Unpacking the NEA: The Role of Utah's Teachers at the 1920 Convention

Unpacking the NEA: The Role of Utah's Teachers at the 1920 Convention

BY FREDERICK S. BUCHANAN

THE MILITANT STAND ASSUMED by Utah's public school teachers in the early 1960s over the issue of school financing and teacher salaries precipitated a school crisis which attracted national attention. The teachers had threatened to withhold their contracts if their demands were not met, and the National Education Association supported the local affiliate, the Utah Education Association, by raising the spectre of a national boycott of Utah schools if the state's teachers decided to strike. Under the heading "Showdown in Utah," Time magazine described the struggle as having the potential of greatly hurting or of helping the NEA. The Time report added that "the normally silent but influential Mormon church . . . denounced the U.E.A. tactics." This denunciation took the form of a letter to the UEA from Ernest Wilkinson, president of Brigham Young University, and was similar to the criticism leveled at the UEA by officials of Utah State University and the University of Utah. A few months later at the NEA annual convention in Detroit, the tactics adopted by the Utah teachers were the focus of the national convention's deliberations.

The outcome of the Utah teachers' struggle with the governor and the legislature was viewed as a portent for the future of national educational politics. A new breed of teachers was emerging which was the very antithesis of the traditional "school marm" caricature of former years, and Utah's teachers were symptomatic of the change. This was not the first time, however, that Utah's teachers had played an important role in NEA affairs—in 1920 they were the kingpins of a plan to reorganize and "democratize" the national association. But, whereas in the 1960s they were being decried as radical in their actions, in 1920 they were accused by some social critics of being willingly manipulated by the power of school administrators and big business interests.

According to Upton Sinclair, the power of teachers to resist the encroachments of business interests was seriously impaired by their own organization—the National Education Association. In The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools, Sinclair presents an expose of the way in which he thought the NEA was subservient to the Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Rockefellers of American business. In chapters entitled "A Plot Against Democracy," "Mormon Magic," "The Funeral of Democracy," he points to the NEA convention of 1920 as one of the events which effectively reduced the teachers' power in the schools.

The main points of Sinclair's argument were that (1) the leadership of the NEA were stymied in their efforts to make the organization more compliant to business interests by the political influence of "radical" teacher organizations in the large urban centers who were able to control the yearly meetings through deliberate packing of the convention (as had happened on at least three previous occasions) ; (2) in order to avoid the influence of these "packed" assemblies, the NEA leadership decided that the 1920 convention should be held as far away as possible from the center of radical teacher power; (3) Salt Lake City was chosen as the convention site because of its isolation and because Utah's Mormon teachers would be easily controlled through the dominance of the Mormon church in the state; and (4) compliant Utah teachers were "herded" into the convention and instructed to vote en masse for the amendment which would change the government of the association from a town-meeting type to that of a delegate assembly in which local teachers would have no more power than teachers from other areas and in which the administration would wield more power in terms of votes than teachers.

It was perhaps inevitable that the cry of Mormon collusion with business interests would be raised, especially when one considers that earlier muckrakers tied the Mormon church to the "Sugar Trust" and that Sinclair himself in The Goosestep repeated the charge that the Mormon church had exerted pressure on the University of Utah to stifle anti-Mormon sentiments among the faculty in 1915. 5 In addition, the convention itself was held in the Mormon Tabernacle— where the delegates were greeted by Mormon leaders and entertained by Mormon choirs.

To Sinclair's mind the setting and circumstances of the convention in the Salt Lake Tabernacle were indicative of a capitalist plot to deprive America's teachers of their democratic right to have a say in the affairs of their profession. It reminded him of a story he had read in his childhood, "a fearsome story about an innocent American virgin lured into the clutches of a diabolical Mormon patriarch; and here is the story made real—the victim being the associated school marms of America."

Sinclair stopped short of claiming that the Mormon church controlled the NEA, but he did not hesitate to assert that the church hierarchy was a significant influence at the 1920 convention in the form of "the Mormon governor, the Mormon mayor, the Mormon bishops, the presidents and professors of the Mormon colleges and universities, and the two United States senators from the 'Sugar Trust.' " This was the power that Sinclair believed was used to seduce the "associated school marms of America."

