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This campaign to make the schools safe for the plutocracy culminated in the passage of the so-called “Lusk laws” at Albany. Senator Lusk was a Republican machine politician, who accepted 137 pieces of silverware, worth a couple of thousand dollars, from New York police detectives, for whom he had got a salary raise. This did not put the Senator out of business, nor did it interfere with his laws, which disgraced the statute books of the state for four years. One of the laws was for the purpose of suppressing the Rand School of Social Science. They had already attempted this by a raid on the school and they now attempted it by a law requiring all schools to apply for a license. The Rand School refused to apply, and a long-drawn-out and expensive legal conflict followed.^[C]

ssss1. In “The Goose-step” it is stated that when the “Luskers” raided the Rand School they “threw the typewriters and the teachers down the stairs.” I am informed that this is an error; the throwing in question occurred at the office of the New York “Call,” the Russian People’s House, and other places. I talked the other day with a magazine writer who was present at the raid on the Russian People’s House, when a New York police detective ordered an inoffensive elderly Russian teacher to take off his eye-glasses, and then hit the man in the forehead with the butt of his revolver and crushed his skull. The offense of this elderly Russian was teaching algebra to other Russians.