IS A TEACHER A CITIZEN?
We continue East to St. Louis, another city where God and Mammon have
combined for the exploitation of the children. There is no city in which
the Catholics are stronger, nor any in which the two political parties
are more completely in the hands of the open-shoppers and labor
exploiters. Up to last year the two parties had a gentleman’s agreement
by which each party nominated for the school board only half as many
candidates as there were places to be filled. The result was no
competition for school board memberships on election day. The Democrats
inevitably elected their candidates and the Republicans theirs; and
since the nominating conventions were under the complete domination of
political bosses, these bosses in effect named the school board members.
Recently the people made an especial effort to eliminate one gang
member, by the name of Murphy. They kept him off the Democratic ticket,
whereupon the Republicans nominated him, both the gangs voted for him,
and he went in for another six years. These school board members are
uneducated men of the ward-leader, campaign-manager type; at least three
of them, I am assured, have never been through the grade schools. A
prominent citizen of St. Louis wrote me in 1922: “We have men on our
board of education who are ignorant and vicious and without character
whatsoever.” Another citizen of St. Louis writes in 1923:
There is no such thing as an honest election in St. Louis. The ballots
are changed by the political gangsters, who are the election officials
at all the polls. I visited a large number of the polls at the last
school election, and in some found only one individual sober; some
were lying with head on the table, dead to the world, others maudlin.
The large mass of the people are criminally negligent toward their
civic duties—they do not vote, and this makes it all the easier for
the ward-heelers. This is for your private information, for it would
work me much harm here in my position if anything of this appeared
over my signature.
The Catholics of St. Louis have a complete educational system of their
own, replacing the public school system. The German Catholics used to
send their children to the public schools, but now the archbishop says,
“You will be damned if your children attend the godless schools”; and
the Irish and Italians and Poles, who compose the new Catholic
population, bow to this threat. You might think the Catholics would at
least be willing to let the “godless schools” alone, but they are not;
on the contrary, seventy per cent of the teachers in the public school
system are Catholics, and a good part of the board has been for a long
time made up of Catholics. The purpose of this is the same as we have
seen in New York and San Francisco, and shall see in Boston and
Baltimore—to starve the public schools.
The extent to which this is done in St. Louis you will find difficult to
believe. The people want to have good schools, and go to the polls and
vote the money—and then the board of education refuses to spend the
money! Recently the people passed a bond issue of three million dollars
for new buildings; while I was in the city the board decided to spend
only one million and a half. The people have voted an education tax of
eight and one-half mills on the dollar, but the board again and again
has voted to spare the poor taxpayer and save his money. There were six
millions available for buildings, and no move had been made to spend
them. Ten grade schools and two senior high schools had been authorized
by the board the previous year, but they were not yet off the
drawing-boards; and meantime all the residence districts of St. Louis
are dotted with Catholic schools and high schools, and a new half
million dollar Catholic high school is near completion.
I talked with Dr. Henry L. Wolfner, who is one of the best known
oculists in the United States, and was until recently a member of the
school board. Dr. Wolfner told me that he did not know why the board was
unwilling to spend this money; he had tried his best to get it spent, he
said, and the result was a long intrigue to force him off the board.
When finally he resigned, the “Globe-Democrat,” organ of the gang,
declared that in a letter to the board he had given ill health as his
reason for resignation. This, Dr. Wolfner assured me, was an out and out
lie. He summed up the situation in the St. Louis schools in two
contrasting incidents: first, the courts had removed a board member
because it had been discovered that the board had purchased a building
site through his real estate firm; and second, the Catholic president of
the school board had withdrawn from the college library a set of
Havelock Ellis’ great work, “The Psychology of Sex.” These books had
been in the library for many years, and were made use of by juvenile
court workers, and teachers of incorrigible boys and defectives.
Dr. Wolfner told me of the efforts of the gang to get rid of one
competent educator after another. They had just forced out Dr. John W.
Withers, and also Dr. E. George Payne, director of the Teachers’
College. Dr. Withers wrote a letter to the papers three or four years
ago, in which he showed how political graft and favoritism made
impossible an honest administration of the schools. The superintendent
was continually besieged by demands from the gang for favors, the
appointment or promotion of this or that political favorite. The
Catholics, of course, are tirelessly working for promotions for their
crowd. “I wish I could bring myself to become a Catholic,” said a
teacher to a friend of mine; “I would get on three times as fast.”
Also, there has been a long struggle over the question of whether
graduates of the Catholic high schools should have the right to enter
Teachers’ College without passing an entrance examination. Since the
Catholic schools have very low standards, the educators of St. Louis
have fought this, and it was on this issue that Superintendent Withers
and Principal Payne of Teachers’ College were driven from St. Louis. The
Catholics brought suit in the courts, and won their case in St. Louis,
but lost it before the supreme court of the state. Now everybody in St.
Louis rests easy, in the assurance that standards are being maintained
for the teachers. But just recently the school board has thrown down the
bars, and parochial school graduates are accepted wholesale. This news
has been entirely suppressed by the St. Louis newspapers, so the public
of that city will get from this book their first information that their
school board has set aside the decision of their supreme court!
Also, of course, the book companies are on the job. Up to the year 1921
a member of the committee for the adoption of text-books was receiving a
salary from the American Book Company, for spending summers in
California and doing some nominal editorial work. Naturally this board
was friendly to American Book Company publications. The board meets in
secret, what it calls “executive meetings”; the members of the gang hold
a caucus in advance, and decide what they are going to do, and make
everything unanimous; so the public never finds out what is going on.
