Let us now move to the Atlantic seaboard, beginning with Boston, hub of the universe and fountain-head of our culture. Boston once prided itself upon the civic virtues and stern New England moralities; today it is a graft-ridden city of slums, the cultured population having withdrawn to the suburban towns, and the plutocracy to haughty isolation in the Back Bay District, where “the Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.” The great bankers and corporation magnates employ the corrupt city government in their factional fights—Lee, Higginson & Company against Kidder, Peabody & Company; it is reported by those on the inside that one mayor of the city made more than a million dollars out of the “tips” he got from the latter firm. For a decade or two the great part of Boston’s government has been for sale; the district attorney was selling justice, or injustice, wholesale, and recently an effort was made to convict him, but the gang proved too strong.

All that these haughty magnates, the Lee-Higginsons and Kidder-Peabodys and Lowell-Cabot-Lodges ask of the schools is that taxes be kept down. To this end they have entered into alliance with the Catholic hierarchy—the old firm of God, Mammon & Company operating on the shores of Boston Bay, as we have seen it on the shores of San Francisco Bay and the Mississippi River. For some time the arrangement was that the school board consisted of two Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew; but when I was in Boston last year the line-up was four Catholics out of five members. As usual, the entire program of the Catholic element can be summed up in one sentence, to starve the public schools so that the parochial schools may thrive. The hierarchy never ceases to denounce from its pulpits those Catholics who fail to send their children to the church schools. They have advised Catholic women not to join the National Education Association, because this organization has endorsed the Shepard-Towner Bill, providing national subsidies for education. It was offered to exclude the Catholic schools from federal inspection, but that made no difference—the Catholic authorities do not want the public schools improved, they do not want the competition of good schools.

They are tireless in their efforts to keep control. They have blocked the movement for a “Greater Boston,” because this would bring in the suburbs, which are Protestant. At a meeting at the Notre Dame Cathedral one speaker after another stressed the importance of getting Catholic teachers into the schools. “The Irish are always for the Irish,” testifies ex-President Eliot of Harvard; and there have been some funny illustrations in Boston education. Two or three years ago there was an uproar in the city, it having been discovered that the schools were using a work of anti-Irish propaganda, the Century Dictionary! Someone had looked up the word “brutal,” and discovered that in illustrating its use the dictionary employed a sentence from Emerson’s “English Traits,” dealing with the great famine: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form.” So the school board solemnly resolved as follows: “Ordered: That the use of the Century Dictionary in the Boston Public Schools is hereby discontinued until such time as a discriminating, unfair, and untrue reference to the Irish race is eliminated.” And the Board of Superintendents ordered the passage blacked out from all copies in the school libraries! I suggest to the publishers of the Century Dictionary that when they are getting ready their next edition for Boston, St. Louis, San Francisco, and other Catholic cities, they look a little farther in Emerson’s “English Traits,” and quote the following: “The English uncultured are a brutal nation.... The brutality of the manners in the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all classes.”

The Catholic censorship of Boston’s intellectual life extends even to the public library, which was at one time a famous institution, but is now useless to students, because it excludes whole groups of modern books. There is a reading-room for children, and on the prominent shelves of this room you find church propaganda for the young, thrilling stories about popular and beautiful lady Catholic wives, and wicked Protestant “vamps” who break up homes. The Italians cannot get the Bible, but have to write down their names and stand in line and wait—and even then they don’t get it. I was told by a teacher in the Brookline schools that the public library there had refused to order Chafee’s “Freedom of Speech,” the standard work on the subject, written by a professor of the Harvard Law School. I was told by a teacher in a Boston high school that she had been rebuked by her principal for using a text-book in which it was stated, casually and without comment, that the Irish immigrants had come to America on account of the potato famine.

I was told also of a high school department head who was called up on the telephone by a Jesuit priest of Boston College, and ordered to promote a certain Catholic to a higher grade. Considering this Catholic incompetent, the department head declined, and was given two hours in which to make her decision; when she still refused, scandals were spread concerning her and she was summoned before the board. I cannot give the details of this case, for the reason that the teacher who told me the story was afraid to put it into writing, or even to revise my manuscript. It is interesting to note that this priest is the person who has been selected by the Catholic hierarchy to give the “improvement lectures” for the teachers of the Boston schools; these lectures being public school affairs, originally given by professors of Harvard. One high school teacher told me that her pupils had been forbidden by the priest to read Dumas!

Boston is one city in which they have teachers’ councils. “What freedom we have is due to these councils,” said a group of teachers to me; and I asked just what kind of freedom that meant. They might take up the question, at what hour should the janitor clean a certain room. They might take up the question, what credits should be allowed for certain courses. “But you have nothing to do with hiring and firing?” I asked, and there came a chorus: “Oh, no, no, no!” And, of course, they have nothing to do with salaries; their salaries have been held down, and when the women teachers agitated for increased pay, they were “put off.” They called a meeting in Faneuil Hall, “the cradle of liberty,” to discuss their problem; they invited the board members to attend, but not a single one was interested enough to come. Some teachers belong to a union, but they keep very quiet; they saw what happened to the policemen’s union in Boston. It is interesting to note that at the time of the Boston police strike the teachers of English and history received instructions from the school board not to permit any mention of it in classes.^[I]

There was a Boston tea-party once upon a time, and the history books are proud of it; but those old days are past, and the White Terror holds sway in Boston and its suburbs. A teacher in the Cambridge public schools was driven from the system for telling her pupils that the Soviets had a right to determine their own way. At one of the Boston high schools a child was writing on Bolshevism, and asked the teacher about it, and the teacher gave her an article from the “Review of Reviews,” which presented some facts favorable to the Russian government. This teacher was called before the board and suspended, with two weeks’ loss of pay, and was told never again “to teach anything with two sides.” In Boston they passed an ordinance forbidding the displaying of the red flag; and only after they had passed it did somebody recollect that the red flag is the emblem of Harvard. I should like to tell you of a number of other funny things which have happened in the shadow of our “cradle of liberty”; I spent several hours listening to stories of teachers—and after I got back home, most of these teachers wrote, forbidding me to repeat what they had told me!