TO HENRIETTA RODMAN
In city after city I found school conditions like these, and in every
case I found a little group of men and women opposing them, facing every
handicap and humiliation. In two cities the soul and inspiration of this
protest was a woman: Margaret Haley in Chicago, and Henrietta Rodman in
New York. Henrietta took me in charge, and like Virgil with Dante, led
me through the seven hells. She would gather a flock of teachers, and
sit by while they told me their troubles in chorus. I counted upon
Henrietta to read and revise this manuscript; but last spring she died,
and all I can do is to tell about her, and pass on her brave and loving
spirit to the future.
Henrietta Rodman came of an old New York family, dating back some two
hundred years. Her great-grandfather, Colonel Robert Blackwood, was a
member of the First Continental Congress, and would have signed the
Declaration of Independence if his death had not intervened. I think it
would not be an exaggeration to say that this fighting Colonial ancestor
kept Henrietta in the school system in New York. Many and many a time he
put on his ruffles and his cocked hat, and drew his rusty old sword and
stormed into the presence of boards of education and superintendents, or
into the columns of capitalist newspapers—to prove that his
great-grand-daughter was not a Bolshevik nor an alien enemy! Under the
shadow of his revolutionary banner Henrietta fought for true
Americanism, with the fangs of the Tammany tiger in her flesh.
She was twenty-three years in the school system, yet she never lost her
courage, her idealism, or her sense of humor. She was always full of
energy, always pleading for the schools; to her pupils she was
warm-hearted and loving, interested in new ideas, eager for new
adventures. Her father had said to her: “Find the fundamental issue of
your day, and concentrate on that.” The great-grandfather had chosen the
issue of American independence; the father had chosen the issue of
chattel-slavery; and Henrietta chose the issue of wage-slavery.
She had been teaching Latin at Wadleigh High School, and found that
ninety-four per cent of the pupils were being forced out because they
could not pass the examinations. She proceeded to teach them so that
they could pass; but it was against the rule to teach that way, and the
principal sent for her and scolded her. She persisted in passing her
pupils, and so the city superintendent sent for her; a teacher had no
right to criticize her superiors, he declared, and flew into a passion.
Suddenly a light leaped into Henrietta’s eyes, and the sword of the old
revolutionary colonel swished over the superintendent’s head. “If you
storm at me like a primitive man I’ll shriek like a primitive woman!” So
at once the superintendent calmed down!
They wanted to give her some real trouble, so they put her in charge of
a hundred defective girls. At that time no one knew anything about
psychological tests, or what to do with mentally defective children in
the schools. Henrietta worked out a course of study by easily graded
stages, which the most feeble-minded of them could follow. The principal
of the school took this and published it as his own, and so stated
before the board of superintendents. Some of these pupils were homeless
and sick, and Henrietta got the class to adopt them; that was an
unprecedented thing, altogether against the rules, and Henrietta was
stormed at some more. They sent her to the Julia Richman High School,
one of those terrible old barns that was built apparently before the use
of paint was discovered. It was supposed to be one of the most
democratic schools in New York City. “But,” said Henrietta, “we can’t
call the teachers together, we can’t pass a motion, we can’t send a
statement to the press or make an application to the school board,
without first having the sanction of the school principal!”
There came the George Eliot incident, whereby the spotlight of publicity
was turned upon this liberal teacher. She was teaching English, and some
girl asked if it was true that George Eliot had lived with a man to whom
she was not married. What was Henrietta to do? Should she tell the girl
to hush, that was a naughty question? Or should she lie? She explained
that George Henry Lewes had had an insane wife, and under the English
law could not get a divorce; so he and George Eliot had lived as husband
and wife, and had been so accepted by all their friends for the rest of
their lifetime. One of the children took this home to her father, and
the father took it to the priest, and the priest took it to the pulpit,
and the New York “Times” took it to the whole city. There was a terrible
uproar—it is so that reputations are made in the radical movement. We
have to do something queer or unusual, something supposed to be
shocking; and we must manage to be right while we are doing it!
Next came the uproar over married teachers. The board passed a rule that
women teachers who got married should automatically lose their jobs; so
the women took to concealing their marriages. But now and then one could
no longer be concealed, and there would be a case of what Henrietta
called “mother-baiting.” The board of education caught one woman about
to become a mother, and Henrietta wrote a satirical letter to the
newspapers. For this she was suspended for eight months without pay. As
she said: “They fined me eighteen hundred dollars, and then they adopted
my idea. They have always adopted my ideas, and have always fined me for
making them adopt them.”
Henrietta, like myself, supported the war. She was head of a “team” that
sold fifteen thousand dollars worth of Liberty bonds; but that did not
save her from being “investigated” by military intelligence agents. They
got hold of her pupils while she was away; the agents were suspicious,
because she had been teaching from Frederic C. Howe’s book, “European
Cities at Work.” They discovered that what she had been teaching from
the book was city planning. But it was an offense at that time to let
children know that the Germans planned their cities well!
Henrietta was summoned by Superintendent Tildsley. She had been making a
disturbance because the spy department was having the pupils write
essays on Bolshevism as a means of finding out what the children were
being taught at home. Henrietta brought along a stenographer to take
down the interview—so little trust did she have in Dr. Tildsley; but
they would not let the stenographer take notes. They summoned her again
before the board. She had written a letter to the Brooklyn “Eagle,” and
the “Eagle” had not published it, but had turned it over to the board.
They had an assistant district attorney present to try to twist her
statements; they had no evidence, but they tried to get some out of her,
luring her into testifying against herself. They furnished a
stenographer for this meeting, and when she got the stenographer’s
transcript it had been “doctored.” In American political life today you
must realize that you are dealing, quite literally, with criminals in
office, and there is no limit to what they will do to you.
At this time Henrietta was organizing the high school teachers, and the
principal forbade them to meet unless he was present; so it was that the
principals took to carrying step-ladders and peering over the transoms,
to see if the teachers were violating orders. Said Henrietta: “One might
think, if we are fit to teach the children in the schools, we are fit to
meet and discuss our own problems and ideas. But, no! Here are a million
children and twenty-five thousand teachers, and all the thinking for the
whole system is to be done by twenty-two men. If anybody else presumes
to think, that is impertinence.”
She explained the situation to me; teachers as a rule are people of
quiet tastes, not good fighters, and the community knows nothing about
how they are treated. For example, during the war-time, New York City
agreed to cancel all its contracts for the purchase of school supplies,
because prices had gone up, and it would not be fair to make the
contractors fulfil the old contracts. But no one thought about the
contracts with the teachers, and what was fair to them. The teachers
suffered in silence, or retired to some other occupation, giving place
to less competent people. And who gave a thought to the children, who
were now to be taught by the incompetent?
It happened once that Henrietta met Mrs. Tildsley at a reception, and
there was a discussion. “If you don’t like the way the schools are run,
why do you stay?” asked the superintendent’s wife; to which Henrietta
answered: “I stay because I am not willing to leave the children to Dr.
Tildsley.” To me she said: “I have enlisted as if for a war. I am
furiously patriotic; I believe in the future of America with all my
heart and soul, and I am going to make freedom a reality here. I am
going to stick to the death.” She did this.
We were sitting on the little roof-garden of the Civic Club one spring
evening, and there were six or eight teachers in the group. I could not
see their faces in the darkness, but I could hear their eager voices,
their murmurs of assent to Henrietta’s statements. With a pencil and pad
I noted down in the dark one after another of her sentences: “Tight
mindedness and fear are the occupational diseases of teaching.... In the
business world there is no such thing as unquestioned obedience; that
belongs only in teaching.... There is more kowtowing in our schools than
anywhere else in the world.”
She told me how she had been assigned to teach “Americanization”
classes. There was a class of union painters, foreigners who had asked
for help; naturally, they wanted a union teacher, and they chose
Henrietta. But the superintendent in charge said that she was a
dangerous radical, and they could not have her! Here was a school system
with twenty-two per cent of its children, more than two hundred
thousand, according to official statistics, coming to school suffering
from malnutrition. According to the director of physical training, more
than half the children who come to the high schools have physical
defects. And if you try to do anything whatever about these conditions,
if you have any sense of public responsibility for the poverty, the
exploitation and neglect of children—why then, you are a Bolshevik and a
social outcast!
A young teacher spoke up, a girl who had just begun work. The principal
had given her mimeographed directions as to how to teach. There was a
book containing all the problems, and day by day she read from these
sheets; she was merely a phonograph. They would hold a stop-watch on her
pupils to see the number of words per minute they could read, and they
would rate her according to that. They figured what they called the
“pupil load” of a teacher. Every teacher had to carry a “pupil load” of
710; that was the minimum, and they never let you get below it. There
was supposed also to be a maximum, but they never minded driving you
above it; they would report the extra pupils as “visitors.” Another
teacher spoke up; she was teaching typewriting, and they had gone
through the books and cut out a sentence of Emerson’s attributing to
society some responsibility for criminals. That was radicalism!
Henrietta is gone; but her soul lives, and likewise the teachers’ union
she helped to found. This book goes out as a call to the teachers and
friends of teachers, not merely in New York, but all over America, to
come to the aid of the children, to save the young and groping minds of
the new generation from the bigotry and squalid ignorance which afflicts
our adults. I quote you a letter written last year by a high school boy
of Brooklyn, and sent to me by a teacher in that school. The teacher
does not say how he answered this letter; read it and see if you would
know how to answer, if such a letter came to you:
Brooklyn, N. Y., Aug. 31, 1922.
Dear Mr. ——:
I have never had the pleasure of being in one of your classes, but it
will not deter me from writing to you. Somehow I believe that you are
one who may be able to help us where I and my friend have pondered
many, many hours and still could not achieve solution.
We are young—youths just upon the threshold of learning the way of our
feet in the world of men. And when the week’s work is done and we have
a day or two or three all to ourselves, what are we to do?
Bear with me a moment. All about us yawns the pit of mediocrity. With
few exceptions, the men and women and the sweet boys and girls I meet
jade on me. It is appalling—their unlovely spirit—mediocrity. They are
without greatness, without camaraderie, never do much of anything that
is virile and stinging and resentful, nor ever feel the prod and urge
of life to will over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. I can
see through them and beyond them, and all there is to see is their
frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness and pitifulness. They are
miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans,
fluttering their May-fly dance of an hour. As far as we are concerned
in the matter they can go hang. We laugh at the ridiculous effrontery
of their efforts to crystallize us in the particular mold of their
two-by-two, cut-and-dried, conventional world.
Don’t you see? Beyond all of us and the spirit of us that is a-bubble
whispers Romance, Adventure. We have read the books and are aflame
with purple hints of a world beyond our world. When the week-ends roll
around, we want to do novel and stirring things, we want to realize
ourselves, to chance and boast and dare, to put laughter in our
throats, and quicken the throb of our blood. Heavens! We have
considered and counseled a myriad times, and the only conclusion we
reached was that we were as abysmally ignorant of life as we were or
thought we were profoundly wise.
We have no morality in the matter. We will be grateful for anything,
providing it is provocative of the thrills and novelty we seek. And
please do not consider any such insipidity as taking a hike to the
country or a trip to Bear Mt. They are commonplaces, don’t you see?
For instance, a séance with a medium would have been a glorious
suggestion—or something more unusual. But this is only a sample of the
many possible things that would lend color and individuality to our
days.
So we who are merely young, appeal to you, a little naively perhaps,
but with stern sincerity, in the hope that you who have passed through
our stage of evolution may sympathize with us and may be able to help
us in the way that we wish to be helped.
To me this letter is like a flashlight thrown suddenly upon the minds of
the young people. Our whole problem of education is summed up in it; and
I ask again: Would you know what to answer. I, for my part, would tell
these lads to find one of the big strikes which are always going on, say
in the clothing trades of New York, and attempt to read the Constitution
and so come into contact with the realities of the class struggle. But,
of course, a teacher who gave that advice would cease to be a teacher.
Those who hold their jobs and get their promotions in the system are
those who follow the mimeographed formulas, and see that the pupils read
the required number of words per minute. The result is a newspaper item
from the New York “Times” of May 26, 1922; I quote the first paragraph:
Two school girls were found yesterday afternoon, clasped in each
other’s arms, lying on the floor of a kitchen of an apartment in the
tenement house at 75 Van Alst Avenue, Long Island City. The room was
filled with gas and the discovery was made just in time to save them
from death by asphyxiation. The girls were Dora Boylan, 15 years old,
daughter of a widow who occupied the apartment, and who at the time
was at work in a factory near by, and Agnes Dougherty, also 15, of 28
Hunterspoint Avenue, Long Island City. They had made up their minds to
die rather than go to school.