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.”