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:

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:

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.