Next came “The Citadel of Freedom,” by Randolph Leigh, a product of Nicholas Murray Butler’s educational machine. It was written as a Columbia doctor’s thesis, and is a panegyric of the Constitution, in which every reactionary influence in our history is glorified, and every popular influence sneered at. I have read the galley proofs of this book, as submitted to the school board of Los Angeles, and they bear at the top the tell-tale label, “Times.” Mr. Leigh appeared personally before the board of education, offering to put a copy of this book into the hands of every student orator. He was backed by a committee, including Chandler of the “Times” and Haldeman of the Better America Federation, who offered a prize of fifteen hundred dollars, or “a de luxe summer tour of the Mediterranean country,” for the best oration by any high school student using this book and its references as source material. A liberal representative on the school board objected, saying that the students should have an opportunity to hear both sides. Mr. Leigh said that he had done all the research work. The board member answered: “Our students are trained to do their own research work.” And Mrs. Dorsey sat there and did not say one word in defense of her school system!
Reactionary teachers are appointed for the express purpose of repressing originality and independence in the students. What are their standards and ideals was charmingly revealed by one of them who was discussing a certain pupil with a friend of mine. This pupil was a “leader,” said the teacher; “I know she’s a good leader—you give her something to do and she’ll do it beautifully.” The consequences of such training are seen in the so-called “Ephebian Society,” an organization formed to interest the high school alumni in public service. The choicest of the high school graduates are picked out each year, and this is a great honor—while you are graduating. After that you discover it to be a farce; because the members of the society meet and the authorities in control forbid them to take up any vital subject whatever. The Ephebians meet in the rooms of the board of education, and are permitted to spend their time raising money for the Travelers’ Aid Society, or superintending the Newsboys’ Christmas Dinner! I talked with this year’s president of the society, Lee Payne; they will never get him again, he said.
This same young man told me of his experiences when he was selected to deliver the valedictory of his class. He asked to have a liberal teacher as his guide, but was compelled to have a reactionary teacher. She assigned to him a commonplace theme, and he rejected it, and wrote on the subject of “Labor’s Right to a Share in Industry.” When he brought in his address, the teacher refused to let him deliver it; it was “too Bolsheviki,” she said, and told him that when he went into a garden he must see the beautiful red roses, and not the thorns. She practically rewrote the address for the student, and he took it off and wrote it again. The controversy continued up to a day or two before commencement, when the boy finally had to deliver an address which did not represent his own convictions.
I have mentioned favoritism among the principals and teachers; needless to say, also, that children who come from poor homes, and especially the children of foreigners, are slighted. A boy came to see me, Clarence Alpert by name, a sensitive lad, conscientious and idealistic; with tears in his eyes he told me how he had been turned out of Lincoln High School by the principal, Miss Andrus. I was familiar with the name of this lady. In an address to the school assembly she had referred to “that notorious disloyalist and traitor, Upton Sinclair.” I wrote a letter to the lady in which I mentioned my support of the war—you may find it in “The Brass Check,” pages 205-7. I served notice upon her that she would make a retraction of her statements or face a libel suit, and she preferred the former alternative.
The boy whom she had now expelled had refused to salute the flag. He was a Socialist, and believed that the flag stood for capitalism. Miss Andrus sent for him, and stormed at him; he was a Russian Jew, and she knew his kind from her experience at Hull House. They were dirty, rotten scoundrels; they were people with no ideals and no country; they were cheap material, who could not be made into good citizens and were not entitled to an education. Miss Andrus tried her best to get young Alpert to name some of the teachers who had encouraged him in his ideas; the boy was threatened with immediate dismissal if he refused to name them, but in spite of the fact that he had “no ideals,” he stood firm! Finally he was given three days in which to make up his mind and salute the flag.
Then—so the boy explained to me—one of his teachers labored with him, explaining to him that he was under a misapprehension about the flag. To be sure it was used by capitalism at the present time, but that was only because it had been stolen; in reality the flag stood for the highest ideals ever conceived by mankind, and it was our business to preserve it for those ideals, and to take it away from the exploiters and rascals. Alpert agreed to that, and went back to Miss Andrus and told her that he had realized his mistake, and that he was now ready to salute the flag as she required. But she declared that he was a hypocrite and a coward, and should not stay in the school. I went to a friend of mine, a wealthy man who happens to be a liberal. He called up a member of the school board, who went to see Miss Andrus; so in two or three days the boy was restored to school, from which he has since been graduated.
The schools are starting in this fall with what they call “codified patriotism”; a whole outfit of flummery contrived by the American Legion and the professional hundred percenters. The flag must be exactly at the top of the staff, and you must raise it briskly, and lower it slowly and reverently; you must raise your hat with your right hand, and women must put their right hand over the heart. The legislature has passed a bill, requiring that American history shall be taught “from the American viewpoint”; no longer is it to be taught from the viewpoint of truth! The children are to learn that Alexander Hamilton was a good American, but the soft pedal will be put on Thomas Jefferson. They will not be taught that the Mexican War was a disgraceful foray of greed, and that Abraham Lincoln denounced it in Congress. Instead, they will be taught all about the “Red” menace—with the columns of the “Times” for source material. At last commencement time at least six addresses by students, dealing with this subject, were featured by the “Times” in its radio service, which is devoutly followed by hundreds of thousands of wage-slaves in our community. All these addresses, of course, had been carefully censored; one or two of them were “repeated by request,” and the announcement was made that you could have a printed copy of them by application to the “Times.”
CHAPTER XII
THE SCHOOLS OF MAMMON
What becomes of the children under this regime of the Black Hand? I have talked with scores of teachers, and their testimony is unanimous, that the children’s minds are on anything in the world but study. I choose the great “L. A. High,” because that is where the children of the rich attend. One parent, a woman of refinement and sense, has tried to keep the tastes of her daughter simple and wholesome, but she tells me it is impossible, because home influence counts for nothing against the overwhelming collective power of the mass. The child comes home thrilled with excitement, telling of what the other girls have; and she must have what they have, or her happiness is ruined. It is all money; their ideal is the spending of money, their standard is what things cost. I know a lad, who tells me gravely that a fellow can’t have anything to do with girls these days; they have no interest in you but for the money you spend on them, and unless you are rich you cannot “go the pace.” About this school you will see the automobiles parked for blocks; and, of course, the youngsters who drive these cars are the social leaders, they run the school affairs, and they get the girls.
The schools are given up to athletic excitements and “assemblies”; “Aud Calls,” the students term them—that is, calls to the auditorium. They come to practice cheering; they follow the cheer leader, who tells them: “That wasn’t loud enough. Now give one for the team.” The young people come out from these affairs trembling with excitement, and they have no mind for their studies the rest of that day. Out in the halls are students waving balloons which they have bought in the bookstore; on athletic occasions, you see, it looks so lovely if everybody in the bleachers is waving toy balloons with the school colors. They will just get settled in class with their toy balloons, when there comes a call for “fire drill.” Or if such diversions are lacking, the pretty young things take out their vanity boxes and proceed to powder their noses and smear red paint on their lips, while the poor unhappy teachers are trying to put something into their silly heads. I have walked through the corridors of a high school and counted a dozen of the young things performing these toilet operations while chatting with their beaux.