Chapter LXI: The Riot Department

Next, our military men present themselves as educators; nothing would please them more than to take over our schools entirely, and make a hundred thousand little West Points. They have made much progress, and Big Business cheers them on, and puts up the money for their propaganda. We have seen the N. E. A. turning over its conscience to the American Legion, which may be described as the Riot Department of the plutocracy. In city after city the chambers of commerce and merchants and manufacturers have built palatial club-houses for the Legion; they are subsidizing its worst activities, and keeping its inciters of violence upon their secret payrolls. They are working out a program to have a representative of the Legion as one of the orators at every school commencement. All reactionaries understand that to get the school children into uniform and drill them is the one sure way to save us from modern thought. Hear, for example, General Pershing, orating at a banquet tendered to him by the Chamber of Commerce and its Riot Department in San Diego. According to the Los Angeles “Times”:

More than 500 persons whistled, applauded and pounded the tables when
the commander of the United States Army in war and in peace paid his
compliments to the Reds. “Military training with its teaching of
submission to the will of authority is one of the best methods of
teaching young and old the sacredness and the power of the
Constitution of the United States,” said Gen. Pershing. “I firmly
believe that a sane program of military training for every young man
is a great immunity against the idle, insidious and foolish propaganda
of the I. W. W., the parlor Bolsheviks and all other shades of Reds of
which there are too many right now.”

Thus the “Times”; and if you think the schools are not drinking in this poison, I refer you to “School Life,” the official publication of the United States Bureau of Education, December, 1921. The front page of this magazine opens with an article by Commissioner Tigert, self-appointed slaughterer of Socialists. The title is “Educational Aspects of the American Legion’s Convention.” Let me make clear to you before you go on that this is that same hideous orgy in Kansas City, to which I have previously referred. You may find a sketch of it at the end of my novel, “They Call Me Carpenter,” and a detailed account published in the “Nation” for November 23, 1921. After you have read these, read how the convention is made to appear to the school children. The headlines continue:

Presence of International Figures Made Occasion a Memorable Event.
School Children Impress General Diaz. Program of Americanization
Enthusiastically Indorsed. Policies and Principles of Legion. Program
for American Education Week.

Then follows a list of the “international figures” who were present—Marshal Foch, Admiral Beatty, General Diaz, General Jacques, General Pershing, Vice-president Coolidge, etc. “Gigantic parade of 40,000 heroes of the Great War, the banquet given in honor of the distinguished gentlemen,” etc. “Thousands of school children lined along the boulevards to see Foch.” And here is the message of the pious Catholic general to America: “You boys, when you grow up, must work. You little girls, when you grow up, must remember to pray.”

They are getting the little children into the Boy Scout movement, which is the first step. They get them into uniforms and march them, and teach them the military ideal of obedience. The Boy Scouts become more and more warlike every hour; and the men who run the movement become more warlike in their attitude toward the school authorities. Says Mr. O. G. Wood, quoted in our Butte story:

One Scout Master in Butte by the name of Owen used to come before the
school board and tell them what to do in regard to allowing the public
schools for Scout meetings. He fixed the dates and no change was made.
He threatened to have any member of the board beaten at the next
election if an objection was hinted at.

For the high school and college boys they have what they call the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps; wherever possible, they compel them to serve and where the people have prevented this, they lure the boys by uniforms and music and badges and banners and holidays in camp. They teach them to plunge bayonets into human bodies, and to snarl and howl like wild beasts while doing it. Says Mr. Ray McKaig, of Boise, Idaho:

In 1922 one very prominent club woman came home to find a group of
children watching her fourteen-year-old boy bayoneting a dummy and
screaming while so doing. To her horror she found that he was learning
this at high school. She learned that the commandant, a West Point
officer, was deliberately instilling arrogance into the boys.
Oftentimes the boys, in squads led by a corporal and fully armed,
would walk down the sidewalk brushing others in the gutter. A large
public funeral was held of one of the leading Boise citizens, and the
high school boys were having a military drill. With insolence
characteristic of militarism “made in Germany” these young future
soldiers were ordered to break through the funeral procession, instead
of waiting quietly until it had passed by.

One of the lads who was being taught militarism in Camp Kearney, California, turned traitor and delivered to me the typewritten memorandum of a lecture on “Military Psychology,” delivered July 26, 1920, by Robert J. Halpin, Lt. Colonel of Infantry. It consists of approximately fifteen hundred words of blood-thirsty raving; I cannot spare space for it all, but I quote one paragraph from the beginning and one from the end, and assure you that the rest is all the same:

This is a period of a truce. The Great Wars of the world have not been
fought. . . .

Gentlemen: There will be wars until the end of time. Everlasting peace
is for the grave—not for life. The wish for everlasting peace is born
of fear and ignorance. It is a sure sign of weakness and a declining
civilization.

This is an old, old story—the training of little children to the murdering of their fellowmen and calling it glory. In the old days this was Kultur, and we went to war to put a stop to it, but apparently have not done so. The capitalists who now rule Germany are being robbed by the capitalists of France; and they are preparing the school children of Germany for the next war, in which they will gain a chance to rob the capitalists of France. In a “German History for Schools,” which is used in all the schools of present-day Germany, it is stated that French airplanes bombarded German railways before the declaration of war; this in spite of the fact that the German ambassador at Paris asserted the falsity of the charge.

This is wicked of the Germans, and ought to be stopped at once. The French are getting ready to stop it; the capitalists of France, who are robbing the capitalists of Germany, are training the children of France for the next war, by teaching them from text-books equally full of lies. There is a history of the great war, in use throughout the schools and written by a school director; “For Our France” is the title, and in it the Germans are described as “a host of savages, whose profession is war, and who go about to despoil, to devastate, and to terrorize.” Under the heading of “Entertainment” there is a series of questions adapted to children, dealing with the savageness of the Teutons. There is also a reader for primary and secondary schools, full of terrible stories of murder and rape; also a volume entitled “Les Lectures des Petits,” that is, readings for young children, full of such stories. In Belgium there is an “Atlas Manual of Geography,” intended for use in high schools, published four years after the end of the war, describing the Germans as “brigands, thieves and assassins”; they are not to be received into the League of Nations, but must be kept under surveillance, like the Negroes and the Malay races—even these have hearts but the Germans have none.

Strange as it may seem to you, they are teaching such stuff, not merely to the children of Belgium and France, but to the children of America who study French! For example, a standard text-book, Chardenal’s “Complete French Course,” New and Revised Edition, 1920, is full of the basest French chauvinism: Germany was the sole author of the war; the real hero of the world, and of France, is always the warrior; the sacred places of France are the victorious battle-fields, and the scenes of peace conferences such as Versailles. The date of the signing of this most infamous of all the world’s peace treaties has a mystic significance, because it was four hundred years previously, on that same day, June 28, 1519, that Charles V was elected Emperor!

There are some really sane men writing on the subject of war and peace in France at the present time; but never would it do for American school children to read anything by Anatole France or Romain Rolland! Any more than it would do for them to read the writings of American humanitarians, such as Jane Addams or David Starr Jordan. Says Dr. Jordan, concerning our school text-books:

They have glorified deeds of blood and celebrated most persistently
the heroes of the battle-field. The heroes of peace barely appear on
their pages, and they fail to recognize that the actual heroisms which
have brightened the records of war like flashes of lightning in a
thunderstorm are not products of war. They represent the divine in man
revealed in desperate conditions, in wallowing in physical and moral
mud, midst the barbaric loneliness of war.

And, needless to say, our chambers of commerce with their Riot Department are going to see that we continue to get text-books of this sort. Says Colonel Galbraith of this Riot Department, at a May Day meeting, 1921:

We will see what kind of courses these teachers are giving and what
text-books they use. If we find that they are disloyal we’ll tell you,
and you can kick them out. We don’t care what you do with them.

And in another newspaper item I read:

Captain Walter I. Joyce, chairman of a sub-committee of the
Americanization Committee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is
appointed to meet with the representatives of the American Book
Company to scrutinize history text-books gotten out by that company in
order to prevent the creeping in of un-American propaganda. The
investigation of American histories has been going on for the past two
years, and as a result thereof, two histories have been discarded by
the Board of Education of New York and several are under consideration
at the present time in Boston.

This kind of thing has been the rule all over the country, and the National Council for the Prevention of War has been making a study of standard text-books of history to determine the result. Here they are, briefly stated:

Fully 25% of the space in each approved text-book on history is
devoted to war. “The test of a state is its ability to wage war,” is a
statement frequently found in text-books. “Americans demonstrated
their instinctive military talent.” “Fair field of battle,” “valor,”
“bravery,” “audacious courage,” “brilliant,” “magnificent drive,” “our
great adventure,” are terms frequently used to glorify war.

Underlying conditions predisposing to international friction, such as
commercial rivalry, territorial ambitions, centralized autocratic
government control and the maintenance of gigantic military and naval
establishments, are rarely, and usually very inadequately, analyzed.

In analyzing the results of war, emphasis is always laid on the
territorial gains acknowledged in the treaty of peace. If reference is
made at all to tremendous destruction and cost of war, it is to point
out that it was worth while.

No attempt is made in the text-books to understand developments in
Russia. Sweeping terms are used in characterizing the present regime
there; such phrases as “two sinister figures, Lenin and Trotzky,”
“brazenly serving Germany’s ends,” “the anarchy known as Bolshevism,”
are frequent.

In treating of the world war, all recent text-books perpetuate the
hate and rancor engendered by the war. The guiltlessness of the allies
is always proclaimed.