The friends of education in the state of Washington brought before the voters in 1922 a “tax equalization” measure, whose purpose was to compel the big corporations, and especially the lumber interests, to pay their proper share of school taxes. Against this measure all the organizations of the Black Hand lined up—the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Central Committee of the Republican Party, the reactionary governor, the Seattle Board of Education, the kept newspapers, the state university, the Weyerhaeuser lumber interests, the president of Whitman College—to which the Weyerhaeusers had just contributed seventy-five thousand dollars—and finally the state superintendent of education, Mrs. Josephine C. Preston. Remember this lady, because when we come to study the National Education Association, we shall find her as its president, occupying the throne of power at the Salt Lake City convention of 1920, where the gang turned out the teachers from control. I have shown in Los Angeles, and will show in many other cities, how the Black Hand bars “politics” from the schools. Here in Seattle the board of education offered a classic demonstration of what this means. Some of the teachers in the high schools presumed to have class discussions in which both sides of the equalization amendment were heard. At five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, October 27, 1922, the school board of Seattle passed a resolution absolutely forbidding teachers to engage in any kind of political propaganda in the schools, or to post on the bulletin boards any notices except those pertaining strictly to school business. Eighteen hours later, at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, October 28, Dr. Sharples of the board, Mr. Santmyer of the board, and also the secretary of the board, appeared before a meeting of school janitors, engineers and custodians, in a school building, and there spoke in opposition to the equalization amendment. The secretary of the board traveled to other parts of the state to oppose this amendment, and he spoke at meetings during business hours—that is, during the time he was being paid by the people of Seattle to do his work as school board secretary. Another incident, to give you an idea what it means to be a teacher in Seattle. Early in 1923 eight or ten high school teachers received notice from the superintendent that their names were being withheld for reappointment, until the board could complete an investigation concerning a teachers’ meeting which had been held the previous summer, at which a resolution had been adopted condemning the board for cutting the teachers’ salaries. The teachers who received this written notice tried to find out what it was all about, and they learned that the board of education had in its possession an unsigned typewritten document, purporting to be a resolution adopted by the teachers and transmitted to the Central Labor Council.