American Teachers’ Unions and Fabian Society Influence
Leo Casey, writing for the Albert Shanker Institute, explained how Fabian Society ideas infiltrated the ranks of teachers in the United States through organized labor and the formation of teachers’ unions:
- In the early twentieth century, there was a great deal of trans-Atlantic cross-fertilization between British and American leftists, with London and New York as the two intellectual centers in this exchange of ideas. From the Women’s Trade Union League and the settlement house movement to Fabian Society proposals for reform and the idea of labor party...and campaigns for birth control, sex education and the decriminalization of gay sex, New Yorkers often drew inspiration from their British counterparts. The American Teacher [magazine] followed the development of the National Union of Teachers in the United Kingdom, and New York teachers on the left increasingly looked to it as a model of what could be done in the United States.63
Columbia University philosopher John Dewey was instrumental in this trans-Atlantic cross-fertilization of Fabian socialist ideas and teachers’ unions in the United States.
John Dewey — Bridging the NEA & British Fabian Society
In 1894, philosopher John Dewey became the chairman of the Rockefeller-funded education department at the University of Chicago. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dewey’s evolutionary theory of knowledge was the “scientific” foundation of his ideas about social reconstruction. Dewey established the university’s Laboratory School where he tested his philosophical and psychological ideas on live children.64 The school’s ultimate ideal was the transformation of society by nurturing socially minded individuals. However, the school closed in 1904, when Dewey resigned from the university following a dispute over his appointment of his wife as principal. This ended his laboratory experimentation in education, and Dewey moved to Columbia University in New York.65
Dewey in New York City
In 1929, John Dewey and Fabian Society founder Julian Huxley joined the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.66 Potter, a former Unitarian minister, made the first move to institutionalize humanism outside Unitarianism. His philosophy openly rejected traditional Christian beliefs and replaced them with a humanist philosophy that incorporated various aspects of naturalism, materialism, rationalism, and socialism.67
In 1933, Dewey co-authored and was a co-signer of the Humanist Manifesto I.68 Consistent with the Fabians’ evolutionary humanist belief system, the first and second statements of the manifesto are “Religious humanists (emphasis added) regard the universe as self-existing and not created” and “Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.” Though later humanists (who reformed Potter’s organization as the American Humanist Society in 1941) de-emphasized American Humanism as a religion and emphasized the nontheistic and secular nature of humanism, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized secular humanism as a religion in Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U S 488 (1961).69 In his Terry Lectures at Yale in 1934, Dewey authored what became the single most enduring philosophical statement of religious humanism, published as A Common Faith.70 For Dewey, religion does not involve the supernatural, but is the formation of social intelligence as morality.71
Humanists view schools and teachers as planned agents of social and cultural reform by addressing and solving real-world social problems.72 In other words, schools are viewed as training sites for activists — a kind of non-theistic missionary. Dewey’s book, Education for A Changing Social Order (1934), identifies classroom teachers as the agents of social reconstruction of the United States.73 The mission of teachers as change agents is creating the “new social order.” The NEA adopted this mission when it made academics secondary to its purpose to address social issues.74
In his 1907 essay, "Religion and Our Schools," Dewey described the missionary role of public schools to teach social unity in a single non-theistic faith, and the counterproductivity of releasing students from school to learn the teachings of “rival faiths”:
- Our schools...are performing an infinitely significant religious work. They are promoting the social unity out of which in the end genuine religious unity must grow...shall we interfere with this work? shall [sic] we run the risk of undoing it by introducing into education a subject which can be taught only by segregating pupils and turning them over at special hours to separate representatives of rival faiths? This would be deliberately to adopt a scheme which is predicated upon the maintenance of social divisions in just the matter, religion, which is empty and futile save as it expresses the basic unities of life...the American people is conscious that its schools serve best the cause of religion in serving the cause of social unification, and that under certain conditions schools are more religious in substance and in promise without any of the conventional badges and machinery of religious instruction than they could be in cultivating these forms at the expense of a state consciousness.75 (p. 807)
Aligned with Dewey’s position, Charles Potter, a co-signer of Dewey’s Humanist Manifesto and author of Humanism, A New Religion, described the role of public schools in the proselytizing of Humanism. Quoting from a colleague’s sermon, Potter wrote,
- Our nation...disestablished the church...In place of the church that it had disestablished, it established the school.... Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?” (pp. 127-128)76
The anti-Christian messaging permeating American culture today is at least in-part attributable to the Humanists’ view of public schools as their “churches.” Despite Dewey’s claim that democracy is serviced by replacing religious pluralism with a common humanist faith, Dewey and Potter’s statements expose humanism’s state-consciousness in public schools as a government-established religion in violation of the First Amendment.
