Last fortnight some 8,000 school superintendents, principals and teachers turned up in Atlantic City for the winter's biggest pedagogical parley: the convention of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association. The superintendents rambled up & down the boardwalk, talked shop, patted each other decorously on the back. It was a Sunday afternoon and the convention would not get fairly under way until Monday morning. The educators sunned themselves—all but 600.
The 600 who did not sun themselves dropped in on a meeting run by the busy, vocal "Social Frontier" professors who come chiefly from Teachers' College, Columbia. This faction, always a power in N. E. A. conventions, had gone to Atlantic City determined to jolt the superintendents out of their customary conservatism. They were holding forth in the Rose Room of the Traymore Hotel.
A shadow hung over the Rose Room that afternoon, a shadow which stretched across the continent from a ranch at San Simeon, Calif. It was the shadow of the left-wing professors' No. 1 bogey whose mighty press from coast to coast has been hounding liberal teachers as Reds and renegades to U. S. ideals. The meeting began with Columnist Heywood Broun boxing the shadow as valiantly as he could without naming names. Historian Charles Austin Beard, who once taught at Columbia, followed him. Hawk-nosed, white-haired, clean-shaven Dr. Beard read his speech, made the point that education should be "a scholarly, balanced presentation of facts." Finished, he looked up, said slowly: "Some people, I am told, don't want this kind of teaching—among them, William Randolph Hearst." The shadow had been named. The audience came to attention.
"In the course of the past 50 years," went on Dr. Beard, "I have talked with Presidents of the United States, Senators, Justices of the Supreme Court, members of the House of Representatives, governors, mayors, bankers, editors, college presidents . . . leading men of science, Nobel-Prize winners in science and letters, and I have never found one single person, who for talents and character commands the respect of the American people, who has not agreed with me that William Randolph Hearst has pandered to depraved tastes and has been an enemy of everything that is noblest and best in our American tradition. . . . There is not a cesspool of vice and crime which Hearst has not raked and exploited for money-making purposes. No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole for any purpose or to gain any end."
The audience was on its feet, cheering, clapping, stamping. A professor of mathematics put two fingers in his mouth, whistled. From the rear came a rebel yell. Not for minutes did the audience quiet down sufficiently to thunder through a resolution asking Senator Nye's Munitions Investigation Committee to dig into the Hearst Press.*