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

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Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood, the world’s greatest honey-pot, with its thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood, where youth and gayety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you have only to wait. Hollywood is young America.

Of course our hundreds of churches are not entirely inactive. We have revivalists, who furiously denounce the sins of Hollywood, using the most up-to-date slang; and groups of men and women, instead of going to the movies, gather in Bible classes and learn the history of the Hittites and the succession of the kings of the Jebusites. You can hear sermons over the radio—that is, if you have a high-priced set, and can tune out the jazz orchestras. The cheaper sets hear everything at once, and you can dance to the sermons or pray to the jazz, as you prefer.

Who runs this new empire of the Southwest? It is run by a secret society, which I have named the Black Hand; consisting of a dozen or so of big bankers and business men, hard-fisted, cunning and unscrupulous profiteers of the pioneer type, a scant generation removed from the bad man with a gun on each hip. They are the inner council and directing circle of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; with a propaganda department formerly known as the Commercial Federation of California, and now camouflaged as the Better America Federation. Concerning this latter organization, you will find much information in “The Goose Step,” pages 129-132. It occupies the entire floor of a large building, and has raised a fund of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year for five years for its campaign of terrorism. Like all criminals, it operates under many aliases: the American Protective League, the Association for Betterment of the Public Service, the Associated Patriotic Societies, the Taxpayers’ Association, the People’s Economy League, the Tax Investigating and Economy League, the Americanization Committee, the Committee of One Thousand, the Committee of Ten Thousand, the Parent-Teachers’ Associations, the Board of Education, the District Attorney’s Office, and the Police Department of the City of Los Angeles.