Once more the firm of God, Mammon and Company; and note how the schools are taken in as junior partners. For twenty years Denver had a most efficient school superintendent, a former president of the National Education Association by the name of Gove. I call him efficient, meaning that he served his masters, by keeping out of the system all revolutionary and dangerous new ideas, such as kindergartens, manual training and directed play. The progressive women’s clubs waged war upon him, and at the end of the twenty years succeeded in getting rid of him. And where do you think he went? Why, he became confidential lobbyist for the Great Western Sugar Company in our national capital! A congressional investigating committee raided some offices and got hold of the letters of his employers, and it was disclosed that Gove had been “interviewing” congressmen in their home districts; he had been instructed not to name his employers, and not to itemize his expense accounts!
The president of the Denver school board is a young aristocrat by the name of Hallett, whose qualification for spending the money of the schools was described to me by one of his friends: “He never earned a dollar in his life.” His father was a millionaire federal judge, whose tyrannies and fearful temper made his name one of terror to labor unions and would-be reformers in Colorado. Young Mr. Hallett also is a socially prominent vestryman of the exclusive St. John’s Cathedral, and he helped to import the very expensive Dean Brown from the effete East. Mr. Hallett was in a delicate position—he was both vestryman of the cathedral and president of the school board, and the cathedral owned twenty-six lots which it wanted to sell to the city as a school site. It must have been hard for Mr. Hallett to make up his mind where his duty lay, but apparently he decided that all eternity meant more to him than his term as president of the school board; his vestry sold the lots to his school board for a hundred thousand dollars, which was two or three times what they were worth.
In May, 1923, Mr. Hallett came up for re-election, together with Mr. Taylor, seventy-four-year-old vestryman of the cathedral, who serves the mining kings as an engineer; and Mr. Schenck, seventy-three years old, a former store-keeper at coal-mines for Mr. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. (The other board members are a lumber dealer, sixty-seven years old, a nice old lady of seventy, and an able-bodied contractor, active in politics.)
There was an opposition ticket put up by the liberals, and a second put up by labor, and a third put up by the Denver “Post.” In order that you may appreciate this story, I explain that the “Post” is a wealthy and powerful newspaper, which began in the old “shirt-sleeve” days, when newspapers in mining camps lived by blackmail. The “Post” has seen no reason for mending either its morals or its manners; its two proprietors, Tammen and Bonfils, are former gamblers and saloon keepers, whom I have told about in “The Brass Check.” Tammen, a frank and delightful personality, tells at Chamber of Commerce meetings how he would toss a dollar in the air, and if it stuck to the ceiling it belonged to the boss, and if it came down again it belonged to him. The Chamber of Commerce whoops with delight at this anecdote.
The “Post” now broke loose against President Lucius Hallett and his board. For a month or two the murders, highway robberies and sexual scandals of Colorado were shoved off the front page, and the red head-lines of the paper were given up to the crimes of the school board. The “Post” charged that the board members had permitted corrupt deals with members of the Real Estate Exchange and the Chamber of Commerce, and that the taxpayers had been robbed of great sums through shady land purchases. It went into details concerning the “favoritism” of the school authorities for the American Book Company. It showed also how the school board was favoring the children of the rich, and published pictures of the luxurious high schools in the rich neighborhoods and the overcrowded old fire-traps in the slum districts. It charged that the school board was maintaining the worst political machine in Denver’s history; the teachers were in fear for their jobs, the principals were political henchmen, and propaganda literature for the school board was distributed among the children to be taken to their homes. A Denver edition of “The Goslings” in serial form!
Why this sudden concern of the “Post” for the welfare of the schools? I do not know that. But I know that President Hallett published the statement that the cause of the attack was the school board’s refusal to make a contract with a coal company owned by the “Post.” I know also that the “Post” did not deny this charge of Mr. Hallett’s, or refer to it. An intimate friend of Mr. Tammen’s has asked me to meet him when next I am in Denver; then I shall ask him about it, and I have no doubt he will live up to his reputation as a “good sport.” Every now and then the “Post” has entered into campaigns against the stealing of city franchises, and when Tammen’s friends have asked him why so much fuss, he has answered with his cheerful laugh, “Because we didn’t get in on the graft.”
Election day came and passed, and Mr. Hallett and his friends were declared re-elected. The grand jury took up the charges of the “Post” concerning real estate graft, and it was shown that one prominent “realtor,” or a dummy of his firm, had bought a parcel of land for several thousand dollars, and a few days later sold it to the school board for so many more thousands that it was considered dishonest even in Denver. Another “realtor,” recently a member of the city council, had bought land and sold it to the board for twice the price—and had charged a commission at both ends besides. He had used dummies—an office-boy, also his own son—and on this technicality the courts let him off. You will form an idea of the state of Colorado culture when I tell you that I consulted the Denver telephone directory, and found listed therein approximately 450 of these “realtors”—and to balance this, book-stores to the number of sixteen!
In the face of such obstacles, a few devoted souls labor to save the children of the city. The schools have been shockingly overcrowded—with classes in cook-rooms, in hallways, in basements, in rooms without light or air. And, of course, the school board has made to the teachers the usual explanations why the city could not pay them a living wage. The high school teachers called a mass meeting, intending to affiliate with labor; whereupon the school authorities rushed to head them off—by bringing in a famous orator of the National Education Association, and then by granting the raise in wages! When the president of the Denver Labor College asked for the right to use school rooms for classes, the board with seven representatives of business and not one of labor turned him down in horror; if they allowed a working-class school, they would have to allow a capitalist school! Let the labor college allow the board to appoint the instructors, and then they might consider the matter. “Won’t you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly!
For ten years the progressives have pleaded with the school board to permit school buildings to be used by the citizens for public meetings—but in vain. As I write, they are winning a long struggle to have some attention paid to the health of the school children; the “interests” denounce this as Bolshevism—though just why it is Bolshevism to take care of the children’s bodies, when it is not Bolshevism to take care of their minds, is not explained. There is one devoted friend of the children in Denver, Judge Lindsey of the Juvenile Court; all over the United States he has spoken to great gatherings in the schools—but not in Denver! He tells me that he hopes to get back this fall; if so, it will be the first time in ten years that he has spoken in a Denver school! The officials have told him quite frankly that “business” would not permit it.[[F]]