Now there can be no dispute that this proposition asserts “immunity” for

the Church and for ecclesiastical persons; and the word “immunity” is a

technical church word, meaning immunity from civil law—a prerogative

which was maintained by the Church until recent times. The question

considered in the Syllabus is whether this “immunity” is derived from

the State or from God. If it is derived from the State, it can be

abolished by the State, and this is the “error” which the Pope is

denouncing. He affirms the contrary, that the immunity is from God, and

therefore can never be taken away. Is not this the very proposition

which Monsignor Noll finds “utterly abhorrent even to the Catholic”?

The Monsignor goes on to discuss the propositions referring to the

schools, and to say that they are applicable only where there is union

of Church and State, and have nothing to do with the Catholic Church in

its relation to our own public schools. “Outside of countries where

there is union of Church and State, the Catholic Church does not pretend

to have any jurisdiction, nor would she ever dream of interfering with

the public schools. The teaching of the Church is that both the State

and Church are supreme, each in its own domain.” And then, after reading

that, I get the text of the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, which are part

of the supreme law of the Church, and I read:

The Church of Rome is one monarchy over all the kingdoms of the earth,

and is, among temporal kingdoms, as the mind or soul to the body of a

man, or as God in the world. Therefore the Church of Rome must not

only have the spiritual power, but also the supreme temporal power.

And once more:

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the

purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the laws of the

Church under the pretext of obeying the civil law.

In the effort to clear up these mysteries, I wrote to the fourteen

catholic archbishops of the United States, also to the papal delegate in

Washington, and to the Paulist Fathers in New York. The first reply came

by telegraph from the archbishop of New Orleans, referring me to the

Catholic Encyclopedia. I consulted in that work the topics “Pius IX,”

and the “Syllabus of Errors,” and the first thing I read was that the

Encyclical containing this “Syllabus of Errors” “was solemnly received

in national and provincial councils by the episcopate of the whole

world.” I also learned that “the ‘Syllabus’ is not only the defense of

the inalienable rights of God, of the Church, and of truth against the

abuse of the words _freedom_ and _culture_ on the part of unbridled

Liberalism, but it is also a protest, earnest and energetic, against the

attempt to eliminate the influence of the Catholic Church on the life of

nations and of individuals, on the family and the school.” And again:

“It has done an inestimable service to the Church and to society at

large by unmasking the false liberalism which had begun to insinuate its

subtle poison into the very marrow of Catholicism.”

But I do not find one word in either of these articles to indicate that

the propositions of the Syllabus do not apply to America, but only to

countries which have separation of Church and State. I find sweeping

endorsements of sweeping propositions; and how can I bring myself to

believe that ecclesiastical authorities, solemnly laying down the law

for all time, would omit to state such vital qualifications, if they

wished such qualifications to be understood?

I have before me a stack of letters from Catholic authorities, also a

stack of Catholic pamphlets, and references to a great number of books;

I realize now that if I were to make an authoritative pronouncement on

the attitude of the Catholic Church toward the American public schools,

I should have to write a volume instead of a chapter. How complicated

the subject is you may judge from one sentence, quoted to me by

Archbishop Keane of Dubuque. This is a statement made by Cardinal

Newman, in the course of his controversy with Gladstone over the meaning

of the “Syllabus of Errors.” Says the great master of Catholic

apologetics: “The ‘Syllabus,’ viewed in itself, is nothing more than a

digest of certain errors made by an anonymous writer.” I can only give

my reaction to this sentence—it shows me that I should be wasting my

time if I tried to understand Catholic controversy. The “Syllabus” is an

explicit statement by the highest Catholic authority, that the

propositions of the “anonymous writer” are errors; from which it follows

that the contrary of these propositions is upon the highest Catholic

authority affirmed. If someone tells me that I am reported to have

burglarized a bank, that is an anonymous statement; but if I answer,

“that is a lie,” then I am making the flat assertion that I did not

burglarize a bank. And if anyone denies that, I say that he is not

seeking truth, but merely juggling words, and I have no more time to

waste on Cardinal Newman.

CHAPTER LXX

THE PRACTICAL CHURCH ADMINISTRATOR

Let us now break through the tangle of ecclesiastical sophistry, and try

to get in a few paragraphs the common sense of the situation. Why are

Catholic authorities reduced to quibbling and evading, and hiding their

real dogmas from the world? The answer is that Catholic students

throughout the world are inevitably influenced by their environment;

those who live in liberal countries take on a tinge of liberalism. But

meantime the dogmas of the church are laid down by a group of

medieval-minded bigots in Rome, who set their faces against the whole of

modern life, and prescribe formulas which are excruciatingly

embarrassing to American Catholics with political and social ambitions.

Hence it comes about that the “Syllabus of Errors” of Pius IX is not

obtainable in official Catholic translations in American public

libraries; hence also it comes about that one Catholic archbishop after

another writes to assure me that the propositions of the “Syllabus” do

not apply to public schools in America.

The frankest letter is from Archbishop Dowling of St. Paul, who

practically admits that I am right in my suspicion that American

Catholics are going as far as they dare to put the dogmas of the Papal

reactionaries upon the shelf. He says:

The theologian still holds that in itself that State is most perfect

where the rights of God are recognized as well as the rights of man.

He assumes all the implications of that position. But his thesis

receives the attention and the respect that are usually given to

Utopias. The practical church administrator loyally accepts the _fait

accompli_. He adjusts his policies and his plans to things as he finds

them.

And again:

So far as I know nobody with any influence in the Catholic body of

this country opposes the public school system. I doubt if Catholics

ever give the subject of such a fatuous movement a single thought. In

fact, Catholics are not effectively organized in any but parish

groups. They have not an influential press. There is not a Catholic

paper of any kind that circulates largely throughout the whole

country. They are divided into many racial groups with no point of

contact save a common creed.

I should like to accept this very courteous statement; but when I am

dealing with men who admit that they are “practical,” meaning that they

profess creeds which they do not try to apply, I am necessarily led to

wonder whether such an attitude might not lead a man to feel justified

in “shading” his views while writing to a non-Catholic correspondent.

Also, I am obliged to contrast the archbishop’s statement with that on

the letter-head of Msgr. Noll: “‘Our Sunday Visitor,’ 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.” How can this be fitted to the statement that “there is not a

Catholic paper of any kind that circulates largely throughout the whole

country?”

For the rest of this chapter let us follow the program of the “practical

church administrator,” and adjust ourselves to things as we find them.

What one finds everywhere throughout America is as follows: The

Catholics are maintaining a rival system to the public schools; they are

running an enormous business, spending tens of millions of dollars, and

they take toward the public schools precisely the attitude which

business rivalry engenders in every human group. They say in their

propaganda literature that they wish to be “fair” to the public schools.

But just what can be the meaning of this word, to men who regard secular

education as destructive to the souls of the children who receive it?

Inevitably, they wish to save as many souls as possible; and the fact

that they do it from the best of motives makes no difference to us. The

attitude of the Catholic church is to get as much for the church schools

as possible, and to hold down the public schools as much as possible;

that is the fact, and any denial of that fact is propaganda, and a part

of the game.

So when you travel from city to city, and from state to state, as I have

done, you find that the Catholics are everywhere claiming what is

“right”; but that “right” is never the same in two places. It varies

according to one simple formula—it is always a little bit more than the

Catholics are getting in that place. In Italy, Catholic “right” demands

that the Pope shall be the civil ruler of the papal state, including the

city of Rome, and that there shall be no schools except church schools.

Catholic “right” requires this latter in South American countries also.

In cities of the United States where the Catholic vote is large,

Catholic “right” demands that church schools be supported out of public

taxes. In California, which is not Catholic, “right” is somewhat less

than this—merely that the state should furnish free text books for the

Catholic schools. In order to get this concession, the Catholic

lobbyists made a deal with the Y. M. C. A., agreeing to help the “Y,”

which thought it had a “right” to be released from having to pay taxes

on its property![L]

-----

Footnote L:

Franklin Hichborn: “Legislative Bulletin,” April 21, 1917.

-----

Archbishop Dowling tells me that the Catholic “finds that the secular

State which is founded on liberty is, after all, not such a bad sort.”

But then I go to my Catholic documents once more, and I note that only a

few years ago the most beloved of modern Catholic popes, Leo XIII, sent

an Encyclical to the most beloved of American Catholic prelates,

Cardinal Gibbons, dealing with that dangerous and wicked thing known as

“Americanism,” and insisting that the growth of the church in America

must not be attributed to the excellence of America and American

institutions, but solely to the peculiar divine excellence of the

church. What the beloved Leo thought of our American scheme of

separation of Church and State, with a fair field and no favor for all

religions, he set forth in his Encyclical “Immortale Dei,” dated 1885;

denouncing as one of the products of “unbridled license” the theory that

the State is “not obliged to make public profession of any one religion,

but on the contrary is bound to grant equal rights to every creed.” And

lest any “practical” American archbishop should try to do funny work

with that sentence, he went on to nail the doctrine down; declaring

“that it is not lawful for the State, any more than for the individual,

either to disregard all religious duties, or to hold in equal favor

different kinds of religion; that the unrestrained freedom of thinking

and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights

of citizens, and is by no means to be reckoned worthy of favor and

support.”

I could go on for chapters, exposing such inconsistencies between the

divinely revealed papal doctrines, and the propaganda of the “practical

church administrator.” But the thing you are really interested in is

what I have shown you in Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco—the

Catholic hierarchy building a whole school system to replace the public

schools; and at the same time electing to the public school boards of

these cities Catholic ladies and gentlemen who omit to develop the

building programs of the public schools, and when the people persist in

voting the money, refuse to spend the money and have the buildings

constructed.

CHAPTER LXXI

FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT

One more important question we have to consider: What is Catholic

education? Here again we find two aspects of the problem—first, the

doctrines of the church, and second, their “practical” application to

American life.

When Catholic priests and Catholic sisters teach the

multiplication-table, they teach the same multiplication-table as the

public schools. When they teach chemistry, they teach the same formulas

as the public schools. When they teach astronomy, they teach that the

earth is positively known to move round the sun. But when they teach the

_history_ of astronomy, they have to call upon their subtle casuists,

and get round the fact that their infallible popes infallibly decreed

that the sun moves round the earth, and caused the imprisonment of

Galileo in a dungeon for having taught the devilish Copernican heresy.

During my last year in the New York public schools I had an Irish

Catholic gentleman for my teacher. I never had a better teacher, and

wouldn’t want one; he was efficient, and at the same time human and

jolly. He discovered that it was possible to let us talk to him and ask

him questions without the formality of raising our hands. He would let

us argue and “scrap” with him, and he evolved a most delightful method

of discipline for boys who did not pay attention—he would let fly a

piece of chalk at their heads. I learned more from him in one year than

I learned from some other teachers in two; so I have a kindly spot in my

heart for Irish Catholic teachers.

But then I went on to college, and here it was quite different; for I

was not studying spelling and geography and arithmetic, about which all

the world agrees; I was studying history and philosophy and literature,

about which Catholics differ from everybody else. I was studying at a

public college, run by Tammany Hall, and many of the professors were

Catholics; later on, when the college moved up to its new buildings,

they took most of its staff from Fordham College, a Catholic

institution, and without any examinations or preliminaries.

I had as my Latin teacher Professor Charles G. Herberman, editor of the

“Catholic Encyclopedia,” and a captain of the Society of Jesus. He was a

great Latin scholar, but a despot as well as a bigot; and when he

wandered from the subject, which he did frequently, he supported every

obscurantist idea in the world. My philosophy teacher, John J. McNulty,

taught me the intellectual cob-web spinning of all the ages. Naturally,

he could not have taught me a philosophy of evolution, or a philosophy

of common-sense, such as pragmatism. I spent my entire time in his

classes marveling that no one of the world’s great philosophers had ever

thought of relating metaphysical theories to the plain facts of life

which everybody knows and lives by; I would try to pin Professor McNulty

down on this point, only to find that he couldn’t understand what I

meant.

And then Professor George E. Hardy, who taught us English, according to

the New York “Sun” and Tammany Hall. I have told about him in “The

Goose-step”—how he made us learn and recite Catholic poetry, and taught

us that Milton was a narrow bigot and Chaucer not a Wyckliffite. I

didn’t know what a Wyckliffite was, but I understand now that he was the

Bolshevik of the fourteenth century—a creature so wicked that it wasn’t

safe for you to know about him, for fear you might come to agree with

him!

Now, manifestly the education which these Catholic gentlemen tried to

give me was absurd; and if they had tried to give me education in

biology, or in sociology, or in history, it would have been equally

absurd. To the Catholic Church the entire development of modern thought

is a kind of malignant tumor upon the human race. This again is

something about which there can be no argument—there simply is not in

the Catholic system any place for the secular state, or for rationalism,

or for evolution, or for democracy; I could give a long list of other

impossibilities—but instead I invite you to study a book by the leading

literary Catholic of England, Hilaire Belloc. I don’t think I exaggerate

in saying that Belloc is the one living Catholic man of letters who has

managed to achieve a first-rate position in English letters. And here he

writes a big book, “Europe and the Faith,” working out in detail the

exact point of view which I have just set forth.

He begins by telling us that he is the only real historian, he is the

only one who can in the deep and mystic sense know his subject, because

he has the Faith; all those who have not the Faith are outsiders and

predestined to error. According to this Faith, Mr. Belloc knows that

Rome is the source of European civilization, Rome created the Eternal

Empire—from Scotland to the Sahara, and from Syria to Spain. All was

going well with this Eternal Empire until the lust and greed of King

Henry VIII of England led him upon a path of crime; England turned

traitor to the great European Empire—and as a result of that came all

the monstrosities and abnormalities of the last four hundred years,

Protestantism, Capitalism, Industrialism, Atheism, Pessimism,

Imperialism, and the World War.

Such is Catholic history; and Catholic biology and Catholic sociology

and Catholic philosophy and Catholic literature will be things equally

and inevitably as remote from reality. When you go into Catholic

colleges you will find such fantasticalities being taught, you will find

all knowledge being distorted to fit the Catholic theories and sustain

the Catholic Faith. One illustration—in Milwaukee the Catholic

archbishop objected to a pageant of the Pilgrims being given by the

Milwaukee school children, because it was said that the Pilgrim Fathers

came to this country in search of religious liberty; the archbishop

forced the change of the word “religious” to “political”! You will find

everything thus taught from the point of view of the Faith—or else not

taught at all. For what does it really matter? Our stay on this earth is

brief, and so long as our souls are saved, why care what becomes of our

minds? Says the Milwaukee “Catholic Citizen” of July 15, 1922: “One

would imagine that devotional books are the chief output of our Catholic

publishing houses—ten new books of devotion to one of history or

biography.”

What are the standards of the Catholic parochial schools? This again is

something which follows from the premises already stated. Mr. Franklin

Hichborn, one of the most careful of social investigators, tells me that

he has been collecting data on the effect of the parochial schools upon

the public school system, in a town of six thousand inhabitants. This

material has not yet been published, but Mr. Hichborn gives me a

summary:

I found that the dual school system is most demoralizing. It increases

the difficulties of the truant officer, and is a drag upon progressive

school policies. Furthermore, I found that children who started in the

parochial school were from two to five years behind when they entered

the public schools. Or, to put it another way, children from the

parochial school, who left such school at the age of ten, for example,

were qualified for public school grades where the ages of the children

were eight or even seven years. Children leaving the parochial school

at the age of sixteen entered public school grades where the age of

the students was nine or ten. I have this information with the names,

dates and grades, and covering a number of years.

In America the Catholic Church has to build and run schools, because

they have the competition of the public schools to meet; but there are

other countries in which they do not have this competition, and there we

may see what the Church would do with education if it had its own way. I

will give you a few of the statistics of illiteracy throughout the

world, and to make the contrast vivid I will give first a Protestant

country, and then a Catholic country—and see if you can tell which is

which! The percentages, taken from the U. S. Census of 1920, are as

follows: U. S. A., 6; Argentina, 54; Canada, 11; Brazil, 85; Australia,

1.8; Bolivia, 82; Holland, .08; Chili, 49; England, 1.8; Colombia, 73;

Denmark, .2; Hungary, 33; Scotland, 1.6; Mexico, 70; Sweden, .2;

Portugal, 68; Germany, .05; Spain, 58; Switzerland, .3; Italy, 37. It

seems to me these figures cover the case.

The main basis of the Catholic attack upon the American public schools

is that they are “godless”; the children come out without religion and

without morality. But then you go to the juvenile courts, and what do

you find? Judge Collins of the Juvenile Court in New York City,

addressing a meeting of Catholics at St. Charles Borromeo Church,

reports 145,000 cases brought up each year in the children’s court, 60%

of them Catholic, 30% Jewish, and the remaining 10% of other faiths; 65%

of the boys in the reformatories are Catholic—and this in a city whose

population is 25% Catholic. According to the Department of Correction of

New York, there were 23,539 Catholics in New York jails, as against

9,278 non-Catholics. On the other side of the continent, in San

Francisco, I find a tabulation of the inmates of the state prison; 76%

of these are from Catholic schools, brought up in the Catholic faith,

yet the Catholics have less than 20% of the population of California.

I close this subject with one glimpse of what might be called Catholic

adult education. In some parts of our country the church has become so

powerful that the capitalist press has taken to publishing Catholic

propaganda; I have before me a specimen of such propaganda, cut from the

Boston “Post” of July 25, 1921:

MEDAL GIVEN TO AUTOISTS

Special Blessing from Patron Saint of Motorists

Some 2000 autoists—chaffeurs and car owners—thronged St. Leonard of

Port Maurice Church, Prince Street, North End, yesterday to receive

special blessing and obtain a St. Christopher medal, bearing the

picture of the patron saint of automobilists—the charm against motor

accidents and death.

The story spread over two columns, describes the “solemn high mass and

adoration of the St. Christopher relic,” and the “eloquent sermon”

preached by the Reverend Christopher Burzi, who told all the legends

concerning the saint, and how this particular feast had been ordered by

Pope Pius X. “At the conclusion of the mass the relic of the saint

encased in glass was brought to the altar rail, where the congregation

gathered to kiss the sacred relic.”

Here we have what we may describe as an adult vocational course of the

parochial schools. In the “godless” public schools, you must realize,

there are night classes where men painfully acquire knowledge of the

proper handling of automobiles; but under this Catholic system all these

tiresome details become superfluous, and men avoid automobile accidents

by kissing the bones of a saint and purchasing magic medallions—“one a

pocket charm, and the other a sterling silver plate that can be attached

to the car itself.”

CHAPTER LXXII

THE SCHOOLS OF STEEL

We are now familiar with the principal agencies which have taken over

our education upon a national scale. In addition to these, each

community has its local interests, which may be small from a national

standpoint, but are big enough to block the vision of a school board.

Wherever capitalist industry exists in America, in towns or villages or

country districts, that industry dominates the schools. There are whole

counties, hundreds of them scattered over the United States, which are

feudal domains of great corporations. In cases where these corporations

own the land and the homes of the workers, as in the coal towns of West

Virginia and Colorado, the corporations support the schools, and the

teachers are the least competent and poorest paid of their clerks. In

cases where other landlords have a chance to exploit the workers, the

burden of the schools falls upon the tax-payers—with the great

corporations dodging their taxes.

I talked the other day with a teacher from Benicia, California, a

“tannery town.” A school board member, elected to serve the people, got

the idea that the tannery was not paying its proper share of taxes, and

he brought an expert from the city to get the facts. The firm was

assessed on a quarter of a million dollars, and should have been

assessed on two millions. This same school board member belonged to the

city council, and brought the matter up before that body, which decided

to do nothing. Of course the schools were starved, and sometimes the

teachers did not get their salaries at all. Again, I talked with a

gentleman from Wisconsin, whose father was an engineer. A lumber company

wanted his services, but could not afford to pay what he was worth, so

they decided to give him an extra salary, and ordered the secretary of

the school board to resign!

I talked with a teacher who had taught in several of the coal towns of

Southern Illinois; the invariable condition is wretched schools, with

the vast wealth of the corporations untaxed. The miners who attempt to

control their own schools are browbeaten or tricked. The mines

invariably work on school election days; the club women turn out with

their automobiles, and bring the voters to the polls—those who will vote

the business men’s ticket. By the time the miners get out of the pits

the polls are closed, so the miners’ candidates are not elected. At

Eldorado, Illinois, the organized miners endeavored to put up a ticket,

and the clerk of the school board lied to them as to the date for the

filing of petitions.

For a detailed study of what industrial feudalism does to education, I

propose that we investigate Judge Gary and his Steel Trust. In

Pittsburgh, I talked with a reporter on one of the newspapers, who had

been watching school conditions for twenty years. Here is a whole county

entirely dominated by steel; you cannot hold meetings without permission

of the police, which means that if you are a labor organizer you do not

hold them at all. The valley is a solid line of “steel-towns,” and in

one of them, McKeesport, representatives of the American Civil Liberties

Union duplicated my experience at San Pedro—they were arrested for

reading the Constitution of the United States on private property.

The Pittsburgh schools of course are run by the steel interests; the

president of the board is David B. Oliver, eighty-five year old steel

magnate. The people have nothing to do with the matter, because the

school board is named by the judges of the county, and this board levies

taxes as it sees fit, and spends the money on its friends. A Pittsburgh

physician writes me: “The offices of the board are palatial, the staff

of clerks legion, the extra teachers unnumbered, and the equipment of

paper and materials would keep any supply-house wreathed in smiles.” He

goes on to add that the present superintendent draws a salary of $12,000

a year, with automobile, chauffeur, and upkeep of car; “he is rumored to

be on speaking terms, at least, with a book-publishing house.”

But that is a lot better than what Pittsburgh had ten years ago—a

superintendent who represented a school-book house in St. Paul, and

spent the rest of his time seducing his girl pupils; it was proved in

court that he had had a criminal operation performed on one of them. My

reporter friend had dug up four cases of rape by this superintendent in

his own office, and the affidavits were presented to the grand jury. The

school children went on strike against their superintendent, and finally

he was tried, and the jury disagreed. Juries in Allegheny County agree

only with steel officials.

In the slum neighborhoods of Pittsburgh you find atrociously crowded

schools, in wretched buildings, some of them made of corrugated iron; in

the rich districts you find palatial high schools. The system is run on

a basis of political pull; good teachers are shifted, so that the

sisters of ward-heelers may get promotion. When parents venture to

complain they are insulted—especially if they are poor. There is a

political machine even of the doctors; the favorites of the board of

health get the jobs of vaccinating in the schools.

Further down the valley is Homestead, from which the Carnegie Foundation

for the Advancement of Teaching derives its millions. You will

appreciate the gay humor of this situation—in the schools of Homestead

the steel-slaves are drinking water from the Monongahela River, into

which various industrial plants discharge their acids. When complaint

was made about this water in Homestead, the newspapers saw an

opportunity to be witty, and assured the public that the water needed no

filtering—the acids would kill the bacteria! I am assured that, owing to

the effect of these acids, the plumbing in the homesteads of Homestead

wears out in one-third the normal time; and this suggests the subject

for an important scientific monograph—I see it in my mind’s eye,

catalogued in Carnegie libraries throughout the United States and Great

Britain: “The Internal Plumbing of Pupils; a Study of the Stimulation

Effects of Sulphuric and Nitric Acids on the Renal Canals of One

Thousand School Children at Homestead, Pennsylvania. By A. Learned

Phaque, A.M., Ph.D., T.O.A.D.Y.; Bulletin of the Carnegie Foundation for

the Advancement of Teaching, No. 4-11-44.”

Come to Northern Minnesota, and see what the Steel Trust does to the

shipping port of its vast ore fields. I have before me a copy of the

Duluth “Rip-Saw,” containing a detailed account of the activities of

school board members who have had charge of teachers’ pension money, and

have been lending it out for their private graft. One board member was

an insurance agent, and if he loaned you the teachers’ money, you had to

place your insurance with him. Needless to say, along with this go

accounts of the humiliating of teachers, the beating down of wages, and

the driving out of those with liberal sympathies. Judge Gary, of course,

would say that he has nothing to do with all this; all that he does is

to put up the campaign funds to keep such gangs in office.

Again, Lorain, Ohio, a port on Lake Erie, headquarters of one of the

Steel Trust subsidiaries, the National Tube Company. Here are forty

thousand people, most of them wage-slaves, and recently they elected a

mayor who made an effort to serve them, and was smashed by the Black

Hand. On the school system of Lorain the people have been unable to make

any impression whatever. The house agent of the National Tube Company, a

sort of watch-dog against the radical element in the mills, occupies the

same post on the school board. The president of the board is a dentist

and bank director, a high-up Mason and pillar of the Lutheran church; he

rolls down-town in his big limousine, and lives “on the Avenue” in a

large residence, which is taxed less than the small cottage of a

machinist. Another member is a jeweler and bank director, a pillar of

the Congregational church, who sees to it that the works of Scott

Nearing, Jack London, Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair are kept out of

the Carnegie library. The other members are a bank teller and a very

intolerant ex-teacher, both devout Methodists.

As superintendent this board has had for ten years a perfect autocrat,

who finds opportunity for many financial activities on the side. He is a

typical small-town mind, and excludes from the system all teachers whose

minds are bigger. The two most popular teachers in the system were

driven out because their parents happened to be Socialists. A high

school teacher, who had been on the faculty for twelve years, was

charged with “refusing to do team work”—the real reason being that he

attended labor meetings and tried to help the workers. When he was

fired, a petition was presented, signed by every student in his

class—except one, whose father was manager of the Chamber of Commerce.

The fight was carried to the school board elections, but to no purpose,

and this teacher left town.

There must be “no politics” in Lorain school affairs, the board solemnly

ordains; but four years ago, when the ring was kicked out of the city

hall, the school board hastened to make a job for one ring member. A

working-boy was a minute or two late because a draw-bridge which he had

to cross was swung open; he was punished for this, and on the second

offense was threatened with loss of his grades. The son of a big bank

director and promoter was found smoking cigarettes in the high school

building, the punishment for which is expulsion, but the young man

graduated three months later. These are petty details, and I only cite

them because they are typical of a thousand school systems in small

towns. Lorain would tell you that its schools are “progressive,” and

would mention the beveled glass mirrors in the new high school, costing

ninety-five dollars a piece. Its educators stand high—the superintendent

got his enamel finish under Nicholas Miraculous last summer, and the

high school principal did the same thing the year before, and other

members of the faculty have done it or intend to. Superintendent Boone

is a director of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Y. M. C. A., a Mason

and a Kiwani, and when he came back from his course in “school

management” at Columbia, he showed what he had learned by joining the

Elks!

CHAPTER LXXIII

THE SCHOOLS OF OIL

So much for what steel does to schools; let us now see what oil does.

Our journey of inspection will be under the escort of a rare high school

teacher—one who is willing to tell his experiences over his own

signature. Mr. David H. Pierce specializes in sociology, and at present

is teaching hygiene and Spanish at a high school in Ohio. Two or three

years ago he accepted a position as principal of a high school in the

oil country of West Virginia. The town of Littleton, containing about

seven hundred inhabitants, is spread along a valley, sharing it with a

creek, a mud road, and a railroad; as far as the eye can see in every

direction the hillsides have sprouted oil derricks. Mr. Pierce went

there because he was tired of the “rigid” school system of New York

state, and was told that in West Virginia things were more free. He

found a commodious brick high school, and felt much encouraged—until the

first faculty meeting, when the district superintendent stated: “There

are two boys in your senior class who must pass regardless of their

work. They have never been known to work in school and never will, but

they come from a good family and must graduate.”

Mr. Pierce was supposed to be the principal of the school, but the

superintendent hadn’t much else to do, and made his headquarters in the

building. Mr. Pierce describes him as “a kindly gentleman, a good

husband and father”; he let his teachers alone, except when it became

necessary to protect his own position, by pleasing the aristocracy of

Littleton. He would say to a student who was deficient in half a year of

algebra: “Work six cases of factoring, and it will be satisfactory.” To

a girl who had failed to take a year of high school mathematics he would

suggest: “Go down and observe the class in eighth grade arithmetic a few

times.”

The faculty spent several hours working out a schedule of classes, and

the school ran for three weeks, when news came that a prominent athlete,

desired for the basket-ball team, was to be admitted to school. He was

employed in the mornings at outside work, so it was necessary to arrange

three afternoon classes for this young athlete. As this conflicted with

the schedule of the school, Mr. Pierce suggested that the boy should

spend his entire day in school, in order to secure the fifteen hours per

week of class work. The superintendent’s reply was that this could not

be required, because the lad’s father was president of the school board;

the old schedule must be destroyed and a new one arranged. Immediately

after this had been done, the boy changed his mind and decided he would

not come to school. The athletic coach spent a month persuading him,

then he concluded to come to school for the entire day. When Mr. Pierce

had occasion to admonish this young man for truancy, he retorted: “Ah,

what the hell difference does it make? I’ve been guaranteed graduation a

year from June.” Says Mr. Pierce:

In many cases the athlete runs the school. I heard of one who told a

school superintendent to “go to hell” and was given one day’s

suspension. I have known of others to engage in physical combat with

instructors, with no ill results to their scholastic position. They

are privileged characters. They obey only those rules which they

desire. Being assured of a coterie of hero-worshipers in the

community, they live in no terror of penalties or punishments. It

would be as much as a principal’s or teacher’s place is worth if he or

she dared to prevent a boy from taking part in an important game. This

is no exaggeration. It is a fact. To put it mildly, a teacher in many

a small West Virginia high school who attempted honestly to enforce

the rules laid down by the State High School Athletic Association

would be blacklisted. He would suffer indignities. Littleton High

School was of this sort, and the villagers of Littleton wanted teams

that could win.

I have shown in “The Goose-step” how the coaches and the athletic alumni

run the colleges, and here in this high school of the oil country we

find the same phenomenon. Mr. Pierce’s year in Littleton was one long

struggle, because he would not permit mid-week basket-ball games, which

drew a large part of the students from their work. The coach of the

basket-ball team was a junior high school teacher, and he advised Mr.

Pierce that “It ain’t the way we do them things in this section.” He

proceeded to give instructions to the girls’ basket-ball team:

Girls, you’ll be up against a stiff team tonight. Go in and foul for

all you’re worth. Remember if you are fouled by the referee, and the

opponents make a goal it counts one point. If the opposing team is

given room to shoot from the open floor, every basket they make counts

two.

The team proceeded to follow this advice. The referee was one of their

own students, and because of foul play Mr. Pierce went down on the floor

and stopped the game and ordered the referee from the floor. The crowd

was raving, and for several days the town debated whether or not the

principal should be dismissed from the high school. There was a meeting

in honor of the coach, and his admirers presented him with a fountain

pen, and he made them a speech:

Fellows, maybe it ain’t right, but I’ve got to tell you what was told

me by a man that saw you play. He said “Christ, but you’ve a hell of a

good team,” and I agree with him. You fellows have been there with the

goods.

This oil town was extremely religious. Mr. Pierce provided some of his

students with copies of the “Survey,” but the paper was thrown out of

the homes by two parents, who were afraid it would interfere with the

children’s religion. Mr. Pierce taught at the Methodist Sunday school,

but at his boarding house he ventured to question the existence of a

future life, and so the word spread that he was an “atheist,” and he

found on his school blackboard the announcement: “Reverend Pierce will

lecture on ‘No Heaven, No Hell.’” A gentleman was appointed to spy upon

his Sunday school class, to discover what he was teaching. A preacher

devoted two-thirds of his sermon to the glories of basket-ball, and

closed with an earnest prayer for victory in the approaching game.

Dancing and card playing were barred. The town’s idea of diversion was

to tie one end of a rope to a switch engine and the other end to

somebody’s front porch.

A part of Mr. Pierce’s story was published in an article in the

“Survey,” entitled “A Village School,” April 23, 1921. Mr. Pierce was

then teaching in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and the superintendent of

Littleton wrote to him, threatening to “beat him up.” The superintendent

sent this threat through the mail, and thereby laid himself liable to

several years’ imprisonment; but Mr. Pierce, being, like myself, an

amiable muckraker, forebore to press the point. Besides, he had new

troubles in Clarksburg; the high school team won a debate favoring

government control of railroads, and this so frightened the principal

that “he spent ten minutes notifying the entire assembly that debates do

not mean anything, and the decision was not to be taken seriously.” Mr.

