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Business Propaganda in the Schools: Labor's Struggle Against the Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System, 1949–1954

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Extract

In early March 1953, the Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System (ACES), a private, business-backed economic education association, opened up shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. Founded three years earlier in Philadelphia, ACES sought to “demonstrate the superiority of the American competitive system over any forms of collectivism.” To achieve that goal, the organization distributed literature, created a speakers’ bureau, and offered educational activities for clergy, women's groups, and industrial workers. ACES’ most extensive program, however, targeted high school students. It consisted of a three-day schedule of activities that included classroom instruction in economics and tours of local industries. In 1953, after having successfully established a program in the Philadelphia public and parochial schools, ACES sought to expand its base of operations throughout Pennsylvania with chapters in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Erie, and Reading. Although unions throughout the state were suspicious of the organization from its inception, ACES met the strongest resistance in Reading. In that city, local socialists and trade unionists immediately mobilized along class lines and blocked ACES from gaining access to the Reading public school classrooms.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , Fall 2000 , pp. 255 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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4 There are only a handful of studies that discuss this topic, including Rippa, S. Alexander Education in a Free Society: An American History (New York & London: Longman, 1984), chap. 10; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, chap. 7; Moore, Colleen Ann “The National Association of Manufacturers: The Voice of Industry and the Free Enterprise Campaign in the Schools, 1929–1949,” (Ph.D diss, University of Akron, 1985).Google Scholar

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