CHAPTER XLVIII
THE STEAM ROLLER
I again select California, because it is the nearest, and the easiest for me to study. We can best know the California machine by following the adventures of a rebel teacher; so permit me to introduce Mr. Ray E. Chase, until recently head of a department at the Manual Arts High School of Los Angeles. Mr. Chase was a man of brains, who refused to take the orders of the gang; and we shall see what the gang did to him.
In the year 1917 Mr. Chase was chosen by the Los Angeles High School Teachers’ Association as their legislative representative, to proceed to the state capital and watch out for the interests of teachers. He applied to the school board of Los Angeles for leave of absence without pay, whereupon the board members called him before them, and required him to submit a complete list of the measures proposed or endorsed by the Teachers’ Association. Said Mrs. Waters, widow of a bank president and member of the board: “How could we know but that you meant to advocate something of which the board would not approve?” But having heard an outline of the projects, she declared: “I think those are all harmless.” So they “allowed” Mr. Chase to go—and incidentally invited him to work for some measures of theirs!
Turn back to our Los Angeles story, and refresh your mind concerning “Bill 1013” whereby the Better America Federation and its political crooks tried to cripple the schools of the state. When this bill came up before the legislature, the teachers’ agents were assured that it would not affect the schools, so they let it go by; afterwards, the teachers had to initiate and put through a referendum to repeal this bill, so as to keep the schools functioning. Mr. Chase was a leader in this procedure, and earned thereby the deadly enmity of the Black Hand. They did all they could to drive him out of the school; his principal was offered promotion by Judge Bordwell, president of the school board, on condition that he would get rid of Chase and two other “radicals.” It was during this intrigue that Bordwell asked the question: “Can’t you get something on their morals?”
Mr. Chase came back to Los Angeles and set to work on a plan to enable the teachers of the city to exercise control of their Association. At risk of repetition, let me make it clear that these teachers’ associations are purely voluntary affairs—the teachers’ clubs, or professional societies, which they try to run in their own interest and according to their own ideas. Not merely does the gang take this control away from them; the gang has made it a matter of professional life and death for a teacher to stand out for the independence of the federation. When elections are held, principals and superintendents are nominated, and teachers who oppose their superior’s ambitions are denied promotion, and sometimes dismissed. Let me remind you of the teacher in Oakland who refused to vote for Superintendent Hunter’s candidate, and was hounded, not merely in the schools, but in the business world outside.
It is no easy matter for a common teacher to travel to a convention; only the high-salaried ones can afford such a luxury. The rules of the teachers’ associations permit members of one group to send members of another group as delegates; so when the teachers cannot go, it is tactfully suggested that a superintendent or a principal would like to go; and how should a teacher be rude enough to deny credentials to such a personage? So these personages go; they go fully versed in the technique of controlling conventions, and the first thing they do is to enter a caucus, and come out of it with a program of proceedings and a “slate,” all ready to be “jammed through.”
For three years the independent teachers of Los Angeles worked over a plan to reorganize the Southern section of the association, taking it out of the hands of the superintendents and putting it under the control of the class-room teachers. The project came up in December, 1920, at a convention whose chairman was Dr. E. C. Moore, director of the Southern branch of the University of California. We met this gentleman as superintendent of schools in Los Angeles seventeen years ago, getting himself into trouble by cutting out General Otis’s “open shop” propaganda from the program of the National Education Association. Since then Dr. Moore has learned discretion, and become a thoroughly tame servant of the Black Hand. At this convention he ruled out the report of the reorganization committee, on the technical ground that he had not had thirty days’ notice of the matter. Mind you, this committee was reporting according to orders given at the last year’s convention, where it had made a tentative report; Dr. Moore had known all about it at that time, but he now shut the committee off, and appointed a new committee to “work over” the constitution. This took another year, and resulted in a document under which the association is a closed corporation, entirely controlled by the supervising element in the schools.
Simultaneously with all this, and practically duplicating it, was Mr. Chase’s experience with the State Council of Education, the executive body of all these California teachers’ associations. At its meeting in Oakland, April, 1918, Mr. Chase brought up a project to bring these associations under control of the classroom teachers. He had a detailed and carefully worked out program to reorganize the associations, and provide for their democratic control from the floor of the conventions. Mr. Chase swept the assemblage with this project, and was made chairman of a committee to perfect it. His ill health prevented his activity for two years; but finally the project was got into shape, and was brought before local bodies, and approved by every one that voted on it. In December, 1920, Mr. Chase took it to the state council; but the gang leaders, knowing what was coming, deliberately kept the convention busy all day, and called for “new business” late at night, when everybody had gone home except the administrative crowd. Out of thirty present, there was only one class-room teacher! They meant of course, to vote down the project, and then have the kept press flash the news over the state. So Mr. Chase forbore to introduce it; he never will introduce it now, because his story came to a sudden end. The Black Hand in Los Angeles succeeded in “getting” him, according to the formula suggested by Judge Bordwell some years earlier. The story is a complicated and rather ghastly one; suffice it to say that they put him in a position where he could not defend himself without dragging in some other people. As he was unwilling to do that, he is out of the schools, and the gang leaders are secure in their grip upon the teachers’ associations of Southern California.
But California is our most reactionary state, you will say. Very well: then let us skip to Wisconsin, which is our most progressive state. Let us see what has happened to the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association.
There is one significant detail for you to get clear at the outset: In state after state we find the people taking over their political government, but they cannot get hold of their schools. The school machine is intrenched behind entanglements of “red tape”; the supervising force has “pull,” sometimes it is protected by civil service—anyhow, the machine is tough, and hangs on until the reactionaries come back. We shall see that happening in North Dakota, in Minnesota, in Wisconsin. Senator LaFollette carried his state last time by the biggest plurality ever known in America; but Mrs. LaFollette was barred from speaking in country school-houses! The state educational machine, the county machines, and most of the city machines in Wisconsin are still in the hands of the gang.