It was left to the Civic Club, an independent organization, to force an investigation, which has shown substitution of inferior materials, meaning tens of thousands of dollars stolen from the people of the city. Some new buildings have been condemned as unsafe, and the work ordered done over. And note, please, that Hunter is on the building committee, and had full knowledge of what his gang was doing. The presidents of the various women’s clubs of Oakland unite in a statement: “We are told of fire hazards, faulty roof construction, and other grave dangers menacing the lives of our children. And yet we are told that no crime has been committed!” I entreat you to remember these things when, later on in this book, you are reading about Hunter of Oakland, and his career of glory at the annual conventions of the National Education Association.
You will not need to be told that a Black Hand such as this rules firmly the thinking of the people of Oakland. How they do it was narrated at a meeting of the Better America Federation at the Oakland Hotel, where Mr. Levenson, manager of the biggest department-store, stated that the police under his direction had undertaken to crush street speaking, and had crushed it. Also the school department under Fred M. Hunter was put to work, and the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, author of “Vanishing Landmarks,” was brought to Oakland, and all the teachers in the school system were compelled by official order to listen while he denounced the referendum and woman’s suffrage.
Then came Woodworth Clum, of the Better America Federation, to tell the high school children that a proposition to amend the Constitution of the United States is “akin to treason.” The Black Hand shipped up from Los Angeles eleven thousand copies of Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” the substance being that America is calling her school children to mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. The Black Hand gave them a practical demonstration of this program by mobbing the editor of the Oakland “Free Press,” who was too freely exposing graft.
It was proposed to distribute Mr. Clum’s pamphlet to every pupil in the high schools, but the Central Labor Council made a protest to the state board of education, and the state superintendent, acting by vote of the board, forbade the distribution. Here comes an interesting test of the Black Hand. The thing they are in business to protect is “law and order”; their one purpose in getting the school children into their military classes is that the children may learn discipline and subordination to authority. Now the state superintendent of education is the superior of the Oakland superintendent, and under the law it was his right and his duty to forbid the distribution of propaganda in the schools. In issuing his order to Hunter, he was acting by vote of the state board; and what did Hunter do about it? Why, he went ahead and distributed the pamphlets, and the Better America Federation proclaimed him a hero throughout the state!
Every once in a while a hero like this arises: first Ole Hanson of Seattle, then Cal Coolidge of Massachusetts, then President Atwood of Clark University, who leaped into the limelight upon the face of Scott Nearing. I invite you once more not to forget Fred M. Hunter, Oakland superintendent of schools. There is a strong movement under way to establish a new cabinet position, a secretary of education, and Hunter has his eye on this goal, and is bending every effort toward it. How beautifully he would fit in the cabinet of Cal Coolidge, strike-breaking hero of Massachusetts! What a demonstration of national unity—from Boston Bay to San Francisco Bay, one country, one flag, and one goose-step! Black Hands across the continent!
CHAPTER XXVII
THE ROMEO AND JULIET STUNT
We move north to Portland, which is the harbor of the lumber country, a relatively old city with an aristocracy of merchant princes, like Baltimore or Boston. Ten years ago Oregon had a strong progressive movement, it was the pioneer in direct legislation. Today the old guard rules, and Portland is in the grip of a Black Hand which imports its ideas direct from Los Angeles. Curiously enough, they had a strike of the longshoremen and seamen, at the same time as Los Angeles; and here also the I. W. W. attacked the very basis of American civic life by closing up the boot-legging dives and dumping the liquor into the gutters. The insurrection was put down by the same methods as in Los Angeles—the throwing of hundreds of men into jail and holding them incommunicado without warrant or charge.
A number of Portland’s old and ineffably haughty families got their wealth by stealing the school lands which the government had given to the people of the state; now other families are on the way to becoming haughty upon the basis of real estate manipulations of the school board, and the sale of school supplies at double prices. The boss of the Oregon political machine is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National Bank; for the past ten years he has kept a political agent to run the state legislature. The machine sent down to Los Angeles for copies of Woodworth’s Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” for distribution in Oregon; and from these dragon’s teeth resulted a whole crop of legislative vermin—a bill requiring every school teacher to take an oath of loyalty, a bill forbidding aliens to teach in the schools; a bill barring any teacher who “either publicly or privately engages in destructive or undermining criticism of our government”; a bill requiring “the teaching of the Constitution in all public and private schools”—meaning, of course, the teaching of the Constitution as a bulwark of special privilege.
As the directing staff of the public schools of Portland, Mr. Mills has selected a group of educators about whom I have yet to hear anything good. To call them uneducated educators would not tell you much; so come with me and make the acquaintance of Mr. D. A. Grout, superintendent of schools for a quarter of a million people. Mr. Grout is clammy and cold in his personal dealings, but in literary composition and oratory he expands and reveals himself. He takes a parental attitude towards his teachers, gathering them in large assemblies to instruct and inspire them. He composes verses, and has the teachers learn and recite these verses before him. He tells them stories with moral lessons, and then prints the stories in the official “School Bulletin.” One of these stories had to do with the philosophy of an old Negro, who was accustomed to say on all occasions: “Make the most of life today, ’caze you don’t know what may come along tomorrow.” A group of teachers declared to me that in telling the story Mr. Grout repeated this formula eight times; but I suspect these teachers of inaccuracy—because, as Mr. Grout publishes the story in the “School Bulletin,” September 6, 1919, he repeats it only three times, and then varies it for another three times as follows: “Make the most of life today, ’caze we do know what may come along tomorrow.”
Two or three years ago Mr. Grout went East to attend a convention of the National Education Association. His expenses were paid by the city; he has done considerable traveling at the city’s expense—$4,995.08 in the past three years. Superintendents do this traveling upon the theory that they will meet other great educators and bring home new ideas and inspirations. “We do get so tired,” said one of Mr. Grout’s flock, in telling me about it. “We do so crave a little bit of enthusiasm, something to make us think it’s worth while to go on with the old, dead routine!”