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Buzzing over Dr. Beard's speech, the 8,000 superintendents crowded into the auditorium next day. For them there was no such heady fare. Chairman Jesse Jones of the RFC brought greetings from the White House. President Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin came sonorously "out of the no-man's land between old deals and new deals to sound again the bitter cry of the children for a square deal." Dr. Frank and the children wanted more money from the Federal Government. After his speech President Frank seconded Dr. Beard's Hearst-baiting. Then he quickly caught a train for Madison, where the Wisconsin Legislature, egged on by the Hearst Press, had just voted to go Red-hunting in his pink-&-white university.
On the third day the convention got down to its main business: Social Change and Education. A Committee of Eleven, detailed to write the convention yearbook on that subject, had wrangled for two years, come back with eleven different opinions.
From the left, Professor Jesse Homer Newlon of Teachers' College threw the issue to the convention: "We cannot and we will not remain neutral in the struggle of social forces going on in this country."
The superintendents picked up the issue, tossed it back & forth. Said Washington's Superintendent Frank Washington Ballou, to whose schools go the children of Congressmen of all political and social hues: "Before we indoctrinate students in the new social order we ought to find out what that social order shall be."
New York's Associate Superintendent William E. Grady: "The school man, no matter what his patrons think, must have courage enough to say we can't keep controversial issues out."
All that day in convention and all next day between committee meetings, the issue of academic freedom was debated. Warier & warier grew the superintendents as they realized that the Great Issue had been neatly and publicly tied to a denunciation of Hearst "Americanism." The superintendents knew they were on a spot when they trooped into the final meeting. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace raised liberal hopes briefly by glooming over the end of capitalism. But when he was done the Resolutions Committee reported out one mild resolution on the Great Issue: "We affirm our unqualified belief in the principle of academic freedom. . . ."
"It has no teeth," shouted the liberals. By way of teeth they proposed an amendment guaranteeing legal aid to embattled liberal teachers. Superintendent J. Chester Cochran of San Antonio, Tex., spoke for the Committee: "We all believe in freedom of the Press, freedom of speech and all that sort of thing. But we don't feel that it is our business to fight anybody's private war. It's just a fight between the Hearst papers and the Columbia University group." The superintendents voted down the amendment, adopted the original resolution.
*The Munitions Committee could not consider the request immediately because Missouri's plump Senator Bennett Champ Clark last week tumbled down a flight of stairs in his home, was too sore to go to Capitol Hill. Senator Nye saw ''no reason to question the motives of Mr. Hearst."