THE INCORPORATE TAX-DODGING CREATURES
It is important to note that a great part of the opposition to graft and
propaganda and repression in the Chicago schools has come from classroom
teachers. That is the real significance of a struggle which has been
going on for many years, over the question of the teachers organizing
and being affiliated with labor unions. Eight years ago Big Business put
in as president of the school board a gentleman named Jacob Loeb, who
proceeded to enforce a resolution forbidding teachers to belong to
unions. Sixty-eight teachers were dismissed, of whom thirty-eight were
officers or active members of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. So this
federation was forced to withdraw from affiliation with labor, and is
still withdrawn.
Mr. Loeb was so satisfactory to the plutocracy that first a Democratic
and then a Republican administration appointed him. A Hebrew workers’
union was induced to support Mr. Loeb’s candidacy by the statement that
the Catholic Federation was opposed to it; but at this time Roger
Sullivan, the Democratic Catholic boss, was secretly supporting the
reappointment of Loeb by Mayor Thompson, the Republican boss! Mayor
Thompson afterwards stated that Mr. Loeb cried in his office and begged
for the reappointment. Anyhow, the Chicago teachers fought the “Loeb
rule,” as it was called, and the unions backed them. So the Loeb rule
has fallen into disuse, and Chicago is one city in which the teachers
run their own affairs.
But, of course, the teachers are powerless to clean out the school
system; it would be Bolshevism and Sovietism if they were to try. The
teachers are mere employes, and the principals and superintendents are
their “superiors”—this in spite of the fact that to be a grade teacher
in Chicago you have to have educational qualifications, while the
friends of politicians find it easy to pass the examinations for
principalships.
In a city where $10 is not safe anywhere, most of the attention of the
teachers naturally has to be devoted to the getting of a living wage.
Throughout this book you will find stories of teachers in revolt over
this question, so let me say once for all that the rise in prices which
cut the salaries of teachers to less than half, was not confined to Los
Angeles and New York; it was a universal condition. The teachers in
Chicago showed that between 1897 and 1919, the increase in the cost of
living had been 349 per cent, so, in spite of the raises they had won,
their salaries had been cut squarely in half; they had lost a dollar a
day in buying power from their 1897 salaries!
Yet the grafters were fertile in devices to keep the teachers from
getting more money. Years ago, under the regime of Superintendent
Cooley, they established a fake salary schedule; that is, they had one
schedule on paper and another which they actually paid. They would grant
increases, and then take them back; they would adopt schedules, and then
suspend their operation; they would require examinations for admission
to the higher salaries, and then pass but very few, and burn the papers
in a great hurry. An investigation by the Teachers’ Federation showed
that only sixty-two out of a possible twenty-six hundred were getting
the maximum salary! They called this scheme the “merit system,” and it
is still in use in many of our schools—the Department of Superintendence
of the National Education Association being a clearing-house for such
bright ideas.
Understand, there was a thousand dollar maximum, and the teachers had
been trying for ten years to get it, in vain. And now somebody worked
out a new arrangement; they were to get a raise if they got five points
of credit in five outside courses of study. This was supposed to take
three years—and keep them waiting meantime! But Margaret Haley
discovered a loop-hole, an institute at which the teachers could take
five courses in one year. The board had intended to change that
regulation, but the teachers beat them to it; they rushed to the
institute and registered for five courses at once. The teachers regarded
this as a great lark; they swarmed into the place, and studied till late
every night. The authorities pretended to be out of application blanks;
but the Teachers’ Federation had some printed in a hurry!
Sixteen hundred teachers thus got in, and this broke the back of
Superintendent Cooley’s scheme. He had assured the big business men of
the city that he could hold down the salaries, but now he had a pain in
the head and stayed in Europe; when he came back, he was made president
of D. C. Heath & Co., one of the big school-book publishers. After that,
the Commercial Club of Chicago made him its “educational commissioner,”
and for five years paid him a salary to study the training of
wage-slaves in Europe, so that he might come back and take charge of the
“continuation schools” of the city. Make note, please that this
gentleman was a past president of the National Education Association; we
shall meet these “great educators” one by one in their home districts,
and observe just what their greatness consists in.
