While we are in this Southwestern country, with its new rich and its new poor, let us take time to consider the great Invisible Empire, which is so rapidly taking over the control of our political life. Wherever you travel in the West nowadays, people consider it necessary to ask whether you belong; so I answer that I have been invited to join, but have not availed myself of the opportunity. Many klansmen will read this book, and discover that some of the things they want are the things I want; but I venture to tell them that they will not get these things through the Klan, whose leaders got rich in a hurry, and are now hand in glove with Wall Street. A great many Klan members are former Socialists, who have got tired of waiting for something to happen; they will wait a while longer, and then the class struggle will begin inside the Klan, and its membership will decide whether Americanism means wage slavery and no more.
For the present I record that Socialist school teachers are being hounded by the Klan, in places as far apart as Oklahoma and Indiana. How intelligent the conduct of the organization is, you may judge from the fact that the school board of the large city of Dallas, Texas, has been formally condemned by the Klan, and sentenced to extinction at the next election. The local Klan potentate wrote officially to the school board in substance as follows: “We have been informed that the wife of the manager of the lunch room at the Forest Avenue High School has told her husband that if he joins the Ku Klux Klan, she will leave him. Now we beg to inform you that the Ku Klux Klan is a one hundred per cent Christian and American organization, and it resents such statements; and we expect the school board to see that they are not repeated and that proper punishment is meted out to persons in the school that make such remarks.” The Dallas school board committed the offense of filing this letter without action, and so it is slated to go.
CHAPTER LXI
THE RIOT DEPARTMENT
Next, our military men present themselves as educators; nothing would please them more than to take over our schools entirely, and make a hundred thousand little West Points. They have made much progress, and Big Business cheers them on, and puts up the money for their propaganda. We have seen the N. E. A. turning over its conscience to the American Legion, which may be described as the Riot Department of the plutocracy. In city after city the chambers of commerce and merchants and manufacturers have built palatial club-houses for the Legion; they are subsidizing its worst activities, and keeping its inciters of violence upon their secret payrolls. They are working out a program to have a representative of the Legion as one of the orators at every school commencement. All reactionaries understand that to get the school children into uniform and drill them is the one sure way to save us from modern thought. Hear, for example, General Pershing, orating at a banquet tendered to him by the Chamber of Commerce and its Riot Department in San Diego. According to the Los Angeles “Times”:
More than 500 persons whistled, applauded and pounded the tables when the commander of the United States Army in war and in peace paid his compliments to the Reds. “Military training with its teaching of submission to the will of authority is one of the best methods of teaching young and old the sacredness and the power of the Constitution of the United States,” said Gen. Pershing. “I firmly believe that a sane program of military training for every young man is a great immunity against the idle, insidious and foolish propaganda of the I. W. W., the parlor Bolsheviks and all other shades of Reds of which there are too many right now.”
Thus the “Times”; and if you think the schools are not drinking in this poison, I refer you to “School Life,” the official publication of the United States Bureau of Education, December, 1921. The front page of this magazine opens with an article by Commissioner Tigert, self-appointed slaughterer of Socialists. The title is “Educational Aspects of the American Legion’s Convention.” Let me make clear to you before you go on that this is that same hideous orgy in Kansas City, to which I have previously referred. You may find a sketch of it at the end of my novel, “They Call Me Carpenter,” and a detailed account published in the “Nation” for November 23, 1921. After you have read these, read how the convention is made to appear to the school children. The headlines continue:
Presence of International Figures Made Occasion a Memorable Event. School Children Impress General Diaz. Program of Americanization Enthusiastically Indorsed. Policies and Principles of Legion. Program for American Education Week.
Then follows a list of the “international figures” who were present—Marshal Foch, Admiral Beatty, General Diaz, General Jacques, General Pershing, Vice-president Coolidge,[Coolidge,] etc. “Gigantic parade of 40,000 heroes of the Great War, the banquet given in honor of the distinguished gentlemen,” etc. “Thousands of school children lined along the boulevards to see Foch.” And here is the message of the pious Catholic general to America: “You boys, when you grow up, must work. You little girls, when you grow up, must remember to pray.”
They are getting the little children into the Boy Scout movement, which is the first step. They get them into uniforms and march them, and teach them the military ideal of obedience. The Boy Scouts become more and more warlike every hour; and the men who run the movement become more warlike in their attitude toward the school authorities. Says Mr. O. G. Wood, quoted in our Butte story:
One Scout Master in Butte by the name of Owen used to come before the school board and tell them what to do in regard to allowing the public schools for Scout meetings. He fixed the dates and no change was made. He threatened to have any member of the board beaten at the next election if an objection was hinted at.