Mr. Loeb was so satisfactory to the plutocracy that first a Democratic and then a Republican administration appointed him. A Hebrew workers’ union was induced to support Mr. Loeb’s candidacy by the statement that the Catholic Federation was opposed to it; but at this time Roger Sullivan, the Democratic Catholic boss, was secretly supporting the reappointment of Loeb by Mayor Thompson, the Republican boss! Mayor Thompson afterwards stated that Mr. Loeb cried in his office and begged for the reappointment. Anyhow, the Chicago teachers fought the “Loeb rule,” as it was called, and the unions backed them. So the Loeb rule has fallen into disuse, and Chicago is one city in which the teachers run their own affairs. But, of course, the teachers are powerless to clean out the school system; it would be Bolshevism and Sovietism if they were to try. The teachers are mere employes, and the principals and superintendents are their “superiors”—this in spite of the fact that to be a grade teacher in Chicago you have to have educational qualifications, while the friends of politicians find it easy to pass the examinations for principalships. In a city where $10 is not safe anywhere, most of the attention of the teachers naturally has to be devoted to the getting of a living wage. Throughout this book you will find stories of teachers in revolt over this question, so let me say once for all that the rise in prices which cut the salaries of teachers to less than half, was not confined to Los Angeles and New York; it was a universal condition. The teachers in Chicago showed that between 1897 and 1919, the increase in the cost of living had been 349 per cent, so, in spite of the raises they had won, their salaries had been cut squarely in half; they had lost a dollar a day in buying power from their 1897 salaries! Yet the grafters were fertile in devices to keep the teachers from getting more money. Years ago, under the regime of Superintendent Cooley, they established a fake salary schedule; that is, they had one schedule on paper and another which they actually paid. They would grant increases, and then take them back; they would adopt schedules, and then suspend their operation; they would require examinations for admission to the higher salaries, and then pass but very few, and burn the papers in a great hurry. An investigation by the Teachers’ Federation showed that only sixty-two out of a possible twenty-six hundred were getting the maximum salary! They called this scheme the “merit system,” and it is still in use in many of our schools—the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association being a clearing-house for such bright ideas.