Bear with me a moment. All about us yawns the pit of mediocrity. With few exceptions, the men and women and the sweet boys and girls I meet jade on me. It is appalling—their unlovely spirit—mediocrity. They are without greatness, without camaraderie, never do much of anything that is virile and stinging and resentful, nor ever feel the prod and urge of life to will over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. I can see through them and beyond them, and all there is to see is their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness and pitifulness. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly dance of an hour. As far as we are concerned in the matter they can go hang. We laugh at the ridiculous effrontery of their efforts to crystallize us in the particular mold of their two-by-two, cut-and-dried, conventional world.

Don’t you see? Beyond all of us and the spirit of us that is a-bubble whispers Romance, Adventure. We have read the books and are aflame with purple hints of a world beyond our world. When the week-ends roll around, we want to do novel and stirring things, we want to realize ourselves, to chance and boast and dare, to put laughter in our throats, and quicken the throb of our blood. Heavens! We have considered and counseled a myriad times, and the only conclusion we reached was that we were as abysmally ignorant of life as we were or thought we were profoundly wise.

We have no morality in the matter. We will be grateful for anything, providing it is provocative of the thrills and novelty we seek. And please do not consider any such insipidity as taking a hike to the country or a trip to Bear Mt. They are commonplaces, don’t you see? For instance, a séance with a medium would have been a glorious suggestion—or something more unusual. But this is only a sample of the many possible things that would lend color and individuality to our days.

So we who are merely young, appeal to you, a little naively perhaps, but with stern sincerity, in the hope that you who have passed through our stage of evolution may sympathize with us and may be able to help us in the way that we wish to be helped.

To me this letter is like a flashlight thrown suddenly upon the minds of the young people. Our whole problem of education is summed up in it; and I ask again: Would you know what to answer. I, for my part, would tell these lads to find one of the big strikes which are always going on, say in the clothing trades of New York, and attempt to read the Constitution and so come into contact with the realities of the class struggle. But, of course, a teacher who gave that advice would cease to be a teacher. Those who hold their jobs and get their promotions in the system are those who follow the mimeographed formulas, and see that the pupils read the required number of words per minute. The result is a newspaper item from the New York “Times” of May 26, 1922; I quote the first paragraph:

Two school girls were found yesterday afternoon, clasped in each other’s arms, lying on the floor of a kitchen of an apartment in the tenement house at 75 Van Alst Avenue, Long Island City. The room was filled with gas and the discovery was made just in time to save them from death by asphyxiation. The girls were Dora Boylan, 15 years old, daughter of a widow who occupied the apartment, and who at the time was at work in a factory near by, and Agnes Dougherty, also 15, of 28 Hunterspoint Avenue, Long Island City. They had made up their minds to die rather than go to school.

CHAPTER XX
MELODRAMA IN CHICAGO

Let us take next the school system of Chicago. Here is a city of three million people, with representatives of most of the races and nations and tribes of the world; a great port, a great railroad center, a meat packing and manufacturing and banking center. The owners of these industries contribute the necessary cash, and finance alternately two rival political machines; candidates are chosen who are satisfactory to the “invisible government,” and with the help of four or five great capitalist newspapers the candidates are elected. The purpose for which they are elected is to protect Big Business while it plunders the city; incidentally, and on the side, the political officials plunder all they can.

The city being a strong union center, the school teachers are organized. The grade teachers form the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, and the business representative of this federation is Margaret Haley; one of those terrible people known as a “walking delegate”—that is, she goes about among the masters of the city, asserting rights for those who are not supposed to have rights. She is hated and slandered, but continues to clamor for the teachers. For a generation the school board and politicians in chorus with the capitalist newspapers have insisted that the teachers could not be paid a living wage, the city was too poor. Nearly twenty-five years ago Margaret Haley took up the question of tax-dodging by the great corporations, and I shall tell later on how she made five of these corporations pay taxes on their franchise valuations.

The business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation lives always in the midst of some tumultuous political issue. She was in the midst of one when I arrived in Chicago, in May, 1922, the city being in the throes of a school graft scandal. The attorney for the school board had just been indicted by the grand jury, and the president of the board and many other members were soon to be indicted. Millions had been wasted—nobody could guess how much. At the same time the governor of the state was being tried for appropriating thirty thousand dollars of the state’s money; the jury acquitted him—and then some members of the jury got jobs from the governor, and were tried in their turn. The day of my arrival it was discovered that the chief clerk of the city jail had stolen thirty-six hundred dollars of the money taken from the prisoners. The Chicago “Tribune” published an editorial headed: “Is $10 Safe Anywhere?”