While we are in Massachusetts, let us have a look at its second city, Worcester, the manufacturing center of the metal trades, and “open shop” headquarters of New England. We have studied this “open shop” system in Southern California, and it will be interesting to note some further evidence of the unity of the United States.
What does the term “open shop” mean? It means that a place is “open” to unorganized wage-slaves, and closed to union men; as corollary to this, it means a universal spy system, with the beating, jailing and deporting of union organizers. That there are factories in which the employers maintain such conditions is bad enough; but when you have, as in Worcester, an open shop city, the case is infinitely more serious. An “open shop city” is a place where the organized employers apply to a whole community those tactics of terrorism which they have learned inside their factory gates; so that the “open shop” becomes not merely the industrial policy, but the philosophy and religion and morality of two hundred thousand human beings.
The Black Hand of Worcester is known as the Metal Trades Association. It has a whole group of subsidiary propaganda organizations, the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Economic Club. It has two kept newspapers, the “Telegram” and the “Gazette,” also a smaller paper, the “Post,” controlled by the Catholics. There is a large Irish population, also a French-Canadian population, to which the open shop is handed down as the will of the Pope. The Protestant God thunders actively through the mouths of fashionable clergymen, who denounce labor unionism and Socialism, not merely in sermons, but in illustrated lectures in colleges and schools, their denunciations being reprinted in the next day’s newspapers.
At the top of the educational system of this Black Hand is Clark University, once a center of America’s feeble intellectual life. I have told in two chapters of “The Goose-step” the story of this university’s collapse. I will restate briefly: one of the trustees, Mr. Thurber, general manager of Ginn & Company, school-book publishers, discovered an opportunity to boost the sales of the Frye-Atwood Elementary Geographies, and selected as the new president of Clark University and Clark College the author of these masterpieces, who proceeded to open in the institutions enormous geographical and geological and physiographical and anthropographical and anthropogeological and physicoanthropological and geophysicogeographical and anthropophysicogeological departments, institutes, summer schools, chautauquas, and correspondence schools, at which teachers and superintendents of the United States are assembled, winter and summer, to meet the book writers and book agents of Ginn & Company, with Mrs. Helen Goss Thomas, head of the geographical division of Ginn & Company, graciously pouring the tea.
It happened that Scott Nearing was lecturing at Clark University on the control of American colleges by the plutocracy, and President Atwood came in to hear him, and being dissatisfied with the proofs he quoted, and wishing to furnish more conclusive proofs, got up in the middle of the lecture and ordered Scott Nearing off the platform and out of the hall. This was the greatest triumph of plutocracy in American educational history, and all Worcester rose with a yell and hailed President Atwood as the saviour of the learned world. The Rotary Club gave him a banquet, welcoming him with such uproar that the newspaper reporters had to admit their best eloquence inadequate. The Economic Club elected him president for the new year, the superintendent of schools sang his praises, and the clergy ordered special anthems.
Nor were more substantial rewards forgotten; I inspect a list of the text-books used in the public schools of Worcester for the year after the Nearing incident, and I discover that in the high schools there are forty-two text-books of Ginn & Company, in the elementary schools twenty, in the supplementary reading list thirty-five, a total of ninety-seven books—and, needless to say, under the heading of “Geography” we find “Frye’s New Geography, Book I, (Frye-Atwood Series),” and also “New Geography, Book II, Atwood, (Frye-Atwood Series).”
While we are on the subject, you will be interested to know of recent developments at Clark University. The chapters in “The Goose-step” evidently got under the skin of the alumni, for they appointed a committee of three to investigate President Atwood’s administration. The chairman of this committee was a young Catholic physician of Worcester, having political ambitions. He looked into the matter, and assured a number of the faculty members that he was going to make a report condemning Atwood’s administration. But then he was summoned before the Clark trustees, who are the big chiefs of Worcester’s Black Hand; and his committee rendered a report which said that everything was just as it should be. Mr. Thurber came out with a statement that “everything is lovely at Clark”; and this at a time when the freshman class had been reduced one-half, the graduate school had been reduced nearly two-thirds, and the trustees were obliged to raise the tuition fifty per cent in order to offset the decrease in income! They have now made plans to drum up students for the next year, and have engaged one of the foremost chautauqua artists, ventriloquists, magicians, and vocal acrobats in New England, to lead the force of salesmen.
Also you will be amused to know that at the close of the last academic year President Atwood summoned all those members of the faculty who were his supporters, and asked them if they could suggest anything wrong about his administration. One of the academic rabbits summoned courage to make a squeak; he said the exclusion of the “Nation” and the “New Republic” from the university library had done more than anything else to injure the reputation of Clark. Whereupon the librarian flared up, and declared that if either of these magazines were restored to the library, he would resign. They have not been restored.
