Kenneth McFarland - Are We Raising the Red Flag Over Ourselves?
LP probably released in 1963 (no date given); McFarland references having spent time at some hotel bar in New York during the Cuban Missle Crisis
What he means by the title of the LP is that he believes the United States of America could end up becoming a socialist/communist nation just like the Soviet Union because of many things including the enactment of the New Deal to help the United States recover from the Depression (i.e. creating jobs for the millions of unemployed people and to help restart the economy) and of something called progressive education. Basically, progressive education focuses on the individual abilities of the child or student and that each individual has his or her own learning style. A key component of progressive education is diversity.
Before Kenneth McFarland embarked on a career of public speaking in front of rich businesspeople and recording many records like this one, he was a superintendent of the Topeka, Kansas school system which was the school system in the Brown v. Board of Education case during Mr. McFarland's tenure. I guess I know why he's bitter towards progressive education. McFarland is also not happy that schools no longer post all the students' grades on all students' report cards. McFarland advocates that everybody should live life in competition everyday including children. I guess that it doesn't matter that students may or may not actually learn anything despite getting A's and B's. It's all about getting better grades than one's classmates. It's not really about measuring how well students are learning. I always thought that letter grades are kind of pointless anyway and I made mostly A's and B's.
McFarland advocates that people should succeed on their own, that is by competing against others. He thinks that those who are rich are the most successful and they should be treated better than anyone else. I guess that anyone born into a rich family is automatically a winner in life. He gripes that the rich pay more in taxes than anyone below them in the economic ladder. This is another way that the U.S. was supposedly headed towards becoming a socialist/communist country. The American way is competition and what he thinks of as "free enterprise" which really means no government regulation of business. McFarland is mistaking economic regulation by the government as control of industries.
On this record, McFarland speaks in front of a group of hospital and healthcare executives somewhere in southern California. It takes McFarland about 11 minutes to get into the topics mentioned already in this post. McFarland implies that the premier of the Soviet Union at the time, Nikita Krushchev, laughed in an evil way at the Americans are becoming a bunch of commies for progressive taxation and progressive education. Okay, Khrushchev didn't really laugh in an evil way at the U.S. (maybe he really did), but McFarland mentioned that Khrushchev said in a speech that the U.S. would someday raise the red flag (communism) over themselves. I can imagine McFarland boiling into some rage and his blood pressure rising at the mere thought of Khrushchev's speech and the fact that not every American shared McFarland's points of view on life. I'm sure everyone knows what happened after this LP was released. You can say that the opposite took place instead.
Tracklisting:
Side 1
1. Are We Raising the Red Flag Over Ourselves? side 1 {27:32}
Side 2
1. Are We Raising the Red Flag Over Ourselves? side 2 part 1 {19:43}
2. Are We Raising the Red Flag Over Ourselves? side 2 part 2 {6:03}
Note: side 2 is broken into two parts because at one point the needle gets stuck in a groove; the stuck part lasted well over a minute and I had to gently nudge the needle forward
