Professional etiquette forbids doctors and lawyers from buying space in the newspapers for advertising purposes, but they are not opposed to columns of fake write-up about the sacrifice they are making to serve the public while serving on the school board, in which to my certain knowledge they take no interest whatever except to get some relative elected to the position of janitor or utility man. The school board will wrangle for weeks over some janitor getting a job, and never pay the slightest attention to the great question of educating the child.... The Anaconda Copper Mining Company has been controlling the members of the school board for years, so as to divert the purchasing of supplies into their particular stores. This corporation has bribed members of the school board and has offered money to some of them to get them to resign, in order to have their men appointed by the county superintendent, who has the appointing of members to fill vacancies. My experience as an instructor in the public schools, and my two years in an executive position handling about a million a year, have led me to the conclusion that there is no public institution in the United States run with more waste and with less regard for the TRUTH than the public school system of the United States. The waste of money is appalling.
I close this story with an illustration of where the money goes. One of the great mining kings of Montana is W. A. Clark, who bought himself into the United States Senate, and was kicked out again because it was proven that his agents had dropped thousand dollar bills over the transoms of the hotel rooms of state legislators. Senator Clark had to get this money back somehow, so he sold the city of Butte a site for the high school, at a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars. But there is no high school on this site, for the reason that the children would have to go through the redlight district to reach the school, and one mother publicly declared that she would burn this school down rather than have the children attend it. After this you will be prepared to learn that ex-Senator Clark’s newspaper, the Butte “Daily Miner,” forever proclaims the sacredness of the schools.
One more illustration of the intense concern of the copper interests for education. You will suspect me of making up this story, because it sounds like a piece of symbolism—it might come straight from a play by Ibsen or Charles Rann Kennedy. The Anaconda discovered a vein of copper immediately underneath the Jefferson School, and has been occupied for several years in undermining the school. Now the walls of the building have begun to crack; but needless to say, the taxpayers are not getting compensation for the ruin of a school building. Nothing has been done about it, because this is an “East Side” school, where only the children of miners attend. When the building collapses, the Anaconda will head the relief list by a subscription of a hundred dollars.
Butte now has a new superintendent, who comes from Columbia University, and writes me that he was appointed as an educator and not as a politician. He tells me that neither he nor the school board would attempt to control outside activities of teachers, and that they are perfectly free to join a union if they wish. I trust they will not fail to act upon this information; and I wish Superintendent Douglass good luck in keeping out of Butte politics!
CHAPTER XXXI
THE LITTLE ANACONDAS
While we are in this mountain country, let us see what is going on throughout the state. The financial agents of the Anaconda, known as the Montana Bankers’ Association, passed a resolution to take charge of the schools; and Mr. W. J. Hannah, who lives at Big Timber, and is a member of the county high school board, also for a dozen years chairman of a rural school board, wrote to their educational committee to ask what they meant by this. In reply they informed him that they intended to appoint teachers, select text-books, and deliver lectures, and thereby inculcate respect for the money-changers of Montana.
Within two years after this action three presidents of banks in Mr. Hannah’s county were appointed as members of the high school board. Says Mr. Hannah: “Not a man among the three possesses any education whatever, nor have they ever evinced any interest whatever in the work of the public schools”—except, as he goes on to explain, to carry on propaganda on behalf of bankers. The high school library has been kept without any of the standard works on history, economics, sociology and ethics, which have any tendency toward democracy in industry or even in politics. None of these ignorant banker board members could possibly have found out for themselves what books to exclude from the library; they must have got from some central organization suggestions causing them to keep from the shelves such historical writings as Draper, Lecky, Buckle and White.
They crowd the pupils with manual training, domestic science and commercial courses; and discovering that basket-ball might be used to divert the minds of the whole community from interest in politics and social reform, they become ardent friends of school athletics. The Nonpartisan League was trying to organize the farmers of Montana, and, says Mr. Hannah: “It is only a year since a mob of high school students, with the full knowledge and tacit approval of this board of banker trustees, broke into a peaceful assemblage of farmers which was being held in the county court house.” They tried to break up the meeting, but did not succeed, and subsequent efforts to have them disciplined were thwarted by these banker trustees. Mr. Hannah continues:
What the bankers are now doing to our own high school in a limited way, they are also doing throughout the state in a much more general and effective way. Their educational program is in full operation. For two or more years they have demanded and secured prominent speaking places at every meeting of school men that is held in the state. Their voice is now heard wherever the subject of education is publicly discussed. Moreover, I read in the public press almost every day of addresses delivered by bankers to high school assemblies; and it is plain to see that it is merely a campaign of propaganda designed for the one purpose of misleading the children concerning the real nature of our banking system.
I have had occasion to argue with big business men concerning this control of school funds by bankers; they never can see anything wrong with it—who is there that should handle money, if not bankers? But I come upon a little item in the “Inter-Mountain Educator,” official organ of the Montana State Teachers’ Association, March, 1923: