A teacher friend of mine traveled all the way from the East to attend the N. E. A. convention of 1923 at Oakland; on the day before the opening of the convention she visited the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, where in the lobby she observed Major Clancy in conversation with Principal Olive Jones of New York. This conference lasted for a couple of hours, and other members of the gang took part in it from time to time. My friend wondered what it was about; she never found out, but she noted that before the convention came to a close, Principal Olive Jones of New York was chosen as the new president of the N. E. A. The Major had had advance information, you may be sure; and likewise the rest of the gang had had it. In fact, this 1923 convention had been held in Oakland, because it was the bailiwick of Hunter, and he and Strayer had promised the honor to Miss Jones when they asked her influence at Salt Lake City. This promise had been for 1921, but the gang had fallen to quarreling among themselves—Owen of Chicago had broken with Strayer, and Miss Williams had got the prize in 1921, and Owen had grabbed it for himself at Boston in 1922. You see what the inside ring is giving its time to, and why the great national organization of the school world is an object of contempt to every educator who has a truly professional ideal.
CHAPTER LV
TEACHERS TO THE REAR
The National Education Association now stands complete, according to the design of its architects. It is a political machine, maintained by Big Business to do a certain job in the interest of Big Business. And just as in any other great factory, the workers are deprived of all power, but are cajoled into thinking themselves free citizens. At the annual conventions you will hear floods of oratory in praise of democracy, while every precaution is taken to keep the rank and file from having any say whatever about their own affairs. All the power is in the hands of one little group; they put themselves in the key positions—each one on six or eight committees. They make the plans, and when the time comes they jam them through.
The classroom teachers form a large group at each convention, but they are helpless. They are outside the circle, a floating group, untaught, untrained, without a background or policy. At Salt Lake City Miss Harden attended a meeting of seventy-five of them, and she asked how many of them had ever come to a previous N. E. A. convention, and found that only eight or ten had had this experience. What do such delegates know about the machine and its tricks? What chance do they stand against the gang?
Miss Flora Menzel of Milwaukee came in 1923, with instructions to recommend certain policies on behalf of her group. She was put on the “credentials committee,” and wandered about the corridors of the Oakland Hotel trying to find out where this committee met. The meeting was set for a certain hour; she succeeded in finding the place, fifteen minutes late, and there was no one in the room. Subsequently she ascertained that the “credentials committee” had already met, named a sub-committee of the gang, and adjourned in fifteen minutes! And that is only one of many devices whereby classroom teachers known to be loyal to their own groups are shunted to one side. In 1921, at Des Moines, they appointed a committee on the revision of elementary education, and they made it up of college presidents and professors, state superintendents, the United States Commissioner of Education—and one elementary teacher. They were going to determine the policy of the N. E. A. toward the most important of all subjects connected with the schools, and they put on this committee just one person who was having actual experience with children!
For more than twenty years Margaret Haley has been fighting in the interest of the teachers for action on salaries, tenure and pensions. It took ten years to get them to adopt resolutions on the question, and ten years more to get them to do anything. I have told about the Atlantic City mid-winter convention of 1918, at which the Department of Superintendence planned the Salt Lake City swindle, and how Miss Frances Harden was there, having paid her own substitute. She was representing Margaret Haley, who had been put on the committee for salaries, tenure and pensions. The chairman of the committee was President Joseph Swain of Swarthmore College, past president of the N. E. A. President Swain got up and made a momentous announcement: two young men from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had been giving him invaluable assistance on this pension question. The two young men were present, and thus introduced they practically ran the committee throughout the sessions. They had a “model teachers’ pension bill,” and they asked the endorsement of the Department of Superintendence, after which they proposed to take the bill to each of the states, and get the endorsement of the state educational machines, and then force it through the legislature.
Perhaps you may wonder why the Carnegie Foundation should be proposing to take charge of teachers’ pension money. Well, if you will turn to “The Goose-step,” pages 408-9, you will find how this institution, with an endowment of some seventeen million dollars, has taken the pension money of the college professors of the United States and made it into a club to be held over the heads of professors, compelling them to obey the orders of presidents and trustees. If you will read Professor Cattell’s book, “Carnegie Pensions,” published in 1919, you will be informed about the wonderful insurance corporation, devised by this Carnegie crowd, and run by Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler; the scheme was submitted by “School and Society” for the consideration of a great number of college professors, and was voted down by 636 to 13.
And now here are these Carnegie specialists in autocracy, setting the very same trap for the seven hundred thousand school teachers of the United States! Their device is known as the “standard pension plan”; it provides a graded pension, and needless to say the sums are very low, while the age limit is very high, from sixty to sixty-five years, and the term of service required is long, from thirty to forty years. Needless to say, also, the women are treated as inferior animals; their heirs have no pensions, while the heirs of men teachers do have pensions; moreover, the women contribute at a higher rate than the men.
Get clear this essential point, that all this pension money is teachers’ money; a certain amount is deducted each month from the salaries of every teacher, and it is of this money that the pension is composed. And, of course, the feature that really counts is the control of the money; you may be sure that under the capitalist system no plan of any sort would be “standard,” that did not provide for the control of the money by those whom God has created for the purpose of controlling money. The essence of this “standard pension plan” is that the teachers have no control over their own pension funds; in all cases this control is in the hands of politicians who serve on the pension board ex officio—the state superintendent, the comptroller, the attorney general, and other leaders of the gang.
It was decided that this Carnegie pension plan should be taken to the state of Vermont and there tried out; and at the summer convention at Pittsburgh the new Carnegie experts appeared again, and their proposition was jammed through, in spite of the protests of Margaret Haley. You see, Margaret Haley wanted the teachers to have the control of their own money, so the gang evolved one of their clever schemes—they divided the “committee on salaries, tenure and pensions” into three separate committees, and they put Margaret Haley on the salary committee, which had already acted! Also, they put in a by-law, providing that these three committees should serve for one year only, and should then be reappointed. This would give them the chance to drop any “kickers”; and sure enough, the next year they dropped Margaret Haley!