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How far the Black Hand is willing to go in this program of cutting out the brains of the school children you may judge by the fact that in 1921 Assemblyman Greene introduced, and the Better America Federation tried to jam through the state legislature, an act providing for the expulsion from the schools of “any teacher who shall disparage to a pupil in the school where said teacher is employed, any provision of the Constitution of the United States of America, or who shall orally make to such pupil any argument or give to such pupil any written or printed argument in favor of making any change in any provision of said Constitution.” And this, you understand, in face of the fact that the Constitution itself provides for its amendment, and has been quite legally and constitutionally amended no less than nineteen times in our history! Think of a school teacher being forbidden by law to discuss with a pupil the desirability of an amendment prohibiting child labor!

A still more curious incident occurs while I am finishing this book. There is in Los Angeles an organization called the Young Workers’ League, an educational society of the Communists; they held a debate on the subject of Communism versus Capitalism, and not being able to get anybody to defend capitalism, they appointed their own speakers, who naturally didn’t do it very ardently. Three lads, one of them a high school student, the other two just graduated, attended the meeting and found themselves dissatisfied with this defense; they rose up and said they could do better, and the result was the planning of a debate. The Young Workers’ League hired a hall, and the three students spent a good part of their summer vacation preparing for the contest. Two or three days before it came off, the Young Workers’ League distributed announcement cards in the high schools, erroneously referring to the students as “three representatives of a high school debating society.” Immediately thereafter the one high school student was informed by Principal Dunn of the Polytechnic High School that he must not take part in the affair. Mr. Dunn did not take this action on his own initiative, he explained, but under instructions from Mrs. Dorsey, who had investigated the matter.