So we are not surprised to learn that the invisible government of Spokane is the Employers’ Association, backed by the Washington Water Power Corporation; and that the head of the city school board is a grain speculator, prominent in anti-labor campaigns; also that they have their full quota of text-book scandals, and a campaign to introduce the teaching of the Bible in the schools—purely as literature, of course; also, that they discovered a high school teacher to be a Unitarian and believer in evolution, and he was reported to the superintendent as an atheist; also, that the teachers at the high school do not dare attend a lecture course given by the local Unitarian clergyman. You might think you were in Portland, hearing a teacher remark: “Whenever they want to reduce our salaries, they cast slurs at us in the newspapers for weeks.” You might think you were in Los Angeles, when you hear how the business organizers endeavored to set the school children to writing essays on reactionary themes, and how a little group of “kickers” in the city offered a prize for the best essay on Woodrow Wilson’s “The New Freedom.” At this time Woodrow Wilson was robed in the majesty of office, so the proposition put the school board in something of a quandary. They turned the matter over to a committee, which solemnly resolved: “‘The New Freedom’ is not a book by Woodrow Wilson, but a series of extracts from campaign speeches, highly partisan in character.” So the proposition was turned down! CHAPTER XXX THE ANACONDA’S LAIR We continue our journey, and enter the domain of the copper kings. In “The Goose-step” I have portrayed the state of Montana as entirely swallowed by a monstrous reptile known as the Anaconda, and I have shown what this reptile has done to the universities of the state. Let us now have a glimpse of Butte, which is a mountain of copper with office buildings and miners’ shacks on top. We shall find here a situation resembling Berkeley; that is to say, the workers have been making desperate efforts to control the education of their own children, but without success. The copper interests, in their efforts to control Montana, have stopped at no atrocity and no crime. They have broken strikes with the utmost brutality, and when the people of Butte succeeded in electing their own political administration, the Black Hand used its control of the state machine to turn the city administration out. In the same way, they have been willing to wreck the schools by every device of slander and corruption. It is hard indeed to find honest public officials in a community where the rewards of treason are so high, and the penalties of public service so heavy. The result has been that the schools of Butte have served as a football of rowdy gangs.