put upon the payrolls of the General Education Board, and sent to every
portion of the United States to run our schools free of charge; and if
you were to ask the General Education Board, or the capitalist press of
the United States, you would be assured that never, never could it
happen that anyone of these educators would cease for one moment from
his altruistic labors, or think about anything so base as the interests
of the Rockefeller corporations. But I invite you now to give attention
to the story of Mr. Granville Cubage, who in 1922, announced himself as
candidate for superintendent of public instruction in Union County,
Arkansas. Mr. Cubage got out a pamphlet entitled “How Arkansas Schools
Lost a Million Dollars,” and here is the strange story he tells. Mr.
Cubage’s opponent in the race for state superintendent was Mr. A. B.
Hill, state high school inspector at a salary of thirty-five hundred
dollars a year paid by the Rockefeller General Education Board, together
with an expense allowance of twelve hundred dollars. Mr. Hill’s second
in rank got the same salary and allowance of Rockefeller money, his
third in rank got the same, and his fourth in rank, the supervisor of
Negro schools, got a little more—presumably to salve his feelings and
preserve his prestige among the people of Arkansas, who do not like
Negro schools.
Mr. Cubage, who has been for the past fourteen years a teacher at the
State Normal School, goes on to explain how these four great educators
have spent most of their time playing politics, and have secured one act
after another from the state legislature, building up the power of their
machine. Mr. Hill obtained the power to grade the schools, and to hire
and fire teachers, and to give orders to the county superintendents—so
on through a long list of powers. That may be all right, of course—if
the educators are really educators, trying to serve the people. Also it
may be proper that the state board of education should be filled up with
Rockefeller agents, drawing Rockefeller salaries; but are they really
serving the people?
Read on a little further, and you discover that Mr. Cubage is advocating
that the great oil and pipe line companies, principally Standard
Oil-Rockefeller concerns, should pay a “severance tax” upon the natural
wealth which they draw from the state of Arkansas. And what have the
great Rockefeller educators to say about that?
Mr. Cubage, in his campaign circular, tells us about an amendment to the
state constitution, providing that the people shall pay more taxes to
provide more money for the schools. At the meeting of the State
Teachers’ Association, November 11, 1920, such an amendment was
approved—but also containing a provision for the severance tax.
Immediately Mr. Hill rose in the convention, and proposed that a
“Committee on Phraseology” be appointed, to put the finishing touches to
this resolution. Mr. Hill himself was not named on this committee, but
his influence counted—for when the bill came out from the committee,
with the “finishing touches” complete, it was discovered that the
principal “finishing touch” had finished the severance tax provision!
This provision had entirely disappeared, and Amendment 14, as approved
by the teachers of the state, said nothing about such a tax. In order to
beat Mr. Cubage, who favored the tax, and elect Mr. Hill, who opposed
it, the gang assessed all the Arkansas school teachers three times, and
made all county and city superintendents contribute one hundred dollars
each to the campaign fund!
Later on, when the legislature came to consider bills providing for a
severance tax, the great Rockefeller educators were at the state
capital, advising the legislators that these bills were objectionable.
And so, the next time you read about the abundant generosity of Mr.
Rockefeller, the greatest educational philanthropist of all time, don’t
forget this little story from Union County, Arkansas. By paying out a
few thousand dollars for the improvement of Arkansas education, Mr.
Rockefeller’s industries expected to save a million dollars a year in
one single bill! I am sorry I have not access to the complete files of
the General Education Board and of the Standard Oil Company, so that I
can tell you how many tens of millions a year have been added to Mr.
Rockefeller’s income by this simple little scheme of paying the salaries
of educational politicians!
When you question our great captains of industry about proceedings such
as this, they make one defense—they have to do it, because the other
fellow is doing it. We must give Mr. Rockefeller the benefit of this
plea; the rivals of the Standard Oil Company have also been buying up
educators and state governments. Especially they have done this in order
to get school lands which have been discovered to contain oil.
I have before me a copy of the Oklahoma “Leader” for July 1, 1922,
telling the story of Robert H. Wilson, then candidate of the Black Hand
for governor of Oklahoma. It appears that Wilson had been a member of
the School Land Commission, and he had awarded a lease for a hundred and
eighteen thousand acres of school land to an oil operator by the name of
Marland, who made sixty-seven million dollars out of this lease and
others. The scandal became so great that the legislature took up the
matter and prescribed terms for releasing; but the School Land
Commission met and solemnly took the stand that the act of the
legislature was unconstitutional, and proceeded to continue Marland’s
holdings on the old terms. In the court battle which ensued, the state
of Oklahoma obtained $1,400,000 from the Marland interests—a sum which
the School Land Commission had endeavored to throw away. If the school
commission had held on to the lands and leased them upon proper terms,
the schools of Oklahoma would have had not less than thirty million
dollars.
It is interesting to note the outcome of the gubernatorial election. Mr.
Wilson, the candidate of the Black Hand, was beaten by “Jack” Walton,
hero of the Farmer-Labor party. Immediately afterwards it was discovered
that all Walton’s campaign expenses had been met by the oil interests,
and he proceeded to kick over his party and run the state of Oklahoma
for these oil interests—among other things, turning out of office a
radical educator, president of the Agricultural College. Governor Walton
would still, no doubt, have been running the state for the oil men, if
he had not made the mistake of attacking the Ku Klux Klan.
While we are in this Southwestern country, with its new rich and its new
poor, let us take time to consider the great Invisible Empire, which is
so rapidly taking over the control of our political life. Wherever you
travel in the West nowadays, people consider it necessary to ask whether
you belong; so I answer that I have been invited to join, but have not
availed myself of the opportunity. Many klansmen will read this book,
and discover that some of the things they want are the things I want;
but I venture to tell them that they will not get these things through
the Klan, whose leaders got rich in a hurry, and are now hand in glove
with Wall Street. A great many Klan members are former Socialists, who
have got tired of waiting for something to happen; they will wait a
while longer, and then the class struggle will begin inside the Klan,
and its membership will decide whether Americanism means wage slavery
and no more.
For the present I record that Socialist school teachers are being
hounded by the Klan, in places as far apart as Oklahoma and Indiana. How
intelligent the conduct of the organization is, you may judge from the
fact that the school board of the large city of Dallas, Texas, has been
formally condemned by the Klan, and sentenced to extinction at the next
election. The local Klan potentate wrote officially to the school board
in substance as follows: “We have been informed that the wife of the
manager of the lunch room at the Forest Avenue High School has told her
husband that if he joins the Ku Klux Klan, she will leave him. Now we
beg to inform you that the Ku Klux Klan is a one hundred per cent
Christian and American organization, and it resents such statements; and
we expect the school board to see that they are not repeated and that
proper punishment is meted out to persons in the school that make such
remarks.” The Dallas school board committed the offense of filing this
letter without action, and so it is slated to go.
CHAPTER LXI
THE RIOT DEPARTMENT
Next, our military men present themselves as educators; nothing would
please them more than to take over our schools entirely, and make a
hundred thousand little West Points. They have made much progress, and
Big Business cheers them on, and puts up the money for their propaganda.
We have seen the N. E. A. turning over its conscience to the American
Legion, which may be described as the Riot Department of the plutocracy.
In city after city the chambers of commerce and merchants and
manufacturers have built palatial club-houses for the Legion; they are
subsidizing its worst activities, and keeping its inciters of violence
upon their secret payrolls. They are working out a program to have a
representative of the Legion as one of the orators at every school
commencement. All reactionaries understand that to get the school
children into uniform and drill them is the one sure way to save us from
modern thought. Hear, for example, General Pershing, orating at a
banquet tendered to him by the Chamber of Commerce and its Riot
Department in San Diego. According to the Los Angeles “Times”:
More than 500 persons whistled, applauded and pounded the tables when
the commander of the United States Army in war and in peace paid his
compliments to the Reds. “Military training with its teaching of
submission to the will of authority is one of the best methods of
teaching young and old the sacredness and the power of the
Constitution of the United States,” said Gen. Pershing. “I firmly
believe that a sane program of military training for every young man
is a great immunity against the idle, insidious and foolish propaganda
of the I. W. W., the parlor Bolsheviks and all other shades of Reds of
which there are too many right now.”
Thus the “Times”; and if you think the schools are not drinking in this
poison, I refer you to “School Life,” the official publication of the
United States Bureau of Education, December, 1921. The front page of
this magazine opens with an article by Commissioner Tigert,
self-appointed slaughterer of Socialists. The title is “Educational
Aspects of the American Legion’s Convention.” Let me make clear to you
before you go on that this is that same hideous orgy in Kansas City, to
which I have previously referred. You may find a sketch of it at the end
of my novel, “They Call Me Carpenter,” and a detailed account published
in the “Nation” for November 23, 1921. After you have read these, read
how the convention is made to appear to the school children. The
headlines continue:
Presence of International Figures Made Occasion a Memorable Event.
School Children Impress General Diaz. Program of Americanization
Enthusiastically Indorsed. Policies and Principles of Legion. Program
for American Education Week.
Then follows a list of the “international figures” who were
present—Marshal Foch, Admiral Beatty, General Diaz, General Jacques,
General Pershing, Vice-president Coolidge, etc. “Gigantic parade of
40,000 heroes of the Great War, the banquet given in honor of the
distinguished gentlemen,” etc. “Thousands of school children lined along
the boulevards to see Foch.” And here is the message of the pious
Catholic general to America: “You boys, when you grow up, must work. You
little girls, when you grow up, must remember to pray.”
They are getting the little children into the Boy Scout movement, which
is the first step. They get them into uniforms and march them, and teach
them the military ideal of obedience. The Boy Scouts become more and
more warlike every hour; and the men who run the movement become more
warlike in their attitude toward the school authorities. Says Mr. O. G.
Wood, quoted in our Butte story:
One Scout Master in Butte by the name of Owen used to come before the
school board and tell them what to do in regard to allowing the public
schools for Scout meetings. He fixed the dates and no change was made.
He threatened to have any member of the board beaten at the next
election if an objection was hinted at.
For the high school and college boys they have what they call the
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps; wherever possible, they compel them to
serve and where the people have prevented this, they lure the boys by
uniforms and music and badges and banners and holidays in camp. They
teach them to plunge bayonets into human bodies, and to snarl and howl
like wild beasts while doing it. Says Mr. Ray McKaig, of Boise, Idaho:
In 1922 one very prominent club woman came home to find a group of
children watching her fourteen-year-old boy bayoneting a dummy and
screaming while so doing. To her horror she found that he was learning
this at high school. She learned that the commandant, a West Point
officer, was deliberately instilling arrogance into the boys.
