Infiltration and Subversion of American Education and Academia: Why, how, who, when, where?
George Counts, creator of "Social Reconstruction", destroyer of Normal-America
For years, Normal-Americans have observed the destruction of our culture. Many have observed that destructive attitudes and beliefs are introduced to our children in K-12 schools and in universities.
These observations have created a constant flurry of analysis and guesses. The analysts posit various theories about the who/why/when/where/how of the destructive belief system’s introduction into our education and academia learning systems.
Many of these theories brush up against the reality. Many of them are way off-base.
I published Willing Accomplices in 2011. This book lays out details on who/how/why/where/when of both the belief system that became today’s Politically Correct Progressivism (PC-Prog), and the methods and actors used to insert it into American education and academia (as well as the media and Hollywood).
Americans are now much more aware of the reality of the destruction of Normal-American culture. However, without a clear understanding of the PC-Prog belief system, and the covert influence methods used to spread it, awareness is not enough.
This post is a chapter from my book, Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness, Obama's Hate-America-First Political Platform, and Destroyed America.
This chapter lays out details of the main architect, his beliefs, where those beliefs came from, and his methods used to insert the PC-Prog beliefs into American education and academia.
That architect was Dr. George S. Counts of the Columbia University Teachers College International Institute.
This knowledge provides the foundation for Normal-Americans of today to counter-act Counts’ PC-Prog destruction. What will you do?
Chapter 1
Willing Accomplice in Academia and Education:
Dr. George S. Counts
Review
Up to this point Willing Accomplices has worked toward laying out the background to prove the hypothesis that KGB covert influence operations created Political Correctness and the Progressive political agenda in American today.
I’ve laid out my unique qualifications for conducting this CI analysis. We’ve examined the background of the KGB’s covert action program, and its genesis with Lenin. We identified the reasons behind the Soviets’ decision to create operations to destroy the American spirit and culture. We examined examples of KGB covert action operations, and heard from their case officers.
We identified the specific targeted domains of the KGB’s covert influence operations—the transmission belts of culture—the media, education/academia, and Hollywood.
We explored the reasons that a paper trail has not yet surfaced publicly to provide documentation of the Comintern covered KGB covert influence operations.
We looked at a recent case of Russian espionage covert influence operations against the U.S., Vicki Pelaez.
We’ve explored Willi Muenzenberg’s role as the covert influence genius who wrote the influence payload. And we’ve examined his use of the Comintern, cover organizations, fronts, and Innocents Clubs, to gain access to the pool of potential influence agents in America.
We looked at the American cultural milieu in the years between the World Wars. We explored the reasons that some Americans were vulnerable to a philosophy that denigrated their country while, at the same time, provided them with justification for feeling superior to the American “moron millions.”
We saw how this feeling and set of beliefs inculcated by the KGB’s operation, the Muenzenberg Creed, is nearly identical to today’s PC-Progressive set of beliefs.
We’ve also studied a CI analysis methodology that provides a 3-question screening test to indicate whether a suspect can be considered a covert influence agent for the KGB.
Now let’s put this all together, and identify some of Muenzenberg’s American Willing Accomplices.
CI Analysis—Eight Decades Later
Conducting a CI investigation from 80 years distance may seem more difficult than examining a contemporary suspect. And it may be. However, it is probably easier in some ways, especially when considering covert influence suspects.
Covert influence leaves a large footprint, even when done subtly. There is a product—a newspaper article, a book, a speech, a movie, a lecture—something relatively public that communicates the covert payload.
The point of a covert influence operation is to influence the target culture. This requires mass communication. The KGB’s Muenzenberg operation cranked out influence products by the ton.
Finding the influence production of our suspects is relatively easy. And analyzing the products is relatively easy, since we now have the benefit of Babette Gross’s recitation of the Muenzenberg Creed. Prior to her admission of this Creed to Stephen Koch, one had to rely on a gut feeling that, for example, Walter Duranty was “Stalin’s Apologist,” and leave it at that.
Making the connection between a suspect’s being an “apologist” for the communists, and his being an actual influence agent left a writer open to being attacked as a “conspiracy nut,” or a “Red scare” fear-monger.
No longer.
We can now identify the gist of a suspect’s influence message, boil it down to its essence, and compare this essence with the Creed.
Examining suspects from a distance of decades, we also have the benefit of easily available search tools—to find records of travel to Russia, for example.
We are also more or less immune to the tactics of Andemca that contemporaneous investigations met. Consider the absolutely horrific abuse that Senator McCarthy had to endure during his investigations of communists in the government, or the abuse heaped on the investigators of Alger Hiss.
The counter-accusations hurled by the PC-Progressives and their political predecessors complicate any investigation, and are liable to at least be a distraction. The benefit of conducting this analysis from 8 decades is that we will avoid some of those distractions. (Once the PC-Progressives catch wind of the conclusions in Willing Accomplices, however, the counter-accusations are likely to fly thick and fast.)
Let’s use our 3-question analytical screening Willing Accomplice identification tool on selected suspects from the Muenzenberg era. We’ll look at a suspect from each of the KGB’s targeted domains, beginning with Academia and Education.
I selected these suspects based on the third indicator of the CI screening test—based on their public writings, pronouncements, speeches, by the content of their work being consistent with the Muenzenberg Creed. Once a suspect was identified as positive for the third question, I then researched in-depth the first two criteria to determine those answers.
Here are the results.
Carbondale, Illinois
August, 2009
The slow pace of the town in Southern Illinois’s Little Egypt (the delta between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers) is made even slower by the storm damage. A freak straight-line wind storm hit the town hard, several months before. Evidently the cost of clearing all the fallen trees exceeded the budget of the University, and the town. Across campus numerous huge trees and branches littered the wooded areas. Most of the green was cleared, and sidewalks were passable. The buildings, many of them thrown up during the GI Bill boom times of the 1950s and 1960s, appeared shabby and tawdry—concrete and brick, shorn of their protective trees.
It was a homecoming, of sorts. This is where I met my wife, where I completed most of my BA degree. Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois University. I’d spent two years after military service here. Bought my first home here—an eight by forty-eight foot mobile home. Worked in the library, delivered pizzas, ran a typing service, sold used cars to foreign students. Hustled and studied.
A couple hours’ drive from St Louis, Carbondale’s economy was clearly hurting. Ever since coal had dwindled as an industry, the delta region had almost no viable source of income.
The library was newly renovated. The old entry hallway, with a statue of D. Morris, where I had manned the security desk, had been converted to a side hall, and the statue moved out into the elements. Checking in with the Archives staff, I had to surrender my belongings, everything except a pencil and my laptop.
The archive attendant pushed out a cart loaded with boxes from the Counts collection. She only allowed me to browse through one box at a time. Waiting for the first folder, I thought back to the phone interview with my old SIU professor, Dr. Aikman.
Retired for the last twenty years, Dr. Aikman had taught in SIU’s education department since the 1950s. He had known George Counts, and had been his colleague. Aikman’s description of the elderly Counts, in SIU Education department faculty meetings, spouting Greek and shuffling to his seat, helped to make Counts real to me.
I’d taken many classes in the same rooms where Counts had taught. In my Teaching English as a Second Language undergraduate major, and then when I’d returned for graduate studies in Instructional Design, Education classes were prominent in my course load.
This was where I’d seen PC-Progressivism first hand for the first time. In Education classes, Counts’ philosophy of collectivism, and American non-exceptionalism took center stage. Along with Dewey’s child-centered curriculum, which denigrated the need for society to prepare children for actual roles in the economy, instead advocating for children to guide their own studies, Counts’ and other Progressive Education ideas dominated the School of Education.
