Teachers Organize: What Margaret Haley Lost

Abstract

"I never wanted to fight" (Haley, p. 3). With those words Margaret Haley began her autobiography. But fight she did. For more that three decades, she was the voice of what was for a while the most militant teachers' union in the country, the Chicago Teachers Federation. She spoke for the underpaid, female elementary school teachers in the second largest public school system in the U.S. "This little woman," Carl Sandburg wrote of her in 1915, "has flung her clenched fist into the faces of contractors, school land lease holders, tax dodgers and their politicians, fixers, go-betweens and stool pigeons." (Haley, p. xxxi) Haley called her autobiography Battleground, and she described herself as having "beaten my fists, and sometimes my head, against stone walls of power and privilege," as having "railed at mayors, at governors, at legislators, at presidents of great universities." (Haley, p. 3) Haley's autobiography, written in parts in 1910-11, 1929 and completed in 1935 just before her death, has now finally been edited and introduced by Robert L. Reid. It is an important document, and ought to be required reading for historians of education, and for every teachers' union member in the country, for "Maggie" Haley was, during the early decades of this century, the conscience of American education. She has not received her due. Not until 1974 when David Tyack wrote about the "lady labor slugger" in The One-Best System did historians take her seriously. Her autobiography, along with the other books reviewed below, should correct that situation. When Haley came to Chicago in the early 1880s, after having taught in small towns and having attended the Illinois Normal School, she entered a rapidly expanding industrial, immigrant city, in the process of becoming divided along class, racial, and ethnic lines. It was an extraordinary city, one