As manager of their “open-shop” schools this board has engaged a superintendent by the name of Cammack, at a salary of eight thousand a year; an aged despot with a second-grade teacher’s certificate and a very bad temper. When you hear the story of his handling of the teachers you find it so familiar, that you wonder if you have not already read this part of the book. I had the same sensation all the time I was traveling over America; it was like those dreams you have, in which you know you’ve dreamed all that before!
In Kansas City, as everywhere else, the teachers were unable to live upon their wages; and here, as everywhere else, the business men had to “jolly them along,” and persuade them that a great rich city could not possibly afford to pay a living wage to the teachers of its children. The women’s clubs took up the problem, and appointed a committee, which voted that the question was “an intricate, vexatious and dangerous one”—but it would never do to raise the tax assessment! Fifty-two teachers had to go to work as telephone girls and in department stores during the summer, to make up the deficit in their salaries; others were working as waitresses in the railway hotels. They had borrowed money to go to summer school, hoping thus to get promotion; now they were in debt and could not make it up.
So the teachers took up the idea of affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers; there was a mass meeting, and the president of a “co-operative” organization of the teachers, supposed to be representing their interests, got them started at singing, and after they had sung for a while he let them hear some “hand-picked” speakers; then, just when everybody was expecting to hear a speech on the subject they were all interested in, an increase in wages, he had them sing one more song—and then declared the meeting adjourned! For this service he was awarded with a five thousand dollar position in the school system of another city.
Kansas City has a kind of Margaret Haley of its own; she is Mrs. Sarah Green, president of the Woman’s Trade Union League, and her organization took up the fight for the teachers’ salaries. A mass-meeting was called, and Mrs. Green called up the president of the board of education, and asked permission to distribute announcements of the meeting to the teachers in the schools; this permission was refused. Then Mrs. Green asked the superintendent of schools for permission to hold the meeting in a high school building; this permission also was refused. The meeting was held outside, and a great many teachers got up the courage to attend, and in the end they got about half the salary increase they should have had. The cultured lady-teachers were shocked at the idea of joining a trade union and identifying themselves with common working girls. “But,” said Mrs. Green to me, “I know of girls who work in factories in this city, and don’t even know how to read, who have more courage than our teachers, and would not submit to the humiliations which the teachers have to endure.” That is something for school-teachers, and all other white-collared wage-slaves, to think seriously about!
Mrs. Green has also made herself a great nuisance to the school authorities by butting in on debates in the public schools. You see, they cannot keep the students from wanting to discuss that livest of all live issues in Kansas City, the open shop. Mr. Cammack and his supervisors and principals naturally plan to have the opponents of union labor win these debates; but the students persist in coming to Mrs. Green, who takes them in off hours and provides them with the facts—with the result that out of ninety-seven she had trained, only seven have lost the debates! You can imagine what a terrible thing that is for the morale of an open-shop city!
In the summer of 1922 there was an epidemic of trachoma in the Kansas City schools. This is a dreadful eye-disease, which in its later stages eats out the eye-balls. It is one of the most contagious of known diseases, and so is a serious matter in schools. In one Kansas City school a majority of the children were afflicted, but the board didn’t want anything done about it, because it would interfere with the real estate business; they would not let the doctors and nurses make the facts known, so the parents had to take up the agitation. They went before the school board and protested again and again, but could get nothing done; the board sent nurses—to forbid the parents of infected children to discuss the matter! One courageous teacher, Miss Letitia Cotter, took up the agitation, at peril of her position, and carried it to the labor unions and the parent-teacher associations. The superintendent went off on his vacation, and left the assistant superintendent, who told Miss Cotter that no more public money would be spent on this matter—“the Red Cross already has spent six hundred dollars on those dirty rats and wops!” So you see how they love the people in these open-shop schools!
CHAPTER XXXV
IS A TEACHER A CITIZEN?
We continue East to St. Louis, another city where God and Mammon have combined for the exploitation of the children. There is no city in which the Catholics are stronger, nor any in which the two political parties are more completely in the hands of the open-shoppers and labor exploiters. Up to last year the two parties had a gentleman’s agreement by which each party nominated for the school board only half as many candidates as there were places to be filled. The result was no competition for school board memberships on election day. The Democrats inevitably elected their candidates and the Republicans theirs; and since the nominating conventions were under the complete domination of political bosses, these bosses in effect named the school board members.
Recently the people made an especial effort to eliminate one gang member, by the name of Murphy. They kept him off the Democratic ticket, whereupon the Republicans nominated him, both the gangs voted for him, and he went in for another six years. These school board members are uneducated men of the ward-leader, campaign-manager type; at least three of them, I am assured, have never been through the grade schools. A prominent citizen of St. Louis wrote me in 1922: “We have men on our board of education who are ignorant and vicious and without character whatsoever.” Another citizen of St. Louis writes in 1923:
There is no such thing as an honest election in St. Louis. The ballots are changed by the political gangsters, who are the election officials at all the polls. I visited a large number of the polls at the last school election, and in some found only one individual sober; some were lying with head on the table, dead to the world, others maudlin. The large mass of the people are criminally negligent toward their civic duties—they do not vote, and this makes it all the easier for the ward-heelers. This is for your private information, for it would work me much harm here in my position if anything of this appeared over my signature.