The Wisdom of G. Edward Griffin

I frequently read the writings of G. Edward Griffin. If you want to know what has happened to our Republic...please read his works.


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 that 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 another powerful and prestigious tax-exempt
foundation, the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace. 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
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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 very scholarly fashion. After
many 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
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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.
Now lets go to the words of Mr. Dodd, himself, as he described this event before our
cameras in 1982. He said:

This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the
American Historical Association. Then toward the end of the 1920’s the Endowment
grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in
those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can
look forward to in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last
volume of which is a summary of the contents of the other six. And the essence of the
last volume is, the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with
characteristic American efficiency.1

Now we must turn off our time machine for a few moments and deal with this word
collectivism. You are going to hear it a lot. Especially if you delve into the historical papers
of the individuals and groups we are discussing, you will find them using that word over and
over. Although most people have only a vague concept of what it means, the advocates of
collectivism have a very clear understanding of it, so let’s deal with that now.