In the summer of 1922 there was an epidemic of trachoma in the Kansas City schools. This is a dreadful eye-disease, which in its later stages eats out the eye-balls. It is one of the most contagious of known diseases, and so is a serious matter in schools. In one Kansas City school a majority of the children were afflicted, but the board didn’t want anything done about it, because it would interfere with the real estate business; they would not let the doctors and nurses make the facts known, so the parents had to take up the agitation. They went before the school board and protested again and again, but could get nothing done; the board sent nurses—to forbid the parents of infected children to discuss the matter! One courageous teacher, Miss Letitia Cotter, took up the agitation, at peril of her position, and carried it to the labor unions and the parent-teacher associations. The superintendent went off on his vacation, and left the assistant superintendent, who told Miss Cotter that no more public money would be spent on this matter—“the Red Cross already has spent six hundred dollars on those dirty rats and wops!” So you see how they love the people in these open-shop schools! CHAPTER XXXV IS A TEACHER A CITIZEN? We continue East to St. Louis, another city where God and Mammon have combined for the exploitation of the children. There is no city in which the Catholics are stronger, nor any in which the two political parties are more completely in the hands of the open-shoppers and labor exploiters. Up to last year the two parties had a gentleman’s agreement by which each party nominated for the school board only half as many candidates as there were places to be filled. The result was no competition for school board memberships on election day. The Democrats inevitably elected their candidates and the Republicans theirs; and since the nominating conventions were under the complete domination of political bosses, these bosses in effect named the school board members. Recently the people made an especial effort to eliminate one gang member, by the name of Murphy. They kept him off the Democratic ticket, whereupon the Republicans nominated him, both the gangs voted for him, and he went in for another six years. These school board members are uneducated men of the ward-leader, campaign-manager type; at least three of them, I am assured, have never been through the grade schools. A prominent citizen of St. Louis wrote me in 1922: “We have men on our board of education who are ignorant and vicious and without character whatsoever.” Another citizen of St. Louis writes in 1923: