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

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The first place to which I went was Margaret Haley’s office. She gave me a chair, and started to tell me the news, but the telephone rang; it rang every few minutes during our chat, and I listened, and little by little this scene became unreal—it wasn’t a business woman’s office in Chicago, it was an act from one of those old-fashioned “muck-raking” plays which used to be written by Charles Klein and George Broadhurst and others, twenty years or so ago. You couldn’t produce such plays in America today, you would be sent to jail for “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” In these plays the hero, an upright young politician, or maybe a newspaper man, would be hunting a band of grafters, and tied up in a tangle of plots and counter-plots. You would see him in his office, with breathless messengers running in; or at the telephone in swift conversations, giving orders and thwarting the moves of his enemies.

I had my note-book and pencil ready, and it occurred to me that you might be interested to hear two or three minutes of the conversation which goes on in the office of the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, in these days of “normalcy” and “hundred per cent Americanism” triumphant. So I wrote a little scene from a play, a regular thrilling melodrama, with plots and counterplots, betrayals and raids and sudden surprises, grafters getting away with their loot and grand juries’ representatives bursting in upon them—all the stock stage material. But alas, when I brought it to Margaret Haley to read, I discovered that she had no idea she was dramatic, and didn’t like it; also, the particular bit of melodrama to which I had been witness had never been brought home to her, and her connection with it could not be revealed without pointing to certain very precious sources of information. And so my stage scene had to be “cut,” and you will have to learn about Chicago school graft from plain narrative prose.