As a rule, we put through these little jobs without disagreeable publicity; but once in a while accidents happen. We may take the best of care in selecting our educators, but now and then a Bolshevik will creep in. Take, for example, the United States Bureau of Education; we have had some most eminent Bolshevik-hunters in charge of that organization, and had every right to feel safe about it. Who could have foreseen that when the United States Commissioner of Education selected a young lady by the name of Alice Barrows, whose ancestors went back two hundred and eighty years in our history—a niece of Thomas Brackett Reed, Republican party boss of the House of Representatives for a generation—who could possibly have foreseen that this hundred per cent respectable young lady would turn out to have sympathy for a labor union? Thereby hangs a story, full of tragedy for our merchants and manufacturers of woolen materials.
In the course of the war we discovered a great many foreigners who didn’t speak English and didn’t know how to read and write. That seemed dangerous in war-time, so we started campaigns of “Americanization.” So after the war the Bureau of Education sent Miss Alice Barrows to Passaic, New Jersey, to make a study of the problem of adult education among the foreigners who work in the woolen mills. It so happened that only a few months ago there had been a big mass strike among these workers, and they had formed a union. We were quietly engaged in strangling this union, when Miss Barrows, entirely neglectful of her dignity as a government investigator, had the bad taste to go and consult with the president of the union about teaching the union workers to speak and read and write English.
Of course, we merchants and manufacturers can’t hold down this foreign riff-raff without a great many spies to keep track of them. We have had to develop a whole industry of espionage, almost as elaborate as our school machine. We have scores of secret service agencies, some of which spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have complete private armies of their own, cavalry, infantry and artillery. Naturally, we had spies in the office of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of Passaic, and one of these spies sent in a report concerning a “Mrs. Alice Borrows of the Educational Division of the United States Department of Labor.” There were a number of slips in that description, but we haven’t as yet been able to introduce courses on espionage in our schools, so our spies are not as highly cultured as we should like.
The report referred to “Mrs. Borrows” as “a misguided zealot,” and pictured her engaged in “a long and earnest conversation with Mathew Pluhar, the head of this so-called union.” The two of them were concocting a vile plot; there were to be night schools for the workers, and the workers were actually to be permitted to select their own teachers—who would, of course, teach them Bolshevik doctrines disguised as English lessons! “This appears to be a very subtle scheme,” said our spy, and he brought his report in haste to Mr. J. Frank Andres, secretary of the Passaic Council of the Woolen Manufacturers’ Association. Mr. Andres naturally hastened with it to the superintendent of schools, so as to warn him against this subtle scheme and keep these night schools from getting started. But here again an unforeseeable accident happened. The superintendent of schools, instead of regarding Miss Barrows as “a misguided zealot,” regarded her as a fellow educator, and sent for her and put the report into her hands!
Miss Barrows went to interview Mr. Andres, who consented not to punish her for what she had done, but put it up to her fairly: “Don’t you think that a corporation worth twenty million dollars ought to have some control over the policy of the public schools?” There is a cheap newspaper in Passaic, catering to the lower classes, and this published the story; the yellow newspapers of New York took it up—they set out to find out about our spy system, pretending never to have heard of such a thing! Our Mr. Andres took a high moral position, explaining that “It is of the highest importance for manufacturers to use agents among their workers for the dissemination of truth against the doctrines of hatred and antagonism which are being preached by such men as the leaders of the Amalgamated.”
But not all our members were as courageous as this. Miss Barrows began calling upon the presidents of our great woolen corporations, and one of them, Mr. Forstmann, denied that he had ever heard of such a thing as industrial espionage, and promised to have it abolished except inside the mills. Of course, that made us laugh; but it didn’t help to stop the publicity. In order to hold down the Bolshevik agitators during the late strike, our city authorities had required all speakers to get a permit; and we didn’t give permits to unionists. But now came another kind of union, a parlor Bolshevik affair called the American Civil Liberties Union, demanding to hold meetings without permits.
They have a clever trick—they hire a hall, and get up and start to read the Constitution of the United States; they don’t really care anything about the Constitution, of course, they just want to put us in a hole. In this case they put up the Polish president of the Amalgamated, to translate the Constitution into Polish, something which ought to be a crime in itself. They wanted to make us arrest him, but we were too clever for that; our chief of police just turned out the lights in the hall, and then shoved all the foreigners and workingmen outside, and left the newspaper reporters and parlor Bolsheviks inside to listen to the Constitution in Polish! Of course, the Bolshevik newspapers made a great fuss over that; there was a fellow by the name of William Hard, who made it into a farce comedy in four issues of the “New Republic,” April 7 to April 28, 1920.
But, as the saying is, we showed them where to get off. To make everything legal, our city council passed an ordinance, requiring that everyone who speaks at a public meeting in Passaic shall first get a permit from the police; and then, to complete the matter, our mayor put Mr. J. Frank Andres on the school board. Now he is right there to see that foreigners who belong to labor unions don’t get into the night schools to learn English or anything else! Also we sent a couple of our manufacturers down to Washington to try to have that Barrows woman turned out of her job; but we couldn’t manage that—the politicians were too much afraid of the publicity. We tried to keep them from printing her report, but they wouldn’t even do that. It was published as the Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1920, No. 4, and we hope you won’t send for it. It is unfit for any decent person to read, as you can tell from one sentence on page 23:
It should, however, be clearly understood by the people of Passaic that, so long as an espionage system so subversive of mutual trust and social confidence among the adult population of Passaic continues, the educational process is impossible.