CHAPTER LX THE SCHOOLS OF SOCONY Among the great capitalists who have been making over our schools, the most active has been Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller established the General Education Board, an institution with an endowment of a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, for the purpose of exercising supervision over American education. Of course this is all supposed to be entirely altruistic; its purpose is to improve our standards of education, and has no relationship whatever to the fact that Mr. Rockefeller is engaged in collecting tens of millions of dollars every year from a long list of our biggest industries. I have discussed this matter in detail in “The Goose-step”; but it is of such overwhelming importance to the schools, that I must repeat the facts here. The Rockefeller General Education Board is without doubt the most powerful single agency now engaged in keeping our schools subservient to special privilege. Dr. W. J. Spillman, of the United States Bureau of Agricultural Economics, tells of the efforts of the Rockefeller board to control the agricultural colleges in the different states, and of the activities of their agent, David F. Houston, ex-president of the University of Texas, and Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson, to keep the farmers of the United States from learning anything about how they were “deflated” by the Federal Reserve banks. Dr. Houston is a member of the Southern Education Board, one of the Rockefeller organizations, and later became chairman of the Federal Reserve and Farm Loan Board. Dr. Spillman was on the inside all through the Houston administration of the Department of Agriculture, and portrays his chief as “lying, cheating and intriguing, resorting to every device in order to keep the facts about farming costs from being collected.” You see, the farmers were expected to raise food and sell it below the cost of production; they are still being expected to do this, and are doing it. There was circulated through Dr. Houston’s department a typewritten sheet, said to have come from Mr. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, and concurred in by Secretary Houston, forbidding the department to make any investigation which would determine the cost of producing farm products; no one should ever hint at over-production in farm products, and the sole business of the department was to persuade the farmers to produce more.