MELODRAMA IN CHICAGO
Let us take next the school system of Chicago. Here is a city of three
million people, with representatives of most of the races and nations
and tribes of the world; a great port, a great railroad center, a meat
packing and manufacturing and banking center. The owners of these
industries contribute the necessary cash, and finance alternately two
rival political machines; candidates are chosen who are satisfactory to
the “invisible government,” and with the help of four or five great
capitalist newspapers the candidates are elected. The purpose for which
they are elected is to protect Big Business while it plunders the city;
incidentally, and on the side, the political officials plunder all they
can.
The city being a strong union center, the school teachers are organized.
The grade teachers form the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, and the
business representative of this federation is Margaret Haley; one of
those terrible people known as a “walking delegate”—that is, she goes
about among the masters of the city, asserting rights for those who are
not supposed to have rights. She is hated and slandered, but continues
to clamor for the teachers. For a generation the school board and
politicians in chorus with the capitalist newspapers have insisted that
the teachers could not be paid a living wage, the city was too poor.
Nearly twenty-five years ago Margaret Haley took up the question of
tax-dodging by the great corporations, and I shall tell later on how she
made five of these corporations pay taxes on their franchise valuations.
The business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation lives
always in the midst of some tumultuous political issue. She was in the
midst of one when I arrived in Chicago, in May, 1922, the city being in
the throes of a school graft scandal. The attorney for the school board
had just been indicted by the grand jury, and the president of the board
and many other members were soon to be indicted. Millions had been
wasted—nobody could guess how much. At the same time the governor of the
state was being tried for appropriating thirty thousand dollars of the
state’s money; the jury acquitted him—and then some members of the jury
got jobs from the governor, and were tried in their turn. The day of my
arrival it was discovered that the chief clerk of the city jail had
stolen thirty-six hundred dollars of the money taken from the prisoners.
The Chicago “Tribune” published an editorial headed: “Is $10 Safe
Anywhere?”
The answer to this question is No; and if you ask the reason, it is the
Chicago “Tribune.” Turn to page 270 of “The Brass Check,” and read the
story of how the “Tribune” robbed the school children of enormous sums.
This paper, and also the “Daily News,” have their buildings on school
land; and they got leases at absurdly low rentals, the leases extending
for ninety-nine years, with no provision for revaluation during the
entire period. In order to put this job over, the “Tribune” had got its
own attorney appointed on the school board!
The affair created a tremendous scandal, and during the administration
of Mayor Dunne there were some school board members not under Big
Business control, and these attempted to have the leases declared
invalid; whereupon the “Tribune” and the “News” started a crusade of
slander against the school board and against Mayor Dunne, who appointed
the school board. The “Tribune” calls itself “The World’s Greatest
Newspaper,” and is undoubtedly the most powerful newspaper in the Middle
West. The “Daily News” is the most powerful evening paper; and the two
of them, according to William Marion Reedy, “rallied to their support
all the corrupt and vicious element of the Chicago slums, likewise the
forces that could be controlled by the street railways and other public
service corporations.” They elected a mayor who was their tool, and he,
in defiance of law, turned some school board members out of office, and
the courts upheld the leases! Here, you see, are two bands of
highwaymen, operating under the cloak of “patriotism” and “hundred per
cent Americanism,” and robbing the school children of Chicago of sums
beyond estimate. Every politician and office-holder in the city knows
that, and follows this high example; and so it comes about that $10 is
not safe anywhere in Chicago.
The first place to which I went was Margaret Haley’s office. She gave me
a chair, and started to tell me the news, but the telephone rang; it
rang every few minutes during our chat, and I listened, and little by
little this scene became unreal—it wasn’t a business woman’s office in
Chicago, it was an act from one of those old-fashioned “muck-raking”
plays which used to be written by Charles Klein and George Broadhurst
and others, twenty years or so ago. You couldn’t produce such plays in
America today, you would be sent to jail for “suspicion of criminal
syndicalism.” In these plays the hero, an upright young politician, or
maybe a newspaper man, would be hunting a band of grafters, and tied up
in a tangle of plots and counter-plots. You would see him in his office,
with breathless messengers running in; or at the telephone in swift
conversations, giving orders and thwarting the moves of his enemies.
I had my note-book and pencil ready, and it occurred to me that you
might be interested to hear two or three minutes of the conversation
which goes on in the office of the business representative of the
Chicago Teachers’ Federation, in these days of “normalcy” and “hundred
per cent Americanism” triumphant. So I wrote a little scene from a play,
a regular thrilling melodrama, with plots and counterplots, betrayals
and raids and sudden surprises, grafters getting away with their loot
and grand juries’ representatives bursting in upon them—all the stock
stage material. But alas, when I brought it to Margaret Haley to read, I
discovered that she had no idea she was dramatic, and didn’t like it;
also, the particular bit of melodrama to which I had been witness had
never been brought home to her, and her connection with it could not be
revealed without pointing to certain very precious sources of
information. And so my stage scene had to be “cut,” and you will have to
learn about Chicago school graft from plain narrative prose.
The public schools of Chicago still have some land which the grafters
have not stolen. There is a tract of one square mile on the outskirts of
the city, and in 1921 a bill was introduced in the state legislature to
authorize the school board to sell it to the grafters. The Teachers’
Federation protested, and received in reply a letter from Mr. Bither,
attorney for the school board, saying that the expenses of holding this
land for the schools were such that if the teachers insisted upon its
being held they must be prepared to have their salaries cut five hundred
thousand dollars! The business representative of the teachers
investigated and ascertained that the cost of holding this land was
literally and absolutely nothing; if any money had been paid it had been
paid illegally. So Mr. Bither’s proposition came to this: the teachers
must stand by and let the grafters rob the schools, or else the teachers
themselves would be robbed!
Instead of bowing to this threat, the teachers appealed to the public;
they demonstrated that the figures presented to the mayor by Mr. Bither,
showing the money spent for running the schools and for teachers’
salaries, had been juggled. Mr. Bither had overstated the amount paid
for teachers’ salaries by $868,000 and understated the amount paid for
administrative salaries by $314,000. When he had wanted a big
appropriation from the legislature, he had presented to this legislature
tables showing that the teachers’ salaries were very low; but when he
had wanted to keep the teachers from getting this money, he had
presented to the mayor tables showing that their salaries were higher.
All this, of course, led the teachers to go thoroughly into the
expenditure of school funds. Reports began to come to the federation
from one source after another. The legislature had appropriated thirteen
million dollars, for the schools, and the school board was spending it
in a hurry, so that the business men would get it instead of the
teachers. School principals were called on the telephone and compelled
to order quantities of stuff—office furniture, chairs, desks, moving
pictures, telephones, pianos, rugs, phonographs. A pamphlet issued by
the Chicago Teachers’ Federation showed that the rate of increase of
appropriations for “incidentals” in 1921 was ten times the rate of
increase of the total appropriations for teachers’ salaries in 1921.
Then came the news of strange goings on among the “engineers,” the
school custodians. It was charged that the vice-president of the school
board had got increases in salaries for the engineers and they had
generously paid to him the three months’ back pay included in the
measure. The engineers came to the Masonic Temple to pay this
money—between $75,000 and $125,000. Every man presented the exact
amount, and they checked him up carefully. And later on they had a
banquet, and presented with fulsome speeches a magnificent silver
service. An amusing feature of this story is that the chief of police of
Chicago furnished two “front-office men” to sit and guard the sums of
money which the engineers brought in. You have to take every precaution,
in a city where $10 is not safe anywhere!