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:

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:

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!