Instead of that, Clark University is sending out bulletins offering “home study courses” to people who want to learn to talk about the weather! You may think that just one of my hideous jokes, but here is the “Supplement” for April, 1923, listing “Courses Now Ready,” and the first course is entitled: “The Passing Weather.” Says the description: “This course will prove of interest and value to all who wish to know the simple, scientific facts which underlie that ever-present widely discussed subject, the weather.” The advertisement goes on to explain that “the person who finds pleasure in observing and anticipating the ever-changing face of the sky will find this study interesting and profitable.”
There remains to be mentioned a tragic incident. Among the faculty of Clark who were in rebellion against the Atwood regime was Arthur Gordon Webster, an internationally known scientist and physicist. Professor Webster had been on the faculty for thirty years. I was advised to write and ask him, in confidence, his ideas and conclusions. He wrote briefly, but did not give me what I wanted, and I was told afterwards by some of his colleagues that he was afraid to do so, and that the shame of his position preyed upon his mind. Two months after “The Goose-step” appeared, and while the faculty and student-body at Clark were discussing the book, Professor Webster said to his students: “This is the last time I shall address you from this platform—that is, for a long time.” He wrote a note to his son, saying that his life had been a failure; then he retired to his laboratory and put two bullets into his head.
Let us now take up the training of the goslings of this open shop city. There is the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with President Hollis, a former naval officer and martial soul, who boasts that he is ready at any time to place the entire student body of the Institute at the disposal of the police to break strikes. (Last summer he loaned his own daughters to break the strike of the underpaid telephone operators!) A list of the trustees of this concern is a list of the Black Hand of Massachusetts. At the head stands George I. Alden, president of the state board of education, also president of the Norton Grinding Company, a thoroughly feudal concern, which owns its workers’ homes, and ruthlessly ferrets out every independent thought in their heads. Just for fun, I will list the rest of these trustees by occupation, so that you may see what a really plutocratic board can be when it tries.
The manager of the American Steel & Wire Company, another feudal concern, whose special device is to avoid paying pensions by discharging its old employes a year or two before they become eligible; a prominent banker and member of this same concern; a prominent lumber dealer and manufacturer; the head of the largest loom manufactory in the United States, heavily interested in banks and in the two Worcester newspapers; the head of the United States Envelope Company; a leading banker; the president of a sprinkler company, a notorious reactionary; the treasurer of the Norton Company; the vice-president and sales manager of a forge company; the president of the White Motor Company; the president and general manger of a pump machinery company; the vice-president and superintendent of the shoe machinery trust; the vice-president of the Westinghouse Electric Company; the manager of a tool manufacturing concern; the vice-president of a scales company, president of two other scales companies, chairman of a typewriter company, director of an asbestos corporation, a cement company, two banks, a safety razor company, an arms company, a finance and trading corporation, a guarantee company, and a water power company; the treasurer of a construction company; another magnate of the Norton Company; the vice-president of a national bank; the president of a lumber company; another manufacturer; the treasurer of another manufacturing company; and three representatives of the open shop of Jesus Christ.
Let me give you also an illustration of what it means to run education for such a board of magnificoes. The brother-in-law of one, an interlocking director of manufacturing, banking, journalism and hospitals, found himself with a son on his hands; and in the effort to get this son through this institution he employed one of the institution’s young instructors as a tutor. The son being unwilling to take the trouble to visit the tutor, it was arranged that an automobile should come each day to bring the tutor to the son. On one occasion there turned up at the tutor’s door a large industrial truck of unprepossessing appearance. As the tutor knew the garage of the great magnate was stocked with motor cars of all kinds and sizes, he felt himself injured in his dignity, and declined to climb aboard the industrial truck. When the magnate learned of this, he was enraged, and threatened the tutor—not merely with loss of the opportunity to tute, but also with the loss of his position in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The tutor still remaining obstinate, the issue was carried to President Hollis, who took the side of his instructor: how could a retired naval officer preserve the proper strike-breaking spirit in his faculty, if members of the faculty were required to ride alongside common workingmen in industrial trucks? He refused to discharge the instructor—and this in spite of the fact that the magnate threatened the institution with loss of a big donation. The tutor stopped tuting, but went on instructing at Worcester Polytechnic; and I take pleasure in recording this first feeble sprout of academic dignity in the Open Shop for Culture.
Next in turn comes Worcester Academy, a preparatory school for young plutocrats, correct, spiritual, and athletic; the principal a Rotary Club educator, an ardent open shopper, who bars all liberal periodicals, and rushed forward to denounce as “dissolute” those members of the Clark faculty who opposed President Atwood. The grand duke of the board of trustees is the president of a great construction company, and a leading member of Worcester’s Black Hand. I might give you the complete list of these plutocrats, but it would bore you, because it is the same kind of thing as you have just read a minute ago.
Next, the Worcester State Normal School, an entirely innocuous and thought-excluding institution, in which the Black Hand trains its teachers. One of the students reports everyone ardent in support of Atwood, everything correct and cautious—because the funds depend upon the open shop magnates.
