THE STEAM ROLLER
I again select California, because it is the nearest, and the easiest
for me to study. We can best know the California machine by following
the adventures of a rebel teacher; so permit me to introduce Mr. Ray E.
Chase, until recently head of a department at the Manual Arts High
School of Los Angeles. Mr. Chase was a man of brains, who refused to
take the orders of the gang; and we shall see what the gang did to him.
In the year 1917 Mr. Chase was chosen by the Los Angeles High School
Teachers’ Association as their legislative representative, to proceed to
the state capital and watch out for the interests of teachers. He
applied to the school board of Los Angeles for leave of absence without
pay, whereupon the board members called him before them, and required
him to submit a complete list of the measures proposed or endorsed by
the Teachers’ Association. Said Mrs. Waters, widow of a bank president
and member of the board: “How could we know but that you meant to
advocate something of which the board would not approve?” But having
heard an outline of the projects, she declared: “I think those are all
harmless.” So they “allowed” Mr. Chase to go—and incidentally invited
him to work for some measures of theirs!
Turn back to our Los Angeles story, and refresh your mind concerning
“Bill 1013” whereby the Better America Federation and its political
crooks tried to cripple the schools of the state. When this bill came up
before the legislature, the teachers’ agents were assured that it would
not affect the schools, so they let it go by; afterwards, the teachers
had to initiate and put through a referendum to repeal this bill, so as
to keep the schools functioning. Mr. Chase was a leader in this
procedure, and earned thereby the deadly enmity of the Black Hand. They
did all they could to drive him out of the school; his principal was
offered promotion by Judge Bordwell, president of the school board, on
condition that he would get rid of Chase and two other “radicals.” It
was during this intrigue that Bordwell asked the question: “Can’t you
get something on their morals?”
Mr. Chase came back to Los Angeles and set to work on a plan to enable
the teachers of the city to exercise control of their Association. At
risk of repetition, let me make it clear that these teachers’
associations are purely voluntary affairs—the teachers’ clubs, or
professional societies, which they try to run in their own interest and
according to their own ideas. Not merely does the gang take this control
away from them; the gang has made it a matter of professional life and
death for a teacher to stand out for the independence of the federation.
When elections are held, principals and superintendents are nominated,
and teachers who oppose their superior’s ambitions are denied promotion,
and sometimes dismissed. Let me remind you of the teacher in Oakland who
refused to vote for Superintendent Hunter’s candidate, and was hounded,
not merely in the schools, but in the business world outside.
It is no easy matter for a common teacher to travel to a convention;
only the high-salaried ones can afford such a luxury. The rules of the
teachers’ associations permit members of one group to send members of
another group as delegates; so when the teachers cannot go, it is
tactfully suggested that a superintendent or a principal would like to
go; and how should a teacher be rude enough to deny credentials to such
a personage? So these personages go; they go fully versed in the
technique of controlling conventions, and the first thing they do is to
enter a caucus, and come out of it with a program of proceedings and a
“slate,” all ready to be “jammed through.”
For three years the independent teachers of Los Angeles worked over a
plan to reorganize the Southern section of the association, taking it
out of the hands of the superintendents and putting it under the control
of the class-room teachers. The project came up in December, 1920, at a
convention whose chairman was Dr. E. C. Moore, director of the Southern
branch of the University of California. We met this gentleman as
superintendent of schools in Los Angeles seventeen years ago, getting
himself into trouble by cutting out General Otis’s “open shop”
propaganda from the program of the National Education Association. Since
then Dr. Moore has learned discretion, and become a thoroughly tame
servant of the Black Hand. At this convention he ruled out the report of
the reorganization committee, on the technical ground that he had not
had thirty days’ notice of the matter. Mind you, this committee was
reporting according to orders given at the last year’s convention, where
it had made a tentative report; Dr. Moore had known all about it at that
time, but he now shut the committee off, and appointed a new committee
to “work over” the constitution. This took another year, and resulted in
a document under which the association is a closed corporation, entirely
controlled by the supervising element in the schools.
Simultaneously with all this, and practically duplicating it, was Mr.
Chase’s experience with the State Council of Education, the executive
body of all these California teachers’ associations. At its meeting in
Oakland, April, 1918, Mr. Chase brought up a project to bring these
associations under control of the classroom teachers. He had a detailed
and carefully worked out program to reorganize the associations, and
provide for their democratic control from the floor of the conventions.
Mr. Chase swept the assemblage with this project, and was made chairman
of a committee to perfect it. His ill health prevented his activity for
two years; but finally the project was got into shape, and was brought
before local bodies, and approved by every one that voted on it. In
December, 1920, Mr. Chase took it to the state council; but the gang
leaders, knowing what was coming, deliberately kept the convention busy
all day, and called for “new business” late at night, when everybody had
gone home except the administrative crowd. Out of thirty present, there
was only one class-room teacher! They meant of course, to vote down the
project, and then have the kept press flash the news over the state. So
Mr. Chase forbore to introduce it; he never will introduce it now,
because his story came to a sudden end. The Black Hand in Los Angeles
succeeded in “getting” him, according to the formula suggested by Judge
Bordwell some years earlier. The story is a complicated and rather
ghastly one; suffice it to say that they put him in a position where he
could not defend himself without dragging in some other people. As he
was unwilling to do that, he is out of the schools, and the gang leaders
are secure in their grip upon the teachers’ associations of Southern
California.
But California is our most reactionary state, you will say. Very well:
then let us skip to Wisconsin, which is our most progressive state. Let
us see what has happened to the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association.
There is one significant detail for you to get clear at the outset: In
state after state we find the people taking over their political
government, but they cannot get hold of their schools. The school
machine is intrenched behind entanglements of “red tape”; the
supervising force has “pull,” sometimes it is protected by civil
service—anyhow, the machine is tough, and hangs on until the
reactionaries come back. We shall see that happening in North Dakota, in
Minnesota, in Wisconsin. Senator LaFollette carried his state last time
by the biggest plurality ever known in America; but Mrs. LaFollette was
barred from speaking in country school-houses! The state educational
machine, the county machines, and most of the city machines in Wisconsin
are still in the hands of the gang.
The situation in Milwaukee is especially interesting. Before the war
Milwaukee was under the eye of Victor Berger, while the schools were
under the eye of Victor Berger’s wife; so there was one American city
with no graft in its school affairs. But during the war the gang came
back, and they still have the schools—Mrs. Berger was for years the lone
Socialist member, and the board is run by the so-called “Voters’
League,” which consists of exactly seven men, the chiefs of the Black
Hand of Wisconsin. These seven picked the candidates for the school
board at every election, and the newspapers printed the list
conspicuously, and told the people to “cut this out and take it to the
polls”; and, like good, patriotic Americans, they did so.
In the effort to bludgeon the Teachers’ Federation, this Voters’ League
proposed a bill making it unlawful for public employes to organize. But
this bill failed, and the teachers of Milwaukee have stayed organized,
and what is more, they have kept the control of their own organization.
They went over the heads of their reactionary school board, and appealed
to a progressive state legislature, and got the school taxes in
Milwaukee conditioned upon the payment of a minimum salary of $1,500 to
grade teachers, running up to $2,400. Imagine a school board unable to
terrify its teachers by threats of salary reduction, and you will
understand the fury with which the educational gang regards the
Milwaukee Teachers’ Federation!
Not content with getting their own salaries increased, these Milwaukee
teachers contributed $2,400 to the publicity campaign of the state
association, to get salary increases for the other teachers. They
lobbied through the state legislature the best kindergarten law in the
United States. They proposed legislation for tenure, and drafted the
best law on this subject. In short, the Milwaukee Local of the Wisconsin
Teachers’ Association is Bolshevism, raw, red and bloody, trampling the
holy ground of American education.[J]
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Footnote J:
From the “Clarion,” Milwaukee, November 18, 1922:
“EDUCATIONAL BOLSHIVISM (sic)
“Milwaukee last week entertained the literati of Wisconsin’s leading
educationalists. The convention, designed to be creative in works of
harmony, good will and a spirit of constructive development, resulted
in a wild and riotous effort to determine the status of the caste
system with regard to our state educators. Topping it all, the head of
the Milwaukee’s Teachers Association emits a theory so rank in its
bolshevistic nature as to rock the very foundation of learning and to
place in extreme jeopardy the principles and ideals of our system of
state education.” (Note: This “theory” was that teachers are the
equals of superintendents.)
