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THE GOSLINGS
BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(Now in Print and Obtainable)
THE GOSLINGS: 1924
HELL: 1923
THE GOOSE-STEP: 1923
THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: 1922
THE BOOK OF LIFE: 1922
100%: 1920
THE BRASS CHECK: 1920
JIMMIE HIGGINS: 1919
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION: 1919
KING COAL: 1917
THE CRY FOR JUSTICE: 1915
DAMAGED GOODS: 1913
SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE: 1913
THE FASTING CURE: 1911
SAMUEL THE SEEKER: 1909
THE METROPOLIS: 1907
THE JUNGLE: 1906
MANASSAS: 1904
THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING: 1903
PRINCE HAGEN: 1902
[Illustration]
The Goslings
A Study of the American Schools
BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
AUTHOR OF
“THE GOOSE-STEP,” “THE BRASS CHECK,” “THE PROFITS OF RELIGION,” ETC.
[Illustration]
UPTON SINCLAIR
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
COPYRIGHT, 1924
BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
---
_All rights reserved._
---
First edition, January, 1924, 5,000 copies, clothbound, 5,000 copies,
paperbound.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY ix-x
I. Land of Orange-Groves and Jails 1
II. The Adventure of the University Club 8
III. In Which I Get Arrested 13
IV. The Empire of the Black Hand 19
V. The Schools of the “Times” 22
VI. The Teachers’ Soviets 26
VII. A Prayer for Freedom 32
VIII. The Price of Independence 36
IX. The Regime of Reciprocity 40
X. The Spy System 44
XI. Lies for Children 50
XII. The Schools of Mammon 54
XIII. The Tammany Tiger 59
XIV. God and Mammon 62
XV. Honest Graft 66
XVI. A Letter to Woodrow Wilson 72
XVII. An Arrangement of Little Bits 77
XVIII. The Luskers 81
XIX. To Henrietta Rodman 87
XX. Melodrama in Chicago 94
XXI. Continuous Performance 98
XXII. The Incorporate Tax-Dodging Creatures 102
XXIII. The Superintendent of Trombones 109
XXIV. The City of French Restaurants 113
XXV. The University Gang 119
XXVI. The Ward Leader 125
XXVII. The Romeo and Juliet Stunt 130
XXVIII. The Inventor of Five Sciences 135
XXIX. The Land of Lumber 140
XXX. The Anaconda’s Lair 146
XXXI. The Little Anacondas 151
XXXII. Colorado Culture 154
XXXIII. The Domain of King Coal 159
XXXIV. The Homestead of the Free 164
XXXV. Is a Teacher a Citizen? 167
XXXVI. Introducing Comrade Thompson 173
XXXVII. Millers and Militarism 179
XXXVIII. Newberry Pie 184
XXXIX. Beets and Celery 186
XL. Boston in Bondage 191
XLI. The Open Shop for Culture 195
XLII. Corrupt and Contented 203
XLIII. The Scenes of My Childhood 209
XLIV. The Brewer’s Daughter-in-Law 212
XLV. An Autocracy of Politicians 216
XLVI. The Calibre of Congressmen 221
XLVII. The Local Machines 224
XLVIII. The Steam Roller 228
XLIX. The Dispensers of Prominence 234
L. A Plot Against Democracy 240
LI. The Plot Fails 244
LII. Mormon Magic 249
LIII. The Funeral of Democracy 253
LIV. The Fruits of the Sowing 258
LV. Teachers to the Rear 263
LVI. Bread and Circuses 269
LVII. Schools for Strike-Breakers 275
LVIII. The National Spies’ Association 279
LIX. Babbitts and Bolsheviks 284
LX. The Schools of Socony 290
LXI. The Riot Department 296
LXII. The Blindfold School of Patriotism 301
LXIII. Professor Facing Both-Ways 307
LXIV. Poison Pictures 312
LXV. The Book Business 315
LXVI. Ten Per Cent Commissions 320
LXVII. The Superintendent-Makers 324
LXVIII. The Church Conspiracy 330
LXIX. Catholicism and the Schools 334
LXX. The Practical Church Administrator 341
LXXI. Faith and Modern Thought 344
LXXII. The Schools of Steel 349
LXXIII. The Schools of Oil 353
LXXIV. The Country Geese 357
LXXV. The Schools of Snobbery 362
LXXVI. A School Survey 369
LXXVII. The Educational Mills 377
LXXVIII. Descensus Averno 381
LXXIX. The Teacher’s Job 385
LXXX. Teachers’ Terror 389
LXXXI. The School Serfs 395
LXXXII. The Teachers’ Union 402
LXXXIII. The Teachers’ Magna Charta 406
LXXXIV. Workers’ Education 410
LXXXV. The Goose-step March 417
LXXXVI. The Goose-step Advance 423
LXXXVII. The Goose-step Double-quick 428
LXXXVIII. The Goose-step Review 432
LXXXIX. The Call to Action 440
INTRODUCTORY
Life has given you one of its precious treasures, a child; a body to
nurture, a character to train, a mind with endless possibilities of
growth, a soul with hidden stores of tenderness and beauty—all these are
Nature’s gifts. Modern science has shown that within the child’s soul
lies magically locked up all the past of our race; also, it is evident
that within it lies all the future of our race. What our children are
now being made is what America will be.
You send these little ones to school. Twenty-three millions of them
troop off every week-day morning, with their shining faces newly washed,
their clothing cleaned and mended. You bear them, you rear them, with
infinite pains and devotion you prepare them, and feed them into the
gigantic educational machine.
You do not know much about this machine. You have turned it over to
others to run. Every year you pay to maintain it a billion dollars of
wealth which you have produced by real and earnest toil. You take it for
granted that this billion dollars is competently used; that those who
run the machine are giving your twenty-three million children the best
education that forty-three dollars and forty-seven cents per child will
buy.
The purpose of this book is to show you how the “invisible government”
of Big Business which controls the rest of America has taken over the
charge of your children. In the course of a public debate with the
writer, in the Civic Club in New York City, May, 1922, Dr. Tildsley,
district superintendent of the public school system of that city, made
the statement: “I do not know any school system in the United States
which is run for the benefit of the children. They are all run for the
benefit of the gang.” This statement, made upon high authority, is the
thesis of “The Goslings.” Come with me and let me show you what is this
“gang” which runs the school system of the United States; how they got
their power, what use they make of it, and what this means to the bodies
and minds of your twenty-three million little ones.
To assist the reader in finding his way through a big book, I give
traveling directions:
Pages 1 to 22 take you behind the scenes of that “invisible government”
which is now ruling America, including its schools. Pages 22 to 59 show
in detail what this “invisible government” is doing to the schools of
one large American city—Los Angeles. Pages 59 to 93 study the schools of
New York, and 94 to 109 those of Chicago. Pages 109 to 224 deal with
school conditions in a score of other large cities. I realize that this
is a large number; but then, many people are interested in these cities.
You will find both melodrama and humor in the stories; and if there is
too much, you can skip!
Beginning at page 224 is a study of the state and national machines of
the school world; and whatever else you miss, do not miss the National
Education Association, and how it was stolen from the teachers of
America—there is no drama on Broadway to equal that for thrills. From
275 to 329 you will find a score of powerful Big Business organizations
which have assumed to take control of our schools. From 330 to 349 comes
the Catholic Church in relation to the schools—this in addition to
details given in a number of cities. From 349 to 417 you will find a
general survey of the school situation from the point of view of both
pupils and teachers. The concluding chapters discuss “The Goose-step”
and its critics, and developments in the college world since its
publication.
