THE DISPENSERS OF PROMINENCE
We now ascend to the top of our great school pyramid, the National
Education Association. This is the professional organization of the
educators of the United States, and as such it possesses tremendous
prestige and power in the educational world. You probably know very
little about it, and may think that it has nothing to do with your local
schools; but in this you will be deceiving yourself, for its influence
is none the less strong because indirect. What the N. E. A. does is to
set the standards of the school world; in its councils, open or secret,
the thing called educational greatness is determined.
Who are the “great” educators of America? Who are the ones that really
know how children should be taught, and what they should be taught? Do
you know who they are? Manifestly you do not; you have to be told who
they are, and the function of the N. E. A. is to tell you. It is the
dispenser of educational prominence and applause. The final test of
greatness in the school world is to be invited to deliver one of the
addresses before its annual convention; while to have your name added to
the list of presidents of the organization is in the school world the
same thing as it is in public life to have your name added to the list
of presidents of the United States, which every school child has to
learn by heart. You step out before this vast assemblage, amid a flutter
of applause, and tens of thousands of teachers and sympathizers absorb
your utterances, and carry them away to the farthest hamlets—this is
what is known in America as “inspiration.” The local newspapers print
your address in full, and the Associated Press sends a summary of it to
its thirteen hundred leading newspapers. Thus, if you are a reactionary,
you help to set backward the clock of American history, and to render
the position of your capitalist employers secure. If you are not a
reactionary, then you do not get within many feet of the platform at the
N. E. A. convention.
There are at the present time a hundred and twenty-five thousand members
of the N. E. A., and they pay dues at the rate of two dollars per
member. More than eighty per cent of them are the plain, ordinary,
humble, rank and file classroom teachers, whose function is that of the
day laborer in the great corporation—to produce the wealth, while their
superiors spend it. You will be told that the N. E. A. is a “democratic”
organization, and you will understand what this means when I tell you
that Tammany Hall also is a “democratic” organization. New members are
welcome, in fact, they are eagerly sought-“drives” are carried on, and
the prestige of schools is established by the fact that they have one
hundred per cent membership in the N. E. A. Some school systems are even
going so far as to make membership in the N. E. A. compulsory to all
applicants for teachers’ positions. The Journal of the National
Education Association for September, 1922, triumphantly quotes the
superintendent of schools at Onaway, Michigan, as stating that
“teachers’ contracts in Onaway, Michigan, will in future require
teachers to become members of state and national educational
associations.” And in the case of St. Joseph, Missouri, the blanks to be
filled out by applicants for teaching positions contain the following
two questions: “Are you a member of the N. E. A.? If not, will you be a
member this year?”
Now the classroom teachers are the real educators in America. They do
the actual work of teaching your children; they are the ones who know
your children, they spend some twenty-five hours with them every week,
and they are not seduced from the job of understanding children by
prominence and applause, nor by high salaries, nor by any other lure.
The classroom teachers are the ones we must depend upon if education is
to be improved. The classroom teachers represent democracy in the school
world, and the test of democracy in the N. E. A. is what happens to this
rank and file. So I begin my study of this great organization with its
Department of Classroom Teachers.
Until a year or two ago the Department of Classroom Teachers of the N.
E. A. was nothing but a name. The way it leaped into sudden life is an
amusing story. The school superintendents of the N. E. A. decided that
they would have an exclusive organization, and hold meetings
uncontaminated by the presence of the school proletariat. At their
mid-winter convention of 1920 they reorganized themselves into an
autonomous body, called the Department of Superintendence. After they
had done this, the embarrassing discovery was made that they had
violated the by-laws of the N. E. A.; but, of course, at the next
convention of the N. E. A. special amendments were passed, so as to
legalize what the superintendents had done. Being a superintendent in
the N. E. A. is like being a millionaire in a police-court.
Now to each of the N. E. A. conventions come the “Bolsheviks” of the
Milwaukee Teachers’ Association, headed by their president, Ethel
Gardner; also the “Bolsheviks” of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation,
headed by Margaret Haley. These groups are fighting for the school
proletariat, and they watch with practiced eyes the tricks and
contrivances of their superiors. They pounced upon this brilliant scheme
of the Department of Superintendence; why not reorganize the Classroom
Teachers’ Department of the N. E. A., and have it autonomous, like the
Department of Superintendence? A beautiful scheme, you see! The
Department of Superintendence had excluded from its membership everyone
who was not a superintendent; now let the Department of Classroom
Teachers exclude everyone who was not a classroom teacher!
Here was treason and rank rebellion; and actually, these teachers had
the insolence to call a convention in Chicago, in February, 1922, at the
same time as the midwinter meeting of the Department of Superintendence.
The gang was so indignant that in Milwaukee the board of education
refused leave of absence to Miss Ethel Gardner, who was president of the
Department of Classroom Teachers, so that she might attend the
convention she had called. The gang moved heaven and earth to oust her
from her job as a teacher; but it so happened that she had an honest
principal, and when they asked him to report her as incompetent he
replied: “I will not tell a damned lie.”
