oy 


The AMERICA N 


TEACHER © 





DECEMBER 
1938 





\ 











EXTRA! EXTRA! 


DIES INVESTIGATES FOUNDING FATHERS 





AN EQUAL CHANCE FOR ALL - - - - - Elbert D. Thomas - 
THE SOUTH’S ANSWER - - - - - - - - Stanton E. Smith 
PROPAGANDA ANALYSIS - - - - - - - Clyde R. Miller 
NEW PROTECTION FOR THE CHILD LABORER - Gertrude Binder 
A COLLEGE IS FRED - - - - --+--+-e - Leo Huberman 
A STATEMENT ON THE PROPOSED CLOSING 

OF NEW COLLEGE -..-.--+-. - Arnold Shukotoff 

REVIEWS BY 

Frank E. Baker Eugene Holmes Granville Hicks 

Joel Seidman Boris Gamzue John R. Reid 





ON THE LABOR FRONT 
THE TEACHERS UNION IN ACTION 


Published by the AMERICAN FEDERATION of TEACHERS 














—-— 
a 








Inside the Cover 








—Q 








One of Mr. Winchell’s “orchids” to the 
Kenosha, Wis., Local (No. 557) for the fine 
job they did in editing an education page 
for Kenosha Labor during American Edu- 
cation week. Articles on “Education and 
Democracy,” “Too Much of a Good Thing” 
(vocational education), “The Story of 
American Education Week,” etc., filled the 
complete back page. Every educational- 
policies committee chairman ought to send 
to Paul Porter, Kenosha, Wis., for a copy 
of the November 11 issue of Kenosha Labor 
and enclose ten cents. A really fine job! 


» 2. 


Senator Thomas whose article appears on 
page 5 of this issue of THe AMERICAN 
TEACHER was invited to speak to the Salt 
Lake City chamber of commerce after the 
recent election. In introducing Senator 
Thomas, President Marion C. Nelson com- 
plimented him on the clean campaign which 
had been conducted on his behalf. In re- 
spanse, the Senator said, “I wish the presi- 
dent of the chamber of commerce could 
have seen his way clear to repudiate the 
lies circulated about me before the election 
was over.” 

He went on to point out that “it is 
necessary for the chamber of commerce, and 
others, to reorientate their point of view. 
. . . I remember when the chamber of com- 
merce tried to abolish the University of 
Utah school of business administration . . 
how Workmen’s Compensation laws were 
first fought here . . . how we were called 
bolsheviks when we fought for federal and 
state laws in years gone by .. . laws that 
the present generation has thanked us for 
. . . and now we are called communists 
for pushing legislation that will help the 
people of the country more.” 

*> * 


The American Youth Commission, which, 
incidentally, publishes a fine bulletin which 
will be sent to you free, has just published 
a 48-page pamphlet entitled How To Make 
a Community Youth Survey. The pamphlet 
explains the methods of collecting informa- 
tion and of digesting and interpreting the 
results. It may be secured by sending 25 
cents to the commission at 744 Jackson 
Place, Washington, D. C. 


* * * 


Another fine pamphlet (apparently free) 
which will be of interest to union teachers 
is Racial Inequalities in Education published 
by the National Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Colored People, 69 Fifth Ave., 
New York City. In his letter which ac- 
companied the pamphlet, Walter White ex- 
plained that “foundations have indicated 
that they will not contribute to a frontal 
attack such as the N. A. A. C. P. has made 


upon educational inequalities. The burden, 
therefore, must be borne in the main by 
the Negroes themselves, as is told in the 


attached pamphlet.” 
** * 


And finally if you are interested in find- 
ing out about the National Labor Relations 
Board, Bernard W. Stern of Columbia Uni- 
versity has prepared a list of references on 
it which may be secured by dropping a 
post card to the N. L. R. B. in Washington, 
D. C. The bibliography was compiled pri- 
marily as a guide for those who are inter- 
ested in the history and activities of the 
National Labor Relations Board and the 
emphasis is placed upon references of a 
comprehensive character which cover th« 
broad phases of the board's activities. 

* * * 

We live in a world of propaganda and 
counter-propaganda, and no one is more 
aware of it than an editor. Six times a 
week, the mailman brings the strangest as- 
sortment of left, right, and center publicity 
releases to my office. In a newspaper office, 
most of these will never see the first edi- 
tion. Those, none too expertly mimeo- 
graphed, that violate the newspaper own- 
er’s concept of “freedom of the press” will 
be tossed into the nearest waste-basket. So 
it really doesn’t make much difference what 
newspaper you buy to kill that morning 
“L,” bus, or subway ride, you get a propa- 
ganda sheet which has been pretty well 
sifted. Our press does not by any reasonable 
definition present “both sides” fairly. 

From the pile of material that accumu- 
lates weekly, I learn that the Office of Edu- 
cation is sponsoring a new national radio 
program, “Wings for the Martins,” a story 
of the problems which millions of Americans 
face in their daily living; that Ordway Tead, 
chairman of the board of higher education 
of New York City, will address the American 
Student Union at its national convention in 
New York City, December 26-30, and that 
the theme of the convention is “Keep 
Democracy Working by Keeping it Moving 
Forward”; that Aubrey Williams in analyz- 
img the rise and fall of relief rolls claims 
that the largest relief projects have been 
started in non-election years, that A. F. 
Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of 
Railway Trainmen and chairmen of the 
labor committee of the American League 
for Peace and Democracy, has issued a call 
to 20,000 labor unions to send delegates to 
the league’s conference in Washington, D. C., 
January 6-8; from a P. W. A. release (wast- 
ing the taxpayer’s money) that 250,000 chil- 
dren started school this fall in new class- 
rooms in approximately 1,000 schools made 
possible by “government spending”; from a 
National Council for the Prevention of War 
release that the Farmers Union met in 
Salina and urged “the State Textbook Com- 





I 








7 eS 


mission to refrain from frequent change”; 
and from a pro-Loyalist bulletin, Vews of 
Spain, comes the score of the recent Physio- 
logical Congress in Zurich—Loyalist scien- 


12, Insurgent scientists, 0. 
2 * * 


On the other side of the ledger I find 
Frank Gannett’s America’s Future (32- 
pages), sent free of charge, with a full-page 
press release giving me an “advance” of 
Josiah Bailey’s Borrowed Money—Stagger- 
ing Tax Load Enslaving Nations Voters 
(now I've given Frank his plug), a four-page 
release. Medical News, published by the med- 
ical society of the State of New York 
which contains an address by Dr. William A. 
Groat in which he complains about “the 
growth of wunprincipled propaganda”; a 
cleanly mimeographed statement about the 
work which Dr. Lloyd Burgess Sharp, ex- 
ecutive director of “Life Camps,” is doing 
for the underprivileged girls of New York 
City which helps get non-union Life maga- 
zine before the public’s eye; a short squib 
from a confidential taxation sheet that “no 
definite declaration that adjustment (replace 
with “reduction”) of wages is illegal, has 
been made by the Wages and Hours Divi- 
sion”; and three copies of Dean William F. 
Russell’s speech to the New York Legion, 
“How To Tell a Communist and How to 
Beat Him.” 


tists attending, 


*> * * 


Teachers and the general public would 
have little to worry about if they had the 
chance to wade through a stack of pub- 
licity releases and determine from many dif- 
ferent sources what to think and believe. 
Unfortunately, millions of Americans never 
see a press release from a civil-liberties or- 
ganization on the latest police brutality case, 
or the answer to a distorted Chicago Tri- 
bune story on W. P. A. They must merely 
guess, become disinterested, or set aside the 
time it takes to dig up for themselves, by 
every manner of means possible, the kind of 
information which will keep democracy 
working. 

And though 90 per cent of the American 
newspapers will screech “dictatorship” in 
72-point BF streamers, I’m waiting for the 
day when the American Newspaper Guild 
calls a strike and demands the right of re- 
porters to have some voice in determining 
the policy of the newspaper. 


(Continued on page 31) 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 




















™ AMERICAN TEACHER 


Published by The American Federation of Teachers 





VOLUME XXIII 


DECEMBER, 1938 


NUMBER 3 





IN THIS ISSUE: 


An Equal Chance for All..............+.+05 Elbert D. Thomas 5 
SEND GION cs ccc cccccccccccocseccess Stanton E. Smith 7 
Propaganda Analysis in Everyday Life.......... Clyde R. Miller 8 
Chairman Dies vs. Founding Fathers...............00e0seee05 11 
New Protection for the Child Laborer.......... Gertrude Binder 13 
A College Is Fired.......cccccccccccccccccccees Leo Huberman 16 
A Statement on the Proposed Closing of New College.......... 
att a cele s et eed wedwhe dias een Arnold Shukotoff 17 
Consumer Incomes in the United States................000005: 18 
DEPARTMENTS 
NS CET ETE ee Eey Oey G.T.G. 2 
EE RO Cn OE ee 3 
The President’s Page, Who Is the Good Teacher?.............. 6 
Among the New Books: 
The Structure and Administration of Education in American 
SS EEE OEE OIE Frank E. Baker 20 
Philosopher’s Holiday................++5.: Eugene Holmes 20 
ee ee ry Granville Hicks 21 
Socialism on the Defensive.................. Joel Seidman 22 
American Playwrights: 1918-1938............ Boris Gamzue 22 
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.............. John R. Reid 23 
Se NE CD OD PURINE vce ce cicccnccccsccceesecncbeses 25 
a. 64sec bees cb «laeescasebebweicwads da 28 
OEE CTCL T TET ee hi on et 31 
Ts PD BOND cocccccccesscvercestcgetbeses 31 
Drawings by Chandler Montgomery 
——— 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
Grorce T. Guernsey, Editor 


ENTERED as second class matter October 18, 1933, at the post office at 
Chicago, Llinois, under the act of March 3, 1879. Acceptance for mailing 
at special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of February 28, 
1925, authorized November 3, 1926. 


SUBSCRIPTION: $1.00 for the year—Foreign $1.10—Single copies, 25c. 
Published monthly except June, July and August, at 506 S. Wabash Ave., 
Chicago, Ill. Subscribers are requested to give prompt notice of changes of 
address. Remittances should be made in postal or express money orders, 


draft, stamps, or check. 
Re a 








OST OF THE EDITORIAL COMMENT on the furore created 

by the now famous Orson Welles Martian broad- 
cast was severely critical of the radio officials who per- 
mitted this bit of aerial realism to reach the microphone. 
Few writers were moved to reflect upon the level of public 
intelligence which could take such a broadcast seriously. 
No one, so far as we know, has noted that the juvenile 
fans who have endured the stresses and strains of the 
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers episodes were completely 
unperturbed by the invasion of the men from Mars. 

To school people this amazing incident possesses a special 
significance. If the gullible multitude can be roused to 
hysteria by a relatively innocuous radio fantasy, what de- 
fense can there be if next year the radio, television, the 


DECEMBER, 1938 


newspaper, the photoplay, the magazine, the loudspeaker 
truck, the billboard, the tract and pamphlet combine in a 
systematically planned barrage of propaganda against ra- 
cial minorities or workers’ organizations? Keeping the 
traffic lanes open for all facts and opinions, and providing 
instruction in the analysis of propaganda are the only 
effective defense measures at our disposal, and they should 
be made the primary objectives of every school program. 


WMT 
sO8 SS 


= 


CIVILIZATION BASED ON HATE cannot long endure. The 
A persecution of Jews in Germany has shocked the 
moral sensibilities of all civilized people, and decent people 
all over the world are repulsed by this relapse into barbarism 
by the Germans. It is easy to condemn Hitler, but if no 
positive program for preventing the same development in 
our own country is formulated, it is futile to condemn, in- 
criminate, and analyze the situation. 

We in the United States must be very realistic. There 
are anti-semitics, red-baiters, and people who refuse to 
accept the negro as an equal. Other people feel that the 
Catholic Church is a menace. America, too, has its fascist 
and semi-fascist organizations. Two of the most notorious 
samples are the Silver Shirts and the German Bund. Po- 
tential dictators are just around the corner, willing to capi- 
talize on prejudice in order to win power. 

If we seriously want to prevent the same mad doctrine 
from invading the United States, we must do so through 
education. In doing so, we must be convinced of a basic 
truth—mainly, that to give way to hate of any individual 
or any group introduces the virus that will ultimately fill 
our blood stream with hatred for others. We must oppose 
very emphatically any form of anti-semitism. We must 
rest our very existence on the philosophy of goodwill. We 
must educate the minds of our pupils that no race has a 
monopoly on its contributions to civilization. In order 
to develop unregimented minds, we as teachers must be 
unafraid of philosophic, educational, and political inno- 
vations. 

If our civilization based on rapid technical advancements 





















3 








is to endure, we must maintain our progress in the social 
sciences. Primitive man killed his enemies with a club. 
Modern savages use poison gas. 

Whenever one becomes prophetic, one does so at consid- 
erable risk; but it seems that there is no more incontro- 
vertible historical truth than the statement, “they who live 
by the sword shall perish by the sword.” To paraphrase, 
“they who seek prosperity by piling up non-productive 
goods, shall be destroyed by their inconsistencies.” The 
child who grows up and enters the laboratory or the school- 
room may be building a better civilization; but the youth 
who dies on some bloody battle-field gives his life before 
its full fruition. 

In all education for civic sensitivity, we must be con- 
stantly conscious of just three things: (1) nothing con- 
structive is built on hate; (2) if we want to maintain a po- 
litical democracy, we must bolster economic democracy; 
and (3) economy based on destructiveness cannot endure. 


x*rk 


VER 100,000,000 vo_umgs are housed in the 6,000 pub- 

lic libraries throughout the United States. These li- 

braries serve political units containing a total population of 

77,500,000 people. The remaining group of more than 
50,000,000 Americans are without library facilities. 

Such are the startling facts concerning distribution of 
educational opportunities made public by President Roose- 
velt’s Advisory Committee on Education in its report on li- 
brary service. In terms of averages, the average person in 
an area served by libraries has available for his use 1.3 
books. Taking the nation as a whole, this average dips to 
0.8. No wonder that large sections of our people must be 
classified as economic, social, political, and cultural illiter- 
ates; they could not, even if they wished to, gain access to 
the books they need. 

The facts plead more eloquently than can the most schol- 
arly or impassioned advocate of federal aid for education. 
Precisely as we know that equality of school opportunities 
depends upon support from the national government, so 
also does equality of non-school opportunities. Educators 
cannot rest content with their work until they make sure 
that American citizens are able to continue their educa- 
tion after graduation from the public schools. Libraries 
are an essential. All of which is one more weighty argu- 


ment for an immediate drive for federal equalization of edu- 
cational facilities. 



































ARKEST SPOT ON THE EDUCATIONAL MAP as We go to 

press is Ohio, where closed schools and payless pay- 
days are grim threats. Already schools are closed in Day- 
ton. Only because teachers in Parma have waived claims 
to their salaries have the schools in that town remained 
open. Reports from many other communities warn of ex- 
hausted finances. 

Two factors join hands in causing trouble. Inadequate 
methods of financing the State Foundation Program are 
leading to insolvency of this source of state aid for local 
school districts. The second cause is the existence of mill 
levy limitations, shortsightedly imposed by selfish real-estate 
groups. These can be raised only by special elections. 





Despite closed schools, the Dayton citizenry was persuaded 
to reject such a special levy this year. In Springfield, Ohio, 
where the schools were forced to close two years, the peo- 


ple of the town approved a special tax levy. In this town 
Local 296 of the A. F. of T. has approximately 90 per cent 
of the teachers as members. 

An attempt to place school-tax limitation on an educa- 
tionally sound basis was inaugurated by the Pennsyl- 
vania Federation of Teachers in a measure which would 
have based taxes on the pupil-teacher ratio. Legislatures 
added an amendment applying an absolute mill limitation to 
the bill, thus destroying its effect. As a result, the Phila- 
delphia school board has adopted an eleven-month budget. 
Unless something is done to change the situation, next De- 
cember will find Philadelphia children forced to idle on 
frigid streets. 


x*n 

N A RECENTLY PUBLISHED REPORT Of the Office of Edu- 
I cation it is revealed that less than 15 per cent of the 
courses of study examined by its survey staff give even 
slight evidence of the influence of the correlation or inte- 
gration movement. It is true that at least two large states 
—California and Virginia—and at least two large cities— 
Denver and Houston—have adopted curricula based upon 
pupil experiences, but the Office of Education report makes 
it clear that in the vast hinterland and in many of the metro- 
politan areas the public-school curriculum is badly in need 
of modernization. 

The inertia of social Institutions in a period of rapid 
change constitutes one of the major perils of civilization. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














to 


* om FF 





Sn 














almost a hundred years now some sort of assist- 

ance has been given to the states for education 
in various forms. Nearly all of this aid has been given 
on the basis of matching money, that is, if the federal 
government contributed a dollar, the state was under 
obligation to contribute a dollar also. The federal aid 
for education bill which will be before the next con- 
gress is aid based upon the theory of need; therefore 
there will be no matching. The states, though, will 
have certain definite obligations. They must use the 
money only in conformity with the law and they must 
use it, therefore, in conformity with an accepted stand- 
ard of education which will be consistent with the gen- 
eral fundamental trends throughout the whole nation. 

The state, too, will have complete control of the 
expenditure of the money and its apportionment into 
the various channels within the accepted limits. Thus, 
for example, if a state is deficient in its ability to carry 
out a simple program of adult education, it may inaug- 
urate such a program and use the funds for this purpose. 
If it is backward in kindergarten work, it may use the 
funds for this purpose. 

The theory of granting aid as a result of actual need 
is a result of the experiences which many of our states 
have had in the last nine years. For example, let us 
take a rural county which has been dependent primarily 
on a railroad which runs through the county from end 
to end for supplying the tax school needs of that 
county, and the railroad finds itself insolvent and un- 
able to pay taxes. Boys and girls are thus deprived 


| \ EDERAL AID FOR EDUCATION is not new. For 





A\n Equal Chance for All 


Senator Elbert D. Thomas, Chairman, Senate Committee on Education and Labor 


of a chance to go to school. A proper theory of Ameri- 
can citizenship is that citizens should have equal 
opportunity for obtaining what is the outstanding fun- 
damental for American citizenship—the ability to read 
and write, and pass judgment at election time. If a 
trained citizenry is essential to the preservation of 
democracy in America, surely that training should 
extend to every citizen, and the federal government 
is justified in providing facilities where the local in- 
stitutions are unable to do so in order that these essen- 
tials to American citizenship be provided. Thus the 
bill to provide federal aid to education is thoroughly 
consistent with the finest traditions of our American 
public schools and public-school ideals. 

Precaution is taken in the bill to maintain local con- 
trol of the schools. That theory of our American fed- 
eral system which vests those elements of administration 
which are purely local in the jurisdiction of the local 
unit of the state and those elements which are national 
in interest in the national government is to be pre- 
served. 

The public schools’ contribution to the development 
and preservation of democracy in America cannot be 
measured. It is, in fact, beyond measure. But this is 
certain, it undoubtedly has been the greatest single 
factor in the evolution and perpetuation of American 
democracy. Therefore, an act such as the act to provide 
federal aid to education will add greatly to that univer- 
sal desire of all true Americans—that democracy shall 
be preserved in America and the theory of democracy 
shall be preserved for the whole world. 








