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This same young man told me of his experiences when he was selected to deliver the valedictory of his class. He asked to have a liberal teacher as his guide, but was compelled to have a reactionary teacher. She assigned to him a commonplace theme, and he rejected it, and wrote on the subject of “Labor’s Right to a Share in Industry.” When he brought in his address, the teacher refused to let him deliver it; it was “too Bolsheviki,” she said, and told him that when he went into a garden he must see the beautiful red roses, and not the thorns. She practically rewrote the address for the student, and he took it off and wrote it again. The controversy continued up to a day or two before commencement, when the boy finally had to deliver an address which did not represent his own convictions.

I have mentioned favoritism among the principals and teachers; needless to say, also, that children who come from poor homes, and especially the children of foreigners, are slighted. A boy came to see me, Clarence Alpert by name, a sensitive lad, conscientious and idealistic; with tears in his eyes he told me how he had been turned out of Lincoln High School by the principal, Miss Andrus. I was familiar with the name of this lady. In an address to the school assembly she had referred to “that notorious disloyalist and traitor, Upton Sinclair.” I wrote a letter to the lady in which I mentioned my support of the war—you may find it in “The Brass Check,” pages 205-7. I served notice upon her that she would make a retraction of her statements or face a libel suit, and she preferred the former alternative.