THE PLOT FAILS
First you will ask to know the people who did the job; which means that
you will be introduced to the bosses of our educational Tammany Hall.
Some of them you know already; but for convenience I will re-introduce
them.
Superintendent Fred M. Hunter, ward leader of Oakland, 1921 president of
the N. E. A., and life director of the N. E. A. During his presidency,
Mr. Hunter had a liberal teacher, whom he recommended for discharge to
his board of education. The board thought the teacher ought to have a
hearing, to which he was legally entitled; but Hunter’s proposition was
that he would give the teacher a hearing if the teacher would first
resign. “In other words,” said a board member, “you want to hang him
first and try him afterward.” With these words ringing in his ears,
Hunter went to the convention of the N. E. A., and presided over
meetings at which eloquent orators set forth in glowing terms the rights
of teachers under our great American democracy!
Carroll G. Pearse, formerly president of the Milwaukee State Normal
School, and now a book agent; also a trustee and life director of the N.
E. A. We have seen Mr. Pearse smashing the classroom teachers of his own
city. If we had time for a detailed study, we should discover him
running the N. E. A. machine for a decade, from the time he was
president in 1912.
Next, President William B. Owen, of the Chicago Normal School, 1923
president of the N. E. A. Mr. Owen is the ward leader of Chicago, and we
have just seen him in Boston, stealing from the classroom teachers their
own national organization. Mr. Owen is vice-president and life director
of the N. E. A.
Next, Professor Howard Driggs, of the English department of the
University of Utah, author of “Live Language Lessons,” president of the
Utah Educational Association, a power in the Mormon church, and
vice-president of the N. E. A.
Next, Superintendent Charl O. Williams, of Shelby County, Tennessee, a
lady of fine presence, an “inspirational” orator of the old Southern
style, an aggressive Democratic politician, 1922 president, and now life
director and field secretary of the N. E. A.
Next, Mrs. Josephine C. Preston, state superintendent of public
instruction of Washington, 1920 president and life director of the N. E.
A. We have seen Mrs. Preston browbeating the teachers and defending the
incorporate tax-dodging creatures of the lumber country.
Next, Principal Olive Jones of New York, 1924 president of the N. E. A.,
also trustee and director. I asked two New York teachers to tell me
about her, and the answer came: “She is small-minded, vindictive, not
over-scrupulous, a self-advertiser and office seeker, a good, clever
politician.”
Last but not least, the representative of Columbia University in our
educational Tammany Hall. Before introducing him it is necessary to
explain that for the first decade of this century our national school
machine was run by Nicholas Murray Butler, who was president of the N.
E. A. in 1895, and then head of the Department of Education at Columbia
University. Becoming president of Columbia, Butler dispensed the
educational patronage of Teachers’ College for his gang. How great this
patronage is, you will understand when I tell you that Teachers’ College
has officially announced that it furnishes more teachers than all the
other universities and colleges of the United States and Canada
combined. You will find half a dozen chapters about the dispenser of
this patronage in “The Goose-step,” and I point out to you that the most
bitter critics of the book did not find a single error in my statements
concerning him; nor did one educator in the United States come to his
defense.
“Nicholas Miraculous” was preparing himself to take charge of the
American government, so he no longer had time to bother with the school
world. He turned this detail over to one of his subordinates, George D.
Strayer, professor of educational administration in Columbia University,
and 1919 president of the N. E. A. It was during Strayer’s presidency
that the great plot was hatched, and he received a year’s leave of
absence from his university, so that he might devote his entire time to
putting it through. He presided at the Milwaukee convention of 1919,
where he failed. Then he was elected first vice-president, and sat at
the right hand of the president at the Salt Lake City convention of
1920, and supervised her every move. Both Strayer and Butler are life
directors of the N. E. A.; and so, as you read this story, you must
understand it as one more of the Nicholas Murray Butler chapters of “The
Goose-step”—it is the spectral hand of old J. P. Morgan, the elder,
reaching out and seizing the minds of your children, and twisting them
out of shape, so that Morgan’s heirs shall be able to pick their pockets
without inconvenience.
Our story begins with the midwinter convention of the N. E. A. in 1918.
Miss Frances Harden of Chicago was the first classroom teacher who ever
attended a midwinter convention—and she had to pay her own substitute in
order to do it! She saw the plot being hatched by the Department of
Superintendence, and brought back word to the Chicago teachers, who got
out a circular describing it, and pointing out what had happened in
their own state of Illinois, which had just been “reorganized” and made
a delegate body according to the new scheme. The first Illinois
convention under this plan had been held in December, 1917; 1,360
teachers had attended, and the effect of the scheme had been that 1,193
of these teachers were disfranchised! There were only 167 delegates
entitled to vote, and the occupations of these delegates were listed as
follows: county superintendents, 42; city superintendents, 53;
presidents of colleges, 4; principals of high schools, 12; principals of
elementary schools, 24; teachers in colleges, 5; teachers in high
schools, 13; teachers in elementary schools, 14. In other words, out of
167 delegates, 135 represented the supervising departments, and only 32
were teachers—only 14 of these being elementary classroom teachers!
This Illinois reorganization was the work of Owen of Chicago; it was his
pet scheme. At the Pittsburgh convention notice was given of intention
to apply it to the N. E. A., and the gang set to work to line up the
school bosses.
Then came the Milwaukee convention of 1919; here Strayer presided, and
the gang had a charming device to get rid of the teachers. The by-laws
provided for the business meeting at 11 a. m. of the 4th of July.
Milwaukee had a “sane Fourth” program for that day, and the teachers
were supposed to be occupied in the parks; the gang, thinking to catch
them off guard, called a “snap” meeting at nine in the morning. But the
Milwaukee teachers have been trained in politics, and know its devices.
They had arranged to have the “sane Fourth” program taken care of by
those teachers who were “associate” members of the N. E. A., while the
“active” members, who had votes, were to attend the business meeting.
Some of them got wind of the 9 a. m. trick, and these went in and
started singing “America.” They went right on singing “America” until 11
a. m.—they are so patriotic in Milwaukee, and that was their idea of a
“sane Fourth!” To make sure of keeping it sane, these Milwaukee teachers
omitted to eat any lunch, and stayed by the convention until it came to
an end at 5 p. m.
The gang brought up their reorganization scheme, and Margaret Haley
arose on the floor of the convention, and told them that they were
violating their federal charter. The reply was that they would put the
scheme through and get the charter changed afterwards. But Margaret
Haley, who has a way of consulting lawyers, pointed out to them that any
teacher could get a court injunction, and forbid them spending a penny
of the association’s money for a year. So they dropped the proposal;
Owen resigned from the committee and moved to discharge it; the slate
was wiped clean, and the teachers thought the scheme was dead—except for
a few who made note of a motion to appoint a committee to take up the
question of amending the charter of the N. E. A!
The place selected for the next national convention was Salt Lake City.
The classroom teachers made no protest—how were they to know that the
gang had been conducting an “educational survey,” combing the United
States with a fine comb, to find one place where they might be sure of
getting their way? Said one teacher, when she got to Salt Lake and saw
the frame-up: “We should have had notice of this.” Said H. S. Magill,
field secretary of the N. E. A.: “You blocked us twice; this year we’ve
come where your cohorts couldn’t follow us!” Said Strayer, strutting
like a little bantam: “We took it where we could put it over.” And if
that is not enough for you, a prominent official of the Milwaukee
convention told Miss Ethel Gardner, quite naively, that Professor
Strayer had a most wonderful plan, by which he was going to get all the
big business men of the United States back of the N. E. A! (He did.)
When the minutes of the Milwaukee business meeting were produced, they
included a notice of intention to amend the by-laws at the next
convention, by repealing the provision which requires a year’s notice
before a constitutional amendment can be adopted. No one could recollect
having heard such notice given, but the minutes showed that it had been
given by Professor Howard Driggs, the great Mormon educator. It was a
peculiar kind of proposition for a great educator to make; whenever you
mention the subject of constitutions and by-laws to such an educator,
the first thing he praises is that system of “checks and balances”
prevailing in the Constitution of the United States, which imposes
restrictions upon the hasty passions of the masses and compels us all to
stop and think before we act. Such a provision had been put into the
by-laws of the N. E. A.; and now it was proposed to abolish it, and
permit the hasty passions of the masses to prevail!
Professor Driggs apparently realized the strangeness of such a
proposition, coming from a great educator; discussing the matter on the
floor of the Salt Lake convention, he said he had not known the contents
of the notice when he gave it. Somebody had handed it to him—he thought
perhaps it was Mr. Magill, the field secretary—and asked him to give the
notice, and he did so. Dear, innocent, trusting Mormon educator—you
could hardly believe that he was forty-seven years of age! Before you
decide what to believe about him, wait and see what use the gang made of
that alleged notice.
They had a whole year to work in, and they went at it systematically.
They drafted an amendment to the charter of the N. E. A., known as
Section 12, providing that it might be organized as a delegate body and
governed by a representative assembly. The gang leaders spent much time
in our national capital, getting this charter amendment passed by
Congress and signed by the President. When our leading plutocratic
educators appear in Washington, asking to be permitted to govern their
school proletariat in their own way, how should a plutocratic Congress
refuse? The amendment was being trumpeted over the country as a plan to
make the N. E. A. “democratic.” The President of the United States had
just made the whole world “democratic,” so it was to be expected that he
would approve the plan and sign the bill.
CHAPTER LII
MORMON MAGIC
Come now to Salt Lake City, and see why the N. E. A. machine selected it
for their next convention. Externally there are reasons, in the form of
beautiful temples and educational institutions, erected by the devotees
of a weird religious cult. This cult is based upon “certain tablets
having the appearance of gold,” which were dug out of the ground by an
ignorant New York farmer-youth named Joseph Smith, and were found to be
miraculously inscribed with fantastic chronicles in biblical language;
Smith was able to interpret them by the aid of two magic stones, and
they are now the inspired word of God to half a million people. One of
the customs recommended in this “word” is the patriarchal Old Testament
virtue of polygamy, and the United States government fought a little war
with the Mormons over this issue, and Utah was not admitted as a state
until the chiefs had agreed to follow the example of the rest of our
plutocracy, and keep their polygamy under cover.
This is not a work on religion, but on economics, and what here concerns
us are the two great Mormon virtues of industry and submissiveness.
Seldom has a priestly caste evolved a more perfect system for separating
its devotees from their cash. The Mormon hierarchy is a Big Business
institution, which works hand in glove with the great corporations of
Utah, and their political representative, the Grand Old Party. The
Mormon church is practically the same thing as the Sugar Trust in the
state, and also the Smelter Trust and the railroads; their two
representatives in the United States Senate are equally active in the
affairs of God and Mammon. The church machine has its own educational
institutions, and at the same time, like the Catholic church in other
parts of the United States, it controls the public schools. I have
portrayed in “The Goose-step” its domination of the University of Utah,
and how sixteen professors resigned at once in protest against its
policy.
