In February of 1922 a meeting of the executive committee of the state association was held, and it was resolved to permit the forming of locals of the association in small communities, these locals to consist of twenty-six members or more, the understanding being that the convention, to be held in November, would determine whether or not it approved this procedure. All over the state delegates were chosen under this arrangement, and forty-six of them came to the convention. The scheme of the gang was to get these country delegates seated, overwhelm the twenty-seven delegates from Milwaukee, and put through an arrangement to perpetuate that semi-disfranchisement of the “Bolsheviks.”
The “floor leader” who put through the job for the gang was Mr. Carroll G. Pearse, then president of the Milwaukee State Normal School, and now a book agent. I point out to you in passing that he is one of the big chiefs of the national school machine. You remember, I have referred to this as our educational Tammany Hall; and if you thought I was just calling bad names, read this account of the “steam-roller” at the 1922 convention of the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association, and see if Tammany could teach anything to the school-masters!
On the evening before the convention there was a meeting of the credentials committee, which voted that the forty-six delegates, representing locals having less than fifty members, were to be admitted in violation of the constitution. And next day the president of the convention placed his chair in such a way that he could not see the Milwaukee representatives when they rose to demand recognition; he called for a viva voce vote on the report of the credentials committee, and declared that this report had carried. The Milwaukee teachers, of course, demanded a roll-call; but the president refused to order it. One after another he recognized the representatives of the supervising force, who orated to the convention amid storms of protest.
Here was a large gathering of people, and no one had any means of knowing which were delegates and which were not; yet the president refused to determine who was voting on this motion or on that. He refused even to rule on the point of order, that he should determine who had votes! He drove his “steam-roller” ahead, rushing through one motion after another. The assembly adopted an amendment to the constitution, admitting delegates from locals with twenty-six members or more. The assembly elected a normal school president as president of the state association for the next year. The assembly passed a resolution, offered by Mr. Pearse, validating and legalizing all proceedings up to that time—and all this without a single roll-call, without any record whatsoever as to what persons had voted for these various resolutions, what mob had altered the state constitution and disfranchised the Milwaukee teachers!
Having a night to think it over, the gang must have realized that this story would look just a little “raw” when told in “The Goslings.” So Floor-leader Pearse appeared next morning with a resolution excluding those representatives whose rights to seats had been questioned on the day before. But all the motions which had been passed by the shouts of these representatives were permitted to stand! The disfranchised delegates were directed to leave the hall; then they were reseated—the whole transaction occupying five minutes! Finally a superintendent of schools was elected secretary of the association, at a salary of fifty-five hundred dollars, and the public school system of the state of Wisconsin was safe for another year! Take this to any ward-healer or henchman of your local political machine, and see if he can “beat it!”
CHAPTER XLIX
THE DISPENSERS OF PROMINENCE
We now ascend to the top of our great school pyramid, the National Education Association. This is the professional organization of the educators of the United States, and as such it possesses tremendous prestige and power in the educational world. You probably know very little about it, and may think that it has nothing to do with your local schools; but in this you will be deceiving yourself, for its influence is none the less strong because indirect. What the N. E. A. does is to set the standards of the school world; in its councils, open or secret, the thing called educational greatness is determined.
Who are the “great” educators of America? Who are the ones that really know how children should be taught, and what they should be taught? Do you know who they are? Manifestly you do not; you have to be told who they are, and the function of the N. E. A. is to tell you. It is the dispenser of educational prominence and applause. The final test of greatness in the school world is to be invited to deliver one of the addresses before its annual convention; while to have your name added to the list of presidents of the organization is in the school world the same thing as it is in public life to have your name added to the list of presidents of the United States, which every school child has to learn by heart. You step out before this vast assemblage, amid a flutter of applause, and tens of thousands of teachers and sympathizers absorb your utterances, and carry them away to the farthest hamlets—this is what is known in America as “inspiration.” The local newspapers print your address in full, and the Associated Press sends a summary of it to its thirteen hundred leading newspapers. Thus, if you are a reactionary, you help to set backward the clock of American history, and to render the position of your capitalist employers secure. If you are not a reactionary, then you do not get within many feet of the platform at the N. E. A. convention.
There are at the present time a hundred and twenty-five thousand members of the N. E. A., and they pay dues at the rate of two dollars per member. More than eighty per cent of them are the plain, ordinary, humble, rank and file classroom teachers, whose function is that of the day laborer in the great corporation—to produce the wealth, while their superiors spend it. You will be told that the N. E. A. is a “democratic” organization, and you will understand what this means when I tell you that Tammany Hall also is a “democratic” organization. New members are welcome, in fact, they are eagerly sought-“drives” are carried on, and the prestige of schools is established by the fact that they have one hundred per cent membership in the N. E. A. Some school systems are even going so far as to make membership in the N. E. A. compulsory to all applicants for teachers’ positions. The Journal of the National Education Association for September, 1922, triumphantly quotes the superintendent of schools at Onaway, Michigan, as stating that “teachers’ contracts in Onaway, Michigan, will in future require teachers to become members of state and national educational associations.” And in the case of St. Joseph, Missouri, the blanks to be filled out by applicants for teaching positions contain the following two questions: “Are you a member of the N. E. A.? If not, will you be a member this year?”
Now the classroom teachers are the real educators in America. They do the actual work of teaching your children; they are the ones who know your children, they spend some twenty-five hours with them every week, and they are not seduced from the job of understanding children by prominence and applause, nor by high salaries, nor by any other lure. The classroom teachers are the ones we must depend upon if education is to be improved. The classroom teachers represent democracy in the school world, and the test of democracy in the N. E. A. is what happens to this rank and file. So I begin my study of this great organization with its Department of Classroom Teachers.