It was where I had discovered that there was surely no place for me in this PC-mafia dominated profession. I had learned how to plan and structure lessons, and how to be an Instructional Designer, but the ugly PC of Education scared me.
Spending time inside the secret lair of American Education schools would convince most people to keep their kids away from the brain-washing that graduates of Education schools are prepared to inflict on their students.
With great anticipation, I attacked the documents in the Counts collection. The first folder dragged me deep into Counts’ personality and life. A handwritten autobiographical sketch for a listing in the Directory of American Scholars revealed his high self-regard.
Morning became evening as I examined his Soviet driver’s license, Counts’ arrogant, irritated eyes peering sideways from behind round, rimless gold spectacles, his neatly trimmed mustache framing his down-turned mouth (picture below).
He did not suffer fools lightly, and in this picture, he clearly felt he was dealing with a fool. His huge collection of typed, and later, hand-transcribed quotes on 3x5 index cards took up several boxes. His secretary had taken care of him well. In the years when Nucia Lodge had been his assistant, she had typed the cards. After he’d left Columbia, the cards were block letter, Counts’ own handwriting.
Counts must have been humiliated by the need to prostitute himself to a little jerkwater university. After decades of being quoted on the front page of the New York Times, being toasted by intellectuals and politicians around the world, influencing policies, how down-market must Carbondale have been for Counts?
The Education School was housed in a three story brick building that looked a lot like an elementary school. After 30 years at Columbia’s marble palaces, what did Counts think every morning when he crossed the parking lot on Clocktower Drive. Counts’ attempts to change to world, his revolutionary calls to remake America, with blood and bullets, if necessary, had not led him to the halls of power. They’d led him to almost literally nowhere.
After two days of immersion in the remnants of Counts’ scholarly life, I was left with more questions than answers. I’d discovered that there were almost no documents from before Counts’ arrival in Illinois. His daughter, Martha, told me in a telephone conversation that he had destroyed his papers when he left Columbia, in the mid-1955. It seemed that Counts had overstayed his welcome there, maybe because of the heat of the anti-communist investigations, maybe because of his age, but Columbia asked him to leave.
And Martha said that, in a fit of pique, the little man had burned everything. For someone with such a massive sense of self-importance, of his own historical importance, and a massive output of writing, it must have been a huge undertaking, psychically and physically. His papers were surely his babies. He produced nothing in his life but thoughts and words. His papers represented his thoughts and words. What drove him to destroy the lot? Was there something that he wanted to hide?
His works in the fifteen years following his arrival at Columbia were revolutionary screeds extolling the superiority of collectivism and educational methods of indoctrination.
He had been in touch with myriad Soviets, American leftists, and Willing Accomplices. He had been a member and leader of many Willing Accomplice organizations. He must have had a huge collection of membership files, agendas, meeting minutes, planning documents, and more from his days as a Soviet stooge.
Having left the service of Soviet intelligence in the late 1940s, he must have panicked when he realized the evidence that had accumulated in his Columbia office. Did he destroy the incriminating items long before he left Columbia? Or did he not destroy them, and they are sitting in a box, in an archives or an attic somewhere even now, waiting for the truth to be documented?
Until his lost papers show up, I can only base my analysis on the remnants he left behind, which he must have believed to be non-incriminating: his Soviet drivers license; a notebook with contacts in Moscow he and Nucia Perlmutter had jotted down before his first visit; postcards the little professor collected in Russia.
Later items of great value he left in his Carbondale papers included a series of letters with his Russian companions from his driving trip across Russia, chronicled in his little book: A Ford Crosses Russia.
In early 1964, Counts attempted to raise funds to repeat his 6,000 mile car trip across Russia. He recontacted the Soviet handlers who had accompanied him, and pitched them the idea. A correspondence ensued, over the next couple years, as Counts futilely attempted to convince the communists to give him a visa to enter the USSR. The KGB, with a full file on the turncoat, would never authorize his visit. But the letters that resulted from the idea are full of unspoken secrets shared between comrades.
Taking a coffee break in Morris Library’s soaring atrium, with a Starbucks kiosk brewing latte, Counts’ rhetoric bounced around my brain. This little man talked and wrote, and wrote and talked. Enabled by the Soviets, he had ruined American education. I put down my grande cappuccino and gazed out on the storm-wracked campus through the huge atrium windows.
If only there was a smoking gun in those boxes—a note from his handling case officer, an accounting for expenses reimbursed by the KGB. But the clues and insights come thick and fast. More time in the archives could pay dividends. Intriguing leads to the archived papers of the John Day Publishing Company, at Princeton University’s library, add an item to my to-do list. This is one search that probably won’t be over soon.
Baltimore
February 1932
The hall was packed. A chilly February evening in the dead of winter. Yet the audience, packed into the small hall, standing room only, was steaming hot. The little wiry man, after his introduction by the chairman of the Progressive Education Association, stepped up to the podium.
In a strong tenor voice, he wove a hypnotizing tale. The world, as his audience knew it, was rotten. They raptly followed his rapid fire delivery. Fact piled upon anecdote, the mustachioed, bespectacled professor had seen the future—and it worked.
He plied the listeners with intoxicating tales of Russian peasants cooperatively creating their own learning communities. He told them that America’s mythical rugged individualism was dead and dangerous. The audience would lead Americans, willingly or unwillingly, into the bright future of collectivist striving for the communal good.
He told the now spellbound American teachers how, in Russia, experts such as he used a five year plan to guide their efforts. He extolled the excellent results being achieved, ahead of schedule, by the brilliant technologists he knew in the Soviet Union.
Riding the wave of tension and excitement, George Sylvester Counts pounded the podium as he delivered his final pronouncement to the dumb-struck teachers: “If democracy is to be achieved in the industrial age, powerful classes must be persuaded to surrender their privileges.”
The little professor strolled over to his chair to the left of the podium, on the stage, and sat down. Self-satisfied and smug, he smoothed his mustache. The audience, stunned, began to buzz. The teachers were not sure if they had heard right.
Counts stood up. He adjusted his coat, and approached the podium. He glanced at his notes. The crowd hushed. Counts declared, his high pitched voice echoing throughout the hall, “Ruling classes never surrender their privileges voluntarily!”
He went on, “If a bold and realistic program of education is not forthcoming, we can only anticipate a struggle of increasing bitterness terminating in revolution and disaster!”
Some in the assembly of Progressive teachers were unsure if they had heard the professor correctly. Had he just advocated the violent overthrow of the constitutional government of the United States? Was he advocating a revolution, and that it be led by teachers?
Many of the teachers crowded around Counts after his speech. Teachers questioned him. Hands thrust through the ring of questioners to slap his back.
In the first class compartment of the late train to New York that night, Counts was ablaze with fervor. He had done it. An almost direct call for violence. The repressed ardor for collectivism was finally released from his small breast. Now the world could see that he was a lion, not a Midwestern lamb. He folded the notes that Nucia Perlmutter had typed for his speech, slid them into his coat’s inside pocket, leaned back in the richly upholstered chair, closed his eyes, and dreamed.
Counts’ dreams were vivid and satisfying. He was the American Education Commissar. He’d seen how the Russians respected their commissar. He held complete sway over all education matters. He would create a five year plan, spelling out in excruciating detail, for the dunces he controlled, exactly how to achieve the goals set out in the Chairman’s Five Year Plan.
