One might think that the plutocracy of California ought to be content to leave its educational business in the hands of such a board; nevertheless, they have felt it necessary to organize an independent vigilance committee, to supplement Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker. The prime mover in this action was Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Pacific Pipe & Supply Company of Los Angeles, a gentleman whose qualifications to direct the higher education of California were acquired while driving a stage. Mr. Haldeman founded what he called the Commercial Federation of California; later, learning from the war the advantages of camouflage, he changed the name to the Better America Federation. He went out among the interlocking directorate and raised the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the purpose of keeping California capitalist. The Better America Federation is a kind of “black hand” society of the rich, a terrorist organization which does not stop short of crime, as I know from personal experience. It works in league with several depraved newspapers—the Los Angeles “Times,” owned by Harry Chandler, speculator in Mexican revolutions, and co-partner with Mrs. Sartori’s husband in the Vanderlip Kamtchtkan adventure; the Los Angeles “Express,” with two university regents in charge; the San Francisco “Chronicle,” owned by Mike de Young, whom Ambrose Bierce pictured hanging on all the gibbets of the world; the San Francisco “Bulletin,” whose bottomless venality has been revealed in Fremont Older’s book. I have told in “The Brass Check,” Chapter LXVI, the story of how “The Dugout,” a returned soldier’s paper in Los Angeles, was smashed because its publisher would not have it used as a strike-breaking agency. The secret service branch of the Better America Federation committed a dozen separate crimes in the doing of this job, and much of this was proved at the publisher’s trial.
The Better America Federation investigates every person who runs for office in California, and black-lists him unless he is one hundred per cent capitalist. It browbeats public officials and slanders them in its newspapers; it causes the raiding of labor offices, and the jailing without trial of labor organizers; and among its other activities it runs the educational system of California, including the state university. The spirit in which it works is revealed in a bill which it came near to pushing through the last California legislature, providing for cancelling the license of any school teacher who, discussing the constitution of the United States with a pupil “shall express to such pupil any opinion or argument in favor of making any change in any provision.”