THE HOMESTEAD OF THE FREE
We continue East and cross “bleeding Kansas,” where John Brown fought,
and the old settlers came in their covered wagons, singing:
/* We cross the prairie as of old The Pilgrims crossed the sea, To make
the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free. */
Now in this homestead of the free the organizers of the Nonpartisan
League are beaten, tarred and feathered, jailed or deported, for trying
to address the farmers. Alexander Howat is thrown into jail for six
months for advising coal miners to strike, and William Allen White,
editor of the Emporia “Gazette,” is arrested for putting in his window a
card stating that he sympathizes with the strikers. The principal organ
of culture in the state is the Kansas City “Star,” founded by a brave
and sincere liberal, and now turned into an organ of screaming bigotry
and hate. Two years ago this paper flung wide the gates off the city to
its darlings, the American Legion, and the boys gathered by the tens of
thousands, and repaid their hosts by conducting a three days’ drunken
orgy, in the course of which they wrecked the lobby of the city’s
palatial hotel.
Kansas City is a packing-house and railroad center, and the head of its
Black Hand is W. T. Kemper, hard-fisted “open-shop” exponent and
manipulator of high finance. To run the board of education he has a
prominent real estate operator, Nichols, with four children, none in the
public schools; a lawyer, Nugent, a little brother to the rich; and
Pinkerton, president of the Gate City Bank. All these gentlemen call
themselves Democrats, I believe; but this makes no difference, because
Kansas City has what they call a bi-partisan school board—one-half its
members to the Democratic party, one-half to the Republicans, and none
to the people. This school board is absolutely autocratic, makes no
reports to anyone, and does not even have an auditor. Its function was
described by one of the teachers—“to buy all the holes in the ground
belonging to the bankers and put schools on them.” I regret that I
cannot give the figures as to what the bankers got, because the lady who
knows, and made the statement, is not willing to take the risk of
publicity.
As manager of their “open-shop” schools this board has engaged a
superintendent by the name of Cammack, at a salary of eight thousand a
year; an aged despot with a second-grade teacher’s certificate and a
very bad temper. When you hear the story of his handling of the teachers
you find it so familiar, that you wonder if you have not already read
this part of the book. I had the same sensation all the time I was
traveling over America; it was like those dreams you have, in which you
know you’ve dreamed all that before!
In Kansas City, as everywhere else, the teachers were unable to live
upon their wages; and here, as everywhere else, the business men had to
“jolly them along,” and persuade them that a great rich city could not
possibly afford to pay a living wage to the teachers of its children.
The women’s clubs took up the problem, and appointed a committee, which
voted that the question was “an intricate, vexatious and dangerous
one”—but it would never do to raise the tax assessment! Fifty-two
teachers had to go to work as telephone girls and in department stores
during the summer, to make up the deficit in their salaries; others were
working as waitresses in the railway hotels. They had borrowed money to
go to summer school, hoping thus to get promotion; now they were in debt
and could not make it up.
So the teachers took up the idea of affiliation with the American
Federation of Teachers; there was a mass meeting, and the president of a
“co-operative” organization of the teachers, supposed to be representing
their interests, got them started at singing, and after they had sung
for a while he let them hear some “hand-picked” speakers; then, just
when everybody was expecting to hear a speech on the subject they were
all interested in, an increase in wages, he had them sing one more
song—and then declared the meeting adjourned! For this service he was
awarded with a five thousand dollar position in the school system of
another city.
Kansas City has a kind of Margaret Haley of its own; she is Mrs. Sarah
Green, president of the Woman’s Trade Union League, and her organization
took up the fight for the teachers’ salaries. A mass-meeting was called,
and Mrs. Green called up the president of the board of education, and
asked permission to distribute announcements of the meeting to the
teachers in the schools; this permission was refused. Then Mrs. Green
asked the superintendent of schools for permission to hold the meeting
in a high school building; this permission also was refused. The meeting
was held outside, and a great many teachers got up the courage to
attend, and in the end they got about half the salary increase they
should have had. The cultured lady-teachers were shocked at the idea of
joining a trade union and identifying themselves with common working
girls. “But,” said Mrs. Green to me, “I know of girls who work in
factories in this city, and don’t even know how to read, who have more
courage than our teachers, and would not submit to the humiliations
which the teachers have to endure.” That is something for
school-teachers, and all other white-collared wage-slaves, to think
seriously about!
Mrs. Green has also made herself a great nuisance to the school
authorities by butting in on debates in the public schools. You see,
they cannot keep the students from wanting to discuss that livest of all
live issues in Kansas City, the open shop. Mr. Cammack and his
supervisors and principals naturally plan to have the opponents of union
labor win these debates; but the students persist in coming to Mrs.
Green, who takes them in off hours and provides them with the facts—with
the result that out of ninety-seven she had trained, only seven have
lost the debates! You can imagine what a terrible thing that is for the
morale of an open-shop city!
In the summer of 1922 there was an epidemic of trachoma in the Kansas
City schools. This is a dreadful eye-disease, which in its later stages
eats out the eye-balls. It is one of the most contagious of known
diseases, and so is a serious matter in schools. In one Kansas City
school a majority of the children were afflicted, but the board didn’t
want anything done about it, because it would interfere with the real
estate business; they would not let the doctors and nurses make the
facts known, so the parents had to take up the agitation. They went
before the school board and protested again and again, but could get
nothing done; the board sent nurses—to forbid the parents of infected
children to discuss the matter! One courageous teacher, Miss Letitia
Cotter, took up the agitation, at peril of her position, and carried it
to the labor unions and the parent-teacher associations. The
superintendent went off on his vacation, and left the assistant
superintendent, who told Miss Cotter that no more public money would be
spent on this matter—“the Red Cross already has spent six hundred
dollars on those dirty rats and wops!” So you see how they love the
people in these open-shop schools!