Origins of the Federal Reserve System

From Origins of the Federal Reserve System:

This is a key point Gatto gets wrong, I believe, because he took the historical discourse at face value. It was a loud and frequant cry from the business world that "ruinous competition" was getting everyone into prices wars that were destroying the profits required to make an industrial economy viable. Origins of the Federal Reserve System as some good pointers into the business discourse of that time period. Likewise, it was part of the worldview of many Progressive politicians, activists, and educators, that the recessions and economic panics that had been happening more frequently of late (1893, 1907, 1929) were caused by the corrosive spirit of "competitive rivalry", a notion that blended a generic idea of selfish-greed with actual business competition. Education and the Social Crisis articulates this common view quite clearly. So Gatto is basically reporting the explanations he's seeing people give for why they're trying to push the U.S to a more planned economy. It's just that these people were wrong and/or lying about these changes being remotely necessitated by the nature of mass industrialization.

James Livingston has written an excellent short account of this rapid social transformation, called Origins of the Federal Reserve System, from which I’ve taken some lessons. Livingston tells us that the very language of proponents of corporate America underwent a radical change at the start of the century. Business decisions began to be spoken of almost exclusively as courses of purposeful social action, not mere profit-seeking. Charles Phillips of the Delaware Trust wrote, for instance, "The banker, the merchant, the manufacturer, and the agent of transportation, must unite to create and maintain that reasonable distribution of opportunity, of advantage, and of profit, which alone can forestall an adjustment that left to itself must needs assume the character of a revolution."[p.61] It hardly requires genius to see how such a directive would play itself out in forced schooling.