Pierce continues:

Upon another occasion, he advised me not to discuss the coal strike in

my class, or at least to show no sympathy for organized labor, because

he asserted that ninety per cent of my students were children of coal

miners who belonged to unions, and they would be inclined to be

aroused too much. Upon another occasion, he entered my class casually,

when I was discussing some of the advantages of government control of

railroads, and he told the class that the movement for government

control was Bolshevistic. I was using, at that time, New York state as

an example, in trying to show what saving could be made, if, for

example, the Erie Railroad was used for passenger service and the

Lackawanna for freight. Of course, I had to defend myself from the

accusation of Bolshevism, but as we were personally friendly (in fact,

I was a roomer at his house), he did not carry the case up at all.

That indicates at least one way for a liberal to keep his job in a high

school!

CHAPTER LXXIV

THE COUNTRY GEESE

We have had glimpses of rural school conditions in the far West. Let us

glance at the wheat country. From the point of view of politics and

education the Dakotas are a back-yard of Minneapolis and St. Paul, being

governed by the railroads and banks and chambers of commerce of these

cities. The farmers made a desperate effort to free themselves by their

Nonpartisan League, and the story of their ten years’ struggle to

control their schools is most illuminating.

The Nonpartisan League was strong in the country districts, while the

gang still held the towns; so their legislature put through a measure

taking control of city schools away from the state; after which the gang

proceeded to dump overboard all city teachers who belonged to the

League, or who ventured to speak in its support. “The Reds have taken

the schools,” was the cry; and in cases where the Nonpartisan League

appointed principals or heads of state institutions, the students were

incited to strike against these officers. The Teachers’ Union was forced

to disband in Fargo, and in the State Agricultural College a teacher who

became secretary of the Teachers’ Union was refused the increase of

salary to which she was legally entitled.

By methods such as these the gang managed to hold on in North Dakota;

they were sure the political tide would turn, and it did. The Federal

Reserve Board “deflated” the farmers, and the price of wheat dropped to

less than half the cost of producing it; when I was in North Dakota, in

1922, there were counties of the state in which every farm was being

sold for taxes. In four months during 1923 over seventy small banks went

to the wall, and two hundred others were in trouble. The Nonpartisan

League program included state-owned mills and elevators, and these

half-completed enterprises of course were useless. The League was

without funds—the bankers saw to that, by calling the loans of farmers

who paid their dues. So the gang came back, and they put out MacDonald,

the League superintendent of schools—not content with that, they hounded

him literally to his death. A friend of his writes me:

Wherever he secured a position, he was followed by his North Dakota

enemies. The new superintendent and the new director of vocational

training prepared letters and bulletins denouncing him; they sent

these to his students and the officers under whom he worked, and this

would be continued until he was dismissed. As soon as he would get a

new job and they would get him located, they would repeat.

The gang put in as its new superintendent a political woman, Miss

Neilson, president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization

controlled by the Black Hand, in North Dakota as in Los Angeles. Miss

Neilson is not a graduate of any college, normal school or high school;

under the law she was ineligible to the position, but the courts very

kindly held this law unconstitutional. The uneducated lady now has

absolute control of the teachers of North Dakota, and can and does

withhold certificates from her political opponents. They have set up a

system of “grading” schools, a purely political scheme to strengthen the

control of the gang; they have four politicians as “school inspectors,”

and the standards on which the grading is done are wholly artificial,

having no relationship to merit. If the schools stand in with the gang,

the pupils from those schools do not have to pass examinations to enter

the higher state institutions, or to secure positions from the gang.

The text-book graft is back again; and also the banker-graft. There are

quarter sections of land belonging to the bankers, and these have been

left out of the school districts, so that they do not have to pay school

taxes. The law requires the banks to pay interest on school money, but

the bankers handle that matter by the simple device of naming the school

treasurer and keeping the books for him—and incidentally keeping the

interest! In the county where my friend Smith was superintendent, the

school treasurer was threatened that if he made trouble he would have to

pay up his own note at the bank; and when Mr. Smith persisted in making

trouble, the banker came in a fury, demanding: “What’s this?”

Mr. Smith told me also about the graft in building jobs—the biggest of

all. Mr. Smith had to see to putting up school buildings, and was told

to charge as much as the other counties were paying, otherwise the money

would not be allowed him. When he refused to do this, they passed a law

compelling him to do it! He put up a building 42 by 54, with a full

basement, for $3,700; while for the same building other counties were

paying from nine to ten thousand dollars. But in spite of such public

services, Mr. Smith never had a safe majority in the county—he had

against him the bankers’ machine and the bankers’ newspapers, and the

vote of the towns, whose people depended for their jobs upon the

bankers, and for their ideas upon the bankers’ newspapers. Imagine the

political conditions in a community where a man, hoping to get back into

the educational field, dares not permit me to relate these incidents in

connection with his real name!

These conditions prevail wherever the farmer movement has been active.

In South Dakota the Nonpartisan League was never able to carry the

state; but it is growing, and the gang has been frantic to stamp it out

of the schools. At the Madison State Normal School there were several

teachers who made so bold as to declare their sympathy with the League.

In 1920 one of these teachers, Mrs. Anna Mae Brady, was unceremoniously

kicked out by the president, and a prominent Republican politician

stated as the reason her sympathy with the League. But realizing that

this wouldn’t look well as a campaign issue, President Higbie discovered

that Mrs. Brady had been giving lectures at teachers’ institutes in

other counties. Mrs. Brady had been doing this for eight years, and it

was a custom of teachers throughout the state. But the president had

nothing more to say, and when Mrs. Brady demanded a hearing before the

board of regents, they graciously permitted her to come and speak, but

professed to know nothing about the matter, and refused to summon

President Higbie and permit Mrs. Brady to question him. Another teacher,

Miss Alice L. Daly, handed in her resignation in protest, and stated

that the political machine of the state, and powerful financial

interests outside the state, were running South Dakota education. The

answer of President Higbie to this protest was to drop three more

teachers who were sympathetic to the League.

Also in Idaho the farmer movement is becoming powerful, and the

interests have been hard put to it. In Boise they have a beautiful new

high school, with a big auditorium, and the school board had made the

rule that under no circumstances was it to be open for political

gatherings. But it happened that at the close of the 1922 campaign, the

radical candidate for governor secured the big opera house; the gang

wished to offer a counter attraction, and there was no hall big enough

for their purposes. So the school board met and rescinded their

resolution, and the Republican party held a meeting in the high school

auditorium, addressed by the Republican governor. Next day the school

board met again, and restored the rule forbidding political gatherings

in the public schools of Boise! Laws made to order, so to speak!

Let us take the country districts of California, from which you get most

of your fruits, canned and dried. I have notes of the misadventures of

many California teachers; apparently the habit of breaking the law is

universal among school boards and superintendents of this state. In

Bishop the principal of the high school drops teachers contrary to law,

and when they resort to the courts he solves the problem by eliminating

the courses of study taught by these teachers. In Calexico the courts

refused to enforce the law regarding teachers’ tenure. In Santa Cruz the

board of education has set aside the state law providing equal pay for

equal work as between men and women. They have a school principal who

for a trivial offense whipped two little boys so severely that they had

to have medical attention. This also was against the law, but the board

paid no heed to the petitions of the parents. Mrs. Josephine Tyler, who

writes about this matter, states:

I secured one letter from a former resident of Santa Cruz, who had

taken her adopted daughter out of school because of insulting

treatment from Forsyth. I gave this letter to the president of the

board to read, and, after reading it, he remarked, “I believe the man

is crazy.” But he didn’t advocate his removal. He asked permission to

show the letter to other members of the board, and I granted his

request, after securing his promise to return the letter to me. I

afterwards learned that some members of the board were very loath to

return the letter to me, and I heard only recently that there is still

some apprehension concerning that letter.... Forsyth holds his job

because he stands in with and is a good propagandist tool of the

lodges and the banking and business interests.

Or take the strange experience of the teachers at Fresno, the place from

which you get your raisins. Up to recently the schools in Fresno had a

superintendent by the name of Cross; he used to run the high school in

Pasadena, and we played tennis together, and took pleasure in licking

the school champions. I never observed in Mr. Cross any failure of

manners on the tennis court, so I long for the day when we apply inside

our schools the same standards as on the play-grounds outside. When Mr.

Cross came to Fresno the sanitary conditions in the schools were

“shocking,” and he so reported them; but next year one of the teachers

ventured to make a report, showing that conditions in her school were

still more “shocking,” and Mr. Cross resented the meddling of teachers

in such affairs. This teacher was persecuted until she resigned, and the

result was the forming of a teachers’ union in Fresno. Miss Verna Carson

became the president of this union, and one of the board members told

her that “the business men of this town are getting tired of having you

going around through the state and organizing other locals.” In June of

that year Superintendent Cross dropped Miss Carson, and when the

teachers made protest, he declared his attitude to organized teachers:

there was no use trying to deal with them by conference—“a base-ball bat

or a gatling-gun is needed.” That was the kind of talk the Chamber of

Commerce wanted, and they rallied to their superintendent’s support, and

gave him a raise of a thousand dollars. When pushed by friends of Miss

Carson, Mr. Cross finally gave a reason for her dismissal, “professional

incapacity.” Miss Carson, being unable to get a hearing, proceeded to

bring a libel suit, and Mr. Cross on the witness stand was invited to

state what acts of “professional incapacity” she had committed. He could

not give any, so he was adjudged guilty of libel, and obliged to pay the

costs of the suit, and at the end of the year to resign from his

position. This is one of the pleasantest school stories I have to tell,

and I wish that teachers would make note of it and do likewise.

CHAPTER LXXV

THE SCHOOLS OF SNOBBERY

So far our attention has been given to the public schools. There is

another large field of education, at which we can only stop for a

glance—the private schools. There are over two thousand private high

schools and academies in the United States, with two or three hundred

thousand students; and apart from parochial and a few experimental

schools, these institutions are maintained by the rich for the purpose

of giving their children a class education. Some of them are large and

wealthy, with endowments running into the millions; when we glance at

their boards of control we are reminded of the interlocking directorates

of “The Goose-step.”

For example, here is Phillips Exeter, a hundred and forty-two years old;

in control we find Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, partner in the firm of J. P.

Morgan and Company, director of the Guaranty Trust Company, overseer of

Harvard University, trustee of Smith College, and director of the

Crowell Publishing Company, which gives us that lovely “American

Magazine” about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” Also Colonel

William Boyce Thompson, mining magnate and Republican party chief; also

Mr. George A. Plimpton, trustee of Amherst College, who has just helped

to kick out its liberal president, and senior partner of Ginn and

Company, who run Clark University and Clark College for the benefit of

the Frye-Atwood geographies.

Also there is Phillips Andover, a hundred and forty-five years old,

having at the head of its board a Boston bank president, interlocked

with Yale University; as board members a clergyman, interlocked by

marriage with the Boston Lowells, who are even more exclusive than the

Boston banks; also a New York corporation lawyer, who ran our war

department under Taft. At Hotchkiss we find the president of a trust

company and a dean of Yale; a partner in a stock exchange firm, who is

also treasurer of Yale; and a president of a bank, vice-president of a

trust company and of the American Brass Company, director of a life

insurance company and a trustee of Trinity College. At Groton we find as

secretary the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, interlocked

with Barnard College and Nicholas Miraculous; also a member of the firm

of Lee, Higginson & Company, the Boston bankers, interlocked with the

University of Lee-Higginson, popularly known as Harvard; also two

representatives of the Episcopal department of God, Mammon & Company.

At St. Paul’s we find the New Hampshire bishop and two other members of

this same aristocratic firm, one of them interlocked with Yale; also a

Baltimore copper magnate, interlocked with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad

and Johns Hopkins University; also a carpet manufacturer; a Republican

politician of Boston; a Philadelphia lawyer, who is president of a bank

and two railroads, director in four railroads, a trust company, an

electrical company and an asphalt company; and finally, a real

sure-enough, honest-to-goodness, cross-my-heart-and-swear-it English

lord! At St. Marks we have the same bishop as at Groton, and two other

representatives of the firm; also a cotton goods merchant interlocked

with Boston Edison and Massachusetts Gas, the invisible government of

Harvard; also a president of several manufacturing companies, who is

vice-president of a railroad; one of the Choates, who directs railroads,

banks and life insurance in New York; and finally “Jim” Wadsworth,

senator and Republican boss of New York state, whose father I had the

pleasure of putting out of politics some eighteen years ago. (See “The

Brass Check,” page 45.)

The Lawrenceville School, a magnificent institution located five miles

from Princeton, has on its board of trustees President John Grier Hibben

of Princeton, one of our leading clerical militarists; also a New York

banker who directs much foreign exploitation; also a bank president who

directs insurance. At Lawrenceville they had a head master who was

liberal, or at least human; he died recently, and the plutocratic alumni

came, offering to raise a few millions, on condition that they should

name the head master. They brought in the very successful coach of the

Yale rowing crew; incidentally he was professor of Latin, but that is

hardly worth mentioning in comparison. Because of his services in

beating the Harvard crew, Yale gave him the degree of M.A., _honoris

causa_—the same as they had extended to Jane Addams! This rowing

gentleman proceeded to coach Lawrenceville under the new Prussian spy

system, with the result of a faculty explosion too unsavory to be

detailed in this book.

These schools of snobbery are scattered all over New England and the

eastern states. They are training grounds for the athletic teams of the

big universities, also for the university fraternities, so that social

strivings and jealousies make up a good part of their student life.

Admission to the more exclusive of them is an hereditary privilege; if

you belong to the right families, your children and grandchildren are

booked when they are born. Needless to say, the plutocratic psychology

of these schools is never offended by the least breath of liberalism. In

place of ideas, the boys are furnished with golf courses, motor cars,

saddle-horses, boot-leggers, and all other comforts of home.

You have heard of Roger W. Babson, who sends out bulletins to keep the

rich informed as to the progress of social revolution. Mr. Babson deals

also in plutocratic education; conducting at Wellesley Hills,

Massachusetts, the Babson Institute, where thirty sons of the plutocracy

are trained to be magnates, at two thousand dollars per magnate per

year—room and meals not included! The Babson Institute also undertakes

to educate your employes, furnishing you with magic circulars to be put

in their pay envelopes. I have seen some of this magic; Mr. Babson asks

the wage-slaves: “What is the law of capitalism?” and answers, in

capital letters: “The law of capitalism is that wealth saved in

production should be honored and respected.” I wonder what Mr. Babson

tells his thirty budding magnates to answer when their wage-slaves ask

concerning wealth which has been stolen in corruption.

Of course there are private schools which are less expensive, and less

plutocratically correct. They descend in a sliding scale, until you come

to places which only a Dickens could describe. Society ladies enjoying

life in Reno or Paris, captains of industry who are sent to Congress or

to jail, want some place where they can stow their children out of the

way. Professor William Ellery Leonard was once a master in one of these

places, up in New York state, and told me vivid tales about the hordes

of young savages, and how, for trying to enforce a little discipline, he

incurred such furious enmity that on his last night in the school he had

to barricade himself in his room and defend his life with a baseball

bat!

I know a lady who, in order to get an education for her only son,

accepted a position as “house-mother” in another of these private hells,

and found herself housed in a room with fungus on the walls and on the

floor the overflow from an adjoining urinal. Everywhere the toilets were

overflowing and the floors covered with filth, the cooking atrocious,

the boys ill with indigestion, colds and sore throats, no infirmary or

provision for the sick, and among the hundred and fifteen boys a general

prevalence of smoking and wine-drinking, and practice of self-abuse so

general that many of the boys were mentally helpless—a lad would sit in

class “with dropped jaw and staring eyes, or with nervous spasms which

furnished entertainment for the other boys.”

I talked with a group of young masters at one of the older and more

reputable of these “schools of snobbery.” To show how closely the boys

were guarded from modern thought, one of these masters said that he had

passed through the school as a pupil, and then gone out into the world

and become a bit of a liberal; returning to the school as a master, he

had met his former masters, and discovered that they too were liberals.

But never a whisper of their ideas had got to him as a pupil, nor are

they getting to the pupils now. All the boys’ attention is on wealth,

all their standards are those of worldly possessions, and this is what

their parents desire and ordain.

I have referred to Phillips Andover; this school is located five miles

from Lawrence, Massachusetts, the headquarters of the Woolen Trust, run

by William M. Wood, one of our most ruthless labor smashers, who ten

years ago was prosecuted for a dynamite frame-up against the strikers in

his mills. A group of conspirators, headed by a prominent contractor,

placed dynamite in the home of a non-union worker, the intention being

that the explosion should be blamed upon the strikers. The contractor

who placed the dynamite blew out his brains rather than face an inquiry.

Such is the atmosphere of Lawrence. In 1919 came another great strike,

and a group of young Quaker clergymen took the part of the workers. I

have told about one of these, A. J. Muste, in “The Goose-step.” Among

others whose consciences were stirred was Bernard M. Allen, a teacher of

Latin in Phillips Andover; he went with a party of twenty-five ladies

and gentlemen to attend a meeting of the strikers in Lawrence. The

police commissioner had announced that no more “agitators” would be

allowed to enter the city, and when these ladies and gentlemen left the

railroad station and started to walk across the open square, they were

charged by mounted police, and Mr. Allen was severely clubbed over the

head. This was the first of a series of unprovoked assaults by the

police, in one of which young Muste and another clergyman were driven

into a side street and nearly clubbed to death.

As for Mr. Allen, it happened unfortunately that Phillips Andover was

beginning a campaign for two million dollars’ endowment. (It had just

received half a million dollars from the late Oliver Payne, who had

purchased a United States senatorship for his father.) Mr. Allen’s

resignation from Phillips Andover was requested and promptly accepted.

If I do not tell you many such incidents concerning our schools of

snobbery, you may believe that it is because young masters in these

schools do not often get themselves clubbed over the head in sympathy

for “dagoes” and “wops” on strike.

What these schools are really for was very interestingly shown by a

study of class standing in Harvard University, published in the Harvard

“Advocate” at the end of the year 1923. Here was a graduating class

consisting of 379 men from private schools and 858 from public schools.

The study showed that in the eight major athletic teams there were 40

men from these private schools, and only 22 from public schools. All the

managers were private school men. As regards class officers, musical and

glee clubs, debating teams, dramatic clubs, class day officers, etc.,

there were 183 private school men, as against 29 from the public

schools. But after that came the record on scholarship, and the contrast

was amusing: the scholarship honors had been won by 41 from private

schools, and 82 from public schools! It is interesting to note that this

study was made by a son of Thomas W. Lamont, and I welcome him to the

ranks of the “Bolsheviks.”

In New York City I met a well-known writer, who had taught in a private

school on Staten Island, and had been summoned before the principal for

the crime of putting on the blackboard a stanza by Don Marquis, setting

forth the idea that discontent is a good thing! I met also a woman

teacher from a private school in Brooklyn; this school is located in a

Y. M. C. A. building and the Y. Secretary used to come and pray with the

students—he prayed that God might give them power to smash the Huns, and

power to smash the Bolsheviks, and power to smash many other enemies.

These expensive young gentlemen drove to the school in costly motor

cars, to which God had given power to smash everything in their way.

In Boston I talked with a teacher in one of the private schools for

young ladies, and she described to me the atmosphere in this place. She

had got into trouble, by stating that the happiest people are those who

earn their own way in life; also for stating that labor should be

respected because of its importance. By remarks such as this the teacher

occasioned so much resentment that she was never asked to lead in

chapel. These girls would not stand the simplest kind remark about

working people—not even common humanitarianism.

I talked with another who taught in a girls’ school, where the pupils

were advised to avoid hard thinking, because it would spoil their

complexions and bring wrinkles and other signs of care. I could make a

novel out of the story which this teacher told me about the treatment of

a girl whose father had failed in business, and who was trying to pay

her way through the school by selling an encyclopedia. The teachers at

this place were underpaid and pitiful decayed gentlewomen, who lived

starved lives and read sentimental romances; but they did not feel

sentimental about a girl who was trying to redeem her family fortunes.

Concerning a school of “secretarial science” in Boston I was told a

story which at least has the grace of being funny. Mr. William Lloyd

Garrison, Jr., a Boston banker, was invited to address the young ladies

of this school, and the principal’s speech of introduction ran as

follows: “The gentleman whom we have the privilege of hearing is the

grandson of William Lloyd Garrison” (dead silence); “he is the nephew of

Lucretia Mott” (dead silence); “he is the lightest quarter-back that

ever played on the Harvard eleven” (tumultuous applause).

I am especially informed concerning young ladies’ finishing schools,

because of the fact that my wife was sent up from Mississippi to attend

one. This school stood on the fashionable part of Fifth Avenue, and in

the catalogue you were informed that it adjoined the homes of the Goulds

and Vanderbilts, and the pupils had opportunities to meet the

multi-millionaires of New York. The pupils used to watch these

multi-millionaires and their multi-wives from the windows—hiding behind

the curtains, of course, so that they might not be seen. One of these

fortunate wives came frequently to call upon the young ladies, bringing

her multi-dogs. Helen Gould came once, and it was the same as a court

ceremony, the thrills of it lasted for weeks.

The husband of this establishment was an old gentleman with humiliating

plebeian tastes; he used to go out every afternoon and disappear around

the corner, and come back with a small paper bag, which was a source of

fascinated speculation to the young ladies—until finally one of them

succeeded in brushing it out of his hand as she passed him on the

stairs, and it was discovered to contain a ten-cent apple pie purchased

on Third Avenue! My wife thinks I ought not to tell this story, because

it is unkind to the old gentleman, who has since died. I hasten to

explain that I myself now and then bring home an apple-pie in a paper

bag; the point of the story is not that the old gentleman liked pie, but

that the young ladies considered his liking it a scandal of first-class

proportions. It was only permitted to like expensive things!

