THE ROMEO AND JULIET STUNT
We move north to Portland, which is the harbor of the lumber country, a
relatively old city with an aristocracy of merchant princes, like
Baltimore or Boston. Ten years ago Oregon had a strong progressive
movement, it was the pioneer in direct legislation. Today the old guard
rules, and Portland is in the grip of a Black Hand which imports its
ideas direct from Los Angeles. Curiously enough, they had a strike of
the longshoremen and seamen, at the same time as Los Angeles; and here
also the I. W. W. attacked the very basis of American civic life by
closing up the boot-legging dives and dumping the liquor into the
gutters. The insurrection was put down by the same methods as in Los
Angeles—the throwing of hundreds of men into jail and holding them
incommunicado without warrant or charge.
A number of Portland’s old and ineffably haughty families got their
wealth by stealing the school lands which the government had given to
the people of the state; now other families are on the way to becoming
haughty upon the basis of real estate manipulations of the school board,
and the sale of school supplies at double prices. The boss of the Oregon
political machine is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National
Bank; for the past ten years he has kept a political agent to run the
state legislature. The machine sent down to Los Angeles for copies of
Woodworth’s Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” for distribution in
Oregon; and from these dragon’s teeth resulted a whole crop of
legislative vermin—a bill requiring every school teacher to take an oath
of loyalty, a bill forbidding aliens to teach in the schools; a bill
barring any teacher who “either publicly or privately engages in
destructive or undermining criticism of our government”; a bill
requiring “the teaching of the Constitution in all public and private
schools”—meaning, of course, the teaching of the Constitution as a
bulwark of special privilege.
As the directing staff of the public schools of Portland, Mr. Mills has
selected a group of educators about whom I have yet to hear anything
good. To call them uneducated educators would not tell you much; so come
with me and make the acquaintance of Mr. D. A. Grout, superintendent of
schools for a quarter of a million people. Mr. Grout is clammy and cold
in his personal dealings, but in literary composition and oratory he
expands and reveals himself. He takes a parental attitude towards his
teachers, gathering them in large assemblies to instruct and inspire
them. He composes verses, and has the teachers learn and recite these
verses before him. He tells them stories with moral lessons, and then
prints the stories in the official “School Bulletin.” One of these
stories had to do with the philosophy of an old Negro, who was
accustomed to say on all occasions: “Make the most of life today, ’caze
you don’t know what may come along tomorrow.” A group of teachers
declared to me that in telling the story Mr. Grout repeated this formula
eight times; but I suspect these teachers of inaccuracy—because, as Mr.
Grout publishes the story in the “School Bulletin,” September 6, 1919,
he repeats it only three times, and then varies it for another three
times as follows: “Make the most of life today, ’caze we _do know_ what
may come along tomorrow.”
Two or three years ago Mr. Grout went East to attend a convention of the
National Education Association. His expenses were paid by the city; he
has done considerable traveling at the city’s expense—$4,995.08 in the
past three years. Superintendents do this traveling upon the theory that
they will meet other great educators and bring home new ideas and
inspirations. “We do get so tired,” said one of Mr. Grout’s flock, in
telling me about it. “We do so crave a little bit of enthusiasm,
something to make us think it’s worth while to go on with the old, dead
routine!”
Portland’s great educator comes home from his six thousand mile trip,
and the twelve hundred teachers of the city are summoned to a general
assembly to receive the new ideas and inspiration. The proceedings are
opened with music; there is a supervisor of singing, who stands upon the
platform, with the bulk of the men teachers on the ground floor, and the
bulk of the women up in the gallery. The men are directed to sing: “Soft
o’er the fountain, ling’ring falls the Southern moon.” They do not sing
loud enough, and the music supervisor jumps up and shouts: “Sing until
you break the chandeliers.” After which it is the women’s turn; they
answer: “Nita! Juanita! Ask thy soul if we should part.” The men sing
another verse, and the women answer—the sarcastic young lady teachers
who told me about this performance described it as “the Romeo and Juliet
stunt.” Next they sing, “In the gloaming, oh, my darling”—in the same
“Romeo and Juliet” fashion. I have before me the “School Bulletin” for
two successive years, which provides the texts of these
chandelier-breaking melodies; also, “Just a song at twilight, When the
lights are low,” and “Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie, Where early fa’s the
dew.”
Now Mr. Grout rises, and a hushed silence falls upon the twelve hundred
men and women teachers. The time for new ideas and inspirations has
come. Mr. Grout has brought a really new idea: poetry is to be taught to
the children, and he opens a normal school right there and then, to
teach the teachers how to teach it. His method is to repeat one line of
the poem, and then have the twelve hundred teachers recite this after
him; then he repeats another line of the poem, and the teachers recite
that; then he repeats the two lines together, and the teachers recite
the two; then he goes on to the next two lines, and so on, until all the
twelve hundred teachers are able to recite the entire poem correctly.
