A PLOT AGAINST DEMOCRACY
The National Education Association is a very old institution, predating
the Civil War. It has always been controlled entirely by the supervising
force; in other words, it has been an employers’ organization. During
several decades of its history no classroom teacher was ever elected to
any office. At the present time some well trained teacher is
occasionally admitted to office for the sake of appearances. It required
many years of struggle to get the National Education Association to give
any consideration whatever to the living and working conditions of the
classroom teacher, or to recognize salaries, pensions and tenure as
legitimate subjects for discussion. It required a revolution in the
organization to secure in the year 1903 the appointment of a committee
on salaries, tenure and pensions; and this committee made a report which
was full of misrepresentations. Not until 1911 was action taken even to
gather the real figures on these questions.
I will give you a glimpse of the organization in those early days, just
to let you see how these things remain the same. At the 1901 convention
in Detroit, the United States Commissioner of Education gave a paper
outlining the progress of the schools. He was an aged dotard; as an
eye-witness said to me, “In the educational system we don’t bury the
dead. We let them walk around to save funeral expenses.” This speaker
congratulated the country upon the growing number of school pupils, but
said not a word about the need of more school money. An orator who rose
to applaud him declared that the educational sky was without a cloud,
and his only regret was that the American public schools had not been
able to get a donation from Rockefeller.
But suddenly a cloud rose upon the educational sky. A thing happened
which had never before happened in the history of the N. E. A.—a
classroom teacher rose up from the floor of the convention and asked to
speak! To make matters worse, it was a woman teacher. This female rebel
declared that she for one was glad that the American public schools had
not got any money from Rockefeller, and she hoped they would keep clear
of all corporation influence. If the rich wanted to help the schools,
let them pay their taxes; let the railroads, for example, pay taxes on
their franchise valuations, which they were everywhere evading.
You may not need to be told that this was Margaret Haley, making her
debut to the N. E. A. twenty-three years ago. The great assemblage was
stunned; to attack the railroads, the N. E. A.’s main source of revenue!
At that time, you see, when you bought your ticket to the convention,
the ticket included your dues, and the N. E. A. got the rake-off!
The aged commissioner felt called upon to put down this insurrection. He
got up again and stated that all the wealth of the railroads had come
from economy in administration—he knew, because he was a personal friend
of Commodore Vanderbilt. As for the attitude of the lady teacher, these
meetings were held at the end of the school year, when all the teachers
were tired; if there were any more such hysterical outbursts, he would
insist upon having the time of the convention changed. He urged the
delegates to pay no attention to this; the teachers were worn out from
the school routine, and were not in condition to think soberly.
Moreover, the delegates must bear in mind that Chicago was no criterion
of the rest of the country; Chicago was “morbid and cyclonic.” You can
imagine how the Chicago newspapers appreciated this compliment from
Detroit!
Sixteen years passed, and revolution came in Russia, and our school
superintendents realized the danger of permitting the lower classes to
get out of hand. They resolved to put down the classroom teachers in the
N. E. A., and to keep them down. The procedure by which they did it
constitutes one of the most amazing public crimes in the history of the
United States. Bear in mind: this National Education Association was a
public institution, with a charter from Congress, according to which it
was controlled by its members. Any educator—including teachers—might pay
four dollars and become an active member, and these active members met
in convention once a year, and there voted and elected officers. This
was democracy, as our ancestors understood it; and this was the thing
which was suddenly discovered by school superintendents and their
capitalist masters to be a menace to the American schools.
At N. E. A. conventions there would appear two kinds of active members.
There would be those who had come from all parts of the country, and
ninety per cent of these were from the employing class of the schools.
These had the money to come, and made it their business to come; most of
them had their expenses paid, either by the public, or by the
organization to which they belonged. The other group was made up of
members who lived in or near the city where the convention was held, and
these would be ninety per cent classroom teachers. They were the only
classroom teachers who could attend the convention without great
expense, and they represented, and properly felt that they represented,
the great mass of the teachers who could not attend, but who had a vital
stake in education, and had needs to be voiced.
So at N. E. A. conventions there was beginning to be noticed that major
phenomenon of our time—the class struggle. Here were the high-up and
prosperous and powerful superintendents and “great educators”; and here
were the common riff-raff of the school proletariat. In any big city it
would happen, inevitably, that the proletariat would be in the majority.
They would have little idea what was going on, or how they should vote;
but here would come a dozen or two of the New York and Chicago and
Milwaukee “Bolsheviks,” who would get up in meeting and ask questions
and explain matters to the classroom teachers, and induce them to vote
for their own class—or shall we say for their own classes?
This was the thing which the educational employers decided to change.
They worked out the scheme at their midwinter convention of 1918—the
Atlantic City meeting of the Department of Superintendence. Instead of
the N. E. A. being governed by the democratic vote of its active members
at the annual convention, the N. E. A. was to become a representative
body, like the United States of America; the members in the various
cities and towns and counties would elect delegates to the state bodies,
and both local and the state bodies would elect delegates to the
national convention. The gang, of course, would be on hand at every
stage of these elections to pull wires and get its own politicians
chosen. So, when the convention assembled in some big city, the
classroom teachers of that city would no longer have votes as active
members of the N. E. A.; instead of that, they would be represented by
delegates on the floor, one delegate for every hundred teachers, and, in
case they had more than five hundred members, one delegate for each five
hundred members thereafter. So the classroom teachers of the convention,
instead of having one vote per teacher, would have one-hundredth of one
vote per teacher, or maybe one five-hundredths of one vote per teacher!
And so the N. E. A. would be made safe for the superintendents!
There was only one difficulty with that scheme, and that was explained
to you when you were a child and read Aesop’s “Fables.” The mice wanted
a bell put around the neck of the cat, but how was it to be done? At
some one convention of the N. E. A., the classroom teachers of an
American city must be induced, not merely to disfranchise themselves,
but to disfranchise the classroom teachers of the entire country forever
and ever after! Such was the job; and I repeat that the doing of it was
one of the most amazing public crimes in the history of the United
States. We are now going to hear the story of it in detail.