The situation in Milwaukee is especially interesting. Before the war Milwaukee was under the eye of Victor Berger, while the schools were under the eye of Victor Berger’s wife; so there was one American city with no graft in its school affairs. But during the war the gang came back, and they still have the schools—Mrs. Berger was for years the lone Socialist member, and the board is run by the so-called “Voters’ League,” which consists of exactly seven men, the chiefs of the Black Hand of Wisconsin. These seven picked the candidates for the school board at every election, and the newspapers printed the list conspicuously, and told the people to “cut this out and take it to the polls”; and, like good, patriotic Americans, they did so.
In the effort to bludgeon the Teachers’ Federation, this Voters’ League proposed a bill making it unlawful for public employes to organize. But this bill failed, and the teachers of Milwaukee have stayed organized, and what is more, they have kept the control of their own organization. They went over the heads of their reactionary school board, and appealed to a progressive state legislature, and got the school taxes in Milwaukee conditioned upon the payment of a minimum salary of $1,500 to grade teachers, running up to $2,400. Imagine a school board unable to terrify its teachers by threats of salary reduction, and you will understand the fury with which the educational gang regards the Milwaukee Teachers’ Federation!
Not content with getting their own salaries increased, these Milwaukee teachers contributed $2,400 to the publicity campaign of the state association, to get salary increases for the other teachers. They lobbied through the state legislature the best kindergarten law in the United States. They proposed legislation for tenure, and drafted the best law on this subject. In short, the Milwaukee Local of the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association is Bolshevism, raw, red and bloody, trampling the holy ground of American education.[[J]]
[J]. From the “Clarion,” Milwaukee, November 18, 1922:
“EDUCATIONAL BOLSHIVISM (sic)
“Milwaukee last week entertained the literati of Wisconsin’s leading educationalists. The convention, designed to be creative in works of harmony, good will and a spirit of constructive development, resulted in a wild and riotous effort to determine the status of the caste system with regard to our state educators. Topping it all, the head of the Milwaukee’s Teachers Association emits a theory so rank in its bolshevistic nature as to rock the very foundation of learning and to place in extreme jeopardy the principles and ideals of our system of state education.” (Note: This “theory” was that teachers are the equals of superintendents.)
In order to get clear what follows, you must understand that outside Milwaukee, the gang still controls the teachers’ organizations, as it does in California and all the other states. We are now going to watch the gang leaders of Wisconsin at their job of holding down the Milwaukee local.
The constitution of the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association provided that representation at conventions should be on the basis of one delegate for every fifty members or major fraction of fifty. This provision was as explicit as the English language could make it, and it had been thoroughly threshed out, and understood by everyone. The Milwaukee local had 1,347 paid members, and on that basis their representation had been fixed at twenty-seven. But now the gang set up the claim that small communities should have a chance to send representatives to the convention; let it be provided that communities having less than fifty teachers might have one delegate for every twenty-six members. To this the Milwaukee teachers answered: Very well: but if the basis of representation is to be one delegate for every twenty-six members, then let the large cities also have one representative for every twenty-six members, instead of one for every fifty. But you see, that did not fit the purpose of the gang, which wanted to hold the Milwaukee teachers down to one in fifty, while giving double representation to the country districts, which the gang had under its thumb.