Superintendent & Shadow

Last fortnight some 8,000 school superintendents, principals and teachers turned up in Atlantic City for the winter's biggest pedagogical parley: the convention of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association. The superintendents rambled up & down the boardwalk, talked shop, patted each other decorously on the back. It was a Sunday afternoon and the convention would not get fairly under way until Monday morning. The educators sunned themselves--all but 600.

The 600 who did not sun themselves dropped in on a meeting run by the busy, vocal "Social Frontier" professors who come chiefly from Teachers' College, Columbia. This faction, always a power in N. E. A. conventions, had gone to Atlantic City determined to jolt the superintendents out of their customary conservatism. They were holding forth in the Rose Room of the Traymore Hotel.

A shadow hung over the Rose Room that afternoon, a shadow which stretched across the continent from a ranch at San Simeon, Calif. It was the shadow of the left-wing professors' No. 1 bogey whose mighty press from coast to coast has been hounding liberal teachers as Reds and renegades to U. S. ideals. The meeting began with Columnist Heywood Broun boxing the shadow as valiantly as he could without naming names. Historian Charles Austin Beard, who once taught at Columbia, followed him. Hawk-nosed, white-haired, clean-shaven Dr. Beard read his speech, made the point that education should be "a scholarly, balanced presentation of facts." Finished, he looked up, said slowly: "Some people, I am told, don't want this kind of teaching--among them, William Randolph Hearst." The shadow had been named. The audience came to attention.

"In the course of the past 50 years," went on Dr. Beard, "I have talked with Presidents of the United States, Senators, Justices of the Supreme Court, members of the House of Representatives, governors, mayors, bankers, editors, college presidents . . . leading men of science, Nobel-Prize winners in science and letters, and I have never found one single person, who for talents and character commands the respect of the American people, who has not agreed with me that William Randolph Hearst has pandered to depraved tastes and has been an enemy of everything that is noblest and best in our American tradition. . . . There is not a cesspool of vice and crime which Hearst has not raked and exploited for money-making purposes. No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole for any purpose or to gain any end."

The audience was on its feet, cheering, clapping, stamping. A professor of mathematics put two fingers in his mouth, whistled. From the rear came a rebel yell. Not for minutes did the audience quiet down sufficiently to thunder through a resolution asking Senator Nye's Munitions Investigation Committee to dig into the Hearst Press.*

Buzzing over Dr. Beard's speech, the 8,000 superintendents crowded into the auditorium next day. For them there was no such heady fare. Chairman Jesse Jones of the RFC brought greetings from the White House. President Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin came sonorously "out of the no-man's land between old deals and new deals to sound again the bitter cry of the children for a square deal." Dr. Frank and the children wanted more money from the Federal Government. After his speech President Frank seconded Dr. Beard's Hearst-baiting. Then he quickly caught a train for Madison, where the Wisconsin Legislature, egged on by the Hearst Press, had just voted to go Red-hunting in his pink-&-white university.

On the third day the convention got down to its main business: Social Change and Education. A Committee of Eleven, detailed to write the convention yearbook on that subject, had wrangled for two years, come back with eleven different opinions.

From the left, Professor Jesse Homer Newlon of Teachers' College threw the issue to the convention: "We cannot and we will not remain neutral in the struggle of social forces going on in this country."

The superintendents picked up the issue, tossed it back & forth. Said Washington's Superintendent Frank Washington Ballou, to whose schools go the children of Congressmen of all political and social hues: "Before we indoctrinate students in the new social order we ought to find out what that social order shall be."

New York's Associate Superintendent William E. Grady: "The school man, no matter what his patrons think, must have courage enough to say we can't keep controversial issues out."

All that day in convention and all next day between committee meetings, the issue of academic freedom was debated. Warier & warier grew the superintendents as they realized that the Great Issue had been neatly and publicly tied to a denunciation of Hearst "Americanism." The superintendents knew they were on a spot when they trooped into the final meeting. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace raised liberal hopes briefly by glooming over the end of capitalism. But when he was done the Resolutions Committee reported out one mild resolution on the Great Issue: "We affirm our unqualified belief in the principle of academic freedom. . . ."

"It has no teeth," shouted the liberals. By way of teeth they proposed an amendment guaranteeing legal aid to embattled liberal teachers. Superintendent J. Chester Cochran of San Antonio, Tex., spoke for the Committee: "We all believe in freedom of the Press, freedom of speech and all that sort of thing. But we don't feel that it is our business to fight anybody's private war. It's just a fight between the Hearst papers and the Columbia University group." The superintendents voted down the amendment, adopted the original resolution.

*The Munitions Committee could not consider the request immediately because Missouri's plump Senator Bennett Champ Clark last week tumbled down a flight of stairs in his home, was too sore to go to Capitol Hill. Senator Nye saw ''no reason to question the motives of Mr. Hearst."

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