So you begin to see why the N. E. A. machine picked out Salt Lake City.
Utah is a long way off, and few classroom teachers could afford the
journey. As for the teachers of Utah, the majority of them are Mormons,
and the rest either take the orders of the church or move out. It takes
no stretch of the imagination to picture Professor Driggs, the great
Mormon educator, telling Owen and Strayer and Hunter and Pearse and the
other great educators how we manage things in Utah—so much better than
in Milwaukee! And how beautifully the great Mormon “tabernacle” would
serve as a setting for this “reorganization” drama! I remember in my
childhood reading a fearsome story about an innocent American virgin
lured into the clutches of a diabolical Mormon patriarch; and here is
the story made real—the victim being the associated school-marms of
America.
The delegates arrived, and were welcomed by the entire hierarchy—the
Mormon governor, the Mormon mayor, the Mormon bishops, the presidents
and professors of the Mormon colleges and universities, and the two
United States senators from the Sugar Trust. You may imagine the effect
upon the Salt Lake City school teachers of this array of religious and
financial power; but even so, it was not enough! Church and State and
Big Business combined could not prevail against a few simple facts put
before the teachers of the city! At the very outset of the convention
there was a meeting of classroom teachers, with Margaret Haley and Ethel
Gardner and the rest on hand, and Mr. Magill, field secretary of the N.
E. A., was so indiscreet as to come upon the platform and face the
questions of these teachers. At the end of the session the gang could
not muster three votes among those present; rebellion was spreading, and
the great educators were frantic.
That night hundreds of telegrams were sent out all over the state of
Utah. Superintendents and principals of schools summoned their teachers
to Salt Lake City. It was J. Fred Anderson, president of the Utah
Educational Association, who knew these teachers; and we have seen in
our story of Oakland how Superintendent Hunter presented to him a high
salaried position in the Oakland schools. Hunter was here, hard at work,
and received his reward by being elected president at this convention.
The master of ceremonies of course was Howard Driggs, who was on his
home ground, and had guaranteed to put the job through. With the help of
the Mormon hierarchy, both religious and educational, he got the
teachers of Utah into a caucus on the night preceding the business
meeting of the convention. These teachers were told nothing whatever
about the significance of the issue; they were merely told how to vote.
The radicals, of course, got wind of this meeting, and came to it, but
some of them were excluded, and the stenographer they had brought was
ordered to leave. A motion was made that none should be granted the
floor except Utah state teachers, or those who might be invited by them.
Once during the proceedings a man ventured to ask if they might not hear
the other side and know what were the objections to this plan. Chairman
J. Fred Anderson glowered at the assembly, and roared: “If there is
anyone from the state of Utah who objects to this plan, we’ll listen to
him!”
An important part of the plot was a series of amendments to the by-laws,
providing for great numbers of “ex officio delegates” to N. E. A.
conventions. All the officers and all past presidents were to be such
delegates, likewise all state superintendents, and all N. E. A.
directors in each state—every such personage was to have a vote, and
every such vote was to be equivalent to the vote of from one hundred to
five hundred classroom teachers! Naturally, some one asked for an
explanation, and so was born the classic jest of the American school
world. You might be puzzled to understand why a superintendent of
schools should be referred to as an “oil-dome”; but Professor Howard
Driggs explained the symbolism to the Utah teachers. When you saw a
train of oil-cars on the railroad track, you noted that these cars had
little domes on top. The reason was that on curves the oil would acquire
momentum which would throw the cars off the track, but these domes
served to change the direction of the momentum and so prevented an
accident. And the “oil-domes” of the N. E. A. machine were the
superintendents!
If I thought you could possibly do it, I would ask you to imagine the
mentality of a country school-marm from the far-off mountains and
deserts of Utah, brought up to a devout belief in the golden tablets of
Joseph Smith. Suffice it to say, that at this group meeting the Mormon
ladies listened patiently, and not a single classroom teacher opened her
mouth. Mr. Magill gave them printed statements containing the arguments
of the gang, adding that of course they would vote as they saw fit. But
the Mormon managers were not satisfied with such a careless formula, and
one of them got up and pointed out that it was sometimes a difficult
matter to follow the technicalities of business meetings, and the Utah
teachers ought to take precautions to keep from getting lost in the
parliamentary labyrinths. These managers knew they had to come out on
the floor of the convention next day, and face Margaret Haley and Ethel
Gardner and the rest of the “Bolsheviks”; so they had reason to be
nervous!
It was arranged that the Utah teachers should sit together in a group,
and in their voting they should follow the example of a leader, saying
“aye” when he said “aye,” and “nay” when he said “nay.” And who was that
leader to be? Whom would you guess but Howard Driggs, professor of
English at the University of Utah, author of “Live Language Lessons,”
vice-president of the N. E. A., and president of the Utah Educational
Association? And lest perchance these teachers from the mountains and
deserts of Utah might never have seen the great Mormon professor, the
professor was invited to stand up and display his impressive presence to
the assemblage. It was furthermore ordered that the Utah teachers were
to be on hand in their Mormon Tabernacle half an hour in advance of the
opening of the business session.
Immediately after this meeting there was a secret session in the room of
President Pearse of Milwaukee, at the Utah Hotel. At this meeting the
gang leaders staged a full-dress rehearsal of the proceedings. They had
someone to play the part of Margaret Haley, and to make all the motions
and objections which they expected her to make; they worked out the
method of foiling her, with each one’s duty assigned, each part learned
and recited. This secret meeting lasted until one o’clock in the
morning, and goes down into educational history as “the midnight
rehearsal.”
CHAPTER LIII
THE FUNERAL OF DEMOCRACY
The business meeting of the National Education Association was called
for 8:30 on Friday morning, and the program stated that there would be a
paper read and singing before the transaction of business; but the
moment the meeting opened, they made a motion to dispense with the paper
and the singing. Thus they rushed through a good part of their program
with very little opposition. When Margaret Haley and Ethel Gardner
entered the hall the assemblage was voting on the by-laws, article by
article, and adopting them with vigorous roars from the rehearsed Utah
teachers. In the uproar it was impossible to tell just what was being
voted on.
The presiding officer at this convention was Superintendent Josephine C.
Preston, whom we saw working hard for the Black Hand in Seattle, and
whom we were asked particularly to remember. The report of the Executive
Committee was presented by Professor Strayer of Columbia, first
vice-president, who explained the act of Congress permitting the
reorganization. This report having been adopted by a thunderous “aye”
from the rehearsed Utah teachers, Professor Vice-president Strayer
seated himself at the right hand of Superintendent President Preston,
and was seen to whisper into her ear at every stage of the future
proceedings. No one can say what he whispered, but there were some who
suspected that he was telling her what to do next.
Professor Vice-president Driggs now arose, and had the good fortune to
catch the eye of Superintendent President Preston—or possibly the eye of
Professor Vice-president Strayer. He was recognized, and proceeded to
bring up the resolution of which he had so innocently given notice at
Milwaukee, providing that it should not be necessary to give a year’s
consideration to a by-law amendment.
Now the classroom teachers’ delegates were certain that no notice had
been given, the assembly had had no warning of this revolutionary
proposition. They sought to explain matters, but for some strange reason
Chairman Preston, or possibly Professor Strayer, was unable to see any
of them, and they could not get the floor. Professor Driggs insisted
that the notice appeared in due form in the minutes of the Milwaukee
meeting, therefore his motion was in order. The motion was put, and was
carried by a thunderous “aye” from Professor Driggs and his rehearsed
Utah teachers.
Then at once it appeared what was the purpose for which the innocent
Mormon professor had introduced this resolution without knowing what was
in it. The purpose was that the Salt Lake convention might adopt the new
“Section 12” of the charter, without waiting a year to give the
membership a chance to find out what it was all about! Immediately the
motion to adopt this section was made by Superintendent Life-director
Hunter of Oakland—I hope I don’t bore you with these “titles,” for you
ought to see just who these gang-leaders are, and just how they put the
job over. Ex-Superintendent Field Secretary Magill explained the
proposition to fill the representative assembly with supervising
delegates—life directors, state superintendents, state directors, and
officers. Superintendent Newton of Denver strongly supported the
proposition, and a New York teacher opposed it. A rehearsed Utah teacher
took the side of the gang, as did also the president of a state normal
school in Michigan, Superintendent Dorsey of Los Angeles, and
Superintendent Gwinn of San Francisco. The chairman ruled Margaret Haley
out of order; the chairman instantly ruled out of order everyone who
tried to refer to the rehearsing of the Utah teachers, or to the packing
of the convention. There were shouts of “Question! Question!”—and the
amendment was adopted by a thunderous “aye” from the rehearsed Utah
teachers. The vote was declared unanimous—for the reason that the
steam-roller was rolling so furiously that the opposition teachers could
not find out what was being voted on!
An unforeseen emergency now arose—the tactics of the gang were so crude
that an ex-superintendent of schools of Salt Lake City became troubled
in his conscience, and actually had the temerity to propose that this
coup d’etat should be submitted to a referendum vote of the membership
of the N. E. A.! Ex-Superintendent Field Secretary Magill hastened to
explain that under the resolution just adopted this procedure would be
utterly illegal. In other words, the charter obtained from Congress had
been “loaded” so as to make this very thing impossible; and the gang was
“loaded” with legal opinions to prove that it had so arranged matters!
Mr. Magill’s argument was supported by Principal Trustee President-to-be
Olive Jones of New York, State Superintendent Wood of California,
Superintendent Hunter’s Principal J. Fred Anderson of Utah, and
Professor Vice-president Driggs of Utah. The published minutes of this
business meeting condescend to tell us that Margaret Haley of Illinois
spoke—but they don’t tell us on which side she spoke, nor do they tell
us how the chairman shut her off! They merely record that “the proposed
amendment was laid on the table”—of course by the vote of the rehearsed
Utah teachers.
And note this curious detail: among the new by-laws rolled through by
this steam-roller was one providing for amendments to the by-laws by a
two-thirds vote after a year’s notice given in writing; in other words,
the very same provision which had been done away with, less than an hour
ago, by the motion of Professor Vice-president Driggs! The system of
checks and balances, which had just been destroyed, was magically
restored! Humpty-dumpty, having been knocked off the wall, was put
together again! To choose a more accurate simile—the farmer, having let
down the bars while he got his pig into the pen, now put the bars up
again, to keep the pig inside forever after!
Piled on top of that came an even wilder flight of humor! Margaret Haley
moved that Congress be asked to amend the charter and abolish the
life-directors; whereupon ex-Superintendent Field Secretary Magill
explained that Congress would never again pass another special
charter—this trick was positively the last that could ever be played in
America! Miss Haley’s motion was tabled by a shout of the rehearsed Utah
teachers; and the convention proceeded to elect Superintendent
Life-director Hunter of Oakland its new president, and to hear his
fervid speech in celebration of “democracy”!
It is interesting to note that the minutes of this meeting were withheld
from the membership of the N. E. A. for eleven months, and were finally
published in very inadequate and doctored form. Margaret Haley had
arranged with a stenographic agency to obtain a transcript of the
proceedings, but after the show was over she discovered that she had
been cheated out of this transcript. The agency would not be permitted
to furnish a transcript until it had been “edited.” You see, the gang
had also ordered a transcript from this same concern!
I obtained a copy of this “edited” transcript, and have checked every
statement in this chapter. In case you find my account incredible, I
suggest that you consult in your public library the “Journal of
Education,” Boston, August 19, 1920, in which an eye-witness tells the
story with amiable mockery. That American school teachers should have
had their own organization stolen away from them seems to Editor Winship
just the most delightful joke in the world. Such a comical spectacle—a
great convention, lasting for six days, with several thousand people
devoting all their labors to keeping one little woman from getting the
floor![K]
-----
Footnote K:
Just to make the thing real to you, I give you one glimpse of the
steam-roller, taken from the transcript as furnished by the N. E. A.
secretary. The assembly is here voting on Section 9, which provides
for the packing of the N. E. A. with a hundred and fifty-one
ex-officio delegates, state superintendents, state directors, life
directors, and miscellaneous officers. It has been moved to amend this
section by striking out the ex-officio members; but in the uproar it
is impossible for the opposition to know what is being voted on. The
amendment is voted down, Section 9 is jammed through, and Margaret
Haley is refused the right to ask a question. Field secretary Magill
starts to go on to Section 10; but the protest against this becomes so
vehement that the gang sees it has to give way, and Professor Driggs
blandly rises and pleads for fair play—delicious irony! So Margaret
Haley receives an opportunity to be informed by the chairman that the
measure she has been trying to oppose has already been carried! The
text follows:
THE CHAIRMAN: Are you ready for the question? (Cries of question,
question.)
A DELEGATE: I rise to a question of personal privilege.
THE CHAIRMAN: What is your question of personal privilege?
A DELEGATE: There has been some imputation cast upon the teachers of
Salt Lake and Utah as to the packing of this convention. (Cries of out
of order, out of order.)
THE CHAIRMAN: You are out of order. (Cries of question, question.)
THE CHAIRMAN: We will now vote on the amendment. All of those in favor
of the amendment say aye. All those opposed say no. The amendment is
lost.
A DELEGATE: Question on the original motion.
THE CHAIRMAN: The question is now on the original motion. Are you ready?
(Cries of question, question.)
THE CHAIRMAN: All those in favor signify by saying aye. Those opposed.
Unanimously carried.
A LADY DELEGATE: A question of information——
THE CHAIRMAN: The motion is unanimously carried.
MISS MARGARET HALEY (Chicago): We couldn’t hear what you were voting on.
A DELEGATE: Madam Chairman, I think at this point it would be well to
listen to the lady’s question. She rose and asked for information
before that vote was put. Because of the inability of the chairman to
hear her it was passed.
THE CHAIRMAN: Out of order.
A DELEGATE: She just asked a question, that is all.
A DELEGATE: Is it possible we cannot present a question in this
assembly?
MR. MAGILL: Section 10——
A DELEGATE: Madam Chairman, Madam Chairman, I rise to a point of order.
Is it possible we cannot hear a question in this assembly?
A DELEGATE: No, it is not possible.
A DELEGATE: That lady wants to hear a question. I would like to know
what it is. (Applause.)
MR. DRIGGS (Utah): I appeal from the decision of the chair on a point of
order. Salt Lake is going to stand for a square deal. We want the
lady’s question. (Applause.)
A DELEGATE: Come to the platform.
MISS MARGARET HALEY (Chicago): It is not necessary for me to go to the
platform. I wished to ask the question before the vote is taken. It
was impossible for us to hear what was being done and I didn’t know
the question that was being voted on. I ask for information as to what
the motion was.
THE CHAIRMAN: The amendment was voted down and the motion was carried,
Miss Haley. We presented to everyone that came, when the business
opened, a copy; we want it in the hands of every active member and I
so announced exactly what we were doing.
MISS HALEY (Chicago): That is not the question I asked. I asked what was
the motion that we were voting on. We didn’t hear it when it was
stated.
THE CHAIRMAN: We were voting on section 9 then: we were voting on the
amendment to section 9.
-----
CHAPTER LIV
THE FRUITS OF THE SOWING
So now our National Education Association is what the gang wants it to
be. Let us see exactly what that is.
The next convention was held at Des Moines in 1921, and here were the
first fruits of the sowing. I have before me a tabulation of the
delegates to the Des Moines convention, classified according to their
occupations. Statistics make tiresome reading, but in this case the
statistics are the heart of the argument, so I beg you to consider these
figures carefully. There were present at this convention a total of 553
delegates having votes; among them were: state superintendents, 33;
county superintendents, 21; city superintendents, 104; presidents of
colleges and normal schools, 28; principals of high schools, 34;
principals of elementary schools, 54; supervisors, 23. That makes a
total of 297 delegates belonging to the employing class—297 out of 553,
a comfortable majority. But note further: the tabulation includes 14
miscellaneous, 46 not classified, 6 editors of educational journals, and
2 agents of book companies; if we set these to one side, we find that
the 297 members of the supervising force were figured upon a total of
485 delegates.
And now, to balance this, consider the representation of the teachers:
special teachers, 8; teachers in colleges and normal schools, 34;
teachers in high schools, 65; and teachers in elementary schools, 81.
That makes a total of 188 teachers, including college professors; and
this to be balanced against 297 members of the supervising force! In our
schools the teachers outnumber the supervising force by ten or fifteen
to one; but in this national body, as between the two groups, they have
thirty-nine per cent, while the supervising force has sixty-one. Such is
“democracy” in the great educational organization of the school world!
At the close of the 1923 convention, held in Oakland, it happened that I
was in the locality, and said something to a newspaper reporter about
our school Tammany Hall. Some of the gang leaders made indignant reply;
and I received a letter from Mr. Joy E. Morgan, editor of the official
“Journal of the National Education Association,” who said that I was
misinformed concerning the organization, and asked me to have lunch with
him. I am shy about breaking bread with the enemy, but I am always glad
to talk with him, because he never fails to give me better ammunition
than I could otherwise get. So I went to call on Mr. Morgan after lunch,
and we had a pleasant chat of an hour or so. He is a young man, and
friends assure me that he is well meaning but uninformed. I will pass no
judgment, but my story will make clear his amazing ignorance, not merely
concerning his own organization, but even concerning his own paper.
Mr. Morgan started off with the ancient formula that the N. E. A. is
“democratic”; all the teachers of the United States were welcome—in
fact, they were implored to join their professional organization. I
asked Mr. Morgan about this matter of having honorary members who were
ex-officio delegates and endowed with votes. Here was a representative
body, purporting to be democratic, but which started out with 23 life
directors and a long list of ex-officio delegates, the president, the
treasurer, the 12 vice-presidents, the 5 members of the executive
committee, 52 state directors, 52 state superintendents of public
instruction—and, to cap the climax, all the past presidents, a new one
added every year! The total of these ex-officio delegates was 151, and
out of this total just three were classroom teachers! That constituted a
handicap against the teachers of 145 votes; and since it took 100
classroom teachers to elect one delegate, and in big cities five hundred
teachers, it took somewhere between 14,500 and 72,500 teachers to
overcome the handicap against them in every N. E. A. convention! Was
that what Mr. Morgan understood by “democracy”?
The young editor did not use the phrase, “oil-domes,” but he did assure
me that the interests of superintendents and teachers were not opposed,
and that the teachers of the country, many of them, elected their
superintendents to represent them; moreover, there were great numbers of
teachers who were delegates—probably a majority of the convention, Mr.
Morgan actually said that; and then I handed him the tabulation of the
Des Moines convention, which showed 188 teachers, as against 297 members
of the supervising force. He studied it, and was obviously embarrassed.
“I don’t know just what to say,” he replied. “I hardly think it can be
accurate. The tabulation must have been made by some interested party.”
Now the tabulation had been given to me by Frances Harden, who is in
Margaret Haley’s office, and I could not deny that Miss Harden was
“interested” in the problems of N. E. A. representation. I said to Mr.
Morgan: “I will investigate and find out just how that tabulation was
prepared.”
“It looks to me absurd on the face of it,” continued the young editor,
“because you see it gives two ‘agents of book companies,’ and that is
preposterous. No agent of a book company could be a delegate to the N.
E. A.”
“I will look into that,” I promised; and we chatted for a while about
other aspects of the class struggle in education. Mr. Morgan gave me a
file of his publication for the past year, in order that I might see
what excellent material they were using; then I took my departure, and
sought out Miss Harden and her bunch of “Bolsheviks,” who had come on to
attend this Oakland convention. We had dinner in a little “dago”
restaurant, and I told them of Mr. Morgan’s objection, and it would have
done you good to hear Miss Harden laugh. “Why,” she said, “that
tabulation was made from the official list in his own paper, the Journal
of the N. E. A.; and Mr. Morgan was managing editor at the time the list
was published! When I get back to Chicago I’ll send you a copy of that
issue; they listed all the delegates at the Des Moines convention,
giving the occupation of each, and all I had to do was to go through the
list and check the number of superintendents, the number of principals,
and so on. We made the tabulation and published it, and it’s interesting
to notice that next year the list of delegates as published in the
Journal no longer states the occupations of the delegates, but merely
the organizations they represent. You may take it from me, it will be
many a long year before the Journal again makes the blunder of revealing
the make-up of one of its annual conventions!”
“What about the matter of the book company agent?” I asked; and Miss
Harden and her “Bolshevik” friends laughed more merrily than ever.
“Why, one of those two agents is Major Clancy, and Mr. Morgan knows him
as well as he knows anybody at the convention. He’s here at Oakland—one
of the first sights that is pointed out to a new delegate. He’s a kind
of unofficial host to all of us.”
“But is he here as a book company agent?” I asked, in bewilderment.
“Why, of course,” said the teachers; and Miss Ethel Gardner explained
that he had got up some kind of club or association of the agents in his
locality, and got himself named as their representative.
In case you should find all this as incredible as I found it, let me add
that Miss Harden faithfully carried out her promise; when she got back
to Chicago she sent me two issues of the “Journal of the National
Education Association.” The first is the issue for December, 1921, and I
note the name of Joy Elmer Morgan, managing editor. Beginning at page
199, and continuing to page 205, I find a list headed, “The First
Representative Assembly; delegates who attended the 59th annual meeting
of the National Educational Association in Des Moines, July 5-8, 1921.”
There I find the delegates by state, with the occupation of each one
given; on page 203 I find “Robertson, W. W., agent for Charles E.
Merrill Co., 19 West Main St., Oklahoma City.” And on page 202 the name
“Clancy, Major A. W., 502 Globe Building, Minneapolis.”
The second issue of the Journal is that for September, 1922, and again I
find Joy Elmer Morgan, managing editor. From pages 291 to 298 I find the
list of the second representative assembly, with the occupations of the
delegates not given. On page 295 I find as follows: “Clancy, A. W.,
Bookmen’s Department of Minnesota, 2516 Humboldt Avenue, South,
Minneapolis.” And then, as I complete this manuscript, the Journal of
October, 1923, appears, and gives the list for the third representative
assembly, at Oakland, California—and again the occupations are not
given, and again Major Clancy _is_ given!
Yes, you may count upon Major Clancy to attend all N. E. A. conventions!
Turn back to our Minneapolis chapters, and read about this one-armed old
veteran of the threshing machine. And come to Oakland, and see him in
the luxurious parlors of the Oakland Hotel; come to San Francisco and
see him in the parlors of the Fairmont. He is the lord of motor cars and
of boat-rides; never does he sit down at table except it is crowded with
guests. The editor of the “Journal of Education”—not the official N. E.
A. Journal, but an independent weekly, published in Boston—portrays this
aspect of the Salt Lake convention of 1920 in a playful paragraph. Says
the witty editor Winship: “No one in the association at summer and
winter meetings, has in fifty years had as many men and women to as many
feasts as has Major Clancy.”
Perhaps all this hospitality is poured out from the Major’s own generous
heart; perhaps again, it is his employers, the book companies, who fill
the cornucopia. However it may be, the major is the idol of the
schoolmarms; he chats with them jovially in the lobbies, and now and
then you see him jump up and run across the floor—some superintendent
has entered, and he must shake the hand of all superintendents.
Presently you see him button-holing one of the great leaders of the
gang, and there is a whispered conversation; it is by these little chats
in lobbies that we get our business done—the gentlemen’s agreements
whereby votes and influence are traded for contracts involving your
money and mine.
A teacher friend of mine traveled all the way from the East to attend
the N. E. A. convention of 1923 at Oakland; on the day before the
opening of the convention she visited the Fairmont Hotel in San
Francisco, where in the lobby she observed Major Clancy in conversation
with Principal Olive Jones of New York. This conference lasted for a
couple of hours, and other members of the gang took part in it from time
to time. My friend wondered what it was about; she never found out, but
she noted that before the convention came to a close, Principal Olive
Jones of New York was chosen as the new president of the N. E. A. The
Major had had advance information, you may be sure; and likewise the
rest of the gang had had it. In fact, this 1923 convention had been held
in Oakland, because it was the bailiwick of Hunter, and he and Strayer
had promised the honor to Miss Jones when they asked her influence at
Salt Lake City. This promise had been for 1921, but the gang had fallen
to quarreling among themselves—Owen of Chicago had broken with Strayer,
and Miss Williams had got the prize in 1921, and Owen had grabbed it for
himself at Boston in 1922. You see what the inside ring is giving its
time to, and why the great national organization of the school world is
an object of contempt to every educator who has a truly professional
ideal.
CHAPTER LV
TEACHERS TO THE REAR
The National Education Association now stands complete, according to the
design of its architects. It is a political machine, maintained by Big
Business to do a certain job in the interest of Big Business. And just
as in any other great factory, the workers are deprived of all power,
but are cajoled into thinking themselves free citizens. At the annual
conventions you will hear floods of oratory in praise of democracy,
while every precaution is taken to keep the rank and file from having
any say whatever about their own affairs. All the power is in the hands
of one little group; they put themselves in the key positions—each one
on six or eight committees. They make the plans, and when the time comes
they jam them through.
The classroom teachers form a large group at each convention, but they
are helpless. They are outside the circle, a floating group, untaught,
untrained, without a background or policy. At Salt Lake City Miss Harden
attended a meeting of seventy-five of them, and she asked how many of
them had ever come to a previous N. E. A. convention, and found that
only eight or ten had had this experience. What do such delegates know
about the machine and its tricks? What chance do they stand against the
gang?
Miss Flora Menzel of Milwaukee came in 1923, with instructions to
recommend certain policies on behalf of her group. She was put on the
“credentials committee,” and wandered about the corridors of the Oakland
Hotel trying to find out where this committee met. The meeting was set
for a certain hour; she succeeded in finding the place, fifteen minutes
late, and there was no one in the room. Subsequently she ascertained
that the “credentials committee” had already met, named a sub-committee
of the gang, and adjourned in fifteen minutes! And that is only one of
many devices whereby classroom teachers known to be loyal to their own
groups are shunted to one side. In 1921, at Des Moines, they appointed a
committee on the revision of elementary education, and they made it up
of college presidents and professors, state superintendents, the United
States Commissioner of Education—and one elementary teacher. They were
going to determine the policy of the N. E. A. toward the most important
of all subjects connected with the schools, and they put on this
committee just one person who was having actual experience with
children!
For more than twenty years Margaret Haley has been fighting in the
interest of the teachers for action on salaries, tenure and pensions. It
took ten years to get them to adopt resolutions on the question, and ten
years more to get them to do anything. I have told about the Atlantic
City mid-winter convention of 1918, at which the Department of
Superintendence planned the Salt Lake City swindle, and how Miss Frances
Harden was there, having paid her own substitute. She was representing
Margaret Haley, who had been put on the committee for salaries, tenure
and pensions. The chairman of the committee was President Joseph Swain
of Swarthmore College, past president of the N. E. A. President Swain
got up and made a momentous announcement: two young men from the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had been giving him
invaluable assistance on this pension question. The two young men were
present, and thus introduced they practically ran the committee
throughout the sessions. They had a “model teachers’ pension bill,” and
they asked the endorsement of the Department of Superintendence, after
which they proposed to take the bill to each of the states, and get the
endorsement of the state educational machines, and then force it through
the legislature.
Perhaps you may wonder why the Carnegie Foundation should be proposing
to take charge of teachers’ pension money. Well, if you will turn to
“The Goose-step,” pages 408-9, you will find how this institution, with
an endowment of some seventeen million dollars, has taken the pension
money of the college professors of the United States and made it into a
club to be held over the heads of professors, compelling them to obey
the orders of presidents and trustees. If you will read Professor
Cattell’s book, “Carnegie Pensions,” published in 1919, you will be
informed about the wonderful insurance corporation, devised by this
Carnegie crowd, and run by Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler; the
scheme was submitted by “School and Society” for the consideration of a
great number of college professors, and was voted down by 636 to 13.
And now here are these Carnegie specialists in autocracy, setting the
very same trap for the seven hundred thousand school teachers of the
United States! Their device is known as the “standard pension plan”; it
provides a graded pension, and needless to say the sums are very low,
while the age limit is very high, from sixty to sixty-five years, and
the term of service required is long, from thirty to forty years.
Needless to say, also, the women are treated as inferior animals; their
heirs have no pensions, while the heirs of men teachers do have
pensions; moreover, the women contribute at a higher rate than the men.
Get clear this essential point, that all this pension money is teachers’
money; a certain amount is deducted each month from the salaries of
every teacher, and it is of this money that the pension is composed.
And, of course, the feature that really counts is the control of the
money; you may be sure that under the capitalist system no plan of any
sort would be “standard,” that did not provide for the control of the
money by those whom God has created for the purpose of controlling
money. The essence of this “standard pension plan” is that the teachers
have no control over their own pension funds; in all cases this control
is in the hands of politicians who serve on the pension board ex
officio—the state superintendent, the comptroller, the attorney general,
and other leaders of the gang.
It was decided that this Carnegie pension plan should be taken to the
state of Vermont and there tried out; and at the summer convention at
Pittsburgh the new Carnegie experts appeared again, and their
proposition was jammed through, in spite of the protests of Margaret
Haley. You see, Margaret Haley wanted the teachers to have the control
of their own money, so the gang evolved one of their clever schemes—they
divided the “committee on salaries, tenure and pensions” into three
separate committees, and they put Margaret Haley on the salary
committee, which had already acted! Also, they put in a by-law,
providing that these three committees should serve for one year only,
and should then be reappointed. This would give them the chance to drop
any “kickers”; and sure enough, the next year they dropped Margaret
Haley!
But they couldn’t drop her from Chicago. The teachers there have power
of their own, and they have just got the legislature to adopt the
“Chicago teachers’ pension plan.” Under this plan the teacher gets a
pension after having taught for twenty-five years in the United States,
fifteen years of which must be in Chicago. Women are recognized as human
beings, getting equal treatment with men. But the all-important point is
this: the pension funds are under the control of a committee of nine,
three of them being members of the board of education, and the other six
being teachers elected by teachers. This is the only pension fund in the
United States which is under the democratic control of those who put up
the money; and it is hereby suggested that every teacher in the United
States should set to work to make that Chicago law the “standard”
pension law of the United States.
Next, let us consider the attitude of the N. E. A. on the equally
important question of teachers’ tenure. Is a teacher a civil servant,
with some permanence and security; or is a teacher a wage-slave, who may
be “fired” without notice and without excuse? At Salt Lake City the
committee on tenure handed in a report and a resolution. All the
resolutions appeared in printed form—but that on tenure was left out.
Margaret Haley fought for a whole day to get the floor, and finally one
superintendent who had a sense of decency insisted that she should be
heard, and she asked about this resolution. The chairman asked the
secretary what had become of it, the secretary asked somebody else, and
so they “passed the buck.” The resolution had been mysteriously “lost,”
and nobody knew what had become of it. At Boston, in 1922, they passed a
resolution to work for tenure in every state, but they have not done it
in a single state.
They don’t want to be bothered with the teachers, they want the teachers
to obey orders and teach. Miss Ethel Gardner told me of her experience
at Salt Lake City, where she happened to be the only classroom teacher
present at a conference of administrators. They told how they had been
trying to improve their teachers by holding meetings every Saturday
morning and talking to these teachers. But the stubborn teachers
persisted in not improving, and even showed resentment at having their
Saturday mornings taken in that way. The superintendents discussed the
question whether the teachers might not become more docile if the school
board would pay them for attending these Saturday morning improvement
meetings. Finally some one asked Miss Gardner what she thought about it,
and she asked if it had ever occurred to them to let the teachers talk
at these teachers’ meetings. It was as if Miss Gardner had thrown a bomb
into their midst. Not one of them had ever thought of such an idea! She
went on to tell what the Milwaukee Teachers’ Association was doing for
the improvement of teaching, and when she got through they thanked her
quite earnestly for having made an entirely original contribution to
their conference:
These were unusually polite superintendents. As a rule, they resent such
interference, and take any suggestion from a teacher as an affront to
their dignity. Margaret Haley is one of the most charming of women, a
delightful companion, and on the floor of a convention the very soul of
wit and good fellowship; but to the N. E. A. bosses she is a fiend in
petticoats. They regularly ignore all her resolutions; and when she gets
the teachers stirred up, and some action becomes necessary, they take
her resolutions and write them over and present them as a contribution
of their own. At the same time they diligently circulate slanders about
her; she has been paid ten thousand dollars to deliver the Department of
Classroom Teachers over to the American Federation of Labor; she
received a salary of ten thousand dollars a year from the Chicago
Teachers’ Federation. Such falsehoods as this are circulated and
believed by most of the delegates at the convention—the facts being that
Miss Haley gets the salary of a teacher from her own organization, and
her organization is not affiliated with the American Federation of
Labor.
