The strike tied up the harbor and tied it tight. For more than two weeks not a ship was unloaded, and all the building operations of all the speculators came to an end. One day the “Times” would deny that there was any strike, and next day it would declare that the strike had been broken the day before, the next day it would declare that the strike would be broken the day after next. And in the inner circle of the torturers and despots, such confusion and such fury as you will hardly be able to imagine. You have taken up this book, expecting to read about the American school system; and now you are being told about a strike! It happened that this strike came just as I was settling down to write “The Goslings.” I got arrested; and this experience plows a furrow through one’s mind. Now I sit at home and think about the schools, and naturally, I see them in relation to this series of events—they become one more device of the strikebreakers. I ponder the problem, how to start this book. I want to show you the invisible government which runs your schools, for its own profit, and your loss. This power is the same power which runs your politics and industry; here in Los Angeles, the very men who smashed the union of the shipyard workers also smashed the councils of the school teachers. Indeed, as chance willed it, the two jobs came together and became one job; so that every lie told against the strikers was a lie against the teachers, and every dollar wrested from the shipyard workers was balanced by a dollar stolen from the schools. I ask myself, therefore: How can I do better, at the beginning of this book, than to tell you what I saw at the harbor? This strike was a blazing searchlight, thrown into the very vitals of our invisible government; if you will follow it, you will see the whole system, and understand every detail of its mechanism. So I ask you to set aside for the moment all questions of labor unions, criminal syndicalism, anything of that sort; come with me as a plain American, believing in the Constitution, believing in the people, and their right to run their own affairs. Follow the story of this labor struggle—and before you get to the end of it you will magically find yourself reading about the schools, and learning who has taken them away from you, and why they have done it, and what it means to you and your children. CHAPTER II THE ADVENTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY CLUB The first step in this narrative is to explain how it happened that the writer of this book, a muck-raker and enemy of society, was in the office of Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, and chief of the Black Hand, at the very moment when Mr. Rice was conspiring with his fellow chiefs for the smashing of the harbor strike. This story is amusing in itself, and not altogether alien to education.