THE SCENES OF MY CHILDHOOD
Let us move farther south to Baltimore, another old and slow-moving
city, with a dynasty of long-established merchant princes. For forty
years, to my knowledge, their political gang has run the city and
pocketed the proceeds. It is a community in which you can lose yourself
in miles of brick houses, all exactly alike—little two-story brick
houses for the working class and larger three and four-story brick
houses for their “betters.” I was born in one of these larger brick
houses, and spent my childhood playing on the cobble-stoned streets of
“Ballamaw”—as we called it. I never went to school there, because in my
childhood the family doctor thought I was learning too fast, and did not
realize that to send me to school might be the quickest way to stop me.
In Baltimore, as in Philadelphia, the children of the rich have
beautiful private schools, and leave the children of the poor to the
politicians. As one teacher said to me: “The people take it for granted
that the school system is working, like the water system under the
pavement.” After I had looked a little farther into school matters, I
wanted to substitute for the “water system” the “sewers.”
It is the old story of the business partnership between God and Mammon.
The Catholics are strong in Baltimore, and are doing everything in their
power to choke the public schools; at the same time the merchant princes
are holding down taxes, and their politicians are leaving the old
buildings out of repair, without fire escapes, without proper heat—in
some cases even without books. The salaries of the teachers are
inadequate; but if ever there were two of them who had the courage to
start a union, they kept it so quiet that I was unable to find them.
Baltimore is an old-fashioned city, and the middle-class
respectabilities hold it immovable. I was invited to the home of a lady
and gentleman who were interested in education, and there I found a
large company assembled. I asked them what was the economic control of
their schools, and found that in an audience of twenty-seven educators
there was apparently only one who knew what I meant by the phrase. They
were not conscious of any such thing, they said. I wanted to point out
to them that a horse never feels the rein until he starts to travel in
an undesired direction; but having been brought up in Baltimore, I knew
what politeness required.
Another of the unwritten laws of Baltimore decrees that woman’s place is
the home. Woman is now permitted to leave the home to teach the children
in classrooms, but she is not permitted to come out of the classrooms to
discuss the conduct of the schools. In this company, with which I spent
a couple of hours, I counted ten men and seventeen women, and all of the
men said their say about the Baltimore schools and about education in
general. But only three out of the seventeen women had anything to say
at all; and one of these was the hostess, while the other two were
directly called upon by the hostess to answer a question. Such is the
state of the feminist movement in Baltimore!
I found upon inquiry that the same condition prevailed in the schools.
Although the women teachers in the schools outnumbered the men seven to
one, they were practically unrepresented on the teachers’ councils.
Among nineteen representatives of the white teachers’ training schools
there was only one woman representative; from the girls’ high schools
there was only one woman representative out of thirty. From the colored
schools there was no woman representative, and many groups of the white
teachers had no woman representative. It was interesting to note that
the twenty-one hundred elementary teachers were represented as follows:
four principals, one kindergartner, one teacher in a secondary high
school, and three members of the Schoolmasters’ Club. You can imagine
how easy it is to handle the teachers in Baltimore!
One of the things they need is a Henrietta Rodman in their city; for
they have the old Tammany system of “mother-baiting.” When the women
teachers marry they automatically resign; if they have a “pull” they may
get themselves re-employed as substitutes, at a lower salary—the
advantage in handling substitutes being that they may be immediately
dismissed without excuse. The women teachers in Baltimore have never
dared to have anything to do with the move for equal pay; this fight has
been carried on by the woman’s clubs. The city council was induced to
appropriate money to abolish discriminations between men and women
teachers; but the school board refused to spend the money, and the issue
has now been carried to the court of appeals.
When I asked my impolite question about “economic control,” a former
school board member who was in the company told me how he had taken up
the fight for an increased tax to make possible better schools; he had
found one rich man to whom this increase would mean ten thousand dollars
per year, yet this man was willing to support the program. Surely that
disproved my idea of economic control! I answered patiently that I knew
there were individual rich people capable of generosity; but it was
different with classes, and especially when it came to anything which
threatened class control. Would this rich man have been willing for the
teachers of Baltimore to form a union?
You may recollect that in Los Angeles I criticized the bankers for their
“thrift campaign” in the schools; and perhaps you wondered: did I object
to thrift in the schools? And why could I not believe that the bankers
might have a genuine interest in teaching thrift to the school children?
Well, you may learn about this from what happened in Baltimore. At the
Francis Scott Key School a beginning was made at a school bank, and the
bankers objected. Here, as in Los Angeles, the children were learning
thrift; but in Los Angeles the money was turned over to the bankers,
while in Baltimore the money was kept for the school! So here is a
laboratory test, proving that what the bankers want is not to teach the
children thrift, but to get the children’s money.
The biggest banker in Baltimore is Mr. Robert Garrett, whose palace on
what we used to call “Charles Street Avenue” was one of the scenes of my
childhood. Mr. Garrett is director in half a dozen great financial
institutions, also of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; he is a graduate
of Princeton and of Johns Hopkins, and was selected as the city’s most
eminent financier to act as chairman of the Public Improvement
Commission, and spend twenty-two million dollars of the people’s money
for new school buildings. The work goes forward, under the very highest
capitalistic auspices; and one of the great new high schools is nearly
completed, when a group of independent citizens makes an investigation,
and discovers and proves that all through this building the contractors
have been substituting inferior materials—terra cotta pipe instead of
cast-iron pipe, cement bricks instead of clay bricks, inferior floor
materials, an inferior motor, etc. To cap the climax, the “panic bolts”
on the doors, which were to have brass rods, have steel rods
substituted; steel rusts, you understand, so when there is a fire, and
the children try to fling the doors open in a hurry, they will find the
bolts rusted fast, and the doors immovable. Does that dispose you to
trust your schools to the tender care of your bankers?