My wife came from the far South, and had the prestige which attaches to

that region in the world of elegance. It has been written up in

romances, you understand; so the mining princesses from Idaho and the

cattle kings’ daughters from Wyoming were eager to model themselves upon

the gestures and mannerisms of a real daughter of the Confederacy. The

teachers at this school were forbidden to correct her Southern dialect;

therefore the standard of good English for the “Four Hundred” was set by

a Negro field-hand, black as a scuttle of coal, who had been picked out

as a house servant before the war, and had become “mammy” to a dozen

white babies. When this aged negress was cross she would say: “I never

said any such of a thing”; and when she was pleased she would say: “The

prettiest thing I nearly ever saw.” When the Goulds and Vanderbilts

heard that, they called it “charm”!

What these young ladies were taught in their “finishing school” is

“accomplishments”; everything from the standpoint of the drawing-room,

and just enough to get by on. When my wife was completely “finished,”

she could play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin; she

could sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances;

she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three

operas, and read three books. What was more important, she had had tea

in all the luxurious palm-rooms and Louis Quinze rooms of the great New

York hotels; she had acquired connections with the most expensive

fashion shops, and had had obsequious foreign gentlemen study her

colors, and tell her what was her proper style; she had seen the inside

of a number of Fifth Avenue homes, and learned the names of “period”

furniture; she had been to West Point to attend the annual football

match with Annapolis, and to New Haven to attend the annual rowing match

with Harvard. Now she lets me poke fun at such culture, but she still

has affection for her old teachers, and insists that I specify—they were

giving the young ladies exactly what the parents of these young ladies

demanded, and the only thing they were willing to pay for.

CHAPTER LXXVI

A SCHOOL SURVEY

To just what extent does the plutocracy control our schools? In “The

Goose-step,” pages 28-29, I quoted from a study by Scott Nearing,

reported in “School and Society” for September 8, 1917, showing that in

143 of the leading colleges and universities of the United States there

were a total of 2,470 trustees, of whom 1,444 were of the commercial and

financial class—that is, a percentage of 58. In “School and Society” for

January 20, 1917, Scott Nearing gave the results of a similar

investigation with regard to school boards. He wrote to the

superintendents of schools in all American cities having a population of

over forty thousand; there were a total of 131 such cities, and 104

replies were received.

The total population of the cities was twenty-four million, or

one-fourth of the American people at that time. The number of board

members was 967. The business class, including merchants and

manufacturers, capitalists, contractors, real estate and insurance men,

and officials in railroads, banks and corporations, numbered 433, the

professional class 333, and miscellaneous 201—this last including 18

teachers, mostly college professors, 48 clerks and salesmen, 39

mechanics and wage-earners, and 25 foremen. Nearing points out that in

these cities the wage earners and clerks included five-sixths of the

employed population, but that they had only one-tenth of the school

board representation; nine-tenths of the members had been chosen from

one-sixth of the population. It is interesting to note that women

compose 48% of the population, but only 7% on the boards of education in

large cities, and only 3% on the boards of trustees of colleges and

universities. The commercial class, with their lawyers, compose 58% of

college boards, and 59% of city school boards.

So we see that the plutocracy really does hold the whip hand; whatever

this class has wanted to do with the schools, it has done. Let us now

see, in the form of statistics, just what it has wanted to do.

First: It has been far more interested in killing the young than in

educating them. We are able to put this preference into figures—which is

how the plutocracy likes a thing put. Its interest in war has been

ninety-three times as great as its interest in education and science put

together. According to an analysis of federal appropriations by the

chief of the United States Bureau of Standards, the appropriation of the

government for the year 1920, which was a year of peace, was as follows:

Past wars, 68%; future wars, 25%; civil departments, 3%; public works,

3%; education and science, 1%. Disregarding small fractions, out of a

total of $5,685,000,000 appropriation, the share of wars, past or

future, was $5,279,000,000, and education and science combined got only

$57,000,000.

That represents federal appropriations. Still more illuminating is a

study of the total expenditure of the American people for education, as

contrasted with expenditure for other purposes. The “Survey” for July

16, 1921, presents a table: “The Schools’ Share in the Nation’s Wealth.”

According to this, it appears that the American people spent in 1920,

upon joy-rides, races and pleasure resorts, $3,000,000,000 and upon all

departments of education in the entire country $1,000,000,000. The

American people spent upon sundaes, sodas and drinking fountain

delights, including ice cream, a total of $600,000,000, and upon higher

education $137,000,000. The American people spent upon face lotions and

cosmetics $750,000,000, and upon the public elementary schools

$762,000,000. They spent upon chewing gum $50,000,000, and upon schools

to train their teachers $20,000,000. They spent upon candy alone as much

as they spent upon all departments of education, and upon cigars,

cigarettes, and tobacco more than twice the amount.

We are a self-satisfied people, and we propose to make our foreign

population like ourselves; but we really ought to hesitate, because the

1920 census shows that in illiteracy we are behind nearly all the

civilized nations—Australia, England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, the

Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. We boast of six

per cent illiteracy, while Denmark has only two-tenths of one per cent,

Switzerland and New Zealand three-tenths of one per cent, England and

Wales one and eight-tenths per cent; the German Empire, which we went to

war to destroy, had only three-hundredths of one per cent, which is two

hundred times better than the United States!

The war brought us some definite information about our education. The

Army test of illiteracy was based on the ability to read as well as

children in the second grade, and 25% of our would-be soldiers “flunked”

this test. We cannot get away by attributing our illiteracy to the

Negroes, because Camp Devens in Massachusetts showed 22%; nor can we

attribute it to the foreigners, because there were seven hundred

thousand native-born illiterates in the first draft. The chief of the

Americanization Bureau estimates that there are three and a half million

native-born adults who cannot read any language.

Also it is worth while to glance at the physical condition of our

people. More than one-third of the country’s best manhood between the

ages of twenty-one and thirty-one was disqualified because of physical

defects; and another large percentage was later rejected for the same

reason. One-fourth of all college boys were rejected—it would appear

that shouting at football games does not constitute the whole of

physical training. A report of the committee on health problems of the

National Council of Education estimates that three-fourths of our

twenty-five million school children are suffering from physical defects;

the professor of physical education at Columbia University tells us that

25% of our school children are underfed, while from 50 to 75% have

defective teeth. You would think that our plutocracy would be concerned

about these matters, even on purely business grounds. Taking the state

of Massachusetts, one million workers lose an average of nine days a

year from sickness, which means in wage losses and medical bills

$40,000,000, and $35,000,000 a year additional expenses to the state.

We spend on our school children less than fifty dollars per child per

year, which does not seem a munificent sum. Let us see what we spend per

teacher. The United States Bureau of Education has provided up-to-date

figures, in a study of rural school salaries for the year 1923, covering

one-half the counties in the United States. The number of “one-teacher

schools” reported was 97,758, and the average salary was $729. Sixty

dollars and seventy-five cents per month will keep a teacher alive, but

it won’t keep her a teacher. According to a bulletin of the National

Education Association, there are approximately 600,000 public school

teachers, and one-fourth of them serve in the schools two years or less,

and half of them serve less than five years; in other words, teaching is

a temporary job, by which the teacher earns pin money until she can get

a husband or something better. Naturally these teachers do not trouble

to acquire fitness for their work; one-sixth of them are under twenty

years of age, and half of them have no professional preparation

whatever. Ten per cent have no education beyond the eighth grade, while

half have no more than four years beyond the eighth grade; in other

words, the teachers know as much as the pupils will know at the end of

the school work—and no more!

These figures include the city schools, whose teachers have considerably

more training. Let us see what reward they get for this extra training.

The National Chamber of Commerce, in its survey of school salaries

covering 359 cities, shows that in 1919-’20 more than half the male

elementary teachers were receiving less than $1262 a year; their

salaries had increased 33% in six years, while the cost of living

increased 104%. So naturally the men teachers are leaving the public

schools; from 1880 to 1915 the percentage of men teachers fell from

42.8% to 9.6%; and this was before the increase in the cost of living!

Said the “Bankers’ Magazine,” discussing this question (January, 1919;

the Bankers’ Publishing Co., New York): “We pay the day laborer more

than the teacher because he is worth more—because he produces a service

of greater value to society—just as the corporation manager is paid more

than the preacher.”

Who is to blame for illiteracy in America? Is it the fault of the

children and of the parents, or is it the fault of the propertied

classes, who will not furnish schools for the poor? Upon the opening of

the public schools, September, 1923, it appears that in New York, the

richest city in the world, 150,000 children can receive only part time

instruction, while 200,000 will be taught in double sessions; of the

high school pupils more than two-thirds will have to be content with

less than normal instruction. Los Angeles is even worse, with 16% of its

pupils unseated; Chicago follows with 12%. In the year 1921, with

one-sixth of its population in the public schools, the propertied

classes of the country saw fit to tax but one cent and a half in every

hundred dollars of their income, to provide housing for the school

children. The National Chamber of Commerce reports that 37% of city

school buildings are fire-traps, and only 5% are considered fire-proof.

There is a strong movement under way for federal expenditures upon

education. Educators recite that our government spent $600,000 for a

book about horses; we spend $30,000,000 annually on the prevention of

diseases in hogs and cattle, and the destroying of insects which injure

crops; so surely we ought to spend something on the child! But this

money will have to be spent through our present political machines; and

consider the figures of ex-Congressman John Baer, who made a study of

federal educational expenditures, and showed that out of more than

thirty million dollars appropriated for educational purposes, our chief

educational agency, the Bureau of Education, expended less than one per

cent in actual administration of education. “Federal educational

activities are now directed through more than eighty different offices,

divisions, bureaus, commissions, and other agencies of the government.”

Such is “red tape” in Washington; and if you follow the strands of this

tape, you find it extending to all the seven hundred thousand school

rooms of the country. We have seen our “great educators” keeping the

teachers in submission by loading them with routine work, reports,

questionnaires, examinations and re-examinations. The most universal

complaint of the school teachers, from Los Angeles to Boston, and from

Minnesota to Mississippi, has to do with this administrative and routine

labor, taking up their time and destroying their eyesight and their

nerves. This of course is the very essence of machine education, the

running of schools by business men on the quantity production basis. It

occurred to the National Council of Teachers of English to make a survey

of conditions in their profession, and they found that the average

teacher had four hours of “theme” reading to do every day, while the

average high school teacher had five hours. Many reported that they

skipped and skimmed through every paper, others destroyed the great bulk

of them unread and gave credit without reading. In high schools the

teachers of English were required to take care of 125 pupils per

teacher! Needless to say, the survey reports that teachers of English

are overworked, underpaid, underequipped and underestimated.

