THE LAND OF LUMBER
We continue north to Seattle, another metropolis of fir and cedar. Here
organized labor has been active; the city came near having a Socialist
mayor, and the struggle of Big Business to keep its grip on the schools
has been intense. The state university, located in Seattle, is safe in
the hands of the gang, with a president by the name of Suzzallo, who
acquired his finish at Columbia University, and has made himself a
little miniature Nicholas Miraculous. Last spring he appeared before the
legislature, and explained why he was worth $18,000 a year to the state;
he had effected many economies—and when pressed to cite these, he stated
that he had kept the professors from getting salary increases, and had
reduced the standard salary for incoming instructors! The poor college
slaves are strictly forbidden to take part in politics—which means that
they dare not resent such incidents.
For twenty-one years the public schools of Seattle have been under the
control of a feudal lord of finance, by the melodramatic name of
Ebenezer Shorrock. He was born under the flag of Queen Victoria, and
acts as if he had been born under George III. A teacher asked for an
advance in salary, and gave the excuse that he was paying for a piano.
“A piano!” cried Banker Shorrock. “What business has a man in your
position buying a piano?” To another teacher he made the statement that
“No man who has any self-respect would work for the salary the teachers
are paid.” Yet, in all his twenty-one years he has never voted for an
increase to the teachers; and in June, 1922, he voted a decrease. In the
arguments over this action he used his inside knowledge as head of a
bank to attack his teacher slaves; he knew about their accounts, and
many of them had “saved money!” We are told that these bankers are the
proper persons to guard school finances; so let it be noted that Banker
Shorrock has so run the schools into debt to the banks that now they are
paying more than half a million dollars every year in interest.
On his board this mighty plutocrat has a surgeon to the rich, who was
asked by a labor leader to permit the “Nation,” the “New Republic,” and
the “Freeman” to be used in high school civics classes. “Well,” said Dr.
Sharples, “I cannot answer this question, as I am unacquainted with the
journals you mention.” This from a professional man, presuming to direct
education for a third of a million of people.
But even that is not the limit in Seattle; another board member up to
1923 was a Stone and Webster engineer, who murdered the English of
Banker Shorrock’s queen. Somebody said that a cut in wages would lower
the morale of the teaching force. “That moral stuff don’t go with me,”
declared Engineer Santmyer. “I know lots of them girls, and there ain’t
anything wrong with their morals.” It is interesting to note that this
engineer was also connected with the Pacific Coast Coal Company, from
which the school board purchased most of its coal.
Another board member who retired along with him was Mr. Taylor,
Northwestern representative of a big school-book publishing house. He
gave a written pledge that he would oppose any attempt to reduce the
teachers’ salaries; he signed this pledge on April 19, 1922, and on June
10, 1923, he seconded Banker Shorrock’s motion to make a heavy cut in
the teachers’ salaries. Mr. Santmyer also joined in this vote against
the teachers, and when his victims protested, he got cross, and
addressing a meeting of the school engineers, declared: “I just want one
more crack at them damned teachers.”
The friends of education in the state of Washington brought before the
voters in 1922 a “tax equalization” measure, whose purpose was to compel
the big corporations, and especially the lumber interests, to pay their
proper share of school taxes. Against this measure all the organizations
of the Black Hand lined up—the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Central
Committee of the Republican Party, the reactionary governor, the Seattle
Board of Education, the kept newspapers, the state university, the
Weyerhaeuser lumber interests, the president of Whitman College—to which
the Weyerhaeusers had just contributed seventy-five thousand dollars—and
finally the state superintendent of education, Mrs. Josephine C.
Preston. Remember this lady, because when we come to study the National
Education Association, we shall find her as its president, occupying the
throne of power at the Salt Lake City convention of 1920, where the gang
turned out the teachers from control.
I have shown in Los Angeles, and will show in many other cities, how the
Black Hand bars “politics” from the schools. Here in Seattle the board
of education offered a classic demonstration of what this means. Some of
the teachers in the high schools presumed to have class discussions in
which both sides of the equalization amendment were heard. At five
o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, October 27, 1922, the school board
of Seattle passed a resolution absolutely forbidding teachers to engage
in any kind of political propaganda in the schools, or to post on the
bulletin boards any notices except those pertaining strictly to school
business. Eighteen hours later, at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning,
October 28, Dr. Sharples of the board, Mr. Santmyer of the board, and
also the secretary of the board, appeared before a meeting of school
janitors, engineers and custodians, in a school building, and there
spoke in opposition to the equalization amendment. The secretary of the
board traveled to other parts of the state to oppose this amendment, and
he spoke at meetings during business hours—that is, during the time he
was being paid by the people of Seattle to do his work as school board
secretary.
Another incident, to give you an idea what it means to be a teacher in
Seattle. Early in 1923 eight or ten high school teachers received notice
from the superintendent that their names were being withheld for
reappointment, until the board could complete an investigation
concerning a teachers’ meeting which had been held the previous summer,
at which a resolution had been adopted condemning the board for cutting
the teachers’ salaries. The teachers who received this written notice
tried to find out what it was all about, and they learned that the board
of education had in its possession an unsigned typewritten document,
purporting to be a resolution adopted by the teachers and transmitted to
the Central Labor Council.
