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High-Pressure Salesmanship

In 1916, the year of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, Kellor published Straight America. In it she called for universal military service, industrial mobilization, a continuing military build-up, precisely engineered school curricula, and total Americanization, an urgent package to revitalize nationalism. America was not yet at war.

President Wilson was at that time reading secret surveys which told him Americans had no interest in becoming involved in the European conflict. Furthermore, national sympathy was swinging away from the English and actually favored German victory against Britain. There was no time to waste; the war had to be joined at once. John Higham called it "an adventure in high pressure salesmanship."

Thousands of agencies were in some measure engaged: schools, churches, fraternal orders, patriotic societies, civic organizations, chambers of commerce, philanthropies, railroads, and industries, and—to a limited degree—trade unions. There was much duplication, overlapping, and pawing of the air. Many harassed their local school superintendents.

At the end of 1917, Minnesota’s legislature approved the world’s first secret adoption law, sealing original birth records forever so that worthy families who received a child for adoption—almost always children transferred from an immigrant family of Latin/Slav/Alpine peasant stripe to a family of northern European origins—would not have to fear the original parents demanding their child back. The original Boston adoption law of 1848 had been given horrendous loopholes. Now these were sealed sixty-nine years later.

Toward the end of the war, a striking event, much feared since the Communist revolutions of 1848, came to pass. The huge European state of Russia fell to a socialist revolution. It was as if Russian immigrants in our midst had driven a knife into our national heart and, by extension, that all immigrants had conspired in the crime. Had all our civilizing efforts been wasted? Now Americanization moved into a terrifying phase in response to this perceived threat from outside. The nation was to be purified before a red shadow arose here, too. Frances Kellor began to actively seek assistance from business groups to build what she called "the new interventionist republic of America." (emphasis added)

At an unpublicized dinner meeting at Sherry’s Restaurant near Wall Street in November 1918, Frances Kellor addressed the fifty largest employers of foreign labor, warning them that Americanization had been a failure—that really dangerous times were ahead with Bolshevik menace concealed in every workplace. Kellor proposed a partnership of business and social work to "break up the nationalistic, racial groups." The easiest way to do that was to weaken close family life. Miss Kellor, whose upbringing had itself been an ambiguous one, was the perfect person to lead such a charge.

At the Wall Street meeting, plans were laid for a semi-secret organization of Americanizers to be formed out of interested volunteers from major industrial corporations. An impressive amount of money was pledged at the initial meeting, the story of which you can follow in John Higham’s classic account of our immigration years, Strangers in the Land. "The Inter-Racial Council" presented the external aspect of an eclectic public-spirited enterprise—it even recruited some conservative immigrant representatives as members—but, in fact, it was controlled by Kellor’s backers.

The IRC acted both as intelligence gathering office and propaganda agency. In its first year of existence, Kellor put together an association of advertisers to strong-arm the immigrant press into running anti-radical propaganda. Using this muscle, immigrants could be instructed from far away how to think and what to think about, while remaining unaware of the source of instruction because immediate pressure came from a familiar editor. Advertising revenue could be advanced, as well as withdrawn, providing both carrot and stick, the complete behavioral formula.

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