Kansas City is a packing-house and railroad center, and the head of its Black Hand is W. T. Kemper, hard-fisted “open-shop” exponent and manipulator of high finance. To run the board of education he has a prominent real estate operator, Nichols, with four children, none in the public schools; a lawyer, Nugent, a little brother to the rich; and Pinkerton, president of the Gate City Bank. All these gentlemen call themselves Democrats, I believe; but this makes no difference, because Kansas City has what they call a bi-partisan school board—one-half its members to the Democratic party, one-half to the Republicans, and none to the people. This school board is absolutely autocratic, makes no reports to anyone, and does not even have an auditor. Its function was described by one of the teachers—“to buy all the holes in the ground belonging to the bankers and put schools on them.” I regret that I cannot give the figures as to what the bankers got, because the lady who knows, and made the statement, is not willing to take the risk of publicity. As manager of their “open-shop” schools this board has engaged a superintendent by the name of Cammack, at a salary of eight thousand a year; an aged despot with a second-grade teacher’s certificate and a very bad temper. When you hear the story of his handling of the teachers you find it so familiar, that you wonder if you have not already read this part of the book. I had the same sensation all the time I was traveling over America; it was like those dreams you have, in which you know you’ve dreamed all that before! In Kansas City, as everywhere else, the teachers were unable to live upon their wages; and here, as everywhere else, the business men had to “jolly them along,” and persuade them that a great rich city could not possibly afford to pay a living wage to the teachers of its children. The women’s clubs took up the problem, and appointed a committee, which voted that the question was “an intricate, vexatious and dangerous one”—but it would never do to raise the tax assessment! Fifty-two teachers had to go to work as telephone girls and in department stores during the summer, to make up the deficit in their salaries; others were working as waitresses in the railway hotels. They had borrowed money to go to summer school, hoping thus to get promotion; now they were in debt and could not make it up.