Also we note that two hundred guests are coming from Memphis, Tennessee, in honor of President Charl O. Williams, who is on a year’s leave of absence to enable her to uplift the educational associations of each of the states, as well as sectional meetings—price one hundred dollars per lift. Other notables are coming, General Pershing, Vice-president Coolidge, Secretary of State Hughes; President Harding has promised to attend if possible. Most significant of all, there will be “a patriotic demonstration of mammoth proportions, managed by the commander-in-chief of the American Legion.” It was at the 1921 convention at Des Moines that our N. E. A. turned its political conscience over to the keeping of our Fascisti. In the official “Journal” for November of that year I find a report of the special committee on this subject. The chairman of it is Superintendent Gwinn—the gentleman we saw moving from New Orleans to San Francisco to take the place of the Superintendent of Trombones. This program provides that all teachers must be American citizens; it provides for flag worship, and for the American Legion to furnish speakers for patriotic exercises in the schools. At the very time that this resolution was published in the official “Journal,” the American Legion was displaying its fitness to educate our children by conducting a three-days’ drunken orgy in Kansas City, in the course of which they stripped young girls naked on the street and wrecked the lobby of the Baltimore Hotel. As I write, they are further displaying their passionate affection for democracy by inviting Mussolini to come and address their San Francisco convention! Such is the educational department of capitalist imperialism; there is nothing too murderous and blood-thirsty for them, and no degree of reaction from which they will shrink. If Premier Mussolini should bring his castor-oil squad to the next N. E. A. convention, there would be only the change of language and the absence of black shirts to let him know that he had crossed the ocean. Our leading reactionaries would be there to greet him, headed by United States Commissioner of Education John J. Tigert, who before the Des Moines convention discussed the subject of Socialism, and pointed out the vote for Debs as proving that 900,000 Americans were advocating the abolition of all law, all constitutions, and all forms of government! Addressing the school teachers of San Diego, he sounded a warning against the increasing tendency of the public schools to delve into sociology and economics, which subjects were perilously close to “radicalism.” Said Commissioner Tigert: There is altogether too much preaching of these damnable doctrines of Bolshevism, Anarchy, Communism and Socialism, in this country today. If I had it in my power I would not only imprison, but would expatriate all advocates of these dangerous, un-American doctrines. I would even execute every one of them—and do it joyfully.