Oftentimes the boys, in squads led by a corporal and fully armed,
would walk down the sidewalk brushing others in the gutter. A large
public funeral was held of one of the leading Boise citizens, and the
high school boys were having a military drill. With insolence
characteristic of militarism “made in Germany” these young future
soldiers were ordered to break through the funeral procession, instead
of waiting quietly until it had passed by.
One of the lads who was being taught militarism in Camp Kearney,
California, turned traitor and delivered to me the typewritten
memorandum of a lecture on “Military Psychology,” delivered July 26,
1920, by Robert J. Halpin, Lt. Colonel of Infantry. It consists of
approximately fifteen hundred words of blood-thirsty raving; I cannot
spare space for it all, but I quote one paragraph from the beginning and
one from the end, and assure you that the rest is all the same:
This is a period of a truce. The Great Wars of the world have not been
fought. . . .
Gentlemen: There will be wars until the end of time. Everlasting peace
is for the grave—not for life. The wish for everlasting peace is born
of fear and ignorance. It is a sure sign of weakness and a declining
civilization.
This is an old, old story—the training of little children to the
murdering of their fellowmen and calling it glory. In the old days this
was Kultur, and we went to war to put a stop to it, but apparently have
not done so. The capitalists who now rule Germany are being robbed by
the capitalists of France; and they are preparing the school children of
Germany for the next war, in which they will gain a chance to rob the
capitalists of France. In a “German History for Schools,” which is used
in all the schools of present-day Germany, it is stated that French
airplanes bombarded German railways before the declaration of war; this
in spite of the fact that the German ambassador at Paris asserted the
falsity of the charge.
This is wicked of the Germans, and ought to be stopped at once. The
French are getting ready to stop it; the capitalists of France, who are
robbing the capitalists of Germany, are training the children of France
for the next war, by teaching them from text-books equally full of lies.
There is a history of the great war, in use throughout the schools and
written by a school director; “For Our France” is the title, and in it
the Germans are described as “a host of savages, whose profession is
war, and who go about to despoil, to devastate, and to terrorize.” Under
the heading of “Entertainment” there is a series of questions adapted to
children, dealing with the savageness of the Teutons. There is also a
reader for primary and secondary schools, full of terrible stories of
murder and rape; also a volume entitled “Les Lectures des Petits,” that
is, readings for young children, full of such stories. In Belgium there
is an “Atlas Manual of Geography,” intended for use in high schools,
published four years after the end of the war, describing the Germans as
“brigands, thieves and assassins”; they are not to be received into the
League of Nations, but must be kept under surveillance, like the Negroes
and the Malay races—even these have hearts but the Germans have none.
Strange as it may seem to you, they are teaching such stuff, not merely
to the children of Belgium and France, but to the children of America
who study French! For example, a standard text-book, Chardenal’s
“Complete French Course,” New and Revised Edition, 1920, is full of the
basest French chauvinism: Germany was the sole author of the war; the
real hero of the world, and of France, is always the warrior; the sacred
places of France are the victorious battle-fields, and the scenes of
peace conferences such as Versailles. The date of the signing of this
most infamous of all the world’s peace treaties has a mystic
significance, because it was four hundred years previously, on that same
day, June 28, 1519, that Charles V was elected Emperor!
There are some really sane men writing on the subject of war and peace
in France at the present time; but never would it do for American school
children to read anything by Anatole France or Romain Rolland! Any more
than it would do for them to read the writings of American
humanitarians, such as Jane Addams or David Starr Jordan. Says Dr.
Jordan, concerning our school text-books:
They have glorified deeds of blood and celebrated most persistently
the heroes of the battle-field. The heroes of peace barely appear on
their pages, and they fail to recognize that the actual heroisms which
have brightened the records of war like flashes of lightning in a
thunderstorm are not products of war. They represent the divine in man
revealed in desperate conditions, in wallowing in physical and moral
mud, midst the barbaric loneliness of war.
And, needless to say, our chambers of commerce with their Riot
Department are going to see that we continue to get text-books of this
sort. Says Colonel Galbraith of this Riot Department, at a May Day
meeting, 1921:
We will see what kind of courses these teachers are giving and what
text-books they use. If we find that they are disloyal we’ll tell you,
and you can kick them out. We don’t care what you do with them.
And in another newspaper item I read:
Captain Walter I. Joyce, chairman of a sub-committee of the
Americanization Committee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is
appointed to meet with the representatives of the American Book
Company to scrutinize history text-books gotten out by that company in
order to prevent the creeping in of un-American propaganda. The
investigation of American histories has been going on for the past two
years, and as a result thereof, two histories have been discarded by
the Board of Education of New York and several are under consideration
at the present time in Boston.
This kind of thing has been the rule all over the country, and the
National Council for the Prevention of War has been making a study of
standard text-books of history to determine the result. Here they are,
briefly stated:
Fully 25% of the space in each approved text-book on history is
devoted to war. “The test of a state is its ability to wage war,” is a
statement frequently found in text-books. “Americans demonstrated
their instinctive military talent.” “Fair field of battle,” “valor,”
“bravery,” “audacious courage,” “brilliant,” “magnificent drive,” “our
great adventure,” are terms frequently used to glorify war.
Underlying conditions predisposing to international friction, such as
commercial rivalry, territorial ambitions, centralized autocratic
government control and the maintenance of gigantic military and naval
establishments, are rarely, and usually very inadequately, analyzed.
In analyzing the results of war, emphasis is always laid on the
territorial gains acknowledged in the treaty of peace. If reference is
made at all to tremendous destruction and cost of war, it is to point
out that it was worth while.
No attempt is made in the text-books to understand developments in
Russia. Sweeping terms are used in characterizing the present regime
there; such phrases as “two sinister figures, Lenin and Trotzky,”
“brazenly serving Germany’s ends,” “the anarchy known as Bolshevism,”
are frequent.
In treating of the world war, all recent text-books perpetuate the
hate and rancor engendered by the war. The guiltlessness of the allies
is always proclaimed.
CHAPTER LXII
THE BLINDFOLD SCHOOL OF PATRIOTISM
Needless to say, it is not only the military men who are revising our
school text-books; all the business interests are wielding their blue
pencils, and likewise the religious groups, and the racial and national
groups. In New York City, Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield is
leading a crusade against those who want to bring up our school children
without hatred for England. The commissioner held a series of hearings,
and gave an opportunity for all patriots to vent their dissatisfaction
with school text-books which failed to make proper capital out of Betsy
Ross and John Paul Jones, and which committed such offenses as
mentioning that Sam Adams was a smuggler, or that Alexander Hamilton had
said: “Your people, Sir, is a great beast.” Commissioner Hirshfield
published at the expense of the city of New York an elaborate pamphlet,
listing the offenses of such “un-American” text-books—David S. Muzzey’s
“American History,” Willis M. West’s “History of the American People,”
Albert B. Hart’s “School History,” and so on.
This crusade has spread widely, directed by what might be called the
blindfold school of patriotism. According to this school, all our
ancestors are equally to be revered, regardless of the fact that they
called one another all the vile names in the dictionary; they are
equally to be followed, although they lead in opposite directions. The
bewildered historian must manage to agree with both Thomas Jefferson and
Alexander Hamilton, with Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln; a
generation from now he will learn to agree with Calvin Coolidge and
Eugene V. Debs!
It is easy to poke fun at Chinese ancestor-worship transplanted to
America; but, on the other hand, one does not like to be in the same
boat with those Anglo-maniacs whose purpose in writing text-books is to
line us up with the British ruling-classes in their future wars. It is
hard to take one’s choice between Commissioner Hirshfield, and, for
example, Professor Greenlaw of the University of North Carolina, whose
“Builders of Democracy” is one of the most popular text-books in our
schools. Here is a book of more than three hundred and fifty closely
printed pages, full of Anglo-American military glory. The first part is
“The Call to the Colors,” and that is all American flags and battles.
The second part is “The Builders and Their Work,” and that is Tennyson
and Elizabethan seamen and the mariners of England, and “Burke, the
Friend of America.” Part Three, “Soldiers of Freedom,” is “The Soul of
Jeanne d’Arc,” and “Vive la France!” and “A Chant of Love for England,”
and all the battles and glories of the late war. I search this book from
cover to cover without finding one line about the builders of industrial
democracy. There is a short section entitled “The Growth of Sympathy for
the Poor Man,” which gives us “A Cotter’s Saturday Night,” and oddly
enough, “To a Mouse”! But there isn’t one word about labor, there isn’t
one word about Socialism, there isn’t one hint to any school child of
the colossal struggle for economic self-government now going on all over
the world, with its roll of heroes and martyrs as magnificent as any
ever sung in the days of political revolutions.
All over this country the hunt for the unorthodox text-book is going on,
and the principle upon which the revisers are working is set forth by
Edward Mandel, district superintendent of schools in New York, who
ordered every school principal in the city to direct his teachers of
history to examine the history books and transmit reports. Said Mr.
Mandel: “The question to be considered is not one of whether statements
made in the text-books are truthful and based on fact, but whether
propriety would be observed if they were included in them.” You will not
be surprised to hear that this educational gang-leader went up to
Albany, and was active in pushing through a series of bills known to the
teachers as the “spoils bills,” their purpose being to undermine the
merit system and give the gang entire control over promotions; and when
he got through with this job, he was promoted to be associate
superintendent at a considerably higher salary.
The final goal of these patriots has been reached in Arkansas, where the
state legislature has just passed a bill providing exactly how American
history shall be taught; the teachers are to avoid “a mere recital of
names and events,” and devote themselves to “instilling an understanding
and a love of country,” etc. In other words, there is to be no more
history, only propaganda; and any teacher who slips up on it is to be
fined from one hundred to five hundred dollars, or to serve in jail from
thirty days to six months, or both. As we used to say when we were
youngsters, and had got somebody down with our thumb in his eye: “Now
will you be good?”
The leader in the crusade against what he calls “treason texts” is Mr.
Charles Grant Miller, organizing director of the “Patriot League.” Mr.
Miller tells me how “for years in my newspaper work I have encountered
evils arising from the rivalries of text-book publishers and their
unscrupulous methods of manipulating school officials and intimidating
teachers.” He then goes on to tell how the Patriot League has set to
work to give the text-book companies a dose of their own medicine. The
haughty American Book Company has been brought to its knees; they
submitted to Mr. Miller the proofs of a new school history, which had
won the endorsement of the Sons of the American Revolution. But it
didn’t suit Mr. Miller; he specified over three hundred unsatisfactory
passages, and the American Book Company agreed to accept ninety-five per
cent of these corrections. It has just sent Mr. Miller proofs of another
school history, which he finds to be ninety-nine per cent all right from
his viewpoint. Then they asked him to read in manuscript a new high
school history; says Mr. Miller:
I have had a conference with the full editorial and business staffs of
the American Book Company, within the last few days, and am satisfied
that, whether for business reasons or because of real conversion to
our cause, they will, for the present at least, issue no more texts
that are not patriotic.
