Chapter LXVI
, the story of how “The Dugout,” a returned soldier’s paper in Los Angeles, was smashed because its publisher would not have it used as a strike-breaking agency. The secret service branch of the Better America Federation committed a dozen separate crimes in the doing of this job, and much of this was proved at the publisher’s trial.
The Better America Federation investigates every person who runs for office in California, and black-lists him unless he is one hundred per cent capitalist. It browbeats public officials and slanders them in its newspapers; it causes the raiding of labor offices, and the jailing without trial of labor organizers; and among its other activities it runs the educational system of California, including the state university. The spirit in which it works is revealed in a bill which it came near to pushing through the last California legislature, providing for cancelling the license of any school teacher who, discussing the constitution of the United States with a pupil “shall express to such pupil any opinion or argument in favor of making any change in any provision.”
How this organization puts pressure on university professors is a matter about which you do not have to take my word; you may have the word of Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. In the San Francisco “Call” for January 20, 1922, I find an article occupying the top of seven columns, “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men of San Francisco.” This is a report of a luncheon at the St. Francis Hotel, in which Mr. Haldeman explained his work to the president and vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a group of such leading interlocking directors. Said Mr. Haldeman: “Through the children of the best business families throughout the land, who are attending universities, we are having students of radical tendencies watched. We are receiving reports of what is going on, both as to students and teachers that uphold radical doctrines and views.”
So here is the spy system in our universities; college boys and girls set to tale-bearing on their fellows and on their teachers! On such ignorant and garbled reports professors in the University of California are black-listed for promotion; or they are quietly let out without explanation—or with just a lie or two. When they apply for jobs in other places, letters are written to keep them from getting those jobs. School teachers are black-listed over the entire state; students in the university who graduate with honors are unable to get teaching positions, because the employment system maintained by the university is under the control of this kid-gloved Black Hand.
The active manager of this organization until a few months ago was Mr. Woodworth Clum, a lawyer, author of a pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” the substance of which is that America is calling her school children to mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. Mr. Clum was formerly secretary of the Greater Iowa Association, at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year; also secretary to the Iowa Commission to the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He left the state after a three years’ controversy over the fact that this Commission had failed to file a proper statement of its expenditure of public funds with the state accountant, twenty thousand dollars being missing; also after a typewriter belonging to the Commission had been traced to the office of the Greater Iowa Association; also after Mr. Clum had walked across the street and brutally struck in the face a Civil War veteran, wearing a Grand Army button, because this old man was deaf and did not hear a band playing the Star-Spangled Banner some distance away, and therefore had failed to remove his hat.
Now, here is Mr. Clum’s new organization, the kid-gloved Black Hand of California, working in close alliance with the “open-shoppers” and labor union smashers of the state, and holding over school teachers and college professors the lash, not merely of black-list, slander and starvation, but of sentence to fourteen years in prison. For you must understand that we have a “criminal syndicalism” law in California, and this is applied to you, not merely if you belong to a radical labor union, but if you take any action on behalf of the victims of the Black Hand. This organization has a private army of sluggers, called the “citizens’ police,” which maintains a standing offer of fifty dollars for every arrest of a “radical,” and three hundred dollars for every conviction. As I write this book, one J. P. McDonald is arrested at Long Beach, California, for asking signatures to a petition to President Harding for the release of political prisoners—this petition being one which was signed by three hundred thousand American citizens and presented to the President by a delegation of some thirty leaders of liberal thought. Holding over this workingman’s head the threat of prosecution for “criminal syndicalism,” the police persuaded him to plead guilty to vagrancy—though he had money in his pocket and a job. They promised him he would get thirty days, and the judge gave him six months, and grinned at him. Such is California, described by Romain Rolland as “Land of Orange Groves and Jails”; and such is the atmosphere of espionage and terrorism in which is conducted the University of the Black Hand.
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