In 1916 and 1917, something happened which shook the teachers of Los Angeles into action; their wages were suddenly cut to about forty per cent of what they had been before. Or, to put it in the more common formula, the cost of everything the teachers had to buy with their money increased a hundred and thirty per cent; and meantime their wages remained as in 1914. They were unable to live, and fifty-six per cent of them were forced to do additional outside work. So the teachers’ associations began a salary campaign, which for the first time brought them out of the classrooms and into contact with the real life of Los Angeles. The campaign lasted intermittently for four or five years, and the outcome of it was tragedy for the teachers and comedy for the reader. One of the purposes for which Mrs. Dorsey had been made superintendent was to hold the salaries down; and in her effort to break the resistance of the teachers, she served notice upon them that they must sign their contracts for the next year before the end of the old term—and this although legally they had until twenty days after the end of the term. She would be very sorry not to see their faces next year, she told them, and smiled amiably. When some said that they did not want to return, her smile was still amiable. “You’ll be back,” she said. “Teachers have gone out before this and tried to do something else.” The president of the City Teachers’ Club made herself obnoxious by calling a meeting of the teachers for four o’clock one afternoon—that is to say, after the closing hour of the schools. Mrs. Dorsey, desiring to forestall her, closed the schools at half past one that afternoon. Hitherto Mrs. Dorsey had maintained that the schools must never be closed for special occasions; but now she closed them, and called the teachers together at half past one to listen to an address of her own. Some teachers thought it was her idea that they should be tired out and go home before their own meeting at four o’clock! But the dissatisfaction of the teachers did not abate. A hundred of the best had left, and three hundred more were refusing to renew their contracts for the coming year; so the business men realized that some concession had to be made. Manifestly, it would not do to let it come as a result of teacher agitation; it must be due to the loving concern of business men. Mr. Sylvester Weaver, head of the “education committee” of the Chamber of Commerce, was called in, and he organized a committee of leading citizens, including Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. Somebody had “put over” on the teachers a publicity agent, a gentleman with a big cigar in his mouth and a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat. He now advised the teachers to drop their agitation and allow the business men to handle it; let the grand committee retire and do some grand thinking. So for five weeks the teachers preserved an awed silence.