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THE GOSLINGS
_A Study of the American Schools_
-------
CHAPTER I
LAND OF ORANGE-GROVES AND JAILS
I begin this study of the American school system with Southern
California, because that is the part of the country in which I live, and
which therefore I know best. It is a representative part, being the
newest and most recently mixed. We have all the races, white and black
and yellow and red; but the great bulk of the population is of native
stock, farmers from the Middle West who have sold or rented their
homesteads and moved to this “roof-garden of the world.” It is our
fashion to hold reunions and picnics for the old home folks, and there
are few states that cannot gather thousands of representatives.
We have the most wonderful climate in the world, and soil which is
fertile under irrigation. Our leading occupation is selling this soil
and climate to new arrivals from the East. We are eager traders, and
everything we have is for sale; you can buy the average house in
Southern California for two hundred dollars more than the owner paid for
it, and I know people who have sold their homes and moved several times
in one year. Also, we have struck oil, and this sudden wealth has fanned
our collective greed. We boast ourselves “the white spot on the
industrial map.” Hard times do not touch us, we build literally whole
streets of new houses every week, and labor agitators are banished from
our midst.
The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, the
Los Angeles “Times,” created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money.
The “Times” has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in
its founder’s spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the
largest newspaper in the world—meaning that it prints the most
advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two
or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out
of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of
commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of
the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population
is fed. I pick up this morning’s paper, and find a cartoon on the front
page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is
labeled in large letters: “Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch.”
As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of
fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit.
We have several hundred churches of all sects, and our “Times” prints
pages of church news and sermons, and double-leaded two-column
editorials invoking the aid of Jehovah in all emergencies. But the real
spirit of the staff breaks out on the other pages; when it is necessary
to represent Los Angeles in a cartoon, their symbol is a sly young
prostitute with sparkling black eyes and naked limbs. Once upon a time
such pictures were purchased surreptitiously and handed round by naughty
little boys; but now they are delivered every morning by carrier to
everybody’s home. One of the features of our life is “bathing beauties”;
young ladies in thin tights parading the boardwalks of the beaches,
winning prizes from chambers of commerce and lending gayety to Sunday
supplements. Any new stunt is worth a fortune to one of these ladies;
one day a lady has gilded her legs, and the next day a lady has
butterflies painted on her back, and next—most elegant of all—a lady
appears with a bathing-suit and a monocle.
The men, thus summoned, come in droves. Competition is keen, and the
ladies are strenuous in defense of their meal-tickets, and when one
trespasses upon another’s rights, we have a thrilling murder story. Our
lady murderesses are a leading feature of Southern California life;
sometimes they shoot, and sometimes they poison, and sometimes they go
to the nearest five- and ten-cent store and buy a hammer, and beat out
the other lady’s brains. Then they are sent to jail, which is a career
of glory, with photographs and interviews in every edition of the
newspapers, and a sensational trial with full details of their many
lovers and their quarrels. Autobiographies written in prison are
featured in Sunday supplements and advertised on billboards; and finally
comes the climax—a magical jail delivery. We know, of course, that
nowhere in America can the jails hold the rich, but out here in Southern
California the rich don’t even wait to be pardoned by presidents and
governors—they tip their jailers twenty-five hundred dollars and walk
right out. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!”
Fifteen years ago the writer had haunting his mind what he thought was
to be a great blank verse tragedy. The scene of one act was to be laid
several hundred years in the future, and the crowning achievement of
that time was an invention whereby music could be made audible to people
all over the world. The scene was to show a great musician, whose
inspiration was being thus conveyed to humanity. And now we have this
invention—somewhat ahead of time! Our radio in Southern California is
presided over by the “Times,” and the invisible government decides what
is safe for our hungry masses to hear.
