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Horatio Alger died in 1899. He was a writer of boys' stories about individuals of little means who worked hard and became successful in a land of opportunity. That, however, was before the United States became an increasingly closed and manipulated society.
As Horatio Alger was passing, Sigmund Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays, was growing up and in 1928 became William Paley's chief adviser at CBS. In that same year, Bernays wrote PROPAGANDA, in which he described how the public could be manipulated. The stock market crash came the next year, and in the October 26, 1935 edition of NATIONAL MESSAGE (found at the New York City Public Library), one reads: "It was told to me by a heavyweight American financier before the crash came, that the crash was coming, that it would be permitted to run to the danger point, and that then, when the danger point was passed, it would be reversed by measures carefully prepared in advance to meet the situation."
The stock market crash broke the Republican Party, and Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. In 1940, he was challenged by Wendell Willkie, an internationalist who had been a registered Democrat until 1940, and whom polls showed was favored by only 3% of Republicans just 7 weeks prior to the Republican Convention. On June 19, 1940, Congressman Usher Burdick wrote in the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD: "There is nothing to the Willkie boom for President except the artificial public opinion being created by newspapers, magazines, and the radio. The reason back of all this is money. Money is being spent by someone, and lots of it." Thus, the power (moneyed) elite were the power behind both the Democratic and Republican candidates for the presidency, and the masses were being manipulated by something that would come to be called "groupthink."
The term "groupthink" would be used by William Whyte, Jr. in IS ANYBODY LISTENING? (1950), in which he described the "social engineering movement" as "a machine for the engineering of mediocrity....It is profoundly authoritarian in its implications, for it subordinated the individual to the group." This confirmed what Sigmund Freud said in his GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO (1922), in which he quoted Gustave le Bon as stating: "As a part of the group, man regresses to a primitive mental state. His critical, intellectual ability and control yield to emotionalism, suggestibility, and inconsistency."
The year after Whyte's book was published, Bertrand Russell's THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY was published and described how, through education, government "could control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen." The next year (1952), the National Training Laborotries (NTL) became part of the National Education Association (NEA), and in 1962, the NTL published ISSUES IN (HUMAN RELATIONS) TRAINING, in which the editors wrote that human relations or sensitivity training "fits into a context of institutional influence procedures which includes coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing." The book also includes information about "change agent skills" and "unfreezing, changing and refreezing" attitudes. In 1964, Roderick Seidenberg's ANATOMY OF THE FUTURE describes how the masses of people could be controlled "by the ever increasing techniques and refined arts of mental coercion" to the level of mindless guinea pigs.
The effort, of course, was to program people to the point where behavior would be predictable. In DEMOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP: THE EMERGENT CONSTITUTION OF CONTROL (1981), Arthur S. Miller describes a "new feudal order" controlled by elitists, and he assesses that "dictatorship will come---is coming---but with the acquiesence of the people....The goal is 'predictable' man." Two years later, FDR's son, Elliott Roosevelt, wrote in THE CONSERVATORS that "there are within our world perhaps only a dozen or so organizations which shape the courses of our various destinies as rigidly as our regularly constituted governments...this unofficial council of the elite, the creme de la creme of global planners." Four years later, Arthur S. Miller wrote THE SECRET CONSTITUTION AND THE NEED FOR CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE (1987), declaring that "a pervasive system of thought control exists in the States....The citizenry is indoctrinated by employment of the mass media and the system of public education,...people are told what to think about....A new vision is required to plan and manage the future....Ours is the age of the planned society....No other way is possible."
In 1992, the public was told to think about "change." Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton said he wanted to be an "agent of change." Just as in 1940, the moneyed elite were the power behind both Clinton and President Bush, both of whom had been Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) members and Trilateralists. And even though statistics showed Clinton's state of Arkansas had done poorly in many areas, he won the presidency despite his many personal problems in the past and his opposition to the vast majority of Americans on important issues of the day such as a voluntary school prayer amendment and parental consent for minors' abortions. Even though Clinton's negative ratings in the polls were quite high, individuals responding to the polltakers often indicated that they felt it was time for a "change" (just as they had been programmed to say), though they seemed to have no consensus regarding exactly how "change" would make things better. More recently, Barrack Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2008 with the themes of "hope" and "change."
Another word that has been drummed into people's minds over the past 60 years by the media and press is "McCarthyism." This term has been used to close off debate immediately whenever someone suggested that Communists may have become a powerful force in this country. Even the Clinton campaign quickly used the word when someone suggested that he may have been monitored by the KGB when he went to Moscow at the height of the Vietnam War. But what the media and press did not tell the public was that the basis for Sen. McCarthy's assertions is now known to have been correct. Former WASHINGTON POST reporter Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein "Watergate" fame) in 1989 wrote LOYALTIES: A SON'S MEMOIRS, in which he quoted his father (who along with Carl's mother were members of the Communist Party in America): "You're going to prove McCarthy right, because all he was saying was that the system was loaded with Communists. And he was right.
You've got to take a big hard look at what you are doing because the whole fight against his was that people weren't Communists. I'm worried about the kind of book you're going to write and about cleaning up McCarthy. The problem is that everybody said he was a liar; you're saying he was right....I agree that the Party was a force in the country."
According the Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, one of the best ways to undermine a country like the United States was to attack the culture. Today, one can observe our culture being attacked via the media. On a recent episode of the popular television network program "Castle," the character Richard Castle (a writer) is talking with his 19-year old daughter, who has decided to move in with her boyfriend. Richard protests, but his daughter reminds him that at 19, he moved in with his girlfriend. He pathetically replied "That's different," and the daughter typically responds, "How?" Richard's partner in crimefighting, a police woman, tells Richard that her father objected when she first moved in with a boyfriend (clearly indicating she did it more than once). She then said the only thing her father's objection caused her to do was to be all the more determined to do it! Note that nowhere in that conversation was the fact mentioned that THE HOLY BIBLE in Galatians 5:19-21 says fornicators go to hell forever. This is but one of many examples of how Americans today are being manipulated away from a Biblical morality and into accepting a secular humanist morality.
© 2013 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved
Dennis Laurence Cuddy, historian and political analyst, received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (major in American History, minor in political science). Dr. Cuddy has taught at the university level, has been a political and economic risk analyst for an international consulting firm, and has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education.
Cuddy has also testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Cuddy has authored or edited twenty books and booklets, and has written hundreds of articles appearing in newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows in various parts of the country, such as ABC Radio in New York City, and he has also been a guest on the national television programs USA Today and CBS's Nightwatch.
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