100 years ago in Spokane: Corporal punishment discredited, Chronicle says

The school teachers of America had learned an important lesson, and now it was time for the parents of America to learn it as well, said the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

The lesson? Corporal punishment does not work.

“Is it not time for American fathers and mothers to learn it also?” asked the Chronicle editors. “If reason, love, patience and courtesy can rule with full success in the schoolhouse, can they not rule as well in the home?”

The editorial noted that corporal punishment was nearly rooted out in the schools.

“If here and there, a Squeers (a cruel Dickens teacher) is found, he is discredited and disgraced by his own folly and bad temper, and soon he and the last of his tribe will vanish from the class rooms.”

From the strike beat: Spokane’s striking construction workers were mulling a compromise offer from the city’s master builders, who offered a raise for carpenters effective May 1.

The builders, however, refused to offer a raise to laborers, calling a $6 a day wage “absolutely out of the question.”

Meanwhile, work was still halted on all major construction projects.

Contractors threatened to hire nonunion workers as replacements.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1958: The term “beatnik” was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to refer to members of the pre-hippie counterculture; the term was inspired by the “Beat Generation” and by the Soviet launch of its second Sputnik spacecraft.