This regime of graft and favoritism extends all the way down; the
principals are petty tyrants, flattered and fawned upon; those teachers
who are weak and subservient, and do clerical work for their principals,
are the ones who get the marks. The St. Louis school system was worked
out by a real Prussian some thirty years ago; it is a military affair,
routine and red tape and formulas. Every year the teachers are
automatically dismissed, and must be reappointed—the ideal of the “open
shop” system.
Here, as usual, the teachers had to take up the fight for a living wage.
No attention was paid to them, so they proceeded to organize. Miss Rosa
Hesse was elected president of the teachers’ organization, and the
superintendent sent for her and demanded to know if they were going to
join the American Federation of Teachers; if so, every one of them would
be discharged. The organizer of the teachers’ federation was barred from
speaking to them. At the same time, the official representative of the
Chamber of Commerce was coming and soliciting them to join his
organization. It would be “advantageous,” he assured the teachers
significantly. This Chamber of Commerce was deeply interested in the
schools—it had been taking action to prevent the professors at the
Teachers’ College using a series of text-books, “Community and National
Life,” prepared by Professor Charles H. Judd, and published by the
United States government; the ground of the objection being that these
books intimated very mildly that labor unions had some advantage, in
that they developed a sense of self-respect among laborers!
If you have read “The Goose-step” you will recollect the question raised
by Professor H. L. Bolley of North Dakota: “Is a college professor a
citizen?” You will remember that we cited a number of cases proving that
he is not a citizen. We shall in this book consider the question: “Is a
school teacher a citizen?” In St. Louis she very certainly is not, as
the case of Miss Rosa Hesse proves. I had the pleasure of talking with
this lady, and if it would do her any good I would cheerfully bear
testimony that she is an American gentlewoman of the old school,
absolutely uncontaminated by any touch of “Red”—that is, unless
perchance the reading of “The Goose-step” has since affected her! At the
time I talked with her, she had no idea whatever of the social
significance of what had happened to her; she was simply bewildered by
her discovery that a school teacher is not permitted to demand a living
wage and to exercise her rights as a voter.
To begin with, Miss Hesse discovered that the meetings of the school
board were supposed to be public; so she got a group of teachers to
agree to attend them and see what was going on. But when it came to a
showdown not one of the teachers dared; Miss Hesse went in all by
herself, and gave me a comical account of the expression on the
superintendent’s face when he saw her in that holy of holies. As a
result of this presumption, her name was left off the list for
reappointment in the year 1921. The superintendent lied to her outright
about it, but one of the board members gave him away, and the protests
of the teachers forced a reconsideration at this time.
But shortly afterwards an election for the school board came up, and
Miss Hesse’s organization, the Grade Teachers’ Association, ventured to
approve certain candidates. I am told by a gentleman of St. Louis who
knows the situation intimately that in this political struggle the
teachers’ organization was being misled by the “gang”; and this, alas,
may be—I have seen labor unions thus used on many occasions. Anyhow, a
lady by the name of Mrs. Gellhorn, president of the Missouri League of
Women Voters, issued a call for a meeting of women. At this meeting the
choice of the Grade Teachers’ Association was condemned; and among those
endorsed was Mr. Christopher W. Johnson, millionaire basket
manufacturer, and a member of the board for twenty-four years.
Mr. Johnson was running for re-election to a public office, and Miss
Hesse, a citizen of St. Louis, was being asked for her vote; she thought
she had a right to be informed about the matter, and she said to Mrs.
Gellhorn, privately and politely: “Is it true, as has just been stated
at an open men’s meeting, that Mr. Johnson is the head of a sweat-shop,
and is connected with a real estate company doing business with the
board?” That was all of the conversation; and for it Miss Hesse, who was
head assistant of the Franz Sigel School, and had been a teacher in St.
Louis for thirty-one years, was driven from her position and from the
school system.
Mr. Johnson himself got hold of the story, and the matter was brought up
before the board. A motion was made for the expulsion of Miss Hesse, and
when the motion was about to die, Mr. Johnson himself seconded it. Miss
Hesse managed to get a public trial, and at this trial Mr. Johnson
served in the triple capacity of complainant, prosecutor and judge.
Three other members of the board gave testimony against the teacher, and
then voted as judges against her.
I am told by one who has investigated the matter that the charge
concerning Mr. Johnson’s connection with a real estate company was
false; but the charge had been made in a public meeting, and so Miss
Hesse thought she had a right to inquire about it. Whether Mr. Johnson’s
large box and basket factory is properly described as “a sweat-shop” I
can not say; if I should call it that, Mr. Johnson, who is a contentious
person, might put me on trial also. But I presume I may quote a
physician in St. Louis, Dr. H. W. Faber, who writes me that he had to
attend girls who worked in this basket factory, and had worn down the
skin of their fingers until the blood oozed out on the baskets. I
presume also it is permissible to say that one of the ladies who
testified to having heard Miss Hesse’s question about a “sweat-shop,”
belongs to a family which ran a sweat-shop in the Missouri penitentiary!
Miss Hesse’s expulsion made a great stir in the city; a petition was
circulated for her restoration, and twenty-five thousand people signed
it. The Central Trades and Labor Union appointed a committee to take up
the matter; but the board declared that it had no power to advise the
superintendent to reappoint a teacher. We may venture to guess that if
the board had made a polite recommendation, the superintendent would not
have ignored it. But they preferred to leave matters as they stood; and
the rule for teachers in St. Louis was stated to the newspapers by a
Jewish rabbi: “Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing!”