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.