Haley seemed to delight in such criticism. She identified as a proud “fighting Irish” and a feminist, too: “To win rudimentary justice, women had to battle with brain, with wit, and sometimes even with force,” she wrote in Battleground, her autobiography. “If you happened to be born wanting freedom for yourself, for your group, for people at large, you had to fight for it—and you had to fight hard.”
Haley’s combative posture would not always serve the long-term interests of the teachers union movement well. But at the birth of the Chicago Teachers Federation, she stage-managed several spectacular political victories. In 1900, at the age of thirty-eight, she took what would become a permanent leave of absence from the classroom in order to investigate why, at the height of the late-1890s economic boom, the city of Chicago claimed it had too little money to unfreeze teachers’ wages and secure their newly established pension system. After immersing herself in the details of Illinois tax, corporate, and real estate law, Haley discovered two startling facts. First, land granted to the common schools system under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had been rented by the Chicago school board to some of the city’s major corporations for far below market rates, on ninety-nine-year leases with few opportunities for reassessments of the properties’ real values. The Chicago Tribune, for example, was paying the school board about half the market value for its headquarters in the desirable Loop district. The Chicago Daily News enjoyed a similar sweetheart deal. The underpayments became a scandal when the Federation publicized the fact that the president of the school board was also the Tribune’s attorney. All in all, if the downtown square mile owned by the Chicago Public Schools had been competently managed, each year it would have brought in $200 million in rent, which could have been used not only to pay teachers more, but to improve every aspect of Chicago public education. While the Federation did not succeed in raising the suspect rents, its campaign on the issue helped attract early support from the city’s influential good-government reformers, like Jane Addams, the settlement house crusader, and Carl Sandburg, the socialist journalist.
Haley’s second major finding had even greater implications for the Chicago public sector and won her the admiration of populist progressives across the United States. She discovered that the state of Illinois was not enforcing its own laws on corporate taxation. Seven for-profit public utilities, including streetcar, gas, electricity, and telephone companies, paid no taxes at all on their corporate franchises, costing the city millions in lost revenue. On October 29, 1900, the Teachers Federation hosted a dramatic mass meeting to publicize the lawsuit it had filed to compel the state to collect these taxes. Hundreds of teachers and other interested citizens crowded into the Central Music Hall downtown. The tone of the meeting was indignant. Female activists accused male businessmen of knowingly dodging their taxes over the course of decades, as politicians looked the other way. After Haley gave an exhaustive report on thirty years of Illinois tax history, the stately Jane Addams rose to frame the fight in more visceral, sentimental terms. Additional tax revenue could pay not only for higher teacher salaries, she said, but also for better public sanitation, to protect poor children’s health. When businessmen evade taxes, “property … loses its moral value,” Addams said, and she called on the entire community to unite to “bring [businessmen] back to a sense of moral obligation, in order to make it seem righteous to pay taxes—because I imagine that to many men, it seems righteous to evade taxes if you can do it in the interests of the stockholder.”
Chicago’s cultural leaders took their political cues from Addams, and they expressed wild enthusiasm about the Federation’s tax fight. Eliza A. Starr, a prominent author and lecturer on Renaissance art, congratulated Haley on her “heroic efforts to stem the tide of plutocracy rushing over our land.” Lucy Fitch Perkins, the children’s book author, told Haley and Goggin, “You make me think of Moses and Aaron, and I firmly believe you will make your way through this Red Sea and bring the children of Israel through with you.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra headlined a January 1901 concert to raise Federation legal fees. Teacher unionism had become, at least momentarily, trendy.
On October 1, 1901, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Chicago public utility companies must pay back taxes, later assessed at $2.3 million. A federal court reduced the payments to a total of $600,000 annually, of which nearly a quarter-million dollars would be paid to the Chicago Board of Education. Teachers earned back pay. It was a major win for Haley and the early teacher unionization movement. She was soon traveling the country urging classroom teachers to organize everywhere. When the Wisconsin Teachers Association booked her for a lecture, they advertised Haley as “the plucky little woman who led the Chicago teachers in their successful struggle against the tax-dodging corporations of Illinois. She is a remarkably brilliant speaker, and every teacher in Wisconsin ought to hear her address.” The journalist William Hard worked for the Chicago Tribune but disagreed with his employer’s hostile stance toward teacher unionization. Hard took to the pages of the Times Magazine, in a freelance article, to celebrate “Margaret Haley, Rebel.” Of two million Chicagoans, “there was just one human being, a female human being, who determined to set a great wrong right,” he wrote of the tax fight. “I don’t care what else Miss Haley has done. In that moment she achieved greatness.”
When, in 1904, Harriet Taylor Upton, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, asked Haley to help reach out to newly organized teachers across the country to engage them in the fight for the vote, Haley happily did so. Her activism had convinced her that without suffrage, female teachers would always enter political negotiations at a severe disadvantage, since they couldn’t back their policy preferences with votes. But rather than wait for suffrage to be won, in 1902 Haley had made an incredibly controversial decision: Through an introduction from the crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, who admired the Federation and had represented labor leaders like Eugene Debs, Haley led her organization for female teachers into an affiliation with the working-class male Chicago Federation of Labor, whose votes and lobbying prowess would help amplify teachers’ policy preferences. The Chicago Teachers Federation also applied for a charter from the American Federation of Labor, led by the astute Samuel Gompers, who was building deep ties to the national Democratic Party.
When Susan B. Anthony suggested in 1869 that print shops respond to a typesetters’ strike by training female replacement workers, she sowed distrust between the women’s movement and organized labor. Thirty-three years later, female teachers, though often strident feminists, were less threatening to male craftsmen; male unionists were unqualified for and uninterested in elementary school teaching jobs, and allying with teachers gave the AFL an inroad into urban education policy making, which affected union members’ children. But while female teacher unionists and male labor leaders saw affiliation as mutually advantageous, their partnership was deeply discomfiting to the Chicago establishment. Could unionized teachers simultaneously fight for their own interests as workers and for the educational interests of the city’s children? Or were those two priorities at odds?
In the fall of 1902, just as the Teachers Federation and Chicago Federation of Labor were joining forces, Chicago children launched an extraordinary protest movement, one that seemed to take its cues from union politics. As part of his campaign to centralize and professionalize Chicago’s school system, Superintendent Edwin Cooley had replaced two female principals with men and had transferred several popular women teachers away from schools in which they had long worked, because they had supposedly become too close with students and parents who shared their own ethnicity, often Irish or Czech. Instead of rewarding teachers only for time on the job, already the status quo policy in urban school districts, Cooley, like other reformers, wanted to tie teachers’ promotions and raises to their scores on a written exam, as well as on “efficiency” evaluations conducted by principals. He was also sweeping the city’s streets for truant children, bringing dozens of new stude
nts into already overcrowded working-class elementary schools, who were unaccustomed to the routines of the classroom.
Jane McKeon, an active member of the Federation, was a veteran teacher at the Andrew Jackson School, with personal ties to its surrounding, predominantly Irish West Side neighborhood. On Halloween, she booted a formerly truant student from her class of fifty-five children as a punishment for using profanity. When the new male principal sent the offender back to the classroom and McKeon refused to let him enter, she was suspended without pay for thirty days and told she would be transferred to another school.
A week later, Andrew Jackson students walked out of school to demonstrate solidarity with McKeon. The students said they would not return to class unless their teacher was permanently reinstated. A large photograph on page three of the Chicago Tribune showed a mass of cherub-faced demonstrators assembled at the entrance of their school. “We want Miss McKeon … and no one else,” a girl with a large bow in her hair told the Tribune. One boy in a newsboy cap said, “We won’t go back until we get her.” McKeon secured a lawyer, who said his client had been targeted in retaliation for her union membership. In an editorial, the outraged Tribune ignored unmanageable class sizes and blamed the unrest on lax West Side parents, some of whom were supporting “the dismal burlesque presented down at the Andrew Jackson school,” a “petticoated” place that would benefit from “a little starch”—presumably in the form of more male teachers who could impose proper discipline. The paper urged the school board to stand firm in its suspension of McKeon, writing, “Employment means work, not argumentation. The school system is not a debating society.” Teachers who question administrators “carry little children with them into rebellion … What we need in Chicago is a set of teachers who will either work in harmony with the board of education or else get on the outside and stay there. Insurrectionists are not exactly fit guides for the young.” In the end, the student protestors returned to class, but Jane McKeon refused her new assignment and resigned from the school system.
Union teachers triggered another moral panic among the media establishment in 1905, when Federation members marched in solidarity with thirty-five thousand Teamsters picketing for the right to “closed shops,” where employment is available only to union members. The Teamsters strike targeted high-profile department stores like Marshall Field, Sears, and Montgomery Ward. It lasted an incredible 105 days, during which 415 people were injured and 21 killed. Teamsters took control of city streets in order to block the passage of replacement truckers carting merchandise to and from downtown businesses. Some of these replacements were black, and a few were savagely beaten. Liberal magazines like Harper’s Weekly and The Nation compared the strike to the “Terror of Revolutionary France” and the Teamsters to a mob.
For the upper middle class, even those with liberal politics, it was utterly confounding that lady teachers would want to affiliate with such a movement. The Tribune worried that in their alliance with sometimes violent Teamsters, Federation members were teaching 240,000 Chicago schoolchildren “sedition, revolt against constitutional authority, disrespect for the law, and subversion of private and public rights.” A more even-keeled (and prescient) critique of early teacher union activism came from Chicago writer David Swing Wicker. In a report for Educational Review, a national reform journal, Wicker argued that by opposing Superintendent Cooley’s plan to evaluate teachers on their performance, Federationists were denying the fact that “teachers are not born, they are made” by high-quality training and supervision. The editors of Scribner’s Magazine agreed. They believed teachers who affiliated with labor were shortsighted, because of “the cardinal principle of unionism, its most pernicious principle … that of subordinating individual development to the capacity of the average. To that principle, essentially hostile to independence or advance in education or professional life, do these Chicago teachers stand committed by their act in becoming ‘unionists’?”
Indeed, teaching was not like many other unionized jobs. In education, poor job performance put children’s well-being immediately at stake. Yet Haley and the Federation organized against Cooley’s teacher evaluation plan without suggesting any alternative for judging teachers’ professional merit and distinguishing good from bad performers. Cooley had proposed tests and merit pay for teachers not only as a way to reward the best practitioners, they believed, but also as a maneuver to avoid raising teacher salaries across the board. Wary of budget cutting, the Federation argued that teachers should be paid primarily for time on the job.*2 Haley and her organization actually agreed with Cooley and his ally at the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, about many priorities for the school system, such as more art and music courses and the construction of playgrounds. But given the men’s many sexist assumptions about female teachers—that they should never become principals and should be paid less than male teachers—rather than collaborate in these areas, the Federation developed a stance of across-the-board animosity.
In 1909 a Chicago factory inspector named Helen Todd conducted an informal survey of 500 child laborers who had dropped out of public schools. When she asked the children if, financial necessity aside, they would rather work in a factory or attend school, 412 chose work. They described school as a joyless place of ethnic bigotry, corporal punishment, and mind-numbing rote memorization.*3 The typical poor urban child experienced school as “sheer cruelty” and a “humiliation,” Todd concluded—no wonder they dropped out in droves, sometimes turning to honest labor, but sometimes to crime.
Todd’s study was not scientific, and considering that thirty thousand turn-of-the-century Chicago children never enrolled in school at all, one wonders if child workers could have been reliable judges of classroom practices. Yet during a tumultuous era for the nation’s cities, muckraking reports like Todd’s renewed the quintessentially American conviction that public education was the proper salve for the wounds of poverty; that if only schools and teachers did a better job, problems like child labor and juvenile delinquency could be solved. The writer and photographer Jacob Riis became famous for his stark depiction of New York slum life in How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890. He interviewed boys who had never attended school and spent their days spying on neighborhood prostitutes or toiling in sweatshops. Most immigrant children, Riis wrote, were so rooted in their ethnic ghettoes that they had never visited Central Park or gazed upon the architectural marvel of the Brooklyn Bridge, just a five-minute walk from their homes. Riis acknowledged the systemic constraints on immigrant children’s lives. The United States lacked strong restrictions on child labor and relied mostly on overextended local charities, many with a proselytizing religious mission, to provide the poor with health care and job training. There were no housing sanitation laws, and far too few truant officers, who were supposed to encourage child workers to enroll in school. Nevertheless, like many of today’s reformers, Riis considered teachers the determining factor in whether a child escaped poverty. In his 1892 book The Children of the Poor, he wrote that schools are “our chief defense against the tenement and the flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us … it is the personal influence of the teacher that counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home, and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the way of sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred ways.”
Despite sensationalism, many muckraking critiques of public education contained more than a kernel of truth. Classroom overcrowding meant schools did turn a blind eye to truancy, sometimes even counseling poorly behaved students as young as seven years old to quit school and get a job. A child who dropped out of the primary grades, or who never enrolled at all, would most likely end up on a factory floor working with massive, dangerous machinery, or selling newspapers or other goods on the street, exposed to harsh weather, typhoid-infected water hydrants, and speeding streetcars.
When Jane Addams was appointed to the city school board in 1905 by Chicag
o’s new progressive mayor, Edward Dunne, she earnestly hoped to awaken the school system to these larger social challenges, especially truancy. Federation teachers like Jane McKeon, though, had long held a more pragmatic view: If problem children were allowed to remain in classrooms, they would threaten the learning of their well-behaved peers. Addams agreed with the Federation that teachers ought to have more influence over which textbooks were purchased and how to structure the curriculum. But she also believed there ought to be more formal tests of teachers’ competence; after all, some teachers had only a primary school education. “[T]here was a constant danger in a great public school system that teachers lose pliancy and the open mind,” she wrote, “and that many of them had obviously grown mechanical and indifferent.” When Haley realized Addams would not support the entirety of the Federation’s agenda, she began to refer to the social reformer derisively as “Gentle Jane.”
The Teacher Wars Page 9