GOD AND MAMMON
The education of a million children, and the control of twenty-five
thousand teachers in the metropolis, is entrusted to a school board of
seven people. The president of this board is a leading real estate
operator; the retired president, still a member of the board, is a
manufacturer of chemicals, who profiteered extensively during the World
War; the next member is a manufacturer of cigars; the next is a leading
real estate operator; the next is the private physician to the mayor of
the city; the next is a woman of wealth and leisure, who represents the
Tammany machine; the last is a lawyer. As always, you will note that
there is not one educator on the board. There are few who know anything
about education; but all know about business—especially those kinds of
business which are transacted with school boards.
What are those kinds of business? To be able to pick the location of
handsome new schools is worth a fortune to real estate interests; and
that this is regularly done in New York is not my charge, but that of
the comptroller of the city. To be able to determine the placing of
contracts for school buildings and supplies is worth a fortune to any
member of a political machine; and I talked with a former clerk of the
school board, who told me he had seen so much graft that he had run away
from the sight. I do not mean that this Tammany school board personally
carries off the money, as it did in the days of Tweed; the method now is
“honest graft”—that is, the placing of school contracts with companies
in which your wife’s relatives and the members of your gang are
interested. The amount to be expended in New York amounts to a hundred
million dollars a year, and Tammany gets it all. At least four of the
members of the board are “dummies,” having no function save to vote as
the machine directs. All of them are Democrats, and the majority are
Catholics; that is to say, the educating of a million American children
is in the hands of people who teach that public education is a crime
against God.
So it comes about that the principal indictment of this Tammany regime
is not the money it spends, but the money it withholds. New York is the
wealthiest city in the world; the masters of the city have money for
palatial town houses, for country estates many square miles in extent,
with homes as big as summer hotels; they have money for private yachts
as big as ocean liners, and for luxurious motor cars by the tens of
thousands; but they have no money to provide a decent education for the
children of the poor. While their own children go to elegant private
schools, the children of the poor are herded into dark, insanitary
fire-traps, some of them seventy-five years of age; and even of these
there is an insufficiency! Ever since my boyhood the refusal of New York
City to accommodate the children who clamor for an education has been
the blackest crime of the Tammany ruffians. At present one-third of the
children are on “part time”; that is, they are turned out of school
after two or three hours, to make room for another relay. The rest of
the day they pick up the vices of the streets; and if they are made into
young criminals, the city is ready and able to build whatever jails may
be necessary.
Two years ago a committee of women representing a score of civic
organizations—the Women’s Municipal League, the Women’s Department of
the National Civic Federation, the Civitas Club of Brooklyn, the Women’s
City Club, the League of Catholic Women, etc.—made a careful study of
forty of the school buildings of New York City; they reported that
twenty out of these forty were fire-traps, old wooden buildings with
narrow stairways and no fire escapes. Sanitation was reported “bad” and
“wretched” in twenty-one of these schools, and “fair” in eleven more.
Twenty-one out of thirty-six were in need of repairs, twenty-seven had
only dark basement playgrounds, and so on. I quote a few phrases, just
to give you the flavor of these reports:
Boys’ toilets terrible; no basins and towels.... Toilets old and in
bad condition; foul air unavoidable.... Plumbing too old to operate,
inadequate and unsanitary; few basins and no towels.... Garbage dump
nearby, inexcusable menace to health and comfort of the children....
Twelve toilets for twelve hundred boys, old, bad conditions, bad odor.
No repairs in years, furniture and woodwork almost falling to
pieces.... Fearfully dilapidated; paint and repairs needed on walls;
stairs worn down to danger point.... Buildings so old as to be beyond
repair, should be abandoned.... Insufficient lighting and ventilation;
two rooms with only one window, eight rooms with only two windows....
Fire escapes incomplete and badly constructed.... Wooden buildings, no
fire escapes reported.
These reports were given wide publicity; the ladies waited six months,
over the summer vacation, and then came back to see what had been done.
Out of twenty-three buildings reported dangerous as to fire conditions,
twenty remained unchanged. Only two out of twenty-two schools had made
any improvement as to provisions for the comfort of the teachers. As
regards sanitation, fourteen had been improved, twenty-three had not
been changed; and so on. How much the public authorities were concerned
about such matters was shown by the experience of the Teachers’ Union,
which prepared for an exhibit of the Public Health Association a series
of posters and charts showing the physical condition of the schools.
“Over nine hundred thousand children suffer from lack of a good
ventilation system,” declared one of these posters. “No soap, no water,
no towels,” declared another; and so on. Privately the nurses of the
Health Department at this show all admitted that the posters represented
the truth; but for three days the man who was then commissioner of
health and the man who is now commissioner of health sought desperately
to compel the Teachers’ Union to remove these posters; failing in this,
the publicity agencies of the show cut out all the press notices of the
teachers’ exhibits.
What this means to the teachers was set forth to me by the victims. One
was teaching a class of children on a dark stone staircase. Another was
teaching in a room on a level with the elevated railroad, with trains
coming and going on four tracks; she would have to stand in the middle
of the room and shout in order to be heard by all the pupils; and this
in a new school, just built! An inspector of some sort came along and
entered on his report, “room noisy”; the teacher was denied promotion,
for some reason which could not be explained, and it was over a year
before she could get the matter straightened out—the words “room noisy”
had been taken to mean that she did not maintain discipline!
Another woman was teaching physical culture in a dark basement, with
water always on the floor. She had seven classes every day, with fifty
children in each class; and the gas lights were so feeble that she could
not see the children she was supposed to be teaching. She said to one
boy: “Stand with your feet together.” He answered: “There’s a puddle of
water under me.” And when the physical culture classes got through with
this hole, it became a play-ground for the other children!
I am reluctant to introduce into this book any statements which may add
to the income of the Grand Imperial Kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan;
nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss school conditions in such
cities as New York, Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco without
mentioning the fact that we have in our country some ten or fifteen
million people, held by fear of eternal torment in subjection to a
priestly system, which repudiates democracy, repudiates freedom of
opinion and of teaching, repudiates everything we know as Americanism.
The Catholic church denies the power of the state over marriage and
divorce, and above all things else, it denies the right of the state to
educate the child. I am going to prove that in detail before I finish;
for the present I merely point out that in city after city we shall
encounter this influence.
The Catholics, you see, have their system of parochial schools, in which
the children are taught the priestly view of life. The church is
enormously wealthy, and some of these schools are, as buildings, very
fine. Manifestly, the priestly admonition to the faithful, to send their
children to church schools, will be much more effective if the public
schools are old and filthy and insanitary; and more especially if they
are fire-traps! Tammany Hall is a semi-religious institution, maintained
by the votes of Irish and Italian and Polish Catholics. Practically the
entire list of public officials are Catholics—and this includes the
majority of the public school board and of the superintending force. So,
to the natural greed of the plutocracy is added the power of priestly
intrigue. Mr. Stewart Browne, president of the Real Estate Board of New
York, attends every hearing of the Board of Estimate, and of other
public bodies having anything to do with appropriations for the schools.
His one function is to prevent appropriations; and with the secret help
of the Catholic prelates, he succeeds. Thus we observe, in full
operation in our modern age, the ancient alliance between the secular
arm and the spiritual; we see God and Mammon united to rivet the chains
of wage-slavery upon the poor.