The Black Hand was sending Colonel Andrew Copp, whose ideas on education we have learned, to denounce the “teachers’ soviets” before the City Club and the Woman’s City Club. The Chamber of Commerce resolved to make an “impartial investigation” of the question, and appointed a committee, and a teacher was invited to appear before it to defend the new idea. Two teachers went, and found Colonel Copp on hand. The teachers were permitted to speak briefly, and then they were questioned, in tones that might have been used to naughty pupils. “Suppose the board of education refuses to carry out the orders of your teachers’ councils, what are you going to do then?”—and so on. Colonel Copp spoke at length, making a series of false statements; after which he packed up his papers and marched out, refusing to answer a single question. The chairman declared the meeting adjourned, without permitting the teachers even to deny the falsehoods! This was a regular habit of Colonel Copp, it appears; a group of high school teachers interviewed him after one of his addresses, and pointed out to him a number of flat misstatements he had made. He said he would “investigate”; but a day or two later he repeated the misstatements, and refused to correct them. When a teacher asked him how he could do such a thing, he turned his back upon her. For months the “Times” continued its denunciations of the “teachers’ soviets”; and, of course, they succeeded in crushing the hydra-headed monster. There come a hundred thousand new people into this community every year, and these people know nothing about local matters except what they read in the “Times.” When the “Times” tells them day after day that there is a band of secret conspirators, in sympathy with Moscow, trying to undermine the school system and destroy the morals of the children, they really believe it, and go to the polls and make their little “x” marks on the ballot, according to the pattern set before them in the “Times”! And so it is that four thousand highly trained experts are denied all opportunity to have effective say concerning the education of the children. CHAPTER VII A PRAYER FOR FREEDOM There is an election of the school board in Los Angeles every two years. The Black Hand laid their plans to elect a complete board in the spring of 1923; they went at the job in grim earnest, sparing neither trouble nor expense, and the story of what they did reads like a chapter from a muckraking novel.