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In order to get clear what follows, you must understand that outside
Milwaukee, the gang still controls the teachers’ organizations, as it
does in California and all the other states. We are now going to watch
the gang leaders of Wisconsin at their job of holding down the Milwaukee
local.
The constitution of the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association provided that
representation at conventions should be on the basis of one delegate for
every fifty members or major fraction of fifty. This provision was as
explicit as the English language could make it, and it had been
thoroughly threshed out, and understood by everyone. The Milwaukee local
had 1,347 paid members, and on that basis their representation had been
fixed at twenty-seven. But now the gang set up the claim that small
communities should have a chance to send representatives to the
convention; let it be provided that communities having less than fifty
teachers might have one delegate for every twenty-six members. To this
the Milwaukee teachers answered: Very well: but if the basis of
representation is to be one delegate for every twenty-six members, then
let the large cities also have one representative for every twenty-six
members, instead of one for every fifty. But you see, that did not fit
the purpose of the gang, which wanted to hold the Milwaukee teachers
down to one in fifty, while giving double representation to the country
districts, which the gang had under its thumb.
In February of 1922 a meeting of the executive committee of the state
association was held, and it was resolved to permit the forming of
locals of the association in small communities, these locals to consist
of twenty-six members or more, the understanding being that the
convention, to be held in November, would determine whether or not it
approved this procedure. All over the state delegates were chosen under
this arrangement, and forty-six of them came to the convention. The
scheme of the gang was to get these country delegates seated, overwhelm
the twenty-seven delegates from Milwaukee, and put through an
arrangement to perpetuate that semi-disfranchisement of the
“Bolsheviks.”
The “floor leader” who put through the job for the gang was Mr. Carroll
G. Pearse, then president of the Milwaukee State Normal School, and now
a book agent. I point out to you in passing that he is one of the big
chiefs of the national school machine. You remember, I have referred to
this as our educational Tammany Hall; and if you thought I was just
calling bad names, read this account of the “steam-roller” at the 1922
convention of the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association, and see if Tammany
could teach anything to the school-masters!
On the evening before the convention there was a meeting of the
credentials committee, which voted that the forty-six delegates,
representing locals having less than fifty members, were to be admitted
in violation of the constitution. And next day the president of the
convention placed his chair in such a way that he could not see the
Milwaukee representatives when they rose to demand recognition; he
called for a viva voce vote on the report of the credentials committee,
and declared that this report had carried. The Milwaukee teachers, of
course, demanded a roll-call; but the president refused to order it. One
after another he recognized the representatives of the supervising
force, who orated to the convention amid storms of protest.
Here was a large gathering of people, and no one had any means of
knowing which were delegates and which were not; yet the president
refused to determine who was voting on this motion or on that. He
refused even to rule on the point of order, that he should determine who
had votes! He drove his “steam-roller” ahead, rushing through one motion
after another. The assembly adopted an amendment to the constitution,
admitting delegates from locals with twenty-six members or more. The
assembly elected a normal school president as president of the state
association for the next year. The assembly passed a resolution, offered
by Mr. Pearse, validating and legalizing all proceedings up to that
time—and all this without a single roll-call, without any record
whatsoever as to what persons had voted for these various resolutions,
what mob had altered the state constitution and disfranchised the
Milwaukee teachers!
Having a night to think it over, the gang must have realized that this
story would look just a little “raw” when told in “The Goslings.” So
Floor-leader Pearse appeared next morning with a resolution excluding
those representatives whose rights to seats had been questioned on the
day before. But all the motions which had been passed by the shouts of
these representatives were permitted to stand! The disfranchised
delegates were directed to leave the hall; then they were reseated—the
whole transaction occupying five minutes! Finally a superintendent of
schools was elected secretary of the association, at a salary of
fifty-five hundred dollars, and the public school system of the state of
Wisconsin was safe for another year! Take this to any ward-healer or
henchman of your local political machine, and see if he can “beat it!”