George S. Counts, Columbia Teachers College (TC) professor from the 1920s to the 1950s, was a willing accomplice to the Communist International (Comintern) operation to destroy Normal-American culture from within. At TC, Counts was appointed to the International Institute, as the TCII Russia expert.
According to Counts’ daughter, Martha in an interview in July 2009, Russell recruited Counts because the Institute needed someone who was an expert on Russia. The fact that Counts was not a Russia expert did not seem to make a difference.
Counts was assigned an assistant, Nucia Perlmutter, a Russian immigrant, as his secretary assistant. Counts spoke no Russian, and no knowledge of Russia's culture or history. He quickly began frequent visits to the USSR. The KGB co-opted Counts in record time. Within a year, Counts began close cooperation with Soviet intelligence, and the Comintern.
Counts collaborated with the Soviet intelligence services to insert a message of doom, despair and destruction into American culture. Burrowing into the K-12 education establishment, and the university academic establishment, Counts preached death to Normal-America. His message was an unrelenting call to destroy Americans' proud heritage of individual striving and competition. In its place, Counts called for a collectivized American identity.
Counts’ writings and speeches were so influential and powerful in American academia and education that his Soviet-provided messages have been, and continue to be, even today, among the most powerful and quoted theories in American Schools of Education.
His Dare the School Build a New Social Order speeches and publications galvanized the education industry. Teachers flocked to his Progressive movement, basking in his assertions that their profession, long a backwater, under-appreciated province of women and milquetoast young men, had the power to actually transform American culture.
The transformation into a collectivist utopia was, Counts assured them, within their grasp. All the teachers needed to do was to organize, unionize, and professionalize, become part of the Elite Vanguard, and they could have the prize.
In 1929, just a few years after becoming the TCII's Russian czar, Counts embarked on an auto trip around Russia. He shipped an American Ford to Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg and Petrograd, today’s name again back to St. Petersburg). From there, he drove to Moscow. From Moscow he went south and east, into the steppes of Ukraine. He took several other trips through the countryside to various cities.
The book he wrote upon his return to the US, A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, like nearly all Counts' public pronouncements, was false from the title to the last page. He and his Ford did not cross Soviet Russia, not even close. As he later described the trip:
I … remained seven months. On this occasion I took a Ford car into the country and during July, August, September, and October, drove approximately six thousand miles through the European part of the Union, from Leningrad across the Caucasus Mountains and from Odessa to Nizhni Novgorod and regions beyond.
His narrative hides the fact that he was accompanied by a handler/translator/guide for nearly the entire time he spent on the road.
Although he claimed that he was “entirely alone” for just one-sixth of the journey, he still pretended that he could move about freely.
He did not detail who accompanied him, or the level of control they exerted, for the other five-sixths of the trip, “I shaped the route myself and motored entirely alone for about a thousand miles. The major object of the journey was to see at first hand the new construction which was supposed to be under way. It was an illuminating and thrilling experience.”
Counts never mentions who was traveling with him, but does let slip every now and then that he did have a traveling companion.
In the narrative, Counts' peevish, nasty, self-centered personality drips from each episode he describes. Another main theme of Counts' story, though entirely unintended, is Counts' oily hypocrisy. Remember that this is the man who, at the same time, was calling for the end of American individualism, and the need for Americans to evolve into the higher order of human evolution that the Russians had already attained--collectivism.
Evidently, it never dawned on Counts that, from his conception of the trip, the trip itself, and his narrative of the trip, the whole enterprise was an entirely individualistic, traditionally American, man-on-the-road-finding-himself stereotype. Counts never deals with this in his narrative, and was likely unable to see this truth.
For this man who was calling for America to ape Russia's ascent to collectivist nirvana, the brutal reality of communism's fundamental clash with human nature, seems to have sailed over his head. And yet, every episode of his tale features clear evidence of the superiority of America's system over Russia's. Counts, like many academics, seems not to link his ivory-tower theories with reality that slaps him in the face. From the first day of his automobile arriving on the ship, until the final episode, as he tried to sell the car before returning to the US, Counts is immersed in the grinding, soul-less bureaucratic struggle to complete simple tasks. Forms, signatures, incompetence, stamps, approvals, interviews, bureaucrats, red-tape, lies, each task that would be simple and cheap in the US becomes a days, or weeks, long nightmare in Counts' communist paradise.
The amazing thing, when you know Counts' love for collectivism, and his loud and proud calls for America to institute collectivist educational teaching, to change American society away from our individualist roots, is that, in this book, he constantly compares Russia's weaknesses to America's strengths. He bemoans the sad state of roads throughout the country. He complains about the people, the food, the beds, the villages, nothing meets Counts' standards.
Another glimpse into the obtuse mind of the little American wannabe-dictator is his casual mention of what he calls the Gay-Pay-Oo, the GPU, the name of the KGB in 1929. He's clearly aware of the organization. He clearly knows that they are all-powerful and have a tight grip on the populace. And, we know, though Counts never mentions in his lifetime, that he was working for them, either as a unwitting willing accomplice, or wittingly, and that he was accompanied by one or more Soviet officials, likely GPU, through most of his trip. Yet he pretends that he was on a solo trip into the wild. He betrays himself, however, bragging that he eventually began seeking out the GPU whenever he found himself in need of help to overcome some difficulty he encountered.
Counts’ letters [found in the archives of Southern Illinois University] reveal the identities of his 1929 companions. In 1964, Counts sought to relive his glory days, to return to Russia and drive his 1929 route again. He wrote to his handlers from the trip—Mikail Bernstein, and Johansen Zilberfarb.
Bernstein hints at the sort of relationship they had in 1929, in his letter from February, 1964, “The chief vice of your last Challenge was not that you criticized us but that you were clearly indiscriminate in your choice of sources and your ‘ideological’ allies.”
The scolding tone of a scorned handler comes through in Bernstein’s letter. He wants to rekindle the relationship, or at least get “time on target” again.
An account of Counts' trip might have been interesting, if the story was told by a narrator who could describe the hypocrisy and irony of the effort. With Counts as the narrator, my reading was frequently interrupted by my laughing at the little poser's posing.
A Ford Crosses Russia is an excellent source to understand the loathsome hypocrisy of those who laid the foundations for the destruction of Normal-American culture, and the annihilation of the American education system. Counts' betrayal of his country, cooperating with a hostile foreign ideology that was dedicated to the destruction of his native country and culture, should have earned Counts the death penalty. Instead, Counts enjoyed decades of fame and fortune and adulation in his native country. And today, in the 21st century, we suffer from the continuing application of his theory of Social Reconstructionism in our schools and universities.
If Counts' Ford had blown a tire, causing him to lose control and plunge off a bridge into the Volga, and this book had ended with his death on a reckless adventure trip, then we could hail Counts as a brave adventurer. Instead, here in reality, we must condemn this diminutive schemer for the destructive force he was, and remains.