I have not undertaken a thorough study of school text-books; most of my
readers have them in their own homes, and can investigate for
themselves. However, I have on my desk a few samples, which were thrown
at my head by indignant teachers and pupils in the course of my travels.
For example, here is “Economics and the Community,” published by the
Century Company, and written by Professor J. A. Lapp, a prominent
Catholic propagandist. I consult the index for the most important aspect
of “economics and the community”—that is, Socialism—and I find it is not
mentioned! And then I take up a book prepared for the education of
immigrants, Howard and Brown’s “United States,” published by Appleton. I
glance over it, and in six different places I find enthusiastic praise
of our great American newspapers. Also, the unsuspecting immigrants are
told that “in our great country there is almost always work for
everybody.” At the time this book was handed to me there were nearly
five million unemployed in the United States! Later on the immigrants
are told that “in the South Central and Southern states there are
millions and millions of acres of good land which cannot now be
cultivated because there are not laborers enough.” Nothing is said, of
course, about the rents the poor immigrants will have to pay for this
land, or what the bankers will charge them for crop and chattel
loans—see “The Book of Life,” a quotation from a report of the United
States comptroller of the currency.
And while we are dealing with country problems, let me quote from the
letter of Mr. W. J. Hannah, of Big Timber, Montana, chairman of a rural
school board:
As you know, even the grade schools are now teaching “scientific
agriculture.” My boy of twelve has just placed in my hand Stone-Mills
“Intermediate Arithmetic.” It contains page after page of so-called
“Problems of the Farm.” I cite you a composite of half a dozen—by
actual count there are twenty-four like this in one small text:
“Farmer Jones raised ten acres of wheat, which yielded 100 bushels and
sold at $1 per bushel. What did he receive for his crop? How much more
would he have received if, by better cultivation, better seeding,
better seed and more careful harvesting, he had raised 200 bushels on
the same field?”
Now, the fact is that in this problem there has been inserted the most
deliberate falsehood that was ever spoken in the name of economic
science. The implication is that in order to double his income all the
farmer has to do is to double his output. And that implication is a
lie. It is a known fact that with our present marketing system the
farmers of the country receive even less for their bumper crops than
they receive for their lean crops of the same products. And why not?
If there is an iota of truth in the so-called law of demand and
supply, it follows that just as the farmer increases his output of
crops, there must follow a corresponding decrease in price or
purchasing power. Hence an increased output cannot possibly benefit
the farmer.
In the chapters dealing with Detroit we made the acquaintance of
Professor Edwin L. Miller, principal of the Northern High School. An
agonized pupil mails me another book by this professor, entitled
“Practical English Composition, Part II.” It deals with the subject of
journalism, and I find the margin dug into by an indignant pencil, where
Professor Miller tells his students what public-spirited and
well-meaning men are the editorial writers of the American press. The
professor gives examples of editorials, one of them an exposition of the
follies of Socialism, taken from the Philadelphia “Record.” I quote one
paragraph:
There is a common impression among Socialistic workmen, encouraged by
some of the new-fangled college professors, that the weaver produces
all the cloth that comes off the loom he tends, and he is robbed if
his wages are only a part of the value of the cloth. But he is only
one of a long line of producers, each of whom has to get some of the
money for which that cloth is sold.
There follows a detailed argument to the effect that the farmers who
raised the raw fibre and the railway men who transported it are entitled
to their share of the product. And after the pupils have read and
assimilated this marvelous discovery, they are asked the question: “What
is proved by this editorial?” Let me tell Mr. Miller’s future pupils
what is proved—that the editorial-writer of the Philadelphia “Record” is
an ignoramus. I challenge Professor Miller and the “Record” both, to
find anywhere in the world a Socialist authority who does not plainly
state that the Socialist demand is for the _collective_ workers to
receive the full value of their _collective_ product. Under Socialism,
as a matter of course, all workers of whatever sort, whether of hand or
brain, who contribute to the making of finished products, will receive
their proportionate share of the value they have created. The only
people who will be left out are the owners of stocks and bonds and other
pieces of paper, who under the present system of wage-slavery draw off
the surplus product of the collective labor, and use this unearned
wealth to hire educational experts to misrepresent the cause of social
justice.
Or take the volume entitled “Representative Modern Constitutions,”
extensively used in the colleges and high schools in Southern
California. It is edited by two instructors at the Southern Branch of
the University of California, and published, of course, by the Los
Angeles “Times.” Among the constitutions of a dozen different European
countries is included that of Russia; but our “Times” is not content to
print the constitution of Russia and let it speak for itself, it is
necessary to provide an antidote in the form of a preface by W. J.
Ghent, retired Socialist who is introduced as “a distinguished authority
on Russian affairs.” Ex-Comrade Ghent’s preface elaborately explains to
the student that the Russian constitution doesn’t really mean anything.
He talks about its “safeguards against democracy,” as if such safeguards
were obviously wicked; overlooking that other text-book published by the
“Times,” “Back to the Republic,” by Harry Atwood—which compares
democracy with promiscuity, free love, gluttony, drunkenness, discord
and insanity!
Says ex-Comrade Ghent: “Never before has anything professing to be a
constitution set up such elaborate safeguards against democracy.” The
students will swallow that, without bothering to look into the
constitution and see; but I did bother, and I quote you a few of the
things expressly provided for: “The land to those who work it ... a
general democratic peace ... the free determination of the peoples ...
real freedom of conscience ... freedom of expression of the toiling
masses ... free meetings ... full and free education ... equal rights to
all citizens ... recall of deputies.” Do you think I would be
exaggerating if I were to reverse Ghent’s statement and make it read:
“Never before has anything professing to be a constitution set up such
elaborate _protection_ of democracy?”
CHAPTER LXIII
PROFESSOR FACING BOTH-WAYS
The situation confronting a would-be writer of school text-books in the
United States is as follows: If he writes on astronomy, engineering, or
Spanish grammar, he may write the truth; but if he writes on history,
economics, or literature, he either writes dishonest books, or he writes
no books.
Says Professor James Harvey Robinson, author of “The Mind in the
Making”: “No publisher of text-books for the schools would venture to
permit a writer to give children the best and most authoritative
knowledge that we have today.” Says Mr. Aaron Sapiro, attorney for the
Farmers’ Co-operative Societies: “The text-books we now use are censored
by political and social factions.” Says Mr. William McAndrew, member of
the board of education in New York: “The text-books which are supposed
to discuss our civic problems do not know enough to keep a women’s whist
club from financial and moral bankruptcy.”
I have a letter from Mr. S. M. Dinkins, principal of a private school at
Selma, Alabama, who tells me about his experience with a text-book,
“Problems of American Democracy,” by Professor R. O. Hughes. Mr. Dinkins
found this book so unsatisfactory in its attitude toward modern
questions that he wrote to the professor, and received in reply the
statement: “I know my publishers would be pleased to learn that my
readers cannot tell from my book what my own opinions about many
questions really are.” Mr. Dinkins was so much troubled by this that he
wrote to the publishers, Allyn and Bacon of Boston, to ask them if that
could possibly be true; it took Mr. Dinkins two months of continuous
letter-writing before he finally got from the publishers a reply to the
effect that school authorities would not adopt any other kind of book,
and publishers had to meet the demand; they did not care to publish a
book that would not sell.
That many college professors have taken up the role of “Mr. Facing
Both-Ways,” adjusting their opinions to the demands of the school bosses
and school-book publishers, is amusingly shown in the pamphlet published
by Commissioner Hirshfield. He takes some American history text-books
and gives us in parallel columns the statements which were made before
and after the patriots got to work. For example, here is Dr. W. B.
Guitteau, director of schools of Toledo, Ohio, who published a text-book
in 1919, with a preface urging the international point of view:
Throughout this book, therefore, special emphasis has been placed upon
the relations of the United States to other countries, in order that
the young citizens who study it may realize more fully the importance
of our world relations and our world responsibilities.
But then the hundred percenters got after Dr. Guitteau, and he brought
out a new edition of his book in 1923, and started his preface with this
statement:
Recent events have demonstrated that our teaching of history should
emphasize more than ever before the peculiar and characteristic genius
of American institutions, and the permanent and outstanding assets of
American democracy.
Or take Professor Everett Barnes, who published an American history book
in 1920, in which he described the battle of Bunker Hill as follows:
The courage shown on both sides was wonderful. To march, as those
British soldiers did up to the works, so near that each one felt that
the man who was aiming at him could not miss, required a nerve as
steady as was ever shown on battlefield since men began to kill each
other.
But then the super-patriots landed on Professor Barnes, and there was a
new edition of his book in 1922, in which the incident is told as
follows:
The courage shown on both sides was wonderful. “Don’t fire until you
see the whites of their eyes,” said the American commander, who knew
that their supply of ammunition was small, and that his men did not
have enough bayonets to be used successfully in meeting the charge of
the British.
I could take up a great deal more space with this kind of fun; but
instead I will go on to mention that there are in America a few
educators who have not been willing to play the part of Professor Facing
Both-Ways. One of these men is Scott Nearing. He had three text-books on
economics, all written in collaboration with some other person. These
text-books enjoyed the greatest popularity; for example, the “Elements
of Economics” had seventy-five per cent of the field; also “Community
Civics” had a big sale. But after Nearing was kicked out of the
University of Pennsylvania for his loyalty to the truth, the sale on
these text-books stopped. When I talked with him in 1922 he told me that
his publishers had not made a contract on them in two years, and they
were about to bring out new editions without Scott Nearing’s name!
As it happens, I am able to tell Nearing exactly how he lost some of
this business. I have mentioned Mr. W. H. Powell, editor of the
“Courier” of Ottumwa, Iowa, who haled a college professor before the
state legislature for the crime of referring to the “English Industrial
Revolution,” and for listing the I. W. W. as a labor organization. Mr.
Powell is naively proud of his achievements, and has written to a friend
of mine, telling about them. So let us hear one of these Bolshevik
hunters speaking for himself:
I discovered, along in 1918—late in the year—that our high school was
using and had been using for about eight years, Burch and Nearing’s
“Principles of Economics.” Nearing had made himself notorious during
the war and I thought a book by him, on whatever subject, would not be
a good thing to have in our schools. I suggested that much through a
reporter, to the superintendent of schools, but he replied that the
board was under contract to use the book, or had bought a certain
number on a contract, and it could not be eliminated. I may say that
we supply text-books here at public expense.
Inquiry developed that there were only perhaps a hundred of these
books in use and as each was worth less than one dollar, the expense
didn’t seem to me to be prohibitive. I got a copy of the book and
found in it some matter decidedly socialistic and radical. Then I
canvassed the school board members and found none of them had ever
read the book. The superintendent admitted he never had read it and
the teacher who had charge of the class in which it was being studied
told me he hadn’t read the text ahead of the day to day lessons. The
principal of the high school hadn’t read it, either. In fact, I seemed
to be about the only one in town who knew what was in the book.
But the members of the board backed the superintendent, who didn’t
want to stir up a quarrel with book publishers. Finally, however, he
changed front and our first mention of the affair, publicly, was an
announcement in the news columns that he had ordered the book out of
the course of study. Thus we gave him credit for the move.
In the meantime, however, I had discovered that two other
objectionable texts were being used at the high school—David Saville
Muzzey’s American History, and “Outlines of European History—Part II,”
by Robinson and Beard. Muzzey’s book is socialistic, or
pro-socialistic, and it is rankly unfair in its treatment of several
subjects, in my opinion. The Robinson and Beard book had been thrown
out of the Seattle schools in the summer of 1918 because of its
pro-German taint. It was re-written twice during that summer by
Professor James Harvey Robinson, according to the information given me
by a representative of the publishers—Ginn and Company. Robinson is a
more or less radical professor and Beard had been the subject of
considerable adverse comment during the war.
We took the position that regardless of its text, a book by those men
was not a fit volume to have in the hands of boys and girls. We held
that Muzzey’s book condemned itself, as did Nearing’s.
And then Mr. Powell goes on to tell how the superintendent of schools
sold these Nearing books second-hand, for use in schools in Indiana,
price ten cents per copy. Mr. Powell was not complaining about this
sacrifice price—quite the contrary, he thought the books should have
been burned, and he says that “this sale turned public sentiment against
the superintendent.” He does not tell us, but we are permitted to guess,
that the Ottumwa “Courier” may have had something to do with the turning
of public sentiment in the matter!
Another educator who is entitled to honorable mention is Professor
Willis N. West, historian. I have told in “The Goose-step” how Professor
West was kicked out by the Black Hand of the University of Minnesota.
His admirable text-book on American history has been kicked out of
schools in various parts of the country, because it tells the truth
about the buying of state and national governments by the corporations.
Mr. Ray McKaig tells me how the gang went after this history in Boise,
Idaho. The Nonpartisan League being so strong, they did not dare attack
the book on political grounds; but they discovered that Professor West
described General Grant as a simple-minded soldier, and General Lee as a
noble figure. They brought this to the attention of the G. A. R., and
the old veterans attended to the matter!
I have before me a letter from Gilson Gardner, Washington correspondent
of the Scripps newspapers, and a well-known liberal. Mr. Gardner tells
his own experience as a writer of text-books:
Largely for my own amusement, but with a view to making a little more
pleasant the task of high school students in approaching political
economy, I wrote a little book called “The New Robinson Crusoe.” It
was put out by that thoroughly staid and respectable firm, Harcourt &
Brace. The book did nothing but illustrate in a microcosm the
commercial and economic system of our world as it is. There was no
attempt at suggesting a remedy such as Socialism or Communism, nor any
effort at propaganda. So at least it seemed to my mind in writing it,
and so it seemed to the mind of Mr. Harcourt. He thought it would be
an excellent book for side reading in high school economics courses,
and took it as a commercial prospect. In addition to the regular
edition, he printed 250 copies in pamphlet form, which were sent to
high school teachers with letters asking them to look it over and give
their opinion. Harcourt showed me letters received from teachers,
which run about as follows:
“I am a teacher in such and such a high school and teach political
economy. I have read ‘The New Robinson Crusoe,’ and find it very
interesting. I should like to recommend it to my pupils, but you know
as well as I do that the day I make such a recommendation I would lose
my job. Our supervisors will not stand for that amount of truth in
regard to our political and economic system. How did you come to print
the book?”
I was told of many cases of text-book publishers who are literally
facing both ways—running two editions of books, adjusted to the
prejudices of their customers. The American Book Company has one version
of Civil War history for the North, and another for the South. In
text-books on biology, you may believe in evolution in your editions for
New England; but if you want to sell to the far South, you must have an
edition in which “Darwinism” is repudiated. I have before me an
editorial from the Newton, Mississippi, “Record,” a daily newspaper
whose pious editor is not much shocked to learn that the book companies
have been “robbing the state and the poor students,” but is horrified by
the news that they have been furnishing books “contrary to the teaching
of the Bible.” We may assure this pious editor that the book companies
will accept a compromise with him, whereby they may continue to “rob the
state and the poor students,” in consideration of their leaving out the
achievements of modern science!
CHAPTER LXIV
POISON PICTURES
There are other forms of propaganda now being turned out wholesale for
our children. There are various papers and magazines, to which in many
cases the pupils are required to subscribe. For example, a four-page
weekly newspaper called “Current Events”; during the time of the White
Terror in this country this paper was full of the most atrocious
slanders concerning the radicals. As I am working on this book someone
sends me a sample copy; a new president of Armour & Company has been
appointed, and the event is recorded to the school children under a
headline, “Reward for Hard Work.” Such little touches, you see! Nothing
is said about “The Jungle”; indeed, I could tell you of teachers who
have lost their jobs for advising their pupils to read “The Jungle.” At
the high school of Claremont, California, some thirty miles from where I
live, the Better America Federation dragged a teacher into the
newspapers because he ordered from the county library “The Jungle Book,”
by Rudyard Kipling, and the librarian sent him “The Jungle” by mistake!
Also there are moving pictures. Quite recently one of the great
statesmen of our plutocracy was appointed director of moving picture
propaganda, at a salary of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year;
our kept press celebrated this as one of the great events of our
history. Speaking before the Bond Club in New York City, Mr. Will H.
Hays unbosomed himself to his masters: “Unless people are properly
entertained, this country may go Red; but shake a rattle at the baby and
it calms down.” The rattle is now being diligently shaken from eleven
o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, in some twenty
thousand moving picture houses throughout the United States; and the
censors keep careful watch over the infant’s mental states. Some of the
organized workers made an effort to start a moving picture business of
their own, the Labor Film Service; and among the films they tried to
show was “The Jungle.” They submitted it in due course to the National
Board of Review, and were ordered to remove a caption describing the
United States of America as “Not just the sweet land of liberty.” Also
they were ordered to remove a caption in a court house scene, “Pleading
for Justice.” This seemed to convey the idea that workingmen sometimes
did not get justice in the United States without pleading for it!
Take the experience of D. W. Griffith, who produced a film called “The
Whistle,” dealing with the life of a factory worker. The Philadelphia
Chamber of Commerce took offense at this picture, and issued a bulletin
warning the masters of industry throughout the United States of the
perils contained in such films. One caption ran: “Since the days of
Plato and Socrates there have been many men of wisdom, but none sage
enough to solve the eternal struggle between capital and labor.” Mr.
Griffith was forbidden to mention the struggle between capital and labor
in Pennsylvania, and the caption had to read: “One of the eternal
struggles of life.” Another line read: “Connors’ widow came to you and
you sent her away with a few filthy dollars when you killed her
husband.” This had to be modified to read: “When Connors’ widow came to
you, why didn’t you act like the decent bosses of today?” And again the
lines: “You’ve had six years to make this place safe. You’ve been
thinking of dollars. You haven’t had time to think of lives.” The censor
changed this to read: “You had no right to put off making this place
safe.”
Also there are films prepared especially for schools; “educational
films,” they are called. This industry is the growth of the past four
years, and already there are a hundred firms offering films, and some
thirty thousand schools using them. Will Hays went before the N. E. A.
convention of 1922 in Boston, and shook his rattle; the moving picture
manufacturers of the country yearned to co-operate with the educators,
to produce great pictures for the schools. Then he went back to his
masters, who turned him over their knee and spanked him; the
manufacturers had no remotest desire to co-operate with anyone—the movie
houses would stand no competition from the schools, and the schools
could not have pictures except second hand. So the poor educators have
to make out with scenery pictures boosting the railroads, and so-called
“industrial films,” boosting various makes of auto tires and shoes.
If you get tired of these, there are propaganda pictures, in support of
every base prejudice. Needless to say, the product is full of the
trickery of Big Business. A state inspector of “visual instruction”
sends me some samples. Here is the National Film Company, with its
newest release, “Wolves of the Street, an absorbing story showing
machinations of the Bolsheviki.” And here is the Victor Animatograph
Company, with Mr. Bryan’s “wonderful illustrated address. Back to the
Ape, or Back to God?” And here are the “Better America Lectures,”
prepared by Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, chaplain to the military
department of God, Mammon and Company. For only $425 you may purchase
these ten complete “lectures,” which have been supplied to the United
States Army and Navy to the amount of $55,000, and which are full of
every mental poison you can imagine.
This chaplain, it appears, is making up for the money he lost a few
years ago, when he got caught in some stock-gambling business, and had
to confess in tears before his congregation. If you will consult “The
Brass Check,” pages 186-7, you will find him lying about the Colorado
miners, and having his lies circulated in expensive form by parties whom
he dares not name; also you will find him, pages 389-90, hiring himself
out to the anti-Bolshevik liars, and perpetrating this culmination of
all human infamy: “It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities
of Russia have gone over to this nationalization of women.” From the
flamboyant circular of his lectures, I learn that he has spoken before
2,600 audiences, and in every state of the union, and that the subjects
he offers to colleges and schools include: “How Bolshevism Ruined
Russia, and how it works Ruin where Tried; Is Socialism the Perpetual
Motion Machine Delusion converted into Economics; False Views of
Equality as Incitements to Social Revolution”—etc., etc. And such a list
of sponsors—the whole Interlocking Directorate, and the Chiefs of its
Riot Department, and of its Grand Old Party, and of its Goose-herds and
Goose-step Drill-masters.
There is a preface, written by James Roscoe Day, ex-Chancellor of the
University of Heaven, and now Chancellor of Heaven. Being right up
there, and in position to know, the chancellor tells us that these
lectures are “a providential instrument.” If you should be curious to
know what Providence wishes the soldiers and sailors of the United
States to believe, I mention, for example, that John Ruskin and Henry C.
