Caroline A. Lowe, was a teacher (in 1908, Vice President of the Kansas City Teachers’ Association), founder and leader of National Women’s Committee in the Socialist Party of America. A Left Winger Lowe later returned to school, became a lawyer defending the I.W.W., and working on many cases of the Red Scare. Still later she worked with the International Labor Defense.

‘A Socialist Teacher’s Plea to Teachers’ by Caroline Lowe from The Socialist Woman. Vol. 2. No. 7. November 1908.

With a heart full of love, I greet you my teacher companions. Throughout our life we have journeyed together. Your joys have been my joys, my sorrows have been your sorrows. Together we have tarried, on vacation times, in scenes of marvelous beauty, in great white palaces set among luxuriant gardens, surrounded by lakes alive with light and song. Here and there we caught glimpses of handsome men and women and beautiful children, beings whose existence seemed in complete harmony with the joy of life. And together we have crossed the chasm, have hastened through dark, noisome streets, between gaunt, prison-like houses, haunted by millions of haggard-faced men, emaciated women, and lifeless babes. We have seen these flock to the machines and bring forth untold abundance. We have seen them carry this abundance into the beautiful gardens and pile it mountain-high—for themselves, retaining not enough with which to maintain life; merely enough with which to escape death.

Our hearts have ached for those people of the great cities, of the noisome streets, as we have watched them in our vacation times, when we have gone out to gather fresh material to take back to our school rooms. We have wondered that a loving father permitted this great chasm to so divide his children. That millions were kept in bondage chained to an animal existence in order that a few might become masters and luxuriate in abundance so great that they, too, were enslaved, that they, too, lost the true joy of living.

As we stood upon the bridge that spanned the chasm, many passed us. And we, teachers with our eyes open, looked and saw men and women of all professions—editors, ministers, teachers, lawyers doctors. With our minds alert, we learned that they were but messengers, carrying sermons, editorials, textbooks, court decisions and prescriptions, dictated by the masters, sanctified by our signature and delivered by us to the bondsmen, who, because of their ignorance, looked reverently to us for truth and justice.

As dealers in the futures of humanity—as teachers of men and women to be, our souls have sickened at the sight. All humanity enslaved. The masters enslaved to their desire for power, and their fear of the slave; the bondsmen enslaved to their grinding tasks, and to their fear of the master, and we, the intermediaries, enslaved too, realizing our dependence for the necessities of life upon those who employ us-upon our masters.

How long, we have cried, How long, O Lord, has poor humanity suffered thus-and is there no hope for the future?

And then some of us, teachers—a few of us, have turned to history. Not to our school histories, for they, alas, fail to tell the whole story. But to the works of scientists on the shelves of our great libraries, and we have found—oh, refreshing discovery!—that social systems have not always been slave systems. That in the remotest period, so dim that scarcely could it be outlined, the human race stood erect, men and women gazing into each others’ eyes fearlessly, none enslaved, none masters—all brothers. Throughout this long period of communism no child was conceived in slavery, in fear and reverence for a master man.’

This discovery, of the one-time freedom of man from his kind, brought untold joy to us. Surely, if the race once tasted of freedom it would never be content until it again possessed freedom in all its fullness. We continued our search. What caused man to lose this great boon? How came he to pass from communism to slavery, from slavery to feudalism, and on into the present wage-system we call capitalism?

Unnoticed by man, its great unseen forces silently changing all of his institutions—his customs, his governments, his religions—the tool with which man worked, shaped the destiny of the human race. Because the forked stick of communal times became tipped with metal, its productive power increased and a surplus was produced. The strongest man desired this surplus. He enslaved his weaker brother that he might obtain it—and slavery followed communism. The metal-tipped plow improved, the slaves began to organize, they broke the bands of slavery—and feudalism appeared. The hand tool gave way to the weaving machine. The printing press brought light to the ignorant serfs, gunpowder aided in their struggle for emancipation—and feudalism passed into history, with wage-slavery taking its place.

What then? ls the wage-system the final aim of all the centuries of evolution? May we not pass on to other stages? Do we not already see a light pouring forth from the great machine of production giving glimpses of the future? Do we not hear it crying to us, “Come unto me all ye workers! You who have produced me in common, shall now own me in common! You who use me socially shall own me socially, and never again will I hear from you, ‘I was naked and ye clothed me not. I was an hungered and ye fed me not.’”

You of the school room, you who train the minds of little children-who form the intelligence of the future-do you not see that the competitive system called capitalism is already dying? That it is dead?

Millions of men, homeless, wandering the streets for a chance to work—are they not testimony of its inability to longer serve the human race? Millions of women engaged in labor, making home life and care of children impossible, millions of babies torn from the joys of childhood, thrust into factories, mines and sweatshops, converted into tiny human wrecks—are they not testimony that this system is dead, that it cannot longer serve humanity?

Profit! Profit! Profit! demands this capitalist system. It is a system of profit by profits and for profits, rather than a system of, by and for the people. The new order, the higher order, will be a system for humanity—for men, women and children. It will be a system wherein the people own the machines, and receive the benefit from them.

School teachers, as you stand before the youths in your classes, as you teach history and politics and science to your pupils, be sure that you teach them the truth! If you are intelligent you know the truth. If you are not intelligent, you are cheating those dependent upon you. You have no right in the school room.

Through the power of machine production we will pass out of capitalism into Socialism. The machine is already socially used. It is waiting for our fuller claim. Let us answer its cry, and inaugurate the new day of the Co-operative Commonwealth—the Brotherhood of Man.

The Socialist Woman was a monthly magazine edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko from 1907 with this aim: “The Socialist Woman exists for the sole purpose of bringing women into touch with the Socialist idea. We intend to make this paper a forum for the discussion of problems that lie closest to women’s lives, from the Socialist standpoint”. In 1908, Conger-Kaneko and her husband Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko moved to Girard, Kansas home of Appeal to Reason, which would print Socialist Woman. In 1909 it was renamed The Progressive Woman, and The Coming Nation in 1913. Its contributors included Socialist Party activist Kate Richards O’Hare, Alice Stone Blackwell, Eugene V. Debs, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. A treat of the journal was the For Kiddies in Socialist Homes column by Elizabeth Vincent.The Progressive Woman lasted until 1916.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-woman/081100-socialistwoman-v2w18.pdf