I have mentioned how Margaret Haley made the corporations pay their
school taxes. This happened in 1900—there was a shortage in the school
funds, and the board of education went so far as to take away from the
teachers money which had already been paid to them. The income of the
schools was supposed to be derived from taxes; and Margaret Haley
discovered that there were no assessments on franchise valuations being
levied against corporations in Chicago. They were not even filing
schedules, as under the law they were required to do. So the Chicago
Teachers’ Federation set to work to bring mandamus proceedings against
five public service corporations, and after three years of agitation and
legal controversy, these five corporations paid six hundred thousand
dollars in one year—of which nearly half went to the schools. Somebody
composed a poem on the subject:
/* Mandamus proceedings were brought by the teachers Against the
incorporate, tax-dodging creatures; “No, no,” said the ladies, “you
cannot flim-flam us, We’ll keep up the fighting though every man damn
us.” */
After that the big highwaymen resolved to put Margaret Haley out of
business. The Chicago “Tribune” came out with a story that she had
applied for a four thousand dollar pension, and it was then discovered
that she had for seven years been collecting two salaries, one from the
board of education and the other from the teachers. The “Tribune” had
told so many lies about the teachers that it thought nothing mattered.
But Margaret Haley brought a libel suit, and proved that she had had no
salary from the board of education and that her salary as business
representative of the Teachers’ Federation was precisely the same as she
would have got as a school teacher. The jury brought in a verdict in
Miss Haley’s favor, and she collected five hundred dollars from the
“Tribune,” and presented it to the Labor party!
By way of countering the Teachers’ Federation, the politicians of
Chicago have got up the usual fake organization. It is called the
“Teachers’ League,” and nobody can find out who belongs to it, or who
gives it the authority to speak for the teachers. But it speaks; and the
“Tribune” and other kept newspapers take up its voice and broadcast it.
This fake “League” is used for lobbying in the school board and the
state legislature, and more especially for the slandering of union
teachers. It appeals to every kind of ignorance and base prejudice;
charging that those who run the Teachers’ Federation are “Bolsheviks,”
and more terrible yet, that they are atheists! When the “Tribune” calls
you names like this you cannot punish it; Henry Ford found that out when
the “Tribune” called him an Anarchist! You know how much of an Anarchist
Henry Ford is, and so you can judge how much of a Bolshevik and atheist
the leaders of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation are! As I write this
book, a superintendent and two instructors at the Chicago Parental
School are suspended, as result of a coroner’s probe into the suicide of
a fifteen-year-old boy, who hanged himself to escape torture. And I
wonder, if I were to call the owners of the Chicago “Tribune” the
murderers of this boy, would anybody sue me for libel?
It is time we gave some attention to the fate of the children, in this
city where $10 is not safe anywhere. Let me take you to one Chicago
high school as portrayed to me two years ago. This school gets up
entertainments, which take the boys out of the class-rooms; pupils
often fail in their classes, because they have been playing in an
opera “to make money for the school.” Money is collected at such
entertainments—and replaces scholarship as an aim. The school takes
part in industrial exhibits; the boys work to prepare these exhibits,
and prizes are collected, and the money goes into the general fund.
When the state stops giving cash prizes, the school at once stops
competing. The school publishes a paper; it is a wretched paper, of
poor literary quality; the “boosters” have charge of it, and it makes
money “for the fund.” A certain teacher in the school has become an
artist, and has painted a beautiful picture; it is proposed to
purchase this picture for the school, and some of the school funds are
to be used for the purpose. The teachers and pupils have been working
under heavy pressure to earn this money, but they are not permitted to
have anything to say concerning the purpose for which the money shall
be expended.
The boys know of such conditions, and so do the teachers; the school is,
to use the phrase of one of them, “a hell of hate.” Poor and
foreign-born parents, coming to the school, are insulted and abused.
Teachers are scolded before their classes. The teachers take the matter
up in a faculty meeting, and the principal is interviewed by a committee
from the faculty, and hears a strenuous and detailed discussion of his
conduct. The teachers object among other things to having their
efficiency judged by their ability to sell tickets. The principal
promises to reform, but does not, and finally thirty teachers sign a
petition to the superintendent. Before delivering it, they have one more
conference with the principal, who admits his faults—and then sets out
to avenge himself, by demoting three of the teachers, and marking down
the rating of another from the highest to a very low grade. A woman
member of the committee is summoned to a “grilling”—in the course of
which she hears all the other members of the committee berated. A day or
two later there breaks out into all the newspapers of Chicago a scandal
story, and the principal gives an interview hinting that “there is one
example of radical teaching in the school.”
It appears that the Association of Commerce had asked that on Armistice
day all the pupils should face the East, and silence should be
maintained for one minute while everybody thought about the dead in
France. But two students refused to face the East, and so the newspapers
called them “Bolsheviks.” It was intended to implicate this brave woman
teacher—although the two boys were not her pupils, nor even in her
department. The boys were hauled up before the authorities, and
questioned as to their “Bolshevism.” They admitted that they did not
believe in war. As to facing the East, that was a Mohammedan custom, and
one of them was a Jew, and neither a Mohammedan!
I could tell you of another school in which the lunchroom, supposed to
be operated at cost, has been used for money-making. I could tell you of
cases of cruelty to pupils, and the abuse of parents. I could tell you
of one of Chicago’s few real educators, Principal McAndrew of the Hyde
Park High School, who was forced out because he refused to promote the
incompetent son of a school board official.
I have in my possession a statement signed by two Chicago high school
boys, reciting how, at the instance of their principal, Mr. Lewis A.
Bloch of the Marshall High School, they agreed to work for the board of
education. They went to the office of the board at 460 South State
Street, and Mr. Bachrach, in whose office they were put to work, agreed
to pay them three dollars a week to cover their car fare and lunch. On
the afternoon of the last day of the week Mr. Bachrach informed them
that “suddenly and unexpectedly the Chicago Board of Education’s
treasury had gone dry, and that the three dollars compensation could not
be given us.” These boys ask me to withhold their names. Another boy
states: “I have since found that this has been done time and again, and
also with the same excuse at hand.”
These Chicago schools are strenuous for the “Americanization” of the
foreigners—which means despising the foreign children and calling them
names. It meant in war-time the activities of spies—boys paid to report
what this teacher has said, and that. Also, it means the repression of
every kind of liberal activity. During the recent slaughter of the Jews
by the Poles, the Jewish people in Chicago were stirred up, and
organized a protest parade. Some Jewish children asked to be permitted
to attend this parade; they got up a petition, and their request was
denied. They argued that they had been allowed to attend all kinds of
bankers’ parades and Association of Commerce parades; why not an
anti-pogrom parade. The answer of their principal was that if they went
to the parade they would all be “fired.” Nevertheless, the Jewish
children went to the parade, and there were so many of them that they
were not “fired.”
The schools of Chicago are a happy hunting ground for every form of
reactionary propaganda. The War Department supplies “dope” for the high
school papers, and it is published. The boys hate this military
training, but they take it; as one boy explained to his teacher, “I’ve
been bullied for two years; now it’s my turn to bully somebody else.”
Many years ago Chicago had a great superintendent of schools, Mrs. Ella
Flagg Young, and she tried to keep this curse of militarism away from
the children. She introduced in courses for every grade a little time to
be given to the teaching of peace; but the president of the school
board, attorney for the packers who came to board meetings drunk, cut it
out.
The bankers come to set up their golden calf in the schools; also
the various commercial men who want to use the schools for
advertising—putting their “dope” into the writing books. For
example, the book-keeping classes copy pages of the transactions of
Marshall, Field & Co. A recent investigation in the technical
schools showed that employers were calling up for high school
students, and even specifying their church affiliations. Such
employers use the public schools to train their apprentices, and
then violate the constitutional rights of citizens. The Yellow
Taxi-cab Company sends to schools to ask if would-be drivers have
union relatives!
The big Babbitts of the Association of Commerce, desiring flocks of
little Babbits, arranged for organizing in the schools what they called
“Junior Associations of Commerce.” The boys must be called out of class
to listen to lectures by Mr. Sam Insull, monarch of all the gas tanks he
surveyed, who made a tour of the schools to tell how he succeeded by
never looking at the clock. Another business man told the kids that
labor “slacked” during the war; and as many of these Chicago kids came
from union homes, they resented it. When the grown-up Association of
Commerce failed to support appropriations for the schools, the kids at
one school got on their dignity and withdrew. Then the Chicago
Federation of Labor had a bright thought—why should there not be a
Junior Federation of Labor in the schools? Why should not labor leaders
come to tell the kids how they succeeded by solidarity? A movement for
this program was started, and the name Junior Associations of Commerce
was changed in a hurry to Civic Industrial Clubs! How badly some labor
representation is needed in Chicago schools you may judge from a story
told me by a parent, whose little boy asked his teacher, “What is the
militia for?” The answer was, “To put down labor strikes.”