The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

Nor were more substantial rewards forgotten; I inspect a list of the text-books used in the public schools of Worcester for the year after the Nearing incident, and I discover that in the high schools there are forty-two text-books of Ginn & Company, in the elementary schools twenty, in the supplementary reading list thirty-five, a total of ninety-seven books—and, needless to say, under the heading of “Geography” we find “Frye’s New Geography, Book I, (Frye-Atwood Series),” and also “New Geography, Book II, Atwood, (Frye-Atwood Series).”

While we are on the subject, you will be interested to know of recent developments at Clark University. The chapters in “The Goose-step” evidently got under the skin of the alumni, for they appointed a committee of three to investigate President Atwood’s administration. The chairman of this committee was a young Catholic physician of Worcester, having political ambitions. He looked into the matter, and assured a number of the faculty members that he was going to make a report condemning Atwood’s administration. But then he was summoned before the Clark trustees, who are the big chiefs of Worcester’s Black Hand; and his committee rendered a report which said that everything was just as it should be. Mr. Thurber came out with a statement that “everything is lovely at Clark”; and this at a time when the freshman class had been reduced one-half, the graduate school had been reduced nearly two-thirds, and the trustees were obliged to raise the tuition fifty per cent in order to offset the decrease in income! They have now made plans to drum up students for the next year, and have engaged one of the foremost chautauqua artists, ventriloquists, magicians, and vocal acrobats in New England, to lead the force of salesmen.

Also you will be amused to know that at the close of the last academic year President Atwood summoned all those members of the faculty who were his supporters, and asked them if they could suggest anything wrong about his administration. One of the academic rabbits summoned courage to make a squeak; he said the exclusion of the “Nation” and the “New Republic” from the university library had done more than anything else to injure the reputation of Clark. Whereupon the librarian flared up, and declared that if either of these magazines were restored to the library, he would resign. They have not been restored.

Instead of that, Clark University is sending out bulletins offering “home study courses” to people who want to learn to talk about the weather! You may think that just one of my hideous jokes, but here is the “Supplement” for April, 1923, listing “Courses Now Ready,” and the first course is entitled: “The Passing Weather.” Says the description: “This course will prove of interest and value to all who wish to know the simple, scientific facts which underlie that ever-present widely discussed subject, the weather.” The advertisement goes on to explain that “the person who finds pleasure in observing and anticipating the ever-changing face of the sky will find this study interesting and profitable.”

There remains to be mentioned a tragic incident. Among the faculty of Clark who were in rebellion against the Atwood regime was Arthur Gordon Webster, an internationally known scientist and physicist. Professor Webster had been on the faculty for thirty years. I was advised to write and ask him, in confidence, his ideas and conclusions. He wrote briefly, but did not give me what I wanted, and I was told afterwards by some of his colleagues that he was afraid to do so, and that the shame of his position preyed upon his mind. Two months after “The Goose-step” appeared, and while the faculty and student-body at Clark were discussing the book, Professor Webster said to his students: “This is the last time I shall address you from this platform—that is, for a long time.” He wrote a note to his son, saying that his life had been a failure; then he retired to his laboratory and put two bullets into his head.

Let us now take up the training of the goslings of this open shop city. There is the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with President Hollis, a former naval officer and martial soul, who boasts that he is ready at any time to place the entire student body of the Institute at the disposal of the police to break strikes. (Last summer he loaned his own daughters to break the strike of the underpaid telephone operators!) A list of the trustees of this concern is a list of the Black Hand of Massachusetts. At the head stands George I. Alden, president of the state board of education, also president of the Norton Grinding Company, a thoroughly feudal concern, which owns its workers’ homes, and ruthlessly ferrets out every independent thought in their heads. Just for fun, I will list the rest of these trustees by occupation, so that you may see what a really plutocratic board can be when it tries.

The manager of the American Steel & Wire Company, another feudal concern, whose special device is to avoid paying pensions by discharging its old employes a year or two before they become eligible; a prominent banker and member of this same concern; a prominent lumber dealer and manufacturer; the head of the largest loom manufactory in the United States, heavily interested in banks and in the two Worcester newspapers; the head of the United States Envelope Company; a leading banker; the president of a sprinkler company, a notorious reactionary; the treasurer of the Norton Company; the vice-president and sales manager of a forge company; the president of the White Motor Company; the president and general manger of a pump machinery company; the vice-president and superintendent of the shoe machinery trust; the vice-president of the Westinghouse Electric Company; the manager of a tool manufacturing concern; the vice-president of a scales company, president of two other scales companies, chairman of a typewriter company, director of an asbestos corporation, a cement company, two banks, a safety razor company, an arms company, a finance and trading corporation, a guarantee company, and a water power company; the treasurer of a construction company; another magnate of the Norton Company; the vice-president of a national bank; the president of a lumber company; another manufacturer; the treasurer of another manufacturing company; and three representatives of the open shop of Jesus Christ.

Let me give you also an illustration of what it means to run education for such a board of magnificoes. The brother-in-law of one, an interlocking director of manufacturing, banking, journalism and hospitals, found himself with a son on his hands; and in the effort to get this son through this institution he employed one of the institution’s young instructors as a tutor. The son being unwilling to take the trouble to visit the tutor, it was arranged that an automobile should come each day to bring the tutor to the son. On one occasion there turned up at the tutor’s door a large industrial truck of unprepossessing appearance. As the tutor knew the garage of the great magnate was stocked with motor cars of all kinds and sizes, he felt himself injured in his dignity, and declined to climb aboard the industrial truck. When the magnate learned of this, he was enraged, and threatened the tutor—not merely with loss of the opportunity to tute, but also with the loss of his position in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

The tutor still remaining obstinate, the issue was carried to President Hollis, who took the side of his instructor: how could a retired naval officer preserve the proper strike-breaking spirit in his faculty, if members of the faculty were required to ride alongside common workingmen in industrial trucks? He refused to discharge the instructor—and this in spite of the fact that the magnate threatened the institution with loss of a big donation. The tutor stopped tuting, but went on instructing at Worcester Polytechnic; and I take pleasure in recording this first feeble sprout of academic dignity in the Open Shop for Culture.

Next in turn comes Worcester Academy, a preparatory school for young plutocrats, correct, spiritual, and athletic; the principal a Rotary Club educator, an ardent open shopper, who bars all liberal periodicals, and rushed forward to denounce as “dissolute” those members of the Clark faculty who opposed President Atwood. The grand duke of the board of trustees is the president of a great construction company, and a leading member of Worcester’s Black Hand. I might give you the complete list of these plutocrats, but it would bore you, because it is the same kind of thing as you have just read a minute ago.