Our plutocracy has just built for itself a new hotel, a sultan’s dream
of luxury, costing several million dollars. The opening of this hotel
became the great historical event of Southern California; there were
several pages about it in the newspapers, and it was announced that a
certain prominent person, would convey his inspiration to the multitude
over the “Times” radio. In a hundred thousand homes the hungry “fans”
put on their ear-caps and awaited the sublime moment; and meanwhile in
the Hotel Biltmore a great part of the guests got royally drunk. The
orator had his share, and his inspiration over the radio took the form
of obscenities and cursing; the horrified “fans” heard his friends
trying to stop him, begging him to come and have one more drink; but he
told them they were a set of blankety blank blank fools, and that he
knew what he was going to say, and it was nobody’s blankety blank blank
business. This continued until suddenly the radio was shut off, and the
fans were left to silence and speculation!
Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood, the world’s greatest honey-pot, with
its thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood,
where youth and gayety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say
that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you have only to wait.
Hollywood is _young_ America.
Of course our hundreds of churches are not entirely inactive. We have
revivalists, who furiously denounce the sins of Hollywood, using the
most up-to-date slang; and groups of men and women, instead of going to
the movies, gather in Bible classes and learn the history of the
Hittites and the succession of the kings of the Jebusites. You can hear
sermons over the radio—that is, if you have a high-priced set, and can
tune out the jazz orchestras. The cheaper sets hear everything at once,
and you can dance to the sermons or pray to the jazz, as you prefer.
Who runs this new empire of the Southwest? It is run by a secret
society, which I have named the Black Hand; consisting of a dozen or so
of big bankers and business men, hard-fisted, cunning and unscrupulous
profiteers of the pioneer type, a scant generation removed from the bad
man with a gun on each hip. They are the inner council and directing
circle of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; with a
propaganda department formerly known as the Commercial Federation of
California, and now camouflaged as the Better America Federation.
Concerning this latter organization, you will find much information in
“The Goose Step,” pages 129-132. It occupies the entire floor of a large
building, and has raised a fund of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars
a year for five years for its campaign of terrorism. Like all criminals,
it operates under many aliases: the American Protective League, the
Association for Betterment of the Public Service, the Associated
Patriotic Societies, the Taxpayers’ Association, the People’s Economy
League, the Tax Investigating and Economy League, the Americanization
Committee, the Committee of One Thousand, the Committee of Ten Thousand,
the Parent-Teachers’ Associations, the Board of Education, the District
Attorney’s Office, and the Police Department of the City of Los Angeles.
Ours is an “open shop” city; that is, the business men and merchants are
forbidden to employ union workers, and if they disregard this rule they
are blacklisted, their credit is cut off, and they are driven into
bankruptcy. When a new man comes into town and sets up in business he is
politely interviewed and invited to join the gang; at the same time he
is given his orders, and if he disobeys, he moves on to some other part
of the world, or down into the ranks of the wage-slaves. So perfect is
the system of the Black Hand, so all-seeing is its spy service, that the
Young Women’s Christian Association could not prepare and mail out a
circular letter asking for funds without every merchant in the city
having on his desk by the same mail a letter from the Better America
Federation president, warning him that the Young Women’s Christian
Association is supporting the eight-hour day for women, the minimum wage
law for women, and other immoral propositions.
We have a “criminal syndicalism law” in California; the public is told
by the Black Hand and its newspapers that this law is to punish men who
advocate the overthrow of government by force and violence. Under this
law eighty men are now coughing out their lungs in the jute mill at San
Quentin prison, under sentence of from two to twenty-eight years. As I
write, one of these men collapses under the strain and refuses to work
longer in the jute mill, and seventy others are being tortured in
“solitary” because they “strike” in sympathy with this comrade. No one
of these men has ever had proven against him, or even charged against
him, any act of force or violence or any destruction of property. They
were convicted because the Black Hand of California pays three hundred
and fifty dollars a month to several hired witnesses, who travel about
from place to place testifying before juries that ten years ago, when
they belonged to the I. W. W., they, the witnesses, personally burned
down barns. Because of this testimony men who have recently joined the
organization, and have never burned down barns nor advocated burning
down barns, are sentenced to the jute mill.
