CHAPTER XLII
CORRUPT AND CONTENTED
We move south to Philadelphia, the third largest city of the country, controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad and its allied banks, through an old-established and smoothly running political machine. Nearly twenty years ago Lincoln Steffens described it as “Philadelphia corrupt and contented.” For a while after that it ceased to be contented; there was a general strike, which was smashed by the mounted police. But then came the war, and Philadelphia is again at the apex of contented corruption and corrupt contentment.
So far as concerns the schools, there has always been the usual hundred per cent plutocratic board, distributing patronage and financial and real estate favors. When I visited the city in 1922 the schools were under the care of what was called “the octogenarian board”; at its head Judge Beeber, president of the Commonwealth Title and Trust Company, who sees that a good part of the school funds are deposited in his bank. Next to him was Mr. Burt of the American Bank, and financial intimate of the Vare brothers, contractors and political bosses who had run the city for a generation. Next, Mr. Simon Gratz, the czar of the schools for a generation, and president of a real estate organization—you remember in “The Goose-step” what I called the “interlocking directorate”; next, an aged war-horse of the Republican machine, who was open in saying that he represented the Vare brothers on the board, and whose name was frequently mentioned in connection with female teachers and pupils, to whom he had displayed undue ardor in his private office.
Several of these aged plutocrats have just been forced out by a popular upheaval, and the board is now run by Mr. William Rowan, who has a bank in Kensington, and whose other qualification for the office of school board president of a great city is that he is an undertaker. He presided at a banquet in honor of some distinguished Frenchmen, and one of these Frenchmen, a member of the Academy, made a speech in perfect English; Mr. Rowan in reply proposed that the assemblage should unite in singing the French national anthem, the “Marr-sales.” Also there is Mr. Boyle, replacing Mr. Burt as representative of the American Bank. Also Mr. Shallcross, a suburban political boss, whose son was recently president of the real estaters. Also Mr. Mitten, president of the Rapid Transit Company, and a nationally known union-smasher. Mr. Mitten has deluged the schools with his propaganda in favor of company unions; he sent so much that one high school returned it, marked “Send no more.” This traction company has been so plundered by the financiers that seventy per cent of its gross revenue goes to the bond-holders of underlying companies, which own no property and do no work. In the girls’ high schools some of the teachers of civics ventured to point out the significance of this, and so Mr. Mitten transferred this subject of civics to the grade schools, where the children are too young to understand high finance.
Philadelphia is an old and slow-moving city, in which everything follows precedent, and outward respectability is the whole of life. It resembles London, in that its leisure-class gentlemen have cricket-clubs; also in that old families have vast holdings of real estate throughout the city, which they hand down from generation to generation. The rich as a matter of course send their children to private schools, where they do not have to associate with the vulgar unwashed; so the big business men do not care what becomes of the public schools, and only want their tax assessments held down.
For many years the social service organizations agitated for a school survey by the city, and finally matters got so bad that the survey was made by the state. The four volumes of the report, dated 1921, lie before me. If you are suspicious of my opinions about schools, you may prefer to hear from the state superintendent of public instruction. Dr. Thomas E. Finegan is not a muck-raker, but a high-up educational politician, with more letters after his name than he has in it—A.M., Pd.D., Litt.D., L.H.D., LL.D.; and he says:
It cannot be too emphatically stated that the general condition of Philadelphia’s school plant is deplorable.
Nearly forty thousand elementary pupils are on part-time attendance because of lack of sufficient classrooms, and the high school pupils are handicapped by the heavy overcrowding of their classes.
There is a real hazard to the children of Philadelphia in the fact that seventy-four per cent of the school buildings are not fireproof, and are not equipped with modern fire protection apparatus. The system of fire drills and the devotion and competence of the teaching force afford the chief protection to most of the children in times of danger from fire.
The citizens of Philadelphia would be shocked to learn of the unsanitary and unwholesome toilet facilities that are provided for the children in a majority of the public schoolhouses. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the conditions not only threaten the health of the children, but are a menace to their morals as well.