Dr. David Seabury, November 4. 1928
“Thousands of persons are queer simply because of their own mental images. There has been a 30% increase in the last ten years and a 60% increase in neurosis. The mass of humanity tries to mold people as they think they ought to be. But if one attempts to shape the basic character or nature of children, the latter are bound to become queer.”
Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, April 2, 1916
“There is nothing about feminism or in the minds of those who believe in feminism most strongly that will in any way injure monogamous marriage, the private home in the separate house, the motherhood and mother love and mother care of children, to a such degree as is good for them.
“Moreover, woman is not going to leave off being a woman. No matter how feministic she may become, she is never going to stop being feminine. Feminism, in short, is not going to hurt any of the fundamental things of life.
“As you probably know, there has been going on among the women for the last century, notably for the last half century, a movement towards something they have never had before. It is very plain nowadays, and those who cannot help but see it and fear it are indeed mortally afraid. The woman’s movement has been misquoted and misjudged and ridiculed and slandered and garbled until many excellent people without knowing anything about it are fully convinced that it is attempting to undermine the very foundations of society. They hold that the feminist is an unnatural woman. They have particularly nice term for it – a denatured woman.
“Feminism is really nothing but humanism; it is merely the right of women to be persons, instead of females, and to have interests, affairs, and businesses of their own. Women are developing their human traits and characteristics rapidly. When the historians of a new day write the history of this period, the greatest thing in it is going to be the humanizing of women.
“It is a handicap to any man to marry a woman who is behind him. She ought to be beside him, and perhaps even a little bit ahead. It will be better for the race when the woman catches up.”
Q: Would you advise working after a woman is married?
A: Ultimately the woman will be financially independent all her life, married or single. It is necessary if she is to make an independent choice of a husband instead of having to marry any who will feed her and if after marriage she is going to be a human being instead of an owned chattel.
Professor Arthur Holmes, March 26, 1916
“The trouble with many people is that they insist on an individual standard. By that standard all of us are backward because we have not attained to what we conceive to be our full possibilities, and the only normal human being is an idiot who has been educated to the ultimate limit of his power to learn.
“We cannot say that backwardness is bad until we find out what that backwardness means. It is not always a sinister thing to say that a child is backward. One of our most famous educators, a man with a Ph.D. to his name, did not enter the first grade until he was 14 years of age. Backward? Not a bit of it. He was the son of an American missionary in a foreign field and did not come to this country until he was of that age; and he entered the first grade for that reason.
“Remember, all of us were born into the world deaf, dumb, blind, and helpless. Some of us recover and some of us don’t – that’s all.”
Q: How is one to pick a safe matrimonial partner?
A: Love alone is no excuse for marriage. There should be a long courtship, an understanding with an acquaintance among the family and the use of a little common sense. Further, I think the State should insist on a physical examination.
Dr. Stephen S. Wise, October 31, 1915
“I sometimes think that this attitude of mind is the most hurtful consequence of the war – this dependency that has struck dumb the moral and spiritual natures of men and that has made them insensible to the terrible wrongs committed in its name. We have become so hardened that we are scarcely stirred with the slightest emotion when we read of the slaughter of a thousand or two thousand men in some skirmish; we must read of hecatombs being slain to awaken our interest. We are not going to put an end to war merely by willing that there shall be no war. We have got to have a little more backbone and a little less wishbone.”
Q: Isn’t it true that all the teachings of Christianity and of the Jewish religion for the past thousand years have not been able to prevent war and that economic causes are really behind the war?
A: If there were true Christians in the world, and if my people were as true Jews as I want them to be, there would have been no war.”
Rev. John A. Ryan, D.D., February 14, 1915
“The percentage of women in this country making their own living as independent economic units is increasing constantly and rather rapidly. The most important fact, however, is that there is a large proportion, more than a majority, a wage-earning women who are getting less than what authorities have come to regard as decent living wages. About three-fifths of the women of the United States engaged in working for wages were receiving less than $8 a week, less than decent living wages. Now, I do not intend to go into any discussion or description of the evil effects of low wages on health, mind, and morals. I shall simply assume that these evil effects are considerable, that they are serious, that it is of very great importance that some comprehensive remedy or device be found to prevent these evils. So there is a need for a comprehensive remedy for this state of low wages among women.”
Earl Barnes, November 8, 1914
“We all know what it is to work. Many of us know only too well what it means to be worked. To be able to work in our own way, conquering, achieving, creating, and to enjoy the full fruits of our labor is a glorious privilege. To be obliged to work as another may arbitrarily dictate, with no choice of time, place or occupation, and to receive less than our labor entitles us to, is essentially slavery. Our hearts cry out in protest against an industrial order and commercial standards that take no account of the individual’s welfare or of the merit of his service to society. We challenge the soundness of an economic system that so generously interferes with the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and which also so often denies that the laborer is worthy of his hire.”
Mary Antin, November 1, 1914
“Evolution in no way contradicted the story of Genesis. The theory of the scientists simply explained to us in what manner God did His work. It became interesting to go back and explore the Bible; and I learned that at first there was nothing, and then there was something – the plants, the fishes, the reptiles, the mammals, and by and by, man. Why, it was the story of evolution – the poetical form – the old story after all.”
Q: Why doesn’t God perform some miracle in order to demonstrate His existence to the inhabitants of the earth?
A: I see a miracle spread under my eyes tonight – all these men and women, living apart, brought together by the same thought. What are you all doing here tonight?
Q: Do you believe in God with a future and a heaven and hell?
A: Whether or not God has future, He has a pretty long pat behind Him, and I pin my faith to the law or orthogenesis. As for heaven and hell, I think they are right here with us.”
John Cowper Powys, April 4, 1914
“Women, by being near the flow of life, by being the true creators, through the magic of the life force, of the world that is to be, understand certain things better than men do. And they understand, though they are too wise to put it into words, that in no sphere are there any absolutely fixed or external principles. There are relative truths only.
“How does this bear on the economic aspect of woman suffrage? Women will never be really free or have justice until Socialism is established. What makes woman a slave today is the economic condition which prevails. A certain number of people are afraid that if you made every woman the equal unit of society with every man, and made that unit the person and not the head of the family, every kind of catastrophe, moral and otherwise, would come about – free love the least of them.
“As a matter of fact it may turn out that the vote is not the most important aspect of the woman question. It may be more important to be a feminist than a suffragist, and it may even be that no one can be a suffragist in the logical sense without being a feminist too.”
Susan W. Fitzgerald, 1913
“It seems to me that the fundamental difficulty with our schools is the same thing that is the fundamental difficulty with so much of our common life – the fact that democracy is more common in speech than in practice, and that the lesson we have got to learn is not to say that democracy is an overworked word, but to learn that it is an underworked thing.
“It would be better for our schools and for us all if socially the schools were more democratic in Boston today. Of course the schools cannot be the same in all districts, but if we could feel that in each school section the schools really gathered together the whole of young life and taught them to work together and thing together and pull together, we should be well satisfied. I don’t know whether we can look to the happy time when that will be true in all parts of Boston. There is nothing more damaging to our public schools than the growth of the private schools, which always stand for separation.”
Paul Moore Strayer, 1913
“This is an incurably competitive world. It is competition that gives zest to life and adds something of play to work. How are we going to socialize this competitive world? The desire to excel above one’s fellows still remains with us. A man’s greatness still rests on h9is achievement.
“The way to socialize this incurably competitive world is to set men to competing for something better than lordship and gold. You can’t get rid of the game; and you don’t want to. But you can change the rules of the game, and if you do that, then the game itself is changed. It is just as exciting to invent some new social machinery to enable people to get along better as it is to invent some new kind of locomotive or aeroplane – to invent something to put back money into the community as something to extract from it everything one can. That game is social – it is Christian.
“It isn’t true that ‘the world owes you a living.’ You owe the world a life. How have you spent and how are you going to spend it?”
Edward A. Filene, February 9, 1913
“I think that we shall agree, all of us, that we are face to face with most momentous political, industrial, and social changes. I think we shall also agree that in as much as these changes predicate the need of greater justice, we should feel ourselves under obligation to see that they are brought about with fairness to all interests concerned with due regard for the conversation of all in the present order that is worth conserving. I think we may also agree that the most immediate changes needed are those dealing big business and those making for greater justice between employees and employers. I do not think that such just relations come about from the mere statement of abstract principles, but most come rather from the working out in our everyday life and in competitive business of these principles. If that is true and the great questions that underlie the coming changes are business questions, then we shall require the best leadership and the best business leadership that we can get.
“The best rule for business is the golden rule. Men who love their neighbors and therefore can handle and lead men are the coming leaders of business. The only road to success and happiness for any of us is to conform to the great current of democracy of which we are a part and to do with a will our share of work for the common good.”
Q: Does the rum business serve the common good, and shall it go on serving it?
A: There is a difference of opinion about that. The last vote of this commonwealth said that it did and that the people want it continues.
Q: What do you think of the single tax?
A: I think well of it. I think it is good. I do not believe in the final radical program of it. But I think the tax will come more and more on the land and less on production.
Miss Vida D. Scudder, January 12, 1913
“Struggle is the essence of life everywhere. The assertion of the right to live is a holy and a sacred thing. Life is in itself a dim desire on the part of man to be more filled with Deity – to reach a fuller measure of likeness to the Infinite, and wherever one finds a demand for life it is intrinsically holy.
“It seems to me that the man who is striving to get economic freedom for his fellows is more to be applauded than he who is simply fighting for himself and his immediate family. What I see in the Labor War movement generally is an incentive to wage earners for the growth of the feeling of love and solicitude for one another.
“The question for shorter hours is a desire for more time, and time is a spiritual thing; the one thing that is distributed on a perfectly socialistic basis.”
Q: What is the Socialist definition of the privileged class to a man who believes in following the Golden Rule?
A: I think that the privileged class of people are those living on money that they have not directly earned.
Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, January 5, 1913
“We have had pressing upon us from the kindergarten through the elementary school a wholly new scope and breadth of education and have had pressing down to the high school another great congerie of studies that seem to be absolutely necessary for the student to know something about; and in the elementary school the two things have come together like a lumberman’s jam. Something has got to give way; we cannot have a shorter school day, more vacations, and more holidays, and longer summer vacations; we cannot keep on cutting off at every end our time of study and then pour in an infinitely increased content of education.
“The teachers are getting nervous prostration by wholesale trying to do the impossible – putting a gallon into a pint; and the children are following, too, in their wild rush for knowledge. You cannot simply set children to repeat and memorize, to do the mere things that mean the saying over and over and over of something enough to make it so that it cannot be forgotten, but we have got to have something that attracts the attention and holds the power of acquisition immediately, and so we have come into an era of demonstration. We have pushed the laboratory from the post-graduate course in the university down into the elementary schools and we are pushing it more and more, and now somebody ( I believe it is Mr. Edison) says that we are going to get our education quick, on the run, by the moving picture that is going to pour into us, as we stop for a minute between sandwiches, all that we need to know.”
Q: Does the speaker of the evening think that the right meaning of democracy ought to be taught in the schools?
A: Yes, I do. What’s more, my son, I think it should be lived in the schools.
Professor Charles Zueblin, December 22, 1912
“There are two classes of people who are not doing enough for this contemporary life of ours. One is the class who are satisfied with the present state of affairs, and the other is the class who jump to their remote ideal without thought of the present. I believe the latter is better than the ‘Stand Patters.’ The germ is all in the present, and while it is necessary to have some hypothesis, we must be careful not to allow the wish to become father to the thought.”
