Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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The city being a strong union center, the school teachers are organized. The grade teachers form the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, and the business representative of this federation is Margaret Haley; one of those terrible people known as a “walking delegate”—that is, she goes about among the masters of the city, asserting rights for those who are not supposed to have rights. She is hated and slandered, but continues to clamor for the teachers. For a generation the school board and politicians in chorus with the capitalist newspapers have insisted that the teachers could not be paid a living wage, the city was too poor. Nearly twenty-five years ago Margaret Haley took up the question of tax-dodging by the great corporations, and I shall tell later on how she made five of these corporations pay taxes on their franchise valuations.

The business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation lives always in the midst of some tumultuous political issue. She was in the midst of one when I arrived in Chicago, in May, 1922, the city being in the throes of a school graft scandal. The attorney for the school board had just been indicted by the grand jury, and the president of the board and many other members were soon to be indicted. Millions had been wasted—nobody could guess how much. At the same time the governor of the state was being tried for appropriating thirty thousand dollars of the state’s money; the jury acquitted him—and then some members of the jury got jobs from the governor, and were tried in their turn. The day of my arrival it was discovered that the chief clerk of the city jail had stolen thirty-six hundred dollars of the money taken from the prisoners. The Chicago “Tribune” published an editorial headed: “Is $10 Safe Anywhere?”