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.”