There was the usual fight over salary increase, and the teachers were forming a union. The president of the Citizens’ Alliance, a former head of a strike-breaking agency named Briggs, set out to “smooth them down,” and gave a dinner to the teachers’ officers and leaders, about sixty of them, at a “swell” club. There was an association of the teachers, controlling their pension fund, and Mr. Briggs attended a meeting of this, and pleaded with them “like a Methodist revivalist, with tears in his eyes,” not to be so wicked as to join a union. He had several teacher-lobbyists to help him in this campaign—and one of them got a fine job in the state university as his reward. Another got up a “Teachers’ League,” one of those “yellow” unions which the gang controls. The teachers were asking five hundred dollars raise, and this representative went before the board and said they would take three hundred; after which he was made, an assistant principal, with a three thousand dollar salary! It is interesting to note that when the Black Hand was raising campaign funds to drive Comrade Thompson from the school board, one of the charges named in their secret circulars was that he had opposed promotion for this man! The militarists are making a desperate struggle to keep their hold on the schools in this city of the millers. I thought I was back home in Los Angeles when I learned how at one of the general meetings of the Parent-Teachers’ Association they sprang a proposition to endorse military training for the children. There was no time for consideration or debate; they shoved it through without most of the people realizing what was happening; and next morning the kept newspapers triumphantly announced this result as representing some tens of thousands of parents and teachers! Next came a proposition before the board to cut out night schools and the Americanization program, on the ground that these cost too much money. The Socialist carpenter moved that instead they should cut out the military training; and he demanded a public hearing on the proposition. The board set a time for the hearing, and then began it earlier, hoping to rush it through before the opponents of militarism got in. But that was easy for a soap-boxer who has learned to speak at eight meetings in one day; he held all eight meetings right there before the board, and kept things going until the regular time which had been set for the discussion!