AN AUTOCRACY OF POLITICIANS
Next comes our national capital; and here we have a unique situation,
owing to the fact that the people of the District of Columbia have no
votes, but are governed by an autocracy of politicians. The school board
was formerly appointed by the District Commission; now it is appointed
by the District Supreme Court. The invisible government of the city is
made up of the traction interests and the real estate speculators, who
work hand in glove with the political machine, quite regardless of
whether this machine happens to be Democratic or Republican. There are
innumerable ways in which the public may be plundered, and innumerable
forms of “honest graft,” whereby it may be made worth while to
congressmen and senators to stand in with the plunderers. During the war
the population of Washington jumped from 300,000 to 450,000 in three
months; real estate values leaped to the skies, and rents beyond them,
so there was a harvest for every kind of speculator.
The business gang had run our national capital for so long that they had
forgotten the possibility of anything else. But President Wilson
appointed two or three men of liberal sympathies to the District
Commission, and also to the District Supreme Court; so for the first
time some attention was paid to the public clamor concerning the
run-down state of the schools. Probably seventy-five per cent of the
buildings were old and unsanitary, and the overcrowding was unendurable,
especially in the high schools and the schools for Negroes; many of the
pupils had to do their work by artificial light. The way toward school
progress was blocked by entanglements of “red tape”; there was, and
still is, a triple control of school construction—recommendations for
new building sites are made by the board of education to the District
Commission, and from there go to the Appropriation Committee of the
House of Representatives.
The movement for a new deal in school affairs came to a head in 1916. A
Universalist clergyman, Dr. John Van Schaick, Jr., was appointed to the
school board, and shortly afterwards became its president. He secured an
assistant for his church, paying this assistant out of his church
salary, while Dr. Van Schaick gave most of his time, without salary, to
the service of the Washington schools. He was a man of culture and broad
vision, a liberal of the finest type; and what the gang thought of him
was revealed three years later, when he was nominated for the District
Commission, and a congressional hearing was held. The first witness to
take the stand was a Washington business man, who set forth that Dr. Van
Schaick was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but “a man who has been
handling a few dollars in a church,” whereas “we want a man who has been
in our city here, who has made a success of life.” Reading this, I could
not help thinking of a story I was told, about a former president of
this board of education who had made such a success. He remarked to a
friend that he had sold for a school site a lot so steep that it had to
be measured perpendicularly!
The war came, and Dr. Van Schaick obtained leave of absence from the
school board and served as Commissioner for Belgium of the American Red
Cross. He has written a book about this, “The Little Corner Never
Conquered.” Returning, he again became president of the school board,
and took up the fight for the public. The district commissioners were
fixing the value of the traction lines, squeezing out a little of the
“water,” and Dr. Van Schaick supported them. He opposed one of the
traction mergers, which would give value to millions of dollars worth of
this “water.” Also, there was a commission to reduce rents, and Dr. Van
Schaick committed the crime of supporting one of its members who was
trying to expose the high rate of interest charged by the banks on
second mortgages. He had tried to get the new tuberculosis hospital
located in a decent site, whereas the real estate interests wanted it in
a swamp. As if that were not enough, this clergyman-educator advocated
prohibition enforcement—and anybody who knows Washington life will
understand how intolerable this would be to senators and congressmen.
Also, he supported the commissioner of police, who was trying to clean
up the “red-light” district; and this also would cause much
inconvenience to our leading statesmen.
There was a superintendent of schools who was incompetent, but who stood
in with the gang. He had made political appointments, he had fought the
unions of the teachers and held down the teachers’ salaries; also, he
was a local favorite, raised in our own schools, and supported by the
Washington “Star.” Now Dr. Van Schaick and his board of education had
the temerity to get rid of this superintendent by a vote of eight to
one. The gang took up the challenge, and “Pat” Harrison of Mississippi
introduced into the Senate a resolution for an investigation of school
affairs. This investigation occupied a period of six weeks, during which
time the work of the schools came pretty much to a stand-still.
Senator Harrison was not the chairman of the committee, but he took upon
himself the rôle of prosecutor, and did ninety-five per cent of the
questioning. He is the fighting type of statesman, who specializes in
not very courteous wit. I don’t suppose that many of my readers will
care to peruse the 1349 closely printed pages of this government
document, but my sense of duty has carried me through it, and I report
briefly thereon. It was a trial of four or five leading citizens for the
crime of being public-spirited. Dr. Van Schaick was on the stand for two
or three days, and showed himself a man of social vision and of the
finest courtesy. The spirit in which he was questioned may be judged
from one sentence of Senator Harrison’s: “And you have a very great
admiration for your ability in answering the questions that have been
propounded to you, have you not?” This caused the other members of the
school board to submit a written request that they might be represented
by counsel at the hearing; but the request was denied.
The next victim was Mrs. Margarita Spalding Gerry, novelist, widow of a
former teacher in the Washington schools. Mrs. Gerry, a self-supporting
woman, had given herself without salary. She was accused of the crime of
owing Dr. Van Schaick a thousand dollar mortgage on her home, which
compelled her to vote as he directed. She was able to prove, first, that
Dr. Van Schaick did not own, and never had owned, any mortgage on her
home; and, second, that her vote had frequently been opposed to his.
There was a school teacher, Miss Alice Wood, who was accused of having
answered some questions of her pupils on the subject of Bolshevism.
Later on we shall hear her story; suffice it for the moment to say that
the school board had punished her, but that Mrs. Gerry, coming to know
her, had realized that injustice had been done. That constituted Mrs.
Gerry a Bolshevik, and made it necessary that both she and Miss Wood be
questioned minutely as to their political views. Dr. Van Schaick, on
returning from Belgium, had persuaded the board to reverse its action in
Miss Wood’s case; and that constituted Dr. Van Schaick a Bolshevik.
Then came the turn of Mrs. Coralie Cook, a colored citizen, representing
the large Negro population of the city on the board of education. In
Mississippi the Negroes do not get much education, and Senator Harrison
felt it his duty to put this wife of a professor at Howard University in
her place. He referred to her niece, a teacher, as “this Clifford
woman,” and to a Negro teacher in the Washington schools as “a fellow by
the name of.” At the same time the Senator was cordially cooperating
with a Negro board member who had turned traitor to the liberal board.
It had chanced that prior to the war the Dutch consul had sent to Dr.
Van Schaick a scientist from his country with a letter of introduction,
and Dr. Van Schaick, as a matter of routine, and in the midst of many
pressing duties, gave this gentleman a letter authorizing him to inspect
the schools. Subsequently this man was accused of being a German spy,
and it was proved that, as an anthropologist, and being interested in
racial types, he had taken nude photographs of women. Whether these
photographs were really obscene, I cannot say; but in any case, Dr. Van
Schaick had known nothing about the matter. But there was that letter of
introduction; and you can imagine what use the kept press made of such a
chance! Professor H. B. Learned of Yale University and Stanford, having
been so unwise as to serve on this school board, had to travel all the
way from California to explain that the Dutch anthropologist had visited
his home one evening and played on the piano and sung!
The city of Washington can claim the prize over all the capitals of the
world for the degradation of its press. The leader of this man-hunt was
Theodore Noyes of the “Star,” who has always run the school board; he is
the brother of Frank Noyes, director of the Associated Press. Also
Edward B. McLean, owner of the Washington “Post,” heir of one vast
fortune and husband of another; Mr. McLean is notorious among Washington
newspaper men for his defiance of the prohibition laws, and it takes
some real defiance to achieve such prominence in Washington.
These two newspapers made the claim that Dr. Van Schaick was not
eligible for the office of district commissioner, because he had not
been a resident of Washington for three years. They published a
photographic facsimile of a ballot alleged to have been cast by Dr. Van
Schaick at his summer home in Cobleskill, New York. It was subsequently
proved that this ballot had been cast by Dr. Van Schaick’s father, at
the time when Dr. Van Schaick was busy with Red Cross work in Belgium.
You will not need to be told that the newspapers did not feature this
correction!
At the close of the investigation Senator Harrison delivered three or
four hours of eloquent denunciation in the Senate. But the school board
persisted in asserting its right to appoint a competent man as
superintendent. Then, having made sure of this appointment, Dr. Van
Schaick resigned, so that the new superintendent might not inherit all
his enemies. Also, Mrs. Gerry resigned—saying to a friend of mine:
“After all, my life is worth something to myself, and apparently it is
worth nothing to the city.” You can understand that the effect of this
uproar has been to make self-respecting citizens very reluctant to
assume the unpaid and thankless task of being responsible for the
Washington schools.