I think that to make the above story complete and perfect you will need to know something about the lady-president of the N. E. A. who put this job through for the gang. You already have her name—Charl O. Williams; she was school superintendent of Shelby County, Tennessee, and immediately after this convention she got her reward—a permanent N. E. A. job, carrying not merely a salary of $7,500 a year, but the privilege of uplifting the teachers with Southern eloquence at one hundred dollars per lift. This lady ex-superintendent ex-president field secretary also represents her State of Tennessee on the national committee of the Democratic party, where she sits in conference with the chiefs of Tammany Hall; so you see exactly where this rascality comes from. Keep the lady in mind, because a year later we shall find her selected by the N. E. A. to uplift the world conference of educators—and to soothe their cravings for peace with weazel words of war.
CHAPTER L
A PLOT AGAINST DEMOCRACY
The National Education Association is a very old institution, predating the Civil War. It has always been controlled entirely by the supervising force; in other words, it has been an employers’ organization. During several decades of its history no classroom teacher was ever elected to any office. At the present time some well trained teacher is occasionally admitted to office for the sake of appearances. It required many years of struggle to get the National Education Association to give any consideration whatever to the living and working conditions of the classroom teacher, or to recognize salaries, pensions and tenure as legitimate subjects for discussion. It required a revolution in the organization to secure in the year 1903 the appointment of a committee on salaries, tenure and pensions; and this committee made a report which was full of misrepresentations. Not until 1911 was action taken even to gather the real figures on these questions.
I will give you a glimpse of the organization in those early days, just to let you see how these things remain the same. At the 1901 convention in Detroit, the United States Commissioner of Education gave a paper outlining the progress of the schools. He was an aged dotard; as an eye-witness said to me, “In the educational system we don’t bury the dead. We let them walk around to save funeral expenses.” This speaker congratulated the country upon the growing number of school pupils, but said not a word about the need of more school money. An orator who rose to applaud him declared that the educational sky was without a cloud, and his only regret was that the American public schools had not been able to get a donation from Rockefeller.
But suddenly a cloud rose upon the educational sky. A thing happened which had never before happened in the history of the N. E. A.—a classroom teacher rose up from the floor of the convention and asked to speak! To make matters worse, it was a woman teacher. This female rebel declared that she for one was glad that the American public schools had not got any money from Rockefeller, and she hoped they would keep clear of all corporation influence. If the rich wanted to help the schools, let them pay their taxes; let the railroads, for example, pay taxes on their franchise valuations, which they were everywhere evading.
You may not need to be told that this was Margaret Haley, making her debut to the N. E. A. twenty-three years ago. The great assemblage was stunned; to attack the railroads, the N. E. A.’s main source of revenue! At that time, you see, when you bought your ticket to the convention, the ticket included your dues, and the N. E. A. got the rake-off!
The aged commissioner felt called upon to put down this insurrection. He got up again and stated that all the wealth of the railroads had come from economy in administration—he knew, because he was a personal friend of Commodore Vanderbilt. As for the attitude of the lady teacher, these meetings were held at the end of the school year, when all the teachers were tired; if there were any more such hysterical outbursts, he would insist upon having the time of the convention changed. He urged the delegates to pay no attention to this; the teachers were worn out from the school routine, and were not in condition to think soberly. Moreover, the delegates must bear in mind that Chicago was no criterion of the rest of the country; Chicago was “morbid and cyclonic.” You can imagine how the Chicago newspapers appreciated this compliment from Detroit!
Sixteen years passed, and revolution came in Russia, and our school superintendents realized the danger of permitting the lower classes to get out of hand. They resolved to put down the classroom teachers in the N. E. A., and to keep them down. The procedure by which they did it constitutes one of the most amazing public crimes in the history of the United States. Bear in mind: this National Education Association was a public institution, with a charter from Congress, according to which it was controlled by its members. Any educator—including teachers—might pay four dollars and become an active member, and these active members met in convention once a year, and there voted and elected officers. This was democracy, as our ancestors understood it; and this was the thing which was suddenly discovered by school superintendents and their capitalist masters to be a menace to the American schools.
At N. E. A. conventions there would appear two kinds of active members. There would be those who had come from all parts of the country, and ninety per cent of these were from the employing class of the schools. These had the money to come, and made it their business to come; most of them had their expenses paid, either by the public, or by the organization to which they belonged. The other group was made up of members who lived in or near the city where the convention was held, and these would be ninety per cent classroom teachers. They were the only classroom teachers who could attend the convention without great expense, and they represented, and properly felt that they represented, the great mass of the teachers who could not attend, but who had a vital stake in education, and had needs to be voiced.
So at N. E. A. conventions there was beginning to be noticed that major phenomenon of our time—the class struggle. Here were the high-up and prosperous and powerful superintendents and “great educators”; and here were the common riff-raff of the school proletariat. In any big city it would happen, inevitably, that the proletariat would be in the majority. They would have little idea what was going on, or how they should vote; but here would come a dozen or two of the New York and Chicago and Milwaukee “Bolsheviks,” who would get up in meeting and ask questions and explain matters to the classroom teachers, and induce them to vote for their own class—or shall we say for their own classes?