In city after city I found school conditions like these, and in every case I found a little group of men and women opposing them, facing every handicap and humiliation. In two cities the soul and inspiration of this protest was a woman: Margaret Haley in Chicago, and Henrietta Rodman in New York. Henrietta took me in charge, and like Virgil with Dante, led me through the seven hells. She would gather a flock of teachers, and sit by while they told me their troubles in chorus. I counted upon Henrietta to read and revise this manuscript; but last spring she died, and all I can do is to tell about her, and pass on her brave and loving spirit to the future.
Henrietta Rodman came of an old New York family, dating back some two hundred years. Her great-grandfather, Colonel Robert Blackwood, was a member of the First Continental Congress, and would have signed the Declaration of Independence if his death had not intervened. I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that this fighting Colonial ancestor kept Henrietta in the school system in New York. Many and many a time he put on his ruffles and his cocked hat, and drew his rusty old sword and stormed into the presence of boards of education and superintendents, or into the columns of capitalist newspapers—to prove that his great-grand-daughter was not a Bolshevik nor an alien enemy! Under the shadow of his revolutionary banner Henrietta fought for true Americanism, with the fangs of the Tammany tiger in her flesh.
She was twenty-three years in the school system, yet she never lost her courage, her idealism, or her sense of humor. She was always full of energy, always pleading for the schools; to her pupils she was warm-hearted and loving, interested in new ideas, eager for new adventures. Her father had said to her: “Find the fundamental issue of your day, and concentrate on that.” The great-grandfather had chosen the issue of American independence; the father had chosen the issue of chattel-slavery; and Henrietta chose the issue of wage-slavery.
She had been teaching Latin at Wadleigh High School, and found that ninety-four per cent of the pupils were being forced out because they could not pass the examinations. She proceeded to teach them so that they could pass; but it was against the rule to teach that way, and the principal sent for her and scolded her. She persisted in passing her pupils, and so the city superintendent sent for her; a teacher had no right to criticize her superiors, he declared, and flew into a passion. Suddenly a light leaped into Henrietta’s eyes, and the sword of the old revolutionary colonel swished over the superintendent’s head. “If you storm at me like a primitive man I’ll shriek like a primitive woman!” So at once the superintendent calmed down!
They wanted to give her some real trouble, so they put her in charge of a hundred defective girls. At that time no one knew anything about psychological tests, or what to do with mentally defective children in the schools. Henrietta worked out a course of study by easily graded stages, which the most feeble-minded of them could follow. The principal of the school took this and published it as his own, and so stated before the board of superintendents. Some of these pupils were homeless and sick, and Henrietta got the class to adopt them; that was an unprecedented thing, altogether against the rules, and Henrietta was stormed at some more. They sent her to the Julia Richman High School, one of those terrible old barns that was built apparently before the use of paint was discovered. It was supposed to be one of the most democratic schools in New York City. “But,” said Henrietta, “we can’t call the teachers together, we can’t pass a motion, we can’t send a statement to the press or make an application to the school board, without first having the sanction of the school principal!”
There came the George Eliot incident, whereby the spotlight of publicity was turned upon this liberal teacher. She was teaching English, and some girl asked if it was true that George Eliot had lived with a man to whom she was not married. What was Henrietta to do? Should she tell the girl to hush, that was a naughty question? Or should she lie? She explained that George Henry Lewes had had an insane wife, and under the English law could not get a divorce; so he and George Eliot had lived as husband and wife, and had been so accepted by all their friends for the rest of their lifetime. One of the children took this home to her father, and the father took it to the priest, and the priest took it to the pulpit, and the New York “Times” took it to the whole city. There was a terrible uproar—it is so that reputations are made in the radical movement. We have to do something queer or unusual, something supposed to be shocking; and we must manage to be right while we are doing it!
Next came the uproar over married teachers. The board passed a rule that women teachers who got married should automatically lose their jobs; so the women took to concealing their marriages. But now and then one could no longer be concealed, and there would be a case of what Henrietta called “mother-baiting.” The board of education caught one woman about to become a mother, and Henrietta wrote a satirical letter to the newspapers. For this she was suspended for eight months without pay. As she said: “They fined me eighteen hundred dollars, and then they adopted my idea. They have always adopted my ideas, and have always fined me for making them adopt them.”
Henrietta, like myself, supported the war. She was head of a “team” that sold fifteen thousand dollars worth of Liberty bonds; but that did not save her from being “investigated” by military intelligence agents. They got hold of her pupils while she was away; the agents were suspicious, because she had been teaching from Frederic C. Howe’s book, “European Cities at Work.” They discovered that what she had been teaching from the book was city planning. But it was an offense at that time to let children know that the Germans planned their cities well!
Henrietta was summoned by Superintendent Tildsley. She had been making a disturbance because the spy department was having the pupils write essays on Bolshevism as a means of finding out what the children were being taught at home. Henrietta brought along a stenographer to take down the interview—so little trust did she have in Dr. Tildsley; but they would not let the stenographer take notes. They summoned her again before the board. She had written a letter to the Brooklyn “Eagle,” and the “Eagle” had not published it, but had turned it over to the board. They had an assistant district attorney present to try to twist her statements; they had no evidence, but they tried to get some out of her, luring her into testifying against herself. They furnished a stenographer for this meeting, and when she got the stenographer’s transcript it had been “doctored.” In American political life today you must realize that you are dealing, quite literally, with criminals in office, and there is no limit to what they will do to you.
At this time Henrietta was organizing the high school teachers, and the principal forbade them to meet unless he was present; so it was that the principals took to carrying step-ladders and peering over the transoms, to see if the teachers were violating orders. Said Henrietta: “One might think, if we are fit to teach the children in the schools, we are fit to meet and discuss our own problems and ideas. But, no! Here are a million children and twenty-five thousand teachers, and all the thinking for the whole system is to be done by twenty-two men. If anybody else presumes to think, that is impertinence.”