But also she cajoles these fellows, and touches their hearts. Once upon a time they were children, and some of them went to school; now they have children of their own, and these are going to school; do they want to steal the children’s money? And then she goes after the big fellows, and sometimes she finds that even they have hearts! When she was fighting for this new school on Locust Point, she tackled not merely the mayor and the school board and the Catholic hierarchy, she tackled the president of the Baltimore Dry Dock and Ship Building Company. She wanted a park around the school, so that it would have room to grow, and she got this mighty magnate to the point of declaring that if the politicians wouldn’t vote the forty-five thousand dollars, he would put it up himself and he would spend another forty-five thousand to find out why he had had to do it! So, of course, the politicians fell all over themselves, and the school has its park.

Here was a second case of plutocratic generosity in Baltimore, and I began to fear for the thesis of “The Goslings”! I asked Mrs. Bauernschmidt about it, and she made a face. They will never be able to fool her again, said she. Four years ago the schools wanted six million dollars, and all the civic agencies of Baltimore were fighting for a bond issue; they went to the business organizations, which endorsed their program cordially, and there was thanksgiving among the educators. But then it was discovered that a group of politicians and land-speculators intended to tack on another bond issue of forty-two million dollars for a “port loan”! The people of Baltimore were invited to put up this enormous sum to provide harbor facilities for Big Business, and the six million dollars for the schools was to provide the “human appeal.” The combined propositions were carried in a whirlwind campaign, and a “Port Commission” was appointed, which has been drawing fat salaries for four years—but not a single dock has been built to date!

No, I do not expect to get very much for the people’s schools from the plutocracy; but you note that I am perfectly willing to take what I can get. For example, I take Mrs. Bauernschmidt! I don’t think she knows much economics, and I am sure she never met a Socialist before; but she has a robust mind, and she faces facts, whatever they may be. When there was a strike of the ship-workers on Locust Point, she faced the fact that the children were starving, and she helped raise money to feed them. That, of course, was a terrible thing; everywhere throughout the United States it is one of the worst offenses you can commit against the plutocracy, because they rely upon the cries of the starving children to break down the morale of strikers.

Years passed, and Mrs. Bauernschmidt continued her wayward course. She took up the fight for the new school at Locust Point, and did not stop for the Catholic priest, nor yet for the political machine and its political superintendent of schools. She went to speak before a Parent-Teachers’ Association; a teacher asked her, and the superintendent rebuked this teacher, saying that she had made a grievous mistake, that Mrs. Bauernschmidt must not speak in the schools of Baltimore, and a teacher ought not even be seen on the street with her. He added words to this effect: “I know my business so well that I never give promotion to a teacher who doesn’t stand in with the powers that be.”

So Mrs. Bauernschmidt went to war with this superintendent. She put him on trial before the school board—when you have money you can do that kind of thing. The gang was greatly exercised, because a teacher and a principal who had been witnesses to the superintendent’s statement, told the truth before the board; and that was a violation of the first principle of gang ethics, it meant the end of discipline in the school machine. The upshot of the controversy was that my native city got one or two new board members, and the old superintendent was dismissed. You see how it pays to keep track of the fillings in the teeth of your politicians!

There is the same story in Baltimore that we saw in San Francisco, St. Louis and Boston; the people appropriate money for their schools, and the representatives of God, Mammon and Company refuse to spend it. They even get the courts to forbid them to spend it! The schools were discovered to be fire-traps—and what better way to make Catholic parents send their children to the parochial schools, than to have it generally rumored that there is danger of fire in the public schools? So the money for fire-escapes was not spent; and a delegation waited on the mayor, one from each of the twenty-five schools which lacked fire-escapes. Mrs. Bauernschmidt went along, and the Baltimore newspapers reported the “wallop” which she delivered to the mayor: “History tells us about a ruler who fiddled while the town burned, but I don’t remember reading of his re-election, and I’ll bet you he couldn’t be re-elected mayor of this city!”

So the schools got some fire-escapes—but not all. Last year the politicians returned an “unexpended balance” of $104,000 out of $600,000 appropriated for school repairs; and so Mrs. Bauernschmidt’s organization, the Public School Association, went after them once more. Now it is promised that all the schools will be safe; and the Catholic priests, realizing that they have to come up to the new standards, pay visits to the Francis Scott Key school—a dozen of them in the course of a couple of months—to find out about modern education!

I make this Baltimore chapter the basis of a special word to those people who read my books and write me that I am too bitter, that I refuse to believe anything good about the rich. The story of Mrs. Bauernschmidt gives me the chance to show that I like rich people exactly as well as poor. All I ask of the rich is that they turn traitor to their class and serve the general welfare. Not one in a hundred can conceive of doing this, and not one in a thousand has the courage to act on the idea; but at least I give them the chance. In every city, town and village of the United States there is room for a woman of wealth who will turn out and fight for the schools—not merely to get more money from the tax-payers, and to keep the grafters from stealing it, but to make the schools places of freedom, with windows open to the new doctrines which are blowing over the world. In free inquiry and free discussion lies the salvation of America; and it may be my misfortune, but nevertheless it is a fact, that after having spent a year and a half making inquiries, I am unable to name a single public school in the United States in which the policy of free inquiry and free discussion is consistently and boldly followed.

CHAPTER XLV
AN AUTOCRACY OF POLITICIANS

Next comes our national capital; and here we have a unique situation, owing to the fact that the people of the District of Columbia have no votes, but are governed by an autocracy of politicians. The school board was formerly appointed by the District Commission; now it is appointed by the District Supreme Court. The invisible government of the city is made up of the traction interests and the real estate speculators, who work hand in glove with the political machine, quite regardless of whether this machine happens to be Democratic or Republican. There are innumerable ways in which the public may be plundered, and innumerable forms of “honest graft,” whereby it may be made worth while to congressmen and senators to stand in with the plunderers. During the war the population of Washington jumped from 300,000 to 450,000 in three months; real estate values leaped to the skies, and rents beyond them, so there was a harvest for every kind of speculator.