The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Goslings, by Upton Sinclair This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Goslings A Study of the American Schools Author: Upton Sinclair Release Date: June 9, 2021 [eBook #65576] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: KD Weeks, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOSLINGS *** Transcriber’s Note: Footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference. Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation. Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text. THE GOSLINGS BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR (Now in Print and Obtainable) THE GOSLINGS: 1924 HELL: 1923 THE GOOSE-STEP: 1923 THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: 1922 THE BOOK OF LIFE: 1922 100%: 1920 THE BRASS CHECK: 1920 JIMMIE HIGGINS: 1919 THE PROFITS OF RELIGION: 1919 KING COAL: 1917 THE CRY FOR JUSTICE: 1915 DAMAGED GOODS: 1913 SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE: 1913 THE FASTING CURE: 1911 SAMUEL THE SEEKER: 1909 THE METROPOLIS: 1907 THE JUNGLE: 1906 MANASSAS: 1904 THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING: 1903 PRINCE HAGEN: 1902 The Goslings A Study of the American Schools BY UPTON SINCLAIR A UTHOR OF “T HE G OOSE - STEP ,” “T HE B RASS C HECK ,” “T HE P ROFITS OF R ELIGION ,” ETC UPTON SINCLAIR P ASADENA , C ALIFORNIA C OPYRIGHT , 1924 BY UPTON SINCLAIR All rights reserved. First edition, January, 1924, 5,000 copies, clothbound, 5,000 copies, paperbound. Rights for this book: Public domain in the USA. This edition is published by Project Gutenberg. Originally issued by Project Gutenberg on 2021-06-09. To support the work of Project Gutenberg, visit their Donation Page. This free ebook has been produced by GITenberg, a program of the Free Ebook Foundation. If you have corrections or improvements to make to this ebook, or you want to use the source files for this ebook, visit the book's github repository. You can support the work of the Free Ebook Foundation at their Contributors Page. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I NTRODUCTORY ix-x I. Land of Orange-Groves and Jails 1 II. The Adventure of the University Club 8 III. In Which I Get Arrested 13 IV. The Empire of the Black Hand 19 V. The Schools of the “Times” 22 VI. The Teachers’ Soviets 26 VII. A Prayer for Freedom 32 VIII. The Price of Independence 36 IX. The Regime of Reciprocity 40 X. The Spy System 44 XI. Lies for Children 50 XII. The Schools of Mammon 54 XIII. The Tammany Tiger 59 XIV. God and Mammon 62 XV. Honest Graft 66 XVI. A Letter to Woodrow Wilson 72 XVII. An Arrangement of Little Bits 77 XVIII. The Luskers 81 XIX. To Henrietta Rodman 87 XX. Melodrama in Chicago 94 XXI. Continuous Performance 98 XXII. The Incorporate Tax-Dodging Creatures 102 XXIII. The Superintendent of Trombones XXIII. The Superintendent of Trombones 109 XXIV. The City of French Restaurants 113 XXV. The University Gang 119 XXVI. The Ward Leader 125 XXVII. The Romeo and Juliet Stunt 130 XXVIII. The Inventor of Five Sciences 135 XXIX. The Land of Lumber 140 XXX. The Anaconda’s Lair 146 XXXI. The Little Anacondas 151 XXXII. Colorado Culture 154 XXXIII. The Domain of King Coal 159 XXXIV. The Homestead of the Free 164 XXXV. Is a Teacher a Citizen? 167 XXXVI. Introducing Comrade Thompson 173 XXXVII. Millers and Militarism 179 XXXVIII. Newberry Pie 184 XXXIX. Beets and Celery 186 XL. Boston in Bondage 191 XLI. The Open Shop for Culture 195 XLII. Corrupt and Contented 203 XLIII. The Scenes of My Childhood 209 XLIV. The Brewer’s Daughter-in-Law 212 XLV. An Autocracy of Politicians 216 XLVI. The Calibre of Congressmen 221 XLVII. The Local Machines 224 XLVIII. The Steam Roller 228 XLIX. The Dispensers of Prominence 234 L. A Plot Against Democracy 240 LI. The Plot Fails 244 LII. Mormon Magic 249 LIII. The Funeral of Democracy 253 LIV. The Fruits of the Sowing 258 LV. Teachers to the Rear 263 LVI. Bread and Circuses LVI. Bread and Circuses 269 LVII. Schools for Strike-Breakers 275 LVIII. The National Spies’ Association 279 LIX. Babbitts and Bolsheviks 284 LX. The Schools of Socony 290 LXI. The Riot Department 296 LXII. The Blindfold School of Patriotism 301 LXIII. Professor Facing Both-Ways 307 LXIV. Poison Pictures 312 LXV. The Book Business 315 LXVI. Ten Per Cent Commissions 320 LXVII. The Superintendent-Makers 324 LXVIII. The Church Conspiracy 330 LXIX. Catholicism and the Schools 334 LXX. The Practical Church Administrator 341 LXXI. Faith and Modern Thought 344 LXXII. The Schools of Steel 349 LXXIII. The Schools of Oil 353 LXXIV. The Country Geese 357 LXXV. The Schools of Snobbery 362 LXXVI. A School Survey 369 LXXVII. The Educational Mills 377 LXXVIII. Descensus Averno 381 LXXIX. The Teacher’s Job 385 LXXX. Teachers’ Terror 389 LXXXI. The School Serfs 395 LXXXII. The Teachers’ Union 402 LXXXIII. The Teachers’ Magna Charta 406 LXXXIV. Workers’ Education 410 LXXXV. The Goose-step March 417 LXXXVI. The Goose-step Advance 423 LXXXVII. The Goose-step Double-quick 428 LXXXVIII. The Goose-step Review 432 LXXXIX. The Call to Action LXXXIX. The Call to Action 440 INTRODUCTORY Life has given you one of its precious treasures, a child; a body to nurture, a character to train, a mind with endless possibilities of growth, a soul with hidden stores of tenderness and beauty—all these are Nature’s gifts. Modern science has shown that within the child’s soul lies magically locked up all the past of our race; also, it is evident that within it lies all the future of our race. What our children are now being made is what America will be. You send these little ones to school. Twenty-three millions of them troop off every week-day morning, with their shining faces newly washed, their clothing cleaned and mended. You bear them, you rear them, with infinite pains and devotion you prepare them, and feed them into the gigantic educational machine. You do not know much about this machine. You have turned it over to others to run. Every year you pay to maintain it a billion dollars of wealth which you have produced by real and earnest toil. You take it for granted that this billion dollars is competently used; that those who run the machine are giving your twenty-three million children the best education that forty-three dollars and forty-seven cents per child will buy. The purpose of this book is to show you how the “invisible government” of Big Business which controls the rest of America has taken over the charge of your children. In the course of a public debate with the writer, in the Civic Club in New York City, May, 1922, Dr. Tildsley, district superintendent of the public school system of that city, made the statement: “I do not know any school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the children. They are all run for the benefit of the gang.” This statement, made upon high authority, is the thesis of “The Goslings.” Come with me and let me show you what is this “gang” which runs the school system of the United States; how they got their power, what use they make of it, and what this means to the bodies and minds of your twenty-three million little ones. To assist the reader in finding his way through a big book, I give traveling directions: Pages 1 to 22 take you behind the scenes of that “invisible government” which is now ruling America, including its schools. Pages 22 to 59 show in detail what this “invisible government” is doing to the schools of one large American city— Los Angeles. Pages 59 to 93 study the schools of New York, and 94 to 109 those of Chicago. Pages 109 to 224 deal with school conditions in a score of other large cities. I realize that this is a large number; but then, many people are interested in these cities. You will find both melodrama and humor in the stories; and if there is too much, you can skip! Beginning at page 224 is a study of the state and national machines of the school world; and whatever else you miss, do not miss the National Education Association, and how it was stolen from the teachers of America—there is no drama on Broadway to equal that for thrills. From 275 to 329 you will find a score of powerful Big Business organizations which have assumed to take control of our schools. From 330 to 349 comes the Catholic Church in relation to the schools—this in addition to details given in a number of cities. From 349 to 417 you will find a general survey of the school situation from the point of view of both pupils and teachers. The concluding chapters discuss “The Goose-step” and its critics, and developments in the college world since its publication. THE GOSLINGS A Study of the American Schools CHAPTER I LAND OF ORANGE-GROVES AND JAILS I begin this study of the American school system with Southern California, because that is the part of the country in which I live, and which therefore I know best. It is a representative part, being the newest and most recently mixed. We have all the races, white and black and yellow and red; but the great bulk of the population is of native stock, farmers from the Middle West who have sold or rented their homesteads and moved to this “roof-garden of the world.” It is our fashion to hold reunions and picnics for the old home folks, and there are few states that cannot gather thousands of representatives. We have the most wonderful climate in the world, and soil which is fertile under irrigation. Our leading occupation is selling this soil and climate to new arrivals from the East. We are eager traders, and everything we have is for sale; you can buy the average house in Southern California for two hundred dollars more than the owner paid for it, and I know people who have sold their homes and moved several times in one year. Also, we have struck oil, and this sudden wealth has fanned our collective greed. We boast ourselves “the white spot on the industrial map.” Hard times do not touch us, we build literally whole streets of new houses every week, and labor agitators are banished from our midst. The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, the Los Angeles “Times,” created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money. The “Times” has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in its founder’s spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the largest newspaper in the world—meaning that it prints the most advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population is fed. I pick up this morning’s paper, and find a cartoon on the front page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is labeled in large letters: “Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch.” As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit. We have several hundred churches of all sects, and our “Times” prints pages of church news and sermons, and double-leaded two-column editorials invoking the aid of Jehovah in all emergencies. But the real spirit of the staff breaks out on the other pages; when it is necessary to represent Los Angeles in a cartoon, their symbol is a sly young prostitute with sparkling black eyes and naked limbs. Once upon a time such pictures were purchased surreptitiously and handed round by naughty little boys; but now they are delivered every morning by carrier to everybody’s home. One of the features of our life is “bathing beauties”; young ladies in thin tights parading the boardwalks of the beaches, winning prizes from chambers of commerce and lending gayety to Sunday supplements. Any new stunt is worth a fortune to one of these ladies; one day a lady has gilded her legs, and the next day a lady has butterflies painted on her back, and next—most elegant of all—a lady appears with a bathing-suit and a monocle. The men, thus summoned, come in droves. Competition is keen, and the ladies are strenuous in defense of their meal-tickets, and when one trespasses upon another’s rights, we have a thrilling murder story. Our lady murderesses are a leading feature of Southern California life; sometimes they shoot, and sometimes they poison, and sometimes they go to the nearest five- and ten-cent store and buy a hammer, and beat out the other lady’s brains. Then they are sent to jail, which is a career of glory, with photographs and interviews in every edition of the newspapers, and a sensational trial with full details of their many lovers and their quarrels. Autobiographies written in prison are featured in Sunday supplements and advertised on billboards; and finally comes the climax—a magical jail delivery. We know, of course, that nowhere in America can the jails hold the rich, but out here in Southern California the rich don’t even wait to be pardoned by presidents and governors—they tip their jailers twenty-five hundred dollars and walk right out. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!” Fifteen years ago the writer had haunting his mind what he thought was to be a great blank verse tragedy. The scene of one act was to be laid several hundred years in the future, and the crowning achievement of that time was an invention whereby music could be made audible to people all over the world. The scene was to show a great musician, whose inspiration was being thus conveyed to humanity. And now we have this invention—somewhat ahead of time! Our radio in Southern California is presided over by the “Times,” and the invisible government decides what is safe for our hungry masses to hear. Our plutocracy has just built for itself a new hotel, a sultan’s dream of luxury, costing several million dollars. The opening of this hotel became the great historical event of Southern California; there were several pages about it in the newspapers, and it was announced that a certain prominent person, would convey his inspiration to the multitude over the “Times” radio. In a hundred thousand homes the hungry “fans” put on their ear-caps and awaited the sublime moment; and meanwhile in the Hotel Biltmore a great part of the guests got royally drunk. The orator had his share, and his inspiration over the radio took the form of obscenities and cursing; the horrified “fans” heard his friends trying to stop him, begging him to come and have one more drink; but he told them they were a set of blankety blank blank fools, and that he knew what he was going to say, and it was nobody’s blankety blank blank business. This continued until suddenly the radio was shut off, and the fans were left to silence and speculation! Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood, the world’s greatest honey-pot, with its thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood, where youth and gayety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you have only to wait. Hollywood is young America. Of course our hundreds of churches are not entirely inactive. We have revivalists, who furiously denounce the sins of Hollywood, using the most up-to- date slang; and groups of men and women, instead of going to the movies, gather in Bible classes and learn the history of the Hittites and the succession of the kings of the Jebusites. You can hear sermons over the radio—that is, if you have a high-priced set, and can tune out the jazz orchestras. The cheaper sets hear everything at once, and you can dance to the sermons or pray to the jazz, as you prefer. Who runs this new empire of the Southwest? It is run by a secret society, which I have named the Black Hand; consisting of a dozen or so of big bankers and business men, hard-fisted, cunning and unscrupulous profiteers of the pioneer type, a scant generation removed from the bad man with a gun on each hip. They are the inner council and directing circle of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; with a propaganda department formerly known as the Commercial Federation of California, and now camouflaged as the Better America Federation. Concerning this latter organization, you will find much information in “The Goose Step,” pages 129-132. It occupies the entire floor of a large building, and has raised a fund of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year for five years for its campaign of terrorism. Like all criminals, it operates under many aliases: the American Protective League, the Association for Betterment of the Public Service, the Associated Patriotic Societies, the Taxpayers’ Association, the People’s Economy League, the Tax Investigating and Economy League, the Americanization Committee, the Committee of One Thousand, the Committee of Ten Thousand, the Parent-Teachers’ Associations, the Board of Education, the District Attorney’s Office, and the Police Department of the City of Los Angeles. Ours is an “open shop” city; that is, the business men and merchants are forbidden to employ union workers, and if they disregard this rule they are blacklisted, their credit is cut off, and they are driven into bankruptcy. When a new man comes into town and sets up in business he is politely interviewed and invited to join the gang; at the same time he is given his orders, and if he disobeys, he moves on to some other part of the world, or down into the ranks of the wage-slaves. So perfect is the system of the Black Hand, so all-seeing is its spy service, that the Young Women’s Christian Association could not prepare and mail out a circular letter asking for funds without every merchant in the city having on his desk by the same mail a letter from the Better America Federation president, warning him that the Young Women’s Christian Association is supporting the eight-hour day for women, the minimum wage law for women, and other immoral propositions. We have a “criminal syndicalism law” in California; the public is told by the Black Hand and its newspapers that this law is to punish men who advocate the overthrow of government by force and violence. Under this law eighty men are now coughing out their lungs in the jute mill at San Quentin prison, under sentence of from two to twenty-eight years. As I write, one of these men collapses under the strain and refuses to work longer in the jute mill, and seventy others are being tortured in “solitary” because they “strike” in sympathy with this comrade. No one of these men has ever had proven against him, or even charged against him, any act of force or violence or any destruction of property. They were convicted because the Black Hand of California pays three hundred and fifty dollars a month to several hired witnesses, who travel about from place to place testifying before juries that ten years ago, when they belonged to the I. W. W., they, the witnesses, personally burned down barns. Because of this testimony men who have recently joined the organization, and have never burned down barns nor advocated burning down barns, are sentenced to the jute mill. The public does not know, and has no means of guessing that the law on the statute books against “criminal syndicalism” has been modified by the police who enforce it to read “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” That means that any man may be arrested at any time that any police official does not happen to like the way he has his hair cut, or the red flower in his button-hole. Crime and suspicion of crime are the same thing in our legal procedure, because men once thrown into jail are held there “incommunicado” without warrant or charge; they are not permitted to see attorneys, and their friends cannot find out what has become of them. They are starved and beaten and tortured in jail; so there is no longer any difference between innocence and guilt. The eighty convicted in the state’s prison suffer less than the many hundreds of unconvicted in jails and police stations all over the state. What this means is that the Black Hand is trying to smash industrial unionism. They have got the old-line unions cowed; they have purchased or frightened most of the leaders, and driven them out of politics, and are no longer afraid of them. But now comes the new movement, the mass union, the portent of the New Day. They are fighting this as furiously as the Spanish Inquisition ever fought against heresy; but to their bewilderment and dismay they are repeating the age-old experience of the torturer and the despot—the blood of the martyrs is becoming the seed of the church! There came a great strike at the harbor. “San Pedro” is a part of our city, where the ships come in laden with lumber and pipe and cement for the endless new streets of homes. Our army of real estate speculators and contractors and bankers are reaping their golden harvest, while several thousand longshoremen slave, literally fourteen and sixteen hours a day of back-breaking toil, handling these heavy materials. They clamor at the docks, bidding against one another, fighting and trampling one another for a chance of life. And here is a ring of grafting employment agencies, secretly maintained by the Shipyard Owners’ Association, draining the last drops of energy from these wretched wage-slaves. The old-line respectable unions are out of business, and everything is serene for the masters; but suddenly comes a flare-up—three thousand men on strike, and one or two hundred I. W. W. organizers spreading the flames of revolt—and just when we thought we had sent the last of them to San Quentin for twenty-eight years! The strike tied up the harbor and tied it tight. For more than two weeks not a ship was unloaded, and all the building operations of all the speculators came to an end. One day the “Times” would deny that there was any strike, and next day it would declare that the strike had been broken the day before, the next day it would declare that the strike would be broken the day after next. And in the inner circle of the torturers and despots, such confusion and such fury as you will hardly be able to imagine. You have taken up this book, expecting to read about the American school system; and now you are being told about a strike! It happened that this strike came just as I was settling down to write “The Goslings.” I got arrested; and this experience plows a furrow through one’s mind. Now I sit at home and think about the schools, and naturally, I see them in relation to this series of events— they become one more device of the strikebreakers. I ponder the problem, how to start this book. I want to show you the invisible government which runs your schools, for its own profit, and your loss. This power is the same power which runs your politics and industry; here in Los Angeles, the very men who smashed the union of the shipyard workers also smashed the councils of the school teachers. Indeed, as chance willed it, the two jobs came together and became one job; so that every lie told against the strikers was a lie against the teachers, and every dollar wrested from the shipyard workers was balanced by a dollar stolen from the schools. I ask myself, therefore: How can I do better, at the beginning of this book, than to tell you what I saw at the harbor? This strike was a blazing searchlight, thrown into the very vitals of our invisible government; if you will follow it, you will see the whole system, and understand every detail of its mechanism. So I ask you to set aside for the moment all questions of labor unions, criminal syndicalism, anything of that sort; come with me as a plain American, believing in the Constitution, believing in the people, and their right to run their own affairs. Follow the story of this labor struggle—and before you get to the end of it you will magically find yourself reading about the schools, and learning who has taken them away from you, and why they have done it, and what it means to you and your children. CHAPTER II THE ADVENTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY CLUB The first step in this narrative is to explain how it happened that the writer of this book, a muck-raker and enemy of society, was in the office of Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, and chief of the Black Hand, at the very moment when Mr. Rice was conspiring with his fellow chiefs for the smashing of the harbor strike. This story is amusing in itself, and not altogether alien to education. In April, 1923, I received a letter from the secretary of the University Club of Pasadena, my home city, asking if I would consent to lecture before the club on the subject of “The Goose-step.” I replied that I was busy, and made it a rule to decline invitations to lecture. Then came a telephone call from a member of the club, begging me to reconsider my decision; here were a group of men, influential in the community, some of whom had read “The Goose-step” and thought they could answer me, and wanted a chance to try. It would be an adventure for them, and might teach me something. To oblige a friend, I accepted, and the lecture was announced at a dinner of the club, and the announcement was published in the local newspapers—upon the club’s initiative, please note. At once the Black Hand got busy; and a week or two later a gentleman called at my home, obviously embarrassed and pink in the face, explaining that he was the president of the University Club of Pasadena. The executive committee had held a meeting the previous evening and decided that in view of certain objections, I should be respectfully requested to consent to have the lecture called off. Knowing my community, I was sympathetic towards the blushing respectable gentleman—an ex-naval officer who would have faced the guns of a foreign foe, but dared not face a new idea. I answered that I would be content to have the lecture forgotten. But an hour or two later a newspaper reporter called me up, asking if I had heard that the action of the University Club had been taken at the instance of William J. Burns, head of the Burns Detective Agency and chief of the United States Secret Service. Naturally, I was interested in that news; as a matter of