According to Sinclair, the leadership of the NEA ran into opposition to their reorganization plan at a meeting of classroom teachers from Salt Lake City:

You may imagine the effect upon the Salt Lake City school teachers of this array of religious and financial power; but even so, it was not enough! Church and State and Big Business combined could not prevail against a few simple facts put before the teachers of the city! At the very outset of the convention there was a meeting of classroom teachers, with Margaret Haley and Ethel Gardner and the rest on hand, and Mr. Magill, field secretary of the N.E.A., was so indiscreet as to come upon the platform and face the questions of these teachers. At the end of the session the gang could not muster three votes among those present; rebellion was spreading, and the great educators were frantic.

That night hundreds of telegrams were sent out all over the state of Utah. Superintendents and principals of schools summoned their teachers to Salt Lake City. It was J. Fred Anderson, president of the Utah Educational Association, who knew these teachers; and we have seen in our story of Oakland how Superintendent Hunter presented to him a high salaried position in the Oakland schools. Hunter was here, hard at work, and received his reward by being elected president at this convention.

The master of ceremonies of course was Howard Driggs, who was on his home ground, and had guaranteed to put the job through. With the help of the Mormon hierarchy, both religious and educational, he got the teachers of Utah into a caucus on the night preceding the business meeting of the convention. These teachers were told nothing whatever about the significance of the issue; they were merely told how to vote. The radicals, of course, got wind of this meeting, and came to it, but some of them were excluded and the stenographer they had brought was ordered to leave. A motion was made that none should be granted the floor except Utah state teachers, or those who might be invited by them. Once during the proceedings a man ventured to ask if they might not hear the other side and know what were the objections to this plan. Chairman j. Fred Anderson glowered at the assembly, and roared: "If there is anyone from the state of Utah who objects to this plan, we'll listen to him!"

On first reading Sinclair's expose of the 1920 convention, one may tend to regard his claims as excessive and designed for radical propaganda purposes. However, as one studies the reactions and responses to the convention from other sources, it becomes very apparent that Sinclair was dealing in less hyperbole than might be supposed. What follows is an attempt to show that Sinclair was not simply drawing conclusions based on his own muckraking biases but that his claims regarding the manner in which the convention was packed were based on accurate data.

From its inception in 1857 until 1920 the NEA was governed by a town-meeting form of democracy ostensibly controlled by the members who were in attendance at the annual meeting. In spite of this, effective leadership was securely in the hands of superintendents and college presidents. Opposition to this centralization of power in the association led to a dispute over control of association funds. Margaret Haley of Chicago, a proponent of a greater teacher role in the NEA, objected to control being exercised through a board of trustees and proposed that members rather than trustees should control association money. Her opposition was ineffective, however, and Congress granted a new charter in 1906 which increased the degree of centralization.

Despite this charter change, the town-meeting form of government, coupled with the rapid rise in the number of teachers in the United States, increased the difficulties of controlling the association's deliberations. The leaders of the association "feared that the meetings would be overwhelmed by local members who would break precedents, change policies, and elect their own candidates." The efforts of the NEA's leadership to give the organization stability and to make it national would thus be defeated "by sudden seizure of control by a local or regional group." An editorial in the School Review of September 1920 argued that at the meetings held in Boston, Milwaukee, and Chicago in previous years "a body of voters, supposed to be professional teachers, voted in blocks after arriving on special trains for no purpose other than political control of the association." This fear of political control of the association by local teachers or by teachers from nearby cities prompted the leadership to seek constitutional changes which would make the annual convention a representative assembly rather than a town-meeting democracy. They hoped thereby to depoliticize the association and make it more professional and democratic.

Many of the teachers in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee—who had most to lose in terms of power over decision making and policy formulating in the NEA if such a change were made —were opposed to any measure which would reduce the little power they had; and, led by Margaret Haley, groups of urban teachers were successful in persuading the leadership of the Milwaukee convention in 1919 to drop the idea of reorganizing the association. However, at Milwaukee the decision was made to hold the 1920 convention in Salt Lake City, and notice was given that in Salt Lake City a motion would be made to repeal that part of the NEA constitution which required a year's notice before a constitutional amendment could be adopted.

In effect, the motion would allow the Salt Lake City convention, under the control of Utah teachers, to make whatever changes the leadership required. The person who gave notice of this proposed motion was Howard R. Driggs, professor of English at the University of Utah and a vice-president of the NEA. In Salt Lake City he was in charge of ensuring that local control would be used at the convention to support rather than stymie the plans of the national leaders. Considering the leadership's complaints against domination of the convention by local pressure groups, it seemed a strange procedure until one realizes that Salt Lake City's local control was exactly what was needed to put over the plan to eliminate local control in other cities where the NEA leadership had run into opposition. The convention was deliberately held in Salt Lake City "far enough away from the great center of population so as to make it quite impossible to pack the meeting" —impossible, that is, for the opponents of the reorganization plan but possiblefor those who favored reorganization. Indeed, that was the strategy followed by the NEA leadership. They were determined to join the "radicals" and, by using their tactics, beat them.

The Salt Lake Telegram reported that the opponents of the NEA plan believed that such a reorganization would destroy teacher power in the organization and that some administrators feared that if teachers became more organized, strike tactics would be adopted. Under the headline "Utah Holds Strategic Position in N.E.A. Fight," the Telegram noted that Utah had more representatives at the convention than all the other states combined and that "the way Utah goes so will go the convention." According to this report, "moral dyspepsia" might keep Utah from using her numerical advantage, and in addition, there was some fear expressed that the enmity with which other states would regard her would reduce Utah's chances of ever hosting another NEA convention.

However much "moral dyspepsia" the Utah delegation may have suffered, their leaders were determined to use the balance of power in favor of the reorganization plan. On the day before the vote on the reorganization was scheduled, all members of the Utah Education Association were urged to attend an important meeting at the Hotel Utah for the purpose of having the reorganization plans for the national association explained and discussed. Margaret Haley attempted to persuade the Utah delegates to vote against the reorganization but was not permitted to speak, and the Utah teachers decided to "vote unitedly for the change"—a decision which was viewed by the Salt Lake Herald as tantamount to overcoming any opposition to the plan.

During the debate in the Mormon Tabernacle on the motion to change the constitution and the organization of the NEA, opponents were often ruled out of order by the chair, and charges of steamroller tactics and Prussianism were made at the administrator-dominated leadership. President Josephine Preston refused to recognize Miss Haley and others who opposed the reorganization and was determined that the "radicals" would have no opportunity of stopping the "democratization" of the NEA!

An observer at the convention, James Winship, editor of the Journal of Education, described in a somewhat humorous vein the scene in the Mormon Tabernacle when Margaret Haley rose to ask a question:

In either wing at the front of the vast auditorium were seated the noble women who had consecrated themselves to the noble work of rescuing the perishing N.E.A. In front of these noble women, behind them and beside them were men whose hands had been hardened for applauding that would be deafening.

All went well until far back in the audience rose the Little Woman who was denied a hearing and, as prearranged, a thousand voices shouted: "Question, question, question."

For the first time the outraged sentiment of those who failed to see the glory of the boasted Democracy of this Autocracy sought expression in the voice of David O. McKay, at the head of the educational interests of the Latter Day Saints, but he was promptly silenced by "Question, question, question."

This was too much for Dr. Richard R. Lyman, co-official with Mr. McKay, and as he sat near the front and had a voice worth while he demanded that there be fair play, that the Little Woman be heard. By this time the Holy Rollers decided that they were rolling over time and the Little Woman said: "I would like to ask a question." This relieved the tension somewhat, and the Steam Roller was put into "intermediate."

Despite Margaret Haley's efforts, however, the convention decided by a voice vote of the Utah teachers to make local teacher control of future conventions impossible. The individual votes of the nonteachers (past presidents, state superintendents, and other administrative personnel, all of whom were made "ex-officio delegates" to future conventions) were to be counted as equal to the votes of the single representatives of from one hundred to five hundred classroom teachers, depending on the size of the local association.

An editorial in the School Review commented after the convention that it was "well that the association has taken away the possibility of being packed, and it certainly did wisely in turning itself into a representative organization rather than a town meeting." The irony is that the efforts to do just this involved turning the Salt Lake City meeting into a town meeting and packing it with Utah teachers who used their local power to reduce the teachers' power in the national organization. Sarah Fahey, president of the Classroom Teachers Association, claimed that "she had never seen in any section of the country any more evidence of local influence than in Salt Lake." The records indicate that indeed the political power of Utah's teachers had been used to "democratize" the NEA, as many speakers hailed the change.

Apparently the leadership feared that Margaret Haley might succeed in marshalling teachers against the reorganization as she had at previous conventions. They had gone to great lengths to prevent this possibility and in doing so subjected Utah teachers to charges of being herded into the convention and instructed on how to vote. Editor James Winship asserted that the steamroller tactics adopted at the convention were a result of undue panic among the leadership and were totally unnecessary, given the small number of non-local teachers in attendance at the convention. The autocratic manner in which the affair was managed led Winship to comment that "Utah had given a final demonstration of how local teachers could be autocratically mobilized as crusaders for nationalization," and "it must be confessed that the birth throes of the deliverance of democracy were the most autocratic deliverance on record, a real Caesarean deliverance."

The Utah Educational Review expressed regret that Utah's educational leaders should be charged with "railroading" and "herding" Utah's teachers at the meeting and concluded "that such leaders must have acted under the excitement of the moment in a way they would not have done in cooler blood." It appears, however, that the intention to pack the convention was not decided upon "under the excitement of the moment" and that Utah's teachers had indeed been well rehearsed to accomplish what the reorganizes wanted—a packed convention controlled by conservative teachers designed to rid the NEA of the evils of packed conventions controlled by radical teachers. In this respect some of Sinclair's charges in The Goslings are based on evidence and not simply on journalistic sensationalism: Utah's teachers were manipulated to serve the purposes of the NEA leadership.

In another respect, Sinclair's suggestion that the Mormon church per se was actively engaged as a partner with business and administration in a nefarious plot to destroy constitutional democracy in the NEA seems to be somewhat overdrawn and based on an ideological framework which saw all of organized religion as the handmaiden of capitalistic influences. Sinclair, it should be noted, had already written a polemic along these lines called the Profits of Religion. Indeed, one is hard pressed to see much difference between Sinclair's advocacy of conspiracy as an explanation for social, political, and economic problems and the ideas advanced by some Mormon writers that the capitalists themselves are part of the worldwide communist conspiracy to destroy constitutional government. In a sense, of course, Sinclair's charges of a Mormon-NEA conspiracy are but an extension of an earlier nineteenthcentury theme that Mormons were a threat to the purity of the family and the American way of life.

As the dean of American muckrakers, Sinclair followed a tradition which stressed sensationalism and which sometimes conveniently glossed over other aspects of a particular situation. For instance, Sinclair makes much of the convention's being held in the Mormon Tabernacle—the necessary setting, he claimed, for the success of the plot and the useof "Mormon Magic." The fact is, of course, that the Tabernacle was, until very recently, the only building in Utah which could accommodate large crowds. Interestingly enough, the 1913 convention was also held in Salt Lake City in the self-same Tabernacle, but no word of Mormon conspiracy about the meeting was ever uttered.

Sinclair insists that the Mormon educational hierarchy was an active conspirator against democracy in the NEA but conveniently ignores the vocal protests of David O. McKay and Richard R. Lyman—both members of the hierarchy—over the shabby treatment of Miss Haley on the convention floor. He was apparently convinced of the direct relationship between the Mormon church and the convention proceedings and did not allow for any other possibility. He even identifies the governor as a Mormon and one of the hierarchy who greeted and eventually seduced the "associated schoolmarms of America." In actual fact the governor, Simon Bamberger, was a Jew.

Sinclair also assumes that because Howard R. Driggs was a Mormon he was therefore representing the Mormon leadership. However, when the Mormon ex-superintendent of schools of Salt Lake City, D. H. Christensen, protested the tactics employed by the NEA leadership, Sinclair does not thereby conclude that the Mormon leaders were opposed to the tactics. Perhaps the term "selective perception" best describes this penchant for glossing over evidence that might contradict one's favorite theories.

None of the foregoing, of course, weakens Sinclair's central claims that the NEA leadership used the geographic location of Salt Lake City and also its unique religious orientation to its fullest advantage. They intended to pack the meeting and succeeded. However, if a conspiracy was involved in their strategy, it was in the best, or worst, tradition of power politics-—a field to which Utah's educators of 1920 were apparently no strangers.

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