Counts smiled in his sleep. The porter, passing by his compartment, looked in to offer service. The evil smile twisting the face of the little professor shocked the porter. He withdrew without a word, and made a mental note to avoid that compartment.
Background
His life was enmeshed in the sweeping arc of historic upheavals in American society, education, and academia. At the same time, he was drawn into, or stepped into, the titanic clash of civilizations—capitalism versus communism, American rugged individualism versus European sophist collectivism, republican democracy versus totalitarian dictatorship, and as can be seen in hindsight: good versus evil. George Sylvester Counts witnessed, and participated in, the tectonic shifts of American culture.
As we will see, the Russian communists built him a platform, and provided him with a message, which he delivered very effectively during a turning point in American history.
This professor of Comparative Education, knowing nothing about Russia, became in less than five years, a leading expert on Soviet education, and a “translator” of a Soviet primary school textbook that explained Stalin’s Five Year Plan.
Counts’ breathless explanations of the beauty and wisdom of collectivist central planning was accepted at face value by a guileless American public, not yet made cynical by the countless lies of the emerging forces of the American Left.
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.
My counter-intelligence analysis reveals, for the first time, the role of his “secretary/assistant” in the covert influence intelligence operation conducted by the KGB. Nucia Perlmutter Lodge was an almost perfect KGB covert influence handler.
The KGB’s influence op used Counts as a channel to insert the Muenzenberg Creed covert payload into American education and academia.
Although Counts seemed to turn against his Soviet collaborators in his later career, he never renounced the point of view which made him a hero to anti-American forces. His books and the Counts Manifesto have influenced the training, education, and educational philosophies and practices of several generations of American teachers, including those teaching, and training teachers, today.
Early Life
Counts was born in Baldwin City, eastern Kansas in 1889, the third of six children in a farming family. His parents valued formal education highly and sacrificed to send the young Counts and his siblings to the good public schools in Baldwin. After graduating high school, Counts entered Baker College in his hometown in 1907, and graduated in 1911. All but one of Counts’ siblings graduated from the College.
How many young Americans were fortunate enough to receive such an education? Counts’ parents sacrificed to provide their children with this education, moving their household to be closer to a town which offered such fine education. Many families could not afford such a move, or were unaware of the opportunities. They made do with a simple education of ABC’s, basics of reading, and simple math.
Some were able to continue through high school, learning a solid curriculum of math and science, history and language. But most American schools were not in the same league as that enjoyed by Counts.
Counts was afforded as thorough a classical education as an American boy on the Midwestern prairie could expect. He studied Latin and Greek. He soaked up the glories of ancient civilizations that had passed on their traditions to the young United States. He learned of the deeds of Greek and Roman warriors, heroes, gods, and goddesses. Young George soaked up a solid understanding of the foundations of American culture and civilization. He learned of the trials and tribulations, successes and defeats, and the myths and legends of the founding fathers of his own young country.
In short, young George Counts was the beneficiary of a thoroughly grounded, thoroughly American education. The roots of America extended through the centuries through English, European, Roman and Greek civilization, philosophy, and government. Democracy was a fragile thread that ran through this historical fabric. American education of Counts’ era made sure that each student grasped this thread firmly and understood the foundations of American government and society.
Counts’ solid grounding in logic, rhetoric, composition, writing and debate served him well throughout his studies, and his later career as an academic. He wrote long, well and often. An introduction to one of his books goes on for what seems like forever, as he weaves thread of detail in and out of the narrative.
At Baker, Counts studied “classical and scientific Latin; scientific and modern language; literature and arts, oratory, commercial, normal,” subjects.
Wilson Counts, George’s younger brother, inherited the family farm in Baldwin. George Counts’ nieces and nephews recall a sharp contrast between the two brothers, Wilson and George. Wilson was an engaging and humble uncle who encouraged their interest in his gems and the farm life.
In contrast, a Kansas historian wrote that George, who would stay only several days during the weeks-long family reunions held annually at the farm from 1920 to 1960, would sit and rock on the front porch “lecturing long-windedly.”
Academic Career
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Counts taught high school science for one school year, and then served as a principal at another high school, both of these in Kansas. In 1913 Counts entered the University of Chicago, where he married a classmate, Lois Bailey, the daughter of a Methodist minister from Kansas, with whom he had two daughters, and remained married the rest of his life. He earned his doctoral degree in education in 1916.
From 1916 to 1920, Counts worked at a series of small colleges in their Education Schools. These included Delaware College (where he was the head of the department of education), Harris Teachers College, and the University of Washington. In 1920 Counts began work at Yale. He described his hiring by Columbia in the preface to a 1931 book—after a short stint at the University of Chicago in 1926, Dr. Counts was hired at the Teachers College of Columbia University (TC) in 1927.
According to his daughter, Martha Counts, Dr. Counts remained on the faculty at TC until his mandatory retirement at age 65 in 1956.
After several visiting professorships, Counts was recruited by Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale. His name brought immediate credibility to the rural School of Education in the coal-mining country in the delta of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Art Aikman, an SIU Education colleague remembered him at SIU as a small, “bumbling, mumbling man” who kept to himself, made sage wisecracks in Latin and Greek, sat in the back of the room at faculty meetings, and constantly smoked a pipe. Counts died in southern Illinois in 1974, weeks away from his 85th birthday.
Columbia Teachers College—International Institute
Teachers College (TC) of Columbia University, New York City. He was hired by the new President of TC, Dr William Russell, in 1927. Dr Russell succeeded his father in that post in the same year. Three years earlier, the Rockefeller Foundation had provided a grant to TC to fund the Teachers College International Institute (TCII).
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’ first foray into international education issues was probably where he networked into the TCII. He was part of a team of academic educators who went on a colonial government survey of the educational system in the Philippines in 1924-25.
His colleagues on that trip, according to a contemporary account in the New York Times, Dec. 20, 1924, included the TCII director, Paul Monroe; the Carnegie Foundation’s Institute of International Education director, Stephen Duggan; Harold Rugg, another TCII professor; as well as several other TC professors.
Monroe’s PhD was from the University of Chicago, like Counts. It’s likely that they shared an alumni network, and probably shared similar philosophies of education. For sure, the months-long Philippines journey, via steamship, and their work on the survey placed Monroe, Count, and the TC professors in intimate contact for a prolonged period.
Confluence of Willing Accomplices
Interestingly, Duggan’s son, Laurence Duggan succeeded his father to head the Carnegie Foundations Institute of International Education director from 1946 until his suicide in 1948. He jumped from his office window after his spying for the KGB was publicly revealed by Whittaker Chambers.
Duggan’s mentor, Edward R. Murrow, also a staffer of the Institute of International Education, made Duggan’s case a stable of his Andemca attacks against the largely accurate McCarthy investigations. The Duggan story played a prominent role in a recent PC-Progressive influence movie produced by George Clooney.
This is an interesting case study of all three cultural domains merging together, across the decades, for a covert influence triple whammy—a Willing Accomplice Hollywood director in 2005, creating a movie about a Willing Accomplice in the media who went after Joe McCarthy with an Andemca attack because his friend, a Willing Accomplice in Academia killed himself after being outed as a KGB agent in 1948.
The precise alignment of the main themes of Muenzenberg’s covert influence ops could not have been brought together more neatly if Willi had planned it himself.
The Venona files reveal that the younger Duggan was a prolific KGB collection agent during his tenure at the U.S. State Department. And one must assume that he was, like Alger Hiss, also engaged in covert influence operations, at State, and later at his education foundation job.
