While we are in this Southwestern country, with its new rich and its new poor, let us take time to consider the great Invisible Empire, which is so rapidly taking over the control of our political life. Wherever you travel in the West nowadays, people consider it necessary to ask whether you belong; so I answer that I have been invited to join, but have not availed myself of the opportunity. Many klansmen will read this book, and discover that some of the things they want are the things I want; but I venture to tell them that they will not get these things through the Klan, whose leaders got rich in a hurry, and are now hand in glove with Wall Street. A great many Klan members are former Socialists, who have got tired of waiting for something to happen; they will wait a while longer, and then the class struggle will begin inside the Klan, and its membership will decide whether Americanism means wage slavery and no more. For the present I record that Socialist school teachers are being hounded by the Klan, in places as far apart as Oklahoma and Indiana. How intelligent the conduct of the organization is, you may judge from the fact that the school board of the large city of Dallas, Texas, has been formally condemned by the Klan, and sentenced to extinction at the next election. The local Klan potentate wrote officially to the school board in substance as follows: “We have been informed that the wife of the manager of the lunch room at the Forest Avenue High School has told her husband that if he joins the Ku Klux Klan, she will leave him. Now we beg to inform you that the Ku Klux Klan is a one hundred per cent Christian and American organization, and it resents such statements; and we expect the school board to see that they are not repeated and that proper punishment is meted out to persons in the school that make such remarks.” The Dallas school board committed the offense of filing this letter without action, and so it is slated to go. CHAPTER LXI THE RIOT DEPARTMENT