CHAPTER XXVII THE ROMEO AND JULIET STUNT We move north to Portland, which is the harbor of the lumber country, a relatively old city with an aristocracy of merchant princes, like Baltimore or Boston. Ten years ago Oregon had a strong progressive movement, it was the pioneer in direct legislation. Today the old guard rules, and Portland is in the grip of a Black Hand which imports its ideas direct from Los Angeles. Curiously enough, they had a strike of the longshoremen and seamen, at the same time as Los Angeles; and here also the I. W. W. attacked the very basis of American civic life by closing up the boot-legging dives and dumping the liquor into the gutters. The insurrection was put down by the same methods as in Los Angeles—the throwing of hundreds of men into jail and holding them incommunicado without warrant or charge. A number of Portland’s old and ineffably haughty families got their wealth by stealing the school lands which the government had given to the people of the state; now other families are on the way to becoming haughty upon the basis of real estate manipulations of the school board, and the sale of school supplies at double prices. The boss of the Oregon political machine is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National Bank; for the past ten years he has kept a political agent to run the state legislature. The machine sent down to Los Angeles for copies of Woodworth’s Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” for distribution in Oregon; and from these dragon’s teeth resulted a whole crop of legislative vermin—a bill requiring every school teacher to take an oath of loyalty, a bill forbidding aliens to teach in the schools; a bill barring any teacher who “either publicly or privately engages in destructive or undermining criticism of our government”; a bill requiring “the teaching of the Constitution in all public and private schools”—meaning, of course, the teaching of the Constitution as a bulwark of special privilege.