Networked his Way to TCII
It would appear that Counts’ close contact during the Philippines project with the elder Duggan, and the other TC professors, convinced the TCII director to bring Counts on as their “Russia expert” at TCII. In 1927, Russian expert or not, Counts joined TC.
Almost immediately, Counts packed up for his first trip to the Soviet Union. Spending the Rockefeller money (likely a sop to the institution where Rockefeller’s two sons, Nelson and David both attended TC’s “experimental” Lincoln School), which flowed into TCII at the rate of $100,000 per year, said funding promised for a total of 10 years, seemed to agree with Counts.
Up to 1927, Counts’ research and writing had focused on parochial subjects: The Social Composition of Boards of Education (1927) and The Selective Character of American Secondary Education (1922). But now that he was deemed a Russia expert, he began to act like one.
Counts followed in the footsteps of his TCII boss—William Russell had worked in Russia during the final days of World War I, in the first (and last) official U.S. government propaganda unit, the Committee on Public Information. Russell had been in Siberia, providing American propaganda movies to the locals, exhorting the Russians to maintain their vigilance against the Germans.
While the effort was ultimately a failure, Russell surely built a strong network among the Russians he encountered there. The Bolsheviks were establishing themselves across the breadth of the Russian empire at that time, and were working the Americans heavily.
At Columbia, Counts (writing in the third person) recounted in the preface to a 1931 book, he was hired to be the “associate director of the International Institute, and professor of education in Teachers College…He served as special investigator of education in the Philippines…and in Russia in 1927 and 1929.”
Counts claimed in the same book that his trip to the Philippines was in 1927. However, ship manifests document his travel on the SS President Jefferson, departing Manila on May 5, 1925, and arriving Seattle on May 28, 1925.
Counts’ trips abroad for TCII were followed by a series of successful publications on Russia in 1929 and the early 1930’s. These publications gained him a national reputation as a “Russia expert.”
According to Counts, his travels in the Soviet Union included: “[In 1927] approximately three months in Soviet Russia traveling extensively by railroad, visiting institutions of many kinds, and engaging citizens from all walks of life in conversation.”
Counts appeared to believe that he was free to go where and as he pleased. If there were any controls over his movements or actions, he was either unaware, or pretended they did not exist.
Handlers in the Ford Crossing Soviet Russia
When he returned to the Soviet Union, in 1929, he said: “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.”
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.”
In the SIU archives, Counts’ letters 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 indiscriminant 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.
After his 1929 trip, Counts’ daughter Martha said he took a sabbatical year in 1936, and again traveled in the Soviet Union.
As was common knowledge among Counts’ contemporaries, no visitors to the Soviet Union in that time period went anywhere without advance coordination with “security,” meaning the KGB.
During the latter part of his Columbia tenure, and for several years thereafter, Counts was involved in electoral politics. This included a stint as the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). He ran for the U.S. Senate seat in New York on the Liberal Party ticket, a Party he helped to found.
Ultimately, his political ambitions bore no fruit, and he moved to rural Illinois, living out his life in obscure academia.
Educational Philosophy
Already a proponent of Dewey’s Progressive Education philosophy when he arrived at Columbia, Counts became a member of a regular discussion group at TC that included Dewey, William Kilpatrick, and other proponents of radical educational reform.
According to a profile of the group, written in 1951, “This discussion group was probably the most powerful influence in Teachers College; it attracted some of the ablest men in the college, including Dewey, Counts, Childs, Watson, Brunner, Raup, Hartmann, Johnson, Newlon, Bagley, Elliott, the young Dean Russell himself, as well as many others.”
The Counts Manifesto:
Individualism is Dead—Long Live Collectivism!
Counts’ attitude toward education matured at TC, and with his visits to Russia. Following his publication of the Soviet Union’s elementary school text-book, The New Russia Primer in 1931, Counts unveiled what I call the “Counts Manifesto.” He made a whirlwind series of speeches to professional education organizations, including his Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1932.
In his bold proclamation, printed as a series of pamphlets capturing his PEA speeches, as Dare the School Build a New Social Order, Counts broke with Dewey’s ideas of child-centered education, and proclaimed the need for “imposition and indoctrination.”
He argued that he and his fellow Progressives had been timid, had professed and theorized, and not acted in concert with their beliefs. Counts’ argument was fundamentally Marxist, in tone and terminology, but never referenced Marx. His themes included class, class conflict, anarchy of extreme individualism, race hatred, reconstruction of society; democracy vs. industrial feudalism, capital must belong to the masses, not the favored few.
In his PEA speeches, He spoke (and spoke, and spoke, and spoke) condescendingly of “the masses,” “the minds of the masses.” He said “natural resources and all important forms of capital will have to be collectively owned.”
Counts went on to demand that “the resulting system of production and distribution be made to serve directly the masses of the people.”
He ended his speeches with a call to action to his fellow Progressive Educators, in effect a call to bloody revolution: “If democracy is to be achieved…powerful classes must be persuaded to surrender their privileges…this process has commonly been attended by bitter struggle and even bloodshed.”
In a shot across the bow of the American bourgeoisie, Counts warned his comrades, “Ruling classes never surrender their privileges voluntarily.”
Counts continued with his line of argument in later speeches and writing, toning it down for his audience, if necessary.
On Nov. 12, 1934, in an article headlined Dr. Counts Sees New Social Era…Age of Individualism is Drawing to a Close…Asks Educators to Prepare Public for Collectivism, he told the New York Times that “America has already entered an era of collectivism.”
The Times commented that Counts’ call for collectivist reconstruction of society was in accord with a related commission study that “urged educators to help the American people adjust themselves to the emerging collectivist society…”
Thus, the fundamental thrust of Counts’ prolific writing during this period called for a revolution, bloody if necessary, in the American education system. His vision was for teachers to lead an inevitable reconstruction of American society.
Counts preached his manifesto throughout the 1930’s, and up to the beginning of World War II.
He continued to publish books promoting his Manifesto, including: A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia (1930); The American Road to Culture: A Social Interpretation of Education in the United States (1930); Soviet Challenge to America (1931); A Call to Teachers of the Nation (1933); The Social Foundations of Education (1934).
Public Identification as an Influence Agent
His very public advocacy for collectivist revolution made Counts fair game for those who disagreed with him. The newspapers of William Randolph Hearst frequently published criticisms of Counts and his comrades. The Progressives did not take the criticism sitting down.
In multiple venues, both spoken and written, Counts and his supporters, practicing the covert action principle of Andemca when exposed, lashed out at the Hearst criticisms. Their responses were personal and, of course avoided the central point of Hearst’s criticisms—that the Counts Manifesto was solidly anti-American and pro-collectivist.
Defection?
At some point in the 1940’s, Counts made a 180 degree turn in tone and substance. Suddenly, with no explanation, he portrayed himself as an anti-communist. He proceeded to churn out several books on the realities of the Soviet Union. Yet, he never explicitly acknowledged that his earlier infatuation with the USSR was wrong.
He called himself an “anti-communist liberal” for the rest of his life, and got away with it. Not only did Dr. Counts have his cake and eat it too, but he had the frosting, the candles, and got to lick the bowl and the spoon.
Rejection of His American Roots
How to explain that Counts, after leaving his high school in Kansas, and obtaining a PhD in Chicago, turned on his roots? It would appear that his goal, after entering academia, and especially after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1927, was to repudiate everything that made up the core of his culture, but most especially the education system that had created him.
