The Hardin State Bank at Hardin, Mont., has closed its doors. Eight school districts in the county have a total of $74,380.85 in the bank. The heaviest loser is Hardin No. 17 H, which has $23,222.63 in the closed bank, and, besides, has been compelled to cut to the quick to operate this year.
There are now hard times in Montana, and in his 1922 report the superintendent of public instruction tells of the retrenchments and sacrifices which have been necessary to keep the schools going. “In hundreds of districts last year all expenses but teachers’ salaries were eliminated, the parents even donating the fuel and hauling. The teachers caught the spirit of sacrifice, and scores of them gave their services from one to several weeks in order that the children would not be deprived of any more school than necessary.” In this report appears a photograph of a mother who drove a team twenty-three miles a day in order to get her three children to school, and brought with her two younger children whom she could not leave at home; she came forty miles to a teachers’ meeting, so that she might get suggestions as to how to help these children at home. The report tells also of an eighth grade boy walking sixteen miles, and of five families who dug holes in a hill-side near Broadus, and lived there during the school season in order that their children might get instruction!
I am dealing in this book with Big Business; but you will understand that in this lair of the gigantic Anaconda, there are many little snakes hoping some day to become Anacondas, and diligently swallowing all they can. In the report of this state superintendent I find several pages of details about the plundering of the district schools by local business men: every kind of graft you could imagine—sixty dollars a month for transportation to bring the child of one trustee a mile and a half to school; a thirty-dollar pearl necklace for a teacher; trustees and clerks paying themselves all kinds of money on school contracts in violation of law; another trustee who hired his brother-in-law as principal for two hundred dollars a month, his wife as teacher at a hundred dollars a month, and his daughter at ninety-five—and the following year raised the principal’s salary to three hundred dollars, and the wife to a hundred and fifty!
Under such economic conditions it is inevitable that teachers should be terrorized. Here, as in Washington, there are grave-yards of radical teachers scattered everywhere. Certificates are continually refused to teachers who refuse to “take policy,” and on the other hand the State Normal College is freely distributing credits to teachers who carry on propaganda for the Black Hand. The teachers have been completely deprived of control of their own organization. At the Montana State Teachers’ Association convention of 1922, the gang put through strong resolutions against every kind of political liberalism, and the superintendent of schools of Lewistown, who was chairman of the Resolutions Committee, denounced the suggestion that there should be a referendum to give the rank and file of the teachers the right to vote on any question.
I have a letter from another Montana school official, who tells me of four different cases in which he heard prominent educators and lecturers admit the intolerable nature of present conditions in the state—but always ending with the anxious statement: “Of course, you understand that I am not a radical, and have no sympathy with radicalism!” At the summer school of 1921, at Lewistown, Montana, a professor of economics, being asked some questions about “The Brass Check,” took occasion to tell the students of the vast wealth which Upton Sinclair had accumulated out of his credulous followers! Just where this professor got his information I do not know, but any time he wishes he can have the fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of debts which I still have left from selling “The Brass Check” below cost. This same professor discussed a student at the Fergus County High School at Lewistown, who had come with the financial help of the school, but had proved himself unworthy and ungrateful—he had not changed any of the radical ideas which he had brought from his Nonpartisan League home! I cite these anecdotes just to show you the atmosphere which prevails in the class-rooms of the kept educators of the Anaconda.
CHAPTER XXXII
COLORADO CULTURE
We move on to Colorado, where we have not only copper kings, but coal and iron and oil and gold and silver kings—half a dozen dynasties dividing an empire. It would take a large volume to tell the corruption of government in the state of Colorado and the city of Denver; I have given a sketch of it in “The Goose-step.” Suffice it here to say, there is no “invisible government” in this community, the offices and privileges are sold on a curb market. As for education, only taxpayers have a right to vote for school bonds, the banks control the handling of the money, and their politicians spend it.
For a generation the active institution in control was the First National Bank, whose educational agent began his career in Denver as “Fudge” Sommers, clerk of the police department. He specialized in the stealing of school elections; he would have a “bunch of money” at each election, and workers awaiting him with their hands out. As “de gang” would say, “dere ain’t no easier money”; the school elections were entirely unguarded—there was no registration, and the ballot-boxes would be carried to the East Denver High School, and there fixed according to orders. “Fudge” was a Democrat, but at times when his party became progressive, he took his influence and his talents to the Republicans. He grew respectable, and is now the Honorable Elmer S. Sommers, oil magnate, good roads promoter, prominent in the Rotary Club, a society man rich enough to have his own “hooch” parties.
Under such conditions the citizens are helpless. For the most part they do not trouble to vote; now and then they protest, and are taught their place. I talked with a member of a committee which entered objection to the waste of school funds, and threatened to nominate a citizens’ ticket. The answer of the boss was: “You put up your board, and I’ll take my bag of money, and we’ll see how far you get!”
Next to Mr. First National Bank Keeley, the most active agent of the plutocracy in controlling the Denver schools was Mr. Great Western Sugar Company Morey. Mr. Morey was the “Sugar Trust” in our national capital, one of the most notorious of the war profiteers. He built himself a magnificent palace in Denver, facing the lofty Mt. Evans, and with the whole of Cheesman Park for a back-yard; then he died, and Denver has the Morey Junior High School, just as other cities have Washington Schools and Lincoln Schools and Jefferson Schools. We may assume that Mr. Morey dwells happily in a celestial palace, because as a far-seeing business man he provided for his spiritual welfare, being a pillar of the exclusive St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral.