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!

But they couldn’t drop her from Chicago. The teachers there have power of their own, and they have just got the legislature to adopt the “Chicago teachers’ pension plan.” Under this plan the teacher gets a pension after having taught for twenty-five years in the United States, fifteen years of which must be in Chicago. Women are recognized as human beings, getting equal treatment with men. But the all-important point is this: the pension funds are under the control of a committee of nine, three of them being members of the board of education, and the other six being teachers elected by teachers. This is the only pension fund in the United States which is under the democratic control of those who put up the money; and it is hereby suggested that every teacher in the United States should set to work to make that Chicago law the “standard” pension law of the United States.

Next, let us consider the attitude of the N. E. A. on the equally important question of teachers’ tenure. Is a teacher a civil servant, with some permanence and security; or is a teacher a wage-slave, who may be “fired” without notice and without excuse? At Salt Lake City the committee on tenure handed in a report and a resolution. All the resolutions appeared in printed form—but that on tenure was left out. Margaret Haley fought for a whole day to get the floor, and finally one superintendent who had a sense of decency insisted that she should be heard, and she asked about this resolution. The chairman asked the secretary what had become of it, the secretary asked somebody else, and so they “passed the buck.” The resolution had been mysteriously “lost,” and nobody knew what had become of it. At Boston, in 1922, they passed a resolution to work for tenure in every state, but they have not done it in a single state.

They don’t want to be bothered with the teachers, they want the teachers to obey orders and teach. Miss Ethel Gardner told me of her experience at Salt Lake City, where she happened to be the only classroom teacher present at a conference of administrators. They told how they had been trying to improve their teachers by holding meetings every Saturday morning and talking to these teachers. But the stubborn teachers persisted in not improving, and even showed resentment at having their Saturday mornings taken in that way. The superintendents discussed the question whether the teachers might not become more docile if the school board would pay them for attending these Saturday morning improvement meetings. Finally some one asked Miss Gardner what she thought about it, and she asked if it had ever occurred to them to let the teachers talk at these teachers’ meetings. It was as if Miss Gardner had thrown a bomb into their midst. Not one of them had ever thought of such an idea! She went on to tell what the Milwaukee Teachers’ Association was doing for the improvement of teaching, and when she got through they thanked her quite earnestly for having made an entirely original contribution to their conference:

These were unusually polite superintendents. As a rule, they resent such interference, and take any suggestion from a teacher as an affront to their dignity. Margaret Haley is one of the most charming of women, a delightful companion, and on the floor of a convention the very soul of wit and good fellowship; but to the N. E. A. bosses she is a fiend in petticoats. They regularly ignore all her resolutions; and when she gets the teachers stirred up, and some action becomes necessary, they take her resolutions and write them over and present them as a contribution of their own. At the same time they diligently circulate slanders about her; she has been paid ten thousand dollars to deliver the Department of Classroom Teachers over to the American Federation of Labor; she received a salary of ten thousand dollars a year from the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. Such falsehoods as this are circulated and believed by most of the delegates at the convention—the facts being that Miss Haley gets the salary of a teacher from her own organization, and her organization is not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.

At the same time the gang, like all other political gangs, is not too scrupulous about its own personnel. It carried for years one life director while he was in Joliet prison for appropriating public funds. It did not hesitate to make use of a man who, while secretary of a state teachers’ association, charged the association for plumbing work done on his home, and then it was found that the plumber hadn’t got the money—the secretary had kept it for himself! And of course the gang leaders are all tied up with the book graft and with other Big Business in their own localities. The book agents swarm to the conventions, and they have their candidates, and if these candidates do not win, it is because some other book agent has been more active. At the last mid-winter convention of the Department of Superintendence, a prominent candidate for president was the school superintendent of Milwaukee, and Major Clancy boasted to a friend of mine that this great educator would surely win. He was favored by the American Book Company. Major Clancy is getting old, and somebody fooled him; the successful candidate came from the city where Ginn & Company has its headquarters!

The first aim of the prudent school superintendent is to stand in with the “bookmen,” as they call themselves. For, whenever there is a vacancy in a desirable place, the book companies are the first to learn of it, and they know their own. So the N. E. A. is honeycombed with book intrigue and graft—especially the Department of Superintendence, the part which really counts. I shall tell you bye and bye of an especially crooked five year book “adoption” in the state of Indiana. Immediately after that event, it was noticed that a practically unknown superintendent from Indianapolis became president of the Department of Superintendence.

That caused a scandal, and efforts were made to break the book companies’ hold; it is like the efforts to drive the railroads out of state politics. At the last meeting of the Department of Superintendence it was announced that no “bookmen” were to have rooms in the Cleveland Hotel, where the N. E. A. had its headquarters; but I am told by a gentleman who was present that the American Book Company had all the rooms it wanted. This same gentleman tells me that he was present at a convention in Milwaukee, some years ago, when it was discovered that the American Book Company had taken the entire second floor of the hotel in which the N. E. A. had settled; Cooley of Chicago, who happened to be president that year, moved his headquarters to another hotel.

Many of the big chiefs of the N. E. A. draw royalties from text-books. Strayer of Columbia edits a whole series of “teachers’ professional books” for the American Book Company; also, it features one of his educational books. Then there are the elaborate systems of record cards which he edits; these are advertised and exhibited at every meeting of the Department of Superintendence. Also there are fees for surveying city school systems, and recommending buildings. I am told by one who knows Strayer that he is eager for money; and this is a part of his Columbia heritage—you may recall the three hundred thousand dollar residence, built out of trust funds for “Nicholas Miraculous.” Sometimes a great expert is summoned to survey a school system, and he tells the city that it needs many new buildings. Also he names the architects who know how to put up just the sort of buildings which he recommends. The architects get six per cent for their work, and pay the expert one-twelfth of that. A modern city thinks nothing of spending a million dollars for a new high school, so the expert’s rake-off will be five thousand dollars.