The rest of the poster is occupied by six facsimile letters, bearing the signature of Lowell E. Jepson, president of the Winkley Artificial Limb Company, Jepson Bros., Sole Owners. One letter reads as follows:
Now until you receive full instructions, send everything by U. S. express to Hon. L. E. Jepson, 106 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn., but always in a box so that contents may not easily be seen, but never use a leg box in so doing. If you should have to send us a leg for changes you had better get a small soap or cracker box and bend it up and put it in that way.
Another letter explains that inasmuch as Mr. Jepson represents the city of Minneapolis in the state senate, the railways give him free transportation, and he will be very glad to visit his correspondent to fit him with two artificial legs. Another letter laments the fact that “The U. S. express has gone back on me, so I had to pay the 30 cents; after this send by Gt. Northern and it will come all right to me all right.” And still another letter is addressed to an agent who is trying to sell an artificial leg to an old soldier. In order to get a cash payment at once, the agent is instructed to make the old soldier think that if he does not pay cash there will be a long delay. “Make them think that if something is not paid, dozens will get ahead of them.”
This poster was used by Mr. Jepson’s political opponents in the effort to keep him from being re-elected to the state senate. It is interesting to hear that Mr. Jepson applied for an injunction, and the courts suppressed the whole edition of these posters. Such a comfortable thing it is to have your own courts!
Against conditions such as this the Socialists and labor men of Minneapolis are carrying on a fight for the schools. Big Business owns not merely the courts and the government, it owns the university, and almost all the churches and newspapers. The labor people started a newspaper of their own, but it seems to have gotten away from them, and they have to go to the public with their bare voices. A Socialist school board member told me that in the campaign of 1921, he spoke at a noon meeting in front of some factory every day for two months, then at a meeting in the afternoon, and six times every evening. He was a member of the board while I was in Minneapolis, and took me into office and showed me the insides.
Permit me to introduce you to Lynn Thompson, plain American carpenter, organizer for the Trades and Labor Assembly of Minneapolis, and for thirteen years an active Socialist soap-boxer. Recently it became his duty to call a strike against the Wonderland Theatre; some judge issued an injunction against the strike, and Comrade Thompson gave me the text thereof, containing many paragraphs, and covering everything a human being could do in connection with a theater and its proprietor. Said Comrade Thompson: “I would violate that injunction if I were to wake up in the middle of the night and dislike him.” Nevertheless, he posted the theatre as unfair, and he and four other men were sentenced to pay two hundred and fifty dollars each. Refusing to pay, they were sent to jail on a six months’ sentence, and actually served sixtyfive days of it—a period of great relief for the representatives of Big Business on the school board!
We are told that we must elect business men to office, because they alone know about business. Here in Minneapolis was a school board composed of business men exclusively, and the schools were reported to be three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt, and there was no money for current expenses. The newly elected carpenter asked these business men, and they didn’t know how matters stood; neither did the board’s employes know. For years the board had been spending the money of the schools on guess-work. They got their appropriations at one time of the year, and figured their expenses at another time, and never could tell how much they needed or how much they had. Professor Swenson, of the state university, who happened to be on the school board, had to go before the legislature and make a guess as to what amount of bond issue was necessary to cover the deficit; he guessed half a million, and came out pretty near right. To make perfect the humor of this situation, an association of business men had got the legislature to pass a strenuous law, providing jail sentences for public officials who allowed overdrafts of public funds. They knew at the time that the board of education was “in the hole,” as were several other departments; and they made no provision to cover the deficits. They went ahead and passed a law, which they knew must be broken every day, if the government were to go on!
A carpenter is not supposed to know much about school-books, but Comrade Thompson, with his colleague Mrs. Kinney, wife of a railroad conductor, did what he could to find out. There had been no system in the book-rooms, and it was often not possible for the principals to know what books were stored in the schools; some of them followed the plan of ordering new books every term, and burning the surplus stock of old books. That was fine for the book companies, which naturally resented Comrade Thompson’s “butting in.”
The American Book Company had been represented for a couple of decades by a famous book man, an old soldier by the name of Major Clancy. I ask you to make particular note of this old gentleman; we shall meet him in several places, and in the end find him high up in the councils of the National Education Association. Major Clancy has only one arm, and this is a picturesque appurtenance of a military title—until you learn that the other arm was lost in a threshing machine! Citizens who were investigating school book graft in Minneapolis noticed that when they brought an indictment against one of the board members, the first thing he did was to make a beeline for Major Clancy, who got him a lawyer and saw to the putting up of his bail bonds. It was discovered that another member of the board, also a member of the normal school board, was attorney for the American Book Company. Text-books had been published in huge quantities, and had stayed on the shelves untouched, until the board had resolved that they were out of date, whereupon the companies had taken them back for a few cents a copy.
Naturally, Lynn Thompson was interested in building. The average cost of school buildings in the United States is 37 cents a cubic foot. This labor agitator and walking delegate, under bonds for violating a court injunction, insisted upon the standardizing of all specifications, and contracts were let in Minneapolis at a cost of 21.7 cents. Nor were these cheap buildings—on the contrary, they were using brick that had been adjudged too high in price for the schools in Des Moines. On that same day the school board of Boston let a contract for a big building at 48.9 cents. It is worth noting that every step in this economy campaign was fought by a big contractor who was on the school board.