There was a question of building three high schools, and three brick concerns bid $33 per thousand; it was manifest that they were in collusion. The price was eight dollars too high, and Thompson moved that they should buy in the open market for $24.10 per thousand. Two weeks later they got an offer at this price from one of the concerns which had bid $33—the same concern and the same bricks! And then came the question of sites. One man having a pull with the board asked $60,000 for a site; Thompson decided that it was worth $28,000 and the board offered him $40,000. He went to the courts, and the jury said $28,000, and the Supreme Court sustained that valuation. “For these efforts,” said Comrade Thompson, “I got some abuse—and sixty-five days in jail.” It is interesting to note that this $28,000 site was a trackage site, and the purchase was made necessary because a previous board had given away trackage to an automobile company.
As a Socialist, of course, Comrade Thompson’s hobby is to have the people do their own work, omitting the grafters. He would make a motion that school buildings should be put up by the city; and he would get one vote beside his own—that of the railroad conductor’s wife. The school board had an electric repair shop, and this persisted in making bids on repair jobs which beat all the contractors—to the contractors’ great annoyance. There was one job on which the city’s men saved the city three thousand dollars, or thirty-five per cent of the total cost. The school board admitted that these workers were responsible and did first-class work; nevertheless, the board passed a motion that the repair shop should make no more bids.
On December 20, 1921, bids were opened for a large job, and it was found that the Sterling Electrical Company had bid $22,688, while the school shop bid $4,300 less. The board awarded the contract to the Sterlings, by a vote of five to two—the two, needless to say, being Thompson and Kinney. Thompson got a taxpayer to go before a court and ask an injunction, and Mr. Purdy, representative of the Black Hand on the school board, appeared for his colleagues, and admitted that the shop had proved to be reliable and efficient, but argued that the interest of the private contractors must be conserved! The court sustained the majority of the board, and the city of Minneapolis lost $4,300 to the grafters.[[G]] It is interesting to note that the judge who rendered the decision is that same Judge Bardwell who kept Comrade Thompson and four other labor men in jail for sixty-five days for violating one of his injunctions!
[G]. Guy Alexander vs. A. P. Ortquest, Nels Juel, Lowell Jepson, et al.; injunction denied Jan. 25, 1923.
CHAPTER XXXVII
MILLERS AND MILITARISM
In order to make a consecutive story, I have shown what Big Business has done in the way of Graft in Minneapolis. Let us now complete our view by taking up Propaganda and Repression. During the war there was formed a “Public Safety Committee,” a lynching society of the Black Hand. One of the first objects of their attention was the school board—with Lynn Thompson daring to defend a teacher who belonged to the I. W. W.! He was a fine teacher, and there was no other charge against him—but he had to go.
There was the usual fight over salary increase, and the teachers were forming a union. The president of the Citizens’ Alliance, a former head of a strike-breaking agency named Briggs, set out to “smooth them down,” and gave a dinner to the teachers’ officers and leaders, about sixty of them, at a “swell” club. There was an association of the teachers, controlling their pension fund, and Mr. Briggs attended a meeting of this, and pleaded with them “like a Methodist revivalist, with tears in his eyes,” not to be so wicked as to join a union. He had several teacher-lobbyists to help him in this campaign—and one of them got a fine job in the state university as his reward. Another got up a “Teachers’ League,” one of those “yellow” unions which the gang controls. The teachers were asking five hundred dollars raise, and this representative went before the board and said they would take three hundred; after which he was made, an assistant principal, with a three thousand dollar salary! It is interesting to note that when the Black Hand was raising campaign funds to drive Comrade Thompson from the school board, one of the charges named in their secret circulars was that he had opposed promotion for this man!
The militarists are making a desperate struggle to keep their hold on the schools in this city of the millers. I thought I was back home in Los Angeles when I learned how at one of the general meetings of the Parent-Teachers’ Association they sprang a proposition to endorse military training for the children. There was no time for consideration or debate; they shoved it through without most of the people realizing what was happening; and next morning the kept newspapers triumphantly announced this result as representing some tens of thousands of parents and teachers!