Next, Holy Cross College, a Jesuit school, where theology is queen of the sciences and logic her chief handmaiden. The leading trustees are prosperous Irish business men, lawyers and politicians. The institution is prosperous, crowded with students, and has famous athletic teams, noted for their bruising tendencies. Holy Cross graduates used to come to Clark for graduate work, and express astonishment upon discovering the existence of the sciences of economics and sociology. Whole new vistas of mental activity would be opened up to them—which vistas have now been closed by President Atwood.
Next, Assumption College, founded by the monks of the Augustinian order, who were driven out of France some twenty years ago. Its trustees are the leading business men and lawyers among the French-Canadian population, and the ideas taught are those which were considered a menace to the existence of the republic in France a generation ago, but which are exactly appropriate to the medievalism of plutocratic New England.
Finally the public schools. These are conducted by a “school committee,” made up of leading representatives of the firm of God, Mammon & Company. There used to be one professor of Clark University on this board, Frank H. Hankins, an eminent sociologist, and it was his liberal ideas which had a great deal to do with the decision of the Worcester plutocracy to smash Clark. Now Professor Hankins and a dozen of his liberal colleagues are gone, and the “school committee” is filled with semi-illiterates, most of whom could not qualify to teach an elementary class in the schools they control.
The Metal Trades Association, with the consent of this “school committee,” sends circulars to the teachers, warning them of the dangers of the closed shop, and of all modern ideas in history, civics and economics. Two or three years ago they encouraged a series of inter-high school debates on the open shop, taking it for granted that their side would win. Of course it didn’t win—it never can where both sides are heard. The secretary of the Black Hand was infuriated, and declared this one more evidence of the prevalence of Bolshevism in the educational world. Nearing and Watson’s “Economics” was first mutilated, and then ousted altogether; the same fate befell the entirely conventional text-book of Professor Thomson, because he stated that immigrants were frequently brought in to get cheaper labor, and were frequently not well treated.
The superintendent of schools in Worcester was, until recently, a gentleman by the name of Gruver. He was a good-natured person, who tried to keep friends with everybody; he made the mistake of recommending in a newspaper interview the reading of Wells’ “Outline of History,” and from that time he was doomed. He moved on, and his assistant took his place, a gentleman by the name of Young, a special darling of the Worcester plutocracy, and a special bete noire of the Worcester teachers; a meddlesome, domineering pedagogue, who delights in the exercise of authority, and is never so happy as when he can order some passage blacked out of a text-book, or can storm at some teacher for an unplutocratic utterance.
Under the former superintendent a number of teachers studied diligently in summer schools, acquiring special credits; they were promised a hundred dollars increase in salary, as reward for ten years of such labor. Superintendent Young has abolished this reward—and so the teachers are “out of luck.” He has substituted an arrangement whereby high school students are enabled to earn money, to the vast satisfaction of the Worcester plutocracy. The boys and girls lose two weeks of their school work, and in return have the educational experience of acting as clerks in the Worcester department-stores during the holiday rush!
The Catholics are so strong that the “school committee” has had a difficult time adjusting promotions to suit all parties. It used to be arranged that executive positions were given alternately to the Knights of Columbus and the Masons; but there developed a deadlock at the secret sessions of the school committee—known to the populace as the “gum-shoe meetings.” The Knights of Columbus were demanding a position out of turn, and the Masons wouldn’t stand for it—so finally they compromised by giving the position to a Jew! The Catholics had to be satisfied with getting an uneducated blacksmith made assistant principal of a high school; first he had been taken on to teach forge work in the manual training department, and then, through his political pull, he became a regular member of the faculty, and now assistant principal, on the way to the top!
Equally powerful in Worcester education are the Rotarians and the Kiwanis. Superintendent Young was chosen by the Rotarians to travel all the way to California as their representative in a national convention; his predecessor, Gruver, was president of the Kiwanis. This book will be translated into a number of European languages, and my translators will write to ask me about these strange words, which are not in any dictionary. So pardon me while I explain that Rotarians and Kiwanis are business men who have made money rapidly, and who meet together to express their satisfaction with the city and the civilization which have made possible their success. Being human, these men would like to make the world better, if it could be done without interfering with business; since it cannot be done, they proceed to make the world bigger, and more like what it is.
How completely these men are divorced from the intellectual life, it will be difficult for a European to imagine. They are bursting with energy; but lacking contact with ideas, they are like engines whirling in a vacuum, unconnected with driving shaft or gears. They assemble and partake of luncheons and dinners in sumptuous hotels, and summon to them preachers and teachers of all degrees, to tell them that they are the ultimate product of evolution. Left to himself, a Rotarian or Kiwani might now and then experience a gleam of humility; but intellectual men accept their hospitality, and for the sake of promotion and pelf flatter their mass-vanities and whip up their herd-emotions—and this surely is what is meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost.