Some time ago the people of California got tired of being robbed by book companies, and put through a provision for the manufacture of elementary school text-books by the state. All over the United States I found the book men incensed concerning this California procedure. They would present me with pocketfuls of literature, expensive pamphlets demonstrating the futility and extravagance of the California text-book program. I would listen politely, and accept the literature and ship it home, where it still forms a pile upon my shelves; but I do not need to go into it, because, having investigated the California situation, I know how the political machine is occupied to sabotage the public text-book scheme. The former state printer, Richardson, is now our governor, put in office by the Black Hand to starve the schools and build up the jails.
To return to San Francisco: there was an election campaign over the issue of reorganizing the school system, and this became of necessity an anti-Catholic campaign. The Catholics fought vigorously—some three hundred nuns were marched to the polls to cast their votes for the Catholic program, and the archbishop formally granted them absolution for the crime of taking part in politics! Nevertheless, the awakened people of San Francisco had their way. Mr. Addicott was reinstated, and Superintendent Roncovieri and President Gallagher of the school board retired.
San Francisco now has a new board of education. The president of this board is a department-store proprietor and strong Chamber of Commerce man, who admitted that he had completed his scanty education in a parochial school. The grand duchess of the board is the mother-in-law of Congressman Kahn, one of our most ardent militarists, and a close friend of the archbishop’s. The rest of the board consists of the sister-in-law of the mayor’s secretary; a prominent tobacco merchant; a prominent lumber merchant; a labor official who is employed in a bank at a salary of $150 a week, and who sends his children to the parochial schools; and finally, Miss Alice Rose Power of the Catholic church.
This board has imported a new superintendent from New Orleans, and I find a long article in the “Sierra Educational News,” state organ of the school machine, telling what a great educator he is. We shall see in due course how greatness is manufactured by these school machines, and for what purpose it is used. We shall see Superintendent Gwinn working with the gang when they stole the National Education Association away from the teachers; also we shall see him drawing up the “patriotism program” under which the N. E. A. turned its conscience over to the keeping of the American Legion. It is worth noting that he retains from the days of the trombones his deputy superintendent, who at the last election was caught taking eight hundred dollars from the Power Trust, for propaganda among the teachers against the public ownership bill.
CHAPTER XXV
THE UNIVERSITY GANG
We cross San Francisco Bay to Berkeley, and here is a city of sixty thousand people, cut in half by a broad avenue; on the one side live well-to-do commuters, retired army and navy officers, capitalists, and university students and professors; on the other side live shipyard and railroad workers, and servants of the rich. The city, both the rich part and the poor, is completely dominated by a medieval fortress on a hill, which I have called the University of the Black Hand, and which is officially known as the University of California. It has eleven thousand students, a completely intrenched bureaucracy, and a board of regents made up of the worst plutocratic elements in the state. Desiring to show how much he cares for “The Goose-step,” the newly elected governor of the Black Hand has just added to the board the greatest enemy of the public welfare in California, Harry Chandler, publisher and owner of the Los Angeles “Times.”
In 1911 the workers of Berkeley took thought of their own interests, and elected a Socialist clergyman as their mayor. This, of course, was terrible to the plutocracy, and they waged incessant war upon the Socialists, one of their principal agencies being the political science department of their university. You understand that the purpose of “political science” is to maintain the capitalist state; and what better practice for the students than to hold down the working class of their university town?
The head of this department was David P. Barrows, whom I have called the Dean of Imperialism: one of these military figures who make our cause easy by caricaturing his own. I have told the story of his career in “The Goose-step”—how he went to Siberia and directed President Wilson’s private war on the Russian people, and then came home and clamored for the shooting of all the Bolsheviks in America. On the strength of this program the Black Hand made him president of the university; a position he has just quit, because the Black Hand discovered that it needs, not merely a man who is “strong,” but one who is not stupid.
What do you do when you are Dean of Imperialism of a state university, and are set to hold down the local populace? You build up a political machine, precisely like Tammany Hall or any other machine. You pick a university representative to become mayor of the town, and you pick another university representative to run the school board. You have your experts draw up the city charter and all the laws and ordinances, so as to make it possible for you to have your way and for the people not to have their way. You summon your fraternities and put them into politics on the side of their fathers. You vote your students en masse in the city, in spite of the fact that they are not legally entitled to vote there. Your fraternity political leader gets five thousand dollars from the Key Route (street railways), and when a student exposes this fact on a public platform, you see this student mobbed and beaten. You collect campaign funds from the public service corporations and big business grafters in the usual political fashion, and pay them with the promise that when there are strikes you will use the students of the university to break the strikes; and whenever the occasion arises you carry out this promise. You drive from your university every professor who dares to lift his voice against the regime of the Black Hand. You kick out unceremoniously a student who dares to publish a paper reciting the facts about your activities. Such is “political science” in an American state university; such are the lessons which the students of the Black Hand learn in Berkeley, and go back to apply in their home cities and towns.
You might have the idea that at least a university administration would do something in the way of improving the schools of its city; but if so, you would be as naive as the people of Berkeley have been. The university-controlled system of Berkeley turns out precisely the same products as the New York system dominated by “Democratic” Tammany Hall, and the Chicago system dominated by the Thompson “Republican” machine, and the San Francisco system dominated by Banker Fleishhacker and Archbishop Hanna; those products being G, F, P, and R—Graft, Favoritism, Propaganda and Repression.