The convention was held without Miss Gardner, and the teachers appointed
a committee of Milwaukee and Chicago “Bolsheviks,” which spent all the
spring drawing up a constitution and having it made air-tight by a
competent attorney. At the 1922 convention of the N. E. A., held in
Boston, they appeared with a printed draft of their scheme. They were
going to re-elect Miss Ethel Gardner, the Milwaukee “Bolshevik,” as
their president; and it goes without saying that the gang did not intend
to let that happen. The gang picked out a “tame” teacher, Miss Effie
MacGregor of Minneapolis, and decreed that she was to become president
of the Department of Classroom Teachers—in spite of the classroom
teachers!
This chapter is called “Dispensers of Prominence,” and here you see what
I mean. The classroom teachers had never heard of Miss Effie MacGregor;
she had never attended a meeting of the Department of Classroom
Teachers, nor was she a member of a classroom teachers’ association. She
had fought hard against the increase of their salaries; but now she was
to be their president, and have the spending of their ten thousand
dollars for a year! President Charl O. Williams of the N. E. A.
proceeded to place the lady on the main program of the N. E. A.,
introducing her as “the foremost classroom teacher in the United
States.” President Williams went on to explain the lady’s credentials to
that title—she had arranged a movie benefit at a theatre, and raised
funds to send eight delegates to the convention! Please understand, that
is not a joke; that is the N. E. A. idea of “greatness.”
Come back with me to Oakland, California, and recall the picture of Fred
M. Hunter, superintendent and educational ward leader, with his school
henchmen and his grafting contractors. Recall Miss Elizabeth Arlett,
“who, while supposed to be teaching the school children of Oakland, was
touring the United States, shortly before the 1920 convention, in the
interest of Mr. Hunter’s candidacy for president of the N. E. A. For
that service and her subsequent activities, Miss Arlett was promoted to
be principal of a high school in Oakland,” etc. You will expect to find
Miss Arlett at this 1922 convention, ready to carry out Mr. Hunter’s
orders for the smashing of the classroom teachers. You will be prepared
to hear that the gang went into caucus in Miss Effie MacGregor’s room,
and that Miss Arlett took the initiative and made the principal speech,
endorsing her and outlining the program.
The gang had engaged Symphony Hall for the business meeting of the
Department of Classroom Teachers—an afternoon meeting, and there was to
be a concert in the hall in the evening. The promise had been made that
the hall would be vacated at five o’clock; but not a word was said to
the teachers about this, and the gang proceeded to drag the meeting out
with technical discussions over the details of the constitution. At six
o’clock a slip of paper was sent up to the presiding officer, stating
that the meeting had already kept the hall for an hour beyond the time
agreed upon, and must vacate immediately!
The teachers had just got down to the work of electing officers; they
wanted to finish this work in a hurry, for they knew exactly whom they
wanted, and it wouldn’t have taken five minutes. But the gang would not
let that happen; a member of the board of trustees of the N. E. A. began
a violent and noisy filibuster, and so prevented the election. The
assembly twice rejected a motion to hold an adjourned meeting; they
wanted to do their electing right there, but the gang held on and
delayed matters, until finally the janitor threatened to turn out the
lights, and thus forced the teachers from the hall.
So here was the Department of Classroom Teachers left without officers
for a year! They did not know what to do; but the gang knew, you may be
sure. They sprung the proposition at an assembly of the N. E. A.
convention, at which very few of the classroom teachers were present,
but at which four out of five of those present were superintendents or
members of the supervising force. To this gathering the president of the
N. E. A. announced that she “ordered” a meeting of the Classroom
Teachers’ Department, to be held as soon as this N. E. A. assembly had
adjourned. Under the by-laws, the president of the N. E. A. was
absolutely without authority to order any such meeting; but she ordered
it, and the incoming president of the N. E. A. took charge—Mr. William
B. Owen, president of the Chicago Normal School, “ward leader” of the
gang in that city.
The meeting was held; that is to say, a number of spectators stayed
over, and Mr. Owen called them to order as classroom teachers, but
without making any effort to find out whether they really were classroom
teachers or not. The climax of absurdity was reached when this
meeting—it was held in a theatre—was forced to vacate, and adjourned to
the Boys’ Trade School. Fewer than two hundred people came to this
place, and no effort was made to ascertain who they were, or what right
they had to vote in the affairs of the classroom teachers. By means of
this assemblage, the gang proceeded to elect Miss Effie MacGregor to run
the Department of Classroom Teachers for a year! And you may be sure
that in the course of that year the gang got busy, and pulled its wires,
and saw to it that at the next convention there was a good majority
against Miss Ethel Gardner, the Milwaukee “Bolshevik!” The job was an
easy one, because the convention was in Oakland, and we have been there
and seen how Superintendent Hunter keeps his teachers under his thumb.
I think that to make the above story complete and perfect you will need
to know something about the lady-president of the N. E. A. who put this
job through for the gang. You already have her name—Charl O. Williams;
she was school superintendent of Shelby County, Tennessee, and
immediately after this convention she got her reward—a permanent N. E.
A. job, carrying not merely a salary of $7,500 a year, but the privilege
of uplifting the teachers with Southern eloquence at one hundred dollars
per lift. This lady ex-superintendent ex-president field secretary also
represents her State of Tennessee on the national committee of the
Democratic party, where she sits in conference with the chiefs of
Tammany Hall; so you see exactly where this rascality comes from. Keep
the lady in mind, because a year later we shall find her selected by the
N. E. A. to uplift the world conference of educators—and to soothe their
cravings for peace with weazel words of war.