[I]. My account of the Boston police strike in “The Goose-step” was ridiculed by the Boston newspapers, and a Cambridge professor wrote me that he knew it was not true, because he had been on the ground—meaning that he had read what the Boston newspapers published concerning it, and had talked with other people who had read the same. I take this occasion to state that my account of what went on during this strike in the private offices of the Black Hand of Boston was furnished by one of Boston’s leading bankers. This old gentleman wrote it out for me with his own hand, and sent it to me—under the pledge that when I had read it and made notes concerning it, I would send it back. I am not sure that I would have had the nerve to publish what I did about Cal Coolidge and his black eye, if I had known that this strike-breaking hero was to become the next President of the United States. But I have published it now, and can’t unpublish it!
There was a Boston tea-party once upon a time, and the history books are proud of it; but those old days are past, and the White Terror holds sway in Boston and its suburbs. A teacher in the Cambridge public schools was driven from the system for telling her pupils that the Soviets had a right to determine their own way. At one of the Boston high schools a child was writing on Bolshevism, and asked the teacher about it, and the teacher gave her an article from the “Review of Reviews,” which presented some facts favorable to the Russian government. This teacher was called before the board and suspended, with two weeks’ loss of pay, and was told never again “to teach anything with two sides.” In Boston they passed an ordinance forbidding the displaying of the red flag; and only after they had passed it did somebody recollect that the red flag is the emblem of Harvard. I should like to tell you of a number of other funny things which have happened in the shadow of our “cradle of liberty”; I spent several hours listening to stories of teachers—and after I got back home, most of these teachers wrote, forbidding me to repeat what they had told me!
CHAPTER XLI
THE OPEN SHOP FOR CULTURE
While we are in Massachusetts, let us have a look at its second city, Worcester, the manufacturing center of the metal trades, and “open shop” headquarters of New England. We have studied this “open shop” system in Southern California, and it will be interesting to note some further evidence of the unity of the United States.
What does the term “open shop” mean? It means that a place is “open” to unorganized wage-slaves, and closed to union men; as corollary to this, it means a universal spy system, with the beating, jailing and deporting of union organizers. That there are factories in which the employers maintain such conditions is bad enough; but when you have, as in Worcester, an open shop city, the case is infinitely more serious. An “open shop city” is a place where the organized employers apply to a whole community those tactics of terrorism which they have learned inside their factory gates; so that the “open shop” becomes not merely the industrial policy, but the philosophy and religion and morality of two hundred thousand human beings.
The Black Hand of Worcester is known as the Metal Trades Association. It has a whole group of subsidiary propaganda organizations, the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Economic Club. It has two kept newspapers, the “Telegram” and the “Gazette,” also a smaller paper, the “Post,” controlled by the Catholics. There is a large Irish population, also a French-Canadian population, to which the open shop is handed down as the will of the Pope. The Protestant God thunders actively through the mouths of fashionable clergymen, who denounce labor unionism and Socialism, not merely in sermons, but in illustrated lectures in colleges and schools, their denunciations being reprinted in the next day’s newspapers.
At the top of the educational system of this Black Hand is Clark University, once a center of America’s feeble intellectual life. I have told in two chapters of “The Goose-step” the story of this university’s collapse. I will restate briefly: one of the trustees, Mr. Thurber, general manager of Ginn & Company, school-book publishers, discovered an opportunity to boost the sales of the Frye-Atwood Elementary Geographies, and selected as the new president of Clark University and Clark College the author of these masterpieces, who proceeded to open in the institutions enormous geographical and geological and physiographical and anthropographical and anthropogeological and physicoanthropological and geophysicogeographical and anthropophysicogeological departments, institutes, summer schools, chautauquas, and correspondence schools, at which teachers and superintendents of the United States are assembled, winter and summer, to meet the book writers and book agents of Ginn & Company, with Mrs. Helen Goss Thomas, head of the geographical division of Ginn & Company, graciously pouring the tea.
It happened that Scott Nearing was lecturing at Clark University on the control of American colleges by the plutocracy, and President Atwood came in to hear him, and being dissatisfied with the proofs he quoted, and wishing to furnish more conclusive proofs, got up in the middle of the lecture and ordered Scott Nearing off the platform and out of the hall. This was the greatest triumph of plutocracy in American educational history, and all Worcester rose with a yell and hailed President Atwood as the saviour of the learned world. The Rotary Club gave him a banquet, welcoming him with such uproar that the newspaper reporters had to admit their best eloquence inadequate. The Economic Club elected him president for the new year, the superintendent of schools sang his praises, and the clergy ordered special anthems.