The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

In 1916 and 1917, something happened which shook the teachers of Los Angeles into action; their wages were suddenly cut to about forty per cent of what they had been before. Or, to put it in the more common formula, the cost of everything the teachers had to buy with their money increased a hundred and thirty per cent; and meantime their wages remained as in 1914. They were unable to live, and fifty-six per cent of them were forced to do additional outside work. So the teachers’ associations began a salary campaign, which for the first time brought them out of the classrooms and into contact with the real life of Los Angeles. The campaign lasted intermittently for four or five years, and the outcome of it was tragedy for the teachers and comedy for the reader.

One of the purposes for which Mrs. Dorsey had been made superintendent was to hold the salaries down; and in her effort to break the resistance of the teachers, she served notice upon them that they must sign their contracts for the next year before the end of the old term—and this although legally they had until twenty days after the end of the term. She would be very sorry not to see their faces next year, she told them, and smiled amiably. When some said that they did not want to return, her smile was still amiable. “You’ll be back,” she said. “Teachers have gone out before this and tried to do something else.”

The president of the City Teachers’ Club made herself obnoxious by calling a meeting of the teachers for four o’clock one afternoon—that is to say, after the closing hour of the schools. Mrs. Dorsey, desiring to forestall her, closed the schools at half past one that afternoon. Hitherto Mrs. Dorsey had maintained that the schools must never be closed for special occasions; but now she closed them, and called the teachers together at half past one to listen to an address of her own. Some teachers thought it was her idea that they should be tired out and go home before their own meeting at four o’clock!

But the dissatisfaction of the teachers did not abate. A hundred of the best had left, and three hundred more were refusing to renew their contracts for the coming year; so the business men realized that some concession had to be made. Manifestly, it would not do to let it come as a result of teacher agitation; it must be due to the loving concern of business men. Mr. Sylvester Weaver, head of the “education committee” of the Chamber of Commerce, was called in, and he organized a committee of leading citizens, including Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. Somebody had “put over” on the teachers a publicity agent, a gentleman with a big cigar in his mouth and a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat. He now advised the teachers to drop their agitation and allow the business men to handle it; let the grand committee retire and do some grand thinking. So for five weeks the teachers preserved an awed silence.

They wanted a flat raise of a thousand dollars a year, and they proved that this amount was not enough to raise the lowest salary to ante-war standards. The committee, when it finally emerged from its thinking-bee, endorsed this demand; but at once the business men set up a howl—and so Mr. Weaver wrote to the board of education that he regarded the thousand dollars increase for teachers as a great and noble ideal to be worked for—in the course of time! The committee went before the board of supervisors, which said that it would be impossible for the teachers to have that much money; the committee went before the board of education, which said there was no use asking what the supervisors refused. The discontent of the teachers burst into flame again; the committee retired and did more thinking; and finally it was announced that the taxpayers of Los Angeles intended to perform an act of unprecedented generosity toward the teachers—every single one was to have a raise of three hundred dollars a year!

This amount made the average salary just one-half what it was before the war; and in a month or two rents went up and absorbed most of this. One landlord said to a teacher friend of mine: “You’ve just got a raise, and I’m going to have my share!” Recently the Chamber of Commerce of Hollywood invited the hungry teachers to a banquet, and informed them that for the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year they should learn to live on respect. On the place-cards of the hungry teachers they printed “A Tribute”:

To the Teachers of Tomorrow’s Manhood and Womanhood:

To you, who bless mankind by the devotion of your lives to a noble vocation, we declare our gratitude! In your charge we have placed the responsibility of tomorrow, and your performance of that sacred duty makes us all your debtors. Your calling is the highest in the social order; your reward is the most valued of possessions—respect.

The advantage of this salary campaign to the teachers was not the money, but the education they got. For the first time a few of them began to think about their board of education, and who was on it, and why. Some even took up the suggestion that the teachers’ organizations should affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. What indignation this excited in our “open-shop” city should hardly need telling; the Better America Federation set forth its ideas in a two-column advertisement in the newspapers of San José:

Teachers must keep aloof alike from politics and industrial discussions. Teachers are beginning to be regarded as wards of the State. Teachers, like soldiers, owe their first and only allegiance to the State.