CHAPTER LXXIV
THE COUNTRY GEESE
We have had glimpses of rural school conditions in the far West. Let us glance at the wheat country. From the point of view of politics and education the Dakotas are a back-yard of Minneapolis and St. Paul, being governed by the railroads and banks and chambers of commerce of these cities. The farmers made a desperate effort to free themselves by their Nonpartisan League, and the story of their ten years’ struggle to control their schools is most illuminating.
The Nonpartisan League was strong in the country districts, while the gang still held the towns; so their legislature put through a measure taking control of city schools away from the state; after which the gang proceeded to dump overboard all city teachers who belonged to the League, or who ventured to speak in its support. “The Reds have taken the schools,” was the cry; and in cases where the Nonpartisan League appointed principals or heads of state institutions, the students were incited to strike against these officers. The Teachers’ Union was forced to disband in Fargo, and in the State Agricultural College a teacher who became secretary of the Teachers’ Union was refused the increase of salary to which she was legally entitled.
By methods such as these the gang managed to hold on in North Dakota; they were sure the political tide would turn, and it did. The Federal Reserve Board “deflated” the farmers, and the price of wheat dropped to less than half the cost of producing it; when I was in North Dakota, in 1922, there were counties of the state in which every farm was being sold for taxes. In four months during 1923 over seventy small banks went to the wall, and two hundred others were in trouble. The Nonpartisan League program included state-owned mills and elevators, and these half-completed enterprises of course were useless. The League was without funds—the bankers saw to that, by calling the loans of farmers who paid their dues. So the gang came back, and they put out MacDonald, the League superintendent of schools—not content with that, they hounded him literally to his death. A friend of his writes me:
Wherever he secured a position, he was followed by his North Dakota enemies. The new superintendent and the new director of vocational training prepared letters and bulletins denouncing him; they sent these to his students and the officers under whom he worked, and this would be continued until he was dismissed. As soon as he would get a new job and they would get him located, they would repeat.
The gang put in as its new superintendent a political woman, Miss Neilson, president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization controlled by the Black Hand, in North Dakota as in Los Angeles. Miss Neilson is not a graduate of any college, normal school or high school; under the law she was ineligible to the position, but the courts very kindly held this law unconstitutional. The uneducated lady now has absolute control of the teachers of North Dakota, and can and does withhold certificates from her political opponents. They have set up a system of “grading” schools, a purely political scheme to strengthen the control of the gang; they have four politicians as “school inspectors,” and the standards on which the grading is done are wholly artificial, having no relationship to merit. If the schools stand in with the gang, the pupils from those schools do not have to pass examinations to enter the higher state institutions, or to secure positions from the gang.
The text-book graft is back again; and also the banker-graft. There are quarter sections of land belonging to the bankers, and these have been left out of the school districts, so that they do not have to pay school taxes. The law requires the banks to pay interest on school money, but the bankers handle that matter by the simple device of naming the school treasurer and keeping the books for him—and incidentally keeping the interest! In the county where my friend Smith was superintendent, the school treasurer was threatened that if he made trouble he would have to pay up his own note at the bank; and when Mr. Smith persisted in making trouble, the banker came in a fury, demanding: “What’s this?”
Mr. Smith told me also about the graft in building jobs—the biggest of all. Mr. Smith had to see to putting up school buildings, and was told to charge as much as the other counties were paying, otherwise the money would not be allowed him. When he refused to do this, they passed a law compelling him to do it! He put up a building 42 by 54, with a full basement, for $3,700; while for the same building other counties were paying from nine to ten thousand dollars. But in spite of such public services, Mr. Smith never had a safe majority in the county—he had against him the bankers’ machine and the bankers’ newspapers, and the vote of the towns, whose people depended for their jobs upon the bankers, and for their ideas upon the bankers’ newspapers. Imagine the political conditions in a community where a man, hoping to get back into the educational field, dares not permit me to relate these incidents in connection with his real name!
These conditions prevail wherever the farmer movement has been active. In South Dakota the Nonpartisan League was never able to carry the state; but it is growing, and the gang has been frantic to stamp it out of the schools. At the Madison State Normal School there were several teachers who made so bold as to declare their sympathy with the League. In 1920 one of these teachers, Mrs. Anna Mae Brady, was unceremoniously kicked out by the president, and a prominent Republican politician stated as the reason her sympathy with the League. But realizing that this wouldn’t look well as a campaign issue, President Higbie discovered that Mrs. Brady had been giving lectures at teachers’ institutes in other counties. Mrs. Brady had been doing this for eight years, and it was a custom of teachers throughout the state. But the president had nothing more to say, and when Mrs. Brady demanded a hearing before the board of regents, they graciously permitted her to come and speak, but professed to know nothing about the matter, and refused to summon President Higbie and permit Mrs. Brady to question him. Another teacher, Miss Alice L. Daly, handed in her resignation in protest, and stated that the political machine of the state, and powerful financial interests outside the state, were running South Dakota education. The answer of President Higbie to this protest was to drop three more teachers who were sympathetic to the League.
Also in Idaho the farmer movement is becoming powerful, and the interests have been hard put to it. In Boise they have a beautiful new high school, with a big auditorium, and the school board had made the rule that under no circumstances was it to be open for political gatherings. But it happened that at the close of the 1922 campaign, the radical candidate for governor secured the big opera house; the gang wished to offer a counter attraction, and there was no hall big enough for their purposes. So the school board met and rescinded their resolution, and the Republican party held a meeting in the high school auditorium, addressed by the Republican governor. Next day the school board met again, and restored the rule forbidding political gatherings in the public schools of Boise! Laws made to order, so to speak!