Also, of course, the book companies are on the job. Up to the year 1921 a member of the committee for the adoption of text-books was receiving a salary from the American Book Company, for spending summers in California and doing some nominal editorial work. Naturally this board was friendly to American Book Company publications. The board meets in secret, what it calls “executive meetings”; the members of the gang hold a caucus in advance, and decide what they are going to do, and make everything unanimous; so the public never finds out what is going on. This regime of graft and favoritism extends all the way down; the principals are petty tyrants, flattered and fawned upon; those teachers who are weak and subservient, and do clerical work for their principals, are the ones who get the marks. The St. Louis school system was worked out by a real Prussian some thirty years ago; it is a military affair, routine and red tape and formulas. Every year the teachers are automatically dismissed, and must be reappointed—the ideal of the “open shop” system. Here, as usual, the teachers had to take up the fight for a living wage. No attention was paid to them, so they proceeded to organize. Miss Rosa Hesse was elected president of the teachers’ organization, and the superintendent sent for her and demanded to know if they were going to join the American Federation of Teachers; if so, every one of them would be discharged. The organizer of the teachers’ federation was barred from speaking to them. At the same time, the official representative of the Chamber of Commerce was coming and soliciting them to join his organization. It would be “advantageous,” he assured the teachers significantly. This Chamber of Commerce was deeply interested in the schools—it had been taking action to prevent the professors at the Teachers’ College using a series of text-books, “Community and National Life,” prepared by Professor Charles H. Judd, and published by the United States government; the ground of the objection being that these books intimated very mildly that labor unions had some advantage, in that they developed a sense of self-respect among laborers!