Brainwashing in the High Schools

An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks

E. Merrill Root

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781789124217
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

One third of the Americans taken prisoner in Korea succumbed to Communist brainwashing, according to U.S. Army studies, and assisted or collaborated with their captors.The Communist brainwashers recognized and took skillful advantage of the Americans' ignorance and confusion concerning United States history, the free-enterprise economy, and the representative system of government.Placing the blame squarely on faulty presentation of history and social studies in the American schools, Professor Root, author of the controversial Collectivism on the Campus, examines eleven of the most widely used United States history textbooks. In these books he finds overwhelming evidence of hostility to traditional American principles, of left-wing partisanship and of class-warfare ideology.Professor Root presents the evidence in these pages, and upon it he bases the following conclusions:that American students are indoctrinated with a Marxian concept of United States history...that the present school generation is being conditioned to accept a socialistic and totalitarian way of life...that, as a consequence, resistance to Communist cold-war techniques is being broken down.Brainwashing in the High Schools quotes freely from the eleven textbooks to illustrate their "biased presentation" of American history from the time of the founding Fathers to the mid-twentieth century. The author makes a strong case and suggests radical changes in educational approach if we are to survive as a free nation. His book is essential reading for parents and for every teacher of history and social studies.

1—Why We Are Losing the Cold War

THE United States is losing the cold war. It is losing, that is, the intellectual and spiritual war, the war of ideas and ideals, which is the real war. Naturally, then, the great question is: Why?

U.S. News & World Report, in the issue of February 24, 1956, released an interview with Major William E. Mayer, United States army psychiatrist and one of the army’s experts on brainwashing. Major Mayer’s report is a most disquieting document. He affirms that, for the first time in American history, one third of all the American soldiers made prisoner in Korea succumbed to brainwashing by the enemy:

...they became something called “progressives.” By the Communists’ own definition, this meant that a man was either a Communist sympathizer or a collaborator—or both—during his stay in a prison camp.

Military weakness was not involved here. “No,” Major Mayer says, “it is something more than that. It goes deeper. The behavior of many Americans in Korean prison camps appears to raise serious questions about American character, and about the education of Americans.”{1}

When asked why, he answered: “Because, in my opinion, the behavior of too many of our soldiers in prison fell far short of the historical American standards of honor, character, loyalty, courage and personal integrity.”

Major Mayer was asked if these men had yielded under physical torture. He answered, “No, this third that I am talking about were not subjected to physical torture, according to their own statements.” They surrendered to brainwashing. Brainwashing, the major said, is “a calculated attempt to distort men’s convictions and their principles...and to supply them with a mass of specific information.” It is the eroding of the mind, the infiltrating of the spirit, and finally the paralyzing of the will. The men who withstand it are those whose minds are firm and clear and in possession of the truth.

The major continued: “It is my impression that brainwashing is an extremely effective weapon which, if it finally succeeds, will render mechanical weapons, if not obsolete, at least needless, since we are engaged in a war basically of ideas.”

The brainwashing was based on the Communists’ contempt for the American mind as the product of American education. He said:

They obviously believed that the average American soldier was poorly informed to an extreme degree about his own country, his own economic and political system; was even more poorly informed about the politics, economics and social problems of other countries; was an individual who based his sense of security and often of superiority on transient, materialistic values, and was a man who, if deprived of material sources of support, would prove to be insecure, easily manipulated and controlled, lacking in real loyalties and convictions.

Major Mayer attributes this intellectual vacuum to the “formal education” of the one third who succumbed. He was asked, “Where does our education seem to be falling down?” He answered:

Again I can only retreat into things the prisoners themselves said. From these things it is tragically clear that the American educational system, fine as it is, is failing miserably in getting across the absolute fundamentals of survival in a tense and troubled international society. This failure needs to be publicized.

Major Mayer was specific:

A returning prisoner often made reference to the fact that he was given by the Communists a very intensive education about America, a Communist viewpoint of history which evidently emphasized every possible defect in our development and our attitudes, and the soldier would confess that his own knowledge of the American system—of our history, our politics, our economics—was insufficient to enable him to refute this Communist version, even in his own mind.

The major points out that during the brainwashing every fault of America was chalked in and every virtue of America was erased out; that the education of most Americans had failed to prepare them to meet the intellectual erosion and the political indoctrination. They had received no fundamental facts and no enduring principles from their “formal education” to counter the Communist brainwashing.

The major was asked, “Weren’t they taught this [knowledge of the American system] in school?” He answered, “Many of them said they weren’t. Many of them said they didn’t know.”

One quality, the major found, had been especially lacking in their education—a love of country, a sense of patriotism. He said:

I think a great many people feel that references to patriotism and love of country are somewhat embarrassing, unsophisticated, or foolish flag-waving. I think this is to a very considerable degree the result both of well-meaning liberals, so called, as well as others whose intentions are clearly destructive, to create the attitude that we should abandon love of country and patriotic ideals, as being identified with this evil thing called “nationalism.”

Conclusions similar to Major Mayer’s were reached by the Defense Department’s Advisory Commission on Prisoners of War, in a report of July 29, 1955, and by Admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of the armed services. Admiral Radford said, in a speech at White Sulphur Springs, almost the same things that Major Mayer said. An INS news dispatch in the Richmond Palladium-Item, September 11, 1956, reports:

Admiral Arthur W. Radford told the southern governors council that the U.S. is failing to instill pride in the American way of life among its youth.

He said that if American youth aren’t taught more about what this nation’s democracy means, communism can come to the United States. He added:

“We cannot write communism off the books simply by saying: ‘Oh, it can’t happen here.’ Because it can, if we allow ourselves to lower our guard or diminish our active patriotism.”

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said bluntly: “We seem either unable or too lazy, to do enough to explain, teach, and most of all to demonstrate publicly before the world the fundamental, basic facts of liberty.

“Too many young men come into the armed forces with too little understanding of their responsibilities for citizenship. There are too many who are apathetic toward responsibilities and complacent about the long term continuance of their society.”

Radford said in his prepared remarks that when American soldiers are sent overseas “they are not well enough equipped to convince others that the path of freedom is the best path.”...

Radford contended that the homes and schools of America share with the military establishments a responsibility for improving the soldiers’ moral outlook. He said: “The skills we teach in the service can only pyramid on the moral character and basic foundations already built in the home and classrooms.”

Nor is it only the armed forces that tell us these disturbing truths. Edward Hunter, a writer, spent two years in Asia, studying the war for men’s minds and the Communist techniques in brainwashing prisoners of war and their own captive and enslaved peoples. He returned and wrote a book, Brainwashing in Red China (1956), which he followed up in 1958 with a second book, Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It, showing how the mind can defend itself against such attack. He says, in a letter to the National Review, June 6, 1956:

The men and women who have broken under brainwashing pressures, and who have created great and unnecessary suffering for their buddies, country and themselves, were in a pathetic number of cases softened up for their crack-up by just the state of mind exhibited in the Princeton episode [the invitation of Alger Hiss to speak]. This is a matter our schools, colleges, and universities should consider of critical importance, so that they no longer are manipulated into a position of weakening minds, for all their pretentious buildings and super-duper equipment.

A government publication (The Great Pretense, May 19, 1956, House Report No. 2189) gathers the opinions of the foremost experts on communism in the United States. The conclusion to which they all come is that, because of our naïveté, our lack of political and intellectual sophistication, our lack of realistic thinking, our spongy education on the nature of collectivism and the true nature of American principles as set up by the Founding Fathers, we are today losing the cold war. It is as if the very roots of America were being frozen by the New Ice Age. One of the contributors, J. Edgar Hoover, says:

In recent months, the united front campaign, always a dangerous Communist tactic, has received even greater emphasis....The Communists are confident that if they can openly cling to the coattails of reputable groups, eventually they will succeed in wearing the entire suit....If America’s resistance can be softened by the lies shouted from these heaps of concealed communism, the party will be in a better position to launch a frontal attack upon our government. (P. 173.)

In the same publication, on page 42, Max Eastman, a leading authority on communism and anticommunism, says flatly:

...we are at present losing the cold war, we are being defeated by the totalitarians on a world scale....

The great question is: why are we allowing ourselves to suffer this miserable and wholly unnecessary defeat?

The cause is, in large measure, the failure of American education, as Major Mayer says, “in getting across the absolute fundamentals of survival in a tense and troubled international society.” Consider the facts. Children, by the law of the land, are compelled to attend our schools for many years. What sense does it make for our country to force them to take an education that makes them susceptible to collectivism in milder forms—and then to force them to go out and fight the armies of collectivism in its most drastic form?

School superintendents, principals, and teachers are in a position of crucial responsibility: theirs is a captive audience. The child is compelled to listen to what they teach; to read the texts they select; to subject himself to their indoctrination. If the schools and the teachers leave the child “poorly informed to an extreme degree about his own country, his own economic and political system...” and if they misinform him about other countries, telling him (for example) that the regime of Mao Tse-tung is merely a “democratic revolt” of “gentle agrarian reformers,” his mind will be a chaos.

The teacher is placed in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. If, in accepting the trust that makes him as it were the intellectual parent of the child, he fails to give the child the facts of life; or if, through ignorance or by indoctrination he gives the child false and perverted facts, he abuses his sacred responsibility to the captive child. As a scholar he betrays his trust and is a traitor to truth and a perverter of children’s minds.

Now, the fact is that, in one particular war, one third of our young men who were captured did succumb to brainwashing. Even more sobering, the case history of this war, dealing with a representative cross-section of our youth, establishes a probability table. It means, by projection, that our young people are being so poorly educated that, under comparable circumstances, the entire third would succumb. And, as Major Mayer points out, it is often the “brightest intellectually” who most easily give way—the privileged and not the underprivileged, the brainy and not the dull.

Now, this has never happened in America before. It must, therefore, have a cause in our contemporary life; and since it has to do with a vacuum in the mind, we can only attribute it to the educational system that has taken upon itself the training of our youth.

This is certainly not to absolve the parents who allow themselves to be excluded to so great an extent from the academic training of their children. Parents are morally obligated to instill at home the spiritual basis and the moral values of life; and parents should object militantly when they find their children being indoctrinated and brainwashed with the relativism, the collectivism, and the nihilism of the hour. The parents are culpable both in what they fail to give their own children and in what they allow the schools to give their children. But, still, much of the blame rests upon the schools, the teachers, and the textbooks.

The Communists, in carrying out their systematic brainwashing, knew what they could count on. Edward Hunter, who interviewed many American prisoners of war after their release from Communist control, told the author how the Reds capitalized on the soft spots in American education. “The Communist indoctrinators,” he said, “took advantage of the Americans’ limited knowledge and understanding of American history and political philos...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1-Why We Are Losing the Cold War
• 2-Eleven Textbooks
• 3-People’s Democracy or Constitutional Republic?
• 4-Nation Indivisible or Class War
• 5-What They Do to the Constitution
• 6-What They Do to the Founding Fathers
• 7-How They Exploit the Gilded Age
• 8-The Seamy Side of American Life
• 9-How to Apply the Double Standard to History: the New Deal
• 10-Brainwashing in Foreign Affairs
• 11-Anti-anticommunism
• 12-Tainted Sources
• 13-How to Win the Cold War
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER