Next, the Worcester State Normal School, an entirely innocuous and thought-excluding institution, in which the Black Hand trains its teachers. One of the students reports everyone ardent in support of Atwood, everything correct and cautious—because the funds depend upon the open shop magnates.
Next, Holy Cross College, a Jesuit school, where theology is queen of the sciences and logic her chief handmaiden. The leading trustees are prosperous Irish business men, lawyers and politicians. The institution is prosperous, crowded with students, and has famous athletic teams, noted for their bruising tendencies. Holy Cross graduates used to come to Clark for graduate work, and express astonishment upon discovering the existence of the sciences of economics and sociology. Whole new vistas of mental activity would be opened up to them—which vistas have now been closed by President Atwood.
Next, Assumption College, founded by the monks of the Augustinian order, who were driven out of France some twenty years ago. Its trustees are the leading business men and lawyers among the French-Canadian population, and the ideas taught are those which were considered a menace to the existence of the republic in France a generation ago, but which are exactly appropriate to the medievalism of plutocratic New England.
Finally the public schools. These are conducted by a “school committee,” made up of leading representatives of the firm of God, Mammon & Company. There used to be one professor of Clark University on this board, Frank H. Hankins, an eminent sociologist, and it was his liberal ideas which had a great deal to do with the decision of the Worcester plutocracy to smash Clark. Now Professor Hankins and a dozen of his liberal colleagues are gone, and the “school committee” is filled with semi-illiterates, most of whom could not qualify to teach an elementary class in the schools they control.
The Metal Trades Association, with the consent of this “school committee,” sends circulars to the teachers, warning them of the dangers of the closed shop, and of all modern ideas in history, civics and economics. Two or three years ago they encouraged a series of inter-high school debates on the open shop, taking it for granted that their side would win. Of course it didn’t win—it never can where both sides are heard. The secretary of the Black Hand was infuriated, and declared this one more evidence of the prevalence of Bolshevism in the educational world. Nearing and Watson’s “Economics” was first mutilated, and then ousted altogether; the same fate befell the entirely conventional text-book of Professor Thomson, because he stated that immigrants were frequently brought in to get cheaper labor, and were frequently not well treated.
The superintendent of schools in Worcester was, until recently, a gentleman by the name of Gruver. He was a good-natured person, who tried to keep friends with everybody; he made the mistake of recommending in a newspaper interview the reading of Wells’ “Outline of History,” and from that time he was doomed. He moved on, and his assistant took his place, a gentleman by the name of Young, a special darling of the Worcester plutocracy, and a special bete noire of the Worcester teachers; a meddlesome, domineering pedagogue, who delights in the exercise of authority, and is never so happy as when he can order some passage blacked out of a text-book, or can storm at some teacher for an unplutocratic utterance.
Under the former superintendent a number of teachers studied diligently in summer schools, acquiring special credits; they were promised a hundred dollars increase in salary, as reward for ten years of such labor. Superintendent Young has abolished this reward—and so the teachers are “out of luck.” He has substituted an arrangement whereby high school students are enabled to earn money, to the vast satisfaction of the Worcester plutocracy. The boys and girls lose two weeks of their school work, and in return have the educational experience of acting as clerks in the Worcester department-stores during the holiday rush!
The Catholics are so strong that the “school committee” has had a difficult time adjusting promotions to suit all parties. It used to be arranged that executive positions were given alternately to the Knights of Columbus and the Masons; but there developed a deadlock at the secret sessions of the school committee—known to the populace as the “gum-shoe meetings.” The Knights of Columbus were demanding a position out of turn, and the Masons wouldn’t stand for it—so finally they compromised by giving the position to a Jew! The Catholics had to be satisfied with getting an uneducated blacksmith made assistant principal of a high school; first he had been taken on to teach forge work in the manual training department, and then, through his political pull, he became a regular member of the faculty, and now assistant principal, on the way to the top!
Equally powerful in Worcester education are the Rotarians and the Kiwanis. Superintendent Young was chosen by the Rotarians to travel all the way to California as their representative in a national convention; his predecessor, Gruver, was president of the Kiwanis. This book will be translated into a number of European languages, and my translators will write to ask me about these strange words, which are not in any dictionary. So pardon me while I explain that Rotarians and Kiwanis are business men who have made money rapidly, and who meet together to express their satisfaction with the city and the civilization which have made possible their success. Being human, these men would like to make the world better, if it could be done without interfering with business; since it cannot be done, they proceed to make the world bigger, and more like what it is.
How completely these men are divorced from the intellectual life, it will be difficult for a European to imagine. They are bursting with energy; but lacking contact with ideas, they are like engines whirling in a vacuum, unconnected with driving shaft or gears. They assemble and partake of luncheons and dinners in sumptuous hotels, and summon to them preachers and teachers of all degrees, to tell them that they are the ultimate product of evolution. Left to himself, a Rotarian or Kiwani might now and then experience a gleam of humility; but intellectual men accept their hospitality, and for the sake of promotion and pelf flatter their mass-vanities and whip up their herd-emotions—and this surely is what is meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost.