Professor Lee asks about the dates of the story which the Associated Press sent out to the effect that Gaylord Wilshire had been prevented from speaking in York, Pa., by a mob, when, as a matter of fact, he was never in this city. Professor Lee makes three paragraphs out of this one demand. It happens that Wilshire is away from home. I have searched his house, but cannot find the volume of “Wilshire’s Magazine” for 1901. Maybe this volume is in the New York Public Library or in the Congressional Library. Meantime I can furnish Professor Lee with two references—the Philadelphia “North American” for Sept. 9, 1901, and the Los Angeles “Express” for the same date.
If you will consult the second edition of “The Goose-step,” you will find that on page 309 I have added in parentheses the words, “A joke.” This has to do with Mr. Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s adventures at Cornell: “When he asked to see the Dante collection, they took him to inspect an electric manure sprayer.” Several reviewers of “The Goose-step” took occasion solemnly to suspect that in this anecdote Van Loon must have been “spoofing” me! Not being supposed to have a sense of humor myself, I am resolved that in future, whenever I do any “spoofing,” or allow anybody else to do any “spoofing,” I will follow the precedent of Artemus Ward, and put in the explanation: “This is a goak.”
Another bit of comedy: In my jesting at Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago, I wrote: “They are sensitive on the subject of petroleum at the university; they blush at the mention of the word, and do not admit the conventional book-plates showing the lamp of knowledge.” This was a pure piece of phantasy on my part; some more “spoofing,” in short. But, lo and behold, soon after “The Goose-step” was out, came a letter from a former student, as follows: “One fact you got, Lord knows how, I got it straight from Dean Robertson (in an address in chapel); it is a matter of the rejection of the oil lamp as a symbol in the ‘Coat of Arms’ of the University.”
Postscript: As this book goes to press, Vassar College makes the answer to “The Goose-step” which really pleases me. A formal “statute of instruction” is issued, granting to all teachers “complete freedom of research, instruction and utterance upon matters of opinion.”
CHAPTER LXXXIX
THE CALL TO ACTION
I have now said my say, concerning both colleges and schools. I have given two years to the subject, have written nearly four hundred thousand words on it—and these words are the truth to the best of my ability. The problem is now up to the American people, and especially to the rank and file of school teachers and college professors; the tens of thousands of devoted men and women who are giving their undivided thought to a glorious ideal—the delivering of every child in a whole nation from the curse and enslavement of ignorance.
This great cause has many enemies—and some of these enemies will try to use my work to spread distrust of education, and cut down the money supplies of both colleges and schools. I wish to state explicitly that the purpose of my study is the very opposite of this; I would have the American people devote to this cause ten times the money they now devote—I would have them give all that is given, so that education may be free from the charity of the rich. But I want them, while giving their money, to give also their time; to study the schools and school problems, and see that their money is honestly spent for the children, and that educational policies are in the hands of men and women who love the children, and believe in freedom and enlightenment—not, as so often at present, in the hands of intriguing politicians, and the sycophants and hirelings of vested greed. The aim of my two books is to set our educators free from this control of selfish private interest; to awaken them to their position in a society which is ruled by organized exploitation.
When you talk with school and college administrators, you discover that the thing they crave above all other things is “harmony.” Everyone in the system must be loyal, everyone must co-operate, there must be an attitude of cheerfulness; in short, the school teacher and the college professor must comply with the formula which was frequent in the want advertisements of “domestics” in the days of my boyhood: “willing and obliging.” Manifestly, the program I have laid out in this book does not make for harmony—at least, not right away. If it would not sound too much like a Bolshevik utterance, I would say to the educator: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set the teacher at variance against the superintendent, and the professor against the president, and the educator against the board of education. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own school.”
In a social system based upon justice and freedom we have a right to ask for harmony; but where the system is based upon injustice and servitude, to ask for harmony is merely to be a tool of intrenched wrong. So my advice to teachers and professors is that they should stand up and assert themselves, and let harmony come when educational institutions are controlled by educators, and not by the owners of stocks and bonds and other symbols of parasitism.
To the educators of the United States—and also to the parents of the United States—I say: Look about this country of ours. Look at it, not through the rose-colored glasses of the capitalist press, but look with your own eyes, and ask if this is a civilization with which you are really satisfied. A country in which five per cent of the population owns ninety-five per cent of the wealth, and uses it to increase its share of income and control; in which ten per cent of the population exists always below the line of bare subsistence, unable to get food enough to maintain physical normality; in whose richest city twenty-two per cent of the children come to school suffering from undernourishment; whose city slums are growing like monstrous cancers, while the farms are being deserted because it no longer pays to work them; where tenantry and farm mortgages are increasing one or two per cent every year; where crime and prisoners in jails are increasing even faster; where between one million and five million men, willing to work, are kept unemployed all the time; where half a million women have to sell their bodies to get bread to live; where ninety-three per cent of the expenditures of government are devoted to the destroying of human lives; where the surplus wealth needed at home is not permitted to be consumed at home, but is sent abroad to seek opportunities of exploitation, to make our flag a symbol of greed, and turn our army and navy into debt-collecting agencies for Wall Street profiteers. Such is America as it really exists today; such are the facts—and ten thousand fancy-salaried administrators of education are forbidden ever to mention them, but required to tell their seven hundred thousand teacher-geese and their twenty-three million goslings that this is the greatest, the grandest, the most beautiful and most Christian country that God ever created.