors of secondary education have been furnished southern universities and the same men furnished State departments of education for supervising secondary schools "on the sole condition that the man selected shall be acceptable to us." One case with regard to which a copy of the letter was sent us from the files by the General Education Board is that of the University of Virginia. It was testified, however, that in most instances these men were looked over by the General Education Board. In the case of the States of Maine and New Hampshire a similar condition was made with respect to demonstratior work by the Secretary of the Interior.[p.999 →]↩
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