Rural Censors
Tj^ DITORS are the best judges of their own editorial •*--' policy, and the enterprise of the New York World, in making a story of small-town spite and oppression matter for a front-page article...
...BuC there is no doubt that, as time goes on, it is becoming intensified rather than showing signs of healing...
...On the other side, it may well be that it is fomented by such pettifogging denials of human liberty and dignity as the village fathers of New City have just supplied a young and ambitious man with, in a measure that is likely to last him all his life...
...Briefly, the story concerns a young teacher of twentytwo who, upon] the threshold of his career, found himself assigned to a rural free school whose facilities serve a population of some 500 souls...
...she was apparently in no hurry to provide the censors of morals behind the window-curtains with the sentimental culmination they had grown to expect as their right...
...This cleavage in customs and habits of thought between two main elements of our population cannot be altogether a new thing...
...It is no slur upon our agriculturalists to believe that for a youth of studious habits and intellectual interests the choice of company for leisure hours can have been neither wide nor grateful...
...There are thousands of towns in the United States," the World only too credibly informs us in an editorial upon its own article, "which regulate the lives of their teachers just as New City regulates the private lives of these two...
...But neither is there the slightest chance that, if it were isolated, any metropolitan newspaper would give it the hospitality of even its inside pages...
...Now if this trivial story were an isolated instance, it would not be worth the price of a single copy of the journal that offers it for the edification of the public...
...she was pretty...
...We think it better for him to go...
...she was young...
...The recalcitrant male teacher is alleged to have received a letter, couched in unmistakable terms, and inviting him to betake his learning elsewhere...
...She was a woman...
...No comment is at hand reflecting upon the nature of a friendship that will drive him for the next few weeks to exchange his text-books for the "male help wanted" column as useful reading...
...This feeling of mutual hostility is nourished on the one side, there can be no doubt of it, by a grievance natural to men on whom hard and dull lives are forced by the nature of their calling...
...A preference for the society of a colleague, interested in the same pursuits and probably, like himself, a stranger in the neighborhood, seemed to range itself in the category of those accidents rated as inevitable...
...It is even admitted that he is a "good teacher...
...The facts of the trivial but pitiful tale will ring so reminiscently in the memory of many who have had experience, brief or prolonged, of community life in remote centres ofj population, that merely by changing dates and names, and rearranging a few essential facts, they will be able to reconstitute more than one petty drama that took place within their own cognizance and purview...
...But the tribal ukase is as unanimous as it is unexplained...
...Even now it is notorious that books and plays pour into publishers' and managers' offices in which country and small-town life is invariably represented as an ordeal only endurable because the whistle of the train headed toward the big city sounds a note of anticipatory deliverance every night...
...Tj^ DITORS are the best judges of their own editorial •*--' policy, and the enterprise of the New York World, in making a story of small-town spite and oppression matter for a front-page article is not to be lightly questioned...
...Given the nature of our institutions, its persistence may well be regarded by thoughtful men and women as a danger only awaiting some major issue to arise to make itself real and palpable...
...No aspersion, we are told, is made upon his character...
...The canny editors of the World know that when they feature the amenities of New City, Rockland County, New York, they are projecting one single pencil of light on conditions that persist to the very gates of our largest cities, and awaking a responsive chord in the breasts of thousands who date the beginning of a worth-while life from the day they made their own escape into happy anonymity...
...But the colleague suffered from certain disqualifications of which none who have lived in similar "centres" will fail to realize the significance...
...With such ingredients at hand the result was only a matter of time and place...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 4
