It is not often that the gang is so frank as that, so we owe thanks to Superintendent Ettinger. Wishing to give him all the fame to which he is entitled, I mention that to a reporter of the New York “Call” he declared that he would bar H. G. Wells from the school forums of New York for having said that Lenin was a great man!
CHAPTER XVIII
THE LUSKERS
This campaign to make the schools safe for the plutocracy culminated in the passage of the so-called “Lusk laws” at Albany. Senator Lusk was a Republican machine politician, who accepted 137 pieces of silverware, worth a couple of thousand dollars, from New York police detectives, for whom he had got a salary raise. This did not put the Senator out of business, nor did it interfere with his laws, which disgraced the statute books of the state for four years. One of the laws was for the purpose of suppressing the Rand School of Social Science. They had already attempted this by a raid on the school and they now attempted it by a law requiring all schools to apply for a license. The Rand School refused to apply, and a long-drawn-out and expensive legal conflict followed.[[C]]
[C]. In “The Goose-step” it is stated that when the “Luskers” raided the Rand School they “threw the typewriters and the teachers down the stairs.” I am informed that this is an error; the throwing in question occurred at the office of the New York “Call,” the Russian People’s House, and other places. I talked the other day with a magazine writer who was present at the raid on the Russian People’s House, when a New York police detective ordered an inoffensive elderly Russian teacher to take off his eye-glasses, and then hit the man in the forehead with the butt of his revolver and crushed his skull. The offense of this elderly Russian was teaching algebra to other Russians.
Another of the Lusk laws provided for the expulsion of any teacher who “advocates a form of government other than the government of the United States or of this state.” Please note that this law did not forbid merely the advocacy of violent change, but also of peaceful change. Interesting light was thrown on this during the debate at the Civic Club, previously referred to in these chapters. Mr. Harry Weinberger asked of Dr. Tildsley the question: “Did you ever, in your entire experience in the school system, hear a teacher, either in school or out of school, advocate the overthrow of the government by violence?” Dr. Tildsley answered, “No.” The next question was: “Then what is the need of the law?” Dr. Tildsley did not answer that; he could not very well explain that the purpose of the law was to make it possible for inquisitors, appointed by the state and by the school board, to summon teachers without warning to a secret inquisition, to browbeat them and try to trap them into dangerous admissions, then to give secretly to the capitalist press false and garbled statements, to be spread broadcast over the country, and then to refuse to the teachers any record of the proceedings, or any protection against such outrages.
The Teachers’ Union issued resolutions denouncing this legislation, and the bigotry and dishonesty displayed in its enforcement. Abraham Lefkowitz, an active member of the Union, was summoned before Dr. Tildsley and Superintendent Ettinger, to be questioned as to his authorship of these resolutions. Superintendent Ettinger had issued an official syllabus on the war, setting forth to all school teachers what they were to teach. It was a compendium of what we now know to be the knaveries of Allied propaganda, and included endorsement of universal military training. In the course of the questioning of Lefkowitz, Dr. Tildsley and Dr. Ettinger got into a wrangle as to whether universal military service and universal military training were the same thing. All this was taken down by a stenographer, and subsequently Mr. Lefkowitz demanded a copy of the record; when he got it, he found that it had been doctored, omitting a great number of the “raw” statements made by Ettinger, which the superintendent realized would not look well in print.
There was an open forum being conducted at the Commercial High School, under the direction of the Rev. John Haynes Holmes. The authorities now required that this open forum should submit a week in advance the names of all proposed speakers. They barred Frank Tannenbaum, an East Side boy who had gone to jail in 1913 as a result of a demonstration of the unemployed, and who subsequently, as a student at Columbia University, had made himself an authority on prison reform. They barred Lincoln Steffens for the offense of having been President Wilson’s personal investigator in Russia. Finally, some one asked Dr. Holmes a question about Lenin, and he replied that he regarded Lenin as a great statesman. For this they barred Dr. Holmes. Then came the Rev. Howard Melish, prominent clergyman of Brooklyn, who praised Dr. Holmes and condemned the board of education. After that the board issued a pledge, which must be signed by all speakers. Among those who refused to sign it was Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; and so the board closed the forum. As one of the teachers said to me, “What they want people to lecture about is Moonlight in Venice.”
This kind of thing had been going on in the New York school system for five years when I visited the city in the spring of 1922. At this time the state commissioner of education, in pursuance of the Lusk laws, had appointed an “advisory council” to investigate suspected teachers and deny them licenses. One of the members of this council was Archibald Stevenson, fanatical attorney for the Luskers. Another was Conde B. Pallen, editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and snooper-in-chief for the National Civic Federation. Another was Finley J. Shepard, husband of Helen Gould; you may read about this gentleman’s activities on behalf of the plutocracy in two chapters of “The Goose-step,” entitled “The Helen Ghouls” and “The Shepard’s Crook.” Another member was Hugh Frayne, Catholic labor leader, who has climbed to power upon the faces of the deluded wage-workers of New York.