Particularly the schools, which must obviously be both the 
first and the last line of social defense, cannot afford to 
evade the issues which ineluctably press upon our society. 
A curriculum consisting of water-tight compartments, each 
containing a traditional body of information, is not a cur- 
riculum for the children of workers in an age of ascendant 
fascism. Comma hounds and date sleuths will not aid 
materially in the struggle for the preservation of democracy. 
The materials of the new curriculum must be taken from 
the situations of everyday life, without respect to vested 
subject interests, and with full recognition of present child 
needs and the demands of a democratic society. 

In many schools the youth are learning to think about 
the broader problems of the community and the nation, 


DECEMBER, 1938 


to express themselves effectively, to be critical of the radio, 
the photoplay, and the newspaper, to assume leadership in 
group undertakings. Such schools are laboratories of demo- 
cratic living. Organized teachers cannot be indifferent to 
these pioneering efforts in curriculum reorganization with- 
out in the long run jeopardizing both their own safety and 
the safety of society. 

The union movement has an important contribution to 
make to current curriculum theory. Pink-tea liberals in 
educational groups who talk glibly about patterns of be- 
havior and social orientation and ego-organization have 
something to learn from the man on the assembly line and 
the relief client. No curriculum committee is complete 
without at least one unadjusted “crackpot” who has been 
face to face with both labor and hunger. 











The Presidents Page 





WHO Is THE GOOD TEACHER? 


VERY FORTY MINUTES in the United States a mur- 

der, every twenty-four seconds a major crime; the 

result—the American people are crime-conscious. 
Actually we are spending ten times as much on crime as 
on education; yet if we spent more on the latter, we would 
not have to spend so much on the former. 

What is the most important factor in educational prog- 
ress? Perhaps it is the good teacher. But what do these 
words mean? I propose to list seven out of an indefinite 
number of possible qualities, not in the order of their 
importance. 

1. Mental ability and scholarship. It is obvious that 
without mental ability of a high order no teacher can 
function adequately. The mind must be strong, analytical, 
capable of grappling with a problem until it is solved. 
It should have creative imagination and be interpretive. 

2. Health. Illness causes a loss of 2,000,000 teaching 
days a year. Radiant, abundant, overflowing health is an 
asset which is invaluable but not indispensable. Some of 
the best teachers have physical limitations. 

3. Personality. This indefinable characteristic should be 
pleasing and forceful. Of incalculable value is a well-de- 
veloped sense of humor and an ability to use it skillfully. 

4. Attitude toward his work. Teaching involves a lot of 
routine: keeping a register, making a seating chart, prepar- 
ing a “lesson plan,” grading papers, disciplining a pupil, 
interviewing a parent. All of this can be mere drudgery, 
something to get out of the way as quickly as possible, or 
it can be a creative adventure which challenges all that one 
has. The real teacher will always have a reverence for 
truth, but will sense the opportunities for truth-sharing in 
every situation. Cooperation with the administration is 
desirable but genuine cooperation is increased a thousand- 
fold by strong group action and the democratizing of the 
whole educational machinery. 

5. The student responses which result. Ability to secure 
sound habits and a disciplined classroom atmosphere, we 
assume. But has the teacher a genuine contribution to share 
with the children; does he or she know how to give it 
while developing pupil self-reliance? The teacher must 
be genuinely interested in the students as persons, main- 
taining a friendly classroom atmosphere. The pupils must 

be continually inspired to develop creativeness, originality, 
and initiative. The teacher who vitalizes, who stimulates 


ambition, who quickens the fires within is needed. 

6. Character. Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt says, regard- 
ing the teacher, that America needs not so much emphasis 
on meticulous scholarship, degrees and the writing of books, 





as on “character, personality, and the special gift of im- 
parting enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge.” Mental and 
moral courage, willingness to defend freedom at all costs, 
and whole-souled sincerity, these are indispensable. In 
addition, the teacher should have sympathy, good will, 
loyalty to ideals, and social altruism. 

7. Civic and social action. This usually penalizes rather 
than helps the teacher in the eyes of certain administrators. 
The ideal teacher would recognize the task of not alone in- 
culcating the tried and true wisdom of the past, but of 
preparing the child to take part in a dynamic civilization 
which sloughs off that which is defective, and which is 
ever building, recreating the new. In other words, the 
teacher must be a prophet of the future as well as a priest 
of the past. 

The Lusk Committee report in New York State (1920) 
said, “No person who is not eager to combat the theories 
of social change should be entrusted with the task of 
fitting the young and old for the responsibilities of citizen- 
ship.” But actually the teacher should have the pioneer- 
ing spirit and should never be content with the status quo. 
The schools should be experiment stations where the child 
learns innovation as well as conservation. The pressing 
controversial problems of our age such as poverty and 
wealth, public utilities, unemployment, and social security 
must be met in the classroom, not avoided. 

The good teacher always remembers that no matter how 
effective his or her work, it can be destroyed by the pres- 
sure of community forces. All life is an educational process. 
Children, after all, are in school only a relatively few 
hours of the day. Afterwards, they go back to their 
homes, out to the playground, and into the community. 

Now, no teacher with the characteristics and qualities 
which I have sketched can possibly fail to be impressed 
with the absolute necessity for an organization affiliated 
with organized labor, such as the American Federation of 
Teachers. For how are we to be prophets of the future if 
we are controlled by superintendents and school boards, 
dominated by the status quo? In a democracy, it is group 
pressure that brings results. The teachers alone are power- 
less. It is only as they are organized and affiliated with 
larger, forward-looking groups that they can hope to build 
the society of the future, or enable the child to come to 
grips with the problems which he must face in the world. 

Teachers should be “front-line,” advance guards, willing 
to adventure for the right when it is unpopular. They 
should never be “sunshine patriots.” In a word, the teacher 
should be a good neighbor in the community, state, and 
nation. JeRomME Davis 









‘SSO y AE RS 





EPO 


are, 


RR sme 


AGRE PE LO TE ERLE SRN LEI tO Ne cy me 


ae 











6 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 












Te EO eS Cy Pw Ss, aoe Ee 


CRE. ~ 


Me eee 


SOON IP te Nig Ae UA AP IO a EE OI - 


RY 














The South's Answer 


@ STANTON E. SMITH 


held at Birmingham, Alabama, November 20-23 

was designed as the South’s answer to the problems 
raised by the report of the National Emergency Council to 
the President on Economic Conditions of the South. This 
report has attracted widespread attention both in and out 
of the South, particularly as it served as the basis for 
President Roosevelt’s designation of the South as “the 
nation’s economic problem number one.” 


Te SOUTHERN CONFERENCE FOR HUMAN WELFARE 


More than 1,200 delegates from the thirteen southern 
states, as well as large numbers of visitors, attended the 
various sessions of the four-day conference, giving it the 
color of a representative section of the progressive thought 
of the South. Persons of national prominence addressed the 
conference including Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Justice 
Hugo Black, Dr. Frank Graham, president of the University 
of North Carolina, and Aubrey Williams. 

Whether or not the Southern Conference for Human 
Welfare has given adequate answers to the problems of the 
South remains to be seen. At least the conference thought 
well enough of its efforts to form itself into a permanent 
organization with the following objectives: 

To unite the southern people and their organizations to 

1. Promote the general welfare; 

2. Improve the economic, social, and cultural standards of 
the southern people; 

3. Advance southern functional growth in accordance with 
democratic institutions and ideals; 

4. Initiate and support progressive legislation in Congress and 
the states in harmony with the principles and program of 
the Southern Conference for Human Welfare; 


5. Secure the cooperation and coordinate the activities of 
other organizations now existing in the southern states. 


In addition, the conference established a governing body 
known as the Southern Council and an executive board, the 
former to be “representative of the entire region, of all 
fields of endeavor, and of all social and racial groups,” and 
the latter to consist of the officers, including a vice president 
from each of the thirteen southern states. 

The conference opened with an address by Dr. Frank 
Graham in which he described the broad pattern of southern 
life and the problems attendant thereto. The conference 
closed with an address by Justice Hugo Black in which he 
accepted the first Thomas Jefferson Medal, which is to be 
an annual award to the southerner who has contributed 
most to human welfare. Between these two events there 
was evolved a broad program touching on the many facets 
of southern economic, social, and cultural life, including 
condemnation of freight-rate differentials, absentee owner- 
ship, and the poll tax; in support of prison and housing 


DECEMBER, 1938 


reform and legislation on wages, hours, and social security; 
and dealing with the problems of agriculture, etc. 

It is not possible within the limits of this report to touch 
on all the actions and resolutions adopted, but I should 
like to mention one which is of particular interest to union 
teachers. 

In the field of education the conference unanimously 
endorsed the Harrison-Thomas-Fletcher Federal Aid Bill. 
Specifically the conference approved the principle of aid 
on a basis of need and ability, took a stand against racial 
or other discrimination in the use of these or other school 
funds, and called attention to the twin facts that the South 
has the highest ratio of children to adults and that it has 
the lowest per-pupil expenditure although it spends a larger 
percentage of its income for education than any other 
section or group of states. It was pointed out that this 
condition is of national concern for three reasons. First, 
a high proportion of children raised in the South spend their 
adult lives elsewhere. The implications of this fact are far- 
reaching. Second, we cannot attain our American goal of 
equal opportunity for all until all children, regardless of 
the accidental geography of birth, shall have equal educa- 
tional opportunity. Third, the educational problems of the 


U . 
e 


South are part of the broader economic problems. If the 
economic problems of the South are the nation’s concern, 
as President Roosevelt maintains (and the Southern Confer- 
ence for Human Welfare agrees), then it follows that the 
South’s educational problems are of national concern also. 
Significantly enough the conference has, since adjourn- 
ment, drawn fire from several sources, including a group 
claiming to represent the Democratic Women’s Clubs of 
Alabama, the Birmingham City Commission, and several 
newspapers. These organizations called upon the Dies 
Committee (which had received the condemnation of the 
conference) to investigate the people “back of” the con- 
ference and its sources of financial support, charging that 
it was inspired by a combination of communists and left- 
wing administration leaders who had led a large number 
of prominent persons to participate through deceit, etc. 
The newspapers attacked, particularly, one action of the 
conference on the race issue, one paper going so far as to 
say that the conference advocated race war. Of course such 





7 














a charge is absurd, and the exact opposite of the truth. 
The 1,200 southerners assembled in Birmingham tried to 
examine the difficult race problem in the same objective 
manner in which the other problems were approached. They 
tried to evolve a program based on justice and fair dealing. 
Unfortunately these certain papers did not attempt an 
appraisal of the whole program but rather isolated one 
action of the conference and read meaning into it which 
was not there. 

However, these attacks open up an interesting avenue 
of speculation. Is it possible that reactionary political 
forces together with the representatives of entrenched greed 
are attacking the Southern Conference for Human Welfare 


at two points which appeal to common prejudices precisely 
because it has pointed the way to solutions of the South’s 
problems? Is it possible that this is because it may disturb 
the ancient alliance between reactionary southern politicians 
and entrenched greed whose long tentacles reach into the 
South from other sections and find ready spokesmen? In 
any event these critics were adequately answered by Judge 
Louise O. Charleton of Birmingham, who was chairman of 
the first conference and is now honorary chairman, when 
she said that the Dies Committee is welcome to investigate 
every aspect of the conference. 

The Southern Conference for Human Welfare struck fire. 
Whether the fire will burn or not remains to be seen. 


Propaganda A\nalysis in Everyday Life 


@ CLYDE R. MILLER 


In analyzing our own opinions and propagandas and 
those of others, we need that cool-headed temper of 
science which has demonstrated its utility for human 
progress through the centuries. We need to remember that 
this temper of science, however, is relatively new. From the 
time of Copernicus on through to Darwin, natural scientists 
have been abused as heretics and atheists. They have had 
showered upon them the vilest epithets and abuse. The 
long battle for freedom of opinion in natural science has 
won only because democracy functioned, and it functioned 
because men were courageous and humane as well as intelli- 
gent. We need that same courage, that same humanity, that 
same intelligence in a world which today is witnessing 
hysterias and phobias caused by propaganda of hatred— 
propaganda based on a false science to make us hate and 
fear Catholics, Protestants, Jews, foreigners, various racial 
and religious groups. Freedom of propaganda in democracy 
means freedom for these vicious propagandas to circulate, 
yes, but it obliges our citizens, and particularly our public- 
school administrators and teachers and our editors and pub- 
lishers to analyze these propagandas. Analysis reveals the 
ends as well as the methods of propagandists. 
In a trenchant and searching editorial published last year, 
the Springfield Republican went to the heart of this whole 
matter. 


P ROPAGANDA ANALYSIs is the scientific method at work. 


Freedom of speech and of the press, to the extent that 
Americans enjoy them, necessarily afford full scope for prop- 
aganda from everybody, everywhere, any time. 

Free propaganda is nothing but free publicity for the views, 
interpretations, arguments, pleadings, truths and untruths, half- 
lies and lies of all creation. Propaganda is good as well as bad. 


The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a non-profit organization, is located 
at 130 Morningside Drive, New York City. The monthly service is sold for 
$2.00 per year. Bound volumes of the first year (1937-38) have been placed 
on sale at $2.00. 






“We are surrounded by clouds of propaganda.” It is up to each 
of us to precipitate from those clouds the true and the false, 
the near-true and the near-false, identifying and giving to each 
classification its correct label. If this task is far beyond the 
facilities or ability of most of us, the fact has to be accepted 
as the price we pay for liberty. 

But precisely how should we deal with the lesser evil? 
Dr. John Studebaker, Commissioner of Education of the 
United States, made a suggestion in connection with the 
recent European crisis. He said: 


The student who missed hearing Chamberlain or Hitler because 
he was forced by an inflexible school program to conjugate 
German verbs or to report on the Elizabethan period of English 
history, was deprived of some real education. 

He missed the significant experience as a close observer of a 
performance which future historians may never quite be able to 
tell accurately. I hope millions of our youth experience an 
acceleration in learning by being stimulated to think and study 
about today’s exciting and thought-provoking pronouncements 
and events. 


Dr. Studebaker’s suggestion is excellent. It suggests the 
need for analysis of the printed and spoken word in today’s 
propagandas; and remember it is today’s propagandas 
which concern us most because they flow from the issues 
which we as citizens must decide today or tomorrow. Sec- 
ondly, in analyzing today’s propagandas, we tend to make 
ourselves more capable of analyzing the propagandas which 
are certain to assail us and to assail the young people in 
our schools tomorrow, next year, or five years hence. 

Now, assuming that our public schools are operated to 
promote public welfare, and recognizing that public welfare 
depends upon public decisions made by millions of indi- 
viduals, and that these decisions can be made wisely only 
if they are made by an intelligent, informed citizenry edu- 
cated to make decisions which will contribute to the 
improvement of democracy, we come to just one conclusion, 
and that is that the school should consciously set out to 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 








a! a ie 


SREP Tes 1A 


a 2 PMNS Uae ae SeRE 














ae aes CIT 


TERRE IC 


Las 


ae 


DEPOSED * 2 PEM ERS ies 10 


ESAS OT UT tae So 





organize a school program so that young people do have 
understanding of current events, of today’s great issues and 
conflicts, and of the propagandas which cause them, which 
result from them, which are associated with them. Particu- 
larly does this obligation rest upon the classroom teacher. 
Insofar as young people are able to recognize propaganda 
when they see it and, having recognized it, begin an analysis 
of it, they will take the first step against being swept off 
their feet by fears and hysterias, that is, they will hold judg- 
ment in abeyance while starting to gather facts and to check 
assumptions. This means they will not be left to their own 
wishful thinking. 


Facts Alone Can Prove Almost Anything 


Facts alone, let us remember however, can be made to 
prove almost anything. Facts must be considered in con- 
nection with definite assumptions. For example, there are 
two types of human organization. One—the democratic 
type—assumes that the individual must be respected for 
what he is worth, that government shall serve the individual. 
The other—the authoritarian—assumes that individuals 
shall serve the state and that as individuals they shall not 
be respected for their own opinions, their own intrinsic 
worth. We can marshall facts to support either assumption. 
What kind of life do we want to live? What is the purpose 
of life? The Institute for Propaganda Analysis has a major 
assumption, namely, that the democratic way of life, whose 
criteria are set forth in the Bill of Rights, is the most 
desirable way of life. Here opinions are respected no matter 
whence they come—whether from Jews, Catholics, Negroes, 
or foreign-born. These opinions, by this assumption, must 
run the gauntlet of criticism just as does the motor car 
which must go through all sorts of trying tests on the proving 
lot before it leaves the factory. 

Study of current events revealed through the news, the 
newsreel, and radio news broadcasting, must mean much 
more than casual reading or casual listening. We can’t hope 
that just by casual reading of newspapers and just by 
casual listening to the radio young people will receive educa- 
tional experience of any particular worth. They need 
teacher guidance to make them discriminating and to build 
in them a healthy skepticism. They need to learn the 
methods of science in testing authorities, in weighing evi- 
dence. When this happens, their skepticism will not run 
into cynicism. No good teacher wants to destroy a pupil’s 
faith in the fact that life can be made worthwhile. Rather, 
good teachers want to make that faith stronger by building 
it on tested knowledge. 

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis believes that in 
the classroom and in the adult study group the most useful 
line of approach to propaganda analysis is through a pre- 
liminary examination of what is said in an advertisement, in 
a political speech, in a newsreel, or in any other public utter- 
ance—such examination, of course, to be followed by search 
for the evidence on which such a statement may rest and 





DECEMBER, 1938 





the means whereby it may be verified. We \ead on from this 
basic process to the study of motives which may have existed 
in the mind of the person making the utterances—to factors 
which may have prejudiced his point of view. Lastly, we 
come to an examination of the persuasive force of the state- 
ment itself, that is, to the evaluation of its appeals to people’s 
interests, needs, desires, and the like, such as appeals to 
desire for popularity, vanity, or health. 

One of the main purposes of the institute’s experimental 
study program in propaganda analysis is to contribute to 
the preparation of teachers, of girls and boys, and of their 
parents for responsible citizenship in a democracy. It should 
help them to understand the methods whereby experts 
arrive at their decisions, and to be able themselves to use 
methods of fact-finding, logical reasoning, and critical think- 
ing independently in all aspects of their daily lives. It is 
important that citizens of a democracy should not rely 
blindly upon the opinions of authorities. It is important 
also that people should be encouraged to make experiments 
and series of observations concerning the things about 
which experts or authorities pass judgment. 

It is also important that young people and adults should 
recognize that in many of the practical judgments which 
they make they have to use data which are not reliable. 
They should recognize that much of their information 
comes from people who have an axe to grind; that they 
must consider the devices deliberately used by speakers 
and writers in order to misrepresent an issue, or to per- 
suade people to come to a conclusion that they would 
not come to if they possessed relevant facts. 

In order to bring about such recognition, it is important 
that teachers, group leaders, and, with careful guidance 
and competent leadership, young people give attention to 
the psychological processes through which judgments are 
formed. It is vital, too, that they consider the part that 
self-interest, the part that respect for evidence, and the 
part that social pressure play in shaping belief. 


Purpose to Develop Critical Thinking 


Another main purpose of propaganda analysis is to give 
life and meaning to adult study and to all school courses— 
in brief, to make the general education of young people 
and of adults live up to its avowed purposes, that is, 
preparation for intelligent citizenship and for the problem- 
solving on which citizenship in democracy depends. In 
particular, the scientific method of propaganda analysis 
should help them to check the validity of assertions which 
they hear made and to see the purposes back of them. It 
should equip them for doing so by reference to reliable 
authorities or by the making of experiments for them- 
selves where that is practicable. 

