INTRODUCING COMRADE THOMPSON
We move north to Minneapolis, headquarters of the milling industry, and
financial center of a rich iron and lumber territory. Here we find the
beginnings of hope for America; organized labor has broken away from its
old leadership and gone vigorously into politics, while the farmers,
rejecting the propaganda of their exploiters, have struck hands with the
labor unions. The result has been the Farmer-Labor party, which has
elected both United States senators from Minnesota, and will probably
take over the state administration at the next election. It controls the
city council of Minneapolis, and is fighting to get the schools away
from the Black Hand.
The labor-smashing society of Minneapolis for twenty years has been the
Citizens’ Alliance, with a secret service department and a program of
terror. They have gone after the schools, as everything else; they have
had their friends on the board—contractors’ friends and real estate
friends, and open-shop friends. During the war the contractors put
forward their lawyer, the product of a military school, and the
secretary of the Citizens’ Alliance announced that this Mr. Purdy was to
run the school board. They borrowed the automobiles of the rich, and
elected him by the votes of the cooks and chambermaids and chauffeurs of
Minneapolis. As colleague on the board they gave him a Mr. Jepson,
president of an artificial limb company, who, needless to say, was
getting rich out of the war. While he was a member of the state senate,
he had written letters to his agents, ordering that all packages should
be shipped to him personally, because the express companies were so kind
as to handle his personal packages free. I had an amusing experience in
connection with this artificial limb gentleman. I sent the manuscript to
a certain high-up Minneapolis educator, who thinks I am too extreme in
my distrust of the plutocracy. He promised to correct my errors; and
concerning this Jepson story he wrote:
This is a dim and mysterious tale. What frank does a state legislator
have? A postage allowance perhaps, that all the boys use up in some
way, whether for stamps or cigars. Or do you mean that the American
Express Company carried his packages free because he was a legislator?
I have never before heard this story, and I am not enough interested
to look it up. But you had better get a more accurate version before
you publish it. I know Jepson, and he does not strike me as just that
kind of a scoundrel.
Well, I was more interested than my correspondent, and I looked it up. I
have before me a poster, measuring 25 inches by 39, with letters at the
top 1-5/8 inches in height:
/* DISHONEST IN BUSINESS IS THIS THE KIND OF STATE SENATOR WE WANT TO
REPRESENT THE 44TH DISTRICT? */
The rest of the poster is occupied by six facsimile letters, bearing the
signature of Lowell E. Jepson, president of the Winkley Artificial Limb
Company, Jepson Bros., Sole Owners. One letter reads as follows:
Now until you receive full instructions, send everything by U. S.
express to Hon. L. E. Jepson, 106 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis,
Minn., but always in a box so that contents may not easily be seen,
but never use a leg box in so doing. If you should have to send us a
leg for changes you had better get a small soap or cracker box and
bend it up and put it in that way.
Another letter explains that inasmuch as Mr. Jepson represents the city
of Minneapolis in the state senate, the railways give him free
transportation, and he will be very glad to visit his correspondent to
fit him with two artificial legs. Another letter laments the fact that
“The U. S. express has gone back on me, so I had to pay the 30 cents;
after this send by Gt. Northern and it will come all right to me all
right.” And still another letter is addressed to an agent who is trying
to sell an artificial leg to an old soldier. In order to get a cash
payment at once, the agent is instructed to make the old soldier think
that if he does not pay cash there will be a long delay. “Make them
think that if something is not paid, dozens will get ahead of them.”
This poster was used by Mr. Jepson’s political opponents in the effort
to keep him from being re-elected to the state senate. It is interesting
to hear that Mr. Jepson applied for an injunction, and the courts
suppressed the whole edition of these posters. Such a comfortable thing
it is to have your own courts!
Against conditions such as this the Socialists and labor men of
Minneapolis are carrying on a fight for the schools. Big Business owns
not merely the courts and the government, it owns the university, and
almost all the churches and newspapers. The labor people started a
newspaper of their own, but it seems to have gotten away from them, and
they have to go to the public with their bare voices. A Socialist school
board member told me that in the campaign of 1921, he spoke at a noon
meeting in front of some factory every day for two months, then at a
meeting in the afternoon, and six times every evening. He was a member
of the board while I was in Minneapolis, and took me into office and
showed me the insides.
Permit me to introduce you to Lynn Thompson, plain American carpenter,
organizer for the Trades and Labor Assembly of Minneapolis, and for
thirteen years an active Socialist soap-boxer. Recently it became his
duty to call a strike against the Wonderland Theatre; some judge issued
an injunction against the strike, and Comrade Thompson gave me the text
thereof, containing many paragraphs, and covering everything a human
being could do in connection with a theater and its proprietor. Said
Comrade Thompson: “I would violate that injunction if I were to wake up
in the middle of the night and dislike him.” Nevertheless, he posted the
theatre as unfair, and he and four other men were sentenced to pay two
hundred and fifty dollars each. Refusing to pay, they were sent to jail
on a six months’ sentence, and actually served sixtyfive days of it—a
period of great relief for the representatives of Big Business on the
school board!
We are told that we must elect business men to office, because they
alone know about business. Here in Minneapolis was a school board
composed of business men exclusively, and the schools were reported to
be three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt, and there was no
money for current expenses. The newly elected carpenter asked these
business men, and they didn’t know how matters stood; neither did the
board’s employes know. For years the board had been spending the money
of the schools on guess-work. They got their appropriations at one time
of the year, and figured their expenses at another time, and never could
tell how much they needed or how much they had. Professor Swenson, of
the state university, who happened to be on the school board, had to go
before the legislature and make a guess as to what amount of bond issue
was necessary to cover the deficit; he guessed half a million, and came
out pretty near right. To make perfect the humor of this situation, an
association of business men had got the legislature to pass a strenuous
law, providing jail sentences for public officials who allowed
overdrafts of public funds. They knew at the time that the board of
education was “in the hole,” as were several other departments; and they
made no provision to cover the deficits. They went ahead and passed a
law, which they knew must be broken every day, if the government were to
go on!
A carpenter is not supposed to know much about school-books, but Comrade
Thompson, with his colleague Mrs. Kinney, wife of a railroad conductor,
did what he could to find out. There had been no system in the
book-rooms, and it was often not possible for the principals to know
what books were stored in the schools; some of them followed the plan of
ordering new books every term, and burning the surplus stock of old
books. That was fine for the book companies, which naturally resented
Comrade Thompson’s “butting in.”
The American Book Company had been represented for a couple of decades
by a famous book man, an old soldier by the name of Major Clancy. I ask
you to make particular note of this old gentleman; we shall meet him in
several places, and in the end find him high up in the councils of the
National Education Association. Major Clancy has only one arm, and this
is a picturesque appurtenance of a military title—until you learn that
the other arm was lost in a threshing machine! Citizens who were
investigating school book graft in Minneapolis noticed that when they
brought an indictment against one of the board members, the first thing
he did was to make a beeline for Major Clancy, who got him a lawyer and
saw to the putting up of his bail bonds. It was discovered that another
member of the board, also a member of the normal school board, was
attorney for the American Book Company. Text-books had been published in
huge quantities, and had stayed on the shelves untouched, until the
board had resolved that they were out of date, whereupon the companies
had taken them back for a few cents a copy.
Naturally, Lynn Thompson was interested in building. The average cost of
school buildings in the United States is 37 cents a cubic foot. This
labor agitator and walking delegate, under bonds for violating a court
injunction, insisted upon the standardizing of all specifications, and
contracts were let in Minneapolis at a cost of 21.7 cents. Nor were
these cheap buildings—on the contrary, they were using brick that had
been adjudged too high in price for the schools in Des Moines. On that
same day the school board of Boston let a contract for a big building at
48.9 cents. It is worth noting that every step in this economy campaign
was fought by a big contractor who was on the school board.
There was a question of building three high schools, and three brick
concerns bid $33 per thousand; it was manifest that they were in
collusion. The price was eight dollars too high, and Thompson moved that
they should buy in the open market for $24.10 per thousand. Two weeks
later they got an offer at this price from one of the concerns which had
bid $33—the same concern and the same bricks! And then came the question
of sites. One man having a pull with the board asked $60,000 for a site;
Thompson decided that it was worth $28,000 and the board offered him
$40,000. He went to the courts, and the jury said $28,000, and the
Supreme Court sustained that valuation. “For these efforts,” said
Comrade Thompson, “I got some abuse—and sixty-five days in jail.” It is
interesting to note that this $28,000 site was a trackage site, and the
purchase was made necessary because a previous board had given away
trackage to an automobile company.
As a Socialist, of course, Comrade Thompson’s hobby is to have the
people do their own work, omitting the grafters. He would make a motion
that school buildings should be put up by the city; and he would get one
vote beside his own—that of the railroad conductor’s wife. The school
board had an electric repair shop, and this persisted in making bids on
repair jobs which beat all the contractors—to the contractors’ great
annoyance. There was one job on which the city’s men saved the city
three thousand dollars, or thirty-five per cent of the total cost. The
school board admitted that these workers were responsible and did
first-class work; nevertheless, the board passed a motion that the
repair shop should make no more bids.
On December 20, 1921, bids were opened for a large job, and it was found
that the Sterling Electrical Company had bid $22,688, while the school
shop bid $4,300 less. The board awarded the contract to the Sterlings,
by a vote of five to two—the two, needless to say, being Thompson and
Kinney. Thompson got a taxpayer to go before a court and ask an
injunction, and Mr. Purdy, representative of the Black Hand on the
school board, appeared for his colleagues, and admitted that the shop
had proved to be reliable and efficient, but argued that the interest of
the private contractors must be conserved! The court sustained the
majority of the board, and the city of Minneapolis lost $4,300 to the
grafters.[G] It is interesting to note that the judge who rendered the
decision is that same Judge Bardwell who kept Comrade Thompson and four
other labor men in jail for sixty-five days for violating one of his
injunctions!
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Footnote G:
Guy Alexander vs. A. P. Ortquest, Nels Juel, Lowell Jepson, et al.;
injunction denied Jan. 25, 1923.
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