In Chicago

The Chicago Board of Education entered their high-ceilinged meeting room. President J. Lewis Coath, melancholy-looking, thin-lipped, sat down on his dias, his subordinates at their desks facing him. In their impassiveness they resembled Indians at a pow-wow with white men. Superintendent Wm. McAndrew, on trial for insubordination (TIME, Sept. 12 et seq.), looked at them with contempt. Another of his many intermittent hearings was about to commence.

But no testimony pertinent to the legal charge of Superintendent McAndrew's "insubordination" was offered. Frederick Franklin Schrader of Manhattan, onetime associate editor of the War-time pro-German magazine The Fatherland and now editor of The Progressive, testified as had many another, that the British were fouling the minds of U. S. school children. He did not mention Superintendent McAndrew at all. After him went a Chicago school teacher, Rosalie Didier, to exclaim: "To read that Washington was a rebel was to me a desecration and to learn that the Boston Tea Party was vandalism made me feel that Schlesinger* should be filling a cell in a Federal prison." This last week's continuation of legal irrelevancies and digressions at last made some restive Chicago citizens rebuke the city's administration. A group of 29 civic organizations published a resolution: "Four or five sessions of this trial, occupying as many weeks, have now been held; but the original charges on which the Superintendent was suspended, and on which he can legally be tried at this time have not been argued. Instead the time has been taken up by trivial and irrelevant matters, with the evident intention of prolonging the trial until the Superintendent's term expires in February. "In the meantime Chicago has no Superintendent of Schools. The President of the Board has usurped the Superintendent's powers, and the schools are being run without the professional direction which the law requires." Shrewd, they added a paragraph which their rambunctious Mayor William Hale Thompson would understand: "We have become convinced that the present situation is a real crisis. It concerns a million parents --all voters--with enough power to enforce any demands they decide must be made to safeguard their children's interests."

The Chicago Public Library officials also rebuked the Mayor during the week. He had accused them of tolerating "pro-British unAmerican" books upon their shelves. They wrote: "Even taking passages quoted at their worst, we believe these books should be supplied to the library patrons that they may be acquainted with every shade of opinion. In this the Chicago Public Library is like all other libraries in the world, a depository of human thought; consequently much of its contents are contradictory. "This exchange and freedom of thought we consider the primary function of a library, and in keeping with the American ideal of a free press. Any other course would lead to an arbitrary censorship as detrimental to American political liberty as to American academic thought." ^

*Professor Arthur Meir Schlesinger, Harvard professor of history, whose books, among others, Superintendent McAndrew recommended for his teachers to read.