His lifelong professional quest seems to have been to destroy that which had created him. He preached the necessity of Progressive Education. This implied Change, with a capital “C.” Things that had been done for decades needed to be Changed. Assumptions needed to be Changed. Attitudes needed to be Changed. Individualism had to Change to Collectivism. Counts saw the future, and had the prescriptions to cure America’s ills.
Nucia Perlmutter Lodge—Counts’ Assistant and KGB Handler
New York Harbor
October 4, 1910
The SS Noordam, a stalwart of the Holland-America line, blasted her whistle. The one-smokestack steamer smoothly slid through the Narrows, past Liberty Island. The pilot steered the huge ocean liner into the New York harbor. An early October chill, damp and windy, permeated the mouth of the Hudson. The twelve day passage from Rotterdam to New York had seemed like an eternity to the sixteen year old girl. She tightly gripped the railing. Her gloveless hands were cold, but she didn’t notice. She shivered as she watched the Statue of Liberty glide by.
Thursday afternoon commuters jammed the ferries plying the route between the Jersey side of the Hudson and the Manhattan piers. The ferries buzzed around like fireflies, darting through the huge ocean-liner’s plodding path.
The Noordam carried only first and second class passengers. With no steerage class passengers, she steamed past Ellis Island. Two tugboats guided the passenger steamship through the channel, up the river and into the narrow slots of the Holland-America pier in New Jersey.
Anna Nucia Perlmutter reached into the inner pocket of her simple but solid black coat, and counted the coins, without looking. Fourteen dollars, everything left from the savings her sister had slipped to her when she left Odessa two months ago. Chinsia had choked up, but kept her regal bearing, so important to her. When they had exchanged simple pecks on the cheek, Anna’s oldest sister whispered in Yiddish, “Tell Mama I love her. Me and the kids will come as soon as we can.”
Anna, so excited to be moving, after months of terrifying waiting in the remains of the crumbling Russian empire, didn’t realize that she would never see her sister alive again. Hearing the catch in Chinsia’s voice, she ignored it, and chirpily answered back, out loud, “Don’t be silly Chinsy. I’ll see you in Chicago!”
As positive as she pretended to be, Anna felt a deep pain leaving her sister and their home. The anti-Jewish pogroms in the last several years had split apart their tight-knit community. Anna, her parents and five brothers and sisters would be reunited in Chicago, but Chinsia decided to stay, with her new husband, to build a life together in Odessa.
Chinsia clinging to her arm, she’d climbed onto the agent’s wagon, looking over her shoulder as the sway-backed horse pulled the rickety vehicle down the alley, to her destiny. Switching from wagon to train. Jewish welfare committee transit houses. Border crossings. Corrupt guards leering as she passed through the de-lousing showers. At the center in Hamburg she paid two marks for a bed and board: white bread, tea with sugar and milk for breakfast; thin meat and vegetable soup for lunch; milk and sugar in tea with white bread at night.
Now, as she inched down the gangway, her small bag packed with her clothes and books weighing down her thin arms, Anna mentally reviewed her mother’s address. Her senses were bombarded by the smell from the Hudson River, the huge debarkation halls on either side of the Holland America’s Hoboken pier number five, the broad paved streets with a tangle of telegraph wires and fine trees, just dropping the last of their leaves, the babble of six, eight, ten European languages, and the familiar Yiddish, stevedores calling, stewards urging passengers to move down the ramps, the pervasive stench of manure.
She knew that the immigration inspectors, after the health screening, would ask for her destination. And she was ready: Fannie Perlmutter, 1302 North Roley St, Chicago, Illinois.
She repeated it to herself again, in English. The difficult rhythm and tongue positions of the new language were easy for Anna. She was like a parrot. If she heard a word, in any language, she could repeat it.
Going down the ship’s gangplank, Anna was behind the Hines family, Mrs. Hines, three girls and their little brother, Nechemje. Surie Hines, just a year older than Anna, became her new best friend during the crossing. The girls stayed close together, Anna appearing to be one of the Hines family, as they moved through the line into the Holland-America arrival hall.
The cavernous red brick building was organized like a cattle sorting operation. Chutes and stalls guided the mass of immigrants through the stations to the American immigration bureaucrats. Anna’s second class ticket bought her out of the chaos of Ellis Island into the more gentile arrival operations at Pier 5. But that was no consolation to Anna.
Surie Hines and the family split off at the first chute. Anna touched Surie’s arm, in a gentle gesture of good-bye. Surie, right arm loaded with a bag and a bundle, left hand holding little Neshe’s hand, glanced at Anna and sighed, then disappeared into the crush of excited immigrants.
So easy to make friends. So easy to move on. So easy to blend in. So easy to make others think she was something she was not. The first in a series of new relationships developed and lost in Anna’s new homeland. October 4, 1910—the first day of the transformation of a little Russian-Jewish girl into a covert communist operator.
Anna Nucia Osipovna Perlmutter Lodge was born in Odessa, in what is now the Ukraine, in February 1894. She seems to have used a variety of names through her life, but finally settled on Nucia, with the family name Lodge taken from a claimed husband (name and identity as yet unknown).
Her family, probably victimized by the recurring anti-Jewish pogroms which swept the region in the late 1800s and early 1900s, fled to America. Her parents, Joseph and Fannie Perlmutter, and Nucia’s five sisters settled in Chicago, where they appeared in the 1910 U.S. census, without Nucia. The children are noted as speaking Russian, and the parents as speaking Yiddish. The family claimed to have arrived in 1910.
Nucia arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, apparently traveling alone, in October 1910, when she was 16 years old, using the name Anna Perlmutter. She indicated her destination to be her mother’s address in Chicago, and her next of kin outside the U.S. to be a sister in Odessa. Her native language was listed by the immigration agent as “Hebrew.”
Nucia next appears in American records at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she earned her Master’s degree in Education in 1924, with a thesis titled History of Education in Russia. She called herself Nucia Perlmutter.
In a resume that she sent to Cossack General Poliakoff, who was seeking a translator for his Russian language memoir in 1966, Nucia claimed that she graduated from the Mariinsky Gymnasium in St. Petersburg in 1916. If that is the case, she must have returned to Russia after her original arrival in America in 1910.
Her great-niece, Amy Dennis, remembers Nucia’s sisters not approving of Nucia and her academic activities dealing with Russia. Amy, whose grandmother was Rayousha, Nucia’s oldest sister, said that her grandmother seemed to be a believing Russian Orthodox Christian. Rayousha had Russian icons all over her house. Until my CI research, Amy had not known that her ancestors were originally Jewish.
In fact, Amy said that her grandmother told her that the three sisters, Rayousha, Zenia, and Nucia arrived by ship in New York, soon after the revolution, in 1917. Rayousha said that she and Xenia had gone on to Chicago, and Nucia had stayed in New York to go to school.
According to Amy, “There was a strange thing going on in that household. Grandmother spoke lovingly of Russia, but didn't want to discuss what happened there. A cloud of repressed suffering hung in the air.”
The secrets were so thick and impenetrable, that they drove Rayousha’s only daughter, Lola Jean Kabrine, to flee the house at 16, and to finally go mad.
Lola Jean adored and idolized her aunt, Nucia. She listed Nucia as her next-of-kin when she enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1943. Lola Jean provided an address in Chicago for Nucia, who actually lived in either New York or Philadelphia at the time, while her own mother, Rayousha, lived less than 15 miles from the University.
The young girl symbolically reached out to her aunt, hoping for contact with her idol. Unfortunately, Nucia was busy. Even this desperate gesture revealed another layer of Nucia’s cover—another name—Kay Lodge. So many names, so many places, one small woman.