A detailed picture of this routine in one school is given in a paper,

“Should English Teachers Teach?” by Edwin M. Hopkins, professor of

English at the University of Kansas, and editor of the “English

Journal.” Professor Hopkins complains that English teachers do not have

time to teach English, because of the other kinds of work piled upon

them by those who run the great educational factories. Many teachers, it

appears, have to do janitor work, because the schools have no janitor

and divide such work among the teachers. Practically all teachers have

to do “school bookkeeping.” In one school the supervisor has provided

printed forms with finely divided blanks, in which the teachers have to

fill in information concerning no fewer than sixty items. These printed

forms vary in size, from ordinary cards to sheets fifteen by twenty

inches; there are “quarantine cards, record cards for office and

superintendent, record of transfer to other schools, registration cards,

three forms of attendance reports, inventories, seating charts,

duplicate schedules”; records must be kept of “absence excuses, term

record sheets, duplicate attendance slips, library cards and library

service, correspondence duty, telephone duty, patrol duty, meeting

parents, care of lockers and keys, returning lost books to pupils.”

A single item, the filling out of a library or text-book card for each

pupil, occupies seven full hours of the teacher’s time for the pupils of

a single section; and this principal makes six sections, of from fifty

to sixty-five pupils each, the regular assignment of his English

teachers. Other details include the filling in of from forty to a

hundred separate items on each of the room cards; also the making of

more than seventy entries of each pupil’s full name and room number, on

the seat-charts of every recitation-room, for each recitation-hour and

subject—there being fifteen or twenty of these for each teacher. Then

there are “schedule cards,” handled by a special committee of three

members assisted by ten or twelve volunteers. This takes two or three

weeks of each semester, and the classes have to wait, doing no work

while this is going on. Then there is the “checking of assembly-room

slips,” an average of eight slips per pupil in a section of forty

pupils. Each of these three hundred and twenty must be checked in its

proper compartment on the individual pupil’s room card, which is ruled

for fifty compartments. “For this item of duty no time allowance

whatever is made.”

And if you trace all this back to its source, you will find it runs in a

straight line, through Professor George D. Strayer and President

Nicholas Murray Butler, to J. P. Morgan, the elder. I have mentioned

that Strayer himself is the author of an elaborate series of

card-systems, which are sold in quantities to teachers; and you will

find that the young men and women who come out from Strayer’s mill are

never happy till they get settled at some job of “scoring.” Thus one

Columbia man is marking a city map with a red dot for every high school

student in each city block. Another writes to a book publisher, asking

for one hundred free copies of six different text-books—he is testing

out text-books, a thousand different volumes, using one hundred copies

of each. Two other Columbia men, with the highest degrees, have been

“scoring” history topics; they have marked subjects mentioned in

seventeen leading magazines for five years, a total of 92,000

references, showing how many times Columbus is named, and Magellan, and

Theodore Roosevelt! They publish this in the “Journal of Educational

Research,” of which Strayer is co-editor.

And every teacher’s college throughout the United States becomes a

little Columbia, with some little “Nicholas Miraculous” at its head. I

have a friend who was brought up within the shadow of such a place, and

writes me what is going on. Listen:

The education of the future high school teachers in Nebraska is

largely in control of the teachers’ college of the state university.

And the teachers’ college has a compact, steam-roller organization run

by a group from Columbia University, who are known to the irate

professors in the other colleges of the university as “the Columbia

ring.” They direct very nearly the whole course of the candidates for

the teachers’ certificates, and you who know Columbia can easily

imagine how they direct it. There is wild war between the “Columbia

ring” and the more liberal professors in the arts and science college,

but the dear little teachers-to-be never hear anything about it. They

go out to their various schools with their life’s ideas supplied to

them ready made, and with the fine “morale”—in the building of which

the teachers’ college prides itself—to safeguard them against getting

any new ideas.

This young lady goes on to explain that so far as she knows, the

Columbia ring are “perfectly sincere and earnest gentlemen,” and no one

has ever heard of the financial powers taking a hand in the matter. I am

advising this correspondent to consult “The Goose-step,” and see who it

was that paid for the costly education of these Nebraska educators. All

the contributors are Wall Street gentlemen who never contributed a

dollar in their lives without being certain that they got two dollars’

worth; and if they can train great educators to serve their interests

sincerely and earnestly—and without knowing it—is not that exactly the

way the driver of a dray-horse likes the horse to be?

CHAPTER LXXVII

THE EDUCATIONAL MILLS

The “little red school-house” may of course be anything, depending on

the individual teacher. In our two hundred thousand “one-teacher”

schools, there are many which are jolly and human, and many which are

efficient, and many which are places of irritability and oppression. But

the characteristic product of our modern system is the big school, the

great educational mill, run by efficiency experts on a quantity

production basis. These huge machines are but little influenced by

individual personalities; they acquire momentum of their own, and grind

up everything which gets in their way. These are the institutions in

which our modern “great educators” specialize; the science of running

them is what you get from experts such as Professor Strayer, head of the

Department of Educational Administration of Columbia University.

From the state of Pennsylvania survey of the schools of Philadelphia, I

take this picture of a well disciplined school:

The teachers in charge watched very carefully and jotted down notes of

the slightest transgressions. All pupils raising their eyes from their

books were liable to punishment. The principal believed that the

amount of study done by pupils in the study hall depended upon the man

in charge. The strictest policing would produce the best results. The

practice was clearly one of coercion and pressure.

And now let us skip one-half the continent and visit the high school at

Superior, Nebraska, where a young lady of my acquaintance was a teacher

three or four years ago; she writes:

The much-vaunted “discipline” of this school included an iron-clad

military regime which forbade pupils ever to run up or down stairs or

to cut corners in passing between classes. When classes were

dismissed, two teachers were required to stand in the hall to see that

nobody cut a corner or took two steps at a time. During general

assembly, when the whole school was gathered together, all the

teachers were required to be in the auditorium and each was assigned

two rows of students to watch during the program. No teacher was

allowed to sit down during assembly, as she was expected to be

watching her rows and seeing that no students exchanged a remark. The

students not unnaturally referred to the school as “the penitentiary,”

and while they were still as mice when the superintendent was looking,

the place seethed with suppressed revolt. Any sort of meanness that

could be done on the sly was a short cut to glory, and teachers were

fair game for anybody who could torment them and get away with it.

And now skip the other half of the continent, and read part of a letter

from Mrs. Edith Summers Kelley, author of a splendid novel, “Weeds.”

Mrs. Kelley describes what is happening to her two children in the

schools of San Diego, California:

At the “Junior High” which my little girl, aged eleven, attends, they

are given no time to play at all. The children race directly from one

classroom to another and have only half an hour for lunch. There is no

chance whatever to form individual friendships, for as the twelve

hundred race from classroom to classroom they are continually changing

roommates and instead of school friendships there is simply a

confusion of half familiar faces soon forgotten. My little girl still

exchanges letters with the friends she made in school in Imperial

Valley. But since she came here she has not made one friend. She could

leave the school tomorrow without the slightest regret for it or any

person, teacher or pupils in it. This seems to me a most damaging

thing to say about a school.

At the “Junior High” they keep strict account of time. If a child has

to go to the toilet during a class he or she is given a “detention

slip” and has to stay after school the length of time that he was out

of the classroom. This sounds like burlesque; but the child tells me

that it is the sober truth. Of course they stuff them at both schools

with flag saluting and patriotic songs, etc. Among other things they

have taken the “Anvil Chorus” from “Il Trovatore” and set to it some

didactic-patriotic words. “With peace and union throughout our happy

land,” is all that the children remember; but you will agree with me

that it is enough.

There is a very strong tendency in both schools to subordinate

individual consciousness to group consciousness. Both of my children

are strongly individualistic, though differently so, and they resent

this. The children are taught they should be “loyal” to their country,

still more so to their state and city, and quite belligerently so to

their school. They have cheer leaders, school yells and songs, and

they hire men to coach the boys in their games so that they can beat

the teams of other schools. The aim seems to be not to encourage the

individual characteristics of a child but to make them all as nearly

as possible alike. My little girl is possessed of insatiable mental

curiosity, and yet she hates the school. This being the case, it seems

to me the fault must be with the school.

The point for you to get is that all this is training for “democracy.”

The teacher in Nebraska just quoted confesses that she was a “misfit,”

and explains the reason:

It seemed so perfectly inane to me to try to bring up citizens for a

democracy under a system which is an old-style bureaucracy. The school

board vents its lust for authority on the superintendent, the

superintendent takes it out on the principal, the principal takes it

out on the teachers, and the teachers take it out on the classes. The

one unforgivable crime seems to be for student, teacher, principal or

superintendent to be “disloyal” or “insubordinate” to the upper layers

of the hierarchy.

With all the discipline and regimentation, just how much do the pupils

succeed in learning? Dean Marshall of the University of Chicago was

chairman of the Committee on Correlation of Secondary and Collegiate

Education, and he examined the first hundred and fifty freshmen who

registered for the School of Commerce and Administration at his

university. He found that of these students, 59% had had no modern

history, 24% no United States history, 86% no English history, 92% no

industrial history, 39% no civics, 72% no economics, 98% no sociology.

And in the courses which they do take, how much do they learn? I think I

do not exaggerate in saying that there is general complaint throughout

the country that they learn far less than they should. Two illustrations

come to me while I am writing. The first is from the San Francisco

“Examiner,” November 10, 1923, and I quote it without change:

Failure of students in the sophomore year at the Sacramento high

school to solve problems involving the subtraction of 2 from 3 was

announced today in connection with arithmetic examinations recently

given to 500 pupils at the institution. In multiplying 3 by 2 eleven

students failed, the test papers show, while fifteen gave incorrect

answers when asked to divide 6 by 3. Though a check of the examination

papers has not yet been completed, early returns establish that 416

boys and girls could not multiply a mixed decimal by a plain decimal.

The second is from the New York “Times,” July 22, 1923, and presents a

column of data collected from examination papers on “current events” in

the high schools of a Tennessee city. The “Times” mercifully withholds

the name of this city—no doubt figuring that all are alike. Prizes were

offered, and 1,160 high school students entered a competition, to answer

a list of sixty questions; the first discovery was that less than 28%

knew the name of the governor of their own state! Michael Collins, Irish

Free State leader, was described as “ex-President of England,” “a noted

boot-legger,” “real estate agent,” “head of labor union,” “manager

Boston Red Sox,” “Chicago ball player,” “manager of Piggly-Wiggly

store.” Clara Barton was classified as a “movie actress,” “nurse whom

the Germans murdered,” “race horse,” “noted writer,” “woman who is to

sing for Kosmos Club,” “candidate for Mayor of a city,” “an unmarried

woman who lives in exile.” It would appear that not many students in

these Tennessee high schools have read “The Goose-step”; for when they

were asked to identify Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, they guessed:

“President Harding’s private physician,” “a well-known Bible teacher,”

“newspaper editor,” “a leader in the medical convention,” “minister,”

“writer and essayist.” Needless to say, they scored a hundred per cent

of correctness on the identity of “Babe” Ruth; and they doubtless would

have done the same for “Fatty” Arbuckle; and who won the last prizefight

or the last world’s baseball series, and who are Mutt and Jeff, and have

we any bananas today. On the other hand, it would have been easy to

frame questions dealing with the higher culture, on which the high

school students would have scored one hundred per cent of failure. Mr.

O. G. Wood, for four years a teacher and for two years clerk of the

school board of Butte, Montana, writes:

The average American boy of today does not care a fig about the

beautiful and art side of life. He wants to see the wheels go round

and run an automobile and fix a spark plug. He is not studious. The

foreign-born boy or the boy born of foreign parentage is far more

studious than the American boy, and I have made an especial study of

this subject right in the class room. The American boy wants to “get

by.” He will shuffle in and out of every class he can. He “fakes” from

morning to night with all kinds of lies and excuses on his mind. It is

doubtful if a single parent will think their boy does this, yet there

are millions of them in the country.

In the course of our travels from city to city we have seen our

miseducated school children indulging in rowdyism, patronizing

boot-leggers, racing in high-powered automobiles, and spending the night

at road-houses. Someone with a sense of humor sends me a copy of a Texas

newspaper, the Dallas “Morning News,” October 4, 1923, in which there

are three items on one page, which seem to have been especially placed

to vindicate my thesis concerning American education. The first item

tells that a committee of preachers are investigating the Southern

Methodist University, to make sure that no one is teaching modern

science. The second reports the director of physical training at this

university, speaking at a luncheon of the Junior Chamber of Commerce,

telling the youngsters that “foot-ball is character building and

training for life.” The third item tells how nine boys and five girls

have been arrested and thrashed, either by their parents or their

principals, for raiding a Jewish synagogue and doing more than a

thousand dollars worth of damage. The Junior Ku Klux Klan!

CHAPTER LXXVIII

DESCENSUS AVERNO

The person who can tell us about the morals of our school children is

Ben B. Lindsey, judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. Lindsey knows,

not merely because he has been on the job for twenty-five years, but

because he has evolved a technique for getting this particular

information. The children come to him literally by thousands—not merely

to tell him their troubles, but to ask his advice on every sort of

question. Instead of sending delinquent children to jail, Lindsey has

fought and exposed the gang politicians, the saloon-keepers, the

proprietors of wine-rooms and dives who were preying on the young. At

every election he has been fought by these powers, backed by the money

of Big Business; he has been supported and elected by the children and

their friends. “Our little Ben,” they call him; and “court” is more like

a home—or like what a school ought to be.

The first principle upon which Lindsey proceeds is that he never

“snitches.” Several times the powers that rule Denver have threatened to

send him to jail, and on one occasion they fined him five hundred

dollars for contempt of court, because he refused to betray a child’s

confidence. As I write, the grand jury is threatening him with

imprisonment, because he has made the statement that the abortion rate

of Denver is one thousand per year, and he will not tell who the

abortionists are, because he has learned their names from women and

school girls “in trouble.”

The Denver board of education has adopted a righteous attitude upon this

question; any teacher or principal who learns of immorality on the part

of any Denver student is required to expel the student and notify the

parents; which is an excellent way for the school authorities to keep

from knowing uncomfortable facts! Lindsey tells me of a school

superintendent who made a statement to reassure the parents: “In more

than twenty years’ experience in the Denver schools I have known of but

three of our high school girls who were guilty of immorality.” It

happened that on that very day four such girls had come to Lindsey’s

court to seek his advice! He tells me that he knew of more than three

hundred sexual cases involving high school girls in a two-year period of

investigation; and two-thirds of these girls came to him of their own

free will. More than a thousand of high school age have confessed to

him.

And, mind you, these are not servant girls and shop girls and

waitresses, the victims of poverty, but the daughters of Denver’s

leading families, copper kings and coal kings and iron kings and gold

kings and silver kings, together with the lawyers who protect their

property, and the doctors who look after their bodies, and the clergymen

who save their souls. A prominent Denver churchman dramatically

denounced Lindsey before a public body because of his attitude on the

question of censorship; and this churchman’s beloved daughter, a high

school student, had confided her troubles to Lindsey, who helped her to

be secretly treated for venereal infection! Another minister’s daughter

became involved with the son of a high-up school official; both of them

were recent high school students, and the affair developed under the

steps of a school building while the young couple were on their way from

church!

You might hunt the moving pictures through and find no stranger

incidents. Here comes a father, one of the great public utility men, who

has been fighting Lindsey tooth and nail in politics. Now the man is

broken; he has discovered that his beloved daughter is in trouble, and

he is going to shoot the youth who seduced her. But Lindsey persuades

him to wait, and the man promises to come back next day; he comes, and

in Lindsey’s chambers, by a coincidence not of Lindsey’s planning, he

meets his own son. The son, thinking the father has been brought there

to confront him, breaks down and tells how he, the son, is responsible

for the pregnancy of a young girl!

At the railroad station, as Lindsey and I were parting, a costly

limousine came rolling up, and three fashionable society beauties

alighted, together with an elderly gentleman. They were the sort of

people you see pictured in the fashion plates and advertisements of

motor cars; Lindsey remarked to me: “One of those three girls came to my

court. She was too rich to attend high school, she went to our fanciest

and most expensive finishing school for young ladies; and she got into

trouble, one night on the way home from the country club. She went away

for two months and had her baby, and I saw to its adoption. I wanted the

mother to “adopt” it herself, some day after marriage; but her nerve

failed her. There are just five people who know—the girl and myself, a

doctor and a nurse, and a prominent young business man, who happened to

have a wife already. I suppose that if the girl’s father knew, he’d drop

dead on the spot.”

Lindsey insists that these conditions are not peculiar to Denver; on the

contrary, matters are worse in other big cities. He attributes the evil

in part to the prudery of parents; more girls are “ruined” by the

attitude of their parents and teachers than by the girls’ own acts. The

parents keep the girls ignorant, and drive them to rebellion by their

unwillingness to face the facts of life. Lindsey himself tries to tell

the parents, but they will not listen; they prefer to “spit on Lindsey’s

shoes”—such was a resolution before the Real Estate Exchange in 1914,

when the miners’ wives whose children had been burned in the Ludlow

massacre were taken by Lindsey to interview President Wilson in

Washington. It happens many times that Lindsey gets permission from some

girl to tell the girl’s parents; he sends for the parents, and starts to

tell them, and there come looks of incredulity and even of rage—he is

accusing their precious children, and the parents are up in arms to deny

the charge and defend their offspring.

I told you how Lindsey has been barred from speaking in the Denver high

schools. All over the country he is invited to speak in other schools—on

his last lecture trip he spoke to thirty-five thousand adolescent boys

and girls. He talked to them “straight”; but now and then a principal

would timidly ask him to avoid “improper” subjects. In one city he was

informed that it would be “distasteful to the school board,” who

expected to be present, if he were to discuss “love, marriage, or

divorce.” He omitted these delicate matters; but after the lecture fifty

children, mostly girls, crowded about him, begging him to answer

questions. And what were the questions? What did he think about

marriage, divorce, love and beauty! Here were these starved little souls

pining for real knowledge about the vital things of their lives; and it

was “distasteful to the school board” to permit them to learn!

A still more powerful cause is the example which the parents of these

children are setting. Many are brought up in luxurious homes, with a

multitude of servants; they are used to every gratification, automobiles

and chauffeurs and extravagant clothes. They hear the smart talk of the

young matrons, they read the literature of the new license, they go to

the movies and drink the poisons of Hollywood. Recently Lindsey visited

one of the fashionable hotels at Colorado Springs, and there he met a

lovely girl from a Denver high school. She made no concealment of the

fact that she was enjoying the gaieties of the season with a lover; and

when the judge remonstrated, she laughed and pointed out “Mrs.

So-and-So,” one of Denver’s leading society matrons, who was there with

a prominent business man not her husband. “Their rooms are on the same

floor as ours,” said the girl.

“Society” girls, now-a-days, know that their parents are breaking the

laws, not merely in business, but in their private lives; they take it

for granted that there is wine on every table, and booze in every

hip-pocket and vanity bag. Their religion is a fairy tale, and they have

nothing with which to replace it. They have learned about

birth-control—but not quite thoroughly, it would appear from Lindsey’s

experiences! So they have to ascertain the names and addresses of the

fashionable abortionists. The leading doctors possess the knowledge, and

will give you the “tip”; the only people who do not know are the

prosecuting authorities!

In the course of my trip I visited a certain wealthy relative. According

to the fashion of the time, this old gentleman chatted about his

bootleggers, and told how the cellar of his country home had been broken

into, and some tens of thousands of dollars worth of precious old

liquors had been stolen. But there was more to replace it—my relative

was making mint juleps for the rest of the company while he denounced

the Eighteenth Amendment. After he had said his say, and his son had

done likewise, and H. L. Mencken had agreed with them, the old gentleman

asked me: “Upton, what do you think about it?” My answer was: “I don’t

think it’s a Bolshevik plot, but if it were, it wouldn’t be different!”

The old gentleman sat up, for he was keen on Bolshevik plots. I

explained: “The poor cannot afford much liquor, so they stay sober; the

rich can afford all they want, and they get it. If this continues for

another ten years, the rich will have got to a condition where they can

no longer pull the trigger of a machine gun. So the Bolsheviks will have

their way.”

CHAPTER LXXIX

THE TEACHER’S JOB

We have seen what becomes of the child in the great educational mill.

Let us now see what becomes of the teacher. Let us inquire, to begin

with, how the teacher gets in; put yourself in the position of the

graduate of a high school or normal school who wishes to enter the cheap

and easy profession. I consult a book called “Out of Work,” by Frances

A. Kellor, a detailed study of the problems of unemployment in America.

Turning its pages, I realize what a vast trap for the poor our country

is—and how little the teachers count in the mass of misery! The problem

of jobs for teachers gets only eight or ten out of the five hundred and

forty-nine pages of this book.

The placement of educators has fallen into the hands of great private

agencies. These “teachers’ bureaus” have set up the claim that they are

not common employment agencies, and on this basis have generally escaped

license fees and regulations. They collect from the teachers a fee,

somewhere from two to five dollars, usually called a “consultation fee”;

it gives you the high privilege of having your name enrolled for one

year, and of visiting the office and asking questions of a clerk. A

great many agencies live entirely upon such fees; that is to say, they

list the teachers’ names and do nothing else. One agency charges three

dollars in its main office, and then advises you to register in ten

branch offices at one dollar each. One agency charged two dollars “for

advice only,” and when a teacher paid the money, the advice she got was:

“Try some other line, as the demand for women teachers is very small

this year.”

When you get a position, the agency claims five per cent of your first

year’s salary, and in some cases ten per cent. You have to pay the

entire sum within one or two months, and even though you lose the

position immediately afterwards, you don’t get the fee back. If you get

an increase of salary, you pay a percentage on that. If you get board as

part of your salary, you pay a percentage on that. Says Miss Kellor: “A

contract seems to give an agency a lien on a teacher for at least one

year, and sometimes for longer. It requires considerable skill to find

any rights or protection for the teachers in these contracts.” Many of

the agencies require the teachers to give them information about

vacancies, thus turning the teachers into unpaid canvassers for them.

They freely use threats of removal to compel teachers to fulfil their

unfair contracts. “A hint of ‘later information’ to a school board can

cause all kinds of trouble.”