MILLERS AND MILITARISM
In order to make a consecutive story, I have shown what Big Business has
done in the way of Graft in Minneapolis. Let us now complete our view by
taking up Propaganda and Repression. During the war there was formed a
“Public Safety Committee,” a lynching society of the Black Hand. One of
the first objects of their attention was the school board—with Lynn
Thompson daring to defend a teacher who belonged to the I. W. W.! He was
a fine teacher, and there was no other charge against him—but he had to
go.
There was the usual fight over salary increase, and the teachers were
forming a union. The president of the Citizens’ Alliance, a former head
of a strike-breaking agency named Briggs, set out to “smooth them down,”
and gave a dinner to the teachers’ officers and leaders, about sixty of
them, at a “swell” club. There was an association of the teachers,
controlling their pension fund, and Mr. Briggs attended a meeting of
this, and pleaded with them “like a Methodist revivalist, with tears in
his eyes,” not to be so wicked as to join a union. He had several
teacher-lobbyists to help him in this campaign—and one of them got a
fine job in the state university as his reward. Another got up a
“Teachers’ League,” one of those “yellow” unions which the gang
controls. The teachers were asking five hundred dollars raise, and this
representative went before the board and said they would take three
hundred; after which he was made, an assistant principal, with a three
thousand dollar salary! It is interesting to note that when the Black
Hand was raising campaign funds to drive Comrade Thompson from the
school board, one of the charges named in their secret circulars was
that he had opposed promotion for this man!
The militarists are making a desperate struggle to keep their hold on
the schools in this city of the millers. I thought I was back home in
Los Angeles when I learned how at one of the general meetings of the
Parent-Teachers’ Association they sprang a proposition to endorse
military training for the children. There was no time for consideration
or debate; they shoved it through without most of the people realizing
what was happening; and next morning the kept newspapers triumphantly
announced this result as representing some tens of thousands of parents
and teachers!
Next came a proposition before the board to cut out night schools and
the Americanization program, on the ground that these cost too much
money. The Socialist carpenter moved that instead they should cut out
the military training; and he demanded a public hearing on the
proposition. The board set a time for the hearing, and then began it
earlier, hoping to rush it through before the opponents of militarism
got in. But that was easy for a soap-boxer who has learned to speak at
eight meetings in one day; he held all eight meetings right there before
the board, and kept things going until the regular time which had been
set for the discussion!
It proved to be a lively session. The Reverend Shutter, pastor of the
Church of the Redeemer—oh, magnificent irony!—wrote a letter in defense
of militarism, and pointed out how the army was needed for the putting
down of strikes. The congressman for the Black Hand liked this so well
that he put it into the Congressional Record, and it was sent out under
the frank of the government. The editor of the Minneapolis “Labor
Review” stated that he had heard the wife of a school board member,
taking part in a debate at a women’s club, state that “we need soldiers
to put the Socialists down.” This was practically the same thing as the
clergyman had said, but for some reason the militarists took offense,
and the editor was challenged to name the woman—which he did.
The climax came when a Congregational clergyman by the name of Stafford
spoke in opposition to military training. He was lieutenant and chaplain
in a medical regiment of the Officers’ Reserve Corps; so here was a
first-class scandal. The members of this corps held a meeting and
expelled him from their mess, and demanded that he surrender his
commission. The commanding officer of his regiment demanded that he
apologize and recant, and when he refused, preferred formal charges
against him for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” The army martinets set
up the contention that members of the Officers’ Reserve Corps and of the
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps are part of the army, and are under
military discipline at all times, and it is a breach of discipline for
any member of any unit to oppose military training. It is pleasant to be
able to record that the War Department refused to sustain this extreme
doctrine.
I have told in “The Goose-step” of the elaborate system of spying which
the Black Hand maintained at the University of Minnesota, located in
Minneapolis. They did the very same in the schools; they got out a
questionnaire on militarism, and when one teacher omitted to answer
about Socialism and labor unions, the fact was broadcasted in the kept
newspapers. They sent a spy to inspect the text-books—including
annotations written in the teachers’ own copies. One teacher told me of
this, and how her principal had refused explanation of the incident.
They tested students on Socialism, the I. W. W., etc., for the purpose
of spying on the parents of these children. One high school teacher
thought it proper that her pupils should know the meaning of such words
before they answered questions; she advised them to go to a Socialist
meeting and hear the Socialist arguments, and she was summoned by the
principal and told that she would be discharged if she repeated this
offense. Another teacher was censured for advising a student to read
“The Jungle.”
The spies were especially successful in the case of W. R. Ball,
“director of citizenship” in the Minneapolis schools. Mr. Ball had the
idea that democracy really means something, and should be applied in
every-day life; still worse, he belonged to the American Federation of
Teachers. The Citizens’ Alliance had a so-called “American Committee,”
and this committee employed two spies, bearing the hundred per cent
names of Olsen and Kunze, who collected a mass of gossip concerning Mr.
Ball’s utterances to his pupils. For example, he had referred his
advanced students to John Fiske’s “Critical Period of American History”;
in this work a chapter dealing with the period prior to the adoption of
the Constitution is entitled “Drifting Toward Anarchy.” So the spies
reported that Mr. Ball had advised his students to read a Socialist book
entitled “On the Road to Anarchy.” They also introduced a statement
charging disloyal teaching, signed by a well-known saloon keeper; and on
the witness stand before the board of education, this gentleman was
unable to remember anything in the statement, and finally admitted that
the paper had been handed to him to sign by Spy Olsen.
Twenty-four principals and teachers, co-workers with Mr. Ball, appeared
to testify to the value of his work, and a committee of professors of
the state university, including a dean of the Graduate School and head
of the history department, certified to the value of the pamphlets Mr.
Ball had got out for his students. But Mr. Ball, in his statement to the
board of education, confessed to holding such ideas as “that a large
number of workers under the present capitalistic system, were getting
wages too low to support their families with the necessities of life.”
Also: “We defined a radical as a man who went to the roots of things and
traced cause to effect, and was necessarily a deep thinker, and a friend
to justice and righteousness.” The Minneapolis board of education
considered that this was equivalent to a plea of guilty, and so they
drove Mr. Ball from the Minneapolis schools.
You will be amused also to hear the story of how the Black Hand of this
city put a detective agency upon the trail of Comrade Thompson, and what
they found. The report came in that he was a plumber, French descent,
member Holy Rosary Catholic Church, short, thick-set, dark complexion,
could neither read nor write the English language, and expressed himself
with great difficulty on the platform. Members of the Citizens’ Alliance
who had heard Lynn Thompson speaking at eight meetings per day, told the
detective agency that the details didn’t fit; they had been shadowing
the wrong Thompson!
It is sad to have to report that after six years of devoted service to
the city, Lynn Thompson and Mrs. T. F. Kinney were defeated for
re-election to the Minneapolis school board in 1923. The teachers
supported them solidly, and they were able to show the voters how they
had saved the city more than a million dollars. But the Black Hand was
out to put down Socialism, and they did it in the usual way—with their
money. The contractors raised a campaign fund; Mr. Purdy wrote to the
vice-president of the First National Bank, pointing out the perils of
radicalism and appealing for support. The club women turned out with
their automobiles—and the wives of workingmen did not turn out, and that
tells the story.
Out of ninety thousand votes the Big Business ticket won by four
thousand majority—and at the head of the board was the Citizens’
Alliance candidate, a man by the name of Gould. It has since been
revealed by a senatorial investigation that this man was holding a
clerical position in one of the departments at the state capital,
drawing a salary of four hundred dollars a month from the state, while
doing the work of the so-called “Sound Government League,” an
organization of the Black Hand formed for the purpose of evading the
corrupt practices law of the state. This league had spent half a million
dollars in order to re-elect the candidate of the Black Hand as governor
of Minnesota; and now its secret agent, Gould, is on the school board of
the city, doing everything in his power to overcome the accomplishments
of Lynn Thompson and Mrs. Kinney.
What does this mean for the teachers? I have before me a letter from a
Minneapolis teacher, who has ventured to speak out against school
autocracy. He explains that he has not been able to send me data,
because he has been loaded with a double amount of work, as punishment
for his opinions. I dare not tell you what this work is, because that
might lead to the teacher’s being recognized. He tells me of the
struggle of the teachers’ organizations, and the plan which they are now
agitating—to be permitted to experiment with a school without a
principal. He tells me also how the high schools are on a “six-hour day”
plan, against which the teachers are in opposition. Says my friend:
One man, an athlete and debater at college said to me: “I think the
plan is a failure.” “Will you say so when you are asked?” I inquired.
“I think the administration will not look kindly on anyone who does,”
he replied. “But do you, a man, mean to tell me that you will not say
what you think?” His rejoinder was that he did not want to be thought
a “knocker.” What can be expected when such things prevail? Before the
war it was considered uneducation to make large classes: the big men
now demand “economy,” and force election of administrators pledged to
guarantee it. These administrators, instead of saying to the people:
“We are doing a reactionary thing,” declare: “We are now, by new
schemes of efficiency, getting one teacher to do the work of two; and
the teachers like it—as witness So-and-so!”