Until 2010, Amy Kabrine Russell had no idea that the family had come to America with 6 sisters, father and mother. Nor did she know that they were Jewish.
She said that she met Nucia a few times in Chicago, growing up in the 1960s, “Nucia was a bit of an enigma. She was attractive, quiet, serious, small in stature, with dark hair.”
It appears that Nucia’s sisters’ guilty knowledge of what Nucia was really about, and their family secrets, was likely to have created much of the fear and dread that haunted the family.
The mystery of the disappeared father, mother, and five children must also have been part of that heavy atmosphere. Did they die in the 1918 flu epidemic in Chicago? Did they return with Nucia to Russia and then get stuck during the Revolution? Whatever happened, it was not nice or pretty, for the matriarch and patriarch of the family, along with five of their children, seem to have been whisked down the memory hole, never mentioned or acknowledged again.
It’s not clear how Nucia portrayed herself to her professional colleagues like Counts, but there is nothing to indicate that she shared her sisters’ adherence to Christianity. It’s also likely that her sisters had some idea that Nucia was involved with the Bolsheviks. Any Russian of that era knew that to return to Russia under the Bolsheviks was to put yourself under the direct control of the communists.
If we accept that Nucia returned to Russia to finish her schooling in St. Petersburg sometime between 1910 and 1916, that leaves eight years—from 1916 to 1924—unaccounted for in her life after receiving her diploma in St. Petersburg.
These were tumultuous years in Russia, including the revolution and civil war. Watch Dr. Zhivago to understand the turmoil.
If her Master’s degree took two years of study at Clark, that still leaves 1916 to 1922 as unaccounted in her life.
I believe that Nucia, during those formative years, was deeply involved with the Bolsheviks, possibly in Russia and maybe in the U.S. Her American ties, with her family living there, made her an attractive candidate for KGB espionage work. Much like Alexander Gumberg, she could establish an American persona, totally non-threatening to her American targets.
The KGB’s Comintern apparatus could even have sponsored her MA at Clark, preparing her for covert action operations. It appears that she returned to Russia after finishing her MA in Massachusetts.
According to Counts’ daughter, Martha, the professor met Nucia on his initial trip to Russia in 1927, where she served as a translator, assistant and secretary to his delegation.
In her resume, Nucia seems to confirm this version of events. She listed her “Assignments in Soviet Russia:”
1927: Interpreter and Secretary to a group of American educators and writers (Paul Douglas, George S. Counts, Stuart Chase, Rexford C. Tugwell, and others). Present at interviews with Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Krupskaya, and many others. Travelled with the delegation from Leningrad to Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Crimea, and back to Moscow.
1929: Appointed by Teachers College to do educational research in Soviet Russia for one year.
1930: Had charge of the American educational exhibit in Leningrad as part of the International Exhibit.
1931: Guided a group of American teachers on an educational tour in Soviet Russia.
If she met Counts on his initial trip to Russia in 1927, and then returned with him to TC as his secretary, this fits very closely the pattern of the KGB’s use of translator/guides for developing, assessing and running espionage agents. After assignment in Russia, if the translators establish a strong enough relationship with their targets, they can manipulate that relationship for operational purposes.
The years 1924 to 1927 are still unaccounted for in Nucia’s life. From the time she graduated Clark, to her first meeting with Counts, was she in America, or in training in Russia, or was she serving elsewhere?
Her later smooth transition to using various names would seem to indicate that she was skilled in tradecraft. Could she have been operational elsewhere during those missing years? In her letters to the Cossack general, she called herself “Anna Osipovna,” Joseph’s daughter Anna, the traditional Russian formal form of address.
She indicated on her resume that, in addition to speaking “Russian and English equally well,” she also could “speak French and German,” and that she could “understand Polish and Ukranian.” She appeared to have cleansed the old Hebrew-speaking Anna Perlmutter from her mind, if not from history. It’s likely that Nucia was able to slip into and out of a variety of identities, with little difficulty.
Nucia in Russia
In Tenenbaum’s story of TC Professor Kilpatrick’s academic career, in 1929, when Kilpatrick went to Russia, he discovered that he was well known. His books had been translated into Russian and were being used in all the teacher-training institutions.
Professor Pinkevich, president of a Moscow university, and later Counts’ source for his first book on Russian education, greeted him warmly. Kilpatrick had met the Russian as a visiting professor in the United States.
Kilpatrick’s greeting at the Russian Educational Bureau was also warm. Revealing both his awareness of restrictions on free movement, followed by naiveté in believing the answer, Kilpatrick asked, "Am I free to go anywhere I wish?" He credulously accepted the answer, “Yes,” he was told, "you are free to go into any school at any time without asking anybody anything."
Using an operational ploy to attach a handler to a visiting American, the KGB assigned Nucia to Kilpatrick. As Tenebaum told it, “At the time, Professor Counts of Teachers College was visiting Russia. He was away from Moscow, traveling somewhere, and he placed at Kilpatrick's disposal his secretary, Miss Nucia Perlmutter, who spoke and read Russian.”
Playing along with Kilpatrick, Nucia arranged a bit of Potemkin Village theater. Tenebaum wrote, “Early one morning Kilpatrick and Miss Perlmutter went up to the first policeman they met and asked him to direct them to the nearest school. Kilpatrick thought that this provided the best way of locating a typical Moscow school.”
The NY Times quoted Nucia at an educational exposition in Leningrad in August 1930. The exposition was organized to celebrate the Soviet advances in education in the second year of their Five Year Plan.
The American exhibit of American Progressive education was presented to the Russian attendees, in their native language by two Teachers College staff, one of whom was Nucia Perlmutter. As reported in an August 24, 1930 article, Nucia wrote to the NY Times in glowing terms about the exhibit, extolling the visits of “the workers” as the most interesting element” of the exhibit.
Later Life
She was naturalized as an American citizen, in Chicago, on January 6, 1927. She continued to work as Counts’ secretary/assistant/translator until he retired from Columbia in 1956. She then moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where she worked from 1956 until her death in 1983, at the age of 96.
Publications
Nucia was a scholar in her own right. In 1934, she published an article in the Educational Yearbook of the International Institute of Teachers College entitled: The University And A Student Of Yesterday – The Birth Of The Russian University. Also in 1934 Nucia published Higher Education And The Student Of Today: The New World In The Making Of The New Man.
Both of these articles, especially the latter, are fairly gushing in their description of the changes brought about by the Bolshevik October Revolution. These two articles appear to be graduate level research done in conjunction with Dr. Counts at TC.
Her thesis at Clark University, completed in 1924, was an exhaustive historical review of the several centuries of Russian education systems. Her research ended with the then-new destruction of Russian education and society by the “Bolshevikis.”
Nucia’s academic articles echo Counts’ own publications of the same time period. As Counts was enthusing about the death of individualism and the emergence of collectivism as the new way for America, Nucia wrote: “The…difference between the old and the new student is that the former was an individualist, whereas the latter is a collectivist.”
Nucia listed her publications on her resume. She included the 1929 first work she translated and Counts “edited,” The New Education in the Soviet Republic, as well as 1930’s best-seller, New Russia’s Primer. These two books both credited Counts as co-translator.
After she and Counts rejected their Muenzenberg Creed covert influence operations, they attempted to build their credentials as anti-communists. In this vein, she and Counts published three more books, as co-translators or co-authors, 1948, I Want to be Like Stalin; 1952, The Country of the Blind; and 1956, The Challenge of Soviet Education.
