The trolley cars take us a few miles south to the city of Oakland, where we find a still larger population of shipyard workers, longshoremen and factory hands, having ideas of their own, and therefore having to be taken in charge by the Black Hand. The situation in Oakland is of especial importance, for the reason that the school superintendent of the Black Hand in this city is one of the big chiefs of the National Education Association. Fred M. Hunter was the 1921 president of the Association, and at the convention where he was chosen the gang put through a “reorganization,” whereby it was made forever certain that the class-room teachers of America shall remain impotent in their own organization, while their opinions are voiced for them and their money is spent for them by the bosses of the educational Tammany Hall. I wish you to understand that when I speak of the N. E. A. as an educational Tammany Hall, I am not slinging language, but giving a precise description of a sociological phenomenon. The N. E. A. is run by a political gang, and the bosses in it are exactly the same kind of people, functioning in exactly the same way as the ward leaders of Tammany. Fred M. Hunter is one of these ward leaders, and he uses the schools of Oakland, in no sense for the benefit of the city or its people, but solely for the building up of the N. E. A. machine, and of his power in this machine. As you read the story, therefore, bear this wider aspect of the matter in mind. The city of Oakland, with its quarter of a million people, mostly workers, contributes the sum of eighteen thousand dollars a day for the education of its children, and this sum is used by a school politician to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Incidentally, of course, this ward leader sees to it that our education, both local and national, remains plutocratic; just as the ward leaders of Tammany see to it that the “traction crowd” and the other big exploiters are protected. The City of Oakland voted five million dollars for new schools, and Mr. Hunter explained publicly his idea that the proper people to handle these bonds were the business men; therefore he appointed a special committee known as the “Bond Expenditure Committee.” This committee proceeded to appoint a prominent politician as “land agent,” to handle the buying of sites, at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. The opposition members of the school board objected to this program, and forced the resignation of the Bond Expenditure Committee; whereupon, Mr. Hunter caused to be printed in the Oakland “Tribune,” kept newspaper of the gang, an interview proclaiming to the citizens that the school system was about to be disrupted.