gat

of industrialists and bankers calling itself the National Security League to warn of coming peril
from subversion on the part of immigrants. One of the most distressing anomalies confronting
Kellor and the NSL was an almost total lack of publicizable sabotage incidents on the domestic
front in WWI, which made it difficult to maintain the desired national mood of fear and anger.
9 There is some evidence American social engineering was being studied abroad. Zamiatin’s We, the horrifying
scientific dystopia of a world government bearing the name "The United State," was published in Russia a few years
later as if in anticipation of an American future for everyone.
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
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