Princeton, New Jersey
June, 2010
From the maze of interstates and the Jersey Turnpike, to the tree-lined drive into Princeton, I negotiated a jumble of construction and detours on a June morning. Eighty-five degrees and sticky, cicadas screamed at each other as I drove into the New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia, with the windows down.
The Firestone library was on the left just before the main drag. With just a few short hours to spend in the Special Collections room, I looked for a parking spot near the library. A couple blocks away, the town offered free parking on the street until 4pm.
Quick walking pace through the college downtown, a trickle of sweat dripping down my back, I crossed Nassau Street onto the campus. The place reeked of America’s elite. The Dulles brothers, one Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and the other the first Director of Central Intelligence, were both Princeton graduates.
Coming around the corner from Washington Road, a hexagonal addition on the ancient stone library has a plaque affixed. The dedication notes the building is the Dulles Library of Diplomatic History, named after the diplomat, not the CIA brother.
Wending my way through the lobby to the Special Collections Department, I begin the bureaucratic process of signing up for a pass to gain access to the Special Collections, which hold the archives of the John Day Publishing Company.
John Day published books by George S. Counts and Nucia Perlmutter Lodge. The archives index showed extensive correspondence between Counts and Nucia, and their John Day editor, Richard Walsh, who later became Mr. Pearl S. Buck. The correspondence started in 1929, and ended in the early-1950s.
Following the bored librarian’s monotone instructions, I got a photo ID card, washed my hands in a 1920s bathroom, and deposited all my possessions but one pencil and my laptop in a locker. I’ve used up 45 minutes of precious time. The short and stocky librarian escorted me to the Special Collections reading room, which coincidentally is in the Dulles hexagon.
Finally, the reading room librarian wheeled up a cart with boxes of archive folders, and let me have them one at a time. I had to fill out a permission form to take a digital photo of any document. She had to take the form for approval to another librarian, hidden away in another room. All this sucked up precious minutes.
The discoveries in the John Day archives make all the aggravations worthwhile. Handwritten and typewritten letters from both Counts and Nucia are in the archives, dozens of them. The letters reveal details of their relationship. But correspondence between Walsh and Counts provided the most interesting new information.
A letter from Counts to Walsh, March 20, 1933. “My dear Dick,” Counts began. Typing the letter himself, on his office letterhead, “International Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, Office of the Associate Director.”
Counts, by mid-1933 was deeply involved in KGB covert influence. He launched directly into his pitch, “Do you know General Victor A. Yakhontoff? He was assistant secretary of war under the Kerensky regime and is the author of Russia and the Soviet Union in the Far East. He is an extremely able and interesting man.”
The dapper little professor, attempting to gain access to the American publishing industry for another KGB influence agent, proposed that Yakhontoff come by the publisher’s office because, “you might like to see him and get acquainted.”
Walsh’s secretary annotated the letter with the date and time of the John Day executive’s planned meeting with Yakhontoff—Monday, April 3, 1933 at 11 o’clock.
Then again, in 1936, a Walsh letter to Counts reveals that Yakhontoff had continued to play a role in their relationship, exactly what role is not clear. On July 2, 1936 Walsh wrote, “General Yakhontoff tells me that you are leaving soon for nine months in Russia. Congratulations! I think it is fine that you are going back.”
As the Special Collections lady hustles me out at closing time, I’m lost in thought, imagining the extensive network of agents that the KGB had created 80 years ago. Their professionalism, expertise and efficiency are amazing.
Now I have to find out just who Yakhontoff was. Later research reveals him to be an influence agent for the Soviets—he traveled around America lecturing on the need for recognition of the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. After their op paid off in 1933, with Roosevelt’s formal diplomatic acknowledgement of the communist enemy that was striving to destroy his country, it appears that Yakhontoff continued his influence work and then disappeared.
Another solid link from the KGB to Counts.
Where the hell did I park? I retrace my steps, through a quaint row of offices and shops. A walkway through the back alley comes out on Madison Ave. Two blocks up, across Paul Robeson Place, named in honor of the black American communist singer, a tool of the Soviets, there’s my car.
Damn! Another ticket. Research costs more in parking tickets than it does in library fees.
Post-Script
Counts and Nucia both rejected their influence work, sometime during, or shortly after World War II. Nucia must have admitted to Counts the truth of the many years of their relationship, pouring out her heart and soul, revealing the methods and techniques the KGB used to control her, and to control him. Maybe Nucia’s defection was the catalyst that drove Counts to reject his former influence work.
They went on to write several anti-communist/Soviet books together, always with Counts as the main author, and Nucia as his unsung co-author. The details of KGB methods and the darkness of the totalitarian society, written in the first person, could only have come from Nucia’s first-hand experience of the brutal intelligence agency of her motherland.
Yet Counts and Lodge never recanted their opinions or writing in public, nor did they withdraw their previous work from the public domain. They never publicly admitted the reasons behind their 180 degree turnaround. Counts continued to be a professor until his death at age 84, becoming an eminence grise at SIU.
Counts renewed the copyrights on his books written as covert influence, extolling the virtues of collectivism. His daughter Martha has continued to renew them after his death.
Unfortunately, PC-Progressive educators of today, nearly 100 years after the peak years of Counts’ communist covert influence work, still view Counts as a prophet. Education journals constantly cite the fruits of the KGB’s Counts operation. A recent (July 2009) Google Scholar search revealed 329 citations of Counts’ 1934 work, Dare the School Build a New Social Order, evidence of the KGB’s continuing influence on our academic/education elite today.
Counts and Nucia continued their work together into the 1950s, with a strong anti-communist theme. Yet, they never admitted, at least publicly, that they were wrong, misled, duped, or just stupid. They simply changed their point of view in mid-stream, abandoning their collectivism for anti-communism.
Yet, Counts railed against the McCarthy investigations, all the while knowing that McCarthy was right. Self-satisfied, smug, and arrogant to the end, Counts’ donated his body for medical study at his death.
Nucia lived out the end of her life far from Counts, dying in California in 1983. She did translation work for the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, where she had followed another Russian revolutionary, Aleksandr Kerensky, helping to translate his memoirs.
CI Analysis of George S. Counts—3-Question Screening
Visited the USSR?
Success not consistent with recent past?
Content of work consistent with Muenzenberg creed?
Question 1—Visited the USSR?
Yes. Counts made multiple trips to the USSR, from 1929 to 1936. He spent months at a time in Russia. On his first visit, not speaking Russian, he met Nucia Perlmutter. Nucia became his constant companion for the next twenty-seven years.
Nucia provided Counts with contacts to high-level Russians, accompanying him on visits to Stalin, Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, and others. She was his translator/assistant for the rest of his career at TC.
Counts, in 1929, did a Potemkin Village-style “self-guided” 6,000 mile automobile trip around Russia. He was accompanied by Russian handlers for at least 5,000 miles of the trip.
Question 2—Success not Consistent with Recent Past?
Yes.
Counts had toiled in relative obscurity, working in a series of universities in the ten years prior to his achieving national prominence in 1929, with the publication of New Russia’s Primer.
In a matter of months, Counts’ name was regularly mentioned in the pages of the New York Times, and national news magazines.
By February 1930, Counts was confident enough of his own national prestige to issue a press release to newspapers on issues relating to the Soviet Union. The New York Times printed his words, with little commentary.
For the rest of his life, Counts milked his fame and notoriety, publishing books that were usually translations of Russian sources, or if his own words, run-on philosophic ramblings. The peak of his string of inconsistent success came in 1952 when he was the Liberal Party candidate the U.S. Senate in New York.
