We are now familiar with the principal agencies which have taken over our education upon a national scale. In addition to these, each community has its local interests, which may be small from a national standpoint, but are big enough to block the vision of a school board. Wherever capitalist industry exists in America, in towns or villages or country districts, that industry dominates the schools. There are whole counties, hundreds of them scattered over the United States, which are feudal domains of great corporations. In cases where these corporations own the land and the homes of the workers, as in the coal towns of West Virginia and Colorado, the corporations support the schools, and the teachers are the least competent and poorest paid of their clerks. In cases where other landlords have a chance to exploit the workers, the burden of the schools falls upon the tax-payers—with the great corporations dodging their taxes.

I talked the other day with a teacher from Benicia, California, a “tannery town.” A school board member, elected to serve the people, got the idea that the tannery was not paying its proper share of taxes, and he brought an expert from the city to get the facts. The firm was assessed on a quarter of a million dollars, and should have been assessed on two millions. This same school board member belonged to the city council, and brought the matter up before that body, which decided to do nothing. Of course the schools were starved, and sometimes the teachers did not get their salaries at all. Again, I talked with a gentleman from Wisconsin, whose father was an engineer. A lumber company wanted his services, but could not afford to pay what he was worth, so they decided to give him an extra salary, and ordered the secretary of the school board to resign!

I talked with a teacher who had taught in several of the coal towns of Southern Illinois; the invariable condition is wretched schools, with the vast wealth of the corporations untaxed. The miners who attempt to control their own schools are browbeaten or tricked. The mines invariably work on school election days; the club women turn out with their automobiles, and bring the voters to the polls—those who will vote the business men’s ticket. By the time the miners get out of the pits the polls are closed, so the miners’ candidates are not elected. At Eldorado, Illinois, the organized miners endeavored to put up a ticket, and the clerk of the school board lied to them as to the date for the filing of petitions.

For a detailed study of what industrial feudalism does to education, I propose that we investigate Judge Gary and his Steel Trust. In Pittsburgh, I talked with a reporter on one of the newspapers, who had been watching school conditions for twenty years. Here is a whole county entirely dominated by steel; you cannot hold meetings without permission of the police, which means that if you are a labor organizer you do not hold them at all. The valley is a solid line of “steel-towns,” and in one of them, McKeesport, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union duplicated my experience at San Pedro—they were arrested for reading the Constitution of the United States on private property.

The Pittsburgh schools of course are run by the steel interests; the president of the board is David B. Oliver, eighty-five year old steel magnate. The people have nothing to do with the matter, because the school board is named by the judges of the county, and this board levies taxes as it sees fit, and spends the money on its friends. A Pittsburgh physician writes me: “The offices of the board are palatial, the staff of clerks legion, the extra teachers unnumbered, and the equipment of paper and materials would keep any supply-house wreathed in smiles.” He goes on to add that the present superintendent draws a salary of $12,000 a year, with automobile, chauffeur, and upkeep of car; “he is rumored to be on speaking terms, at least, with a book-publishing house.”

But that is a lot better than what Pittsburgh had ten years ago—a superintendent who represented a school-book house in St. Paul, and spent the rest of his time seducing his girl pupils; it was proved in court that he had had a criminal operation performed on one of them. My reporter friend had dug up four cases of rape by this superintendent in his own office, and the affidavits were presented to the grand jury. The school children went on strike against their superintendent, and finally he was tried, and the jury disagreed. Juries in Allegheny County agree only with steel officials.

In the slum neighborhoods of Pittsburgh you find atrociously crowded schools, in wretched buildings, some of them made of corrugated iron; in the rich districts you find palatial high schools. The system is run on a basis of political pull; good teachers are shifted, so that the sisters of ward-heelers may get promotion. When parents venture to complain they are insulted—especially if they are poor. There is a political machine even of the doctors; the favorites of the board of health get the jobs of vaccinating in the schools.

Further down the valley is Homestead, from which the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching derives its millions. You will appreciate the gay humor of this situation—in the schools of Homestead the steel-slaves are drinking water from the Monongahela River, into which various industrial plants discharge their acids. When complaint was made about this water in Homestead, the newspapers saw an opportunity to be witty, and assured the public that the water needed no filtering—the acids would kill the bacteria! I am assured that, owing to the effect of these acids, the plumbing in the homesteads of Homestead wears out in one-third the normal time; and this suggests the subject for an important scientific monograph—I see it in my mind’s eye, catalogued in Carnegie libraries throughout the United States and Great Britain: “The Internal Plumbing of Pupils; a Study of the Stimulation Effects of Sulphuric and Nitric Acids on the Renal Canals of One Thousand School Children at Homestead, Pennsylvania. By A. Learned Phaque, A.M., Ph.D., T.O.A.D.Y.; Bulletin of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, No. 4-11-44.”

Come to Northern Minnesota, and see what the Steel Trust does to the shipping port of its vast ore fields. I have before me a copy of the Duluth “Rip-Saw,” containing a detailed account of the activities of school board members who have had charge of teachers’ pension money, and have been lending it out for their private graft. One board member was an insurance agent, and if he loaned you the teachers’ money, you had to place your insurance with him. Needless to say, along with this go accounts of the humiliating of teachers, the beating down of wages, and the driving out of those with liberal sympathies. Judge Gary, of course, would say that he has nothing to do with all this; all that he does is to put up the campaign funds to keep such gangs in office.

Again, Lorain, Ohio, a port on Lake Erie, headquarters of one of the Steel Trust subsidiaries, the National Tube Company. Here are forty thousand people, most of them wage-slaves, and recently they elected a mayor who made an effort to serve them, and was smashed by the Black Hand. On the school system of Lorain the people have been unable to make any impression whatever. The house agent of the National Tube Company, a sort of watch-dog against the radical element in the mills, occupies the same post on the school board. The president of the board is a dentist and bank director, a high-up Mason and pillar of the Lutheran church; he rolls down-town in his big limousine, and lives “on the Avenue” in a large residence, which is taxed less than the small cottage of a machinist. Another member is a jeweler and bank director, a pillar of the Congregational church, who sees to it that the works of Scott Nearing, Jack London, Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair are kept out of the Carnegie library. The other members are a bank teller and a very intolerant ex-teacher, both devout Methodists.

As superintendent this board has had for ten years a perfect autocrat, who finds opportunity for many financial activities on the side. He is a typical small-town mind, and excludes from the system all teachers whose minds are bigger. The two most popular teachers in the system were driven out because their parents happened to be Socialists. A high school teacher, who had been on the faculty for twelve years, was charged with “refusing to do team work”—the real reason being that he attended labor meetings and tried to help the workers. When he was fired, a petition was presented, signed by every student in his class—except one, whose father was manager of the Chamber of Commerce. The fight was carried to the school board elections, but to no purpose, and this teacher left town.

There must be “no politics” in Lorain school affairs, the board solemnly ordains; but four years ago, when the ring was kicked out of the city hall, the school board hastened to make a job for one ring member. A working-boy was a minute or two late because a draw-bridge which he had to cross was swung open; he was punished for this, and on the second offense was threatened with loss of his grades. The son of a big bank director and promoter was found smoking cigarettes in the high school building, the punishment for which is expulsion, but the young man graduated three months later. These are petty details, and I only cite them because they are typical of a thousand school systems in small towns. Lorain would tell you that its schools are “progressive,” and would mention the beveled glass mirrors in the new high school, costing ninety-five dollars a piece. Its educators stand high—the superintendent got his enamel finish under Nicholas Miraculous last summer, and the high school principal did the same thing the year before, and other members of the faculty have done it or intend to. Superintendent Boone is a director of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Y. M. C. A., a Mason and a Kiwani, and when he came back from his course in “school management” at Columbia, he showed what he had learned by joining the Elks!