St. Drogo's Books

After taking on American colleges in The Goose-Step, Upton Sinclair turned his attentions to the American grade schools in follow-up The Goslings.

P. 2 - "The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money. The Times has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in it's founders spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the largest newspaper in the world - meaning that it prints the most advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population is fed. I pick up this morning's paper, and find a cartoon on the front page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is labeled in large letters: 'Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch'. As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit."

P. 4 - "Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood the world's greatest honey pot, with it's thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood, where youth and gaiety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you only have to wait. Hollywood is young America."

p. 22 - "The theme of this book is the schools - public schools and private schools, primary and grammar and high schools; and now I have to carry out my promise, to show you that this same Black Hand of Southern California controls our board of education, putting its own representatives thereon; that it controls our school funds, wasting them in graft; that it controls our teachers, browbeating them and underpaying them and denying them their rights as citizens; that it controls our children, drilling them, suppressing them, putting poison thoughts into their minds - so that they come out perfect little bigots, prepared to hate, and to tar and feather those people that try to apply real Americanism to America, and to protect the rights of the poor as well as the rich. In other words, what the Black Hand wants is to turn out a generation of children who will stand for all the infamies I have just narrated, and will regard them as right and necessary and patriotic actions, and the men who perpetrate them as courageous public officials and high-minded patriots."

P. 26 "It is the thesis of the businessmen who run our educational system that the schools are factories, and the children raw material, to be turned out thoroughly standardized, of the same size and shape, like biscuits or sausages. To these businessmen the teachers are servants, or 'hands', whose duty is the same as in any other factory - to obey orders, and to mind their business, and be respectful to their superiors. Whenever by any chance teachers dare to have ideas of their own, or especially to ask for higher wages, these teachers are treated precisely as we have seen labor unions treated by the Black Hand of Southern California."

P. 54 - from The Schools of Mammon - "What becomes of the children under this regime of the Black Hand? I have spoken with scores of teachers, and their testimony is unanimous, that the children's minds are on anything in the world but study. I chose the great 'L.A. High' because that is where the children of the rich attend. One parent, a woman of refinement and sense, has tried to keep the tastes of her daughter simple and wholesome, but she tells me it is impossible, as home influence counts for nothing against the overwhelming collective power of the mass. The child comes home, thrilled with excitement, telling of what the other girls have, and she must have what they have, or her happiness is ruined. It is all money; their ideal is the spending of money, their standard is what things cost. I know a lad, who tells me gravely that the fellows can't have anything to do with girls these days; they have no interest in you but for the money you spend on them, and unless you are rich you cannot 'go the pace'. About this school you will see the automobiles parked for blocks; and of course the youngsters who drive these cars are the social leaders, they run the school affairs, and they get the girls ... How can the teachers combat such forces? There is only one way, and that is by making the studies interesting, by taking up live topics, which awaken the initiative of the students, and reveal to them the delights of thinking. Several teachers have tried to do this, and the stories of what happened to them are amusing; but unfortunately I cannot tell the stories, because each would identify a teacher, and no teacher dares to take that risk!"

P. 109 - "San Francisco has a long and picturesque history of graft. Its Big Business is in the hands of descendants of gamblers and hold-up men, who have run its affairs in that spirit. Everything has been for sale, including the leaders of the exploited working class. The old line union leaders of San Francisco were, and to a great extent still are, agents made use of by business men against their business rivals. "