Wherever you travel in the school world of the United States, you find these same activities. You recall the almost universal graft in the school affairs of Chicago; it should hardly need saying that the book trust was “up to the eyes” in this graft. You never know where you meet them; they operate under the names of various companies. A member of the school board made the statement that one of the book companies had “a whole trainload of books on a siding,” which they were trying to unload in Chicago; all the newspapers knew about it, but they would not publish the facts. The beginning of the graft exposure was the determination of the agents to dump this supply of books onto the Chicago board.
The same thing extends over the state of Illinois. An agent of one book company was chairman of the state committee of the Republican party, and a superintendent of Peoria, Illinois, was discovered to have grafted to the extent of more than a million dollars, and was sent to jail for it. They had the governor of the state, and had got a five-year “adoption.” They did the same thing in Cincinnati, where they ran the superintendent and school board for a decade. Again, it was a leading book company agent who was mixed up in a scandal with the governor of Oklahoma. There was another exposure in Kentucky—and I was told of other states where there might be an exposure, if I would go there and make inquiries!
In Texas also there was a scandal and a political upheaval. The American Book Company was prosecuted as a trust, and fined fifteen thousand dollars and ousted from the state. It was at that time a New Jersey corporation, and the Texas authorities allowed it to plead guilty, whereupon it was reorganized as a New York corporation and readmitted to do business in the state. Such little jokes as this the big corporations and their attorneys take great pleasure in playing upon state prosecuting authorities and legislatures! An attorney in Dallas writes me:
The American Book Company got an outrageous contract from the state text-book board, headed by the sanctimonious Governor Neff, making a number of needless changes, that would cost the public school fund many hundreds of thousands of dollars; but this contract has been, temporarily at least, defeated. It must be said, however, that the chief reason it has been defeated is not the action of public-spirited Texas citizens, but the activity of other publishers, particularly Ginn and Company, for whom I have the same sort of respect that I have for the American Book Company.
As it happens, I learned of another case, in which the American Book Company was pulling off some dirty work in Michigan, and in that case they were stopped by Heath and Company. So let us be thankful that the school book business is still in the competitive stage!
Kansas was one state in which the farmers went to war against the book trust. You will be interested in the adventures of Mrs. Ella S. Burton, who took up the issue as lecturer for the State Grange. These granges are farmers’ societies; and like the teachers’ associations, theythey have been taken over by the gang. Mrs. Burton found herself fighting the school-book machine inside of her own organization. The book trust controlled not merely the state school book commission; it had its high-priced educators and corporation lawyers and politicians inside the grange. Charges were brought against Mrs. Burton, and a committee appointed to investigate these charges unanimously vindicated her; but the master of the State Grange would not give her the floor, nor hear the committee report, and adjourned the meeting in order to suppress her. It was promised that the findings of the committee would be published in the annual report, but not a word of it was published, and Mrs. Burton was finally expelled from the grange. The right-hand man of the grange master throughout the proceedings was, of course, an American Book Company agent.
Nevertheless, the Kansas legislature passed a bill providing for state manufacture of text-books; and so Kansas shares with California the distinction of being the object of many pamphlets published by school-book company representatives, proving the evils of its school-book habits! I am not going into the cost of text-book publication, but I think it may be worth mentioning that while I was in the state of Washington I found that the schools there were using in many cases the same text-books as in California, and were paying for them from a hundred to a hundred and fifty per cent more than it was costing the people of California to manufacture them.
Sometimes the law permits school teachers to have something to say about the adoption of text-books, and then you have book company agents playing the generous host to teachers. We have seen Major Clancy at Oakland and Boston and Des Moines. In California, I am told by a prominent educator that many teachers get their summer vacations at the expense of the book companies. It is a favorite device to offer them a trip to the East to see where the school books are made; that is not graft, but education! Teachers learn to look to book company agents for promotion; and almost invariably you notice that when any superintendent or board member is turned out of his job, the book companies take care of him. We saw a school superintendent of Chicago becoming president of Heath & Company; we saw President Pearse of the Milwaukee State Normal School becoming an agent for Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia. I am told by Mr. William Bouck, head of the Washington Progressive Grange, that the American Book Company has named more superintendents in the state of Washington than all the big agencies put together; also that the agents of this concern were put on the program of every school institute on the west coast of Washington. This point is also touched upon by Professor Charles H. Judd, of the University of Chicago. He writes:
It is a matter of constant rumor that the selection of the superintendent in various cities is altogether in the hands of book companies. The most impressive and detailed story of this sort that I ever heard relates to the superintendency of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The man who told me the story is still in the educational profession and would hardly want to be implicated, but he said that he was met at the station, when he went to see the board of education at Fort Wayne, not by any member of the board of education, but by the local representative of one of the book companies. His conversation about the position was altogether with this representative of the book company, and he left town telling him that he did not want the place. The representative of the book company told him that he was not going to ask him to keep the conference confidential, because he knew that it was all the superintendent’s professional career was worth to have a controversy with him, and that if the superintendent ever reported any part of this discussion, the representative of the book company would deny the whole affair. This story was told to me by a man who is absolutely reliable and he would not, I am sure, in any wise distort the facts.
Professor Judd goes on to explain his belief that in many cases these things are done by book agents without the knowledge of the company, and that the company would be “greatly distressed to know that these things happen.” I have a great respect for Professor Judd, one of the most liberal and courageous educators in this country; also I have great respect for a college professor, a very distinguished author of school text-books, who writes me that the trouble is due to “the less scrupulous agents in the heat of a campaign.” This gentleman’s own publishers “deprecate these methods, but perhaps the heat of a campaign will now and then lead local agents astray. I have plenty of reason to suspect that other publishers make it impossible to play the game very fairly.”
In answer to this, I can only state my own point of view—that I cannot take much stock in the idea that heads of large-scale modern industries do not know what their employes and agents are doing. They make it their business to know, and any lack of knowledge which they have is formal; that is, a business man smiles and says: “Don’t let me know about it!” But in reality he knows; and the school officials who get the “rake off” also know. Says Professor Robert Morse Lovett, also of the University of Chicago: “There is scarcely a large city in the country in which the pupils and teachers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded by action of school trustees, which would be characterized in the mildest terms as wilful mismanagement conducing to private profit.” And Professor Guido Marx of Stanford University tells me how he referred to school book graft before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and a representative of a book company said to him: “What’s the matter? Have you got a book you can’t get published?”
It appears that ethical codes on book matters are in a somewhat unsettled state—out here in California at any rate. I have on my desk a series of letters from a California school-book publisher, personally a very likeable and genial fellow, who assures me that he doesn’t think there is any harm in the fact that a lady editor of his magazine, formerly a stockholder in his business, and still having a desk in his office, is also a member of the local school board, and in this capacity signed orders for the purchase of something less than a thousand dollars worth of books from this publisher. I suppose that if I were to meet David P. Barrows, Dean of Imperialism at our state university, he would assure me there was nothing wrong in the fact that he, while head of the department of political science at the university, was invited by the Mexican government to come down there and advise them on the subject of education; and that he went, and became vice-president of the Vera Cruz Land & Cattle Company, and came back to recommend war on Mexico, so as to give value to his holdings in that concern!
All this time we have been thinking of text-books as a source of dividends. It is necessary to remind ourselves that these sources of dividends are also sources of ideas to our children. How do the ideas count, in comparison with the dividends? Let me quote Professor Judd once more:
There is a more fundamental matter which is not scandalous but which is important. Book companies influence the schools to an enormous degree by furnishing the materials of instruction. The ordinary teacher in the American school is so little prepared for his or her work that the material supplied in text-books is absolutely indispensable to the conduct of classes. When a book company gets a successful text-book, it is very loath to make any changes in the book for obvious reasons: the cost of making new plates and the danger of losing the market prevent revision of text-books. The result is that there are sets of text-books which exercise a thoroughly unwholesome influence on school practices, just because the book companies are unwilling to make expensive revisions and are interested primarily in selling the books that they now have in stock. When a good report is prepared by one of the technical societies, and book companies are asked to conform to the progressive ideas which are expressed in such a report, one finds these companies very reluctant to try any experiments.
When I was a lad, I learned geometry and algebra as two entirely separate subjects, and until today it never occurred to me that they were in any way related, and might be taught as parts of one subject. But now I learn from an educator that this is the case. And why are they taught separately in all high schools of the United States? Well, because geometry and algebra are the private preserves of Ginn and Company, owners of the Wentworth text-books, which lead in this field. Any teacher or superintendent who should suggest that these profitable works be scrapped would not be regarded with favor by the hundred and twenty-five agents of this great book concern, who have so much to say about high salaried school positions.