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MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
The Home and the National Welfare
By EDWARD C. TONER
been putting this question to men and women of my State, as touching the inalienable right of the poorest child to the richest opportunity for the best education.
Another problem which has been made more acute by the present war arises from the steadily increasing number of wage-earning women in industry. Here also Indiana’s experience is typical. In 1910 Indiana had some thirty-thousand women employed outside of the home. In 1912 as a candidate for Congress in the Eighth Indiana district I fought for Federal Legislation to protect these wage-earners against wrong industrial conditions. The war came along, and Indiana now has a hundred thousand women at work in the various industrial mercantile occupations.
In many instances the conditions under which these wage-earners work call for no criticism. But I am going to give you the facts brought out by Government investigation. These newcomers in industry are working often times under health killing and life-destroying conditions. They work in many instances unprotected against dangerous machinery and occupational disease. They work in a State whose Legislature puts no limitation upon the hours women may be employed and as a result these women wage-earners reap the disastrous effects of long hours and industrial overstrain. The Federal Investigation I have mentioned disclosed the fact that thirty-six per cent of Indiana’s manufacturing establishments worked their women ten hours a day or more and this did not include overtime. An Indiana women may work all night cleaning railway cars in a lonely switchyard, and there is no law to stop her. She may wrap bread all night long in a bake-shop and there is no law to stop her. She may work overtime until the industrial overstrain and lost vitality make her a physical wreck and no Indiana law stops her. The all-day nurseries of Indianapolis are frequently over-flowing with little children while their mothers work ten hours a day in the factories of our State Capital.
And remember, too, that although these women do the work of men there is no Indiana law which requires that they be paid wages of men. Indiana is one of the only two industrial states of the Union which does not limit the hours of women in industry. Every other industrial state save one, has passed this humane law.
Now we must take the proper steps for correcting conditions of this sort. We must put on our Statute books effective measures to safe-guard our women wage-earners against dangerous machinery, occupational disease and industrial overstrain. The health and well-being of our Nation rests upon the health and well-being of our women and our new economic conditions effect more than ever before their well-being. This country can only he a good place for any of us to live in when it is made a good plac j for all of us to live in, and a debilitated womanhood with its train of weak and broken childhood will most certainly work an irremedial damage to our national life.
After all, the home and its we’l-being must be the real concern of a’! of us. Any governmental program that fails to regard the strengthening of the home as the primary object of Government must and should fail. I know no better way to test a political policy than by determining whether it encourages young men and women to marry and establish a wholesome home and rear American children. If it is a proposal for a new type of town or city Government the proposal must be approved as good or condemned as bad according• as it encourages or discourages the (Continued on page 22)
have been closed to the children. One city Superintendent told me the other day that his office had abandoned the executive work of the school management to become an employment agency. Practically all his time was taken up in a frantic effort to find teachers that could not be found.
Indiana in this is not exceptional; it typifies the general situation thru-out the United States. More than 100,000 teaching positions in Public Schools in the United States are today either vacant or filled by untrained teachers. 143,000 teachers walked out in 1919 to go into better paid work. Add to this the fact that young-men and women are turning away from Normal Schools and teachers
training Schools and you will get an idea of what is in store for public education in this country within the next few years if present forces continue to operate. There finally won’t be any trained teachers to teach our children. And there can hardly be anything more important than that there shall be well-trained teachers to teach our children.
Of course the rich man’s child will not suffer. There is always a fine education to be had in the finely equipped private school for those who have the price to pay for it. But the average boy or girl does not have the price. For the past four or five years I have
sense of values. For example, in Indiana, we have boasted much our distinction in cattle and hog-breeding. We Hoosiers are now third in hog-breeding. But while we are third in hogs and near to the top in fine cattle, in our Public School work we have dropped to the fifteenth among the States of the Union. We used to be third. While we have been loudly denouncing Bolshevism and radicalism we have permitted our public schools to fall below standard and become partially demoralized. Yet Americanism—the remedy for Bolshevism— is at the bottom an educational pro-lem; our strongest weapon for its solution is an efficient Public School.
By our indifference we have served
the cause of Bolshevism more effectively than if we were to enroll in a bold and open movement for the overthrow of American institutions.
Then there are the children. We have an obligation to them. They have a right to the most complete and effective education we can give them. That right just now is threatened by the decline of our public schools. Nearly every city of any size in Indiana has had to call upon the public spirited citizens to take the place of departing teachers who have been foreed from the schools by the necessity of making a living. School rooms in many of our towns and rural districts
We Americans face today one of the most critical after-the-war periods in our national history. The re-construction period, following the Revolutionary war, probably exceeds in momentous character the period upon which we are now entering, for the years following the Revolution had before them the great question of adoption of the Constitution and the formation of the American Union. But the issues before the people after the war of 1812, or the Civil War or the Spanish American War are not to be compared in gravity and far-reaching consequence with the great problems now before us.
There is, in the first place, a very real and insidious eort on the part of certain Un-American elements in our population to undermine American institutions. We have become conscious during the past year of a wide spirit of unrest and a call for new and strange allegiances. There has been a spirit of class dominion abroad that would substitute loyalty to class and the ends and purposes of class for the old loyalty to the public welfare and the common life of our common country. Sometimes these forces have boldly asserted their unfriendliness to American ideals and institutions. They are the American Bolshevists. Sometimes these forces press forward their ideas, apparently ignorant of their dangerous character.
We are a little more than a year removed from the events that put an end to a world war. Yet large numbers of our people are already forgetting the deep significance of that struggle So soon are many forgetting the meaning of constitutional liberty and American institutions.
It was my privilege as a Red Cross worker on the battlefront in Europe to see something of the fine spirit of heroism that moved our boys in their brave defense of American institutions.
The events since the Armistice show that there is still an unfinished work to perform; that the great work of defending America against her foes is still an unfinished work; that the heroic effort for strengthening institutions of freedom and providing a larger oportunity for life of man, must not stop with Chateau Thierry and the Argonne. The efforts so finely begun must be caught up, transplanted and made to enrich our native soil in community, state and nation. Americanism is our great need—the Americanism that understands the meaning of our free institutions, the Americanism that emphasizes not only our rights under these institu-tons, but our obligations under them as well. There are three institutions in this country that can do most to create and preserve this American spirit. They are the Public School, the Church and the Home. All other influences combined will not be able to jeopardize our traditional American ideals if these three institutions do their work well. An efficient Public School, a courageous Church and a wholesome American home are the factors that make any community unhealthy for a Bolshevik to live in.
Despite the importance of an efficient system of public education in a' country whose Government and institution are in the people’s hands, the public school system in the United States is rapidly becoming demoralized, and, unless speedy action is taken to avert it, will ultimately meet disaster. Our failure to meet adequately the financial needs of our schools is the cause. Our refusal to provide our Public School teachers with a living and saving wage is driving increasing numbers of our best trained teachers from the school-room, putting unstrained persons in their place and in many instances is actually closing the school-rooms.
We have for the time lost our old
BROTHER EDWARD C. TONER
Member of Anderson, (Indiana,) Lodge No. 1, and Editor and Publisher of the Anderson Herald