THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
We have noted Professor Egbert of the University of J. P. Morgan &
Company, advising the workers to avail themselves of the existing
college system—in other words, to let the capitalists do their educating
for them. “Won’t you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly.”
Just what labor education turns into when it is superintended by the
existing educational authorities was amusingly demonstrated at Bryn
Mawr, a very aristocratic college for women located near Philadelphia,
and having the president of an insurance company for its treasurer, and
for its grand duke the president of a steel company and a trust company,
vice-president of a national bank and director of a sugar company.
We have seen President Thomas of Bryn Mawr branded in the Denver “Post”
as a dangerous radical, and we now discover the basis of the charge; she
started a movement to educate working girls! The idea was that the
brightest and most promising members of labor unions should come to Bryn
Mawr in the summer and be taught by professors from various colleges.
This, of course, was a step in the right direction, and I have no desire
to belittle it; though I should have liked to see the further provision
that at the same time the young ladies of Bryn Mawr should take the
places of the working girls in the factories.
I have no doubt whatever that this experiment was well meant; but in its
working out it revealed the impossibility of honesty under our present
class system. In raising money it was set forth that the purpose of the
plan was to bring the working girls into touch with the cultured classes
and break down the spirit of class consciousness. Then, after the money
was got, it was necessary to get the girls; and so the unions were told
that the purpose of the plan was to make the girls into more efficient
and capable leaders of unions.
Bryn Mawr has received a heavy endowment from John D. Rockefeller; a
hall is named for him, and also a gateway. The organizers of the summer
school were getting up a prospectus telling of the plan, and they put on
the cover a photograph, with the name “Rockefeller Gateway.” But at the
last moment it occurred to someone that this might not look well to the
unions, so the label “Rockefeller” was left off, and the photograph went
out with the caption, “A Gateway.”
I met three different professors who were invited to come to Bryn Mawr
and teach at this summer session; one of them, Professor H. W. L. Dana,
whom we saw turned out of Columbia University as a scapegoat for the
pacifism of Nicholas Miraculous. Professor Dana had an interview with
President Thomas, in which the terms of the engagement were laid down to
him. There were to be no social relationships with the working girls, no
tennis dates, no activities outside the classes. His subject was to be
literature, and he was to avoid dangerous writers, such as Morris,
Whitman and Ruskin; he was to teach literature as art, and not as part
of the labor movement.
On the train going home, Professor Dana decided that his academic
dignity had been infringed upon; therefore he sent a telegram to
President Thomas, saying that he was unable to agree to the terms. He
sent a copy of this telegram to Rose Schneiderman, one of the working
class leaders, who had been charged with selecting the girls: the effect
of which procedure was instant collapse on the part of President Thomas.
She wrote saying that Professor Dana had entirely misunderstood her, she
had not intended anything of the sort. Dana had asked that there should
be student representation on the board controlling the experiment, and
President Thomas now said that she had had that idea in mind all along.
So they provided a system of student representation, with an open vote,
and the balance of power in the hands of Bryn Mawr graduates, who were
helping at the summer school with the title of “tutors.” A harmless
working girl, not a trades unionist, was selected as representative of
the girls.
The union girls, of course, understood perfectly what was being done to
them; they would smile to Professor Dana and say: “You must remember,
they aren’t used to democracy. You must be gentle with them. You see,
they haven’t suffered.” (Stop and think about that beautiful phrase!).
The “tutors” would gossip among themselves, telling about funny mistakes
which the working girls had made, such as not knowing to what century
Shakespeare belonged. They would correct the table manners of the
girls—and without ever thinking that the girls also had secret laughter
over the mistakes of the “tutors.” Thus, some tutor had asked: “What do
the letters A. F. of L. stand for?”—which seemed to the working girls
quite as important a matter as the date of Shakespeare’s birth. One of
the tutors asked: “Is the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
the same as the Third International?”—and that seemed the funniest thing
in the world to these union girls.
More serious matters arose quickly; for you see, these girls have
convictions, and take them just as seriously as Bryn Mawr girls take
their table manners. The first thing they did was to go to the
chambermaids and discover that these women there were working twelve and
fourteen hours a day. They proceeded to organize the women, and the
college authorities were confronted with a demand for an eight-hour
day—which they granted! They granted a number of other things before
they got through. Teaching economics and social science to union girls
was quite a different matter from teaching it to the daughters of the
leisure class. In the winter time Bryn Mawr professors can get by with
formulas, but in these summer months they had to come down to brass
tacks; for to these girls an economic theory meant some particular
place, some particular set of circumstances: “When I was in such and
such a shop,” or, “When I was on strike in New York!” This made an
entirely new thing out of the subject of economics.
Also, it made a new thing out of literature. Professor Dana was selected
to read poetry to the girls at chapel, and poetry, as we know, is an
important source of culture. Dana read one or two poems on Russia, at
which the dean in charge seemed shocked. She asked him to read poems at
least a hundred years old. Dana thought it over, and answered that he
would do so, and next morning he read in chapel two poems which were
exactly a hundred years old—Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy,” and his
Men of England, wherefore plow
For the lords who lay ye low?
This Bryn Mawr experiment was repeated last summer, with much hurrah in
the newspapers; but needless to say, Harry Dana was not one of the
teachers, and neither was a woman professor who proved too sympathetic
to the working girls. Also a Bryn Mawr teacher, who “got the vision”
from the girls, and prepared to teach some of them in the winter time,
was omitted this year. Nevertheless, the leaven works, and two of the
“tutors,” Bryn Mawr students, were arrested during the summer school
term while picketing a clothing shop in Philadelphia, during a strike by
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Once let the rich girls realize what
the poor girls suffer, and some of the rich girls will protest!
I had a pleasant experience in Cambridge. I was guest in a home which is
the shrine of pilgrims from all over the United States—that of New
England’s favorite poet and Cambridge’s most eminent citizen, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. Here lives the poet’s grandson, who is also a
grandson of Richard Henry Dana, a born teacher, and incidentally a
warm-hearted and most lovable man. Nicholas Murray Butler has not
invited him back to Columbia; nor has it occurred to President Lowell to
invite him to step around the corner from his home and lecture on the
literature of social protest to Harvard students. Nevertheless, Harry
Dana has found some teaching to do; he travels over to the Boston Labor
College, and teaches workingmen. One Sunday morning I attended a
committee meeting of this institution—several college professors and
several labor leaders, conspiring in the home of the poet Longfellow to
overturn academic authority in the United States!
Then I traveled across the continent to my home in Pasadena, and found
that Professor John Scott had been kicked out of the Pasadena High
School in the interests of one hundred percent reaction, and with the
help of progressive labor leaders had started a workers’ college in Los
Angeles. So it goes, in one city after another; any time a group of
labor men want to save the brains of their young people, they can find a
kicked-out professor; and any time a kicked-out professor is willing to
cultivate his self-respect on a little oatmeal, he can manage to get
together a group of class-conscious labor men, and can greatly increase
his influence and effectiveness. When Dana was fired from Columbia, he
lectured to classes of six and eight hundred people at the Rand School;
while Scott Nearing assures me that continuously during the eight years
since he parted from the University of Pennsylvania, he has had not
merely larger audiences, but more serious and more interesting
audiences.