The public does not know, and has no means of guessing that the law on
the statute books against “criminal syndicalism” has been modified by
the police who enforce it to read “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.”
That means that any man may be arrested at any time that any police
official does not happen to like the way he has his hair cut, or the red
flower in his button-hole. Crime and suspicion of crime are the same
thing in our legal procedure, because men once thrown into jail are held
there “incommunicado” without warrant or charge; they are not permitted
to see attorneys, and their friends cannot find out what has become of
them. They are starved and beaten and tortured in jail; so there is no
longer any difference between innocence and guilt. The eighty convicted
in the state’s prison suffer less than the many hundreds of unconvicted
in jails and police stations all over the state.
What this means is that the Black Hand is trying to smash industrial
unionism. They have got the old-line unions cowed; they have purchased
or frightened most of the leaders, and driven them out of politics, and
are no longer afraid of them. But now comes the new movement, the mass
union, the portent of the New Day. They are fighting this as furiously
as the Spanish Inquisition ever fought against heresy; but to their
bewilderment and dismay they are repeating the age-old experience of the
torturer and the despot—the blood of the martyrs is becoming the seed of
the church!
There came a great strike at the harbor. “San Pedro” is a part of our
city, where the ships come in laden with lumber and pipe and cement for
the endless new streets of homes. Our army of real estate speculators
and contractors and bankers are reaping their golden harvest, while
several thousand longshoremen slave, literally fourteen and sixteen
hours a day of back-breaking toil, handling these heavy materials. They
clamor at the docks, bidding against one another, fighting and trampling
one another for a chance of life. And here is a ring of grafting
employment agencies, secretly maintained by the Shipyard Owners’
Association, draining the last drops of energy from these wretched
wage-slaves. The old-line respectable unions are out of business, and
everything is serene for the masters; but suddenly comes a
flare-up—three thousand men on strike, and one or two hundred I. W. W.
organizers spreading the flames of revolt—and just when we thought we
had sent the last of them to San Quentin for twenty-eight years!
The strike tied up the harbor and tied it tight. For more than two weeks
not a ship was unloaded, and all the building operations of all the
speculators came to an end. One day the “Times” would deny that there
was any strike, and next day it would declare that the strike had been
broken the day before, the next day it would declare that the strike
would be broken the day after next. And in the inner circle of the
torturers and despots, such confusion and such fury as you will hardly
be able to imagine.
You have taken up this book, expecting to read about the American school
system; and now you are being told about a strike! It happened that this
strike came just as I was settling down to write “The Goslings.” I got
arrested; and this experience plows a furrow through one’s mind. Now I
sit at home and think about the schools, and naturally, I see them in
relation to this series of events—they become one more device of the
strikebreakers.
I ponder the problem, how to start this book. I want to show you the
invisible government which runs your schools, for its own profit, and
your loss. This power is the same power which runs your politics and
industry; here in Los Angeles, the very men who smashed the union of the
shipyard workers also smashed the councils of the school teachers.
Indeed, as chance willed it, the two jobs came together and became one
job; so that every lie told against the strikers was a lie against the
teachers, and every dollar wrested from the shipyard workers was
balanced by a dollar stolen from the schools.
I ask myself, therefore: How can I do better, at the beginning of this
book, than to tell you what I saw at the harbor? This strike was a
blazing searchlight, thrown into the very vitals of our invisible
government; if you will follow it, you will see the whole system, and
understand every detail of its mechanism. So I ask you to set aside for
the moment all questions of labor unions, criminal syndicalism, anything
of that sort; come with me as a plain American, believing in the
Constitution, believing in the people, and their right to run their own
affairs. Follow the story of this labor struggle—and before you get to
the end of it you will magically find yourself reading about the
schools, and learning who has taken them away from you, and why they
have done it, and what it means to you and your children.