Question 3—Content of Work Consistent with Muenzenberg Creed?
Yes.
From the time he visited Russia for the first time in 1927, until he turned against the communists in the early 1940s, the gist of Counts’ message was a virtual carbon copy of the Muenzenberg creed.
Soon after returning to American from his 1929 automobile tour of Russia, in February 1930, Counts got in touch with the press. The New York Times noted that he was just back from “a seven-months tour of Russia as official representative of the International Institute.”
The Times article, seemingly based on Counts’ press release, quoted the professor of education on issues totally outside his realm of expertise.
The article headlined Counts’ warning to the American religious community. Channeling the KGB, his words were a thinly veiled threat to annihilate Russian believers,
Any effort on [the part of the American religious community] to effect an alleviation of conditions within Soviet Russia will be regarded as attacks of avowed enemies and will tend to harden the attitude of the revolutionary leaders toward the [Russian] church. Of course, if these protests were designed to consolidate the opposition of the Western peoples toward the revolutionary experiment in Russia, they will probably succeed admirably.
This is Muenzenberg’s “Russia is trying a grand experiment. You hope they succeed.” Right out of the covert influence workbook.
In the same statement, Counts took up the issue of the day for the KGB—the “Peace” movement. Muenzenberg was, at the same time, convening international congresses for peace, co-opting the liberals and recruiting Willing Accomplices to implant Moscow’s message in America.
Counts, promulgated the Muenzenberg Creed Peace message, “If we as a people think that we can move toward ultimate world peace and at the same time ignore the existence of Soviet Russia I fear that we are practicing the most extreme type of self-deception.”
Following the Muenzenberg Creed, Counts passed on the message to Americans that their country was the real threat to peace and the Russian’s noble experiment.
The article ended with Counts’ observation that the most likely threat to world peace was “the danger of a struggle between Soviet Russia and certain of the Western countries.” Read “America” for certain of the Western countries, of course.
Again the Muenzenberg Creed rings out, loud and clear: “You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding. You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country.”
In a Times article published on August 6, 1930, Counts addressed a captive audience of Summer session students at TC.
After Russian cargo was seized by the Treasury Department because it was suspected of being produced by convict labor, Counts said, “it would be difficult to prove that convict labor exists to any extent in Russia. I observed no evidences of it. I believe investigation will prove it to be a tempest in a teapot.”
Muenzenberg payload, “You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.”
In the same lecture at TC’s Summer session, Counts told the students, “Much depends on this season’s harvest, which…promises to be abundant. Collectivization went forward much more rapidly than had been expected.”
Muenzenberg Creed, “You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.”
Counts next returned to another Muenzenberg Creed point, war-mongering America threatened peace-loving Russia, “Those people who are expecting the present regime to fall are doomed to disappointment. If they are building policies on that assumption they are likely to endanger the peace of the world through antagonism and misunderstanding.”
Muenzenberg Creed reference: “You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding.”
In Count’s 1932 Dare the School Build a New Social Order, he may have tread as close to the covert influence line as possible, without crossing into propaganda. But he always stayed on the covert side of the line, allowing deniability.
He hewed straight down the Muenzenberg methodology, never violating the first part of the Creed, “You do not endorse Stalin. You do not call yourself a Communist. You do not declare your love for the regime. You do not call on people to support the Soviets. Ever. Under any circumstances.”
With those limitations in mind, speaking about capitalism, Counts declared,
With its deification of the principle of selfishness, its exaltation of the profit motive, its reliance upon the forces of competition, and its placing of property above human rights, it will either have to be displaced altogether or changed so radically in form andspirit that its identity will be completely lost.
You can almost hear Muenzenberg reciting his point from the Creed: “You think the capitalist system is corrupt.”
In his 1931 The Soviet Challenge to America, published by his friend Richard Walsh at the John Day Company, Counts declared:
Soviet Russia is endeavoring with all the resources at her command to bring the economic order under a measure of rational control. She may fail in the attempt, but in the meantime every student of human affairs should follow the effort with breathless interest. She issues to the Western nations and particularly to the United States a challenge--perhaps one of the greatest challenges of history. But she issues it not through the Communist International, nor through the Red Army, nor through the Gay-Pay-OO (political police), as most of our citizens naïvely and timorously believe, but through her State Planning Commission and her system of public education.”
Again, and again, and again, Muenzenberg’s Creed: “You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.”
Tracing the Muenzenberg Creed DNA in Counts’ writing is fruitful. These examples will stand to support the resounding “Yes” answer to the last CI screening question. Try it yourself. Read any of Counts’ work from his Muenzenberg period. Try to find the Creed.
Conclusion: George S. Counts—KGB Willing Accomplice in the Destruction of American Culture
I believe that the 3-Question CI screening of Counts’ life and work provides clear evidence that he was a Willing Accomplice in the Muenzenberg covert influence operations to destroy American culture.
Specifically, Counts targeted both higher education, academia, and the kindergarten to 12th grade system, Education. His unique position as a Professor of Education provided access to both of these important transmission belts of American culture.
Counts was able to insert the Muenzenberg Creed into American academia and Education for more than 10 years.
Counts’ continuing influence in American Schools of Education, even today in 2011, demonstrates the enormous efficiency of covert influence operations. Long after the Rosenbergs fried in the electric chair; long after Muenzenberg’s neck was snapped by a rope; long after Counts himself had passed on to that faculty lounge in the sky, his anti-American, anti-individualism, pro-collectivist influence messages are injected into young American skulls every semester throughout the country.
The cost of the Counts operation was negligible to the KGB. Maintaining Nucia Lodge probably required no money, just manpower to meet and motivate her. Counts’ motivation was recognition and approval. They provided him access to high level personalities, research material, and books and other resources that no one else was able to access, all of which was virtually cost-free. Once he had been primed with the Muenzenberg protocol, he was on auto-pilot; albeit with a handler just outside his office door every day.
Willing not Necessarily Witting
It’s important to note one of the little-understood nuances of the psychology of covert espionage agents here.
The fact that Counts was Willing to carry out the influence operation against his country does not necessarily mean that he was witting of exactly who he worked for, or what the KGB’s and Comintern’s ultimate goal was.
To be willing to go along with an operation, an agent must be convinced that his actions are parallel with his own best interests. A case officer simply needs to help an agent see how his own best interests are served by the operation.
The case officer does not necessarily have to make the agent completely witting of who he works for, or the goals of the operation.
That said, Counts surely understood that the KGB controlled Russia completely. In more than one of his books, he mentioned the “Gay-Pay-Oo” (Russian pronunciation of the intelligence service’s contemporary initials, GPU) and its pervasiveness in Russian society.
In Counts’ case, it’s possible that he was not witting of his contacts’, or his handlers’, true affiliation with the KGB. He may not have been witting of the true overall objective of the KGB’s covert influence operation.
But, in the end, it does not matter whether he was fully witting of a KGB operation to destroy American culture in order to rebuild the country under communism or not.
The case officer provides an agent what that particular agent needs in order to survive psychologically. If the agent needs a “fig leaf,” a philosophical justification for helping to destroy his country, then the case officer can provide that.
Willing suspension of disbelief is required on the part of the unwitting agent, but the human psyche is amazingly flexible, and able to do tricks that most people wouldn’t believe.
Witting or un-witting, George S. Counts was Willing to use the material provided by the KGB, to follow the Muenzenberg Creed, to the detriment of his country. Willing Accomplice in the destruction of American culture—George S. Counts.