MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
4
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
AUNT WINNIE’S VIEWS OF READING
“The Outlook,” and “Independent,” give you many points of view. The “Literary Digest,” a kind of fried egg turned twice, makes it a business to tell you what newspapers of all kinds are saying, and therefore, what people presumably are thinking all over the country.
The man or woman, boy or girl, who wants to know what is going on in the world, needs to read some of the great American magazines. My boys were brought up on the “Scientific American.” Everybody in the house read that paper. Husband and the boys used to squabble over who would get it first. I guess the “Scientific American” accounts for the fact that one of the boys is an electrician, and the other a mining engineer.
Then there are the big illustrated weeklies: “The Saturday Evening Post,” “Woman’s Home Companion,” ”Leslie’s,” “Collier’s,” “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and a lot more that tell you everything from how to fry a chicken Maryland Style to howto become a wholesale salesman at four hundred a month. I always feel like I was going on a motor-boat ^picnic when I open “The Saturday Evening-Post.” Everybody is so terribly successful in those papers. They don’t seem to leave much chance for .!ust a plain, ordinary people that haven’t a South American mine or a wealthy father-in-law, or a patent that makes a million a minute.
My girl used to bring home now and then a Nation” or “The New Republic,” or “The Dial,” highbrow literature, and sometimes I found things that had a lot of good sense in them. Personally 1 like better the old line of magazines, the “Atlantic,” or the “Century,” the “Scribners-Harpers,” partly because we have a set of “Harper’s Magazine,” from the biginning down to 1898, that our children were sort of brought up on. I like the travels and the stories and the tales of ants and ostriches and things like that. Oh, there’s lots that’s interesting in the highbrow papers to say nothing of the Sunday supplements of the dailies. If I’d kept all of the Sunday papers that have come into our house in the last twenty-five years, I could build a monument as high as the chimney and get enough for the old paper to refurnish the house.
Mooseheart Reading
I suppose the Mooseheart Magazine ought to give a lot of good advice about Moose reading; for the Moose are pretty well fed up with literature. Lots of the lodges have their local paper to give their Dictators and Past Dictators a slam. Then there is the Mooseheart Weekly. I must say that it is one of the most interesting little papers that comes into our house, because the boys and girls write׳ a good deal of it and tell you what they do and how they live at MOOSEHEART. Those young folks have a way of expressing themselves that I like. It seems as though the place they live in teaches them how to be natural and how to use good language and how to say bright things. Like as not they are bright by nature, and MOOSEHEART only just opens the window for them.
There is another kind of reading that lots of the Moose know nothing about, and that is the Year Book that the Governors send out, telling what has been done in the year before and what they mean to do in the next year. The pictures alone are worth the price of the book, which is sent gratis. I was real interested in the last Year Book showing boys and girls before taking and after taking MOOSEHEART. It almost makes you think, that you haven’t a fair chance in life unless you are an orphan and MOOSEHEART takes care of you.
MOOSEHEART has also just put out something for the special reading of teachers and that is the Academic Course of Study. It is not exactly what you would call a hammock companion. It is meant for teachers and Superintendents. I hope the De-ledo High School will get hold of it, for it seems to suggest a lot of new ideas in education. They look good and I think they will work.
There is no trouble about those children learning to read; when I visited MOOSEHEART, they told me that they meant to make it a feature of the school to help the young people to find good reading and use it. They have an idea over there of a new kind of a thing that you might call a community library, where there should be lots of books and also room for reading and studying, collections of books for children and for young people; little art exhibits, all sorts of things that will help to make MOOSEHEART the School That Trains for Life.
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
Harvard University-Mooseheart Governor
Real Reading
Lots of people that can read never really read. They just drift along. Very few people are like Daniel Webster, who could hold a book open in his hands, read the left page aloud, close the book and repeat the right page by heart, having caught it out of the tail of his eye as he went along. It isn’t the fast reader, however, that reads the best. Abraham Lincoln read few books and read slowly, but filled his mind. I always liked that story of Lincoln as a young man lying on his back under a tree, with his feet up against the trunk, reading a book and kicking himself around as the sun descended, so as to keep in the shade.
My Uncle Silas was the reader in his time. They say that when he was ten years old he read Dickens’ novel, Bleak House, through in two days. He used to be proud of having read all the works of Dickens and Scott and Cooper and Shakespeare and Milton and Lays of Ancient Rome and Poe and George Washington and I don’t know how many more. Then Uncle Silas read the Bible five times and could repeat forty psalms and the whole of the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Epistle to the Romans. He was great on reading history, too, all of Parkman’s works and, why, he knew so much about American History that he could almost talk Indian.
Nowadays, all the world runs to magazines,—especially to the ten-cent magazines that are fifteen cents and the fifteen cent magazines that are twenty-five cents. Well, there are lots of interesting׳ things in those magazines though they are too much like the movies. I get pretty tired of the millionaire’s son that passes himself off as a bunco steer-er and fights the Chinese faro dealer to a finish, and rescues the other millionaire’s daughter in a magnificient black and white drawing. Lots of people would get a great deal more enjoyment out of Dickens’ Tale or Two Cities or Poe’s Gold Bug, where there are plenty of first-class criminals and detectives and hair-breadth escapes. The main thing is to read something that will stick.
Reading the Papers
Many people who work hard with hand or brain during the day don’t feel like solid reading when they come home at night. But some of the busiest and_ most successful men and women have found reading the road to success, that was Edison’s way. Another way of systematic reading is the corres-spondence school. The papers are full of advertisements of courses in reading that will enable you to pull down a larger salary. The subscriber (you can’t get a larger salary for nothing,) reads and studies and makes written reports and answers examination papers.
Look out for frauds. Don’t pay a ten dollar fee and then buy twenty-five dollars worth of books in order to carry it out! Some such schools are happy-go-lucky places. In one of the most renowned, which offers courses in Engineering and Sciences, the “Professors,” who read the papers and write advice, are young women of very little education and knowledge. On the other hand, it is a great thing to read with some system and to have somebody tell you whether you are getting anything out of it.
The main trouble with reading the papers is that most people read one paper and swear by that, while some of their neighbors swear at it. Reading just one paper year in and year out makes me think of the Klondike gold miner, my friend used to tell about that came down to San Francisco and went to a big restaurant—“my, what good restaurants they have in San Francisco!”—and the only thing he could think of to order was: “Waiter, ten dollars’ worth of ham and eggs!” Nearly all our newspapers are just dike a griddle cake,—you turn it over and it is just the same on the other side, no variety of ideas.
Everybody ought to be reading something besides one daily paper. Standard literary papers, like
! Read Page Nine Before You j Lay This Issue Down
I have been reading. What have I been reading? Oh, all kinds—old letters, morning paper, a detective story, the Bible, and, of course the Mooseheart Magazine. Of all the
’steen papers and magazines that come into this house, I like the Mooseheart Magazine the best, because you can read it forward or backward and find MOOSEHEART on most every page. Sometimes it is a little puzzling; I don’t always feel sure which is Magazine and which is Puritan Patterns and which is “Make Money In Your Own Home,” and which is “Director General Visits Lodges,” and which is MOOSEHEART. Oh, it’s a great paper. All these different kinds of reading have made me think about what to read and how to read and what is the use of reading.
Can You Read?
Of course, in this big country of ours, which is full of patriotism and elevation and “the most intelligent people the sun ever shone upon,” we sort of take it for granted that, whether everybody really reads or not, most people know how to take a printed book or paper and look at it and make the corresponding sounds. That is, we took it for granted till they began to test the recruits for the army three years ago; and then they found that hundreds of thousands of them could no more read English print than the Indian sign language. It seemed to me an awful thing that young men that had to read orders and make written reports could not endorse their own names on a cheque for a million dollars signed by John D. Rockefeller, couldn’t read their best girl’s love letter. I felt ashamed of my country.
And I guess there are lots of grown-up girls, too, who want to be somebody and do something, that can’t read and write. That’s an awful thing now that the Nineteenth Amendment has hatched and all the girls are going to be voters at twenty-one. People talk about ignorant foreigners; and it is awful the way.backward states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and Illinois allow hundreds of thousands of men and women to come in and spend the rest of their lives here in this country without ever learning the language of their adopted land.
If I had my way I would just take a broom and sweep out of this country grown men and women that come in and won’t learn such a nice, easy simple language as English. When I get my vote, I am going to send somebody to Congress that will pass a law to the effect that any immigrants who are over ten years old and come to this country and, three years later, can’t speak and write enough English to get on in the ordinary affairs of life, can just go back home and hunt up the old friends that they can talk to.
Of course, the men and women that can’t read might just as well be blind, so far as knowing what is going on in the world. They are worse off than the Missouri man, for they “can’t be shown”—except by information from people of their own race that do read and write. Do you think that is likely to be straight information ? Think of going to railroad stations, riding in the trolley cars, walking-through the streets, without being able to understand a single printed notice or sign or hand-bill. The man and woman that is unable to read and write is at the mercy of other people. They get deceived, they get cheated, they get left.
The First Reader
Yet you may have noticed that nobody is born able to read. Homer and St. Paul and Shakespeare had to learn. Way back in the ages there was a time when the first letters were put together in words, when the first man—or more likely the first woman, said“Jerusalem Crickets, look here, I have made a great discovery. I have found out that ‘e-a-t’ spells ‘cat.’ ” The first readers used pictures of natural objects. The Chinese present character for “absolutely impossible,” really is a picture of too much rain.
Why, a Chinese is not really educated unless he knows at least two thousand of those crazy-quilt Chinese queerograms. It fairly makes me mad to think that intelligent boys and girls, men and women, in the United States won’t take the trouble to learn the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and put them together.