Defrilled Chicago

"I stand before the high court of public opinion and I impeach the solid majority of the Board of Education. . . . I impeach them in the name of youth. I impeach them in the name of American traditions. I impeach them in the name of this great city and its ambitious and enlightened people."

The shade of Edmund Burke may have smiled reminiscently as University of Chicago's goateed Dean of Education Charles Hubbard Judd thundered this peroration in Chicago's West Side Stadium one night last week. But on the faces of 20,000 listening parents and teachers were no smiles. Grimly they had set their jaws and wills against the Board of Education which week before had trimmed $4,000,000 worth of what it called "fads and frills" (junior high schools, kindergartens, physical educators, etc., etc.) out of Chicago's school system (TIME, July 24).

The mass meeting culminated a week of slowly gathering public indignation. Chicago's Hearstian Herald & Examiner had helped to whip it up with daily scourgings of the "handful of political appointees'' attempting "to wreck the city's school system and rob her 500,000 school children of their educational birthright." A "Save Our Schools" committee had sprung into fervent being. Claiming to represent 40 civic organizations, it had deluged the city with petitions, dodgers, tickets for the mass meeting. Other clubs and societies had pelted the board with protests. Cried the Tax Service Association of Illinois: "What we are doing in Chicago is to take a backward step of which even half-savage Russia would be ashamed."

For a time the storm beat chiefly around the educational issues involved. Then it centred on political machinations and the authenticity of the Board's announced $10,000,000 deficit in 1933 which it had offered as motive of its economizing. At the mass meeting Dean Judd traced the economy move back to an order from Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly, who had in turn taken his orders from Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. In the matter of the deficit, Dean Judd gave to the Board the lie direct.

The Herald & Examiner had previously asserted that the deficit was really only some $5,000,000, to which the Board had added $2,600,000 in anticipation of a hypothetical decrease in tax revenues. Now Dean Judd charged outright that the Board had deliberately misstated the deficit in order to frighten the public into accepting its cuts. Even if it were trying to wipe out in one year the deficit accumulated since 1929, that, at 1932's end, had been less than $7,000,000. As for 1933's genuine deficit of $1,162,940, that had already been disposed of by postponing a fortnight the schools' autumn opening. Without curtailment of a single school activity, concluded Dean Judd triumphantly, the board would end 1933 not only without a deficit but with a surplus of more than $800,000!

A moving moment came when grey-haired Superintendent of Schools William J. Bogan unexpectedly rose to address the meeting. Able and popular, he had been ignored by the Board in preparing its economy order. Said he: "I forced myself on this program because I am living in terror of the effect of the economies on the public schools. As I study these economies hour after hour, day after day, my, terror grows."

Superintendent Bogan then proceeded to outline a substitute plan by which the disputed $4,000,000 could be saved, chiefly by still another two-week shortening of the school term, a payless week for teachers. But the audience, happily accepting Dean Judd's figures, would hear of no more school economies. Ignoring Superintendent Bogan, they adopted unanimously resolutions: 1) demanding that the Board rescind its order or resign; 2 & 3) calling on Mayor Kelly and Illinois' Governor Henry Horner to intervene; 4) extending "profound thanks and appreciation" to William Randolph Hearst and the editor of the Herald & Examiner.

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