The method suggested herein is the method of science. 
Propaganda analysis, therefore, examines opinions, assump- 
tions, forms of argument, just as it examines facts, alleged 
facts, lies, truths, half-truths, and all manner of innuendo 





9 





and misdirections flowing from our current controversies. 
If a study could be made quickly of the recent war crisis 
in Europe it might accomplish much even now in cancelling 
the harm done by the innuendo, misdirection, lies, half- 
truths and specious arguments which preceded the “crisis.” 
Such planned chicanery made a Europe and a world fearful 
of a war crisis, then apparently created the crisis, and 
enabled Hitler and Chamberlain successfully to accom- 
plish a pact to make Europe safe for fascism. Safe? Well, 
that depends. Europe will be safe for fascism if present 
censorship and suppression of democratic realities can con- 
tinue in England and France. It will be likely to be safe 
if France and England continue to keep off the radio those 
voices which criticized Daladier and Chamberlain for ap- 
peasing the dictators. It is no accident that Americans 
see more clearly the European picture than do Europeans. 
The reason is that Americans have had the benefit of 
skilled news-gatherers and commentators. No better re- 
search is done in America than is done by our best news- 
paper men. Unfortunately, along with excellent news- 
paper reporting, our press carries an enormous amount of 
poor reporting and of banal entertainment. That is why 
mere reading of newspapers without discrimination is not 
educative. 

The Group Leader's Guide to Propaganda Analysis, by 
Violet Edwards, educational director, revised experimental 
study materials, published by the Institute, stresses the 
importance of making young people in our high schools 
and colleges discriminating in their reading, able to see the 
difference between the foreign correspondence of a paper 
like the Chicago Daily News and the foreign correspondence 
of a paper like the Chicago Tribune. The journalism 
teachers will have their pupils familiar with such writers 
as Webb Miller of the United Press; James A. Mills of 
the Associated Press; Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr. of the New 
York Times; Joseph Driscoll of the New York Herald- 
Tribune; Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Star-Times ; 
and O. K. Bovard, late of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

Contrast such writers, whose writings represent research 
extraordinarily well-done when one considers how difficult 
the conditions are under which it often must be done, with 
other writers who represent prejudice, banality, gossip, and 
rumor and who give no indication that it is prejudice, ban- 
ality, gossip, and rumor. 

Lack of discrimination on the part of recipients makes 
propaganda effective. News stories based on prejudice often 
are super-charged with emotion; and they are easily re- 
ceived and again given forth by our young people and 
adults if that emotion ties to their fears, their hatreds, 
and their wishful thinking. Here the searching of our own 
minds is important. A human mind is a camera film which 
is conditioned to receive some impressions and to reject 
others, to receive some propagandas and to reject others. 


If we are conditioned as children by parents, teachers, and 
associates to hate Catholics, we will be receptive to anti- 
Catholic propaganda. If we are conditioned to hate Jews, 
we will be receptive to anti-Semitic propaganda. If we 
are conditioned to have tolerance for Jews, Catholics, for- 
eigners, Negroes, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and 
Seventh-Day Adventists, we would be less likely to be 
carried off our feet by propagandas of hatred and fear di- 
rected against such groups. 

If pupils’ minds are conditioned in school to respect the 
scientific method of testing hypotheses, of weighing evi- 
dence, of forming tentative conclusions and keeping them 
tentative until thoroughly tested, our pupils will be proof 
against the waves of propaganda which can sweep them 
off their feet. 


Schools Cooperate in Determining Methods 

Method, therefore, is an important word in propaganda 
analysis. The institute, in the first year of its existence, 
has attempted to create and compare various methods of 
approach to propaganda. In this work it has had the coop- 
eration of about four hundred schools, some of which are ex- 
perimental schools operated in connection with Columbia 
University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, 
the University of Missouri, and Ohio State University. There 
have been many private and public schools throughout the 
country cooperating. As a result of the first year’s study, 
the institute has just published the volume, The Group 
Leader’s Guide to Propaganda Analysis. This brings to- 
gether suggestions flowing out of the experience of scores 
of high-school and college teachers. It attempts to set 
forth precisely what can be done in classes in English and 
journalism, home economics, art, music, and science. But 
what it sets forth is still tentative and experimental. 

These pioneering teachers, who have helped create this 
approach to propaganda analysis, have made only a start. 
Other pioneers are needed to relate propaganda study to 
classroom work in standard courses in English literature, 
composition, public speaking, journalism, music, art, geom- 
etry, history, and the social studies. 

One observation which should be of interest to school 
administrators comes out of this work, namely, this ap- 
proach to dealing with the ever-present problem of propa- 
ganda has revealed that the scientific method is not only 
the best method educationally, but the safest method for 
treatment of highly controversial issues. Take, for ex- 
ample, issues related to the New Deal or to Chamber- 
lain’s policy in England. Without advocating any con- 
clusion, it is possible to approach these dynamic matters 
by examining propagandas related to them. For example, 
propagandas for and against the New Deal or aspects 
of the New Deal can be examined. The various de- 
vices used by the propagandist can be identified, using 
for this purpose such categories as were set forth in 
the November, 1937, letter of the institute. Having 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 








OS 4 2 


le a eee ee ld ee 











TY RAST Fayre 


ee ae 


veer Se a> 





thus identified propaganda and the devices used by the 
propagandist, pupils can be set to investigating the facts 
upon which the propaganda statements are based, out- 
lining the assumptions related to these facts, attempting 
to get some measure of the feelings excited in them by the 
propagandist’s words, seeing how these feelings relate to 
their own backgrounds, their own conditioning, their own 
prejudices, biases, convictions, ideals, fears, hatreds, aspira- 
tions, and hopes. Pupils then will find it useful to identify 
the propagandist. What are his motives, his interests? 
If the democratic assumption is accepted, would his in- 
terests, if realized, be in line with that assumption? In 
brief, propaganda analysis attempts to do in the field of 
ideas what chemists, physicists, biologists, and physicians 
have done in the field of atoms, molecules, ions, and bac- 
teria. It is no more likely that social, economic, and po- 
litical troubles will be cured by incantations than it is that 
smallpox can be cured by incantations. That is why propa- 


Chairman Dies vs. 


ASHINGTON, D. c.—George Washington, Thomas 

Jefferson, and other “Founding Fathers” were 

questioned today by the Dies Committee which 
is investigating un-American and radical activities. The 
appearance of America’s revolutionary heroes created a 
sensation such as Washington (D. C.) has seldom expe- 
rienced, as it was not thought that a subpoena could reach 
to the other world. 

General Washington received a great ovation as he 
mounted the witness stand in the capital named after him. 
Chairman Dies broke two gavels before he could restore 
order and focus the attention on himself. 

Washington was subjected to only the briefest question- 
ing, Mr. Dies asking him if it was true that in negotiating 
a treaty with Tripoli in his second administration, he had 
assured the Mohammedans that “the government of the 
United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian 
religion.” 

“That is true,” said the General. He also pleaded guilty 
to the charge that at Valley Forge he had ordered the pub- 
lic reading of Tom Paine’s Crisis, as he thought it a good 
book for pepping up the ragged and undernourished soldiers. 

The sensational witness of the day was Thomas Jeffer- 
son, who described himself as the third president of the 
United States and author of the Bill of Rights of the Con- 
stitution. He was questioned by Chairman Dies as fol- 
lows: 


DECEMBER, 1938 


ganda analysis is needed so desperately today; because 
today we live in one of those transition periods of history 
when there is social upheaval and when too many persons 
are attempting to reach some kind of stability by the 
method of incantation, by exorcising devils, and by spread- 
ing mass hysteria. 
In summary, propaganda analysis, as an organized process, 
is experimental group study along six lines, all inter-related: 
1. Solution of today’s conflicts and issues through the appli- 
cation of critical inquiry, in the scientific temper (possible only 
within the democratic framework). 
2. Strains or pressures which society creates for individuals. 


3. Why people think and act in certain ways under the 
stimuli of appeals to their interests, needs, desires, prejudices, 
fears, and the like. 

4. Interests and desires to which propagandists appeal. 

5. The purposes underlying the appeals of these propa- 
gandists. 

6. The methods, or the means they use to achieve their ends 


or purposes. 


Founding Fathers 


“Ts it true, Mr. Jefferson, that you have openly advo- 
cated the desirability of revolution?” 

Mr. Jefferson: I have, sir, and on numerous occasions. 

Mr. Dies: And this was after our Revolution, after 1783? 

Mr. Jefferson: Yes. 

Mr. Dies: You were not of Mr. Coolidge’s opinion that 
we had had our Revolution, and that one was enough? 

Laughter broke out in the courtroom when Jefferson 
asked who Mr. Coolidge was, and on being told, asked if 
Mr. Coolidge had ever had a revolution. A man in the 
audience yelled, “Boston police strike!” and was forcibly 
ejected by attendants. 

Mr. Jefferson thereupon assured the chairman that he 
was emphatically on record as being in favor of a more or 
less permanent revolution. 

Mr. Dies: Do you recognize the following words as 
yours, Mr. Jefferson? ‘The spirit of resistance to govern- 
ment is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to 
be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when 
wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I 
like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in 
the atmosphere.” Are those your words? 

Mr. Jefferson: They are. But there is a better passage, 
if you will permit— 

Mr. Dies: Excuse me, I’m coming to that. Here is a 
long paragraph in which you incite the people to the 
spirit of resistance. “Let them take arms. The tree of 
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood 





of tyrants. It is its natural manure.” You are an agitator, 
Mr. Jefferson. 

Mr. Jefferson: I was an agitator, Mr. Dies. 

Mr. Dies: You still are. You may be dead, but these 
words are still available. They are in the books, in the 
libraries, accessible to the school children whose tender 
minds are susceptible to plausible appeals to revolt. That 
is why we subpoenaed you and General Washington and 
Mr. Madison and the others, because tradition is powerful, 
and dangerous words and deeds in the past have a way 
of echoing in the present. It is men like you, Mr. Jeffer- 
son, that give the Reds aid and comfort. This committee 
asks you to recant and to make a statement to it and to 
the press that you have taken a saner view, so as to undo 
some of the harm you have done. 

Mr. Jefferson: Tut, Mr. Dies. Let us get on to another 
passage. 

Mr. Dies: You are a Bolshevik, Mr. Jefferson. Not 
even a communist would dare use such language today. 
How did you get away with it? 

Mr. Jefferson: The Bill of Rights which I wrote and 
put through was still fresh in those days, and there were 
no Dies committees. 

Mr. Dies: Do not insult the committee, Mr. Jefferson. 





We are here on a sacred errand, to preserve fundamental 
American institutions. 


Mr. Jefferson: Those are institutions which I helped 
build, and I am as skeptical of this committee’s motives as 
I am of its abilities in this matter of protection. 

Mr. Dies: This is the Twentieth Century, not the 
Eighteenth, Mr. Jefferson. Permit us to solve our own 
problems in our own way. Evidently you lived in bloodier 
days than ours, as shown by this passage of yours: “The 
late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than 
I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion 
in thirteen states in the course of eleven years is but one 
for each state in a century and a half. No country should 
be so long without one.” 

Mr. Jefferson: Policemen and company thugs did not 
shoot down citizens in my day, Mr. Congressman. 

Mr. Dies: Nevertheless, your principles are those of sheer 
Bolshevism. 

Mr. Jefferson: They used to be accounted the princi- 
ples of pure Americanism, as enunciated by the founder of 
your party, Mr. Dies. 

Mr. Dies: And who is that? 

Mr. Jefferson: I, Thomas Jefferson. (Laughter.) May 
I say, taking advantage of a ghost’s privilege to dodge 
contempt of Congress, that meeting you makes me rather 
regret having effected the Louisiana Purchase, since it led 
to the acquisition of Texas, the great state you represent 
in such a small way. (More laughter.) 

Mr. Dies: You may leave the stand. 

Mr. Jefferson (going): You forgot that I also said: 
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without a 
rebellion.” 

When order was restored in the committee room Mr. Dies 
called to the stand James Madison, another former presi- 

































































































































































o ~ 
. y 
i ag 
cx 
7 My 
fatise 
és me | 
5°.6 
“r 
Y 2 & | 
ee | | ! = 
e 7 | 
cal < st | WGN 
> on SL = ‘ 
< c ~ 


ee ae = Vy 











THE AMERICAN TEACHER 











08 ne 


OE er vay 


SS eee 











REM > 








dent of the United States and one of the framers of the 
Constitution. Mr. Madison testified that he entertained 
views concerning economic determinism which were sub- 
stantially in accord with those expressed by one Karl Marx. 

A number of witnesses, among them Alexander Hamil- 
ton and Patrick Henry, were called to prove that among 
the patriot forefathers there were several who held that 
the Constitution was a very imperfect document. 

A rumor which caused considerable stir and anticipation 
in the committee room was that Benjamin Franklin, John 
and Samuel Adams, James Monroe, Thomas Paine, Gouver- 
neur Morris, and John Marshall would be put on the stand 
to establish their attitudes toward wine, women, and song, 
on the ground that lax moral standards are closely asso- 
ciated with political and social radicalism. But although 
these heroes were present as if ready to testify, they were 
not called. 

Tomorrow the committee will question Andrew Jackson 





and Abraham Lincoln. It is understood that the examina- 
tion of the martyred ex-president will take in the following 
territory: 

1. Charges that he was a “dictator” during the Civil War. 

2. Public statement made by him to the effect that labor 
is prior to and independent of capital, a statement tending 
to incite class hatred. 

3. Letter he is alleged to have written and allowed to 
be made public just before his assassination, in which he 
accused the big business interests of conspiracy to under- 
mine “democracy” and destroy the “Republic.” 

4. Public statement credited to him that people had a 
right to change their form of government by force, if neces- 
sary. 

Veteran observers here and sources close to Chairman 
Dies, who for obvious reasons cannot be quoted, say that 
an attempt will be made to discredit the founder of the Re- 
publican party as a Red. 


New Protection for the Child Laborer 


@ GERTRUDE BINDER 


place controls upon the employment of children and 
young people in interstate commerce industries went 
into operation on October 24, 1938, when the Fair Labor 
Standards Act with its excellent child labor provisions be- 
came effective. Two previous efforts at federal child-labor 
legislation, one enacted in 1916 and the other in 1919, were 
declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme 
Court. However, as a result of the more liberal interpreta- 
tion of the term “interstate commerce” accepted by the 
Supreme Court in recent decisions, it is generally believed 
that the new law will withstand the test of constitutionality. 
Under the child-labor provisions of the Fair Labor Stand- 
ards Act, it is illegal to ship across state lines goods pro- 
duced in any establishment in which children under sixteen 
years of age have been employed within thirty days prior 
to such shipment, or in which young people from sixteen 
to eighteen have been employed in any occupation found 
and declared hazardous by the chief of the Children’s Bu- 
reau of the United States Department of Labor, who is 
charged with enforcement of these provisions. Exception is 
made of the employment of children by their parents or 
guardians in industries other than mining or manufactur- 
ing. Children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen may 
be employed at times by order of the Children’s Bureau in 
occupations other than mining and manufacturing and under 
conditions which will not interfere with their schooling, 
health, or general well-being. 


To THIRD ATTEMPT by the federal government to 


DECEMBER, 1938 


No investigations have been made to date of occupations 
believed to be hazardous, and none has been designated as 
unsuitable for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Under regu- 
lations issued immediately after the law took effect the occu- 
pations completely closed to children under sixteen are min- 
ing and manufacturing, operating or helping on motor 
vehicles, and messenger service. Other employment is per- 
mitted outside of school hours for not more than three hours 
on any school day and eight hours on any other day. Pend- 
ing a public hearing, an order prohibiting night work be- 
tween the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. has been temporarily 
suspended. 

Enforcement of the child-labor provisions of the Fair 
Labor Standards Act is carried out through a system of 
employment certificates in the issuance of which both state 
and federal agencies cooperate. Forty states in which certifi- 
cates of age issued to employed minors have the same force 
and effect as federal certificates have already been desig- 
nated. The only states in which plans for cooperation had 
not been worked out by December 1 were Idaho, Iowa, 
Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, 
Texas, and Wyoming. In these states the Children’s Bu- 
reau has provided that for the present a birth certificate or 
record of baptism will be accepted. The act does not make 
it mandatory for employers to have certificates of age for 
their minor employees. but it does provide that if an em- 
ployer has such a certificate on file he is protected against 
unwitting violation of the law. 





nce i ee ne 


Miss Katherine Lenroot, chief of the Children’s Bureau, 
has estimated that about 50,000 children under sixteen years 
of age and an unknown number of sixteen-and seventeen- 
year-olds are affected by the new law. This does not include 
those employed in certain occupations whose status under 
the act is not yet definitely determined. Newsboys, for in- 
stance, come in this group. Although Elmer F. Andrews, 
who is administrator of the wages-and-hours section of the 
act, has announced that newspapers, except those specifi- 
cally exempted, are covered, an article in Editor and Pub- 
lisher of November 5 stated that the question of newsboys 
is still unsettled. The author of the article raised three 
points: whether newsboys are employees of the publishers 
whose papers they distribute, whether they operate in inter- 
state commerce, and whether contracts by which newsboys 
work as “little merchants” or “independent contractors”’ 
relieve the publisher of employer-employee responsibilities. 
However, since the act went into effect, most newspapers 
have discontinued the use of delivery boys under fourteen 
years of age. They estimate that out of 600,000 carriers, 
about 60,000 have been affected by this action. 

In the field of commercialized agriculture the effects of 
the new legislation will probably be slight. Employment of 
children under sixteen in agricultural establishments is 
barred during the hours of legally required school attend- 
ance. However, the child labor and compulsory school 
attendance laws of agricultural states often exempt children 
for work on farms. In many, also, the children of migrants, 
who make up a large proportion of farm laborers, are not 
required, and sometimes not permitted to attend school. 


Actually, although the child-labor provisions of the Fair 
Labor Standards Act represent am important step forward 
in the protection of children against harmful employment, 
the boys and girls which it reaches make up a small group 
when compared with the number still at work in violation 
of neither state nor federal legislation. 

Although no complete count of the number of child labor- 
ers in the country has been made, a conservative estimate, 
based on the 1930 census figures on occupational shifts and 
on trends in child labor as reflected in employment certifi- 
cate figures, placed the number less than sixteen years of 
age gainfully employed in agriculture and industry before 
the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act at 850,000. 
Most of these children are to be found in agriculture and 
in purely local trades and occupations not covered by the 
new federal legislation. Among the types of employment 
commonly entered by children that are not reached by the 
Fair Labor Standards Act are clerical work—chiefly clerks 
in retail stores and messenger, errand, and office work—and 
domestic and personal service, which does not include house- 
work in the child’s own home, but does include employment 
in beauty parlors, hotels, restaurants, and laundries. 


The Children’s Bureau periodically compiles and releases 
statistics based on employment certificates issued in a group 


14 








































































































of states and cities reporting regularly to the federal agency. 
These figures do not show the extent of child labor, since 
they are not based on a complete count, but they are ex- 
tremely usefyl in indicating trends both in the number of 
children leaving school for work each year, and the types 
of occupations entered. They show that in recent years 
there has been a shift in child employment from the mechan- 
ical and manufacturing industries which predominate in 
interstate commerce to the purely local trades mentioned 
above. They also show that, except where controlled by 
state legislation, fluctuations in the number of children 
going to work for the first time, regardless of the occupations 
entered, follow similar movements in adult employment. In 
localities where minimum age legislation remained un- 
changed during the two years, there was, as compared with 
corresponding periods in 1936, a 20 per cent increase in 
the number of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children begin- 
ning work during the first six months of 1937, a period of 
generally rising employment, followed by a 16 per cent 
decrease during the last half of the year, when the number 
of adult unemployed rose. 

In New York and Rhode Island, where a sixteen-year 
minimum age was established in 1936, the issuance of 
employment certificates to children under sixteen has prac- 
tically ceased. Before the new state laws became effective, 
more than half of all certificates issued in the entire report- 
ing area were in these two states. For all states and cities 
reporting to the Children’s Bureau, 41 per cent fewer certifi- 
cates were issued during the entire year of 1937 than in 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 











Se ee ee 


~ 

















Sa lt cae a 


er ed — 


i 
: 
: 
H 





1936. If New York and Rhode Island are eliminated, the 
decline for the remaining areas was only 1 per cent. 

Employment certificate data give, of course, no indication 
of the number of children illegally employed, nor of the 
number to be found in occupations for which work permits 
are not required. By far the largest number of children at 
work today are to be found in industrialized agriculture, 
where employment certificates are not required. 

Studies of migrants, including investigations of child labor 
along the Pacific Coast and on the New Jersey truck farms, 
undertaken during the year by the National Child Labor 
Committee, show that particularly abusive use of children 
as laborers is widespread on large, commercialized fruit and 
vegetable farms. Migratory workers, although absolutely 
necessary for the production of commercial crops, meet dis- 
crimination in the communities into which they move at the 
harvesting season. Usually they are housed in makeshift, 
unsanitary camps, where overcrowding and a complete lack 
of privacy prevail. They are excluded, either through their 
own ignorance or through local regulation, from the health 
and other social services from which residents benefit. 

Migratory children work alongside their parents, putting 
in long hours at tasks which involve repetitive processes un- 
suitable for undeveloped muscles and which are carried on 
under conditions often hazardous as well as exhausting. 
Their education suffers, both as a result of their work in 
the fields and the reluctance of local authorities to admit 
them to schools. In some states non-residents are not 
covered by compulsory school attendance laws; in others 
no attempt is made to enforce the law as it affects them. 
Where they are admitted to the local schools, migratory 
children are so poorly received by both teachers and 
fellow pupils that some communities have considered it 
advisable to segregate them in special classes, separately 
housed. As a result of these conditions, only a few of the 
children of migrants complete the eighth grade, and none 
go further. 

In only a few instances do state child-labor laws provide 
minima for child employment equal to those established by 
the Fair Labor Standards Act for interstate commerce. Only 
ten states have sixteen-year age minima for factory employ- 
ment during school hours. Three states place the minimum 
at fifteen years, twenty-four at fourteen, and eight, through 
exemptions, still permit children under fourteen to leave 
school for employment. Thirty-one states have practically 








no restrictions on hazardous employment for sixteen- and 
seventeen-year-old minors, and nine have almost no such 
regulation even for children of fourteen and fifteen. During 
1938 nine state legislatures met in regular session, but in 
none of them was any advance made over these basic 
standards. 

The pending Child Labor Amendment to the Federal 
Constitution would give to Congress the power to extend 
to children in all types of occupations the protection now 
given by the Fair Labor Standards Act to those in inter- 
state commerce industries. 

This amendment, which was submitted to the states in 
1924, provides that Congress shall have the power to 
“limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under 
eighteen years of age.” Ratification by thirty-six states is 
needed to make this proposal a part of the Constitution, 
and at the close of 1937, twenty-eight had given it their 
approval. No new endorsements were added in 1938. 

In Kansas and Kentucky, both of which ratified in 1937, 
opponents of the amendment challenged the validity of 
ratification in the courts. Both cases involved three major 
issues: whether a state which has affirmatively rejected an 
amendment can subsequently ratify; whether, since an 
amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, 
the Child Labor Amendment which has been affirmatively 
rejected at some time by more than one-fourth of the states 
is thereby killed once and for all; and whether, since the 
Supreme Court has held that an amendment must be ratified 
within a “reasonable” time, the Child Labor Amendment is 
still open for ratification fourteen years after its submission 
by Congress to the states. 

The Supreme Court of Kansas upheld validity of ratifica- 
tion by Kansas on all three points. The Court of Appeals 
of Kentucky declared ratification by Kentucky null and 
void on the same points. Both cases were appealed to the 
United States Supreme Court where arguments were heard 
on October 10 and 11, but at the time of this writing no 
decision has been announced. Should the court find that 
the proposal is still valid, the way will be opened for a 
final drive for ratification in 1939. Should the decision be 
unfavorable, it will be necessary to formulate a new pro- 
posal and make a fresh start toward winning for all Ameri- 
can children complete and equal protection against abusive 
child labor and the attendant losses of schooling, health, 
and opportunities for adult earnings and advancement. 





DECEMBER, 1938 











A College Is Fired 


@ LEO HUBERMAN 


Only an administrative officer drunk with power, or be- 
guiled by self-importance, or exceedingly inept, makes impor- 
tant decisions without wide consultation with his colleagues. 

DEAN WILLIAM F. RussELL 
Teachers College Record, 
Vol. 38, p. 112, Nov., 1936 


* * * 


Teachers College, at a special student-faculty 

assembly, announced the dissolution on June 30, 
1939, of New College, the autonomous experimental teacher- 
training unit of Teachers College. The announced reason was 
a deficit of $35,000. 

Professor Donald G. Tewksbury, the director of New 
College, had not been consulted in the making of the 
decision; the Dean’s Advisory Committee of Teachers Col- 
lege had not been consulted in the making of the decision; 
the New College Advisory Committee had not been con- 
sulted in the making of the decision. Professor Tewksbury 
and Professor Evenden, chairman of the New College 
Advisory Committee, were advised of the decision on 
November 2; five members of the New College faculty, also 
on the staff of Teachers College, were advised of the decision 
on November 8; the rest of the New College faculty were 
advised of the decision at 1 p.m. on November 10; at 2 p.m. 
the dean appeared before the student-faculty assembly and 
there the students were advised of the decision. 


As might be expected, the sudden announcement created 
consternation in the New College body. There had been no 
warning of what was coming. In May, 1938, a bulletin had 
been published containing the announcement that “New 
College was entering upon a new phase.” Professor Tewks- 
bury had been appointed director, not chairman as his 
predecessor had been, or temporary director or adviser: his 
title appeared to be quite as permanent as that of director 
of the Advanced School of Education, director of Educa- 
tional Research, or any of the other directors. He had 
assumed his duties, officially, in June, 1938, and had imme- 
diately instituted various economies which resulted in a 
radical cut of the deficit. Important structural changes 
and decorative improvements had been made in the quarters 
assigned to New College, at considerable cost to Teachers 
College. Incoming registration had increased by one-half, 
and the new students had been admitted without any state- 
ment that the continuance of the college beyond the present 
year was doubtful; four of them in fact, from Iraq, had 


() N NoveMBER 10, 1938, Dean William F . Russell of 


16 


been notified by letter that they were enrolled in New 
College for three years. A new, vigorous, and hopeful spirit 
had been infused into New College. It looked, indeed, as 
though we were entering a new phase. There wasn’t a 
single cloud on the horizon. 


Then, without warning, came the announcement of the 
dissolution. 


The immediate reaction of the students and faculty was 
that the college must be saved, that the undemocratic pro- 
cedure by which it was liquidated be condemned, and 
assurance obtained that it would not happen in the future. 
Out of the crisis came a unanimity of students and faculty 
which was as remarkable as it was unprecedented in the 
history of American colleges. Committees of students, 
teachers, alumnae, and parents were set up to carry on the 
fight. New College, always an active place in the past, 
became more active than anyone would have dreamed pos- 
sible before. The work of the college became the program 
for saving it. Never before was college work better done. 
Page 7 of the New College catalogue became our bible, a 
living bible, a handbook for action: 


New College is deeply concerned that all students should be- 
come thoroughly aware of what is happening in contemporary 
society, beth for the sake of their own insight and that they 
may be able better to interpret the changing social scene to 
others. Education itself is meaningful only in relation to the 
economic and social conditions of the times. It is all too easy 
to acquire a sideline attitude toward crucial issues, to become 
satisfied with intellectual speculation, and to hold one’s self 
aloof from the realities of social and political activity. Social 
problems take on new meaning in practical application. To 
substitute vigorous activity in the place of academic neutrality 
in public affairs, New College students are urged to go beyond 
academic discussion to participation in social and political move- 
ments, each in accordance with his own convictions. Students 
are preparing not only to be teachers in a narrow sense, but to 
be active participants in the community in which they will work 
and be able to assume educational leadership. They are to 
be cognizant of the difficulties in achieving a better social order 
and conversant with the judgment of experts concerning social 
problems. They are to be tactful in dealing with contro- 
versial issues, but not compromising. Above all, they are to 
have a special concern for reconstructing educational institu- 
tions in light of the needs of a changing civilization. 


The crisis has served as a learning situation without 
parallel. Remarkable results are being achieved through 
the integrated work of students and faculty on every com- 
mittee. Our committee on the significance of New College 
is drawing up a statement of its value to the educational 
world; our publicity committee is circularizing hundreds 
of people with a statement of the facts, and calling for help; 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 











our press committee prepares a running account of signifi- 
cant happenings every day; our photography committee is 
trying to get a pictorial record of the struggle to complement 
the history in words being prepared by the records com- 
mittee; our arts committee is describing the field of action 
in original pictures and posters of superb quality; our 
budget committee is trying to get at the facts and figures of 
the alleged deficit; our coordinating committee is directing 
the whole according to the lines laid down by the student- 
faculty body. Our whole procedure is a beautiful example 
of the democratic process. 

The budget committee was faced with the most difficult 
job. At first, the only obtainable figures were those in the 
dean’s annual reports. These were obviously insufficient— 
in fact, they showed that New College had a surplus, not a 
deficit. The dean responded to our request for further 
information with more detailed figures. We then learned 
that the deficit for last year was $36,894.15, and for this 
year, it is estimated at $25,800. The director of New 
College disagrees; his estimate is below $15,000. The 
budget committee went over all the available figures and 
arrived at a deficit figure of $3,800. This is one-tenth of 
one per cent of the total Teachers College budget. 


The estimate may be wrong. But teachers and students 
at New College are in the absurd position of not having 
access to the budget. And the administration, which made 
the arbitrary decision to close New College, refuses to pro- 
vide detailed information on the budget. 

However, our case does not rest on a deficit of only $3,800. 
New College, as the dean himself has indicated in the state- 
ment announcing the dissolution, has been an experiment 
that “has had the widest influence. . . . Professionalized 
subject matter, the seminar approach, field-work experience, 
community organization, foreign study, interneship, educa- 
tional guidance, new type records and reports—all these are 
securing wide recognition and incorporation in other institu- 
tions for the education of teachers. No experiment has 
been more valuable for Teachers College.” 

Were the deficit $35,000, as the dean contends, we believe, 
nevertheless, that this highly significant departure in the 
training of American teachers is worth the money and more. 

We feel that the closing of New College is more than 
our own affair. It is properly the concern of the American 
people because the things at stake—democracy and socially 
realistic education—are too precious in this critical period 
to be attacked in any way, from any quarter. 


A Statement on the Proposed Closing of New College 


NATIONAL ACADEMIC FREEDOM COMMITTEE 
ARNOLD SHUKOTOFF, Chairman 


experimental wing of Teachers College, as arbitrary 

and a setback to progressive education in America, 
the National Academic Freedom Committee urges locals 
throughout the country to support efforts aimed at pre- 
venting the closing of New College. 

In a statement issued by the N.A.F.C., it is pointed out 
that Dean William F. Russell’s action is being challenged 
by a unanimous faculty and student body at New College, 
by the Columbia University chapter of Local 537, by the 
entire membership of Local 537, which includes faculty 
members in colleges throughout New York City, and by 
many prominent educators. 

The resolution passed unanimously by the Columbia 
University union chapter at a meeting on November 18 
characterizes the closing of New College as a setback to 
progressive education, points out that the positions of some 
twenty staff members are involved, and urges Dean Russell 
to request the trustees to reconsider their decision. 

The undemocratic character of the decision is challenged 
by Dr. Alice V. Keliher, chairman of the Commission on 
Human Relations of the Progressive Education Association. 


C HARACTERIZING THE DECISION to close New College, 


DECEMBER, 1938 


In a statement which appears in the New York Times of 
December 4, Dr. Keliher indicates that she has found 
“all over the country effects of the program of New Col- 
lege,” and points out that the decision to close the college 
was made without reference to the faculty or alumnae. 

The sole explanation given by Dean Russell for the de- 
cision is an alleged deficit of $35,000; but as has been stated 
by Dr. Keliher, the figure given by the dean has varied 
on a number of occasions. Furthermore, the students and 
faculty of New College have issued a statement publicly 
challenging the dean’s interpretation of budget figures and 
demonstrating that the alleged deficit is only $3,800. 

The National Academic Freedom Committee feels that 
the budgetary explanation is unacceptable for two rea- 
sons. First, a deficit of $35,000 cannot be considered seri- 
ous in a budget of nearly four million dollars and espe- 
cially not in the case of a valuable experiment in teacher 
training. The educational contribution of New College has 
not been challenged even by the dean himself. Secondly, 
the budgetary explanation appears to be a subterfuge, con- 
sidering the manner in which the decision to close New 
College was arrived at. “If it was merely a question of 


17 








failing finances,” the N.A.F.C. states, “why could not the 
dean have consulted the students and faculty of New Col- 
lege? Why was not the faculty of Teachers College con- 
sulted? Why did the dean not discuss the matter with 
his own advisory committee and with the advisory com- 
mittee of New College? It is very strange that the dean 
found it necessary to settle the whole matter with the 
president and the trustees, and then spring the decision 
as a fait accompli on the faculty and students of New 


College.” 
The secrecy which surrounded the decision and the arbi- 


trariness with which it was made have given rise to specu- 
lations as to the real explanation. According to reports, 
some have attributed the decision to the present search of 
Teachers College for endowments. Others connect the 
decision with a conservative trend which has developed at 
Teachers College ever since the establishment a year ago 
of the Dean’s Lay Council, a group of some 100 bankers, 
corporation officials, lawyers, etc., dedicated to the purpose 
of interesting the layman in education. 








The National Academic Freedom Committee urges 
Locals to take the following actions: 

1. Send resolution of protest to Dean Russell and 
to the trustees of Teachers College. 

2. Request labor bodies in your area to do likewise. 

3. Secure statements from prominent educators in 
your area and forward them to N.A.F.C. 

4. Spread information regarding the matter by print- 
ing articles in local bulletins. 

5. Report all action taken to N.A.F.C., 235 Fourth 
Avenue, New York City. 











In the view of the N.A.F.C., whether or not the closing: 
of New College has its origin in a growing attack on pro- 
gressive education in certain circles, the effect is one of 
strengthening reactionary opposition to progressive educa- 
tion. The N.A.F.C. has accepted the New College case 
for action because freedom to experiment in teacher train- 
ing, freedom to educate in crucial social issues, freedom to 
train prospective teachers for community leadership and. 
participation in social movements are involved. 


Consumer Incomes in the United States 


Consumer Incomes in the United Staies, published by the 
National Resources Board presents for the first time a com- 
prehensive picture of how the national income is distributed 
among the various consumer groups in the United States. 
The survey is based on a study of consumer purchases con- 
ducted by the Bureau of Home Economics of the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics of 
the Department of Labor in cooperation with the Works 
Progress Administration. The questions and answers ap- 
pearing below are based on data contained in the report. 
The two charts on the next page were taken from the same 


report, pp. 19, 20. 

1. How large was the income distributed to consumers 
during 1935-36? The National Resources Board estimates 
that nearly $47,680,000,000 was distributed among 29,- 
400,000 families of two or more members, comprising in all 
115,966,000 persons. In addition, approximately 10,058,- 
000 single persons received $11,580,000,000; and 2,000,000 
persons in institutions, hospitals, etc., and in the Civilian 
Conservation Corps and the military and naval forces 
received $724,300,000. The total income distributed to 
all consumers over the year interval was nearly $60,- 
000,000,000. 

2. What was the average family income during the 
period surveyed? If the total family income of $47,680,- 
000,000 had been divided equally among the 29,400,000 
families (including those on relief), each family would 
have received an annual income of $1,622. 

3. Whut was the actual distribution of income among 
families? The income distribution varied widely. The 
top tenth of the 29,400,000 families received a total income 


of $17,164,000,000, or an average annual income of $5,838 
per family. The same number of families in the lowest 
tenth received a combined income of $906,000,000 or 
$308 per family per year. A large number of the fami- 
lies in the lowest tenth received less than the average of 
$308 per year, while many families in the top tenth re- 
ceived a larger income than the average of $5,838. 


If the total income received by all families is divided 
into 10 equal parts of $4,768,000,000 each, it is found 
that in the highest income brackets one-tenth of the total 
income was distributed among 147,000 families, each 
family averaging about $32,400. In the lowest income 
brackets, the same amount of income was distributed 
among 9,261,000 families, each averaging about $515 per 
year. 

4. How was the 1935-36 income distributed among non- 
relief wage-earning families? Nearly 9,460,000 or 37.9 
per cent of the 24,910,000 nonrelief families were fami- 
lies of wage earners. Out of every 1,000 of these families 
105 received an income of less than $500, 282 from $500 
to $1,000, 289 from $1,000 to $1,500, 172 from $1,500 to 
$2,000, 80 from $2,000 to $2,500, and 72 received an in- 
come of over $2,500. In other words, more than one third 
of all the nonrelief wage-earning families received an in- 
come of less than $1,000 and more than two thirds of the 
families received less than $1,500. About one out of every 
seven nonrelief wage-earning families received, during the 
12-month period 1935-36, an income of $2,000 or more. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














PROPORTION OF NATION'S FAMILIES RECEIVING 


EACH TENTH OF AGGREGATE FAMILY INCOME 
1935 -36 


AGGREGATE INCOME INCOME RANGE FAMILIES 


HIGHEST 
TenTu |$'6000 & overt 








NINTH 5450 - 16,0008 8} 





EIGHTH 3,300 - 5450, RRB) 
SEVENTH 2,525 - 3300IR BRaE 
SIXTH 2075 - 2525, RR RBAE| 


FirtH =| 1,725 - 2,075 DR AEREED 





FOURTH 1410 - | 72500 RR RRRRBBE 























THIRD 1,125 - | 40S R RRRRRR BABAR 
SECOND 820 - |,|\25R RRR RRSRRR RAAB ROS 
LOWEST ‘ 
— UNDER - $6200 BBR A BASRA ARSE AAR RA RARE OR RRR OD | 
fe) ) i0 20 30 ' 40 
PERCENT PERCENT 


BASED ON TABLE 78 
Cuarr 12 
This chart may be read either by length of bars or by symbols 
Each dollar symbol represents 1 percent of aggregate income of al! families or $476,792,380 
Each figure symbol represents 1 percent of all families or 294,000 families 
National Resources Committee 











SHARE OF AGGREGATE FAMILY INCOME RECEIVED 
BY EACH TENTH OF NATIONS FAMILIES 
1935 -36 
FAMILIES INCOME RANGE AGGREGATE INCOME 
CTTT TTT 


PFA APPA PP F#F ALAA IPA#ASIL ALAS? 














M HIGHEST | 
BRRBRBABAL TentH «© $2800 & OVER 


TETTTULET NINTH | 2050 - 2800 


ee ee ee 


BERRBRARAL «EIGHTH ~— «1675 - 2050 
BABB BRBEE) SEVENTH 1375 - 1675 
RERRRRREEL «6SIXTH «=o 160 - 1375 
BERBRBEEAL 6FIFTH) =©=©——6(970 - 1160 
MTTREITET) courts 800 - 970 
BARRREABAL «6OTHIRO))=6©| 6610 - 800 
ARAB BBR BE =6SECOND rer 610 bS® 


’ LOWEsT | 
BERBBRBARL = =otentH «=| UNDER $410 $§ 


10 




















PERCENT PERCENT 
BASED ON TABLE 68 
Cuart ll 
This chart may be read either by length of bars or by symbols 
Each figure symbol represents 1 percent of all families or 294,000 families 


Each dollar symbol represents 1 percent of aggregate income of al! families or $476,792,380 
National Resources Committee 











DECEMBER, 1938 


19 














Among the 


New Gooks 








THE STRUCTURE AND ADMINISTRATION OF 
EDUCATION IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, by 
THe EpucaTIonaL Poricres Commission. Washing- 
ton: National Education Association of the United States 
and the American Association of School Administrators. 


128 pages. $0.50. 


F THE SEVERAL PUBLICATIONS of the Educational 
Policies Commission, this book is by far the best. 
It is simple, clear, and in the main unequivocal. 


The description of the structure and the scope of public 
education in Chapter I is brief but inclusive. The extension 
of the period of public education upward through the junior 
college and the probable changes in the function of the first 
two years of the present college curriculum is clearly fore- 
shadowed and forcefully advocated, together with the inevit- 
ably accompanying changes in the boundary lines of ele- 
mentary, secondary, and professional and university educa- 
tion. 


The mistake in the separation of vocational education 
from the rest of the public-school system and the tragic 
results of the emotional attachment of rural America to 
the small school are graphically pictured. 


’ Chapter II, dealing with the “Administration of Public 
Education,” calls for a very high degree of participation by 
the rank and file. However, to those who accept the con- 
cept of democracy as defined by Professor Boyd Bode as 
that type of government in which the constant extension of 
the area of common agreement is the sole standard of 
progress, some issues have not been answered so unequivo- 
cally as might be expected. Is the administrator a member 
of the rank and file, selected to lead his colleagues in a 
democratic process, or does he represent management on 
the model of American industry? Is the board the employer 
of the teachers, or is it simply a group designated by society 
to work for the teachers in fulfilling certain functions that 
the teachers cannot accomplish? Are the teachers consul- 
tants and advisors only, or are they equal participants in 
the democratic process of carrying on by common consent? 
Are the teachers to have equal share with the administrator 
in the selection of their colleagues, or are they only to ex- 
press an opinion, leaving the final decision to be made by 
the administrator according to his own prejudices and pref- 
erences? These are questions which the AMERICAN 
TEACHER would wish to have answered more explicitly. 


And yet in spite of the dim shadow of business and indus- 
trial management across the pages of the book, the spirit 
and ideals of democracy appear with a much greater per- 


vasiveness than is usually looked for in a statement repre- 
senting the administrative viewpoint. 

Traditionalism in the delegation of educational authority 
to the state is evident in Chapter IV and the consequent 
failure to emphasize the obligation of the federal government 
to promote education as a safeguard of the democratic sys- 
tem follows naturally. 

Altogether the publication is a valuable contribution to 
the literature of contemporary affairs and should be widely 
read. 

Milwaukee State Teachers College 


xx 


PHILOSOPHER’S HOLIDAY, by Irwix EpmMan. New 

York: Viking Press. 280 pages. $2.75. 

S$ ONE OF THOSE FORTUNATES who listened to Professor 
Edman in his famous Phil 144, it is a privilege and a 
gratifying experience to read these essays. They are witty, 
urbane, and synoptic and they serve as an intimate credo 
of a many-sided philosopher who sometimes wishes to be 
known as a teacher and at other times as a non-professional 
philosopher. What these essays disclose is a rich transcript 
of a busy life, in which we are treated to insights about the 
people he has known and the places he has gone. 

There is very little that is missing in these reminiscences. 
Throughout the book we learn what philosophy has been 
about, what it is—‘‘a kind of caviare, a luxury of the under- 
standing”—and what it should be about. On every page 
is the Socratic irony and humor, the exceptionally well- 
turned phrase. We are led into the innermost recesses of 
a metropolitan university. We are told that philosophers 
without portfolio, “without any professional connexion with 
academic philosophy, feel themselves driven to make their 
peace with first and last things.” There is always before us 
a picture of the lover of music and painting, the philosopher- 
poet. The descriptions of former teachers and former stu- 
dents are without parallel in any literature because Profes- 
sor Edman has those rare gifts of a prodigious memory and 
an unequalled style. He traces his youth as a pattern in 
which we see the growth and change of a New York in 
transition from 1910 to 1938 and the Harlem home of 
his boyhood before the Negro invasion, then “a quiet bour- 
geois neighborhood . . . of middle-class domesticity.” 


There is a parade of personalities known and loved. John 
Erskine, Carlton Hayes, John Dewey, Morrie Ryskind, 
Charles Beard, Harold Laski, Gilbert Murray, F.P.A., and 
many others stud the pages. And of George Sokolsky he 
can write, “he has passed from freshman anarchism to be 


FRANK E. BAKER 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














the apologist in the Herald Tribune for things as they are.” 
The places he has been, many of which are the locales of the 
essays—Naples, Ascot, Oxford, Beirut, Damascus, Agri- 
gento—are too numerous to mention. You are left wonder- 
ing how so much could be done in the short space of forty- 
two years. The witticisms and epigrammatic expressions 
which abound are worthwhile quoting, but space forbids. 
“There is no geography of the human spirit”; Schiller, “the 
pragmatist among the Brahmins”; “when ideas are used 
primarily as subjects of conversation, the subjects grow 
wearisome and new ones must be found”; “action is geared 
to the future, not to the past”; “a sabbatical leave is a 
professor’s chance to get away from it all”; and “the sun 
still shines though we are in the sunset of an age, and the 
fact that there is a barbarism rampant in the world is itself 
a challenge to understanding” one cannot resist quoting. 

Professor Edman is no inhabitant of the Ivory Tower. 
He has always been against war. He hates the bombing 
of open towns in China and Spain. He knows that now 
liberalism has “some marks of a dying cause.” He knows 
many things: the causes of war and the causes of the mer- 
curial American fashions in ideas. He may be wrong about 
“the reason a revolution is not nearer in England” but he 
does know Englishmen. He knows that there can no longer 
be a flight to the changeless. He knows that “in a society 
where the bombs batter against the mood of felicity, art 
and philosophy must, for the most part, be moral holidays.” 

That is what this book is, a philosopher’s holiday where 
our philosopher-poet remains enough aloof from reality to 
be “philosophic” about it. He is an understanding savant, 
but the feeling remains that for a person of such warm 
sympathies, he is still disinterested, at times carping, and 
more than often cynical. He understands too well, but our 
philosopher believes that the time has not arrived to take 
sides. He prefers to remain on holiday, and what would 
be more appropriate for his stand than to quote lines from 
a poem of his: 

And I sigh for the days when left meant left 
and weep in a world of peace bereft. 

Howard University EUGENE HOLMES 


xx«re 
WHITMAN, by Newton Arvin. New York: Macmillan. 
328 pages. $2.75. 


ie A DITHER OF EXCITEMENT to prove to readers and edi- 
tors that they, unlike Mr. Arvin, are not socialists, re- 
viewers of Whitman have, for the most part, managed to miss 
the point of a highly significant piece of literary criticism. 
The sustained excellence of Mr. Arvin’s critical analyses in his 
Hawthorne and in his periodical writings during the long 
interval since the appearance of that book might have warned 
reviewers that he would not have entered lightly upon such 
an enterprise as this. They ought to have been prepared, 
in other words, to find precisely the kind of brilliant per- 
formance that the book actually offers. But apparently 


DECEMBER, 1938 





they were so overwhelmed at his referring, on page two, to 
“the establishment and construction of a socialist order” as 
“the next inevitable step in human history” that such critical 
faculties as they possess were instantly paralyzed. 

I should be the last to minimize the importance of Mr. 
Arvin’s political views, but it is worth pointing out that all 
he did, in the staggering sentence I have just quoted, was to 
state—with a frankness that I admit is rare in contemporary 
criticism—the point of view from which he was making his 
study. Having thus candidly put himself on record, he was 
free to proceed with a type of analysis that, if not unique, 
is certainly rare. Poets do have ideas, and Whitman had a 
great many, so many that there never has been any agree- 
ment as to what he really believed. Mr. Arvin held that it 
was possible to find out, and set himself the task. He has 
brilliantly carried it out, and the results are of high impor- 
tance. Here is the mind of a great poet who was also, in a 
dozen significant ways, a representative man of his century. 

The book begins by talking ahout Whitman’s attitudes 
towards politics: towards Jacksonian democracy, the Civil 
War, the corruption of the Gilded Age. It proceeds to his 
views on capital and labor, tracing the modification of his 
original admiration for individualism and the acquisitive life. 
Then comes a fine discussion of Whitman’s opinions on 
science and religion, with the strange blending of Quaker 
pietism and transcendentalism on the one hand and 
eighteenth-century rationalism and scientific materialism on 
the other. Having thus defined Whitman’s mind, Mr. Arvin 
is ready to consider its expression in his poetry, and the book 
ends with a suggestive chapter on Leaves of Grass. 

Whitman’s vast inconsistencies, which he himself recog- 
nized, have been emphasized by the disagreements among 
his critics. Mr. Arvin has overlooked none of them, and 
minimized none. Here is Whitman in all his confusion. 
Mr. Arvin simply persists in asking and answering one ques- 
tion: “On what side does his weight fall?” He sees the 
petty-bourgeois individualist in Whitman, the anti-abolition- 
ist, the obscurantist. But he proves his right to say in his 
closing paragraph: ‘Enough and more than enough remains 
to fortify the writers and the men of our time in their 
struggles against a dark barbarian reaction, and to interest 
and animate the people of a near future in their work of 
building a just society. To such men it is and will be clearer 
and clearer that, from our recent past, we inherit no fuller 
or braver anticipatory statement than Leaves of Grass of a 
democratic and fraternal humanism.” 

To have proved this ought, it seems to me, to be, in Mr. 
Arvin’s phrase, “enough and more than enough,” but I can 
understand that there are those who, because of a vested 
interest in reaction or a purblind indifference to the march 
of barbarism, see no importance in the restoration of Whit- 
man as a great democratic leader. What I cannot grant is 
that such persons have any right to minimize the task of 
clarification the book performs. With a delicate insight and 
a consummate fairness, Mr. Arvin has presented to us all the 


21 





—Umn 


— 








ett ati lie ge 
4G 


diverse elements in a representative mind and a great poetic 
imagination. His work, regarded as pure scholarship, exposes 
the triviality and insensitivity of much academic research, 
and his exposition, beautifully sustained over the three 
hundred pages of the book, might well serve as a model for 
those who have expressed their objections to its thesis in a 
turgid and largely incomprehensible prose. To those of us 
who can take some personal pride in the fact that Mr. Arvin 
is president of the Western Massachusetts branch of the 
A. F. of T. and who, whether we agree with his analysis of 
the political future or not, sense as he does the significance 
of the present struggle, the book renders a particularly 
precious service, and renders it so well that we can afford to 
look with scorn on the petty objectors. 
Harvard University GRANVILLE Hicks 





x* x 
SOCIALISM ON THE DEFENSIVE, by Norman 
Tuomas. New York: Harpers. 304 pages. $3.00. 


EFORE THE WorLD War socialism was a mighty and 
B aggressive international movement, advancing from 
victory to victory. Today, with some notable exceptions, 
it is on the defensive, its forces divided, and its adherents 
more concerned with saving what they have than with daring 
to seek more. Throughout much of the world today the 
offensive has passed to fascism. 

Norman Thomas’ latest book is concerned in part with 
this rise of fascism, which he finds due to “the union of the 
economics of capitalism and the politics of absolute national- 
ism.” The last great war and the treaties that followed 
caused the birth of fascism, as depression and the division 
in labor’s forces permitted it to take power in many countries. 

Thomas believes that the outstanding social development 
since the World War is the rise, neither of fascism nor of 
communism, but of the totalitarian state, whether fascist or 
communist. And to any sort of totalitarian state he is vigor- 
ously opposed, though he sees some elements of hope in the 
U.S.S.R. and none at all in fascism. 

Most of the book is a description and criticism of the 
tactics that believers in a cooperative commonwealth have 
adopted in their efforts to check fascism’s further growth. 
One such tactic is the Popular Front of labor and liberal 
republican groups, which Thomas supports only in the face 
of a real emergency such as existed in Spain or in France. 
In both countries, however, he criticizes the Popular Front 
for having moved to the right instead of to the left. In the 
United States he sees as yét no emergency that would justify 


22 


its use; indeed, political support of the New Deal now under 
any sort of Popular Front, he asserts, is inconsistent with 
effective education and organization for socialism. 

Another defensive tactic to which Thomas objects even 
more vigorously is the “collective security” that most 
European socialists, and communists throughout the world 
advocate. Collective security probably means war, Thomas 
reminds us, and the surest thing about entry of the United 
States into war is that it will make us a totalitarian state. 
Whatever idealistic reasons certain groups may have, an 
alliance of non-fascist states will not be for democracy nor 
even against fascism, but primarily a league of the House 
of Have against the House of Have Not. 

Socialism on the Defensive has the merits and the defects 
of much of Mr. Thomas’ other work. The book is stimu- 
lating, and the writing is always vigorous and sometimes 
brilliant. The volume suffers, however, from hurried writing. 
The treatment of some topics, as planning, is sketchy, and 
the book may become dated because of its concern with 
immediate problems. Nevertheless, Socialism on the Defen- 
sive is an important contribution to our economic and 
political thinking. Those who disagree with Thomas, as well 
as those who agree with him, will find this latest book by 
America’s foremost socialist of very great interest and value. 


League for Industrial Democracy JorL SEIDMAN 
x*r* 


AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS: 1918-1938; The The- 
atre Retreats from Reality, by ELEANOR FLEXNER, 
preface by JoHN GassNER. New York: Simon and 
Schuster. 351 pages. $2.50. 


merican Playwrights: 1918-1938 is devoted in the main 

to a comprehensive study of those dramatists whom 
popular recognition and the acclaim of the critics have al- 
ready established as major figures but who have withdrawn 
more and more from experience with the people they have 
written about, with the resultant failure to live up to the 
courage and honest conviction of their earlier work. Partial 
studies of a few of these writers have been made before, 
notably in New Theatre Magazine and in John Howard 
Lawson’s invaluable Theory and Technique of Playwrit- 
ing. Miss Flexner, however, contributes a unifying study 
of the work as a whole and the causes of frustration of such 
men as Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Ander- 
son, Eugene O’Neill, George S. Kaufman, and Philip Barry. 
In her analysis of the contradictions of commercial Broad- 
way and the destructive influences of Hollywood upon many 
phases of our theatre, with the consequent withdrawal of 
writers from living experience, Miss Flexner explains why 
audiences go away unsatisfied from productions that prom- 
ise so much and end in such confusion, and why the writers 
themselves have sought refuge in the sentimental nostalgia 
of such plays as Ah/ Wilderness, High Tor, Star Wagon, 
and Fabulous Invalid, or have depended upon technical dex- 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 








terity or poetic form to conceal the half-truths or falsehoods 
inherent in their system of ideas. 

In her chapter on “The New Realism” and in her con- 
clusion, Miss Flexner deals more briefly with the real hope 
of the American theatre—the influence exerted upon it by 
such important ventures as the Theatre Union and the 
New Theatre League, and by younger playwrights like 
Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, Albert Bein, and Albert Maltz. 

If the future, however, is to bring America a theatre of 
intelligence, variety, and incisive criticism of life, appealing 
to an audience as widespread as that of the movies, it can 
come, Miss Flexner believes, only through passage of the 
Federal Arts Bill which would put the Federal Theatre 
Projects on a permanent non-relief basis, and through the 
extension of trade-union cultural activities in which theatres 
must have an important place. And those of us who have 
seen the achievements of the Federal Theatre throughout 
the land and of Labor Stage in New York will agree with her. 

Miss Flexner’s book has the advantage of an introduction 
by John Gassner which emphasizes the validity and the 
limitations of the type of social criticism the book represents. 
One can hope Miss Flexner will go on to a further analysis 
of the problems of social drama which she raises in connec- 
tion with “The New Realism.” It is important that these 
problems are stated, though it is perhaps too early to answer 
them as Miss Flexner has answered many questions about 
the older generation of playwrights. 

Washington Square College 


: 
7, 


Borts GAMZUE 








~ 
da. 


S 
ew, 


ap 


\ 
“ 


S 


























| 


LOGIC: THE THEORY OF INQUIRY, by Joun Dewey. 
New York: Henry Holt. 546 pages. $4.00. 


T° MOST PERSONS, I imagine, the word “pragmatism” 
suggests the view that “the truth is what works.” While 
this suggestion is not entirely misleading, it is about as 
exact and adequate as the popular notion that what the 
Einsteinian theory of relativity means is that “everything 
is relative.” Both theories, when thus crudely and igno- 
rantly interpreted, excite equally fatuous “refutations.” The 
pragmatist is told, for example, that an idea works because 
it is true—that it is not true because it works; and the 
follower of Einstein is told that the relative logically pre- 
supposes the absolute—hence everything can’t be relative. 








DECEMBER, 1938 


And so two more straw men are knocked out. 

Perhaps these loose associations which have grown up 
about the term “pragmatism” explain why this word does 
not occur in the index of a book which has been fittingly 
described as the “crowning achievement” of the great 
career of Professor Dewey, our leading pragmatist. But 
while the word is absent, the meanings which pragmatists— 
like Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey—have intended by the 
term are present throughout the book, informing its rich and 
varied contents, operating fruitfully in clearing up its 
technical subject-matters. In this review it will be possible 
to give only the barest hint of these meanings: to be appreci- 
ated, to be understood, they must be experienced—felt, 
manipulated, analytically grasped—in their contexts, as 
these contexts have been articulated, with unequalled 
patience and mastery, by Professor Dewey himself. Such 
an understanding of Dewey’s logical theory will be difficult 
to achieve, and hence rare; for even the most imaginative 
blurb writer could hardly say that this book, “an inquiry 
into inquiry,” reads like a detective story. But neither did 
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Descartes’ Discourse on 
Method, Bacon’s Novum Organum, or Mill’s Logic—with 
which classics, in my opinion, it deserves to be placed. Will 
Durant has not made philosophy “intelligible to the masses,” 
nor, I fear, has Mr. Dewey, lifelong proponent though he 
has been of democracy in education. But perhaps the need 
is not so much for democracy in education as for education 
in a democracy. So let President Hutchins’ bright high- 
school juniors try their coca-cola teeth on Dewey’s Logic! 
In fact, let President Hutchins try his, which flash with 
such engaging confidence from the pages of the Saturday 
Evening Post. 

But for those who have the required bodily aptitudes 
(and the time in which to exercise them), Mr. Dewey’s 
treatise will provide instructive reading and very durable 
satisfactions. For in this book pragmatism, as an intellec- 
tual movement to make the unintellectual respected in 
philosophy, has come of age. This, fortunately, does not 
imply an early decline. For the pragmatists have discovered 
the theoretical elixir of perpetual youth: our ideas may 
mature without ever growing old. Nor is this desirable 
result achieved by a mere dialectical trick. Rather, it is 
declared to be the practical outcome of placing our reliance 
upon the method by which beliefs are reached, are logically 
validated, instead of upon their alleged self-evidence or 
authoritative backing. Method is, or ought to be, supreme. 
It is our only reliable guide, the only thing we can safely 
cling to, in a changing world. 

What then, is this method, which seems to have acquired 
some of the honorific properties of a god? Dewey’s whole 
book is the answer to this question. Knowledge is “war- 
ranted assertibility.” Its meaning is relative to the methods 
by which it is gained and the biosocial contexts in which 
we operate and to which we are constantly responding and 
with which we are intimately inter-acting every moment of 


23 








our lives. Continuous dynamic processes relate the organism 
to its environment, and what this environment is function- 
ally depends upon the properties, the interests and aptitudes, 
of the organism. Conversely, what the organism is func- 
tionally depends upon the properties of this environment. 
In other words, organism and environment are reciprocally 
involved in a total situation whose empirically observed 
traits cannot be understood apart from the properties of 
both organism and environment gua related. 

Since logic has evolved out of such practical situations, 
and since its meaning, as a set of tentatively accepted 
operational principles, depends upon its existential applica- 
tion to such situations, whether crudely empirical or 
scientifically refined in character, we can see why long 
stretches of the traditional logic are verbal, barren, otiose— 
without vital significance for ordinary human living. Hence 
the much-needed reform of logic, if this ancient study is not 
to remain, in large part, a sterile manipulation of arbitrary 
symbols in an academic vacuum, the bemused repetition 
of one’s private rosary in somebody else’s ivory tower— 
preferably Gothic in style, with rose-colored windows and 
ivy-covered walls, that is to say, the latest thing from 
New York’s most expensive architects. Have not college 
students been “introduced” often enough to this abstract 
design for making thinking unnecessary? As for the childish 
ambitions of some of its metaphysical proponents, they 
might be summed up in the nursery rhyme: 


LOGIC 


THE THEORY OF INQUIRY 
By JOHN DEWEY 








In this latest and crowning work 
of Dr. Dewey's career, mature 
expression is given to the phili- 
sophic ideas which underly mod- 
ern scientific practice and have, 
to a large extent, shaped the 
course of progressive education. 


“It will prove to be, for all those who come 
to genuine grips with it, a liberating experi- 
ence."—Eliseo Vivas, in Saturday Review of 
Literature. 


Educational Price $3.00 


HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
257 Fourth Avenue ° New York 




















24 


There little tautology, don’t you cry; 
You'll be a Principle, by and by. 

Mr. Dewey’s rigorous and thoroughgoing analysis, while 
not primarily destructive in intent, perhaps for that reason 
exposes all the more effectively the inanities and trivialities 
of this sort of academic abracadabra. He does this by 
showing, in empirical detail, how rational operations, and 
their generalization into methodological principles, “grow 
out of organic activities, without being identical with that 
from which they emerge.” Means are adjusted naturally 
to consequences; for animals tend to repeat a successful 
act—an act leading to satisfaction, to the temporary 
re-establishment of that organic equilibrium whose disturb- 
ance was the immediate stimulus to the act—sooner than, 
and eventually instead of, alternative acts leading to dis- 
satisfaction, acts which do mot resolve internal conflicts. 
Purpose, then, has its roots in organic needs; bodily acts 
naturally give rise to consequences; causes, functioning as 
means or instruments, become empirically associated with 
ends-in-view; and the whole process may be said to achieve 
“rationality” if the means at hand are employed in such 
a manner as to reach the end-in-view with maximum 
efficiency. 

But this is not, as it is sometimes said to be, a “business 
man’s philosophy” in the sense that efficiency is an end in 
itself. Indeed, in Dewey’s philosophy, there are no ends in 
themselves. Ends are but turning points or resting places, 
where one may catch his breath and look about for a 
moment at the surrounding landscape. But if we are good 
pragmatists we are to do this, apparently, not for the sake 
of relaxation or the esthetic experience as such, but in 
order that we may the better re-orient ourselves cognitively, 
re-define our purposes, and perhaps re-gain energy for that 
moral struggle to which only the Last Judgment (if any) 
will bring surcease. Still, neither the grave nor even Heaven 
is man’s goal. In fact, he has no single goal, but as many 
goals as his own organic needs and drives, his socially 
conditioned interests and impulses, set up, tentatively, in 
the intricate network of shifting events in which his life 
is passed. Which does not mean, I take it, that man never 
is, but always to be blest, but that he should count his 
blessings one by one, rejoicing in the variety and accepting 
the contingency of a pluralistic world. 

Henrik Ibsen once wrote in a letter to Georg Brandes: 
“T hold that man in the right who is most closely in league 
with the future.” If this be a sound basis for critical judg- 
ment, then Dewey is certainly in the right. For his great 
abilities, nowhere better evidenced than in the present 
volume, have always been dedicated to the future—with 
which we may suppose he is in league! However, it is not 
a future determined antecedently by the “metaphysical” 
nature of reality, but an empirical future which we may 
help to create by taking thought, by learning how to do 
better the tasks which lie before us. 

Stanford University Joun R. REID 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 

















The 








Teachers Union in Action 











WO LEADING MEMBERS of the American Federation of Teachers, Doxey A. 
Wilkerson, professor of education at Howard University, national vice presi- 

dent of the A. F. of T., and president of Local 440, and Floyd W. Reeves, chairman 
of the President’s Advisory Committee on Education and member of Local 259, 
have been appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Educational Works 
Progress Administration. Other members of the committee are: Ben G. Graham, 
Willard E. Givens, Sidney B. Hall, Edwin A. Lee, George D. Stoddard, Edna Noble 


White, and George F. Zook. 


The national office reports that three new charters have been granted since the 


last issue of the AMERICAN TEACHER. 
They are as follows: 

No. 602 Federal Teachers of Rich- 
land County, Ohio. 

No. 603 West Fairfield Private School 
Teachers Federation of Greenwich, 
Conn. 

No. 604 Will County Teachers Union 
of Will County, Ill. 


xk 


PATERSON, N. J. (No. 482)—The 
two speakers at the December meeting of the 
Paterson Teachers Union were Janet Marshall 
of Ridgeview, N. J., who spoke on her trip 
with the National Religion and Labor Foun- 
dation which took her through the Tobacco 
Road country, the T. V. A., and the court- 
room scenes of the N. L. R. B. trial in Har- 
lan county, and Marie Duffy who spoke on 
the cooperative movement in Sweden where 
she spent the summer. The Paterson Teach- 
ers Union has started a campaign for full 
salary restorations for all classroom teachers. 


xk 


MICHIGAN STATE FEDERATION 
OF TEACHERS—A conference and lunch- 
eon meeting on “Federal Aid to Education” 
will be held at the Women’s City Club in 
Detroit. Speakers for the luncheon will be 
Professor W. H. Maurer, University of 
Michigan; Paul T. David, secretary, Advisory 
Committee on Education; Earl R. Laing, 
chairman, N. E. A. Michigan Commission on 
Federal Aid; and Dr. Howard A. Dawson, 
director, Division of Rural Service, N. E. A. 

Sponsoring organizations of the luncheon 
meeting are: 

American Association of University Women 
—Michigan Division; Detroit Federation of 
Teachers; Detroit Teachers Association; 
Michigan Education Association; Michigan 
Federation of Labor; Michigan Federation 
of Teachers; Michigan League of Women 
Voters; Michigan Library Association; Mich- 
igan State Federation of Teachers Clubs; 
National Association for Advancement of 
Colored People; N. E. A. Michigan Commit- 
tee on Federal Aid; and Southeastern Michi- 
gan Associated Teachers Clubs. 


DECEMBER, 1938 





BROOKSTON, MINN. (No. 508)— 
The St. Louis County Teachers Federation 
has set up a complete plan for covering the 
rural teachers in the area. Each school is 
represented on a council by a vice president. 
Meetings are held in the court house in Vir- 
ginia, Minn. Superintendent Lampe is ex- 
pected to announce a new sick leave which 
was requested by the union last year. Mem- 
bers of the union felt that it will probably 
be retroactive. 

xk 


KENOSHA, WIS. (No. 557)—The 
board of education decided at its November 
meeting that Local 557 might use the school- 
rooms for meetings and that the Kenosha 
Teacher might be distributed through the 
regular school channels. 


xk 


CHICAGO, ILL. (No. 1)—Delegates 
from fourteen locals in Illinois met at the 
Chicago Teachers Union office in November 
to discuss the principles on which a state 
tenure law for Illinois should be based. 
Speakers for the conference were Donald 
DuShane, chairman of the N. E. A. tenure 
committee; Edward DeBriae, Milwaukee 
Teachers Union; and Professor W. H. Maur- 
er, University of Michigan. A committee was 
appointed to meet with the tenure commit- 
tee of the Illinois Education Association with 
the hope that the two committees can agree 
upon a bill which can be jointly sponsored by 
both organizations. 

The House of Representatives of the union 
adopted a resolution opposing a salary sched- 
ule based upon subjective rating of teachers’ 
efficiency after Superintendent Johnson was 
quoted in the press as advocating the aboli- 
tion of rank as a determinant in teachers’ 
salaries and proposing that “experience, abil- 
ity, and training” become the basis used. 
The House voted a special meeting to dis- 
cuss all phases of salary schedule making. A 
check for fifty dollars was sent to the Tom 
Mooney Defense Fund at the suggestion of 
the executive board. The December issue of 
the Chicago Union Teacher includes articles 
by Dean E. O. Melby, Northwestern Univer- 
sity; Howard Y. McClusky, University of 
Michigan; Charlotte Carr, Hull House; and 
Hortense Fox, Wright Junior College. The 


theme of this issue is “Teacher Training.” 
And just the last few sentences from John 
DeBoer’s column in this issue: 

“We need to build and strengthen our 
Union against the day when fascism, under 
whatever name it may appear, lays siege to 
our “island of sanity.” The fortunes of de- 
mocracy have fluctuated widely in the years 
between Gettysburg and Munich. It may 
well be that the outcome of the new Ap- 
pomattox will depend upon how many friends 
of democracy carry union cards.” 


x*e 

SUPERIOR, WIS. (No. 202)—The Su- 
perior local sponsored a luncheon on October 
7 at which Lewis Harris, superintendent of 
schools at Floodwood, Minn., spoke on “How 
Administrators Can Aid the Growth of the 
American Federation of Teachers.” There 
was a capacity attendance of eighty mem- 
bers and friends, including Superintendent of 
Schools Davies and several local principals. 


x*x*k 

WASHINGTON, D. C. (No. 553)— 
At the first public meeting of the Private 
School Teachers Union of Washington on 
November 8 Ernestine Friedman of Work- 
ers’ Education, W. P. A., spoke on “The 
Place of Unionism in a Democracy.” At the 
December 6 meeting Professor Lincoln Fair- 
ley, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, now a government research 
director, opened a study course on the Ameri- 
can labor movement. 

xk 

DULUTH, MINN. (No. 381)—All Du- 
luth teachers, members of locals of Superior, 
Cloquet, Floodwood, rural St. Louis County, 
and state administrators were invited by the 
Duluth Federation of Teachers to a dinner 
meeting on December 2. Speakers included 
Mercedes Nelson, Minneapolis, vice president 
of the national federation; Lewis Harris, 
Floodwood, of the Minnesota federation; 
Lucy Lawson of the University of Minnesota 
local; and P. F. DeMore of the Railroad 
Brotherhood Joint Legislative Board. 


x*** 

CHICAGO, ILL. (No. 464)—Dorothy 
Van Alstyne was elected president of Local 
464 at its first meeting. Other officers elected 
were C. Griffith, secretary-treasurer, and 
Maurine McCormick and Sarah Greenebaum, 
members of the executive committee. Jack 
Ellison, reporting on the Cedar Point con- 
vention, stressed the report given by Dr. 
Reeves, the work of the National Educational 
Policies Committee, and the necessity for 
labor unity in America. 

xx* 

MISSOULA, MONT. (No. 497)—Pro- 
fessor J. P. Rowe of Montana University has 
been restored his annual contract. Two years 
ago, in spite of his thirty years of service at 


25 








the university, he was placed on a month-to- 
month basis at the time of the dismissal of 
Professor Keeney, head librarian. The A. F. 
of T. has circulated petitions nationally, 
urging the courts to restore both men to their 
former status. Last March, District Judge 
George W. Padbury, Jr., ordered the university 
to reinstate Professor Keeney. The adminis- 
tration has appealed this ruling to a higher 


court. 
xx* 

EAST CHICAGO, IND. (No. 511)— 
Inquiries about the attitude of the board of 
education toward the American Federation 
of Teachers led the East Chicago Teachers 
Federation to make public a letter from Dr. 
A. A. Forszt, president of the East Chicago 
Board of Education, to Carl H. Mullen, presi- 
dent of the Indiana State Federation of 
Labor, saying: 

“We recognize the right of our employees 
to join any organization they see fit and 
have attempted to treat all members of our 
faculty with equality regardless of whether 
they are members of the Teachers Federa- 
tion, Local 511, the East Chicago Teachers 
Association, or non-members of either, and 
that will continue to be our policy.” 

xkx*e 

READING, PA. (No. 560)—During the 
recent campaign the teachers’ union affili- 
ated with Labor’s Non-Partisan League, 
Harry Boyer, president, announced. 

xx*k 

PHILADELPHIA, PA. (No. 192)—The 
November issue of the Philadelphia Teacher 
contains a splendid article entitled, “Fascism 
at the School Door.” The article deals with 
a number of anti-semitic pamphlets and no- 
tices which were distributed in school mail 
boxes by a Philadelphia teacher, Bessie R. 
Burchett. Faculty complaints about Dr. Bur- 
chett in 1936 caused her to be transferred 
from the South Philadelphia High School to 
the West Philadelphia High School. The arti- 
cle indicates that anti-semitism is “a reflec- 
tion of world unrest with all its economic 
implications.” In an effort to combat the 
evils of racial intolerance, the union ap- 
pointed a committee to interview Dr. Nus- 
baum, acting school superintendent, and sug- 
gested to him that the approaching Thanks- 
giving and Christmas seasons provide the 
proper occasion for re-emphasizing the Ameri- 
can tradition of racial and religious coopera- 
tion. 

The recent victory of Local 192 in legally 
establishing the salary schedules in Philadel- 


phia will probably be appealed by the board 
of education in a higher court. The Uni- 
versity of North Carolina has published So- 
journer Truth—God’s Faithful Pilgrim by 
Arthur Huff Fauset, a member of the Phila- 
delphia local. 

x*r* 


PORTLAND, ORE. (No. 111)—The 
Portland Teachers Union has made the prob- 
lem of teachers’ health its first major study 
for the school year. The teachers will con- 
sider the history of health insurance in the 
United States and abroad and the possibilities 
of setting up some form of a group health 
plan for Portland teachers. The study group 
will be open to all interested teachers, not 
only members of the union. Recommended 
in the union’s publication, the Progressive 
Teacher, as worth reading were the following 
books: The Coming Victory of Democracy, 
With Malice Toward Some, and The Folk- 
lore of Capitalism. 

President Kingsley Trenholme of Local 111 
in his message on the opening of the new 
school year pointed out that “the Teachers’ 
Union believes that an expanded social con- 
sciousness in the teacher is one of the key- 
stones of successful presentation of the demo- 
cratic ideal. To aid in achieving this view- 
point, we think that teachers should take a 
dynamic part in the life of the community, 
especially in the policy-determining organiza- 
tions so important in our system of govern- 


ment.” 
xk ** 

CINCINNATI, OHIO (No. 479)—A 
public relations committee consisting of the 
superintendent, the assistant superintendent, 
representatives of the Cincinnati Teachers 
Association, the Federated Council, the P.T.A., 
and representatives of the union has been 
set up by the Cincinnati federation. The com- 
mittee will interpret the schools to the com- 
munity in a “truthful, unbiased, humanized, 
dignified” fashion. A 22-point program of 
educational activities has been adopted. 

* * 

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. (No. 496)— 
The following officers were elected at the 
annual meeting of the Minneapolis federa- 
tion on November 4: G. A. Van Steenwyk, 
president; Robert Boehme, vice president; 
Mrs. Nellie Shaw, recording secretary; Mrs. 
Isabel Gearhart, corresponding secretary; and 
Mrs. Agnes Rich, treasurer. 


xk k 


ATLANTA GA. (No. 89)—On Decem- 
ber 2 Local 89 sponsored a meeting at which 








BUFFALO, N. Y. (No. 39)—At the annual dinner of the Buffalo Teachers Union Father 
Boland, chairman of the State Labor Relations Board, declared that if he were a school 
teacher, he would be a member of the teachers’ union. “If I were a school teacher,” he stated, 
“I would favor a teachers’ union in order to improve teaching and working conditions. If I 
were a schoolmaster, as most of you are, I would be tremendously interested in social justice 
for myself, my fellow teachers, my fellow workers, and my fellow Americans.” 

Father Boland urged that courses in American labor history, the theory and practice of 
trade unionism, labor ethics, and labor relations be added to the curriculum in the elementary 
as well as high schools. “I would want to belong to a teachers’ union,” he affirmed, “be- 
cause the United States, whose welfare we pledge to advance, is in dire need of education 
touching on the subject of labor and labor unionism. American labor history is a most 


inspiring portion of our American history.” 








26 


Professor William H. Kilpatrick spoke on 
“Progressive Education and the World We 


Live In.” Dr. Kilpatrick was brought to 
Atlanta for the three-day Southern Study 
Conference on Progressive Education, spon- 
sored by the Progressive Education Associa- 
tion. 

According to the recent report of the finan- 
cial secretary, Local 89 has a membership of 
1,092 in good standing, including 37 new 
members. This figure represents 100 per cent 
membership in 44 of the 58 schools. In- 
cluded in the treasurer’s report is an item 
of $171.40 which was used to print copies 
of the handbook which already has been 
placed in the hands of every member. 

xk 

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. (No. 61)— 
All meetings of Local 61 are carried in the 
San Francisco Public Schools Bulletin which 
reaches most of the teachers in the city. 

xk*«k 

NEW YORK, N. Y. (No. 537)—The 
Columbia chapter of the New York College 
Teachers Union in a resolution unanimously 
adopted characterized the closing of New 
College as “a setback to progressive educa- 
tion” and expressed its “hope that favorable 
action will be taken for the continuance of 
New College as a separate unit of Teachers 
College.” The resolution further stated the 
belief that there “has been a violation of the 
principle that al! persons vitally affected by a 
decision should participate in its making.” 

The executive board of the New York 
union took the following actions at its No- 
vember meeting: voted to send two delegates 
to the national conference of the American 
League for Peace and Democracy; voted to 
support the China Committee of the Colum- 
bia University Federation of Democracy and 
Intellectual Freedom; named Clifford Mc- 
Avoy acting legislative representative; sug- 
gested to the Central Trades and Labor 
Council that Clifford McAvoy be considered 
for the vacancy on the city council due to 
the death of Mr. Vladeck; voted to cooperate 
with Local 5 on the Teachers Committee to 
Aid Spanish Democracy; and designated a 
delegate to the conference on Vocational Edu- 
cation for Negroes. 

xk * 

MILWAUKEE, WIS. (No. 252)—In 
order to meet the threatened curtailment of 
school revenue in the state by means of tax- 
limitation measures and sharp cuts in state 
aid, a conference was called for Decem- 
ber 3 in Madison. In addition to the Wiscon- 
sin Federation of Teachers, the following or- 
ganizations were invited to participate in 
the conference: State Federation of Labor, 
Farmers’ Equity Union, the Wisconsin Milk 
Pool, the Railroad Brotherhoods, and the 
Northern Cooperative Association. A similar 
conference held in December, 1936, drew up 
a program of legislative action much of 
which was enacted into law. 

The union committee on textbooks, Flora 
Menzel, Harold V. Peterson, Elmer H. Ellis, 
and James L. Fitzpatrick, took part in the 
hearing on textbook changes before the 
Committee on Instruction of the Milwaukee 
schools. Local 252 has submitted a plan to 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 























the school board on methods of hiring new 
teachers which covers examination and classi- 
fication of applicants for full-time work and 
a consideration of young teachers on substi- 
tute pay. The union plan calls for the train- 
ing of young teachers by the principals and 
teachers with whom the young substitutes 
come in contact and for assignment in dis- 
tricts where they may teach the subjects for 
which they have been trained. 


xk**kk 

NEW YORK, N. Y. (No. 5)—One of 
the major activities of the New York Teach- 
ers Union this year will be the alleviation of 
vocational-school conditions in New York 
City. More than 150 vocational teachers 
have asked the board of education to re- 
duce the hours of all teachers in the voca- 
tional schools to the hours of academic school 
level. President Charles Hendley, Bella 
Dodd, Rebecca Schapiro, Irving Adler, and 
Louis Solomon spoke vigorously against the 
reactionary trend which would preserve arti- 
ficial distinctions between vocational and 
academic schools, and would make the for- 
mer trade schools of the narrowest type. 

A good suggestion for other union journals 
is the humor column “Pedagog Agog” which 
is a regular monthly feature of the New 
York Teacher. 

Dr. Alberto C. Bonaschi, member of the 
board of education of New York City, has 
introduced a resolution to the law committee 
of the board which would give teachers the 
right to join any organization they choose 
without fear of discrimination and to hold 
meetings in the school classrooms. Said Dr. 
Bonaschi: 

“Public agencies should be in the forefront 
in employe relationships and I should think 
that the board of education would be the 
first to condemn any official who openly and 
brazenly states that he intends to discrim- 
inate against any group of teachers exercis- 
ing the American right of organization, 
whether on a labor-union or professional 


basis.” 
xk 
FLINT, MICH. (No. 435)—The Flint 


Federation of Teachers is attempting to in- 
crease its membership by a series of informal 
meetings to which prospective members are 
invited. A discussion of the pre-election situ- 
ation in Michigan was led by Arthur Elder, 
national vice president, at the first meeting 
while President Matske, Ann Arbor, spoke on 
the tenure victory in his city. 


xk 


CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (No. 431)—The 
Cambridge Union of University Teachers has 
held two general membership meetings dur- 
ing the present semester. Max Lerner, pro- 
fessor of political science at Williams Col- 
lege and former editor of the Nation, ad- 
dressed the meeting on November 21 on 
“Crisis Democracy.” Sixty new members have 
been added to the local since the first of the 
semester as the result of a membership drive 
under the direction of John Rackliffe. The 
local sponsored a mass meeting of students 
and faculty at which the movement was in- 
itiated which resulted in the decision of Har- 


DECEMBER, 1938 








WASHINGTON STATE FEDERATION OF TEACHERS—Professor Charles Strother, 
University of Washington, was elected president of the state federation at its meeting in 
Bremerton, Wash., October 22. Other officers elected were Mr. Myrhman, president of the 
Tacoma Public School Local, vice president; Hildur Erickson, Seattle Public Schools, secre- 
tary; and Mr. Berst, Seattle W. P. A. teachers, treasurer. Professor Strother replaces Lila 
Hunter, national vice president of the A. F. of T. 

Eighty-one delegates representing 11 locals of the American Federation of Teachers at- 
tended the third annual state convention. Among the speakers were: James A. Taylor, presi- 
dent, Washington State Federation of Labor, who spoke on Initiative 130, as a threat to 
organized labor; Superintendent Thomas, Bothell, Wash., spoke on financial conditions of the 
schools and urged support of the constitutional amendment which would permit the legislature 
to pass a graduated income tax. Mabel Shea was appointed as organizer for Washington by 
Vice President Hunter. The state federation has drawn up the necessary features of a good 
tenure bill and hopes to cooperate with the Washington Educational Association in securing a 


state tenure law. 








vard University to receive twenty German 
refugee students. A union committee on uni- 
versity policy in promotions, appointments, 
and tenure regulations headed by Rupert 
Emerson is drafting a tentative set of princi- 
ples and proposals relating to these questions. 
The local has decided to issue a regular 
monthly bulletin. 
xkx*e 

NEW YORK, N. Y. (No. 453)—The 
campaign by the W. P. A. Teachers Union 
to secure credit for W. P. A. experience from 
the New York Board of Education and the 
Civil Service Commission for all workers on 
educational projects has been received favor- 
ably by James Marshall, president of the 
board of education, Colonel Brehon B. Som- 
erville, head of W. P. A. in New York City, 
and John F. Conroy, chief subject super- 
visor of the Adult Education Project. School 
principals are being canvassed for statements 
on the campaign. 

More than 700 educational workers were 
saved from scheduled dismissal when pres- 
sure by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, con- 
gressmen, and W. P. A. organizations includ- 
ing Local 453 caused Administrator Hopkins 
to rescind his order to Colonel Somerville. 
Leaders in the New York local report that 
weekly wage increases ranging from 66 cents 
to $2.04 were granted recently to many edu- 
cational workers as the result of the A. F. 
of T.’s campaign. 

x * *® 

BLOOMINGTON, ILL. (No. 276)— 
Local rules, recently adopted, give tenure 
protection to Bloomington teachers. The 
Bloomington Federation of Teachers worked 
actively in a successful effort to elect a 
school board friendly to labor and genuinely 
interested in the welfare of the schools and 
their teachers. The school board then adopted 
a set of rules to give the Bloomington teach- 
ers tenure in their positions. 

x** 

BELLEVILLE, ILL. (No. 434)—The 
Belleville local of the American Federation 
of Teachers recently secured passage of board 
rules establishing a single salary schedule 
based upon training and experience. A ten- 
ure provision was also written into the rules. 

Under the single salary schedule, salaries 
range from $1,400 for a teacher with a bach- 
elor’s degree and two years’ teaching experi- 
ence to $2,825 for teachers with thirty years’ 


experience and a master’s degree plus fifteen 
hours of graduate study. 

The tenure provision declares that, after 
passing a probationary period, no teacher 
shall be permanently dismissed until a period 
of arbitration of thirty days has passed, dur- 
ing which period the teacher must be noti- 
fied of the reasons for dismissal and shall be 
given a hearing before a committee of the 
board of education, the principal, and a 
committee elected by the teachers. 

x** 

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH (No. 352) 
—The Salt Lake Federation of Teachers con- 
tributed an article to the Salt Lake Tribune, 
Sunday, October 30, on the union’s attitude 
toward important constitutional amendments 
on uniform school funds which were consid- 
ered by the voters of the state on November 
8. Joseph A. Curtis, secretary of the local, 
explained in the article that “in the last anal- 
ysis the amendments will permit the legisla- 
ture, without injustice, to do an adequate 
job of financing public education in Utah, 
and that is why they are fully in accordance 
with the principles of the American Federa- 
tion of Teachers, an affiliate of the American 
Federation of Labor.” 

x*e* 

TURTLE CREEK, PA. (No, 493)—The 
East Boroughs Federation of Teachers is 
supporting a campaign for increased state aid 
for schools because “the State does not guar- 
antee an adequate minimum program of 
education. The School Code contains no 
minimum standard of educational need. 
Three-fourths of the states have such pro- 
grams.” A ten days’ sick leave with full pay 
has been granted to the teachers of North 
Braddock by the board of education. The 
local points out that this was one of the rec- 
ommendations made by the union last year 
and urges the adoption of the full union 


program. 
x*x*k 

CHEYENNE, WYO. (No. 366)—The 
Cheyenne Federation of Teachers is cooper- 
ating with the Wyoming Educational Asso- 
ciation on a proposed Teacher Retirement 
Law which will be presented to the state 
legislature in January. The local is also 
planning a study of the salary schedule of 
the Cheyenne school system, and its recom- 
mendations will be submitted to the board 
of education. 


27 











On the Labor Front 








Steinbeck Sponsors Conference 

John Steinbeck, noted author of Of Mice 
and Men, In Dubious Battle, and other 
novels, is chairman of a Committee to Aid 
Agricultural Organization formed in Sacra- 
mento, Calif., as an outgrowth of a strike by 
6,000 cotton pickers. 

i. 

The American Federation of Labor joined 
forces last month with the labor movement 
of Oregon in a court battle against the 
vicious anti-labor law voted at the Novem- 
ber elections. 

Joseph A. Padway, A. F. of L. general 
counsel, was assigned by President William 
Green to assist the Oregon Federation of 
Labor in a legal attack on the constitu- 
tionality of the measure. Padway said the 
initial step would be to ask a declaratory 
judgment from the Oregon Supreme Court, 
setting aside the law as a violation of the 
state and national constitutions and in con- 
flict with the National Labor Relations Act 
and the Norris-LaGuardia anti-injunction 
statute. 

Labor is determined to leave nothing un- 
done to invalidate the law, Padway said, 
because large industrial and farm interests 
who indorsed the measure will attempt to 
enact similar legislation in other states. 
Similar laws were defeated at the November 
polls by the voters in California and Wash- 
ington. 

e 6: < 


Organized labor has taken on new life 
in Hawaii within the last few years, The 
Voice of Labor, the island’s only labor news- 
paper, comments in an anniversary edition 
published last month. 

In its 12-page edition, the publication lists 
7,625 members in recognized unions, with 
the C.1.0. leading with 4,195; the A. F. of L., 
1,830, and the independent union of the 
Federation of Federal Workers, with 1,600. 

Hawaii's oldest trade union, according to 
the labor paper, is the Honolulu Typo- 
graphical Union, which was chartered more 
than a half century ago, when the territory 
was a monarchy, known as the Sandwich 


Islands. 
* * * 


Steel Protests Wage Levels 

Two of America’s large steel corporations, 
Bethlehem and Republic Steel, are attack- 
ing the Walsh-Healey Act, which fixes mini- 
mum wages for firms seeking government 
contracts of more than $10,000. Under the 
provisions of the act, the steel companies 
must pay a minimum hourly wage of 62% 
cents in the North and 45 cents in the South. 
In many of the steel plants, wages are below 
this minimum level. 

Union officials said the protest by the 
steel corporations is of great significance to 


28 





trade unions, since the protest might spread 
to other industries if the test case is success- 
ful. 

In the face of this fight, union officials 
pointed to the large salaries paid executives 
of the two corporations. Sixteen officers 
and directors of Bethlehem Steel received 
salaries for 1937 totalling $1,600,000, includ- 
ing Eugene G. Grace, $394,500; Charles M. 
Schwab, $190,000, and three other executives 
who received more than $150,000 each. 

Republic Steel paid its seventeen directors 
and officers more than $500,000, with $175,- 
000 going to T. M. Girdler, leader of anti- 
unionism in the steel industry. 








The new Wages and Hours Law does not 
fully eliminate the practices of child labor, 
the National Child Labor Committee has 
warned. A vast amount, perhaps the largest 
percentage, of child labor is in intra-state 
occupations, which are not covered by the 
new regulation, the committee reported. 
Only those industries which ship goods across 
state lines come under the child-labor ban 
of the act. 

In Washington Administrator Elmer F. 
Andrews, of the Wages and Hours Law, 
warned that employees who consent to eva- 
sion of the act are subject to its penalties. 

Isador Lubin, commissioner of the bureau 
of labor statistics, made public a_ report 
showing that about 35,000, or about one- 
tenth of the workers of cotton mills of 
the United States received wage increases 
as a result of the 25-cent-an-hour minimum 
fixed by the Wages and Hours Law. Almost 
all of the workers benefited were in mills in 
the southern states. 

> 2s 

Legislation designed to curb the activities 
of agencies which provide large corporations 
with strikebreakers and labor spies is being 
considered by the LaFollette Senate Civil 
Liberties Committee for introduction at the 
next session of Congress. 

The proposed measures now being devised 
grew out of the committee’s long investiga- 
tion of methods used to break strikes and 
prevent labor organization. A large part of 
the proposed laws is directed at detective 





—— 
a —~ 





agencies, which would be required to register 
with a federal bureau or the department of 
justice. These agencies would be prohibited 
from interference with collective bargaining, 
picketing, or other union activities. 

Moreover, employers would be denied the 
use of machine guns, gas bombs, and other 
war weapons during strike situations, while 
so-called citizens’ committees, law and order 
groups, and other vigilante organizations 
would be required to disclose the source of 
their funds, under the proposed legislation. 

> * a 

Governor Elmer A. Benson, Farmer- 
Laborite of Minnesota who was defeated for 
reelection last month, has ruled that the 
William J. Burns detective agency can no 
longer operate in the state. 

The liberal gevernor said he based his 
actions on the disclosures before the LaFol- 
lette Senate Civil Liberties Committee. In 
refusing to renew the agency’s license, Gov- 
ernor Benson pointed out that a large part 
of the organization’s business consisted of 
industrial espionage, and that Minnesota 
was one field of operation. 

He also referred to a letter sent from the 
firm’s branch manager in 1934 to the national 
office in New York, complaining of the 
liberal state administration’s policies, yet 
boasting that there were more Burns opera- 
tives in Minnesota than representatives of 


any other agency. 
* ¢ 6 


D. C. Workers Start School 


More than 400 students, representing prac- 
tically every government agency and busi- 
ness activity, are enrolled in the third term 
of the Federal Workers’ School in Wash- 
ington, D. C. 

Sponsored by the United Federal Workers 
of America, the school offers classes ranging 
from courses in history of trade unionism to 
ballroom dancing. Twenty-seven courses are 
offered. 

On the faculty are such notables as Floyd 
Dell, novelist; Walter Polakov, noted econ- 
omist and director of the engineering depart- 
ment of the United Mine Workers of 
America; and Henry M. Hunt, former mayor 
of Cincinnati and one-time general counsel 
for the P.W.A. 

The forums are under the direction of 
Thomas Blaisdell, director of the monopoly 
study of the Securities and Exchange Com- 
mission. 

* * eo 

The old spirit of bitterness by British 
employers is giving way to better mutual 
understanding, Professor J. Henry Richard- 
son of Leeds University reports in a new re- 
vised edition of his work, Industrial Rela- 
tions in Great Britain. 

“Above all,” he writes, “there is growing 
recognition of the common interests of em- 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














ployers and workers in the prosperity of 
British industry, especially in view of the 
intensity of post-war international competi- 
tion. It is upon these common interests 
both within the undertakings and in the 
wider field of collective relations that the 
foundations of industrial peace must be 
built.” 


*- * * 


Wallace Speaks to Labor 


Farmers and organized labor must band 
together if progressive gains in this country 
are to be maintained, Secretary of Agricul- 
ture Henry A. Wallace told delegates to the 
fifth annual National Conference on Labor 
Legislation in Washington last month. 

“Tf we are to continue along moderate and 
progressive lines,” he said, “and if we are 
to prevent development of a special brand 
of fascism here, farmers and city workers 
must learn to work together with mutual 
confidence and respect. 

“City employment depends in some part 
on the ability of farmers to buy. Prices of 
farm products depend in part upon the 
ability of city workers to buy. This funda- 
mental interdependence is evidenced in many 
ways. The cash income of farmers and the 
total of factory payrolls rise and fall to- 
gether, almost dollar for dollar.” 

Not only are farmers dependent on city 
workers for markets for their products, Sec- 
retary Wallace pointed out, but they also 
are dependent on industry for careers for 
their children. Today there is a constant 
flow of farm boys and girls into industrial 
jobs, since farmers raise more children than 
can find places in agriculture, he said. 

Meanwhile, the National Farmers Union, 
representing nearly 125,000 farmers in 36 
states, reiterated its support of organized 
labor and the principle of collective bargain- 
ing. Meeting in Madison, Wis., at its thirty- 
fourth annual convention, the group offered 
full cooperation with the labor movement 
in the fight for progressive measures. 

* * 7 


The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company 
lost another round in its fight against union- 
ization of its agents in New York City 
when the appellate division upheld unani- 
mously the State Labor Relations Act and 
orders of the State Labor Relations Board. 

The insurance company had challenged the 
constitutionality of the act when the Labor 
Board ordered it to bargain with the Indus- 
trial Insurance Agents Union, C.1.0. State 
Supreme Court Justice Aaron Steuer denied 
the company’s motion to vacate the order, 
and granted the board’s counter-motion to 
enforce the order. 

The company then appealed to the appel- 
late division, which upheld Justice Steuer on 
all points. As a result of the decision the 
union is seeking an election among 1,000 
agents of the John Hancock Mutual Life 
Insurance Company. Meanwhile a public 
campaign against the Metropolitan for its 
anti-union policies was undertaken by the 
union with the inauguration of roving pickets. 

* * * 


Industrial production in the United States 
showed the greatest decline since 1929, ac- 


DECEMBER, 1938 


cording to a study of twenty nations by 
the International Labor Office in Geneva. 
Of eight nations on the list with reduced 
production percentages, the U. S. was the 
highest with 33.6 per cent, the report finds. 
Twelve other countries showed production 
increase over the 1929 level, with Latvia 
showing the greatest increase, 82.4 per cent. 
> . > 


Injunction or no injunction, Mayor Frank 
“I Am the Law” Hague still does not permit 
pickets to carry signs within his open-shop 
kingdom in Jersey City. 

Despite Federal Judge William Clark’s 
ruling that pickets must not be molested, 
police officers directed by Hague tore signs 
from the backs of A. F. of L. and C.LO. 
unionists who were jointly picketing a tailor 
shop on Journal Square in the heart of 
Jersey City. 

Captain Peter Quail ripped the signs from 
two pickets, one representing the Journey- 
men Tailors’ Union of the Amalgamated 
Clothing Workers (C.1.0.) and the other a 
member of the Retail Clothing Salesmen’s 
Union, affiliated with the Retail Clerks’ In- 
ternational Protective Association (A. F. 
of L.). Both unions had struck the shop 
a few hours earlier, demanding recognition 
and improved conditions. 

Police Chief Harry M. Walsh said that 
picket signs had been forbidden in Jersey 
City for 25 years and no change was con- 
templated. The pickets kept on marching 
without signs. 

* * * 


Green Urges Nazi Boycott 

A nation-wide boycott of the goods and 
services of Germany was urged by William 
Green, president of the American Federation 
of Labor, in a nation-wide radio hookup. 

Bitterly denouncing Hitler’s racial policies, 
President Green advised continuance of such 
a boycott until persecution of Jews in Ger- 
many is terminated. The boycott, President 
Green said, is backed by the five million 
members of the A. F. of L. 

In New York City, members of District 
Council 9 of the Brotherhood of Painters, 
Decorators and Paperhangers are carrying 
out a program to help raise $100,000 for 
Nazi refugees. Under the plan, members of 
the union are permitted to work an extra 
day each week, with the extra day’s earnings 
being turned over to the special refugee fund, 
union officials expect to raise $25,000 a week 
under this plan. 


won 
won 


oo 

New York A. F. of L. and C.1L.O. organ- 
izations have joined forces in opposing the 
granting of incorporation papers to the 
Liberty Legion of America, Inc., which is 
chartered in Michigan. 

Charging that the Liberty Legion is a 
company-dominated union of the Ford Mo- 
tor Company, the unions banded together in 








the fight include the American Federation 
of Labor, the Albany Central Federation, the 
New York State Industrial Union Council, 
and the United Automobile Workers of 
America. 

In a hearing before the state board of 
standards and appeals, Thurlow Gray, who 
identified himself as founder and secretary 
of the legion, testified the organization was 
started as a group of former service men 
with a membership of 450 and had grown 
to a membership of 85,000 with 34 charters. 
Ninety per cent of this number, he admitted, 
were employees of the Ford Motor Com- 
pany, including all of the officers except him- 
self, a former employee. 

Several former employees of the Ford 
company in Detroit testified under oath that 
they were discharged for refusal to join the 
legion. 

- “ae 


“No Picket Lines,” Says Heil 


The threat to end picket lines in Wis- 
consin made by Julius P. Heil, republican 
governor-elect, is being discussed by state 
labor leaders as an open attack on organized 
labor. The statement was made to news- 
papermen in New York. 

“We are going to have no strikes and no 
picket lines in Wisconsin,” he declared. “As 
governor I am going out on the firing line 
and run those racketeers out of Wisconsin, 
courteously, if I can.” 

* * * 


Picketing by strikers in a demand for a 
closed shop is illegal, Judge J. D. Murphy 
of Oakland, Calif., ruled recently in issuing 
an injunction to the Guy’s Drug Stores. 

Judge Murphy held that closed-shop or 
union-shop agreements “interfere with em- 
ployees’ freedom in the selection of bargain 
agencies and require employers’ interference 
with employees’ selection of agencies.” 

Striking pharmacists, then, ousted from 
their jobs, defied the ruling by continuing to 
picket in a demand for reinstatement in their 
jobs. Members of the Pharmacists’ Union 
are planning an appeal of the decision to a 
higher court, while other local firms are 
taking advantage of the ruling. 

** * 


Women are playing an increasing role in 
the labor movement in America, according to 
a report last month bv the Women’s Bureau 
of the U. S. Department of Labor. 

In the rubber industry, for example, the 
Bureau’s magazine, The Woman Worker. 
reports women make up nearly one-fourth 
of all the workers. Through labor organiza- 
tion women rubber workers have increased 
hourly wages from a low of 26 cents to 
as much as one dollar. Also, the magazine 
notes, the practice of replacing men with 
women at lower rates of pay has been 
eliminated in well-organized plants. 

*- * * 

In an important labor election, mem- 
bers of Local 6 of New York, International 
Typographical Union, have rejected a pro- 
posal for the special per capita tax for the 
American Federation of Labor for its organ- 
izational drive. 

The New York local, the largest I. T. U. 


29 








unit, turned down the Chicago local’s request for a national refer- 
endum on the question, thus reaffirming a stand taken several 
months ago. I.T.U. delegates to the A. F. of L. convention in 
October were refused seats, until President Claude M. Baker prom- 
ised that his union would reconsider the per capita tax. 


Columbia Law Review Studies N. L. R. B. Record 


Columbia University’s Columbia Law Review reports that in spite 
of the fact that the C. I. O. has been victorious in 76.9 per cent of 
its contests with the A. F. of L. before the National Labor Rela- 
tions Board the N. L. R. B. has favored American Federation of 
Labor unions. The Review claims that the board has been willing to 
give preference to craft unions over industrial organization when- 
ever the majority of any group of craftsmen desire it and has refused 
to exclude from the ballot A. F. of L. unions that have been aided by 
employers. 

The Col'umbia Law Review points out that “the amendments to 
the National Labor Relations Act proposed by the counsel for the 
A. F. of L. . . . would prove extremely advantageous to recalcitrant 
employers and of doubtful value to the A. F. of L.” Important 
decisions handed down recently by the N. L. R. B. include: the 
Montgomery Ward Co. (St. Paul) has been ordered to reinstate three 
discharged employees and to pay them back pay for all time lost; 
four newspapermen who have been re-employed by the Hollywood 
Citizen-News gained a victory in their suit for back pay; after two 
years’ waiting, Jerry C. S. Rossi, who was discharged by Debway 
Hats, Beacon, N. Y., for attempting to organize a union, won his 
job back and two years’ back pay; the Murray Hat Co. of De Kalb, 
Ill., has been ordered to reinstate six workers with back pay; 5,000 
employees of Republic Steel who lost their jobs in May, 1937, have 
won a reinstatement order which states that the steel company 
“chose the way of strife” in the strikes and warfare; and, strangely 
enough, the Red River Lumber Company, involved in an A. F. of L.- 
C. I. O. controversy, praised the impartiality of the board in han- 
dling the case. 

Election results issued by the N. L. R. B. on November 18 showed 
that organized labor had won twenty-one elections and lost ten. 
Of this number the C. I. O. won fifteen, the A. F. of L. six; in six 
elections where the workers had to choose between the two groups 
the C. I. O. won four, the A. F. of L. two. In one case an inde- 
pendent employees group won. 


* * * 


Judge Charles N. Feidelson, regional director for the National 
Labor Relations Board, in Atlanta, Ga., has filed a Labor Board 
complaint against the Republic Steel Corporation, which operates a 
number of plants throughout the South. 

The board has already found the Girdler firm guilty of violating 
the Wagner Act in its northern plants, and has ordered the company 
to re-hire several thousand workers fired for union activity. 


*- * * 


According to Washington Merry-Go-Round, syndicated column 
about events in the National Capital, Senator Edward Burke was 
quoted as saying: 

“T still think there ought to be some revision of the Wagner Act, 
but I now feel that whatever changes are proposed should come 
from the sponsor of the measure, Senator Wagner. I don’t contem- 
plate offering any amendments.” 

Senator Wagner has given no indication that he favors amend- 


ments to the law. 
ee 2 © 


Summarizing its work since it started in the fall of 1935, the 
National Labor Relations Board reports it has handled 16 770 cases, 
involving 3.981 052 workers. On September 1 all but 3,820 had been 
disposed of, the board explained. 

A highlight of the report was that less than 5 per cent of the cases 
actually reached the point of trial examiners’ recommendations, or 
board orders. All others were ended by agreement, withdrawal of 
charges, dismissals of cases, or in other ways. 


30 


ene ; 


The Christian Front, Catholic labor publication, declared editor- 
ially in a recent issue: 

“The Christian Front indorses the N. L. R. A. and the National 
Labor Relations Board which is applying the law. The Christian 
Front urges that there be no tinkering with the N. L. R. A. and the 
N. L. R. B. Written to safeguard the rights of the rank and file of 
the American working classes, this Wagner labor relations act is a 
great step toward the achievement of practical social justice.” 

The editorial terms the Wagner act a “direct answer to the call of 
Pope Pius XI for labor legislation.” 

* * * 


President William Green will head labor’s drive in the 1938-39 
war on infantile paralysis which will be conducted as a part of the 
National Committee for the Celebration of the President’s Birthday. 
Labor’s contribution will be presented in person to President Roose- 
velt by President Green and a representative labor committee. Last 
year more than $50,000 was contributed to the national fund and 
this year’s goal is not less than $100,000. The name under considera- 
tion for the labor offering is the “silver salute” which would mean 
nickles, dimes, quarters, and dollars for the National Foundation 
in its war against infantile paralysis. 

ee 


The Supreme Court will decide whether an employee who partici- 
pates in a sitdown strike may be discharged by his employer when 
it reviews the Fansteel case. The N. L. R. B. brought the case 
into court, contesting a two-to-one decision by the Seventh Circuit 
Court setting aside an order by the board for reinstatement of the 
sitdown strikers on the ground that the illegal labor practices of 
the company precipitated the strike. 





In order that the AMERICAN TEACHER may serve aS a 
medium for the discussion of the educational problems of 
today, the contributors are not necessarily expressing the 
policies of the American Federation of Teachers. 

















The AMERICAN TEACHER 


Official Organ of 
THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 
506 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 
Organized April 15, 1916 
Affiliated with The American Federation of Labor 


Editor, Georce T. GUERNSEY 


Consulting Editor, Kermit Esy 


Editorial Board 
Mercepes L. NELSON 


Mary J. Herrick 
Irvin R. KUENZLI 


GeorcE E. AXTELLE 


Secretary-Treasurer 
Irvin R. KUENZLI 


President 
Jerome Davis 


Vice-Presidents 

Mary J. Herricx 
Lira A. HUNTER 
ALLE B. MANN 
Mercepes L. NELSON 
Pau. W. PREISLER 
Jort SEIDMAN 
STANTON E. SMITH 
Doxey A. WILKERSON 


Georce E. AXTELLE 

Haro_p CHAPMAN Brown 
Joun D. Connors 
Micuae. J. Eck 

ARTHUR ELDER 

Mrs. Mary Forty GrossMAN 
C. J. HENDLEY 








THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














INSIDE THE COVER 


(Continued from page 2) 

A new organization, “Films for Democracy,” has been formed 
with Dean Ned Dearborn, Division of General Education, New 
York University, as the head and the following among the spon- 
sors: United States Senator Arthur Capper, Rexford G. Tugwell, 
Thomas Mann, Dr. Mary E. Woolley, Henry Pratt Fairchild, Abra- 
ham Flexner, Dr. A. A. Brill, Heywood Broun, Irene Lewisohn, 
Robert K. Straus, Philip Merivale, Sherwood Anderson, Herman 
Shumlin, Clyde R. Miller, Walter Prichard Eaton, Marc Connelly, 
Rex Ingram, George Seldes, and Will Rogers, Jr. 

The prospectus of the organization indicates that one of the 
reasons for forming the group is that “contemporary social prob- 
lems, if treated to suggest a practical solution, are taboo in Holly- 
wood scripts. As historical dramas grow grander, the films’ retreat 
from present-day reality becomes a rout. Yet those who know 
this country’s moral climate are firmly convinced that in cities and 
small towns all over these United States there are significant masses 
of habitual movie-goers who will, because of the changing spirit of 
the times, welcome new films which interpret current reality and 
point out constructive solutions.” 

And while I’m on the subject of movies, in the recent election 
the Motion Picture Democratic Committee of California, made up 
of such stars as Melvyn Douglas, Franchot Tone, Gale Sondergaard, 
Ralph Morgan (Screen Actors’ Guild prexy), James, Lucille, and 
Russell Gleason, and many others, took to the air and the road 
for Olson, Downey, and Patterson, and AGAINST the vicious anti- 


labor proposition number one which was defeated. 
G. T. G. 


THE CONTRIBUTORS 


FRANK Baker is president of the Milwaukee State Teach- 
ers College. 

GERTRUDE BINDER is assistant director of the Depart- 
ment of Research and Publicity of the National Child 
Labor Committee. 

JeroME Davis is president of the American Federation 
of Teachers. 

Boris GAMzUE teaches in the Department of English 
at Washington Square College (New York University). 

GRANVILLE Hicks is co-editor with Ella Winter of 
The Letters of Lincoln Steffens. He is at Harvard Uni- 
versity. 

EucENE Ho.mes is a member of the philosophy depart- 
ment of Howard University. 

Leo HuBERMAN teaches at New College, Columbia Uni- 
versity. 

CLypE R. MILLER is secretary of the Institute for 
Propaganda Analysis and teaches at Teachers College, Co- 
lumbia University. 

Joun R. Rew is a member of the Department of Philos- 
ophy at Stanford University. 

Joet Seman is A. F. of T. vice president in charge 
of adult education and W. P. A. 

ARNOLD SHuKoTOFF is chairman of the National 
Academic Freedom Committee of the American Federation 
of Teachers. 

STANTON E. Sir is vice president in charge of the 








DECEMBER, 1938 


Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama area of the Ameri- 
can Federation of Teachers. 

ELsert D. Tuomas is senator from Utah and chairman 
of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. 

Chairman Dies vs. Founding Fathers was written by a 
teacher who feels that it would be unwise for him to sign 
the article, American education being what it is. He is a 
member of the American Federation of Teachers. 








Books Received 


ALMANAC FOR NEW YORKERS, by Feperat Waiters’ Proyecr. 
New York: Modern Age Books. 154 pages. $0.50. 

BRICKS WITHOUT MORTAR: The Story of International Co- 
operation, by VaRIAN Fry. New York: Foreign Policy Associa- 
tion. 96 pages. $0.25. 

CENTERVILLE: Book Three, Social Studies, by Paut R. Hanna, 
GENEviEvE ANDERSON, and Wiit1aM S. Gray. Chicago: Scott, 
Foresman. 288 pages. $0.92. 

GROUP LEADER’S GUIDE TO PROPAGANDA ANALYSIS, by 
VioLtet Epwarvs. New York: Institute for Propaganda Analysis. 
240 pages. $2.00. 

HORACE MANN AT ANTIOCH, by Joy Ermer Morcan. Wash- 
ington: Horace Mann Centennial Fund, National Education As- 
sociation. 608 pages. $2.00. 

LORDS OF THE PRESS, by Georce Serves. New York: Julian 
Messner. 408 pages. $3.00. 

MC GILLIVRAY OF THE CREEKS, by Joun Watton CavucuHey. 
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 386 pages. $3.50. 

MADE IN US.A., by Boake Carter. New York: Dodge. 
pages. $1.75. 

NEXT STEPS FORWARD: Taxation, Big Business, Government 
Debt, Old-Age Security, by Donato Siesincer. Washington: 
National Home Library Foundation. 144 pages. $0.25, 

PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND, by Harotp 
J. Lasx1. New York: Viking Press. 384 pages. $3.50. 

PUPIL-TEACHER LEARNING: A Study, directed by L. THomas 
Hopkins. Wilmington: Delaware Citizens Association. 136 pages. 

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: The Story of American De- 
mocracy, by Herspert Acar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 386 
pages. $3.00. 

SUPERVISION IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, by Samve 
Smith and Ropert K. Speer. New York: Cordon. 460 pages. 
$2.90. 


244 


PAMPHLETS RECEIVED 


COLLEGE STUDENT MORTALITY, by Joun H. McNeety. 
Washington: United States Department of the Interior and 
Office of Education. 112 pages. $0.15. 

FEDERAL AID FOR EDUCATION: 1935-36 and 1936-37, by 
Trmon Covert. Washington: United States Department of the 
Interior and Office of Education. 24 pages. $0.10. 

THE NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION, by Parmer O. 
JouHnson and Oswatp L. Harvey with an introduction by Doax 
S. CAMPBELL. Washington: Advisory Committee on Education. 
122 pages. $0.15. 

SCHOOL USE OF VISUAL AIDS, by Cringe M. Koon. Washing- 
ton: United States Department of the Interior and Office of 
Education. 68 pages. $0.10. 

TEACHING ADULTS BY DISCUSSION, by Tuomas FANsLeER. 
New York: New York University Service Bureau for Adult 
Education. 40 pages. $0.35. 

WAGE-HOUR HANDBOOK. Washington: Capitol Daily. 76 
pages. $2.00. 








31 


C : 


»* 











WHAT EVERY 
WELL INFORMED TEACHER 
SHOULD KNOW 


The How and Why of the A. F. of T. 


The following publications answer in convenient form 
questions concerning the aims and organization of the 
American Federation of Teachers. They are well suited 
for distribution to prospective members. Samples will be 
sent on request. 


—_——@——_—. 


. Information about the A. F. T. 
25c per hundred 


. Six Major Purposes 25c per hundred 


. Can Teachers Unions Be Called Out On Strike? 
25c per hundred 


Why I Am a Member of the Teachers Union 
35c per hundred 


. Six Reasons for Joining the A. F. T. 
(jerome Davis) 25c per hundred 


. Questions and Answers 35c per hundred 


. The Historical Setting of the A. F. T. 
(Ruth Gillette Hardy) 35c per hundred 


. Why I Am Glad to Be a Member of the 
A. F 


(Goodman Watson) 35c per hundred 


. The Constitution of the A. F. T. 
(Correct as of Oct. 1, 1937) $2.00 per hundred 


. A Program of Action for Classroom 
Teachers $2.00 per hundred 


. A Critical Evaluation of the A. F. T. 
(Aileen W. Robinson) 50c per copy 


Accomplishments of the A. F. T. 
60c per hundred 


Teachers Should Organize 
(Frank Baker) $2.00 per hundred 


A Golden Opportunity 
(Irvin R. Kuenzli) $2.00 per hundred 


Facts $2.00 per hundred 


Organized Labor and the Public Schools 
(Irvin R. Kuenzli) 75c per hundred 


. Power—Participation and Union Organization 
(Elmer A. Benson) 50c per hundred 


A Challenge to Class-Room Teachers 
(Blotter) $1.00 per hundred 


The National Union of Teachers of England 
(Elsie V. Parker) $1.00 per hundred 


_—_— p——— 


ORDER BY NUMBER FROM 


AMERICAN FEDERATION 
OF TEACHERS 


506 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 








HAVE YOU DISTRIBUTED COPIES OF 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
NEWSPAPER? 


Some Comments on the Newspaper Received from 
A. F. of T. Members 


“I have just finished reading the first issue of the 
AMERICAN TEACHER in newspaper form. It seems to me 
that this is the best issue of our paper that I have 
ever seen. It is more complete than the magazine 
was, has more coverage, and is a hundred times more 
readable . . . For the first time I feel that we really 
have a trade-union paper—and certainly this kind of 


publication is up-to-date, interesting and valuable.” 


“The present single issue tells me more of what I 
want to know about the A. F. of T. than I have been 
able to learn from reading the magazine the last year 
or so. I think the present issue is distinctive in con- 
tent . . . If we can have both beauty and substance 
in our publication, all right, but, of these two, sub- 


stance is all important right now.” 


“T like it better than the larger magazine. It is easier 
to read. There is so much in the other there is a 
tendency to set it aside to read ‘when there is more 
time,” and so it isn't read. I think this would be 
read. I'd like to see this form kept and have the 


issues oftener.” 


“The newspaper . . . has been very useful in bringing 
an understanding of the national federation (conven- 
tion reports) to the locals, most of which were not 
represented at the convention. It has also made the 
formulation of local programs much simpler—they 


can copy national committees.” 


WRITE TODAY FOR COPIES 


AMERICAN FEDERATION 
OF TEACHERS 


506 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS