Education: Dynamite in Chicago

Chicago’s blue-eyed, sallow Superintendent of Schools William Harding Johnson lives in the six-room lower half of a two-family house in the Rogers Park section of Chicago’s North Side. Last week a dynamite bomb shattered his rear doorstep. It was, said the police bomb squad, “no amateur job.”

Detonator. On Sept. 6 Superintendent Johnson had ordered children who were attending public schools outside their own districts to shift back at once. The decree, he explained, was intended to restore the city’s numerically unbalanced classrooms to equilibrium. Parents retorted that to send their children to the appointed schools often meant sending them farther from home than before. Some 10,000 families sabotaged his plan by organizing mass hookey. Indignation meetings sent delegations buzzing to Johnson from all sections of the city. When his back doorstep was blown up, he had been ducking an Illinois Superior Court subpoena for two days.

Leonardo. Dr. Johnson, when his dander is up, is something of a bombshell himself. In Chicago he is credited with many pedagogical firsts. He made Chicago the first big U.S. city to adopt a now-accepted plan of remedial reading. He was probably the first U.S. school superintendent to receive an honorary degree (Doctor of Laws) from a college in his own school system (Chicago Teachers College). He has repeatedly been lampooned as a Kelly-machine man, as the proud possessor of an organization of spies who tell tales out of school.

The Chicago Sun has compared him, skeptically, with Leonardo da Vinci. For Johnson is also first among the authors and co-authors of textbooks purchased by Chicago schools. As the author of 20 titles used in Chicago classrooms, he ranges easily over electricity, ceramics, metalworking, reading and Chicago history. His opponents infer that his chief contribution to some of the texts was his name.

Last March, just before his $15,000-a-year contract came up for vote before the Board of Education, the Chicago Citizens Schools Committee shrilled: “It is doubtful whether in the whole history of America so brazen an attempt was ever made by a superintendent of schools to corner the market for his own books in the schools under his direction.” Johnson promptly assured his employers that he received not one penny from sales of his books to Chicago. His annual royalties, as high as $14,000, he announced, accrue to him from use of his books by cities of seven States other than Illinois.

Superintendent and Mrs. Johnson were sitting over after-dinner coffee with their neighbors upstairs when the bomb went off. Johnson suffered the only wound—a right arm slashed by flying glass. Estimated property damage: $1,000.