THE LITTLE ANACONDAS
While we are in this mountain country, let us see what is going on
throughout the state. The financial agents of the Anaconda, known as the
Montana Bankers’ Association, passed a resolution to take charge of the
schools; and Mr. W. J. Hannah, who lives at Big Timber, and is a member
of the county high school board, also for a dozen years chairman of a
rural school board, wrote to their educational committee to ask what
they meant by this. In reply they informed him that they intended to
appoint teachers, select text-books, and deliver lectures, and thereby
inculcate respect for the money-changers of Montana.
Within two years after this action three presidents of banks in Mr.
Hannah’s county were appointed as members of the high school board. Says
Mr. Hannah: “Not a man among the three possesses any education whatever,
nor have they ever evinced any interest whatever in the work of the
public schools”—except, as he goes on to explain, to carry on propaganda
on behalf of bankers. The high school library has been kept without any
of the standard works on history, economics, sociology and ethics, which
have any tendency toward democracy in industry or even in politics. None
of these ignorant banker board members could possibly have found out for
themselves what books to exclude from the library; they must have got
from some central organization suggestions causing them to keep from the
shelves such historical writings as Draper, Lecky, Buckle and White.
They crowd the pupils with manual training, domestic science and
commercial courses; and discovering that basket-ball might be used to
divert the minds of the whole community from interest in politics and
social reform, they become ardent friends of school athletics. The
Nonpartisan League was trying to organize the farmers of Montana, and,
says Mr. Hannah: “It is only a year since a mob of high school students,
with the full knowledge and tacit approval of this board of banker
trustees, broke into a peaceful assemblage of farmers which was being
held in the county court house.” They tried to break up the meeting, but
did not succeed, and subsequent efforts to have them disciplined were
thwarted by these banker trustees. Mr. Hannah continues:
What the bankers are now doing to our own high school in a limited
way, they are also doing throughout the state in a much more general
and effective way. Their educational program is in full operation. For
two or more years they have demanded and secured prominent speaking
places at every meeting of school men that is held in the state. Their
voice is now heard wherever the subject of education is publicly
discussed. Moreover, I read in the public press almost every day of
addresses delivered by bankers to high school assemblies; and it is
plain to see that it is merely a campaign of propaganda designed for
the one purpose of misleading the children concerning the real nature
of our banking system.
I have had occasion to argue with big business men concerning this
control of school funds by bankers; they never can see anything wrong
with it—who is there that should handle money, if not bankers? But I
come upon a little item in the “Inter-Mountain Educator,” official organ
of the Montana State Teachers’ Association, March, 1923:
The Hardin State Bank at Hardin, Mont., has closed its doors. Eight
school districts in the county have a total of $74,380.85 in the bank.
The heaviest loser is Hardin No. 17 H, which has $23,222.63 in the
closed bank, and, besides, has been compelled to cut to the quick to
operate this year.
There are now hard times in Montana, and in his 1922 report the
superintendent of public instruction tells of the retrenchments and
sacrifices which have been necessary to keep the schools going. “In
hundreds of districts last year all expenses but teachers’ salaries were
eliminated, the parents even donating the fuel and hauling. The teachers
caught the spirit of sacrifice, and scores of them gave their services
from one to several weeks in order that the children would not be
deprived of any more school than necessary.” In this report appears a
photograph of a mother who drove a team twenty-three miles a day in
order to get her three children to school, and brought with her two
younger children whom she could not leave at home; she came forty miles
to a teachers’ meeting, so that she might get suggestions as to how to
help these children at home. The report tells also of an eighth grade
boy walking sixteen miles, and of five families who dug holes in a
hill-side near Broadus, and lived there during the school season in
order that their children might get instruction!
I am dealing in this book with Big Business; but you will understand
that in this lair of the gigantic Anaconda, there are many little snakes
hoping some day to become Anacondas, and diligently swallowing all they
can. In the report of this state superintendent I find several pages of
details about the plundering of the district schools by local business
men: every kind of graft you could imagine—sixty dollars a month for
transportation to bring the child of one trustee a mile and a half to
school; a thirty-dollar pearl necklace for a teacher; trustees and
clerks paying themselves all kinds of money on school contracts in
violation of law; another trustee who hired his brother-in-law as
principal for two hundred dollars a month, his wife as teacher at a
hundred dollars a month, and his daughter at ninety-five—and the
following year raised the principal’s salary to three hundred dollars,
and the wife to a hundred and fifty!
Under such economic conditions it is inevitable that teachers should be
terrorized. Here, as in Washington, there are grave-yards of radical
teachers scattered everywhere. Certificates are continually refused to
teachers who refuse to “take policy,” and on the other hand the State
Normal College is freely distributing credits to teachers who carry on
propaganda for the Black Hand. The teachers have been completely
deprived of control of their own organization. At the Montana State
Teachers’ Association convention of 1922, the gang put through strong
resolutions against every kind of political liberalism, and the
superintendent of schools of Lewistown, who was chairman of the
Resolutions Committee, denounced the suggestion that there should be a
referendum to give the rank and file of the teachers the right to vote
on any question.
I have a letter from another Montana school official, who tells me of
four different cases in which he heard prominent educators and lecturers
admit the intolerable nature of present conditions in the state—but
always ending with the anxious statement: “Of course, you understand
that I am not a radical, and have no sympathy with radicalism!” At the
summer school of 1921, at Lewistown, Montana, a professor of economics,
being asked some questions about “The Brass Check,” took occasion to
tell the students of the vast wealth which Upton Sinclair had
accumulated out of his credulous followers! Just where this professor
got his information I do not know, but any time he wishes he can have
the fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of debts which I still have left
from selling “The Brass Check” below cost. This same professor discussed
a student at the Fergus County High School at Lewistown, who had come
with the financial help of the school, but had proved himself unworthy
and ungrateful—he had not changed any of the radical ideas which he had
brought from his Nonpartisan League home! I cite these anecdotes just to
show you the atmosphere which prevails in the class-rooms of the kept
educators of the Anaconda.