When Commissioner of Accounts Hirshfield urged Mayor Hylan to ban eight history textbooks from the public schools of New York City, he was acting only as would any citizen of his parts. At the order of the Mayor he had made himself an authority on American History by a year and a half's study of school children's textbooks. Next he held five public hearings at which two out of twenty-four persons defended the books in question. Mr. Hirshfield then investigated the activities of countless questionable organizations like the Carnegie Foundation and the Rhodes Scholarship Association, where each discovery made the problem more serious. Confirmed as may have been his suspicions, however, his worst fears were not realized until he saw the real enormity of the pro-British propaganda exposed in a series of discerning articles in the Hearst papers:

With such evidence before him, Commissioner Hirshfield could present Mayor Hylan with but one conclusion. There was, the former maintained, a "money super-power" which, although located in America, sought an extension of British trade, to this end it took up its stand behind all writers who were trying to bring England and America together. In order to accomplish this purpose, he argued, the propagandists tried to make the American people sorry that they had revolted, and thus to bring back this country into the British Empire. It was therefore necessary, Mr. Hirshfield explained, for them to alter the popular conception of the Revolution and to make it less antagonistic to Great Britain. All of the eight books, he pointed out, have been written or revised since that time during the Great War when this pro-British propaganda first raised its head.

In proof of the insidious power of these volumes Mr. Hirshfield quoted from Professor A. B. Hart's "School History of the United States" the statement that Samuel Adams "was a shrewd, hard-headed politician", and from Professor D. S. Muzzey's "An American History" the following passage: "A debatable question, namely, whether the abuses of the king's ministers justified armed resistance". Small wonder that Commissioner Hirshfield urged that these books be banned, for what school child reader of such partisan statements could ever resist the temptation to fly at once into the arms of the British Empire?