HONEST GRAFT
On the top of my desk as I work is a five-foot shelf of big envelopes,
containing data on the school systems of various cities. I take one
envelope, and sort out its contents, marking the material with the
letters, G, F, P, and R. That is to say, Graft, Favoritism, Propaganda
and Repression—the four products of education by Big Business. Under the
letter F in New York City I find the grievances of scores of teachers
with whom I talked. Their story was all the same: the system is brutal,
the system is rigid, the system is honeycombed with politics and
dishonesty.
It fell to my lot while in the city last year to take part in a public
debate with some of the school officials at the Civic Club. To my
statement that Tammany was running the schools, Examiner Smith rejoined
that all promotions in the system depended upon civil service
examinations—he knew, because he did the examining. But when he was
pinned down, he admitted that the twenty-six district superintendents,
the eight associate superintendents, and the thirty high school
principals were all excluded from the civil service list; and here, of
course, are the prizes for which everyone is striving. At that very
moment the schools were in an uproar because of the appointment to a
superintendent’s position of Mrs. Grace Forsythe, a Catholic lady who
had not even high school qualifications; also of Margaret McCooey,
sister of one of the Tammany bosses. Milo MacDonald, a Catholic, had
been appointed principal of a high school from the rank of ordinary
teacher; Henrietta Rodman told me of another teacher, a Catholic, who
took the examination for elementary principalship and failed, and was
appointed to a high school principalship. Other cases have happened
since.
These are a few out of scores of cases that were detailed to me. I was
told of a Catholic who took an examination, and then was permitted to
withdraw his papers and write up a new set at home. It is a matter of
record that Mr. Somers, member of the board of education—a
super-patriot, who called the Teachers’ Union treasonable—let off a
clerk of the school board who had been proven guilty of misappropriating
funds; also another who was charged with letting people get copies of
examination papers in advance, and of selling information to candidates.
Both these people, Catholics, got off with a fine of a few days’ pay,
and both are still in the system.
A form of “honest graft” which has been widely developed under this
Tammany regime is the writing of text-books by school officials. Many of
the text-books in use in the public schools of New York bear the names
of people in the system; in many cases they were written by teachers,
but officials have put their names upon them, and get the greater part
of the profits. The principals recommend these books for use, and the
board of superintendents adopts them. Former Superintendent Maxwell had
a large income from books published by the American Book Company which
he himself had not written; and a number of the district superintendents
get their share. The New York “Globe,” discussing the case of Maxwell,
showed how in his position he had the power to increase the sales of his
own books; and this same power is possessed by all the gang. I was told
of one head of a department with a book to sell, who got himself
transferred three times to different parts of the city—starting in the
High School of Commerce in Manhattan, from there to the Commercial High
School of Brooklyn, and then to Long Island—and in each place he took
with him his commercial arithmetic. The teachers did not want it, but in
every school the other texts were thrown out and the new one introduced.
All over New York—and all over America, as we shall find—there are
school basements and cupboards filled with discarded text-books, or new
text-books which are so bad that the teachers will not use them.
Needless to say, many of the Tammany superintendents and principals are
ignorant men, utterly unfitted for scholastic duties. I look back on my
own days in the College of the City of New York, and recall the comical
old boys whom the Tammany machine appointed to teach me literature and
philosophy and Latin, and other high-brow subjects. Therefore, I was not
surprised to be told of a superintendent who talks about “algebray,” and
who says: “As I was a-saying,” etc. The French teachers find amusement
in the efforts of superintendents to pretend that they know French. I
talked with a charming lady of Spanish birth, who attempted to get by
one of these examiners, but he reported her French as “very bad”; she
“ran all her words together.” Anyone who has listened to a Frenchman
talk will appreciate the humor of this comment; one might say that the
first qualification for speaking good French is to run your words
together to the utmost possible extent. This lady went to see Professor
Cohn, head of the department of French of Columbia University, and one
of our leading French scholars. He reported that she spoke French “like
a native,” and took occasion to add that he knew the examiner in
question, and knew him to be ignorant of French.
This lady got her appointment; but presently she discovered that the
head of her French department didn’t know any French; necessarily, her
pupils discovered it also; and that made her unpopular with her
superior. She was refused promotion upon the ground that she was “a
non-conformist.” She told me of her adventures in trying to get
something explicit from the examiners; she called several times upon
Examiner Smith, the same gentleman who debated with me at the Civic
Club. Mr. Smith was in a hurry to catch a train, and asked the lady to
tell him her story while he was washing his hands in a lavatory. She was
so fastidious as to think that was not quite a courteous examination!
I talked with a young man, who had been for many years in the system,
and with whom they had not been able to find fault; his ratings had been
“double A” from the beginning of his career. But what chance had the
system to hold an energetic man, who saw all promotion depending upon
favoritism and graft, and saw himself condemned to a subordinate
position, taking orders from pompous ignoramuses? The desirable
positions in the system are few—the Board of Estimate sees to that!—and
the struggle for them is tense, and the way of promotion is the way of
intrigue. Here were people giving courses to teachers, instructing them
how to pass examinations for promotion—and then these same people
conducting the examinations! Here were examiners with agents out touting
for them! (You see, they teach what is called “salesmanship” in the New
York schools; and evidently, they practice what they teach!) My young
friend went out into the business world, and is making a good living. He
explained the difference this made in his life; when he met business
men, he was an equal among equals, but as a teacher he had had to
tremble before a board of examiners who could not have passed one of
their own examinations.
“I do not know of a school system in the United States which is run for
the benefit of the pupils; they are all run for the benefit of the
gang”; thus District Superintendent Tildsley, debating with me before
the Civic Club. Dr. Tildsley added that by “the gang” he meant the
superintendents, the principals and the teachers. It was kind of him to
add the teachers, but some of them in the audience did not appreciate
his compliment. There is quite a group in the New York schools who are
really concerned for the children, and feel no sense of solidarity with
the bigoted autocracy which at present holds the power.
“It is the duty of a teacher who knows of anything wrong in the school
system to complain to her superiors about it,” said the pious Dr.
Tildsley; and there came a chorus from all over the room: “Yes, and lose
her job!” Dr. Tildsley was pained by the suggestion that a teacher might
encounter trouble as result of just complaints, made at the proper time
and in the proper manner. As it happened, however, I had spent that
morning in the home of Mr. James F. Berry, a teacher of mathematics at
DeWitt Clinton High School, who had been for twenty-three years in the
system, and took seriously the idea that a teacher has responsibility
for teaching conditions. Mr. Berry made complaint against the grossest
kind of evils in the school—cruelty to pupils, dishonesty, and acts of
injustice by those in authority. As a result, his career in the system
was one long misery. He was denied promotion to which he was justly
entitled; and he put in my hands a little diary, in which he had kept
the record of two decades of struggle for his rights. I glance through
it and find entries such as this:
Mr. Tildsley exemplified today his arbitrary and disagreeable way of
dealing with those under him, by making a perfectly groundless
accusation against me. It was easy to disprove, and then he virtually
apologized, though with no sign of regretting his accusation. I have
observed this practice of sweeping statements by him, and if they are
not promptly disproved one feels that he takes them for granted as
true and admitted, and such an impression does not make for good-will.
I shall before long show you how at this same DeWitt Clinton High School
there has been established with official sanction an elaborate system of
espionage; a teacher drawing full salary devotes the greater part of his
time to training pupils to spy upon other teachers, and when these
pupils bring reports of unorthodox ideas and utterances, the pupils are
praised for a meritorious service. But in the case of Mr. Berry I find
that the disposition to report genuine evils is described by Dr.
Tildsley as “a tendency to tale-bearing which lessens efficiency!”
Why Dr. Tildsley did not like the “tale-bearing” of Mr. Berry is easy to
understand. In 1914 Dr. Tildsley was principal of the DeWitt Clinton
High School, and when he was moved on to a higher position, two of his
favorite teachers in the school, who were in line for principalships,
and who have since been made principals, took five hundred and
twenty-five dollars out of the “general organization fund” of the
school—that is, money contributed by the students for student
activities—and used it to purchase a silver service which was presented
to Dr. Tildsley. The source of this money was kept a secret, but Mr.
Berry learned about it, and wrote to the president of the board of
education, pointing out that this was a clear violation of the law, as
well as a great injustice to the pupils, most of whom were poor and many
self-supporting. Had not one teacher been turned out of the system for
accepting a box of candy from her pupils? A scandal was threatened, but
it was hushed up, the newspapers co-operating by not publishing a line.
Dr. Tildsley returned the silver service, which was sold, I am informed,
to George Sylvester Viereck. For nine years Mr. Berry has been
persecuted because of this affair; while Dr. Tildsley was promoted to be
deputy boss of the gang!
They have a method of punishing teachers which they learned from the
police department in New York. Every now and then some policeman takes
it upon himself to enforce a law which his superiors are using as a
means of extortion; they will shift this policeman to the Bronx, and a
month later they will send him to Brooklyn, and a month later to Staten
Island, and so on—the poor wretch spends the greater part of his life on
street cars, getting to his job and back. In the case of a teacher they
wait just long enough for her to get settled in a new home, and then
they move her again. It is something understood by all teachers that
anyone who opposes the principal will find herself “transferred,” or
lowered in ratings, or will have hard classes, or longer hours with no
more pay. Said one to me: “Any teacher who brings charges against a
principal is ruined. It matters nothing what the charges are: stealing
school funds, or beating the pupils, or offensive advances of a sexual
nature. All that happens is the principal denies the charges, and the
matter is dropped; a teacher’s testimony counts for no more than the
testimony of a Negro in the South.”
New York is not an “open shop” city, and so the teachers have a union.
Its leaders suffer discrimination when it comes to promotion, but that
does not break the union down. As part of the campaign against it, the
authorities maintain a “yellow” union; that is, an organization which is
supposed to represent the teachers, but can be controlled by the gang.
The name of this is the “Teachers’ Council.” It purports to be a
representative body, but the teachers do not vote directly, they vote
for delegates from all organizations recognized by the board of
education; and the insiders will belong to as many as ten or a dozen
organizations, and will have a vote in each. The machine has its
henchmen in all the key positions, and the surest way to promotion in
the system lies in the rendering of this kind of Judas service. This
“Teachers’ Council” is accustomed to attack the reputations of union
teachers, and never give them opportunity to reply; the slander,
whatever it is, will be quoted in the “Times” as representing the
opinion of “twenty-five thousand organized teachers.” We are in New York
now, not in Los Angeles, but you note that we still have our “Times,”
and it is exactly the same kind of “Times”—it will publish any falsehood
about an independent man or woman, and will give the victim no chance to
answer.