With Trotwood
With Trotwood
[This address, delivered January 18th, 1907, before the convention of the Tennessee County Superintendents and Teachers, is compiled from notes by Mr. Settle of theDaily American, and from memory after delivery by its author, Mr. Moore having made no notes at the time, the speech being the occasion of extemporaneous talks at the close of an educational rally. From many sources has come the request that it be reproduced here.—Editor.]
I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your very kind introduction concerning my “Bishop of Cottontown,” and the fact that you see in it an appeal for the childhood of the land. And I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the privilege of addressing you on this subject, so full of great and far reaching interest. And in the beginning permit me to say to you that I, myself, have been a teacher, and that I consider it the grandest profession of all those which make for the uplifting of the human race, save, perhaps, one. If you doubt that I have been there—to use the pungent vernacular of the times—if you doubt that I am familiar with the hardships, trials, ay, and the triumphs of the average teacher, permit me to relate this anecdote as the stamp of the coin, the chip of the block of the profession.
In my younger days, when the Alabama law required that a teacher should teach hygiene and physiology along with other studies—the object being to show the effects of alcohol on the human body—there came to my school a big, double-jointed plow boy, whose opportunities for education had been few, but he was of that stuff from which many of the great men of the republic have been made. After six months of grammar and hygiene, when the class was required to write a composition on the human anatomy, this is the marvelous work of art handed into me by the man of the plow:
“The human anatermy is devided into three parts, the Head, the Chist and the Stummic. The Head contains the brains, if any. The Chist contains the lights and the liver. The Stummic contains the bowels. There are five bowels, a, e, i, o, u and sometimes w and y.”
Have I not been there, my friends?
The rights of childhood—that is the subject you have given me, Mr. Chairman. Why, you might as well have asked me to speak upon the rights of God. You know, and I know, and all within the sound of my voice know, what are the rights of childhood—the right to an education, to health, to play, to work in proportion to its age and strength, to a fair chance and a square deal in this greatest country of the world’s greatest age.
We know, I say, what are the rights of a child. The question I wish to put to you is, are they getting those rights?
The distinguished gentleman and ex-Governor who has just preceded me, has said most eloquently much that I myself do most heartily endorse. And while I dislike to sound in this assembly one discordant note—to strike one chord of the minor here—where all seem so satisfied, I feel that I shall not be true to the great cause of childhood if I fail to say what I do know. It is good for us, now and then, to be shown our shortcomings. It is well for us to see at times into our soul of souls. It is progress to search afterbetter things. Self-sufficiency is retrogression; self satisfaction is decay, and contentment is the sure messenger of degeneracy and death. There is no god as great as the God of Discontent. False glory is the masque of ignorance and self-conceit is the gaudy mantle of the king’s fool.
In telling you then, as the collected teachers and county superintendents of this state, that you have done nobly and performed your solemn duties, the distinguished gentleman has used an hyperbole which strikes me with ironical exaggeration and which has aroused in me this flow of bitterness and gall which I shall now pour out upon your complacent heads. And I do if with this amendment—that if you are doing your duty, if you have fought for the rights of childhood as you should and failed, then the law makers of this state, and the people of the state who send that kind every two years to this capitol are fearfully, wonderfully and criminally derelict in their duty to the children of their own firesides. For I have it from the lips of your chairman himself, in a speech he delivered in Columbia last fall, that in all the forty-five members of the great United States, in numbers of natural born illiterates, North Carolina stands at the very bottom and Tennessee, your own Tennessee, in which you are doing such noble, uplifting work, stands next to her, holding in her hand the black flag of illiteracy.
Does the full force of this get into your peripatetic souls to ruffle the feathers of your immaculate conceit? Great God, it hurts me to think of North Carolina, the birthplace of my father and all his fathers before him that I know anything of, the birthplace of Polk and Shelby and Robertson and a host of others as great sons as ever God gave to the republic, the land of the Anglo-Celt, of patriotism and tar-heel gameness—it hurts me, I repeat, to learn that she stands at the foot, and Tennessee, her daughter and her equal in past grandeur, patriotism and principles, stands next!
Don’t look at me as if you did not want to hear it! Neither do I want to hear it, but it is sometimes good for us to hear the truth—the truth even to crucifixion.
You may be ignorant, but God knows you will fight! Then fight for the white children of your state—fight these laws and the politicians who made them with strings to them—made them to be evaded. Fight for more and better schools and the abolition of child labor until your state stands in the column where its pedigree and its past record entitles it to stand!
For you will fight, thank the Lord!
I journeyed last spring to New Orleans just to see the plain upon which Tennesseans stood and fought to a bloody finish the bullies of beef-eating England and secured by their victory to our nation the Louisiana Purchase and a century of foreign peace, which the memory of that battle strengthens yet in the minds of their children. The old ditch was a swamp of water lilies; the breastworks had gone back to the plain; but the great Mississippi flowed on to the sea, unhampered by Spaniard or Briton, the great artery of a boundless, unbroken and undivided country. And I stood upon a soil made American by the blood of Tennesseans; I looked up at a sky purple, blue and beautiful, thrown over the landscape by the God of our fathers, even as a king of old would throw his royal purple over the masterpieces of the great master. And on the sky and on the land and on the bosom of the mighty river I read: JACKSON—JACKSON—JACKSON!
As I stood there the fighting spirit of my Irish sires came back to me as I saw the ghosts of those long-haired Tennesseans standing behind that bloody ditch fighting for the country which God had ordained should belong to them and the oppressed of the world. The hot blood surged in my cheek as I thought of the 60,000 little white children of the South and the 2,000,000 in the cotton mills and factories and mines and sweatshops of the nation, robbed of their rights of childhoodby the greed of gold, the graft of politicians and the low ignorance and lazy debasement of their own parents, stealing from them not only the rights of an education, but even the right of life! And as the blood surged in my head, beating drumbeats in my brain and marshalling in the fine frenzy of prophetic visions the gray host that stood shoulder to shoulder there, I saw again that sallow-faced leader, with the form of a battle spear and the eyes of a god, riding up and down the long lines—bloody, blasphemous and brave—and forever settling with the invaders the issue they had postponed, but not abandoned, at Yorktown. And, seeing him, I saw again that pitiful picture in the Waxhaw Settlement—the Irish immigrant mother, her husband but a week ago buried in a poor white’s grave, two babes at her knees and this one at her breast, with no money and no home and no bread for their mouths, and I said: “Thank God, there were no cotton mills in South Carolina then, or Andrew Jackson would have died there before he was grown, in the lint and the dust and the grind of them, robbed of his childhood and of his chance in life!”
For he also was a poor white, just the meat for a nice, religious director of a cotton mill!
I thought of another Tennessean, and this time I stood in the Alamo, and again I saw ghosts—for who that has blood in his veins can stand there and not see them? And this was another poor white who died there before he would pull down the flag that floated above him, or could notch on the stock of his rifle the dead Mexicans who were piled up before him—dead—giving to his country an empire and to her coming children an inspiration that is greater than land and gold, “yea, than much fine gold.” And I thanked God again that in his youth there had been no cotton mills in Tennessee to do for Davy Crockett what the bear and panther and Indian could never do.
For he, too, was a poor white, and in his day would have been as good for a cotton mill as a coonskin for a pint of whiskey. And his little life would have gone out behind their shuttles of steel instead of the invader’s bayonet, and the mention of his name would have brought no trumpet-blast from the lips of fame: “Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none!”
Again I thought of a fighting Tennessean, also a poor white, in his youth, and the legitimate prey of the cotton mills—running his gunboats up Mobile Bay in spite of the bellowing forts and the broadsides of death and the hell of the hidden torpedo. And suddenly the engine stopped and a faint heart shouted from below: “Back—back—torpedoes!” But Farragut, from the greatest post of danger, shouted down: “Damn the torpedoes—go ahead!”
My friends, a man who would steal from a child his childhood, that which makes all his after life worth living, who would filch from it its body, brain and soul, is a human torpedo—a torpedo of hell. And, in the language of Farragut, I say unto you: “Damn them and go ahead!”
There was Forrest, another fighting Tennessean and a poor little white trash, one with fifteen brothers and sisters—just the ideal family made for the maw of a cotton mill—for upon such families do they declare their dividends. And if there had been mills in his day there would doubtless have been no Fort Donelson, Tishomingo Creek and Streight’s Raid. He also, like all his fighting predecessors, was a swearing Tennessean. And so I thank heaven for a good, honest, mouth-filling oath in a noble cause. And again I say unto you: “By the Eternal, stand up for the children of your land!”
They tell me that certain animals in the lower forms of life eat their young—a form of disease which we recognize in the sick hen which eats her egg and the swine which devours its young. Good God! Has our boasted civilization reached the sick and abnormal stage of its existencethat it would live upon its young? Has too much wealth and too much glory and too much selfishness and high living made again of some men the man-eater that lived before Adam, except that the hair of his body and his tusks and his claws are gone, and now he is the clean-looking, well-fed, well-groomed son of hell that would fatten on the blood of his own breed? Talk not about his being a Christian, a follower of the sweet and beautiful Savior—the Christ, who, when he had hunted in all the mystic chambers of his God-like mind for some simile to express perfect purity and what we might hope to see in heaven, took the little poor ones in his arms and said: “This is what you must become—this is the kingdom of heaven.”
Once Sargent S. Prentiss, the greatest orator who ever saw the light of day in this country, because his speech was poetry and fire and reason, made a speech in New Orleans in behalf of the starving poor of Ireland. It was only ten minutes’ long, but it sent a shipload of food to Ireland. And he used in that speech a thought which Shakespeare has never surpassed. “He who is able and will not contribute to such a cause as this is not a man and has no right to wear the form. He should be sent back to the mints of nature and there reissued out of baser metal, a counterfeit on humanity!”