Another of the unwritten laws of Baltimore decrees that woman’s place is the home. Woman is now permitted to leave the home to teach the children in classrooms, but she is not permitted to come out of the classrooms to discuss the conduct of the schools. In this company, with which I spent a couple of hours, I counted ten men and seventeen women, and all of the men said their say about the Baltimore schools and about education in general. But only three out of the seventeen women had anything to say at all; and one of these was the hostess, while the other two were directly called upon by the hostess to answer a question. Such is the state of the feminist movement in Baltimore!
I found upon inquiry that the same condition prevailed in the schools. Although the women teachers in the schools outnumbered the men seven to one, they were practically unrepresented on the teachers’ councils. Among nineteen representatives of the white teachers’ training schools there was only one woman representative; from the girls’ high schools there was only one woman representative out of thirty. From the colored schools there was no woman representative, and many groups of the white teachers had no woman representative. It was interesting to note that the twenty-one hundred elementary teachers were represented as follows: four principals, one kindergartner, one teacher in a secondary high school, and three members of the Schoolmasters’ Club. You can imagine how easy it is to handle the teachers in Baltimore!
One of the things they need is a Henrietta Rodman in their city; for they have the old Tammany system of “mother-baiting.” When the women teachers marry they automatically resign; if they have a “pull” they may get themselves re-employed as substitutes, at a lower salary—the advantage in handling substitutes being that they may be immediately dismissed without excuse. The women teachers in Baltimore have never dared to have anything to do with the move for equal pay; this fight has been carried on by the woman’s clubs. The city council was induced to appropriate money to abolish discriminations between men and women teachers; but the school board refused to spend the money, and the issue has now been carried to the court of appeals.
When I asked my impolite question about “economic control,” a former school board member who was in the company told me how he had taken up the fight for an increased tax to make possible better schools; he had found one rich man to whom this increase would mean ten thousand dollars per year, yet this man was willing to support the program. Surely that disproved my idea of economic control! I answered patiently that I knew there were individual rich people capable of generosity; but it was different with classes, and especially when it came to anything which threatened class control. Would this rich man have been willing for the teachers of Baltimore to form a union?
You may recollect that in Los Angeles I criticized the bankers for their “thrift campaign” in the schools; and perhaps you wondered: did I object to thrift in the schools? And why could I not believe that the bankers might have a genuine interest in teaching thrift to the school children? Well, you may learn about this from what happened in Baltimore. At the Francis Scott Key School a beginning was made at a school bank, and the bankers objected. Here, as in Los Angeles, the children were learning thrift; but in Los Angeles the money was turned over to the bankers, while in Baltimore the money was kept for the school! So here is a laboratory test, proving that what the bankers want is not to teach the children thrift, but to get the children’s money.
The biggest banker in Baltimore is Mr. Robert Garrett, whose palace on what we used to call “Charles Street Avenue” was one of the scenes of my childhood. Mr. Garrett is director in half a dozen great financial institutions, also of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; he is a graduate of Princeton and of Johns Hopkins, and was selected as the city’s most eminent financier to act as chairman of the Public Improvement Commission, and spend twenty-two million dollars of the people’s money for new school buildings. The work goes forward, under the very highest capitalistic auspices; and one of the great new high schools is nearly completed, when a group of independent citizens makes an investigation, and discovers and proves that all through this building the contractors have been substituting inferior materials—terra cotta pipe instead of cast-iron pipe, cement bricks instead of clay bricks, inferior floor materials, an inferior motor, etc. To cap the climax, the “panic bolts” on the doors, which were to have brass rods, have steel rods substituted; steel rusts, you understand, so when there is a fire, and the children try to fling the doors open in a hurry, they will find the bolts rusted fast, and the doors immovable. Does that dispose you to trust your schools to the tender care of your bankers?
CHAPTER XLIV
THE BREWER’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
I have referred to the Francis Scott Key School in Baltimore, and you will be interested to hear more about this rare phenomenon—a beautiful building, animated by a beautiful spirit, and located in a city slum. “Locust Point” is out in the shipping district, and the school overlooks the harbor and the old Fort McHenry; it is named after the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who composed the song close to this spot. A few years ago the people of Locust Point had the usual old wooden fire-trap for their children; it burned down, and then came a struggle with the politicians for a better school. The neighborhood is a Catholic stronghold, and the priests wanted the building in an inaccessible place; it had a library, and the priests do not wish Catholic children to have too easy access to modern books. They would have had their way, if it had not been for one rich woman of Baltimore, who has made herself a kind of godmother to the schools.
Meet Mrs. William Bauernschmidt, daughter-in-law of a well-known Baltimore brewer lately deceased. This lady got her education in Baltimore politics in a somewhat amusing way. A quiet, mild-mannered young daughter-in-law, she used to sit in a corner of the library of the old brewer’s home and do her knitting, while the men of the family talked business. As the brewery business was all mixed up with politics, the daughter-in-law came to know a great many secrets. She explained: “The men paid no more attention to me than if I were a dormouse; so now, when I come to deal with Baltimore politicians, I tell them, ‘I know every filling you’ve got in your teeth!’”
This, you perceive, is not refined language; not the sort that was used by ladies during my boyhood in Baltimore! “But,” said Mrs. Bauernschmidt, “there’s no use talking ‘up-town talk’ to them. I use their own language.” She told me about one of these potentates—I forget his name, but his nickname is “Sunny”—and said Mrs. Bauernschmidt: “I know whose man you are every day; you belong on Monday to the gas company, and Tuesday to the street railways, and on Wednesday you belong to the breweries. I want you to know that I always know when our day comes round!”