At the same time the gang, like all other political gangs, is not too
scrupulous about its own personnel. It carried for years one life
director while he was in Joliet prison for appropriating public funds.
It did not hesitate to make use of a man who, while secretary of a state
teachers’ association, charged the association for plumbing work done on
his home, and then it was found that the plumber hadn’t got the
money—the secretary had kept it for himself! And of course the gang
leaders are all tied up with the book graft and with other Big Business
in their own localities. The book agents swarm to the conventions, and
they have their candidates, and if these candidates do not win, it is
because some other book agent has been more active. At the last
mid-winter convention of the Department of Superintendence, a prominent
candidate for president was the school superintendent of Milwaukee, and
Major Clancy boasted to a friend of mine that this great educator would
surely win. He was favored by the American Book Company. Major Clancy is
getting old, and somebody fooled him; the successful candidate came from
the city where Ginn & Company has its headquarters!
The first aim of the prudent school superintendent is to stand in with
the “bookmen,” as they call themselves. For, whenever there is a vacancy
in a desirable place, the book companies are the first to learn of it,
and they know their own. So the N. E. A. is honeycombed with book
intrigue and graft—especially the Department of Superintendence, the
part which really counts. I shall tell you bye and bye of an especially
crooked five year book “adoption” in the state of Indiana. Immediately
after that event, it was noticed that a practically unknown
superintendent from Indianapolis became president of the Department of
Superintendence.
That caused a scandal, and efforts were made to break the book
companies’ hold; it is like the efforts to drive the railroads out of
state politics. At the last meeting of the Department of Superintendence
it was announced that no “bookmen” were to have rooms in the Cleveland
Hotel, where the N. E. A. had its headquarters; but I am told by a
gentleman who was present that the American Book Company had all the
rooms it wanted. This same gentleman tells me that he was present at a
convention in Milwaukee, some years ago, when it was discovered that the
American Book Company had taken the entire second floor of the hotel in
which the N. E. A. had settled; Cooley of Chicago, who happened to be
president that year, moved his headquarters to another hotel.
Many of the big chiefs of the N. E. A. draw royalties from text-books.
Strayer of Columbia edits a whole series of “teachers’ professional
books” for the American Book Company; also, it features one of his
educational books. Then there are the elaborate systems of record cards
which he edits; these are advertised and exhibited at every meeting of
the Department of Superintendence. Also there are fees for surveying
city school systems, and recommending buildings. I am told by one who
knows Strayer that he is eager for money; and this is a part of his
Columbia heritage—you may recall the three hundred thousand dollar
residence, built out of trust funds for “Nicholas Miraculous.” Sometimes
a great expert is summoned to survey a school system, and he tells the
city that it needs many new buildings. Also he names the architects who
know how to put up just the sort of buildings which he recommends. The
architects get six per cent for their work, and pay the expert
one-twelfth of that. A modern city thinks nothing of spending a million
dollars for a new high school, so the expert’s rake-off will be five
thousand dollars.
CHAPTER LVI
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
We have followed closely the business and politics of the N. E. A.
conventions; let us now consider them in their educational and social
aspects. They are imposing assemblages, and of course loom colossal to
the cities in which they occur. To have thirty or forty thousand
visitors spend a week in the city inspires the local merchants with a
deep respect for culture, and the local boosters get busy to show the
school-marms a good time. The N. E. A. politicians naturally make this a
condition in the placing of the convention; they want to have the
delegates occupied with scenery and entertainments, so as to distract
their minds from political controversies. This wisdom has come down to
us from the Roman Empire; then it was bread and circuses, now it is
boat-rides, auto-rides, luncheons, and telephone calls.
I have before me a page from the “Chicago Schools Journal” for June,
1922, giving the official announcement of the Boston Chamber of Commerce
regarding the convention of that year. There are thirty-five affiliated
societies to hold meetings, and halls have been engaged for all. The
leading business men have organized a committee to prepare receptions,
the head of it being a former secretary of the Chamber of Commerce.
Excursions have been planned upon a vast scale; the railroads are
co-operating, likewise the hotels and tourist bureaus; we note the
interesting detail that “One of the book companies has compiled an
exhaustive literary history of Greater Boston and will publish it in
compliment to the convention. A copy of this history will be given to
every teacher who registers.”
Also we note that two hundred guests are coming from Memphis, Tennessee,
in honor of President Charl O. Williams, who is on a year’s leave of
absence to enable her to uplift the educational associations of each of
the states, as well as sectional meetings—price one hundred dollars per
lift. Other notables are coming, General Pershing, Vice-president
Coolidge, Secretary of State Hughes; President Harding has promised to
attend if possible. Most significant of all, there will be “a patriotic
demonstration of mammoth proportions, managed by the commander-in-chief
of the American Legion.”
It was at the 1921 convention at Des Moines that our N. E. A. turned its
political conscience over to the keeping of our Fascisti. In the
official “Journal” for November of that year I find a report of the
special committee on this subject. The chairman of it is Superintendent
Gwinn—the gentleman we saw moving from New Orleans to San Francisco to
take the place of the Superintendent of Trombones. This program provides
that all teachers must be American citizens; it provides for flag
worship, and for the American Legion to furnish speakers for patriotic
exercises in the schools. At the very time that this resolution was
published in the official “Journal,” the American Legion was displaying
its fitness to educate our children by conducting a three-days’ drunken
orgy in Kansas City, in the course of which they stripped young girls
naked on the street and wrecked the lobby of the Baltimore Hotel. As I
write, they are further displaying their passionate affection for
democracy by inviting Mussolini to come and address their San Francisco
convention!
Such is the educational department of capitalist imperialism; there is
nothing too murderous and blood-thirsty for them, and no degree of
reaction from which they will shrink. If Premier Mussolini should bring
his castor-oil squad to the next N. E. A. convention, there would be
only the change of language and the absence of black shirts to let him
know that he had crossed the ocean. Our leading reactionaries would be
there to greet him, headed by United States Commissioner of Education
John J. Tigert, who before the Des Moines convention discussed the
subject of Socialism, and pointed out the vote for Debs as proving that
900,000 Americans were advocating the abolition of all law, all
constitutions, and all forms of government! Addressing the school
teachers of San Diego, he sounded a warning against the increasing
tendency of the public schools to delve into sociology and economics,
which subjects were perilously close to “radicalism.” Said Commissioner
Tigert:
There is altogether too much preaching of these damnable doctrines of
Bolshevism, Anarchy, Communism and Socialism, in this country today.
If I had it in my power I would not only imprison, but would
expatriate all advocates of these dangerous, un-American doctrines. I
would even execute every one of them—and do it joyfully.
Mr. Tigert is a great favorite at conventions of all sorts; he got his
appointment at the hands of President Harding because of his charm as a
teller of humorous anecdotes. He is able to keep sober enough to tell
them—something which his predecessor in office was unable to do. At the
1919 convention of the N. E. A., held in Milwaukee, this gentleman was
apparently lured into celebrating the last “wet” night in the history of
the United States. An eye-witness writes me:
He clung desperately to the desk in front of him, and babbled
incoherently for two hours and a half. People clapped and clapped in
the monotonous fashion they have when they want a speaker to quit, but
he still went on. I don’t know where the efficient President Strayer
was, but nobody stopped him. You ask if it is true that he was carried
off the stage; he may have been for I got tired and left.
I shall be called a vile gossip for publishing things like this. All I
can answer is that I think it is of the utmost importance for the
American people to know what kind of men the Black Hand puts in charge
of the vast and increasing educational work of our government. At the
present time the chiefs of the N. E. A. are concentrating all their
energies upon the so-called Shepard-Towner bill, providing for a Federal
department of education, with a cabinet member at its head, and an
appropriation of a hundred million dollars. When they get it, there will
be one more boot-legging politician in Washington, and one more source
of reactionary propaganda for the kept press to broadcast.
At the same Des Moines convention at which Commissioner Tigert spread
himself, the chiefs of the N. E. A. showed their intellectual caliber by
putting through two resolutions, the first urging disarmament, and the
second urging military training in the schools! The business men got up
a luncheon for the teachers and themselves, and invited Governor Allen
of Kansas, who at that time saw a glorious vision of himself becoming
president of the United States on the platform of putting all strikers
into jail. Under his supervision the big business vigilantes had been
mobbing and tarring and feathering the organizers of the Nonpartisan
League throughout Kansas. Governor Allen delighted the lunchers by his
wit, of which I give a sample: “The I. W. W.—I beg pardon, the
Nonpartisan League—come in, and we deal with them.” The lunchers laughed
so merrily that the Governor repeated this wit several times: “The I. W.
W.—I beg pardon, the Nonpartisan League!” At an evening meeting John
Gay, representative of the miners, showed again and again how Governor
Allen had lied in his statements concerning the Kansas miners’ strike.
He was booed by the audience, under the supervision of the chairman,
Fred M. Hunter, superintendent of schools of Oakland and president of
the N. E. A.
More recently someone had the bright idea of gathering educators from
all over the world and forming a world federation of educators, to be
run by the N. E. A. gang. The call went out to all nations to send their
school representatives to San Francisco, at the same time as the Oakland
convention of 1923. The delegates came* *—nine-tenths of them
“Bolsheviks,” in the N. E. A. sense of that dreadful word; that is,
people dissatisfied with narrow and futile nationalism, and groping
towards international solidarity. They found themselves assembled in a
hall decorated with enormous American flags, and little dinky flags of
all the other nations; also they found themselves being ushered about by
lads in uniform—members of our high school and college military
organizations! The address of welcome was delivered by our gracious
lady-superintendent from Shelby County, Tennessee, field-secretary and
past President Charl O. Williams; and these world-wise and war-weary
educators, who had traveled all the way from China and Czecho-Slovakia
to hear her golden words, were told that we have wonderful scenery in
the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite; also that:
Whenever in the name of democracy the serpent of Communism or
Bolshevism or Anarchy, feared alike in the countries from which you
come, shall rear its head to strike its poisoned fangs into the
charter of our liberties, it will be crushed under the heel of a true
democracy, just as we kill without fear or hesitation, the common,
ordinary garden variety which plays at our feet and then go on about
our business.