In 1935, Dewey, served as vice-president of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID); and then as its president in 1941.77, 78 The overlap of Dewey’s years in leadership in the NEA and leadership in the LID indicate the direct link between the NEA and the Fabian socialist agenda. In 1929 Dewey was awarded a Life Membership in the NEA in honor of his 70th birthday. In 1949, at the age of 90, Dewey — the Father of Progressive Education — was made honorary president of the NEA.79 80 Dr. Sam Blumenfeld described the NEA’s relationship with Dewey as one of idolatry stating, “From 1857 to the present, the NEA has worshiped two gods: Horace Mann, a statist, and John Dewey, a socialist.” (p. 181)81
Evidence of the NEA’s Fabian socialist agenda is provided by the most frequent writer in the NEA Journal throughout the 1930s and 1940s — Fabian socialist Stuart Chase — who for some years was treasurer of the League for Industrial Democracy. His book, A New Deal (1932), became identified with the economic programs of American President Franklin Roosevelt.82 Chase wrote in the NEA’s Journal, “It is no longer a question of collectivism versus individualism, but of what kind of collectivism,” after calling for the U.S. government to take over agriculture, banking, credit, and more. Stuart Chase was also affiliated with the NEA’s brainchild UNESCO, advocating for “Some kind of organized world community, probably as an outgrowth of the United Nations...to administer and safeguard a steady state society.”83
Rockefellers’ Support of British Fabian Socialism Abroad and in the U.S.
Just as the Fabian Society played a large part in shaping the major teacher unions in the United States as instruments of their agenda, including the NEA, American elites played a large part in supporting the Fabian Society’s agenda. The Fabian Society’s LSE received sizable grants from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Rockefeller Foundation (RF).84 LSE pioneered the teaching of the social sciences and remains one of the world’s exclusive educational establishments.85
LSE Director John Ashworth stated in 1995, “This is now the institution in which the elite who will lead Europe in the 21st Century are being educated.”86 Indeed, David Rockefeller wrote his senior thesis at Harvard about Fabian Socialism and completed a year of graduate work at LSE.87 The Rockefeller family’s support of LSE was not shared by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). Moynihan identified LSE as the training site of the leaders of many nations “and had propagated the ideals of British socialism that had made these leaders hostile to the U.S.”88 The senator’s accusation of hostility toward the United States did not deter David Rockefeller who later wrote in his book Memoirs,
- Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. (p. 405)89
In addition, the Rockefellers supported projects aligned to the Fabian Society agenda of scientific progressivism. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was an outspoken supporter of the eugenics movement as a scientific solution to social problems.90 The Rockefeller Foundation gave considerable funding to the United States Social Science Research Council (SSRC) founded in 1923. It was the first national social science institution in the world and is said to represent the creation of a "science of society." In his book Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences, Donald Fischer described a Rockefeller committee report recommending the goals of the Rockefeller philanthropy’s scientific social research program:
- Increase the body of knowledge which in the hands of competent technicians [experts] may be expected in time to result in substantial social control;
- Enlarge the general stock of ideas which should be in the common possession of all intelligent members of civilized society; and...
- Spread the appreciation of [propaganda campaign] the appropriateness and value of scientific methods in the simplification and solution of modern social problems.91
One of the Rockefellers’ beneficiaries who exerted substantial social control and spread the appreciation of the value of scientific methods in the solution of modern social problems was birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Sanger initiated the Negro Project.92 Though her proponents deny any racist intent in controlling the number of births to women of color, the British eugenicists (described in the following article) remove all doubt.
David Rockefeller’s father John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated funding for the Manhattan site on which the United Nations is built.93 Also supporting the Fabian Society’s goal of a one world government, Nelson Rockefeller wrote in The Future of Federalism,
- ...the nation-state is becoming less and less competent to perform its international political tasks (p. 67).... [These] are some of the reasons pressing us to lead vigorously toward the true building of a new world order. And it urgently requires, I believe, that the United States take the leadership among all free peoples to make...national sovereignty truly meaningful through the [transnational] federal approach. (p. 74)94
The Rockefeller family’s public statements and actions supporting the agenda of the British Fabian Society suggest that the American financial elite promoted the cross-fertilization of socialist ideas generated by the British intellectual elite. This model of tax-exempt foundations infringing on the jurisdiction of local districts over curricular content to implement a globalist agenda in K-12 classrooms with NEA’s cooperation is still practiced today. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation heavily funded and promoted the development and implementation of Common Core State Standards and social emotional learning assessments and materials — a practice that the Rockefellers perfected a century earlier.
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