In the East Side High School of Denver there were two teachers who made so bold as to talk about these matters, and also to concern themselves with the civil rights of miners. Of the six demands of the strikers, five were for the enforcement of the laws of the state; and a pupil in one of the high school classes asked Miss Ellen A. Kennan whether this was true. An embarrassing moment for a teacher—with sons and daughters of coal operators in the class! Miss Kennan answered the question truthfully, and forthwith the president of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Mr. Rockefeller’s concern which was breaking the strike, came to the school to demand an explanation!
Miss Kennan was one of the prize teachers of the Denver school system, a Greek and Latin scholar and a prominent lecturer at women’s clubs; she had been in the system for seventeen years. Her friend, Gertrude Nafe, had been in for seven years, and during the strike had the difficult experience of teaching the son of General Chase, the combination dentist and militia officer who was setting aside the Constitution in the coal country and supervising the Ludlow massacre. Miss Nafe also answered her pupils’ questions truthfully, and so the general and his employers made up their minds to get these two ladies out of the schools.
It took them four years to do it, and they had to increase the number of school board members, packing it with their henchmen. Even so, it was only the war that gave them their chance. They drew up an oath for the teachers to take, pledging loyalty to the Constitution and the government, and “to promote by precept and example obedience to laws and constituted authorities.” Miss Kennan and Miss Nafe cheerfully signed the first part of this pledge, but they found themselves in difficulties when it came to the second part. How can one pledge obedience to laws and constituted authorities, when constituted authorities are defying the laws? Consider the 1914 strike, in which the miners had tried to compel the constituted authorities to enforce the laws—and had failed! The teachers had explained this to their pupils, and now could not stultify themselves. Their friends begged them to sign, the pledge being ”nothing but a joke”—the teachers all so regarded it; but these two ladies took the matter seriously, and struck out the word “obedience.”
So they were slated to be driven from the system. They demanded a hearing before the board, and were permitted to make a brief statement explaining their reverence for their revolutionary ancestors, who had defied the constituted authorities when these authorities defied human rights. The principal of the school asked to be heard, and said: “I have never wavered in my faith in their value to the schools, in my faith in their services to the coming citizens of this republic.” But the board turned them out, and for the past five years the children of Denver have been taught by some teachers who take their oath to be a joke.
Time passed, and there came another strike of the Colorado mine-slaves, and another curious test of Colorado education. I have before me an issue of a weekly paper published by the striking miners, the Walsenburg “Independent,” January 3, 1922. It bears across the top in large letters the caption, “This paper was censored by the Colorado Rangers.” Then follows a news item to the effect that Professor S. M. Andrews, school superintendent of Walsenburg, and also of Huerfano County, had addressed a teachers’ meeting in Denver, and praised the rangers and their martial law. That much I learn from the paper; then comes the statement: “Censor cut out report of his speech as printed in the ‘Rocky Mountain News,’ December 30th.” Of course I might hunt up this issue of the “Rocky Mountain News” and tell you what Professor Andrews said, but I don’t think it worth the bother. The point is clear: a superintendent of schools, supposedly a public official, drawing two salaries from a coal mining community, goes up to the state capital, and before a convention of teachers defends the state police in their abrogation of state and federal constitutions during a strike; and the commanding officer of these gunmen in uniform forbids the miners’ newspaper to communicate to the miners what their own superintendent of schools has said about them in their own state capital!
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE HOMESTEAD OF THE FREE
We continue East and cross “bleeding Kansas,” where John Brown fought, and the old settlers came in their covered wagons, singing:
/* We cross the prairie as of old The Pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free. */
Now in this homestead of the free the organizers of the Nonpartisan League are beaten, tarred and feathered, jailed or deported, for trying to address the farmers. Alexander Howat is thrown into jail for six months for advising coal miners to strike, and William Allen White, editor of the Emporia “Gazette,” is arrested for putting in his window a card stating that he sympathizes with the strikers. The principal organ of culture in the state is the Kansas City “Star,” founded by a brave and sincere liberal, and now turned into an organ of screaming bigotry and hate. Two years ago this paper flung wide the gates off the city to its darlings, the American Legion, and the boys gathered by the tens of thousands, and repaid their hosts by conducting a three days’ drunken orgy, in the course of which they wrecked the lobby of the city’s palatial hotel.
Kansas City is a packing-house and railroad center, and the head of its Black Hand is W. T. Kemper, hard-fisted “open-shop” exponent and manipulator of high finance. To run the board of education he has a prominent real estate operator, Nichols, with four children, none in the public schools; a lawyer, Nugent, a little brother to the rich; and Pinkerton, president of the Gate City Bank. All these gentlemen call themselves Democrats, I believe; but this makes no difference, because Kansas City has what they call a bi-partisan school board—one-half its members to the Democratic party, one-half to the Republicans, and none to the people. This school board is absolutely autocratic, makes no reports to anyone, and does not even have an auditor. Its function was described by one of the teachers—“to buy all the holes in the ground belonging to the bankers and put schools on them.” I regret that I cannot give the figures as to what the bankers got, because the lady who knows, and made the statement, is not willing to take the risk of publicity.