CHAPTER XXII
THE INCORPORATE TAX-DODGING CREATURES
It is important to note that a great part of the opposition to graft and propaganda and repression in the Chicago schools has come from classroom teachers. That is the real significance of a struggle which has been going on for many years, over the question of the teachers organizing and being affiliated with labor unions. Eight years ago Big Business put in as president of the school board a gentleman named Jacob Loeb, who proceeded to enforce a resolution forbidding teachers to belong to unions. Sixty-eight teachers were dismissed, of whom thirty-eight were officers or active members of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. So this federation was forced to withdraw from affiliation with labor, and is still withdrawn.
Mr. Loeb was so satisfactory to the plutocracy that first a Democratic and then a Republican administration appointed him. A Hebrew workers’ union was induced to support Mr. Loeb’s candidacy by the statement that the Catholic Federation was opposed to it; but at this time Roger Sullivan, the Democratic Catholic boss, was secretly supporting the reappointment of Loeb by Mayor Thompson, the Republican boss! Mayor Thompson afterwards stated that Mr. Loeb cried in his office and begged for the reappointment. Anyhow, the Chicago teachers fought the “Loeb rule,” as it was called, and the unions backed them. So the Loeb rule has fallen into disuse, and Chicago is one city in which the teachers run their own affairs.
But, of course, the teachers are powerless to clean out the school system; it would be Bolshevism and Sovietism if they were to try. The teachers are mere employes, and the principals and superintendents are their “superiors”—this in spite of the fact that to be a grade teacher in Chicago you have to have educational qualifications, while the friends of politicians find it easy to pass the examinations for principalships.
In a city where $10 is not safe anywhere, most of the attention of the teachers naturally has to be devoted to the getting of a living wage. Throughout this book you will find stories of teachers in revolt over this question, so let me say once for all that the rise in prices which cut the salaries of teachers to less than half, was not confined to Los Angeles and New York; it was a universal condition. The teachers in Chicago showed that between 1897 and 1919, the increase in the cost of living had been 349 per cent, so, in spite of the raises they had won, their salaries had been cut squarely in half; they had lost a dollar a day in buying power from their 1897 salaries!
Yet the grafters were fertile in devices to keep the teachers from getting more money. Years ago, under the regime of Superintendent Cooley, they established a fake salary schedule; that is, they had one schedule on paper and another which they actually paid. They would grant increases, and then take them back; they would adopt schedules, and then suspend their operation; they would require examinations for admission to the higher salaries, and then pass but very few, and burn the papers in a great hurry. An investigation by the Teachers’ Federation showed that only sixty-two out of a possible twenty-six hundred were getting the maximum salary! They called this scheme the “merit system,” and it is still in use in many of our schools—the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association being a clearing-house for such bright ideas.
Understand, there was a thousand dollar maximum, and the teachers had been trying for ten years to get it, in vain. And now somebody worked out a new arrangement; they were to get a raise if they got five points of credit in five outside courses of study. This was supposed to take three years—and keep them waiting meantime! But Margaret Haley discovered a loop-hole, an institute at which the teachers could take five courses in one year. The board had intended to change that regulation, but the teachers beat them to it; they rushed to the institute and registered for five courses at once. The teachers regarded this as a great lark; they swarmed into the place, and studied till late every night. The authorities pretended to be out of application blanks; but the Teachers’ Federation had some printed in a hurry!
Sixteen hundred teachers thus got in, and this broke the back of Superintendent Cooley’s scheme. He had assured the big business men of the city that he could hold down the salaries, but now he had a pain in the head and stayed in Europe; when he came back, he was made president of D. C. Heath & Co., one of the big school-book publishers. After that, the Commercial Club of Chicago made him its “educational commissioner,” and for five years paid him a salary to study the training of wage-slaves in Europe, so that he might come back and take charge of the “continuation schools” of the city. Make note, please that this gentleman was a past president of the National Education Association; we shall meet these “great educators” one by one in their home districts, and observe just what their greatness consists in.
I have mentioned how Margaret Haley made the corporations pay their school taxes. This happened in 1900—there was a shortage in the school funds, and the board of education went so far as to take away from the teachers money which had already been paid to them. The income of the schools was supposed to be derived from taxes; and Margaret Haley discovered that there were no assessments on franchise valuations being levied against corporations in Chicago. They were not even filing schedules, as under the law they were required to do. So the Chicago Teachers’ Federation set to work to bring mandamus proceedings against five public service corporations, and after three years of agitation and legal controversy, these five corporations paid six hundred thousand dollars in one year—of which nearly half went to the schools. Somebody composed a poem on the subject:
/* Mandamus proceedings were brought by the teachers Against the incorporate, tax-dodging creatures; “No, no,” said the ladies, “you cannot flim-flam us, We’ll keep up the fighting though every man damn us.” */