Frick and John D. Rockefeller are benefactors of equal rank and
significance; that human equality is disproven by the fact that the
ostrich is a bigger bird than the lark; that there is a radical agitator
by the name of “Hayward”; that the title “Lazy Socialists and their
Loot” represents thinking on social problems; and that New York city,
“The Flower of Individual Ownership,” has magnificent libraries and
museums, and no slums worth referring to!
CHAPTER LXV
THE BOOK BUSINESS
In addition to the patriots, who are interested in the contents of our
school books, there are large groups of business gentlemen interested in
these books as merchandise. Every year our twenty-three million school
children and seven hundred thousand college students require and consume
millions of new books; so here is a great industry, like every other in
America, a battle-ground of graft and favoritism. It is a main support
of the political machine in our schools, a reason why we cannot get
honest and competent educators for our children.
For a long period the school-book industry was practically a monopoly.
The American Book Company controlled ninety per cent of the business,
and everywhere its name was synonymous with corruption. Now there are
many competitors in the field, and the business of the American Book
Company represents only sixty or seventy per cent of the total. But it
remains an enormous corporation, and its methods are the same as ever.
According to the law of business competition, which is praised in all
school and college text-books, the competitors of the American Book
Company are forced to meet its methods and to buy their share of
success.
There are something like a hundred and fifty “independent” firms
manufacturing and selling school-books; some of them are very large
firms. I had the pleasure of talking with a number of these book
gentlemen, and I found them willing to go into detail about the doings
of their rivals. As to their own doings, nothing is said; but you can
inquire next door. Two of these gentlemen assured me that direct
corruption has gone out of fashion in the book game; no longer do the
agents pay spot cash to superintendents and state commissions for
“adoptions.” I asked one at what date this happy change had taken place,
and made note that the date was prior to some cases of cash payment of
which I had positive information.
However, I report the statements of these book gentlemen. The graft is
now of the “honest” variety; there has been the same evolution that we
have seen in the Tammany machine, from the days of Tweed, when the
property of the city was stolen outright, to the present time, when the
Traction Trust pays the campaign expenses of politicians, and gives them
legal retainers, and contracts, and other “tips” of a legitimate
business nature. What the agent of a book company now does is to
contribute generously to the campaign funds of superintendents and
school board members. Thus the various book companies have their “own”
superintendents and their “own” school machines. The superintendents not
only select the books of these companies, but they accept friendly
recommendations as to teachers and promotions; so book company agents
also conduct informal teachers’ agencies, and have long lists of their
“own” teachers.
And when promotions and favors in the system are desired, the big,
powerful, and always genial book company agent is a good man to see. He
is always present at conventions, pulling wires for his crowd. If
legislation is wanted, he knows the legislators, and if investigation is
threatened he knows the press correspondents and managing editors. All
these things will be told to you by any book man who is willing to talk.
Their excuse is that they have to do it, because the other fellow does
it, and there is no other way to get business. They are in the same
position as the railroads, which have to control the political machines
in order to keep the machines from “holding them up.”
In one of our Eastern cities I had an amusing experience. I happened to
meet socially a certain large capitalist, high up in the councils of the
employers’ association of his city. He was a merry old gentleman, and
meeting a muckraker appealed to his humor; he “blew” me to a fine lunch
at what I guess is the most costly athletic club in the world. He asked
me what I was writing; and when I told him, he mentioned a friend of
his, a high-up official in a big text-book company, who had told him a
number of amusing anecdotes of the buying of state legislatures and city
school boards and superintendents. Naturally, I said I would like to
meet that school book official; so the old gentleman put me in his
limousine and took me to his friend’s office, where I spent an hour or
so, listening to an inside account of conditions in many states.
The substance of what the man said was that it was impossible for book
companies not to pay commissions; the politicians would demand anywhere
from a thousand to five thousand dollars for a state contract. He
described in detail the state of Indiana, where the text-books are
adopted for periods of five-years, and there is a political board of
utterly incompetent men, with no qualifications for judging text-books.
On the date of adoption there will be perhaps fifty agents swarming to
the state capital; you will find out what the price is, and you either
pay it, or you go out of business so far as concerns the state of
Indiana.
I went off and made some notes of what this gentleman had told me; but I
wasn’t sure of some details, so I wrote him a seductive letter—all in
the strictest confidence, of course—asking him to verify certain
statements. In reply came a no less polite letter, assuring me of his
pleasure in the recollection of my visit, but saying that my capitalist
friend and myself had misunderstood the purport of his conversation. He
had entertained us “with some of the legends of the business, which had
been handed down from one generation to another.” But these things
weren’t done any more, and selling text-books is now “an honorable
business.”
It happened through a coincidence that I had on my desk a letter from
Professor Charles H. Judd of the University of Chicago, whose adventures
with the National Industrial Conference Board were told a few chapters
back. Professor Judd, as head of a great department of education, has
had opportunity to watch the book company business from the inside. He
says, among other things:
The situation in the state of Indiana, where there is a book adoption
by the state board of education every five years, is certainly worth
your investigation. The state board of Indiana, which is made up of a
number of ex-officio members, is asked every time there is a book
adoption to canvass an impossible number of school books. It would be
worth while to find out exactly how many are submitted for judgment by
the board. None of these busy professional men can make the analysis
of a book necessary to an intelligent choice, and yet they have to
make the choice. I was told by one of the members of that board that
at the time of the recent adoption an attorney, living in the city of
Richmond, Indiana, where one of the members of the state board lives,
was paid a fee of $10,000 for a month’s work, the character of which
was not otherwise known.
Let us consider the American Book Company, because it is the biggest,
and has set the pace for the rest. Thirty years ago my friend George D.
Herron, then a Congregational clergyman and college professor, came upon
the wholesale knaveries of this concern. Henry D. Lloyd and President
Gates of Grinnell College took up the facts, and published them in a
little Christian Socialist paper in Minneapolis, the “Kingdom.” The
answer of the American Book Company was to file suit for a hundred
thousand dollars damages. Dr. Herron writes me:
The suit has never been brought to trial to this day. The Book Trust
never had any intention of facing the trial or facing the facts in our
possession at that time. They merely meant to announce, as they did
through the Associated Press and with great acclaim, that they had
brought immediate suit for damages because of these infamous and false
charges; and that was all that was necessary. They knew perfectly well
what a short memory the public has, and that they would gain all the
benefits of a victory in the public mind without ever bringing the
matter to trial.
And now, a generation later, we find the Commissioner of Accounts in New
York City carrying on his investigation into text-books, and there
appears before him Mr. George E. Morrison, editor of “The Historic
Hudson,” and recently a reporter for the Detroit “Journal.” You will
recall Detroit as the home of Mr. A. V. Barnes, president of the
American Book Company; also of ex-Senator Newberry, his brother-in-law;
also of Mr. Fred Cody, agent of the American Book Company, convicted
with Newberry of election frauds; also of Mr. Frank Cody, brother of Mr.
Fred, and superintendent of schools in Detroit. Under these
circumstances you will not be surprised to learn that Michigan is a
center of American Book Company activity. Mr. Morrison in his testimony
stated that he had been given several weeks’ leave of absence by the
Detroit “Journal,” to collect evidence concerning this matter. Mr.
Morrison interviewed a hundred and twenty-seven witnesses, and turned
over their evidence, with the affidavits of eighteen out-of-town people,
to the prosecuting authorities. The matter was presented to the grand
jury, which took minutes and returned a report in which Mr. Morrison was
abused by numerous public officials, who stood in with the Newberry-Cody
gang. The influence of this gang, said Mr. Morrison, was sufficient to
paralyze the arm of the public prosecutor, and to cause a police justice
to get busy and prevent indictments.
Mr. Morrison went on to explain the methods of the American Book
Company, and just how the money of the school children of the United
States was used to buy a seat in the Senate for Truman H. Newberry. I
quote from the stenographic record:
All his money practically has come from the American Book Company. His
brother-in-law, Mr. Barnes, is head of the American Book Co., and both
he and his brother John have more money than they know what to do
with. In his campaigns Mr. Truman H. Newberry transferred his funds
from John’s bank account to Truman’s, and no question was ever asked.
The private agent of Mr. Truman H. Newberry was Mr. Frank Cody, who
was by the way indicted with Newberry and the others in the United
States Court at Grand Rapids. He was involved in the scandal of the
American Book Company in Oklahoma at the time Haskell was governor,
and has been a legislative representative of the American Book Company
and a salesman on special occasions when special force was needed to
put over contracts. He always had declined to admit that he was a
representative of the American Book Company. During the time that I
was more or less closely identified with trying to find out about the
American Book Co., I was never able to learn absolutely the identity
of anyone that ever represented the American Book Co. There was one
man that came into the open when I worked at Grand Rapids, Michigan,
who supplied the members of the Board of Education with money. The
members said that the money represented campaign contributions. The
agent and the two members of the Board of Education were indicted, and
it seemed to be difficult to prove that the money was given to them as
members, and as I recall the case never came to trial. This man named
White, as I recall, subsequently declined to see me, and as I say, I
have never known any representative of the American Book Company.
Also I quote from another portion of this interesting testimony:
THE COMMISSIONER: Do you think the American Book Company would be
inclined to pay large premiums, call it that way, to anyone who has
the power to introduce any set of books?
MR. MORRISON: I think there is no question about that at all.
THE COMMISSIONER: Of course, I have no reference to our schools. I am
talking about these schools in Michigan.
MR. MORRISON: The American Book Company is always willing to give. It is
the financial angel of the candidates that would do its bidding.
THE COMMISSIONER: Let me ask you, are the members of the Board of
Education in Detroit elected?
MR. MORRISON: Yes, they are.
THE COMMISSIONER: And you say that the American Book Company is looked
upon as the angel of these candidates for the position of members of
the Board of Education?
MR. MORRISON: Yes.
THE COMMISSIONER: And supplies every one of them?
MR. MORRISON: Yes.
CHAPTER LXVI
TEN PER CENT COMMISSIONS
The solution of the problem of our school-book supply waits upon our
training a generation of social servants who believe in public welfare
and in knowledge, as our forefathers believed in their religions. I
should say that the first step toward this goal is to fill our hearts
with disgust for the present situation, in which private greed and
self-seeking are provided with unlimited sums of money and turned loose
to corrupt our schools, making efficient and even honest education
unattainable. Such is the situation, alike in the crowded cities of the
East and in the farming and ranching country of the far West and the
South. Here and there you will find educators fighting loyally for the
schools; and at the head of the intrigue against them you will find the
representatives of book and supply companies. Wherever you hear of a
superintendent or board member who has gone down fighting in the
people’s cause, you will find it was book and supply companies which
beat him.
I have told the story of Mr. Charles P. Cary, state superintendent of
education in Wisconsin. Early in his teaching career, Mr. Cary tells me,
an agent for the American Book Company asked certain favors of him, and
offered in return to make him superintendent of schools in a big city;
the place depended entirely on this book agent. All through Mr. Cary’s
work as superintendent in Wisconsin, the book-agents would come to him,
demanding this and that. When the question of his re-election came up,
one of the most prominent lawyers in Milwaukee told him that he could
get thirty-five hundred dollars toward his campaign fund by calling on a
certain state official and agreeing to certain terms laid down. Mr. Cary
was told that this was the money of a leading firm of book publishers.
When Mr. Cary did not accept this proposition, an agent of Ginn and
Company put up his father to beat Mr. Cary—and somebody put up the money
to elect this father!
Ginn and Company has been for more than a generation the most active
competitor of the American Book Company, and it would not be surprising
if they had learned something about its methods. We have come upon the
activities of Ginn and Company agents in the school politics of many
cities; as I revise this chapter, there comes a letter from
Philadelphia, telling me how its salesman there became principal of the
girls’ high school. I remind you of the situation in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where Mr. C. H. Thurber, manager of Ginn and Company, and
trustee of Clark College and Clark University, put into the presidency
the author of the Frye-Atwood geographies, and started a whole series of
new sciences, with departments and summer schools and chautauquas based
upon these popular school geographies. The head-lady of Ginn and
Company’s geography department pours tea with the best social charm, and
there are ninety-seven Ginn and Company text-books used in the public
schools of Worcester. Also I should note that the senior partner of this
firm, Mr. George A. Plimpton, is a trustee of Amherst College, which has
just kicked out a liberal president; and also a trustee of Barnard
College, thus interlocking with Nicholas Miraculous, and with Professor
George E. Strayer, who runs the National Education Association.
Let us move to North Dakota, where I listened to the story of a county
superintendent of schools, elected by the Nonpartisan League. The gang
is on top once more in North Dakota, so this man is no longer an
educator, but is earning a living in the real estate business;
nevertheless, he asks me to call him Mr. Smith! Among the forces which
were active in defeating the people in North Dakota while they tried to
control their own schools was a certain Mr. Gleason, agent of the
American Book Company, “whose boast it was that he had placed more
school superintendents than any other man in the United States.” When a
new superintendent was appointed, Mr. Gleason always called, and the
superintendent was always glad to see him—the reason being that it was
the custom of the American Book Company to pay superintendents ten per
cent commission on all books sold in the county. They paid this
quarterly, as a matter of regular routine. They kept track of the
situation in every school district, and if any book was not reordered,
they sent an agent to find out about it.
Mr. Gleason’s subordinate, Mr. Thorson, came to see Mr. Smith, and was
very genial. He wanted him to sign up a new list of books for the
county. But Mr. Smith explained that the request was a little premature,
as he had not yet taken the oath of office. As soon as Mr. Smith had
assumed his duties, Mr. Thorson came again, but Mr. Smith wanted a
little time to get acquainted with the situation. Then came Mr. Gleason
himself; but Mr. Smith insisted upon having his own ideas about
text-books. He made out a list, which gave the American Book Company
sixty per cent of the books, forty per cent being divided among other
companies. Mr. Gleason was dissatisfied with this, because he had been
getting ninety-seven per cent of the business. When these agents could
not persuade Mr. Smith, they tried to threaten him, but this also did
not avail.
In the following year Mr. Thorson came again. He wanted to see Mr. Smith
in private, and asked Mr. Smith to dismiss his stenographer, which Mr.
Smith refused to do. He then asked to see him after office hours, and
Mr. Smith absented himself from the office so as to make this
impossible. The agent telephoned on Sunday evening, and came to Mr.
Smith’s home for an interview; but Mr. Smith’s wife was present, and
that also was not satisfactory. He asked Mr. Smith to come to meet him
in his room in the hotel; Mr. Smith refused this. He begged for an
interview on Monday morning, and Mr. Smith said that he would come to
the hotel at six o’clock in the morning. He went, and took with him his
“Uncle Charley,” who followed Mr. Smith up to Mr. Thorson’s room. When
Mr. Thorson saw this, he asked that “Uncle Charley” should wait in the
lobby; so “Uncle Charley,” by prearrangement with Mr. Smith, pretended
to go down to the lobby, but came back to the door of the room and
listened through the open transom to what was going on. Mr. Thorson
offered Mr. Smith ten per cent commission on all books sold within the
county, and he had the cash with him. Mr. Smith threw the money on the
floor, and walked out of the room.
And so began a long campaign against him. Mr. Gleason, Mr. Thorson, Mr.
James, and several other agents put in nine weeks in the county, trying
to get the school machine lined up against Mr. Smith. They approached a
number of the teachers, as well as school directors; they gave Mr. Smith
“a dirty fight.” But he won with a good majority, and threw out all the
American Book Company’s books. He ordered some of Ginn and Company’s
books for the consolidated school of one township, and Mr. Thorson and
Mr. James went to this school with a supply of American Book Company
books, and traded book for book, taking out the Ginn and Company books,
and putting in their own. But Mr. Smith took the trouble to interview
school boards, and in every case he succeeded in persuading them that
the other books were better; he completely drove the American Book
Company out of the county—that is, until they drove him out of the
schools!
They have one system throughout all North Dakota; they get the
superintendents to an “educational meeting,” which is really a banquet
paid for by book company agents. When they are properly fed, the list of
books is flashed upon them, all carefully prepared for the various
grades of their schools. Many superintendents don’t know anything about
books, and don’t want to bother with them; they know the subject is a
dangerous one, and the easiest way is to sign the list. The book company
then prints this list at its own expense, and sends the copies to the
superintendent for distribution to the school boards. The boards,
receiving this list, assume that it represents the superintendent’s
selection, and they put the list through.
And apparently it is the same way in South Dakota. Miss Alice Daly
resigned in 1921 from the Madison State Normal School, and in a public
statement declared as follows:
The book trust operates in South Dakota exactly the way that it has
operated in other states, against the interests of the great mass of
working people, against the freedom of the teacher, against any
efficient organization of teachers, against the frank and honest
discussion of vital questions of the day, against labor; in short,
against democracy. The book trust operates for its own selfish
interests, for capitalism and for autocracy within and without the
school. The book trust whenever it has enjoyed control, operates
against education in any genuine sense of the word.
The manager of one concern which sells books all over the country, and
concerning which I have not learned of any graft, assures me that
throughout the middle West, especially the states of Missouri and Iowa,
the county “adoptions” are almost uniformly a matter of purchase. The
petty politicians on the school committees see a chance to make a little
money, and they make it—that seems obvious enough. The price is five or
six hundred dollars; and this manager found it so hopeless to try to do
business without paying that he told his agents to quit the county
field. I have not heard of any American counties being without
text-books, so presumably there are other companies not so fastidious.
CHAPTER LXVII
THE SUPERINTENDENT-MAKERS
Wherever you travel in the school world of the United States, you find
these same activities. You recall the almost universal graft in the
school affairs of Chicago; it should hardly need saying that the book
trust was “up to the eyes” in this graft. You never know where you meet
them; they operate under the names of various companies. A member of the
school board made the statement that one of the book companies had “a
whole trainload of books on a siding,” which they were trying to unload
in Chicago; all the newspapers knew about it, but they would not publish
the facts. The beginning of the graft exposure was the determination of
the agents to dump this supply of books onto the Chicago board.
The same thing extends over the state of Illinois. An agent of one book
company was chairman of the state committee of the Republican party, and
a superintendent of Peoria, Illinois, was discovered to have grafted to
the extent of more than a million dollars, and was sent to jail for it.
They had the governor of the state, and had got a five-year “adoption.”
They did the same thing in Cincinnati, where they ran the superintendent
and school board for a decade. Again, it was a leading book company
agent who was mixed up in a scandal with the governor of Oklahoma. There
was another exposure in Kentucky—and I was told of other states where
there might be an exposure, if I would go there and make inquiries!
In Texas also there was a scandal and a political upheaval. The American
Book Company was prosecuted as a trust, and fined fifteen thousand
dollars and ousted from the state. It was at that time a New Jersey
corporation, and the Texas authorities allowed it to plead guilty,
whereupon it was reorganized as a New York corporation and readmitted to
do business in the state. Such little jokes as this the big corporations
and their attorneys take great pleasure in playing upon state
prosecuting authorities and legislatures! An attorney in Dallas writes
me:
The American Book Company got an outrageous contract from the state
text-book board, headed by the sanctimonious Governor Neff, making a
number of needless changes, that would cost the public school fund
many hundreds of thousands of dollars; but this contract has been,
temporarily at least, defeated. It must be said, however, that the
chief reason it has been defeated is not the action of public-spirited
Texas citizens, but the activity of other publishers, particularly
Ginn and Company, for whom I have the same sort of respect that I have
for the American Book Company.
As it happens, I learned of another case, in which the American Book
Company was pulling off some dirty work in Michigan, and in that case
they were stopped by Heath and Company. So let us be thankful that the
school book business is still in the competitive stage!
Kansas was one state in which the farmers went to war against the book
trust. You will be interested in the adventures of Mrs. Ella S. Burton,
who took up the issue as lecturer for the State Grange. These granges
are farmers’ societies; and like the teachers’ associations, they have
been taken over by the gang. Mrs. Burton found herself fighting the
school-book machine inside of her own organization. The book trust
controlled not merely the state school book commission; it had its
high-priced educators and corporation lawyers and politicians inside the
grange. Charges were brought against Mrs. Burton, and a committee
appointed to investigate these charges unanimously vindicated her; but
the master of the State Grange would not give her the floor, nor hear
the committee report, and adjourned the meeting in order to suppress
her. It was promised that the findings of the committee would be
published in the annual report, but not a word of it was published, and
Mrs. Burton was finally expelled from the grange. The right-hand man of
the grange master throughout the proceedings was, of course, an American
Book Company agent.
Nevertheless, the Kansas legislature passed a bill providing for state
manufacture of text-books; and so Kansas shares with California the
distinction of being the object of many pamphlets published by
school-book company representatives, proving the evils of its
school-book habits! I am not going into the cost of text-book
publication, but I think it may be worth mentioning that while I was in
the state of Washington I found that the schools there were using in
many cases the same text-books as in California, and were paying for
them from a hundred to a hundred and fifty per cent more than it was
costing the people of California to manufacture them.