Of course no public address is delivered nowadays without pious
statements that we dearly love peace; you remember how dearly the Kaiser
loved peace—but let his foes beware! Said past-President Charl O.
Williams: “It has been thought by some that this meeting is wholly in
the interest of peace. It is not so.” And the eloquent lady from
Tennessee explained the other purpose—if another war for liberty should
be called, “please God, we shall not send a soldier who cannot write his
name!” As a piece of pacifist fervor, that almost equals the utterance
of Cal Coolidge, as quoted on the front page of the Los Angeles “Times”
feature section, October 7, 1923: “The only hope for peace lies in the
perfection of the arts of war!”
At this same San Francisco convention, a young high school teacher from
Santa Barbara brought in a proposition for the establishment of an
international university, to teach world problems from the international
point of view. They put a committee in charge of this fine project, and
I predict that when the university appears before the next convention,
it will be a university to teach capitalist nationalism. At the N. E. A.
gathering, which was going on across the bay, Mrs. Fannie Fern Andrews
of Boston, a social worker and tireless advocate of international
understanding, was chairman of a committee which brought in an excellent
report, recommending the teaching of history and civics from the
international point of view. The American Legion agents were on hand to
see that this report was postponed; also the National Security League,
whose representative was orating against “Bolshevism.” The gang-leader
selected to postpone Mrs. Andrews was the president of the Department of
Superintendence, Commissioner Payson Smith of Massachusetts. His motion
was carried with a roar, and a crowd of superintendents in the rear of
the room yelled out: “Hurrah for Payson Smith!”
A study of this convention oratory reveals two prominent features:
first, the fulsome flattery which these great educators pour out upon
one another in public; the devout school-marms and enthralled visitors
are told that they are listening to the eloquence of the gods. Second,
the prominence given in all the discussions to the material side of
education, to administrative routine and “red tape.” This, of course,
comes from Columbia University, whose standard-bearers occupy the
prominent places on the program, put there by George D. Strayer,
professor of Educational Administration at Columbia University. Get this
title clear; it means that he teaches, not education, but the business
of conducting education factories. In other words, education has become
a Big Business in itself—a chain system of mills for the grinding out of
standardized minds. That is the thing they deal with at these N. E. A.
conventions; and if you could imagine the soul of a child being present,
you would picture it as a midge rolled over by a ten-ton truck.
The central bureau of the Department of Superintendence is trying out
many great schemes. For example, no longer are janitors for schools to
be employed individually, there is now to be a contract janitor system,
and one great capitalist firm is to take care of all the schools in a
city. Before long we shall find the N. E. A. recognizing a new section,
and its annual conventions will be listening to the specialists of the
“Department of Janitorial Contracting.”
In other parts of the country the “four-term year” is being tried out;
the children of the poor are to be rushed through, and delivered to
their Big Business masters in six years instead of eight. Also, an
enterprising superintendent from Oklahoma has taken up the problem of
what to do with the teacher during the period that used to be the
teacher’s vacation—a dangerous interlude, when she might read
unauthorized books, such as “The Goslings.” The teacher is now to spend
one summer term attending a university under proper supervision; the
next summer she is to be sent to acquire culture by travel under
supervision; the third summer she is to teach in the summer schools of
the city; and during the fourth she is to be permitted to have
recreation—if she has succeeded in passing the requirements of the
previous three summers.
CHAPTER LVII
SCHOOLS FOR STRIKE-BREAKERS
We have seen the National Education Association assembling in Boston,
and welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce. We have seen them assembling in
Oakland, and welcomed by the same organization. Wherever they go, they
are welcomed with open arms by Big Business, and the school-marms hasten
to this bear’s embrace. It is no exaggeration to say that from the
earliest days of the public school system its worst enemy has been
organized commercialism. I understand that there are individual business
men of vision, who believe in and work for the schools; but the
organizations, the class groups of the exploiters did all they could to
block the establishment of public schools, realizing that to educate the
lower classes was to prepare the overthrow of wage-slavery.
What Big Business wants of children is their labor. Twenty years ago
Margaret Haley was lobbying at the state capital of Illinois for a bill
to abolish child labor, and she talked with the head of the Levis
family, which owns enormous glass works at Alton. It was provided in the
bill that children shouldn’t work in these factories earlier than
fourteen. Said Mr. Levis: “If you keep the children in school till then,
they aren’t of any use to us when they come.” This he said before the
legislature; and afterwards Miss Haley went up to him asking: “Just what
is it in the public schools which hurts the children?” The answer was:
“All this literature stuff, and history and music. In the schools where
they don’t have such things the children are willing to go to work.”
Before the legislature Mr. Levis threatened that if this bill were
passed the glass works in Alton would move to some other state. The work
of the children was carrying bottles a short distance, and they couldn’t
get men to do it—not at their price. The bill was passed—and immediately
the manufacturers decided that the work could be done by machines.
Having realized that the schools are here to stay, Big Business now
seeks to turn them to its own ends. Modern educators, with their manual
training want to use handwork to develop the brains of the child, while
the manufacturers want to develop the hands only. The educators want to
keep the unity of the system, understanding that where hand and brain
are separated both degenerate. The business interests want schools in
which their workers may be trained; they are willing to pay generously,
in order to get cheap skilled labor which they may use in
strike-breaking. They want two separate school systems, with separate
boards, buildings, funds and corps of teachers. They want no
co-ordination between the two systems—the plan being that when they have
got them separate, they can feed the vocational schools and starve the
cultural schools. The organized teachers of Chicago have understood this
plan from the beginning, and they have explained it to the organized
workers, who have beaten it.
Move up to Minnesota, and you find the same fight, financed by the same
people. The National Association of Manufacturers has had this definite
policy for the schools for a generation, and they have had highly paid
lobbyists and organizers at work all over the country. In Minnesota
these lobbyists came to the legislature with their bill for industrial
training under the direction of employers. The money was to be put up by
the public, but the school authorities were to have nothing to do with
the spending. There was to be a second school system, run by the
manufacturers, and they were to have power to transfer students without
the consent of their parents! Also, the local school boards were to be
permitted to accept petitions to provide industrial education in the
public schools.
Mr. H. E. Miles, agent of the National Association of Manufacturers,
came to Wisconsin and denounced the schools there, declaring that the
vocational schools would never amount to anything until they were run by
the manufacturers themselves. Once more, Big Business was to train its
wage-slaves, and the state was to pay the bill. Mr. Miles made the
beginning of what he wanted, starting a trade school in a tannery in
Sheboygan. Mr. Schultz, a member of the state board, wanted one in his
chair factory; he objected to all scholastic subjects, especially
civics—he wanted only the trade taught. Many of these pupils were
foreigners, many were feeble-minded and could not get beyond the third
grade.
Mr. Charles P. Cary, state superintendent of education, insisted that
these children should spend half their time in self-improvement; but Mr.
Miles would take nothing less than their whole time. He wanted them to
learn but one thing—the exact thing they were going to do the rest of
their lives; anything else was “overeducating” them. Talking with Mr.
Cary in April, 1921, Mr. Miles admitted that what he wanted of the
part-time schools was to train strike-breakers. “I was talking with one
of our great manufacturers,” he said, “and he told me that by putting in
the plant system of training he had made twenty thousand dollars in one
year. Now if that were paid for by the city and state”—and then suddenly
Mr. Miles realized that Mr. Cary was not a man to appreciate this line
of argument; he said abruptly: “It’s a remarkably fine day, is it not?”
We went to war with Germany, thinking to abolish the German system of
autocracy. But here was a high-salaried agent of our biggest business
organization, representing many billions of dollars of invested capital,
devoting his energies to establishing the complete Prussian system in
the American schools! In Germany of the old regime, this system
comprised two distinct types of schools; first, the people’s schools,
and secondly, the gymnasia for the privileged classes. The children of
the poor dropped out at the age of fourteen years; ninety per cent of
them took to part time study and part work, fitting themselves to do
what their fathers were doing. Those who were destined for the gymnasia
pulled out at the third year, and began on foreign languages. A boy who
finished the people’s school had to go back and take up foreign
languages in order to get into the gymnasia, and very few ever achieved
the feat.
This is class education, and it is what the National Association of
Manufacturers has been working for all over the United States. Margaret
Haley told me of a legislative hearing at Springfield, Illinois, at
which they produced Superintendent Cooley of Chicago, who gave an
elaborate lecture on the European system of vocational training, which
he pretended to know. Mr. Frederick Roman had gone to Germany, with
credentials from the governor of North Carolina, and had spent two years
making an independent study. Superintendent Cooley didn’t know about
this, and was taken by surprise when Mr. Roman walked in upon this
legislative hearing, and showed that Cooley had misrepresented both the
law and the facts of the European system. The vocational training which
the Chicago superintendent of schools was recommending for the state of
Illinois was worse than anything in Prussia!
Superintendent Cary of Wisconsin told me the details of his long
struggle with the manufacturers. They informed him that if he did not
obey orders, they would put him out; he must play the political game,
and name the county superintendents selected by them. When he refused,
they put up a candidate against him—whose son was an agent for Ginn &
Company, book publishers. A little later on we shall deal with these
book companies in detail; suffice it here to say that one book agent
offered to put up fifteen thousand dollars for Mr. Cary’s campaign fund,
and the offer was refused. The manufacturers, being unable to get the
trade schools they wanted from Mr. Cary, went to the legislature and got
provision for separate vocational schools, and put their man in charge
of these. When the next election came round, they put up a man for Mr.
Cary’s place, and set out to raise a campaign fund; one contractor sent
out a letter to the others, the book companies rallied—and so Mr. Cary
no longer has anything to say about public education in Wisconsin.
The National Association of Manufacturers, together with the National
Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers’ Association and the rest
of them, now have a comfortable working majority in the Supreme Court,
and they got a decision granting them the right to work our babies in
their factories. They have several million now at work; and you
recollect how in California the Better America Federation tried to force
through the state legislature a bill providing for the dismissal of any
teacher who should discuss with any pupil the desirability of any
amendment to the Constitution. As an illustration of the conditions they
want, take the state of Delaware, which has no compulsory school
attendance law, and where children are bound out to employers on the old
English apprentice system, which is practically the same thing as
selling them into slavery. In Delaware the powder interests, owned by
the Dupont family, have very kindly taken over the educational system of
the state; they have established a School Association, which under the
law does all the buying of supplies and the putting up of school
buildings.
CHAPTER LVIII
THE NATIONAL SPIES’ ASSOCIATION
Next comes the question of the open shop, the most important in the
world to our National Manufacturers, who have been active in putting
anti-union propaganda into the schools, and in spying on those who deal
with unions. We have seen this going on in city after city—Los Angeles,
Oakland, Portland, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit; and now we
discover the central source from which these impulses come. The National
Association of Manufacturers maintains an “Open Shop Department,” with a
huge campaign fund, and Mr. Noel Sargent as manager. Mr. Sargent
obtained the distribution of his anti-union literature to every school
child of New York, and when he was challenged about this he explained
quite innocently that “the association wished merely to see that
students and teachers understood its view-point.” The American
Federation of Labor made protest to the school authorities; but it
happened, amusingly enough, that at this very time the big labor chiefs
of New York City were doing their best to elect the Tammany ticket—the
very gang under whose direction the distributing had been done!
Cross the continent to Stockton, California, and observe the local
branch of the Black Hand, known as the M. M. & E. (Merchants,
Manufacturers and Employers), engaged in strangling the high school
paper, the “Guard and Tackle,” because the student publishers committed
the crime of accepting the lowest bid for printing the paper—which bid
happened to be made by a concern employing union printers! The editor of
the “Forum,” an independent newspaper of Stockton, is greatly distressed
by this action; he thinks the M. M. & E. is drawing the class lines in
an artificial and fantastic way. Secretary Baker of the M. M. & E.
admits that he has caused advertising to be withdrawn from the school
paper, and admits the reason, but declines to put the statement into
writing, so that his organization would be legally responsible. It
appears that Professor Reed, financial adviser of the school boys, is a
canny gentleman, who advised the boys, at the time they made their
contract with the union concern, to reserve the right to cancel the
contract in case of interference by the business masters of Stockton. So
the work was taken from the union printers; but six months have passed,
and the school paper has not yet got back its lost advertising!
As a rule, we put through these little jobs without disagreeable
publicity; but once in a while accidents happen. We may take the best of
care in selecting our educators, but now and then a Bolshevik will creep
in. Take, for example, the United States Bureau of Education; we have
had some most eminent Bolshevik-hunters in charge of that organization,
and had every right to feel safe about it. Who could have foreseen that
when the United States Commissioner of Education selected a young lady
by the name of Alice Barrows, whose ancestors went back two hundred and
eighty years in our history—a niece of Thomas Brackett Reed, Republican
party boss of the House of Representatives for a generation—who could
possibly have foreseen that this hundred per cent respectable young lady
would turn out to have sympathy for a labor union? Thereby hangs a
story, full of tragedy for our merchants and manufacturers of woolen
materials.
In the course of the war we discovered a great many foreigners who
didn’t speak English and didn’t know how to read and write. That seemed
dangerous in war-time, so we started campaigns of “Americanization.” So
after the war the Bureau of Education sent Miss Alice Barrows to
Passaic, New Jersey, to make a study of the problem of adult education
among the foreigners who work in the woolen mills. It so happened that
only a few months ago there had been a big mass strike among these
workers, and they had formed a union. We were quietly engaged in
strangling this union, when Miss Barrows, entirely neglectful of her
dignity as a government investigator, had the bad taste to go and
consult with the president of the union about teaching the union workers
to speak and read and write English.
Of course, we merchants and manufacturers can’t hold down this foreign
riff-raff without a great many spies to keep track of them. We have had
to develop a whole industry of espionage, almost as elaborate as our
school machine. We have scores of secret service agencies, some of which
spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have complete
private armies of their own, cavalry, infantry and artillery. Naturally,
we had spies in the office of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of
Passaic, and one of these spies sent in a report concerning a “Mrs.
Alice Borrows of the Educational Division of the United States
Department of Labor.” There were a number of slips in that description,
but we haven’t as yet been able to introduce courses on espionage in our
schools, so our spies are not as highly cultured as we should like.
The report referred to “Mrs. Borrows” as “a misguided zealot,” and
pictured her engaged in “a long and earnest conversation with Mathew
Pluhar, the head of this so-called union.” The two of them were
concocting a vile plot; there were to be night schools for the workers,
and the workers were actually to be permitted to select their own
teachers—who would, of course, teach them Bolshevik doctrines disguised
as English lessons! “This appears to be a very subtle scheme,” said our
spy, and he brought his report in haste to Mr. J. Frank Andres,
secretary of the Passaic Council of the Woolen Manufacturers’
Association. Mr. Andres naturally hastened with it to the superintendent
of schools, so as to warn him against this subtle scheme and keep these
night schools from getting started. But here again an unforeseeable
accident happened. The superintendent of schools, instead of regarding
Miss Barrows as “a misguided zealot,” regarded her as a fellow educator,
and sent for her and put the report into her hands!
Miss Barrows went to interview Mr. Andres, who consented not to punish
her for what she had done, but put it up to her fairly: “Don’t you think
that a corporation worth twenty million dollars ought to have some
control over the policy of the public schools?” There is a cheap
newspaper in Passaic, catering to the lower classes, and this published
the story; the yellow newspapers of New York took it up—they set out to
find out about our spy system, pretending never to have heard of such a
thing! Our Mr. Andres took a high moral position, explaining that “It is
of the highest importance for manufacturers to use agents among their
workers for the dissemination of truth against the doctrines of hatred
and antagonism which are being preached by such men as the leaders of
the Amalgamated.”
But not all our members were as courageous as this. Miss Barrows began
calling upon the presidents of our great woolen corporations, and one of
them, Mr. Forstmann, denied that he had ever heard of such a thing as
industrial espionage, and promised to have it abolished except inside
the mills. Of course, that made us laugh; but it didn’t help to stop the
publicity. In order to hold down the Bolshevik agitators during the late
strike, our city authorities had required all speakers to get a permit;
and we didn’t give permits to unionists. But now came another kind of
union, a parlor Bolshevik affair called the American Civil Liberties
Union, demanding to hold meetings without permits.
They have a clever trick—they hire a hall, and get up and start to read
the Constitution of the United States; they don’t really care anything
about the Constitution, of course, they just want to put us in a hole.
In this case they put up the Polish president of the Amalgamated, to
translate the Constitution into Polish, something which ought to be a
crime in itself. They wanted to make us arrest him, but we were too
clever for that; our chief of police just turned out the lights in the
hall, and then shoved all the foreigners and workingmen outside, and
left the newspaper reporters and parlor Bolsheviks inside to listen to
the Constitution in Polish! Of course, the Bolshevik newspapers made a
great fuss over that; there was a fellow by the name of William Hard,
who made it into a farce comedy in four issues of the “New Republic,”
April 7 to April 28, 1920.
But, as the saying is, we showed them where to get off. To make
everything legal, our city council passed an ordinance, requiring that
everyone who speaks at a public meeting in Passaic shall first get a
permit from the police; and then, to complete the matter, our mayor put
Mr. J. Frank Andres on the school board. Now he is right there to see
that foreigners who belong to labor unions don’t get into the night
schools to learn English or anything else! Also we sent a couple of our
manufacturers down to Washington to try to have that Barrows woman
turned out of her job; but we couldn’t manage that—the politicians were
too much afraid of the publicity. We tried to keep them from printing
her report, but they wouldn’t even do that. It was published as the
Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1920, No. 4, and we hope you won’t send
for it. It is unfit for any decent person to read, as you can tell from
one sentence on page 23:
It should, however, be clearly understood by the people of Passaic
that, so long as an espionage system so subversive of mutual trust and
social confidence among the adult population of Passaic continues, the
educational process is impossible.
CHAPTER LIX
BABBITTS AND BOLSHEVIKS
Space is limited, so let us drop the merchants and manufacturers, and
consider another great power, the American Bankers’ Association, which
has gone aggressively into education. This power has formally declared
its disapproval of the popular custom of using such words as “Wall
Street” and “capitalistic” in a disrespectful manner; so, in combination
with the American Institute of Banking, it takes steps to make the new
generation more polite. It has prepared a program of lectures, beginning
with the seventh grammar grade and continuing through the four years of
high school. Its “Committee on Public Education” has prepared a series
of ten lectures, and arranged to distribute them in the schools through
the eighty-three city chapters of the American Institute of Banking.
Bankers from each chapter will give lectures in the public schools at
the rate of one a month during the school year, teaching the economic
system upon which our banks are founded.
What this economic system is can be stated in one sentence: our
government has turned over the most important function of modern life,
the creation of credit, to a group of selfish interests, which are
thereby enabled to confiscate the greater part of the product of the
modern industrial machine. Naturally, the bankers want the schools to
teach that this is a divinely inspired arrangement. We have seen their
educators at work in city after city, with lectures and “thrift
campaigns.” We have seen them in Montana, taking over the whole school
curriculum, and in Colorado taking a good part of the school funds as
well.
Also the lawyers come forward to do their part. At the annual meeting of
the American Bar Association, in Minneapolis, 1923, a “Committee on
American Citizenship” brought in an elaborate report, full of words of
terror: “inroads,” “threatened changes,” “insidiousness,” “dangerous
tendencies,” “dangerous elements,” “long established institutions,”
etc., etc. There are four hundred “Red” newspapers, with five million
readers, say the lawyers of the United States; and these lawyers propose
to protect the people by taking charge of the schools. All local bar
associations are to organize committees, and there is to be “unity of
policy and action” all over the country; “direct contact will be made
with all our schools and colleges.”
And already, it appears, some of the local lawyers have got to work. In
the September, 1923, issue of “School Life,” published by the Bureau of
Education, I learn that the Indiana State Bar Association is
co-operating with the schools, sending speakers on the Constitution; and
of course this will be the same thing, the lecturers will say nothing
about the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, they will interpret it
solely as an instrument for the perpetuation of privilege.
Next, the National Chamber of Commerce, under the guidance of Professor
Strayer of Columbia University, Educator-in-Chief of J. P. Morgan &
Company. This mighty school magnate has organized a committee for
co-operation between chambers of commerce and city school departments.
We have seen this “co-operation” working in many cities, resembling the
alliance between the lady and tiger—“they came back from the ride with
the lady inside!” The co-operating organization is known by the imposing
title of “The American City Bureau of the National Committee for
Chambers of Commerce Co-operation with Public Schools”; think what a
delicious mouthful for a functionary—executive secretary of the A. C. B.
N. C. C. C. C. P. S.!
This mammoth institution issued a report based upon a survey of schools
in nine hundred cities, from which most optimistic conclusions were
drawn by the “Outlook,” house organ of the firm of God, Mammon and
Company. Miss Josephine Colby, a “kicked-out” union teacher, wrote to
the “Outlook,” pointing out how misleading this editorial was, because
it gave the impression that the Chamber of Commerce report represented
the entire country, whereas it covered the large city schools, which are
the best, and left out the rural schools, which are the worst. Needless
to say, the “Outlook” had no space for this letter; and that is why
boards of education all over the United States recommend the “Outlook”
as proper reading for goose-herds and goslings.
Next, the National Industrial Conference Board, which is the research
and propaganda bureau of a long list of Big Business associations—cotton
manufacturers, hardware, paper and pulp, electrical, chemical, wool,
automobiles, boot and shoe, metal trades, erectors, founders, rubber,
silk, railway cars, etc. Here is one of the most powerful “educational”
organizations of the country; its active manager is a consulting
engineer of the General Electric Company, who got his education in
Austria and Germany, and is working to introduce the German system of
slave training. This great organization has been active all over the
country in censoring text-books and supervising the contents of our
children’s minds. At its instance the Chamber of Commerce in St. Louis
caused Washington University to cease using the book entitled “Community
and National Life,” by Professor Charles H. Judd, head of the department
of education of the University of Chicago.
Also, this National Industrial Conference Board discovered that the
Bureau of Education of the United States government was circulating a
series of pamphlets by Professor Judd, entitled “Lessons in Community
and National Life”; which pamphlets were discovered to be full of most
terrible Bolshevik material. They quite definitely labored to prejudice
the minds of little children against the leading doctrines of our
organized American manufacturers. Consider, for example, a sentence such
as the following:
Those in favor of the minimum wage for men say that men should receive
a wage sufficient to marry and rear a family without the dangers that
come from insufficient employment and wages.
Or consider a criminal Bolshevik utterance like the following:
The prohibition of night work, the eight-hour day, and the minimum
wage for women are necessary to protect the health of the mothers of
the next generation.
Or an incendiary statement such as this:
Social insurance helps to maintain normal family standards.
Again, think of telling a tender young child about a workingman who
contracted tuberculosis, so that his oldest boy had to leave school, and
the mother had to go out to day sewing, with the result that “the young
children ran wild.” Then follows the subtle propaganda:
The misfortune of this family could have been prevented if a law
providing for social insurance against sickness, or health insurance,
had been in effect.
There was a whole list of Bolshevik utterances such as this, which you
may find quoted and discussed in a pamphlet published by the National
Industrial Conference at Boston. The title of the pamphlet is: “A Case
of Federal Propaganda in our Public Schools.” The pamphlet doesn’t state
what was done about this matter, so I mention that the circulation of
the wicked propaganda by the United States government was immediately
stopped.
Next, the National Association for Constitutional Government, which is
sending out lecturers to talk to school children on the Constitution. A
teacher in St. Paul tells me about a woman from this organization, who
was allowed half an hour in a high school of St. Paul, and devoted two
minutes to the Constitution, and twenty-eight minutes to the
Bolsheviks—meaning, of course, everybody who believes in municipal milk
inspection and government control of railroads. This lady has just
turned up in Southern California, having got herself transferred to the
Better America Federation. She lectures in the drawing-rooms of our rich
ladies, and feeds them all the old garbage—free love, nationalization of
women, the communization of children, the tearing down of churches. She
lends spice to her discourse by telling how she herself in her youth was
seduced by these cults of Satan. It is noted that no one is ever given
an opportunity to question her, and she never appears before those
organizations whose rules provide that both sides of every question
shall be heard. She has a new and curious formula for getting at the
truth: “If you want to know about Socialism, don’t go to the
Socialists!” To a friend of mine she said, with lifted eyebrows: “Do you
really think Upton Sinclair is sincere?”
Next, the National Security League. From a syndicated newspaper article,
occupying two columns, I cut the following head-lines:
/* LESSONS IN PATRIOTISM ARE FREE FOR TEACHERS
REVISION IN STUDY OF CIVICS ALL OVER COUNTRY HELPED BY NOBLE WORK OF
LEAGUE SECRETARY */
In the text which follows I learn about this wonderful secretary, the
daughter of a “patriotic instructor” of the G. A. R., who now maintains
an office in New York, and is the “personal friend” of the seven hundred
thousand school teachers of the United States. Many of these teachers do
not know much about the Constitution; being afraid to reveal the fact to
their supervisor, they are glad to write for advice to a specialist in
patriotism. In the past five years a quarter of a million teachers have
had either direct or indirect relationship with this system. Twenty-six
states have passed laws requiring the teaching of the Constitution in
the schools, and this secretary is right there with the dope, especially
prepared for children of every age. For example: “The Supreme Court is
the greatest contribution to free government ever made, in that it
exists to protect the people from the tyranny of the government they
themselves set up.” In other words, nine venerable gentlemen, seven of
them the lifelong hired men of great corporations, have usurped to
themselves the power of annuling laws of Congress—including a law
intended to save several million children from slavery in glass
factories and cotton mills and enable them to go to school.
There are numerous other great organizations of Bolshevik hunters
supervising our schools—the American Civic Association, the “America
First” Publicity Association, the International Association of Rotary
Clubs, the Inter-Racial Council, the National American Council, the
Sentinels of the Republic—a whole universe of Babbitts! The New York
“Commercial,” a daily newspaper of Wall Street, makes a regular feature
of Bolshevik hunting. It has an “expert” who publishes a daily
department, “The Searchlight,” all got up in official fashion, with
index numbers ready for filing in your spy cabinet: “File No. 21, Report
No. 7, November 21, 1923, Schools and Colleges, Radicalism In”—this kind
of thing gives delight to the Babbitt soul, like a stuffed cat to a
baby. This particular report deals with the National Student Forum and
its branches in the colleges, particularly the Harvard Liberal Club. It
quotes me as approving these organizations. The passage is taken from
“The Goose-step,” page 466, and appears in the New York “Commercial” as
follows:
As an illustration of the activities of this group I mention that the
Harvard Liberal Club, during the year 1922, had sixty luncheon
speakers in five months, including such radicals as Clark Getts,
Lincoln Steffens, Florence Kelley, Raymond Robins, Frank Tannenbaum,
Roger Baldwin, Percy Mackaye, Clare Sheridan, Norman Angell, and W. E.
B. Dubois.
The New York “Commercial” stopped there, and stopped, according to the
rules of punctuation, with a period. But, as it happens, that period
constitutes a lie; for in “The Goose-step” the punctuation mark is not a
period, but a semi-colon, followed by the words:
Properly balanced by a group of respectable people, including Admiral
Sims, Hamilton Holt, President Eliot, and a nephew of Lord Bryce.
You see what a dirty piece of work! The Harvard Liberal Club is what its
name implies, an organization believing in free discussion and a hearing
for both sides. I gave an account of its activities which proved it to
be that. The New York “Commercial,” desiring to prove the Harvard
Liberal Club a “radical” organization, deliberately mutilates my
sentence, and represents the Harvard Liberal Club as inviting only
radicals, and myself as endorsing such a procedure in colleges!
Now skip one or two thousand miles, to where the Sioux Indians once
chased the buffalo, and the capitalist Indians now chase professors
through college halls. The legislature of Iowa passed a law providing
for a course in “citizenship,” and the state superintendent appointed a
committee to prepare a course, the chairman being Harry G. Plum,
professor of European History at the state university; a Columbia Ph.D.,
author of several historical works, and an entirely respectable person.
Professor Plum, with the help of his graduate students, prepared a
syllabus, in which he made so bold as to discuss American problems on
the basis of facts. So Professor Plum became a target for the arrows of
the Ottumwa “Courier,” which insisted that high school students ought
not hear about such a topic as “the English Industrial Revolution.” Said
the editor of the “Courier”: “To the teacher of history industrial
revolution may mean a change in mechanical methods, but to the radical
it means overthrow of government.”
Furthermore, Editor Powell objected to the use of such words as
“problem” and “difficulty” in connection with our civilization. High
school students ought not to know that there are any problems or
difficulties—unless possibly it be the problem or difficulty of
compelling college professors to obey their masters! Also Editor Powell
would not permit Professor Plum to list the I. W. W. among labor
organizations; he would not let the professor make frequent references
to “the capitalist group” and to “capital and labor”; he would not let
the professor state that the farmers were responsible for the Populist
movement and the Nonpartisan League; nor would he permit the suggestion
to be made that high school pupils should “participate in the working
out of problems.” Editor Powell was so determined about all this that he
carried the matter to the state legislature and forced an investigation,
at which Professor Plum was grilled, and the university faculty was made
unhappy. As Editor Powell put it in his paper: “Iowa City does not want
any question to arise as to the brand of teaching at the university,
while the big appropriations for the institution are pending before the
legislature.” Needless to say, the wicked syllabus was thrown out of the
schools of the state.
CHAPTER LX
THE SCHOOLS OF SOCONY
Among the great capitalists who have been making over our schools, the
most active has been Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller
established the General Education Board, an institution with an
endowment of a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, for the purpose
of exercising supervision over American education. Of course this is all
supposed to be entirely altruistic; its purpose is to improve our
standards of education, and has no relationship whatever to the fact
that Mr. Rockefeller is engaged in collecting tens of millions of
dollars every year from a long list of our biggest industries. I have
discussed this matter in detail in “The Goose-step”; but it is of such
overwhelming importance to the schools, that I must repeat the facts
here. The Rockefeller General Education Board is without doubt the most
powerful single agency now engaged in keeping our schools subservient to
special privilege. Dr. W. J. Spillman, of the United States Bureau of
Agricultural Economics, tells of the efforts of the Rockefeller board to
control the agricultural colleges in the different states, and of the
activities of their agent, David F. Houston, ex-president of the
University of Texas, and Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson,
to keep the farmers of the United States from learning anything about
how they were “deflated” by the Federal Reserve banks.
Dr. Houston is a member of the Southern Education Board, one of the
Rockefeller organizations, and later became chairman of the Federal
Reserve and Farm Loan Board. Dr. Spillman was on the inside all through
the Houston administration of the Department of Agriculture, and
portrays his chief as “lying, cheating and intriguing, resorting to
every device in order to keep the facts about farming costs from being
collected.” You see, the farmers were expected to raise food and sell it
below the cost of production; they are still being expected to do this,
and are doing it. There was circulated through Dr. Houston’s department
a typewritten sheet, said to have come from Mr. Rockefeller’s General
Education Board, and concurred in by Secretary Houston, forbidding the
department to make any investigation which would determine the cost of
producing farm products; no one should ever hint at over-production in
farm products, and the sole business of the department was to persuade
the farmers to produce more.
This General Education Board possesses unlimited funds, pays no taxes,
and renders no accounting to anyone. It employs a huge staff of experts
in lobbying and wire-pulling. These experts got control of the farm
demonstration work in the South, and because Dr. Spillman fought them in
the North and West, they did everything in their power to handicap his
work. I refer you to “The Goose-step” for the story of Professor T. N.
Carver of Harvard University, who became head of a government department
for which the Rockefeller board put up the funds. Professor Carver was
an honest man, who really wanted to help the farmers, and worked out an
elaborate program. It was turned down flat by the Rockefeller board, and
Professor Carver told them in plain language what he thought of them,
and then quit. In consequence of such intrigues on the part of the
Rockefeller experts, the farmers of the Northwest are now flat on their
backs, and ignorant of how it happened, or what to do about it.