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]

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!”