THE WARD LEADER
The trolley cars take us a few miles south to the city of Oakland, where
we find a still larger population of shipyard workers, longshoremen and
factory hands, having ideas of their own, and therefore having to be
taken in charge by the Black Hand. The situation in Oakland is of
especial importance, for the reason that the school superintendent of
the Black Hand in this city is one of the big chiefs of the National
Education Association. Fred M. Hunter was the 1921 president of the
Association, and at the convention where he was chosen the gang put
through a “reorganization,” whereby it was made forever certain that the
class-room teachers of America shall remain impotent in their own
organization, while their opinions are voiced for them and their money
is spent for them by the bosses of the educational Tammany Hall.
I wish you to understand that when I speak of the N. E. A. as an
educational Tammany Hall, I am not slinging language, but giving a
precise description of a sociological phenomenon. The N. E. A. is run by
a political gang, and the bosses in it are exactly the same kind of
people, functioning in exactly the same way as the ward leaders of
Tammany. Fred M. Hunter is one of these ward leaders, and he uses the
schools of Oakland, in no sense for the benefit of the city or its
people, but solely for the building up of the N. E. A. machine, and of
his power in this machine. As you read the story, therefore, bear this
wider aspect of the matter in mind. The city of Oakland, with its
quarter of a million people, mostly workers, contributes the sum of
eighteen thousand dollars a day for the education of its children, and
this sum is used by a school politician to reward his friends and punish
his enemies. Incidentally, of course, this ward leader sees to it that
our education, both local and national, remains plutocratic; just as the
ward leaders of Tammany see to it that the “traction crowd” and the
other big exploiters are protected.
The City of Oakland voted five million dollars for new schools, and Mr.
Hunter explained publicly his idea that the proper people to handle
these bonds were the business men; therefore he appointed a special
committee known as the “Bond Expenditure Committee.” This committee
proceeded to appoint a prominent politician as “land agent,” to handle
the buying of sites, at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. The
opposition members of the school board objected to this program, and
forced the resignation of the Bond Expenditure Committee; whereupon, Mr.
Hunter caused to be printed in the Oakland “Tribune,” kept newspaper of
the gang, an interview proclaiming to the citizens that the school
system was about to be disrupted.
You will appreciate the humor of this when you are told that during the
previous year the schools had had to be closed for two weeks because of
the wasting of school money; but at the same time the board had
increased Mr. Hunter’s salary to ten thousand dollars per year! (It has
since been raised to eleven, and is about to be raised again.) When the
school board, in the effort to keep the schools open, tried to take
control of the business department from Mr. Hunter, he caused the big
business men of Oakland to come before the board and protest; and one of
these men stated that he didn’t think it was so bad for the city to lose
two weeks of school—a small matter of a hundred and eighty thousand
dollars—as it would be to “injure the prestige of so big a man as Mr.
Hunter!”
Not merely must the money put up by the Oakland taxpayers be sacrificed
to Mr. Hunter’s “prestige,” but also the teaching in the Oakland schools
must be sacrificed to the same end. Mr. Hunter promotes teachers who
serve his political ambitions, and this without relation to their
ability. The convention at which the National Education Association was
“reorganized” was held in Salt Lake City in 1920; and Mr. Hunter’s
right-hand man in putting this through was J. Fred Anderson, president
of the Utah Educational Association. He delivered the votes of the Utah
teachers, and immediately was made principal of one of Oakland’s large
high schools, with salary and allowances amounting to $4,390 per year.
Also there is Miss Elizabeth Arlett, who, while supposed to be teaching
the school children of Oakland, was touring the United States, shortly
before the convention, in the interest of Mr. Hunter’s candidacy for the
presidency of the N. E. A. Miss Arlett was promoted to be principal of a
high school in Oakland, and I am told that many teachers in Oakland have
heard her boast that she can have anything she wants in the Oakland
school system.
On the other hand, there have been some teachers who have failed to
carry out Mr. Hunter’s will—just as there are some labor leaders who
will not sell out their union, but persist in representing the workers.
Mr. Hunter wished to put his own henchman in the position of president
of the Oakland Teachers’ Association. Here, please understand, were the
teachers of the city, supposed to be electing the head of their own
professional organization; but they were not permitted to cast their
ballot secretly, they had to vote in the presence of the principal, and
they got their orders for whom to vote. One young woman teacher failed
to vote according to orders, and she was so persecuted in her school
that she felt compelled to resign.
You might think that would have ended the matter, but if so, you don’t
know the methods of the gang. This teacher applied for a position as
secretary to a corporation, and was promised the position, but when she
went to begin her work she was told by the manager that Mr. Hunter had
reported her as having been “disloyal”; consequently this corporation
could not employ her. And if you think that an unusual kind of thing,
let me mention that only yesterday I was talking with a school teacher
in Los Angeles, who told me about a friend of hers who had fought the
gang, and then had left Los Angeles to seek a position elsewhere; for
years afterwards she lost every position she held, because the gang
ferreted her out and wrote letters about her to her new school
employers.
There has just been a new school election in Oakland. In preparation for
it, Mr. Hunter had got his henchmen in all the Babbitt societies of the
city—the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, the Lions, the Ad Clubs, the “High
Twelve,” the “Knights of the Round Table.” And a few days before the
election he took eight boys out of high school, without the permission
or knowledge of their parents, and set them to distributing election
cards in boats and trains. His ticket won; and so he now has everything
his own way.
The old board had persisted in keeping in office a “chief of
construction” who was finishing the new school buildings. This man had
required the contractors to live up to the specifications, and had
thereby incurred the furious enmity of the grafters—and also, of course,
of Mr. Hunter. The grafting contractors put up large sums of money to
pay for the election of the new board, and the first action of Mr.
Hunter when the new board came in was to recommend the discharge and
force the resignation of the too honest chief of construction. In
resigning, this official filed specific charges of fraud against the
contractors, and Mr. Hunter’s school board majority utterly ignored the
communication.
It was left to the Civic Club, an independent organization, to force an
investigation, which has shown substitution of inferior materials,
meaning tens of thousands of dollars stolen from the people of the city.
Some new buildings have been condemned as unsafe, and the work ordered
done over. And note, please, that Hunter is on the building committee,
and had full knowledge of what his gang was doing. The presidents of the
various women’s clubs of Oakland unite in a statement: “We are told of
fire hazards, faulty roof construction, and other grave dangers menacing
the lives of our children. And yet we are told that no crime has been
committed!” I entreat you to remember these things when, later on in
this book, you are reading about Hunter of Oakland, and his career of
glory at the annual conventions of the National Education Association.
You will not need to be told that a Black Hand such as this rules firmly
the thinking of the people of Oakland. How they do it was narrated at a
meeting of the Better America Federation at the Oakland Hotel, where Mr.
Levenson, manager of the biggest department-store, stated that the
police under his direction had undertaken to crush street speaking, and
had crushed it. Also the school department under Fred M. Hunter was put
to work, and the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, author of “Vanishing
Landmarks,” was brought to Oakland, and all the teachers in the school
system were compelled by official order to listen while he denounced the
referendum and woman’s suffrage.
Then came Woodworth Clum, of the Better America Federation, to tell the
high school children that a proposition to amend the Constitution of the
United States is “akin to treason.” The Black Hand shipped up from Los
Angeles eleven thousand copies of Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,”
the substance being that America is calling her school children to mob
their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. The Black
Hand gave them a practical demonstration of this program by mobbing the
editor of the Oakland “Free Press,” who was too freely exposing graft.
It was proposed to distribute Mr. Clum’s pamphlet to every pupil in the
high schools, but the Central Labor Council made a protest to the state
board of education, and the state superintendent, acting by vote of the
board, forbade the distribution. Here comes an interesting test of the
Black Hand. The thing they are in business to protect is “law and
order”; their one purpose in getting the school children into their
military classes is that the children may learn discipline and
subordination to authority. Now the state superintendent of education is
the superior of the Oakland superintendent, and under the law it was his
right and his duty to forbid the distribution of propaganda in the
schools. In issuing his order to Hunter, he was acting by vote of the
state board; and what did Hunter do about it? Why, he went ahead and
distributed the pamphlets, and the Better America Federation proclaimed
him a hero throughout the state!
Every once in a while a hero like this arises: first Ole Hanson of
Seattle, then Cal Coolidge of Massachusetts, then President Atwood of
Clark University, who leaped into the limelight upon the face of Scott
Nearing. I invite you once more not to forget Fred M. Hunter, Oakland
superintendent of schools. There is a strong movement under way to
establish a new cabinet position, a secretary of education, and Hunter
has his eye on this goal, and is bending every effort toward it. How
beautifully he would fit in the cabinet of Cal Coolidge, strike-breaking
hero of Massachusetts! What a demonstration of national unity—from
Boston Bay to San Francisco Bay, one country, one flag, and one
goose-step! Black Hands across the continent!