BOSTON IN BONDAGE
Let us now move to the Atlantic seaboard, beginning with Boston, hub of
the universe and fountain-head of our culture. Boston once prided itself
upon the civic virtues and stern New England moralities; today it is a
graft-ridden city of slums, the cultured population having withdrawn to
the suburban towns, and the plutocracy to haughty isolation in the Back
Bay District, where “the Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots
speak only to God.” The great bankers and corporation magnates employ
the corrupt city government in their factional fights—Lee, Higginson &
Company against Kidder, Peabody & Company; it is reported by those on
the inside that one mayor of the city made more than a million dollars
out of the “tips” he got from the latter firm. For a decade or two the
great part of Boston’s government has been for sale; the district
attorney was selling justice, or injustice, wholesale, and recently an
effort was made to convict him, but the gang proved too strong.
All that these haughty magnates, the Lee-Higginsons and Kidder-Peabodys
and Lowell-Cabot-Lodges ask of the schools is that taxes be kept down.
To this end they have entered into alliance with the Catholic
hierarchy—the old firm of God, Mammon & Company operating on the shores
of Boston Bay, as we have seen it on the shores of San Francisco Bay and
the Mississippi River. For some time the arrangement was that the school
board consisted of two Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew; but when I
was in Boston last year the line-up was four Catholics out of five
members. As usual, the entire program of the Catholic element can be
summed up in one sentence, to starve the public schools so that the
parochial schools may thrive. The hierarchy never ceases to denounce
from its pulpits those Catholics who fail to send their children to the
church schools. They have advised Catholic women not to join the
National Education Association, because this organization has endorsed
the Shepard-Towner Bill, providing national subsidies for education. It
was offered to exclude the Catholic schools from federal inspection, but
that made no difference—the Catholic authorities do not want the public
schools improved, they do not want the competition of good schools.
They are tireless in their efforts to keep control. They have blocked
the movement for a “Greater Boston,” because this would bring in the
suburbs, which are Protestant. At a meeting at the Notre Dame Cathedral
one speaker after another stressed the importance of getting Catholic
teachers into the schools. “The Irish are always for the Irish,”
testifies ex-President Eliot of Harvard; and there have been some funny
illustrations in Boston education. Two or three years ago there was an
uproar in the city, it having been discovered that the schools were
using a work of anti-Irish propaganda, the Century Dictionary! Someone
had looked up the word “brutal,” and discovered that in illustrating its
use the dictionary employed a sentence from Emerson’s “English Traits,”
dealing with the great famine: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in
size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished
brain and brutal form.” So the school board solemnly resolved as
follows: “Ordered: That the use of the Century Dictionary in the Boston
Public Schools is hereby discontinued until such time as a
discriminating, unfair, and untrue reference to the Irish race is
eliminated.” And the Board of Superintendents ordered the passage
blacked out from all copies in the school libraries! I suggest to the
publishers of the Century Dictionary that when they are getting ready
their next edition for Boston, St. Louis, San Francisco, and other
Catholic cities, they look a little farther in Emerson’s “English
Traits,” and quote the following: “The English uncultured are a brutal
nation.... The brutality of the manners in the lower class appears in
the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the
readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all
classes.”
The Catholic censorship of Boston’s intellectual life extends even to
the public library, which was at one time a famous institution, but is
now useless to students, because it excludes whole groups of modern
books. There is a reading-room for children, and on the prominent
shelves of this room you find church propaganda for the young, thrilling
stories about popular and beautiful lady Catholic wives, and wicked
Protestant “vamps” who break up homes. The Italians cannot get the
Bible, but have to write down their names and stand in line and wait—and
even then they don’t get it. I was told by a teacher in the Brookline
schools that the public library there had refused to order Chafee’s
“Freedom of Speech,” the standard work on the subject, written by a
professor of the Harvard Law School. I was told by a teacher in a Boston
high school that she had been rebuked by her principal for using a
text-book in which it was stated, casually and without comment, that the
Irish immigrants had come to America on account of the potato famine.
I was told also of a high school department head who was called up on
the telephone by a Jesuit priest of Boston College, and ordered to
promote a certain Catholic to a higher grade. Considering this Catholic
incompetent, the department head declined, and was given two hours in
which to make her decision; when she still refused, scandals were spread
concerning her and she was summoned before the board. I cannot give the
details of this case, for the reason that the teacher who told me the
story was afraid to put it into writing, or even to revise my
manuscript. It is interesting to note that this priest is the person who
has been selected by the Catholic hierarchy to give the “improvement
lectures” for the teachers of the Boston schools; these lectures being
public school affairs, originally given by professors of Harvard. One
high school teacher told me that her pupils had been forbidden by the
priest to read Dumas!
Boston is one city in which they have teachers’ councils. “What freedom
we have is due to these councils,” said a group of teachers to me; and I
asked just what kind of freedom that meant. They might take up the
question, at what hour should the janitor clean a certain room. They
might take up the question, what credits should be allowed for certain
courses. “But you have nothing to do with hiring and firing?” I asked,
and there came a chorus: “Oh, no, no, no!” And, of course, they have
nothing to do with salaries; their salaries have been held down, and
when the women teachers agitated for increased pay, they were “put off.”
They called a meeting in Faneuil Hall, “the cradle of liberty,” to
discuss their problem; they invited the board members to attend, but not
a single one was interested enough to come. Some teachers belong to a
union, but they keep very quiet; they saw what happened to the
policemen’s union in Boston. It is interesting to note that at the time
of the Boston police strike the teachers of English and history received
instructions from the school board not to permit any mention of it in
classes.[I]
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Footnote I:
My account of the Boston police strike in “The Goose-step” was
ridiculed by the Boston newspapers, and a Cambridge professor wrote me
that he knew it was not true, because he had been on the
ground—meaning that he had read what the Boston newspapers published
concerning it, and had talked with other people who had read the same.
I take this occasion to state that my account of what went on during
this strike in the private offices of the Black Hand of Boston was
furnished by one of Boston’s leading bankers. This old gentleman wrote
it out for me with his own hand, and sent it to me—under the pledge
that when I had read it and made notes concerning it, I would send it
back. I am not sure that I would have had the nerve to publish what I
did about Cal Coolidge and his black eye, if I had known that this
strike-breaking hero was to become the next President of the United
States. But I have published it now, and can’t unpublish it!
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There was a Boston tea-party once upon a time, and the history books are
proud of it; but those old days are past, and the White Terror holds
sway in Boston and its suburbs. A teacher in the Cambridge public
schools was driven from the system for telling her pupils that the
Soviets had a right to determine their own way. At one of the Boston
high schools a child was writing on Bolshevism, and asked the teacher
about it, and the teacher gave her an article from the “Review of
Reviews,” which presented some facts favorable to the Russian
government. This teacher was called before the board and suspended, with
two weeks’ loss of pay, and was told never again “to teach anything with
two sides.” In Boston they passed an ordinance forbidding the displaying
of the red flag; and only after they had passed it did somebody
recollect that the red flag is the emblem of Harvard. I should like to
tell you of a number of other funny things which have happened in the
shadow of our “cradle of liberty”; I spent several hours listening to
stories of teachers—and after I got back home, most of these teachers
wrote, forbidding me to repeat what they had told me!