Sometimes the law permits school teachers to have something to say about
the adoption of text-books, and then you have book company agents
playing the generous host to teachers. We have seen Major Clancy at
Oakland and Boston and Des Moines. In California, I am told by a
prominent educator that many teachers get their summer vacations at the
expense of the book companies. It is a favorite device to offer them a
trip to the East to see where the school books are made; that is not
graft, but education! Teachers learn to look to book company agents for
promotion; and almost invariably you notice that when any superintendent
or board member is turned out of his job, the book companies take care
of him. We saw a school superintendent of Chicago becoming president of
Heath & Company; we saw President Pearse of the Milwaukee State Normal
School becoming an agent for Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia. I am told
by Mr. William Bouck, head of the Washington Progressive Grange, that
the American Book Company has named more superintendents in the state of
Washington than all the big agencies put together; also that the agents
of this concern were put on the program of every school institute on the
west coast of Washington. This point is also touched upon by Professor
Charles H. Judd, of the University of Chicago. He writes:
It is a matter of constant rumor that the selection of the
superintendent in various cities is altogether in the hands of book
companies. The most impressive and detailed story of this sort that I
ever heard relates to the superintendency of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The
man who told me the story is still in the educational profession and
would hardly want to be implicated, but he said that he was met at the
station, when he went to see the board of education at Fort Wayne, not
by any member of the board of education, but by the local
representative of one of the book companies. His conversation about
the position was altogether with this representative of the book
company, and he left town telling him that he did not want the place.
The representative of the book company told him that he was not going
to ask him to keep the conference confidential, because he knew that
it was all the superintendent’s professional career was worth to have
a controversy with him, and that if the superintendent ever reported
any part of this discussion, the representative of the book company
would deny the whole affair. This story was told to me by a man who is
absolutely reliable and he would not, I am sure, in any wise distort
the facts.
Professor Judd goes on to explain his belief that in many cases these
things are done by book agents without the knowledge of the company, and
that the company would be “greatly distressed to know that these things
happen.” I have a great respect for Professor Judd, one of the most
liberal and courageous educators in this country; also I have great
respect for a college professor, a very distinguished author of school
text-books, who writes me that the trouble is due to “the less
scrupulous agents in the heat of a campaign.” This gentleman’s own
publishers “deprecate these methods, but perhaps the heat of a campaign
will now and then lead local agents astray. I have plenty of reason to
suspect that other publishers make it impossible to play the game very
fairly.”
In answer to this, I can only state my own point of view—that I cannot
take much stock in the idea that heads of large-scale modern industries
do not know what their employes and agents are doing. They make it their
business to know, and any lack of knowledge which they have is formal;
that is, a business man smiles and says: “Don’t let me know about it!”
But in reality he knows; and the school officials who get the “rake off”
also know. Says Professor Robert Morse Lovett, also of the University of
Chicago: “There is scarcely a large city in the country in which the
pupils and teachers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded
by action of school trustees, which would be characterized in the
mildest terms as wilful mismanagement conducing to private profit.” And
Professor Guido Marx of Stanford University tells me how he referred to
school book graft before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and a
representative of a book company said to him: “What’s the matter? Have
you got a book you can’t get published?”
It appears that ethical codes on book matters are in a somewhat
unsettled state—out here in California at any rate. I have on my desk a
series of letters from a California school-book publisher, personally a
very likeable and genial fellow, who assures me that he doesn’t think
there is any harm in the fact that a lady editor of his magazine,
formerly a stockholder in his business, and still having a desk in his
office, is also a member of the local school board, and in this capacity
signed orders for the purchase of something less than a thousand dollars
worth of books from this publisher. I suppose that if I were to meet
David P. Barrows, Dean of Imperialism at our state university, he would
assure me there was nothing wrong in the fact that he, while head of the
department of political science at the university, was invited by the
Mexican government to come down there and advise them on the subject of
education; and that he went, and became vice-president of the Vera Cruz
Land & Cattle Company, and came back to recommend war on Mexico, so as
to give value to his holdings in that concern!
All this time we have been thinking of text-books as a source of
dividends. It is necessary to remind ourselves that these sources of
dividends are also sources of ideas to our children. How do the ideas
count, in comparison with the dividends? Let me quote Professor Judd
once more:
There is a more fundamental matter which is not scandalous but which
is important. Book companies influence the schools to an enormous
degree by furnishing the materials of instruction. The ordinary
teacher in the American school is so little prepared for his or her
work that the material supplied in text-books is absolutely
indispensable to the conduct of classes. When a book company gets a
successful text-book, it is very loath to make any changes in the book
for obvious reasons: the cost of making new plates and the danger of
losing the market prevent revision of text-books. The result is that
there are sets of text-books which exercise a thoroughly unwholesome
influence on school practices, just because the book companies are
unwilling to make expensive revisions and are interested primarily in
selling the books that they now have in stock. When a good report is
prepared by one of the technical societies, and book companies are
asked to conform to the progressive ideas which are expressed in such
a report, one finds these companies very reluctant to try any
experiments.
When I was a lad, I learned geometry and algebra as two entirely
separate subjects, and until today it never occurred to me that they
were in any way related, and might be taught as parts of one subject.
But now I learn from an educator that this is the case. And why are they
taught separately in all high schools of the United States? Well,
because geometry and algebra are the private preserves of Ginn and
Company, owners of the Wentworth text-books, which lead in this field.
Any teacher or superintendent who should suggest that these profitable
works be scrapped would not be regarded with favor by the hundred and
twenty-five agents of this great book concern, who have so much to say
about high salaried school positions.
CHAPTER LXVIII
THE CHURCH CONSPIRACY
We have seen the activities of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in many
American cities; but because this is a national system, competing with
the public schools in every part of the country, it is necessary to
consider the general aspects of the parochial school problem. Many
Catholics will read this book and write me letters; therefore I will
save both my time and their feelings if I explain at the outset that I
know there are a great many decent, hard-working Catholics in the United
States, and also many earnest and devoted Catholic teachers in the
American public schools. My quarrel here is with the Roman hierarchy,
which holds the faith of millions of sincere people, and sells it out to
the exploiters of the world. This is a book on economics, and its plea
is to Catholic working people, to open their eyes to the class struggle,
and see how they are being betrayed and plundered in modern capitalist
society.
This class struggle is in the Catholic Church, precisely as in other
organizations. There are Catholic trust magnates and exploiters of
labor, and they give their money to Catholic educational institutions,
and then control these institutions in the interest of the open shop and
general reaction. I was not well informed about the insides of Catholic
affairs, and when I came to investigate I could not keep from laughing,
to discover how completely Catholic education reproduces all the
features of Protestant education. Here, for example, is James A.
Farrell, president of the Steel Trust; he got part of a common school
education, and then went to work in a steel mill; in 1922 we find him
getting an honorary degree from the Catholic Georgetown University!
Here is Francis P. Garvan, wealthy corporation lawyer, Attorney-General
Palmer’s assistant in robbing helpless Germans during the war. He gives
generously to Catholic schools and colleges, and gets an honorary degree
from Fordham University, and is a trustee in the Catholic University of
America. He vigorously carries on the open-shop propaganda in the
Catholic world, and bitterly fights the influence of Father Ryan, who
sympathizes with labor. Here is Condé B. Pallen, graduate of Georgetown
University, a wealthy Catholic propagandist, editor of the “Catholic
Encyclopedia,” and head of the “Committee for the Study of Revolutionary
Movements of the National Civic Federation.” Mr. Pallen is one of the
“Helen Ghouls”; and thereby we discover that in the world of Big
Business the gulf between Catholics and Protestants has been bridged. It
is my hope that this gulf may be bridged in the world of labor, and that
Protestant and Catholic wage-slaves will no longer permit themselves to
be divided and conquered by their masters.
Six or seven hundred years ago the Catholic Church had its Golden Age,
and at that time it was to some extent a proletarian movement. There are
Catholics today who dream of a return of that Golden Age, and see in the
modern labor unions something resembling the medieval guilds. These men
are fighting vigorously inside the church; they got a group of bishops
to support the National Catholic Welfare Council, and the Catholic
Church issued an extremely progressive manifesto on social problems. You
remember during the war we had quite a wave of enthusiasm for the making
over of the world; and there were Catholic idealists, sharing that
bright dream.
But now the war is over, and we no longer need to make promises to
labor, and the “hard guys” are in the saddle. The open-shop gang goes
after the Catholic radicals, and you hear less about the reconstruction
program. John D. Ryan, chairman of the Anaconda Copper Company and
leading Catholic capitalist, resigns from the board of the Catholic
University of America, and Nicholas F. Brady, Catholic traction magnate,
declares that this university will get no more funds while Father John
A. Ryan, the radical, is on its teaching staff. Father Ryan’s teachings
are denounced by the Lusk Committee as “subversive,” and the open-shop
intriguers protest to the Apostolic delegate in America. The Catholic
bishops turn lukewarm to social reconstruction, and the funds to be
devoted to this work are suddenly discovered to be missing. Mr. Condé B.
Pallen travels to Rome, and the next thing we hear is that the Papal See
has ordered the dissolution of the National Catholic Welfare Council.
The Catholic liberals, of course, do not give up without a struggle, and
they have powerful arguments on their side. For a generation the Church
has seen with dismay the organized workers drifting away from its
authority and taking up with Socialism. And what chance has the Catholic
machine to win unless it professes some interest in the cause of social
justice? What chance will the Church have with the American Federation
of Labor if it sells itself body and soul to the open shop? In
Cincinnati a Catholic priest, Father Peter Dietz, started a liberal
organization, the American Academy of Christian Democracy; he opened the
convention of the American Federation of Labor with a prayer, and was
then suspended by the archbishop of the diocese. Thereupon high
officials of the Federation addressed a protest to the archbishop; if
such protests are not heeded, how can the Church hope to hold the rank
and file of organized labor?
The National Catholic Welfare Council appealed to the Pope to reconsider
the order for its suspension. It ought to be interesting to American
Catholics to know the names of the judges who heard and decided this
grave question of American policy; they were Gasparri, Merry del Val,
Bisleti, Sbaretti, Van Rossum, and Pompili: four of them Italians, one a
Spaniard, and one a Hollander! There are no Americans in the Roman
Curia, and American Catholics are excluded from any share in the control
of their church. This seems to me something which every American has a
right to make note of, and which American Catholics must find
embarrassing.
The most active of Catholic propaganda agencies in this country is the
Knights of Columbus, and this order has recently resolved to assume its
share of the labors of revising our schools and school text-books.
