³ Chicago Teachers’ Federation minutes, March 22, 1932, Box 14, Chicago Teachers’ Federation Collection, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago History Museum Research Center, Chicago, Ill. (hereafter CTF Collection). Some teachers are named; others are simply labeled “teacher.”







































⁴ Chicago Teachers’ Federation Minutes, March 28, 1932, Box 14, CTF Collection.










⁵ Chicago Teachers’ Federation Minutes, April 1, 1932, Box 14, CTF Collection.



⁶ Chicago Teachers’ Federation Minutes, April 13, 1933, Box 14, CTF Collection.



























⁷ David, “Schools and the Crisis.”







⁸ Ibid.






















⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ The Nation, September 19, 1934.

March 22, 1932, Chicago Teachers Federation Meeting ³

Margaret Haley: “I wonder if the time has not come, or pretty nearly come, for the teachers to break their silence? . . . Don’t you think someone in this city ought to speak now, not wait until we see what the Commonwealth Edison Company and the People’s Gas Light and Coke Company want and until they get it? I don’t know any organized group of people in this city that is so able as the elementary teachers to spread this kind of thing.”

Miss Roach: “People say it is not ladylike to have a parade . . .” 

Frances Kenney: “It might backfire. You never know.”

Josephine Nichols: “A parade is not an academic thing; it is an emotional thing…Decide now whether you want to do that thing now. If you don’t, you never will do it. Why have a committee to decide the possible dangers and the possible something else? Here you are now. Decide now whether you want to do that thing or not. If you don’t you never will do it

Mary Abbe: “Well, now, I never expected to hear Josephine Nichols say anything like that. I have known her, lo, these many years. I have always looked upon her as being a very conservative and a very nice lady.” 

Teacher: “A perfect lady.” 

Mary Abbe: “I never dreamed if we had a parade she ever would look upon it in any way but—well, just as I would expect Miss Nichols to look at a parade. I am perfectly delighted.”

March 28, 1932, Chicago Teachers Federation Meeting ⁴

Miss McKay: “I had a telephone call last night from a teacher that has never joined a [labor] organization, she has never believed in anything. But she said, ‘For the first time in my life, you are going to do what I would like to see done. I am going to be in that parade.

I think that as this parade idea permeates, it is going to grow. They don’t know what it means. ‘It is not dignified to parade,’ I was told when I went back to school on Wednesday. I said, ‘Is it dignified to take what we have been taking for eleven months?’ I had it sent back to me, ‘I may change my mind.’”

April 1, 1932, Chicago Teachers Federation Meeting ⁵

Mary Abbe: “Remember, teachers are ladies.” (Laughter)

Miss Rhinesmith: “Let us be Communists a while instead of ladies.”

April 13, 1933, Chicago Teachers Federation Meeting ⁶

Inez de Lhorbe:  “If the First National Bank refuses to do business with us, I think we have a business proposition to give them: that each of the teachers file into the First National Bank when the doors are opened and remain in there until the doors close. And one after another, [we] go to all of the tellers and all of the men and put our proposition up to them and keep them busy with our business and not allow any other business to get in; that if we could do that and stop their business completely they would have to listen to us.”

April 22, 1933 – April 24, 1933

“[On] Saturday, April 22, 1933, and Monday, April 24, 35,000 teachers and parents demonstrated, and “raided” the banks. At the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co., teachers, 1,000 strong, paraded through the main banking floor. When President Leavell went into hiding, they searched his private office. After half an hour of milling and shouting in the street before the closed doors of the City National Bank, the demonstrating teachers called for [Bank President “Charley”] Dawes, and the crowd began to chant: 

All we want’s our pay!
All we want’s our pay!
Charley got $90,000,000 but
All we want’s our pay! 

Brigadier-General Dawes, backed by a line of uniformed guards, finally, after an hour, opened the door and talked to 500 teachers. His only contribution was a flash of profanity: ‘To hell with troublemakers!’”⁷

April 26, 1933

“‘Raids’ on the banks continued and on Wednesday, April 26, 1933, the same day on which the teachers of Ireland held their one-day strike against wage cuts, Chicago city and private police slugged and beat the marchers with their clubs and fists to give them a taste of ruling class ‘democracy.’”⁸

May 12, 1933 – May 13, 1933

“Early Friday afternoon, May 12, the following mimeographed bulletin was distributed in all the schools:

‘Information has come to [Superintendent] Bogan’s office from high authority that bankers will refuse to provide the $12,000,000 for salaries for October, November and December if the proposed demonstration or parade of teachers is held tomorrow. Please pass this information on to teachers and other employees at once.’

The effect was instantaneous. By the light of this reactionary torch flare even the dullest timid conservative saw the necessity for action. Saturday morning the teachers massed in Grant Park to march on the Loop banks.

[First National Bank] President Traylor…promised that three months’ salaries would be paid the teachers if the demonstration were called off. Finance capital, unwilling, paid $12,000,000 in teachers’ salaries to protect its investment.”⁹

September 19, 1934

Edith Smith: “Few of us are the sweet, complacent, non-thinking [teachers] that we used to be. Our eyes have been opened…After four years of learning that bankers are our worst enemies, that politicians are interested in our votes and power only and use our children merely as pawns in their selfish game, that we can depend on no one but ourselves, we cannot be restored to our previous complacency.”¹⁰