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I went away from Chicago in May; and coming back in June, on my way home, I discovered that this Chicago melodrama is a continuous performance. A new act was on, and the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation Was in the midst of another whirlwind. The city was on the point of getting a new president of the school board, and he was worse than the old one, if such a thing were possible. He was a physician, Dr. John Dill Robertson, formerly head of the Bennett Medical College, which had been exposed in the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” February 7th, 1914. Margaret Haley had had the article reproduced photographically, with its headlines: “High School Credentials for Sale. Illustration of Irregular Methods by which Commercially Conducted Medical Colleges Admit Students Contrary to Law.” The article told how a student had applied to Dr. Robertson’s college, presenting credits for a year and a half of high school work, and the registrar of the college got him a certificate supposed to represent a full four years’ high-school course. They got this signed by a county school superintendent in Wisconsin, after the applicant had passed an examination for which the registrar furnished him both the questions and the answers! A copy of this article was mailed to every member of the city council of Chicago—but Dr. Robertson was confirmed by this body just the same!

Meantime the graft revelations continued. I have before me a pamphlet by Judge McKinley, chief justice of the criminal court of Cook County, detailing the devices by which the fake purchasing companies made their millions out of the schools. There are pages of details about such concerns, their imaginary offices, their contracts for every kind of material which could be used in a big city school system. There was a deal for a hundred thousand tons of coal, without any competitive bidding; another deal of $244,000 for “surplus Shipping Board boilers”—these being boilers offered for sale by the Shipping Board and purchased by a dummy concern, whose head was a former school board member. This man, Fitzgerald, had “never had a bank account until this sale took place”; and the boilers were bought on the recommendation of Davis, the president of the school board, described as “a nice little fellow who did what he was told.” Says Judge McKinley:

There was “the phonograph deal” of the Hiawatha Company, headed by State Commerce Commissioner P. H. Moynihan; “the six skinny cows” sent to the parental school, as milk producers for the three hundred little truants confined there; the stationery and school supply contracts between the board and Davis’ nephews; the tearing out of expensive plumbing in school buildings to “make work” for Metzger’s “steam heating and ventilating company”; the sale of coal in certain districts to the schools by certain firms who made contributions of 50 cents a ton to board officials; the “sale” of buildings on school property by Bither, the attorney for that board, and the “splitting” of the rents collected from tenants who continued to live in them for two years after they had sold them as additions to the Forrestville and Wendell Phillips schools.

You will wish to know the outcome of this particular act of the continuous Chicago melodrama. William A. Bither, attorney for the school board, and Edwin S. Davis, president of the board, were tried for conspiracy and acquitted, together with thirteen others, including the boss of the gang. Some witnesses had disappeared; others had “forgotten” what they had sworn to before the grand jury; but most significant of all, this clever board had taken the precaution not to pass rules governing its own procedure—and the court instructed the jury that in the absence of rules, the business manager’s rules held good! It was not a crime for board members to sell to their own friends and relatives, nor to sell to companies in which they, the board members, owned stock! It was not a crime to buy supplies without bids! It was not a crime to make bad bargains in purchasing! To have these things proven in court cost the people of Chicago some two hundred thousand dollars—in addition to the millions already wasted.

Chicago got a new mayor, who, by political subtlety too intricate to detail, got rid of the old school board, and of Dr. Robertson as president. The last word of the great medical educator was a letter to the new board, explaining the wonderful legacy he was leaving them, in the form of a commission to study the school housing question; and so, when I came back to Chicago in December, 1923, to read the proofs of this book, I found yet another act of the melodrama on, and the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation in the midst of another whirlwind! This commission and its Big Business masters had set out to foist upon the people of Chicago the wonderful new “platoon system” of schools, as it is now working full blast in Detroit, the very latest wrinkle in Ford factory standardization applied to the minds of children.

Needless to say, in a city where $10 is not safe anywhere, the schools are hideously overcrowded. There is a new building program, amounting to thirty million dollars, and this hurts the plutocracy even to think about. So one day, after a school board session, the kept press of Chicago exploded all over the front page with the news that the school board had discussed a wonderful plan to save all that money, and put half a million children on half time, and hire eleven thousand new teachers, and get double service out of the schools by running them nine hours a day, six days a week, twelve months a year on the “platoon system” as it exists in Detroit.

The first thing to be got clear about this newspaper story is that it was a simultaneous lie. The school board had not considered any such plan, either at its regular meeting or at any committee meeting. The Chicago Teachers’ Federation keeps a court stenographer at every session and has a complete transcript of every word that is spoken—this just because of the newspapers’ habit of shameless lying. But for some reason not easy to guess, the board members failed to make a formal repudiation of this published false news; the papers went on day after day outlining what the board was about to do; and so it was plain that some power behind the scenes was setting out to force the hand of a new and supposed-to-be-liberal school board.

The Chicago teachers decided to find out for themselves about this new Detroit system and how it is working. They sent a committee of nine class-room teachers, who did not wait the convenience of superintendents, but went right into class-rooms at the opening hour, and spent several days wandering about in the great assembling plants for goslings. They found Detroit teachers in secret revolt against the new system—and incidentally much puzzled to learn that it was being boosted in Chicago as a saver of money and building space. The members of the school board in Detroit had been having rows, and calling one another impolite names because of the costliness of the system; and as for space, one Chicago teacher asked: “Why aren’t you using the platoon system in this school?” The answer was: “We haven’t room enough!”

If it is not money and not building space, what is it? To quote the report of the Chicago teachers: “All special work is outlined, standardized, and supervised from some central authority, so that children derive no benefit from the originality and experience of the individual teacher, or from her knowledge of their particular needs. The teachers know the names of but few children in each group, because of the large numbers with which they deal.” Again: “If fatigue and inability to give attention are features of modern life, the children are certainly experiencing life.”

So it appears that this Detroit system is a contrivance to suppress every trace of individuality in school teachers, and make every one of them a phonograph, repeating formulas set before her in print; to prescribe not merely her words but her states of mind, and the “attitudes to be acquired” by her pupils. One teacher read me the specifications, and said: “It’s enough to raise the hair on your head.”

What is the “central authority” which now shapes the minds of all the children of all the wage-slaves of our great metropolis of automobiles? We shall inquire before long, and find that it is the same interlocking directorate we know so well. And here is their master achievement; how well they know it, how proud they are of it, you may learn from their official statement, written by the man who has the job in charge—Mr. Charles L. Spain, deputy superintendent of schools of Detroit. Says this great educator: “During the war the public schools came to be recognized as a powerful agency through which to spread propaganda. It is certain that society will expect more from the schools in this respect than in the past.” And he goes on to explain that the “platoon system” gets the children all ready, and every child in the building can be reached every day! When this new scheme has been set up in all our schools, big and little—and it won’t take them but a few years—it will be possible for Judge Gary or Mr. Morgan to press a button at nine o’clock in the morning, and by twelve o’clock noon every child of our twenty-three million will be ready to go out and kill the “Reds.”