Such is the newest pedagogic discovery, for which the people of Portland
were paying a salary of six hundred and twenty-five dollars per month,
plus a car allowance of fifty dollars per month, plus a traveling
allowance of a hundred and thirty-eight dollars and sixty-one cents per
month.
It depends upon the poem, you may say. So I give you the poem which Mr.
Grout thus taught to the twelve hundred assembled teachers of Portland.
Lest you find it incredible, I specify that when the teachers recited it
to me, I also found it incredible; I made two or three of them recite it
in turn, so as to make sure they really knew it. Later on, I made them
send me a copy of the “School Bulletin,” in which the poem was printed
for the benefit of any of the twelve hundred who might have forgotten
it. Here it is, word for word, and punctuation mark for punctuation
mark:
/* “There was a crooked man Who walked a crooked mile; But I, when I go
walking, Don’t walk in crooked style. I keep my chin and stomach in And
hold my chest up higher, And step along so straight and strong, And
never, never tire.” */
You can imagine the silence which prevailed in the auditorium after this
course in poetry. Could it be that some faint uneasiness penetrated the
mind of the Portland superintendent of schools? Apparently it did, for
he now told the assembled twelve hundred teachers that he had a story to
teach them. There were some teachers who were dissatisfied with the
school system, and were accustomed more or less surreptitiously to
criticize it; for the benefit of such teachers Mr. Grout mentioned that
once upon a time he had owned a dog, and this dog had acquired the habit
of running out on the highway and barking at everybody and everything
that went by. Once a big automobile had come along, and the dog had
rushed out at that, and afterwards the dog had been buried at the foot
of a big tree, and had made excellent fertilizer for the tree. The fate
of this dog was one for all teachers to bear in mind and apply the moral
in their lives. After which the twelve hundred teachers joined in
singing: “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze
on so fondly today”; and the assembly was adjourned.
I was solemnly assured by five teachers at once, that at the assembly of
the following year Mr. Grout started out to ascertain if the teachers
still remembered the poem which he had taught them; but one of the board
members seated on the platform burst out laughing, and brought the
poetical proceedings to an end. The board member thought it was funny,
and maybe you think it is funny; but I don’t. I think it one more proof
of the deliberate conspiracy which the masters of our plutocratic empire
have hatched, to keep the American people at the mental age of eight.
The schools are now conducted upon the basis of keeping the pupils at
that age; and of course the safest way to do this is to keep the
teachers at the same age, and likewise the principals, and the
supervisors—and the superintendents.
But it may be that I do an injustice to the mentality of Portland’s
high-priced educators; it may be that they are not so naive as they
appear, and really know what they are doing to earn their keep. The
teachers have a pension fund, to which all have to belong. The amount of
the fund is over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and some
school officials are ex officio members of the board of directors of
this fund. The board loaned the sum of sixty-five hundred dollars to a
firm of lawyers, and there was a rumor that one school official had got
the use of this money. One of the teachers came upon a newspaper
clipping, telling how an official in the Philippines had been sent to
jail for taking money from a fund of whose board he was a member. This
clipping was mailed anonymously to the school official; and immediately
afterwards the firm of lawyers began to pay up that sixty-five hundred
dollars! At one time it was reported that the fund was on the rocks, and
the teachers were going to lose all their money. May be it really was in
danger; and again, may be somebody wanted to throw it into the hands of
a receiver, so that the politicians could get it. Big Business of course
wants the teachers to take out insurance with private companies; to this
end the Portland “Oregonian,” organ of the Black Hand, cited seventeen
cases of the bankruptcy of teachers’ pension funds!
One incident from the administration of the previous superintendent,
just to show you what happens to school teachers in the days of
“progressive” politics. The teachers’ organizations worked out plans for
certain changes in the school system, which changes were calculated to
cause inconvenience to the superintendent. The teachers went out on the
streets, they went to the restaurants at night, and to the market
places, and got the necessary thirty thousand signatures to petitions.
(This is the thing called “direct legislation,” you understand; this is
what the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, and the Dishonorable Harry Atwood and
Woodworth Clum describe as “Treason to the Republic.”) The teachers
gathered in the superintendent’s office with their signatures; they took
them to the office of a lawyer who was a friend of the superintendent,
and locked them in his safe. After supper they found that the door of
the building had been unlocked, the office door had been unlocked, the
safe had been unlocked, and the petitions were gone! The politicians had
made off with the thirty thousand signatures, and no more was heard of
that treasonable referendum!