Little Red Schoolhouse

To keep people from starving is the Federal Relief Administration's chief job, but it likes to give them food for the mind as well as the body. So it pays Hilda Smith, friend of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and onetime dean of Bryn Mawr, to sponsor a summer School for Workers on Manhattan's East side. There unemployed teachers get jobs and unemployed workers become pupils, get $8 a week. Last week newshawks wandered in, discovered a rack in which supplementary reading was provided for the pupils.

In the rack was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Looking Forward, George W. Wickersham's Restating the Law and similar works. Passing up such dullish reading, reporters fastened their eyes on other social documents: The Working Woman in the Soviet Union, Why a Workers' Daily Press?, and outpourings like What Every Worker Should Know About NRA by Earl Browder, Secretary of the Communist Party. Opening the last they read: "Push aside the capitalists, open the warehouses, distribute the goods to all who need them. . . . Under Roosevelt and the NRA, the millions of workers are getting less food, less clothing, less shelter, than they did under Hoover."

Gleefully reporters rushed to Miss Smith in Washington: Did she know what was being put in the heads of her pupils? Of course she did. Said she: "The school is being operated precisely as it was planned by the Government and according to my instructions. The policy is to present every point of view in economics, history and politics--not just one--and to promote and encourage free and full discussion. . . ."

More gleefully still the newshawks rushed off to help their papers tell taxpayers and Red-Baiters that the U. S. Government was deliberately spending their money to teach workers Communism in the "Little Red Schoolhouse" on Manhattan's East side.*

Winged Patriotism. Benevolent and Protective is the Order of the Elks--but not towards Communism. Last week, Michael F. Shannon of Los Angeles, newly elected Grand Exalted Ruler of the Order, winged into the air from Chicago. Clyde Pangborn and Col. Roscoe Turner were his pilots. Next day he was in Boston, the following day in Atlantic City where he conferred with other benevolent antlered friends. Such was only the beginning of a 10,000-mile air tour that will take him to Asheville, Dallas, Omaha, Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"The time has come" cried Grand Exalted Shannon, "when the issue is between the Stars and Stripes and the Red flag." To the 500,000 Elks in 1,400 cities he was carrying orders:

"District and precinct your members under leaders, classify your manpower as to its usefulness in a year of concentrated patriotism. Let the brains of the builders be as active as the brains of the wreckers.

"Find out who are teaching your children and what they are teaching them. . ..

"We have more than a dollar and cents stake in this. The Elks left a thousand dead in Flanders. . . . Pacifism, confusion and disorder are the allies of Communism. The watchword of the Elks is 'Pro-America'. . . .

"Our program when followed will make us the target of the criticism of the human ostriches who hide their heads to danger."

*Not to be confused with the Little Red Schoolhouse, five-year-old school for the Progressive education of Manhattan moppets.

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