But the teachers had held no such meeting and adopted no such
resolution; the secretary of the Central Labor Council declared that no
such communication had ever been received from the teachers; and when
the teachers tried to get a copy of the alleged resolution from the
board, they were told that all the copies had been “lost”! Under its own
regulations, the board was barred from considering documents with
typewritten signatures; nevertheless, they took two weeks to consider
this “lost” document, and finally gave the teachers their jobs—but
without apology for the false accusation!
We shall find it worthwhile to glance at school conditions throughout
this state. The Washington farmers and fruit ranchers, picked to the
bone by the railroads and the banks, have their Nonpartisan League and
their Farmer-Labor party, and are trying to get their schools. Mr. J. T.
Sullivan, a teacher at Klaber, with a twelve-year record, ventured to
run for county superintendent on the Farmer-Labor ticket. Reports were
circulated that the platform of this party consisted of three
planks—nationalization of all property, compulsory free love, and the
destruction of all churches. The county superintendent—that is, Mr.
Sullivan’s political opponent—declared that Mr. Sullivan would either
give up his political activities or have his teacher’s license revoked;
and Mrs. Josephine C. Preston, the state superintendent, refused him a
license to teach in another county, because he could not get the
endorsement of this same county superintendent!
Mr. William Bouck, master of the Washington Progressive Grange, a rebel
organization, gave me the names of two young women teachers in Lewis
County, who were asked if they were members of the Nonpartisan League,
and when they answered yes, they were told that they were “fired.” Mr.
Bouck’s own daughter applied for a position as teacher, and her
credentials were judged satisfactory, but her name was suspicious; she
was asked if she was any relative of William Bouck, and when she
answered that she was his daughter, the director replied: “Well, you can
go to hell!” Mr. Bouck added that there were grave-yards of radical
teachers all over his county; and one of the other men in the party
spoke up, saying that he had six personal friends who had lost their
teaching positions because of their political opinions.
Everywhere throughout the state the book agents are in active control,
working hand in glove with the politicians. I was shown one school
primer, for which the Washington schools were paying sixty cents, and
the same book was sold by the same company in Tennessee for twenty-two
cents. Many school districts in the state were close to bankruptcy,
because of the theft of their school lands by the big lumber companies;
in all these lumber districts the companies put their own men on the
school boards and run education. In the town of Centralia the boss of
the schools, as well as of the town, is F. B. Hubbard, a mill-man,
former president of the Employers’ Association, who incited the Legion
men to raid an I. W. W. hall and hang the inmates with ropes. The Legion
men had the ropes in their hands, and the door half battered down, when
the I. W. W.’s opened fire, and Hubbard’s own nephew was one of those
killed. The Associated Press sent out a dispatch stating that the I. W.
W.’s had opened fire in cold blood on the Armistice day parade of the
Legion, and it will take a generation to unteach this monstrous lie to
the American people. Thus the Great Madame conducts for her Big Business
masters the adult education classes of our schools!
Beginning our journey East, we find ourselves in Spokane, where we shall
not mind stopping, because the lumber barons and kings of silver and
lead have built themselves a sumptuous hotel; once within its portals,
we may think we are among the plutocracy of New York or Paris or London.
The first thing we do is to buy a paper from the news-stand, and learn
that the lumber barons and kings of silver and lead have been equally
lavish to their children, providing them with high-power motor cars,
which they are driving recklessly about the city to the great distress
of the police—who, of course, could not arrest the sons and daughters of
royalty. It appears that these youngsters, instead of studying their
high school lessons, have been studying the “movies”; they are going off
on joy-rides, spending the night at road-houses, and the judge of the
juvenile court has taken the matter up, and charges that school
probation officers, seeking information about these youthful escapades,
have been unable to get it from high school teachers, because the city
superintendent of schools has intimidated the teachers.
So we are not surprised to learn that the invisible government of
Spokane is the Employers’ Association, backed by the Washington Water
Power Corporation; and that the head of the city school board is a grain
speculator, prominent in anti-labor campaigns; also that they have their
full quota of text-book scandals, and a campaign to introduce the
teaching of the Bible in the schools—purely as literature, of course;
also, that they discovered a high school teacher to be a Unitarian and
believer in evolution, and he was reported to the superintendent as an
atheist; also, that the teachers at the high school do not dare attend a
lecture course given by the local Unitarian clergyman.
You might think you were in Portland, hearing a teacher remark:
“Whenever they want to reduce our salaries, they cast slurs at us in the
newspapers for weeks.” You might think you were in Los Angeles, when you
hear how the business organizers endeavored to set the school children
to writing essays on reactionary themes, and how a little group of
“kickers” in the city offered a prize for the best essay on Woodrow
Wilson’s “The New Freedom.” At this time Woodrow Wilson was robed in the
majesty of office, so the proposition put the school board in something
of a quandary. They turned the matter over to a committee, which
solemnly resolved: “‘The New Freedom’ is not a book by Woodrow Wilson,
but a series of extracts from campaign speeches, highly partisan in
character.” So the proposition was turned down!