I had my note-book and pencil ready, and it occurred to me that you might be interested to hear two or three minutes of the conversation which goes on in the office of the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, in these days of “normalcy” and “hundred per cent Americanism” triumphant. So I wrote a little scene from a play, a regular thrilling melodrama, with plots and counterplots, betrayals and raids and sudden surprises, grafters getting away with their loot and grand juries’ representatives bursting in upon them—all the stock stage material. But alas, when I brought it to Margaret Haley to read, I discovered that she had no idea she was dramatic, and didn’t like it; also, the particular bit of melodrama to which I had been witness had never been brought home to her, and her connection with it could not be revealed without pointing to certain very precious sources of information. And so my stage scene had to be “cut,” and you will have to learn about Chicago school graft from plain narrative prose. The public schools of Chicago still have some land which the grafters have not stolen. There is a tract of one square mile on the outskirts of the city, and in 1921 a bill was introduced in the state legislature to authorize the school board to sell it to the grafters. The Teachers’ Federation protested, and received in reply a letter from Mr. Bither, attorney for the school board, saying that the expenses of holding this land for the schools were such that if the teachers insisted upon its being held they must be prepared to have their salaries cut five hundred thousand dollars! The business representative of the teachers investigated and ascertained that the cost of holding this land was literally and absolutely nothing; if any money had been paid it had been paid illegally. So Mr. Bither’s proposition came to this: the teachers must stand by and let the grafters rob the schools, or else the teachers themselves would be robbed! Instead of bowing to this threat, the teachers appealed to the public; they demonstrated that the figures presented to the mayor by Mr. Bither, showing the money spent for running the schools and for teachers’ salaries, had been juggled. Mr. Bither had overstated the amount paid for teachers’ salaries by $868,000 and understated the amount paid for administrative salaries by $314,000. When he had wanted a big appropriation from the legislature, he had presented to this legislature tables showing that the teachers’ salaries were very low; but when he had wanted to keep the teachers from getting this money, he had presented to the mayor tables showing that their salaries were higher.