The answer to this question is No; and if you ask the reason, it is the Chicago “Tribune.” Turn to page 270 of “The Brass Check,” and read the story of how the “Tribune” robbed the school children of enormous sums. This paper, and also the “Daily News,” have their buildings on school land; and they got leases at absurdly low rentals, the leases extending for ninety-nine years, with no provision for revaluation during the entire period. In order to put this job over, the “Tribune” had got its own attorney appointed on the school board!

The affair created a tremendous scandal, and during the administration of Mayor Dunne there were some school board members not under Big Business control, and these attempted to have the leases declared invalid; whereupon the “Tribune” and the “News” started a crusade of slander against the school board and against Mayor Dunne, who appointed the school board. The “Tribune” calls itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper,” and is undoubtedly the most powerful newspaper in the Middle West. The “Daily News” is the most powerful evening paper; and the two of them, according to William Marion Reedy, “rallied to their support all the corrupt and vicious element of the Chicago slums, likewise the forces that could be controlled by the street railways and other public service corporations.” They elected a mayor who was their tool, and he, in defiance of law, turned some school board members out of office, and the courts upheld the leases! Here, you see, are two bands of highwaymen, operating under the cloak of “patriotism” and “hundred per cent Americanism,” and robbing the school children of Chicago of sums beyond estimate. Every politician and office-holder in the city knows that, and follows this high example; and so it comes about that $10 is not safe anywhere in Chicago.

The first place to which I went was Margaret Haley’s office. She gave me a chair, and started to tell me the news, but the telephone rang; it rang every few minutes during our chat, and I listened, and little by little this scene became unreal—it wasn’t a business woman’s office in Chicago, it was an act from one of those old-fashioned “muck-raking” plays which used to be written by Charles Klein and George Broadhurst and others, twenty years or so ago. You couldn’t produce such plays in America today, you would be sent to jail for “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” In these plays the hero, an upright young politician, or maybe a newspaper man, would be hunting a band of grafters, and tied up in a tangle of plots and counter-plots. You would see him in his office, with breathless messengers running in; or at the telephone in swift conversations, giving orders and thwarting the moves of his enemies.

I had my note-book and pencil ready, and it occurred to me that you might be interested to hear two or three minutes of the conversation which goes on in the office of the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, in these days of “normalcy” and “hundred per cent Americanism” triumphant. So I wrote a little scene from a play, a regular thrilling melodrama, with plots and counterplots, betrayals and raids and sudden surprises, grafters getting away with their loot and grand juries’ representatives bursting in upon them—all the stock stage material. But alas, when I brought it to Margaret Haley to read, I discovered that she had no idea she was dramatic, and didn’t like it; also, the particular bit of melodrama to which I had been witness had never been brought home to her, and her connection with it could not be revealed without pointing to certain very precious sources of information. And so my stage scene had to be “cut,” and you will have to learn about Chicago school graft from plain narrative prose.

The public schools of Chicago still have some land which the grafters have not stolen. There is a tract of one square mile on the outskirts of the city, and in 1921 a bill was introduced in the state legislature to authorize the school board to sell it to the grafters. The Teachers’ Federation protested, and received in reply a letter from Mr. Bither, attorney for the school board, saying that the expenses of holding this land for the schools were such that if the teachers insisted upon its being held they must be prepared to have their salaries cut five hundred thousand dollars! The business representative of the teachers investigated and ascertained that the cost of holding this land was literally and absolutely nothing; if any money had been paid it had been paid illegally. So Mr. Bither’s proposition came to this: the teachers must stand by and let the grafters rob the schools, or else the teachers themselves would be robbed!

Instead of bowing to this threat, the teachers appealed to the public; they demonstrated that the figures presented to the mayor by Mr. Bither, showing the money spent for running the schools and for teachers’ salaries, had been juggled. Mr. Bither had overstated the amount paid for teachers’ salaries by $868,000 and understated the amount paid for administrative salaries by $314,000. When he had wanted a big appropriation from the legislature, he had presented to this legislature tables showing that the teachers’ salaries were very low; but when he had wanted to keep the teachers from getting this money, he had presented to the mayor tables showing that their salaries were higher.

All this, of course, led the teachers to go thoroughly into the expenditure of school funds. Reports began to come to the federation from one source after another. The legislature had appropriated thirteen million dollars, for the schools, and the school board was spending it in a hurry, so that the business men would get it instead of the teachers. School principals were called on the telephone and compelled to order quantities of stuff—office furniture, chairs, desks, moving pictures, telephones, pianos, rugs, phonographs. A pamphlet issued by the Chicago Teachers’ Federation showed that the rate of increase of appropriations for “incidentals” in 1921 was ten times the rate of increase of the total appropriations for teachers’ salaries in 1921.

Then came the news of strange goings on among the “engineers,” the school custodians. It was charged that the vice-president of the school board had got increases in salaries for the engineers and they had generously paid to him the three months’ back pay included in the measure. The engineers came to the Masonic Temple to pay this money—between $75,000 and $125,000. Every man presented the exact amount, and they checked him up carefully. And later on they had a banquet, and presented with fulsome speeches a magnificent silver service. An amusing feature of this story is that the chief of police of Chicago furnished two “front-office men” to sit and guard the sums of money which the engineers brought in. You have to take every precaution, in a city where $10 is not safe anywhere!

CHAPTER XXI
CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE

I went away from Chicago in May; and coming back in June, on my way home, I discovered that this Chicago melodrama is a continuous performance. A new act was on, and the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation Was in the midst of another whirlwind. The city was on the point of getting a new president of the school board, and he was worse than the old one, if such a thing were possible. He was a physician, Dr. John Dill Robertson, formerly head of the Bennett Medical College, which had been exposed in the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” February 7th, 1914. Margaret Haley had had the article reproduced photographically, with its headlines: “High School Credentials for Sale. Illustration of Irregular Methods by which Commercially Conducted Medical Colleges Admit Students Contrary to Law.” The article told how a student had applied to Dr. Robertson’s college, presenting credits for a year and a half of high school work, and the registrar of the college got him a certificate supposed to represent a full four years’ high-school course. They got this signed by a county school superintendent in Wisconsin, after the applicant had passed an examination for which the registrar furnished him both the questions and the answers! A copy of this article was mailed to every member of the city council of Chicago—but Dr. Robertson was confirmed by this body just the same!