At the close of the investigation Senator Harrison delivered three or four hours of eloquent denunciation in the Senate. But the school board persisted in asserting its right to appoint a competent man as superintendent. Then, having made sure of this appointment, Dr. Van Schaick resigned, so that the new superintendent might not inherit all his enemies. Also, Mrs. Gerry resigned—saying to a friend of mine: “After all, my life is worth something to myself, and apparently it is worth nothing to the city.” You can understand that the effect of this uproar has been to make self-respecting citizens very reluctant to assume the unpaid and thankless task of being responsible for the Washington schools.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE CALIBRE OF CONGRESSMEN
Dr. Van Schaick’s successor as president of the board of education was a Catholic gentleman by the name of Edwards, prominent in the Chamber of Commerce, and therefore an undoubted “success.” His intellectual qualifications you may judge when I tell you that he was president of the Columbia Correspondence School, and when I explain to you this amusing product of American public life. Great numbers of newly fledged statesmen come to Washington, where they have to compose political speeches and felicitous after-dinner addresses, letters to the newspapers and to their constituents—all kinds of literary efforts for which they lack the necessary knowledge of grammar. They cannot all have private secretaries to write their speeches for them, as did the late President Harding; so comes the Columbia Correspondence School, filling a long-felt want.
President Edwards would write you an essay or a speech on any subject, at prices ranging from fifty cents up. If you used it only once, he would charge you two dollars. It was all strictly confidential—that is, until President Edwards was put upon the witness-stand at a congressional hearing. Then he was asked: Did they sell essays to school children? He answered, Yes, they would sell essays to people in any part of the country, asking no questions. He was asked: “What would you do if a teacher reprimanded a pupil for passing in one of your essays as his own?” He answered that he was not sure what he would do, but he could see nothing wrong with that. This disclosure raised such a row that the new president of the school board was forced to resign; no one could ever find out which one of the judges of the District Supreme Court had recommended him, but they all united in getting rid of him!
Under this autocracy of politicians the fate of the Washington school teachers has been the same as we have seen in other cities. Their wages in 1917 were on a starvation basis; the minimum was five hundred dollars for assistant kindergartners, and the next was six hundred. Both the high school teachers and the grade teachers formed unions, and the politicians did not dare to stop them. The unions carried the agitation to Congress, and got an increase of salary during the war. The gang tried to corral them into the National Education Association. They have a local “institute” and of course the teachers have little to do with selecting the speakers.
I have referred to the experience of Miss Alice Wood, and promised to tell her story, which shows clearly what happens to teachers under an autocracy of politicians. Miss Wood was a teacher of English at the Western High School, and in the course of study furnished to her by her superiors appeared such items as “Current Events,” “War News,” “Study of Democracy Today,” and “Spontaneous Discussions and Criticisms.” In the year 1919 it was naturally impossible for a teacher to conduct a class along the above lines without being asked something about “Bolshevism.” Miss Wood was asked, and she stated in reply that she had attended a meeting at Poli’s Theater, where several travelers from Russia had spoken, and their accounts of conditions were different from the published stories in the daily press. (Never forget, this was the year of the nationalization of women!) In answer to a direct question, Miss Wood stated that she considered the Soviet government “an improvement over the former government of Russia and a good government for Russia.” She explained the word “Bolshevik” as meaning majority; and finally, she advised pupils who wanted to know more about the subject to read articles from the “Dial,” the “New Republic” and “Current Opinion.”
A few days later Miss Wood received a letter from her principal, questioning her about these matters. She answered, stating the facts as above; furthermore explaining that she was extremely patriotic, that her forefathers had served in the American Revolution, and that she regarded Woodrow Wilson “as the greatest statesman of all times.” The reactionary superintendent of schools then took up the matter with the board of education. Under the law, Miss Wood had the right to a public trial, and to be represented by counsel; the board set this rule quietly to one side, and invited Miss Wood to appear informally before a committee, which questioned her, but without giving her any idea that she was on trial. She stated that she had received no instructions as to what kind of answers she was to return on the subject of Bolshevism, and that she was perfectly willing to follow the directions of her principal, of the superintendent, or of the board, on this and on all other matters. Whereupon the board suspended her, without pay, for a period of one week!
This of course was small punishment in itself—we have seen what is the pay of a Washington teacher for one week. But what the board really sentenced her to was disgrace and outrageous publicity in the carrion-eating press. Therefore the teachers’ union took up the matter, and engaged an attorney, and a long correspondence with the school authorities followed, leading to no result. The matter was carried to the District Supreme Court, and it is pleasant to be able to state that this body reversed the action of the board, and Miss Wood got her week’s salary. But in the meantime the Black Hand of our national capital had accomplished its principal purpose—all the other teachers of the city learned their lesson, and the pupils in the schools continued to believe that all women in Russia were “nationalized”!
Also they continued to believe that Washington is governed by great and patriotic statesmen. Some time previously, a teacher had stated to her pupils that “the calibre of congressmen of the present day is not as good it was in the time of Clay and Webster”; and this teacher was made the object of furious attack upon the floor of Congress! The congressional committee took it up, and summoned the principal of the school before them, and read the riot act to him; and so all the teachers of Washington learned that they are not citizens of a democracy, but serfs of a plutocratic empire.
I am told now by a group of teachers that the new superintendent is doing well, and that there is hope for a better deal in the schools; new buildings are going up, and everyone wants to forget the old unhappy past. The teachers ask me to plead for the cause which lies nearest to their hearts, that of teacher participation in school control; and I answer that this is the thing for which my book is written—to urge that those who do the work of teaching, and really know about teaching, shall take the place of traction magnates and real estate speculators in charge of our children. It is not only in Washington that this is needed, but everywhere, as you have already had opportunity to see.