How America dropped the baton

Every culture is either self-propagating, or by definition it is self-destructive. Culture has no meaning and no value unless it is passed on to the next generation.

Think of it as a generational relay race, with the belief systems of a group of people being the baton that is passed on from runner to runner. You can imagine the mayhem that would be caused in a race if at each hand-off, the runners stopped and debated the shape, size or color of the baton. If each new runner insisted on dictating revisions to the baton before carrying it forward, this would slow things even further. Not only would the team lose the race, but ultimately the baton would not look anything like what it was when the race started.

Under such circumstance, the idea of culture as a set of shared beliefs and values, passed on from father to son, and mother to daughter, would be meaningless. And if each runner taught his or her successor to despise the baton as unworthy, then sooner or later the baton would be dropped, and the culture would end.

It is this picture which must inform our discussion of education as we try to understand why the America of 2011 looks nothing like the America of 1911. Somewhere along the way, the baton of proud American traditions, brilliant accomplishments and upstanding virtues became a thing of shame and ridicule. Our schools, teachers and yes our parents have more and more questioned our long-held values, and have substituted expedient excuses for eternal truths.

Whether such a dangerous agenda was externally imposed or merely a form of accidental suicide, I don’t know. But I am convinced that the proof that such a change took place is just as self-evident as those Jeffersonian truths that mankind for the past 100 years has been so eager to hide from.

You can either believe J. Edgar Hoover or you can believe Nikita Khruschev, two icons from the 1950s — one a proponent of free enterprise and Americanism, the other an advocate of totalitarian communism. But what is funny is that it doesn’t matter which one you believe because they were in total agreement that America was in danger of losing its identity, its values... its cultural baton.

Hoover and Khruschev each acknowledged that there was an effort underway to destroy capitalism and the American way of life. And though both men have tarnished reputations nowadays, in the mid to late 1950s, they were at the pinnacle of their power and were certainly among those in the best position to know whether America was under attack.

Hoover, the director of the FBI during five pivotal decades, wrote in the Elks Magazine in August 1956, “We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.”

This was at the tail end of the so-called McCarthy era, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy argued that there were communists in positions of power throughout our government and elsewhere in society. McCarthy had already been shamed into silence, but Hoover never gave up his belief that America had been infiltrated by those who would destroy it.

In this belief, he may have received comfort from a quote widely attributed to have been uttered by Khruschev, the Soviet dictator, 3 1/2 months before his visit to the United States in late 1959.

“We can’t expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism.”

Like I say, there is no way to ascertain whether Khruschev actually said those exact words, but they certainly represent a common thread (and threat) of communism since at least the time of Lenin. And it is Lenin who perhaps holds the key to how the “monstrous” conspiracy unleashed in the United States took hold.

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” Lenin famously declared.

In the transmission of the baton of culture from one generation to the next, education is everything. Obviously Lenin understood that. Heck, even the simplest stone-age tribal group understands that. Every tribe ever encountered in history has held one fact as true — our way of life is the best. That is the glue that holds individual cultures together. It is also the guarantor of diversity. And as soon as a culture begins to doubt the validity, indeed the primacy of its traditions, then that culture has begun to die.

Perhaps Lenin understood that; perhaps not. But certainly the Soviets as a whole, and the communists and Marxists who supported them, were well aware that if America could no longer wholeheartedly teach its children that the American way of life is the best, then we were doomed.

Indeed, the communists were so confident of victory that Khruschev publicly declared in 1956, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.”

It turns out that the Soviet Union had its own problems, but the collapse of the Soviet Union does not preclude the collapse of the American republic. And what Khruschev saw as the inevitable tide of history is still slowly playing out.

Perhaps no greater proof of the collapse of American values can be found than in the transition that occurred in the1950s or 1960s about who Americans perceived as their enemy.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, following the remarkable tectonic shift of geopolitical power that occurred in World War II, Americans turned to Hoover’s FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities for guidance about how to protect and preserve our values against communist intervention. By 1969, however, following the social revolution of the 1960s, that House committee’s name had been changed to the House Committee on Internal Security, and by 1975 it had been dissolved altogether. No longer could it be assumed that Un-American Activities were bad. They were merely alternative ideologies that we could learn from.

Such relativistic thinking would have been inconceivable to our Founding Fathers. There was no alternative view possible of “unalienable rights,” nor should there be. One could not wage war against King George III by trying to see his point of view, nor would victory in World War II have been possible if America had waffled on the evil of the Third Reich.

But when in the 1950s and 1960s, America began to surrender its own absolute certainty in its self-worth and substituted a form of re-education that might just as well have come from Mao’s China, we were on the path to collapse that has led us to the somnambulistic, hedonistic 21st century. No longer was the enemy communism, but rather the nasty people like McCarthy and Hoover who preached against communism.

Syndicated columnist George Sokolsky, in an article about education in 1952, asked: “Are Marxists to start our children’s careers with their environmentalist doctrines which exclude religion as superstition, patriotism as chauvinism, morals as comparative and ethics as a bourgeois notion?”

He no doubt thought that the question was merely rhetorical, but the answer now seems obvious. Yes, yes, yes and yes! Marxists, or their innocent dupes, did control the education system to a remarkable degree, and thanks to the long lever of John Dewey’s system of “progressive education,” which started before 1900, and the fulcrum of the collapse of American certainty that happened sometime in the 1950s, we were entirely open to all of the elements of indoctrination that Sokolsky tried to warn us against. 

The results would have delighted Khruschev and Lenin, and mortified Thomas Jefferson and J. Edgar Hoover. Turns out that this “shovel-ready project” was taking place at the proposed burial site of America. Lenin had planted his seeds, and the learning tree would sprout its dark fruit just a few years later — in the radical 1960s that re-shaped America for good.