The spies were especially successful in the case of W. R. Ball, “director of citizenship” in the Minneapolis schools. Mr. Ball had the idea that democracy really means something, and should be applied in every-day life; still worse, he belonged to the American Federation of Teachers. The Citizens’ Alliance had a so-called “American Committee,” and this committee employed two spies, bearing the hundred per cent names of Olsen and Kunze, who collected a mass of gossip concerning Mr. Ball’s utterances to his pupils. For example, he had referred his advanced students to John Fiske’s “Critical Period of American History”; in this work a chapter dealing with the period prior to the adoption of the Constitution is entitled “Drifting Toward Anarchy.” So the spies reported that Mr. Ball had advised his students to read a Socialist book entitled “On the Road to Anarchy.” They also introduced a statement charging disloyal teaching, signed by a well-known saloon keeper; and on the witness stand before the board of education, this gentleman was unable to remember anything in the statement, and finally admitted that the paper had been handed to him to sign by Spy Olsen. Twenty-four principals and teachers, co-workers with Mr. Ball, appeared to testify to the value of his work, and a committee of professors of the state university, including a dean of the Graduate School and head of the history department, certified to the value of the pamphlets Mr. Ball had got out for his students. But Mr. Ball, in his statement to the board of education, confessed to holding such ideas as “that a large number of workers under the present capitalistic system, were getting wages too low to support their families with the necessities of life.” Also: “We defined a radical as a man who went to the roots of things and traced cause to effect, and was necessarily a deep thinker, and a friend to justice and righteousness.” The Minneapolis board of education considered that this was equivalent to a plea of guilty, and so they drove Mr. Ball from the Minneapolis schools. You will be amused also to hear the story of how the Black Hand of this city put a detective agency upon the trail of Comrade Thompson, and what they found. The report came in that he was a plumber, French descent, member Holy Rosary Catholic Church, short, thick-set, dark complexion, could neither read nor write the English language, and expressed himself with great difficulty on the platform. Members of the Citizens’ Alliance who had heard Lynn Thompson speaking at eight meetings per day, told the detective agency that the details didn’t fit; they had been shadowing the wrong Thompson!