“Knight” McSweeney has declared that “half the history text-books should
be destroyed.” It is interesting to note that the class struggle is
going on inside this organization, precisely as in the National
Education Association. There are some Catholics who object to seeing
their church used by the political henchmen of Big Business. When
District Attorney Pelletier of Boston, a high-up official of the
Knights, was prosecuted for selling justice to rich criminals, there
were resolutions passed by several state branches to demand his
resignation. Pelletier of course raised the cry that he was being
persecuted because he was a Catholic; such is the device by which the
grafters try to hold on. But Pelletier had to quit.
When I was a boy of sixteen, earning my way through college by writing
jokes and sketches, I went to call upon Street and Smith, publishers of
the “half-dime novels” of my boyhood; detective and Wild West tales,
full of thrilling adventures, and having illustrated covers in brilliant
red and green and blue and yellow. The editor in charge of these
publications was a gentleman who called himself Enrique H. Lewis; he had
lived in South America, and enlisted in the navy. I took him the
manuscript of a long novel, and presently began to write for him a
series of stories about West Point life. Someone asked him if I had been
through West Point, and he answered that I had been through it in three
days! The Spanish War came on, and I took to slaughtering the enemy by
land and sea—on the land I was Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, and on sea
I was Ensign Clark Fitch. My editorial chief used to marvel at the speed
with which these manuscripts appeared; there was a year when I was
turning out a total of fifty-six thousand words a week. We used to have
office consultations, and he was worried about the state of my soul; it
didn’t seem natural that a boy of my age should be holding such serious
views about human problems. His forebodings proved to be justified—I
spoiled myself as a writer of dime novels, and lost my job with Street
and Smith!
My former chief took better care of his career, and is now Henry
Harrison Lewis, editor of “Industrial Progress,” organ of the “open
shop.” I have before me one of his articles, entitled: “The Great
Open-Shop Conspiracy.” You might guess this conspiracy to be the effort
of the Black Hand to make the American people believe that “open shop”
means freedom for labor; but no—this conspiracy is the action of the
National Catholic Welfare Council, together with the Protestant
churches, in defending the right of workers to form unions if they want
to. This article is reprinted in pamphlet form, and copies of it are
sent to every Catholic priest and every Protestant clergyman in the
United States. Mr. Lewis admits that the cost of this is defrayed “by
other persons and organizations”; but he refuses to tell us who these
persons and organizations are!
CHAPTER LXIX
CATHOLICISM AND THE SCHOOLS
Just what is the attitude of the Catholic Church to the American public
schools? This is an important question, because there are fourteen
million Catholics in our country, and they control the education, not
merely of two million children in their own schools, but of other
millions in public schools where the Catholic vote has elected Catholic
officials and school board members, and obtained the appointment of
Catholic superintendents and teachers. There has been so much
controversy over this question, so much has been affirmed by one side
and denied by the other, that I decided I would go into it thoroughly
and settle it once for all. I may as well state at the outset that I
found I had been overambitious. The question cannot be settled once for
all; for the reason that no two Catholic authorities agree with each
other, and in controversy with Catholic theologians the most explicit
Latin and English words are discovered to be capable of so many
interpretations that all meaning goes out of them.
The most detailed statement of the official Catholic attitude towards
Church and State, and State activities such as public schools, is found
in the “Syllabus of Errors” of Pope Pius IX. This is a list of eighty
propositions of liberalism and democracy, which are lumped together and
condemned as “the principal errors of our time.” I had often seen this
Syllabus summarized and discussed, but I had never seen the complete
text. I consulted the public libraries in Pasadena and Los Angeles, but
in vain. I applied to Catholic bookstores, but likewise in vain. I
applied to Loyola College and to the Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, but
these had it only in Latin. I telegraphed to the largest wholesale
book-seller in New York, but was informed that an English text was not
obtainable. By that time I began to suspect that the church authorities
were not anxious to have the American public read their fundamental law
on the subjects of liberalism and democracy; when I finally obtained the
text, I discovered why.
It was left to an enemy of the Church to supply me with this most vital
church document. William Ewart Gladstone attacked the Syllabus with
righteous wrath, and I found the text in his volume “Rome and the Newest
Fashions in Religion.” This Syllabus is extremely awkward to quote, for
the reason that the propositions are all negative—a list of statements
which are condemned; and some of the statements themselves are negative,
so that you find yourself with double negatives to disentangle. A few of
the most important of the propositions will have to suffice; and let me
say that I have brushed up my rusty Latin for the occasion, and made
certain that the translations are literal and precise. Bear in mind that
this is the Supreme Pontiff speaking ex cathedra, which is the same as
the voice of God; so the following statements are not subject to
question or revision, so long as the Holy Catholic Church endures. Thus,
formally and finally, we are told that it is an error to teach that:
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he shall
believe true, guided by the light of reason.
This of course means that every man is _not_ free to embrace and profess
his own religion; and carries the obvious corollary that every man must
let the Catholic Church tell him what religion to embrace.
17. We may entertain at least a well-founded hope for the eternal
salvation of all those who are in no manner in the true Church of
Christ.
This means, in brief, that all non-Catholics are damned eternally, and
it is false doctrine to teach otherwise.
20. The ecclesiastical power must not exercise its authority without
the permission and assent of the civil government.
This means that the Church may exercise its authority without the
consent of the State; that, for example, the Church may marry and annul
marriage, in defiance of the civil laws. This must be taken in
connection with
30. The immunity of the Church and of ecclesiastical persons derives
its origin from civil law.
This means that the Church and its priests are immune to civil law, and
this immunity comes from God, and cannot be taken away by the State. If
the Church could maintain this proposition in America, neither the
Church nor any ecclesiastic could be sued or tried by the regular
courts, but only by courts of their own.
42. In the case of conflicting laws between the two powers, the civil
law ought to prevail.
This means that civil law ought not to prevail over Church law; and
since it is manifest that two laws cannot both prevail, it follows that
Church law is proclaimed superior to civil law.
Such is the Church’s own version of her attitude to the State; and now,
let us see what is her attitude to the schools of the State? The
propositions dealing with this matter are longer, and more involved with
double negatives; but we will take the time to disentangle them, and the
reader who is not interested in the problem may skip.
45. The entire direction of public schools, in which the youth of
Christian states are educated, except (to a certain extent) in the
case of episcopal seminaries, may and must appertain to the civil
power, and belong to it so far that no other authority whatsoever
shall be recognized as having any right to interfere in the discipline
of the schools, the arrangement of the studies, the taking of degrees,
or the choice and approval of the teachers.
The phrase “episcopal seminaries” means what we should call “Catholic
schools” or “parochial schools”; and this proposition states that the
Church is not satisfied with being permitted to teach what it pleases in
these schools, but denounces the claim of the State to exclusive control
of teaching in the State schools.
The next proposition, 46, defends the right of the Church to teach as it
pleases in its own schools. Since that is not commonly disputed in
America, we pass on.
47. The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools
open to the children of all classes, and, generally, all public
institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophy, and for
conducting the education of the young, should be freed from all
ecclesiastical authority, government, and interference, and should be
fully subject to the civil and political power, in conformity with the
will of rulers and the prevalent opinions of the age.
This is an exact statement of the theory upon which the American public
school system is founded, and this theory is declared to be an error.
48. This system of instructing youth, which consists in separating it
from the Catholic faith and from the power of the Church, and in
teaching exclusively, or at least primarily, the knowledge of natural
things and the earthly ends of social life alone, may be approved by
Catholics.
This is practically a definition of what we call “secular education”; it
is what we give in our public schools, and we are declared to be in
error when we do so.
There are many other statements in this Syllabus which are of
importance. Thus in 77 we learn that the Church refuses to give up its
demand that the State shall maintain it as the only religion. In 78 we
are told that the State should not permit non-Catholics to worship
publicly in Catholic countries. In 79 we are told that freedom of
worship, and freedom of manifesting opinions and ideas, conduce to
corrupt the minds of the people. In 80 we are told that the Roman
Pontiff cannot and ought not “reconcile himself to, and agree with,
progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced.” I think
that will suffice to make plain to the average American why the
“Syllabus of Errors” cannot be found in English translation in Catholic
volumes obtainable in libraries or book-stores!
While in the midst of these researches I came upon a little pamphlet
entitled: “The Catholic Answer. An Honest, Dignified Statement of Facts
for Fair-Minded People,” published by “Our Sunday Visitor,” of
Huntington, Indiana. This pamphlet has the American flag on the cover,
and contains an entirely different statement of the Catholic attitude;
also an offer of a thousand dollars to anyone who can disprove anything
in the pamphlet. So I wrote to the editor of this publication, asking
him for help in my researches. At the time of writing I did not have the
full text of the Syllabus; I had merely a summary of some of its
propositions, and I sent these to the editor, asking him to explain the
matter. From the letter-head of his reply I gain the information that
“Our Sunday Visitor” is “the popular National Catholic weekly with
2,000,000 readers scattered over every country in the world. Thousands
of priests order it for all of their people.” The editor is the Rt. Rev.
Msgr. J. F. Noll, and he tells me:
We do not have the Syllabus of Pius IX at hand, and therefore are not
able to determine the accuracy of the quotations which you submit for
verification. The last two quotations seem so utterly abhorrent even
to the Catholic, that I am quite certain that they are not genuine.
You understand that this is the day of bogus documents, concocted and
circulated by enemies of the Catholic Church.
After that, of course, I was more than ever determined to get the full
text of the Syllabus. When I got it, I found that the passages to which
Monsignor Noll takes exception are merely a brief practical summary of a
few propositions, turning their negatives into positive affirmations.
Thus, one of the passages which I sent to the Monsignor and which he
finds “utterly abhorrent even to the Catholic” reads as follows:
The Church has the right to avail itself of force, and to use the
temporal power for that purpose. The Church has the right to exercise
her power without the permission or consent of the State.
And that is covered by Proposition 24 of the Syllabus, which states that
it is an error to teach that
The Church has not the power of availing herself of force, or any
direct or indirect temporal power.
and also Proposition 20, which denounces the error that
The ecclesiastical power must not exercise its authority without the
permission and assent of the civil government.
You will note variations in the translation; no two people, rendering
the same Latin into English, would use the same English words. The Latin
“potestas” is called “right” in one version, and “power” in the other;
but the meaning is the same, for the power claimed by the Church is
moral power, the power given by God, which is what we call “right.” So
far as I can see, the statement which Monsignor Noll finds “utterly
abhorrent even to the Catholic” is a perfectly fair summary of the
practical effect of the Syllabus. And the same applies to the other
quotation, which, as submitted to Monsignor Noll, read:
The Church and her priests have the right to immunity from all civil
laws.
That is Proposition 30 of the Syllabus, which denounces as an error the
doctrine that
The immunity of the Church and of ecclesiastical persons derives its
origin from civil law.