The Turning of the Tides

Paul W. Shafer, John Howland Snow

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781787209480
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Together with John Howland Snow, Michigan Representative Paul W. Shafer authored this 1953 exposé on the education system of the United States, which was delivered in the House of Representatives on March 21, 1952. In The Turning of the Tides, the authors take the position that the education system was an alien collectivist (socialist) philosophy, much of which came from Europe, crashed onto the shores of the American nation, bringing with it radical changes in economics, politics, and education, funded by several wealthy American families and their tax-exempt foundations.

PART I—CURRENTS—THE EARLY MOVEMENT

On the 12th of September 1905 a group of young men met together in lower Manhattan, New York. Conditions in America were not ideal. These young men had an ideal. Consciously or not, it had been borrowed from the social structures of the Old World.

The meeting took place in a loft above Peck’s Restaurant, at 140 Fulton Street. Among the group were some who in later years were to become widely known for views which at that time were the catalyst bringing them together.

On that day nearly fifty years ago was organized the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

The Society

Its godfather was Upton Sinclair. Others officiating at its birth included Jack London, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, J. G. Phelps Stokes and Clarence Darrow. Sinclair was twenty-seven. London, twenty-nine, was elected the first president. On the Executive Board were Morris Hillquit and Harry W. Laidler. Owen R. Lovejoy was the treasurer.

The purpose of the Society was “to promote an intelligent interest in Socialism among college men and women…”

About this time, and also in lower Manhattan, there was organized the Rand School of Social Science. Here, the I.S.S. established permanent headquarters in 1908.

Conditions, to repeat, were not ideal—anywhere—and to change those conditions these young intellectuals had plans. The plans, as we shall see, were put in operation.

The first step was to organize chapters of the I.S.S. in colleges and universities.

Walter Lippmann was president of the Harvard club in 1909 and Heywood Broun was a charter member. David J. Saposs, a student from Russia, was president at Wisconsin in 1910; Freda Kirchwey was president at Barnard. Walter Reuther was president, later, at Wayne.

Other names figured prominently in the early movement and among them were Bruce Bliven at Stanford, professors Vladimir Karapetoff at Cornell and Vida D. Scudder at Wellesley, Alexander Trachtenberg at Trinity, John Spargo at Amherst Agricultural College, Mary R, Sanford at Vassar and Eugene V. Debs at Columbia.

The Society progressed. Associated with its activities, and among its lecturers, writers and organizers, were Mrs. Ella Reeves Bloor, Algernon Lee, Jay Lovestone, Frances E. Perkins, Lincoln Steffens, Rose Pastor Stokes, Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin (“the first Socialist in Congress”), Bouck White, W. E. B. DuBois, Scott Nearing and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes.

The first annual convention was held in January, 1910.

By 1912 the I.S.S. had chapters in 44 colleges and universities and in five alumni associations. By 1917 chapters had been organized in 61 schools of higher learning and in a dozen graduate bodies.

From the very start the Society actively observed the socialist movement in German universities from its first impetus under Bismarck. The I.S.S. was in close intellectual contact with the Fabian Societies which were flourishing in the rarefied air of Britain’s cloistered halls.

The League

In 1921 the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was ready for its next organizational step, and this was signalized by a change of name. The 16-year old I.S.S. in that year became the League for Industrial Democracy.

The L.I.D. was a membership society organized for the specific purpose of “education for a new social order based on production for use and not for profit.”

Under its new name, the original Intercollegiate Socialist Society continued under the joint direction of Harry W. Laidler and Norman Thomas.

The League’s first president was Robert Morss Lovett, a professor of English literature at the University of Chicago and an editor of The New Republic. Charles P. Steinmetz was a vice-president, and Stuart Chase was treasurer. One of its lecturers was Paul R. Porter, later with E.C.A. in Greece. The field secretary was Paul Blanshard. In 1926 one of the directors was Louis Budenz.

The chapters of the I.S.S. were now absorbed into a Student L.I.D., and by the mid-1930s there were some 125 such units. John Dewey was then a vice-president of the League together with John Haynes Holmes.

In 1941 Dewey became president and Reinhold Niebuhr treasurer. For better or worse, the L.I.D. was a fixture in the life of the Nation.{1}

The International

The scene must now shift, for a moment, to Britain. There, in 1883, had been organized the first Fabian Society. Its goal was socialism. Its method of patient, steady procedure was much later to become known as “gradualism”. Its name derived from the Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who so successfully employed a similar strategy—of “delay, attack, delay”—against his arch enemy, the Carthaginian Hannibal. Its organizers were Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and other intellectuals.

The hard core of the British Fabian Society, like that of the L.I.D., was never numerous. By 1932 the Society had only 1,867 members. But it was an operational success. Its Forty-ninth Annual Report gives the clue to much that has transpired, much that we shall find as we read. For it said:

“…we continue active association…with the League for Industrial Democracy of New York which carries on active propaganda in the United States on very similar lines to our own work here…”

The Fifty-eighth Annual Report, 1940, could boast that 15 member Fabians were in the House of Lords, 69 sitting in Commons. One of these, Clement Attlee, became Prime Minister in 1945. Another, a former member of the Executive Committee of the Society, was elevated to the Cabinet—as Minister of Education.{2}

In 1946, the Fabian Society’s Sixty-third Annual Report announced the establishment of an International Bureau

“To prepare the ground for an international socialist policy in international affairs.”

How successful the plan became we shall see.

The fashion

In America, meanwhile, John Dewey had organized the Progressive Education Association and in 1915 the American Association of University Professors. A new concept of education was becoming the vogue. Its development shows three distinct phases since 1905, and these may be defined as follows:

1) The first student-organization; the period of its young ideals;

2) The period of social and educational development as these students were graduated into active life. They entered the drawing rooms of the newly-fashionable liberals, and they began the organized teaching of their views from the rostra of the classroom and of the pulpit;

3) The period of social, economic and political bouleversement, during which the disciples of the Fabianized movement took increasing possession of the guidance of labor, school and state.

Young theoreticians entered the pulpit; they entered the classroom; they entered the fields of textbook writing and revision; they entered the labor movement and the ranks of both of our major political parties. In 1933 the advent of the New Deal found them prepared. The Nation was absorbed in the drama of those first One Hundred Days.

At that time the L.I.D. membership totalled 5,652. And from that membership came many of the men and women whose names were shortly to become synonymous with “social change.”

From an obscure loft in lower Manhattan had been graduated the first advocates of indoctrinated social revolution.

Its alumni were now in positions of vital power, and they used it. They influenced—for better or for worse—the course of the Nation and the conduct of its tens of thousands of schools.

Socially speaking, the loft was forgotten; the milieu was the now-fashionable liberal drawing room, the faculty club and the political caucus.

An open choice

It was this movement, open and at the same time subtle; known and yet generally ignored, which after forty years began to be discussed—not for its purposes but for its effects. Gradually, a counter-current could be discerned. Here, in ever-increasing numbers, were citizens who had determined that, whatever its blessings, there were signs that the movement’s entirety was not in the permanent best interests of the Nation.

The entirety was known as “progressive education”. As a movement, it was self-defined.

This is its early history, highly condensed. The beginning of its forceful development, of its progr...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE TURNING OF THE TIDES
• PART I-CURRENTS-THE EARLY MOVEMENT
• PART II-TIDES-THE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA’S SCHOOLS
• PART III-INTRODUCTION
• PART III-THE FLOOD-THE INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT
• PART IV-THE TURNING OF THE TIDES-ACCOMPLISHMENT AND RESOLUTION
• APPENDIX
• BIBLIOGRAPHIES
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER