The Columbus dispatch. (Columbus, Miss.) 19??-1922, 1920-08-18
A Speech That Typifies The Family
Mans Attitude.

A Speech That Typifies The Family
Mans Attitude.
Gentlemen, I'm an old man and
good mechanic and as long as live l
don't suppose I'll ever have to hunt
for job. | amt asking for charity.
"I've had the blessing of two child
rem, boy and a girl, both of them
now under 10 years old, and they've
come late in my life. | know | won't
never live to see 'em grow up.
"And want to say to you two
gentlemen that have been talking to
US workmen here that if / could be
sure Selma would see that boy and
girl of mine through the public
schools, I'd rather have it than all the
wealth of the Capital National Bank
in Montgomery"
Those of us who heard him looked
down at the floor, or wiped our glass
es, or shut our eyes and thought of
other children we would like to see
through the public schools.
What we had heard was not at all
what the novelists describe as a cry
from a primitive mans soul. 1t was
something finer than that. It was the
clear, positive, direct statement Of an
American workman's greatest long
ing, arising not out of impulse but out
of nobody knows how many hours of
troubled planning.
If his town wanted to serve him
there was one thing it could do be-
fore it did anything else, that was
what he wanted to say, and that thing
was to give an education into the
lives of his two kids, born late in his
life.
Employers will sympathize with
that old man and understand both
him and his longing. Will they under
stand as readily that when he spoke,
there in Selma, in the old Railroad
Y. M. C. A., he spoke for American
workmen?
/ doubt it greatly. For if they could
understand that, how in the world
could they look on approvingly, year
after year, as the Board of Education
in the town where they have their
business, pinches pennies tighter and
tighter before it let's them loose to the
schools of the children of these men
The old type of business executive
may say that this man is an excep-
ton; that even if he were not an ex-
'ception, workmen would not generally
seek new locations or hold on where
they are because one set of schools
finer than another, and that, day in
and day out, there is always a fine
line Of bunk on tap in connection with
the whole subject of public education
in these United States.
The new type of business executive
knows better than that. But he does
not always square his attitude on
taxes with what he knows.
AS simple and chilly proposition,
brought down to brass tacks, is there
any real reason why an employer in
a typical American city should be in
terested, as an employer, in the
schools where he has his plant?
For the farmer, as an employer, the
answer is simple.
In the South a modern system of
American public schools would have
helped to pick last years cotton crop.
For one q the strongest factors in
the resentment that moved thousands
of colored laborers to the North was
the belief that the children could get
a "sho-enuff" education up there. The
white farmer saved a school tax of
one-ffth of mill on 1917 valuation
of his land and lost half Of cotton
crop when cotton was at unheard-of
high prices.
First-Hand Proof of What Working
men Think.
In the North the situation is not !
iissimilar. Farm labor is vanishing.
Here and there the movements slow |
ar than elsewhere. And while II is
no complete explanation, still it is
more than coincidence that, where the |
yorkman iS reluctant tn laava his I