The Legend of George Schmidt and Substance News Lives on in Second City Teachers
In the spirit of a free press in an age of increasing surveillance and Big Brother, we are reprinting a fascinating interview with George Schmidt, the founder of Substance News who passed away in 2018 and inspired Second City Teachers.
You can hear the interview here: https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_caam_oralhistories/15/
Melena Grace Nicholson on behalf of the Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement Collection at Columbia College Chicago interviewed George on April 16, 2010 at the Burgundy Restaurant in Chicago. Thanks to Sharon Schmidt and Substancenews.net for posting this wonderful insight into a brilliant fighter for public education.
Can you tell us about your background?
I was raised in Elizabeth, Lyndon, and Newark, New Jersey. I went to college in 1964 and came to college in Chicago in 1966 at the University of Chicago. And I have been here ever since.
My dad couldn’t go to college but he had insisted that we read all the time and try to come to terms with (injustices) and he’d talk about it. And he really focused on the Holocaust. But it wasn’t called the Holocaust back then.
So, you know it’s like, well it’s hard – hard core Germans but they all fought against Nazism. And so everybody on the draft board knew everybody in my family and their big question was how did you become a commie? I says, well I’m not quite a communist, but yeah I got to tell you this Vietnam War, no. So we had a two hour discussion about the Vietnam War, and then they said – You know they were actually reading the regulations, because I was the first person to apply for C.O. status. And I’m sitting there with all these World War II veterans and government bureaucrats on the draft board; everybody had to go through the draft in those days. And they said to me, Okay, okay we’ll take you on your version that you can be a conscientious objector even though you would have probably fought like your father did in World War II. I said you know, Vietnam is my existential moment about it. And they said okay now, given that, do you want to be a non-combatant military service or do you want to be a civilian alternative service? – Because there were two categories. And I said I don’t care. I’m just not going to kill anybody for this war. Because the issue my parents taught me was, you go in the army you’re going to wind up killing people, especially in the infantry and that’s what you’re doing. So the war better be a good idea because killing people is pretty bad..
They said wait a minute. You’ve got all these objections about the war but you want us to put you in the army so you can – you – you’re not going to shut up are you? I said no. They said okay you can do civilian alternative service. We are having enough of a time figuring out how we got you in the first place. The last thing we want to do is put you in the army and have you come back home here. So that’s how it happened.
I was teaching high school in Chicago. They called me for alternative service, and they told me to report to a mental hospital in Southern New Jersey – where I’d become an orderly and I wrote them back and I said, I’m teaching at DuSable, one of the most segregated and impoverished high schools in the world. You know, it was right next to the old Robert Taylor Homes. And I’d like you to tell me how this can’t be the acceptable alternative service as a, you know, as a, civilian activity. And then they were supposed to get back to me on it, you know, I got one letter back saying, we are considering your thing, and I sent them pictures of DuSable. It was a hundred percent black, a hundred percent poor kids. They all lived in the housing projects, the famous housing projects. And then somebody burned down the draft board.
They all lived in the housing projects, the famous housing projects. And then somebody burned down the draft board.
What?
GS: That draft board was attacked during the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement escalated into the 70’s. And that was one of the draft boards that was burned.
Burned? By who?
GS: I think it was done by one of the Berrigans. Those priests, those radical catholic priests and nuns. It took place in 1971 right when I was having a debate, maybe, no it would have been ‘69, ’70.
And why, why did they burn it down?
GS: They were burning down any draft board they could get to before they were arrested and put in prison. I mean people were attacking government buildings. Uh, you know the weatherman was just this crazy upper middle class version of the same thing. But the people went after the draft boards. They saw the draft boards, especially in working class places like Elizabeth, New Jersey as the funnel within which working class men were sprayed into uniform.
So they had to figure out something. But I still have the card. I share it with people because, you know, when people talk about how, you know, the whole Reagan, post-Reagan, brainwash about how the whole 60’s thing was a crazy, hippie, drug-addicts. Self-indulge – I mean, we ended the draft. Otherwise kids would face what my generation faced coming out of high school in 1964. You either went into the army or you went into college, or you got a medical deferment and people called you a coward for having one.
We started doing what became known as military counseling and GI organizing. Those were two separate things. Military counseling was legal counseling for soldiers who had problems with the military. Some of it was for guys who had actually been in combat or who were facing combat, who decided they were actually conscientious objectors. And it’s pretty amazing, but one of the things that will make you into a pacifist is killing a bunch of people.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this but during the Cold War that was where this Iron Mountain was and they hollowed it out to be the command post for the U.S. military in the event that America got nuked by the Russians. And people were organizing. So, I was out there. We arrived at this address up in the hills near the Garden of the Gods, it was like a farmhouse, you know, and it supposedly was the G.I. Movement Center. It was all these Vietnam veterans and other people there and they were the ones doing the organizing putting out an underground paper for Fort Carson.
And I got there early in the morning and it looked like there’d been an orgy the night before. There was a bunch of naked people laying around. (laughing)
What?
GS: Who slowly woke up as I walked in, and they said, oh come – oh we’re glad you’re here. You know. They sent uh, a bunch of women into town and wearing those big granny dresses from the 60’s to get dinner. They shoplifted steaks in my honor. (laughing)
In your honor?
Yeah, me and my first wife. We were training people how to use the law and how to put out a newspaper. So they had a big barbeque and we ate, and then they had a tank race in my honor. They all got stoned and they pulled a couple of tanks – have you ever seen a tank? Well these are like those old, Patton tanks from the 1940’s and they’re rumbling across this huge field in front of the Iron Mountain, you know having a race. And all these guys are stoned out of their minds!
The teacher group I was with in Chicago became SUBS, Substitutes United for Better Schools. I came back into teaching in 1975 and there were no jobs. Reason there were no jobs was all the guys who didn’t want to organize against the Vietnam War, yet didn’t really want to take a stand, went into teaching and got a teaching deferment. So I came back in ’75 into teaching and, and I put out a leaflet when I saw the pay of substitute teachers had been the same since 1969 when I had started, when I left for a while to do all this G.I. stuff. And so I put out a leaflet and a petition saying, we should get a raise, because our pay has been frozen for six years. And this guy called me up, and he says I got to talk about organizing. So this guy came over and I was in an apartment in Logan Square at the time. We met in the kitchen, he says, how do you know how to organize anything? I said well you know I just spent six years organizing soldiers against the war. He says, well how do you feel about the war? And I said, well you know, sucked in a lot of ways that I couldn’t describe, but I wasn’t there, and I told him – He said, well you don’t know the half of – you don’t know a hundredth of how bad it was. I said how do you know this? He said, well, I was in First Marines Corps. Larry McDonald.
And the look of Substance comes from a newspaper, called Vietnam G.I. Because the paper I had apprenticed on and learned how to do a newspaper layout was V.G.I. which was one of the most famous of the anti-war papers. I just helped, because the guys who actually put it out were all Vietnam veterans.
We’d say, okay, well we got to get to know you better, because you know there’s layers of security you had to be at least aware of, because the bad guys were pretty serious too. So, we did 600 Vietnam G.I. I was mainly in distribution. I would interview people. But one of the funniest parts was this was a tabloid newspaper, printed in Chicago. And it’s mostly mailed to Vietnam.
And so the question is: How do you mail an anti-war newspaper to soldiers in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War? Well, you get a bunch of Catholic girls who had that perfect penmanship, and they would address envelopes in their handwriting, and then you’d spray it with that stuff you use to be able to buy in five and dime stores. I called it, you know, Tijuana whore house cologne.
So you know, then you’d stuff the paper in this thing and seal it and then, somebody would do the big lipstick thing – and so when the letter got to Vietnam, nobody was going to open it except the person to whom it was addressed. Because it was obviously from her. Only it turned out, you open it up and then there is Vietnam G.I.
And they had thousands of, uh, addresses of soldiers in Vietnam, many of whom had written and said I want to get your newspaper.
Did you ever mistakenly take someone?
Yeah we did. I had a roommate who actually spied on me. Um, but, but this one was the big one, because we told him not to come back and he left Chicago. He went to Milwaukee and, and started working for Vietnam Veterans against the War in Milwaukee. And one night, you know there was a lot of stuff going on everywhere, three Vietnam veterans in Milwaukee decided to firebomb a grocery store in the black ghetto that was selling bad food to black people. It was part of the thing with the Black Panthers. Well two of them showed up for the thing and were shot dead. The third one disappeared. The third one I got a call from Milwaukee, they said why didn’t you tell us about this guy? I said you should have asked before it was too late. So he was the agent who told the police this thing was going to happen.
And that was the guy you guys turned away?
That’s the guy we turned away because of the woman.
What were your years of activism?
Probably, uh the most focused was between 1975 and the late 1980’s. It was part of a lot of other things I was doing. By 1975 I had been active in what was called the GI movement and military counseling for almost seven years. And in 1975 we started the teachers newspaper, Substance, after some of us came back teaching in Chicago Public Schools. After the end of the Vietnam War a large number of us continued doing other types of anti-imperialist work and one of the most dramatic examples of white western imperialism on the planet was apartheid in South Africa, along with the other white supremacists governments in the Southern part of Africa. We also worked with uh, ZANU [Zimbabwe African National Union], one of the two liberation groups in Zimbabwe which at that time was called Rhodesia. And we worked with people in Angola, Mozambique, and a few other places in that part of the world. But it grew out of the way in which we came together as a movement as a result of the Vietnam War and the experiences of a lot of people. Especially working class Americans, black and white, in the face of that imperialist monstrosity. So, I’d say roughly from 1975 to the late 80’s overlapping from the end of the GI movement and from the time Substance became very viable in the Chicago Public Schools. I was also doing these other activities. It wasn’t limited to Africa. And probably in 1979 we hosted a teacher from El Salvador who was part of the resistance there in a couple of events against the tyranny in El Salvador at the time. At that point for example, over 200 teachers have been murdered at their desks in El Salvador. But we focused on the anti-apartheid divestiture movement, because the Chicago’s teacher’s pension fund is one of the largest pension funds in the Midwest. And there were investments that were made in those days through the pension fund that were in corporations that were doing business in South Africa. So, we were part of the group with the Chicago’s Teachers Union that demanded that our trustees on the pension fund oppose them, and it required a couple different layers of work. The first would be identifying companies that actually had direct corporate activities in South Africa.
Tell us about Substance News?
Substance has been in business for thirty-five years, and we tell people, we’ve never burned a source. Burning a source means you take information in confidence from a news source, then you turn around and reveal who the source was to the people in power. Um, we’ve never burned a source. I’ve been ready to go to jail. One in particular to get you to reveal sources, and you just can’t do it.
Well, 1975 when I came back teaching, like I told you, Larry McDonald and I got back together. I was interested in protesting the treatment of substitute teachers because we all wound up being stuck as substitute teachers.
Those who had come into teaching after the Vietnam generation that dodged the war draft by becoming teachers. Not exactly a heroic moment in the history of public education, but it did provide a generation of talent. So after a few months of organizing substitute teachers, I suggested that maybe we could publish a newspaper, because I knew how to do that from the Vietnam soldiers movement. So we started. And we literally came together in pieces. I mean the name Substance came out of the organization which was SUBS, which was Substitutes United for Better Schools. And we actually gave ourselves the name SUBS, before we knew what SUBS stood for. I said, somebody will come and figure out what the acronym is. That’s the way things like that happen. So, we started publishing every now and then, and then we, by the late 70’s we were publishing every month and people had to pay for a subscription. And then in 1980, when the ruling class foreclosed on the Chicago Public Schools declaring a financial crisis, which was really the same thing they are doing now, they wanted to suck more money out of the Board of Ed budget. And we learned how to read the budget documents of the government, which is the key to a lot of this stuff. And we’ve been doing it ever since.
Substance in the late 1980’s published a series of articles, mostly about the investments of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund in South Africa. And so, a bunch of activists, including people who were with Substance, started taking the position that there should be no Chicago money going to anything related to South Africa. That included direct investment from corporations and also included indirect investment and there was a big several years long struggle about how far you would take the indirect definition. Connie Day, Lou Pyster and some other people regularly wrote articles documenting how many dollars were invested from the fund in these corporations. And I was the editor. I didn’t do the actual research. Other people did the actual research, Connie Day; it was Connie Day at the time, now I think her name is Connie Prince. Lou Pyster is a retired union person and activist (and current CTU Retired Teacher Delegate). Well, Lou was carrying this fight on as well as me and other people, inside the Union House of Delegates. We were all elected delegates from schools that we were at; most of this time I was at Amundsen High School. It was especially important at the time because after 1984 the president of the Chicago Teachers Union was Jacqueline Vaughn who was an old style union politician, but at the time was a fierce African American female feminist, and so as the movement grew nationally, Jacky Vaughn became more and more attentive, you know, to this part of the argument; that the pension fund simply should say no, we should investigate all the investments that were going there. Some of my friends took a different approach to that. And I remember one of our friends, who is still on the Substance staff, would get up in the union meetings when we’d approach this and he’d say, investments for my future and my pension are not a question of black and white. The only color we should care about is green. Are these investments producing the profits that we need? It was a democratic debate. That CTU’s [Chicago Teachers Union] as democratic as you’re going to find in a large organization, and it was always fun.
Finally, I remember, Pyster. There was a vacancy on the Pension Board of Trustees, and the sure way to get elected, the election was held where all the active duty teachers get to vote for the six teacher reps on the pension board. And there was a vacancy, so Pyster was going to run and he was going to be our candidate, but we were the minority faction in the union. So the key was to get the endorsement of the House of Delegates. We got the endorsement of the House of Delegates, the union would support Pyster [and] through the mailing he’d get the votes to be on the pension board. And, he never forgave me for the speech I gave, but it won the vote.
And my speech was simple, I was a delegate, and I had the right to the floor, and I said you know we are talking about our pension and our future. And we all know Lou Pyster. He’s persistent to the point of obnoxiousness; he’s dogged until the point of tenaciousness and beyond.
Nobody here would ever use the word – and I paused and it was like – calm to describe Lou when he’s really interested in something. But what do you want guarding your pension; a poodle or a pit-bull? Vote for our pit-bull, reject the suggestion that we need another poodle. Elect Lou Pyster to the Pension Board. Pyster got elected to the pension board, and that moved things forward on the question. But it was like, he said did you have to do that? I said Lou, that won a lot of votes. Because the perspective wasn’t we weren’t electing Mr. Congeniality. We were electing the person to guard our future pensions. And didn’t I make it clear that you were dogged and determined and everyman we would want to have there, guarding the gate of our dollars. So that’s the kind of thing you have to do and actually, you know, to get the thing you have to provide people with the information which we were doing with all these articles, because we were researching real carefully.
Finally, during that time, and this was from 1984 to 1994, the biggest single vote was Jacqueline Vaughn, the President of the Chicago Teachers Union. She should be a legend in Chicago history. She certainly was the most powerful black woman in Chicago during the 1980’s, but she’s been literally wiped out of the history books in favor of people like Marva Collins, who’s a total fraud, because of the white-wash and the brainwashing from the Reagan years.
Jacqueline Vaughn was a militant union leader, who led three huge strikes. The strikes were all just nuts and bolts union strikes, but we struck in 1983 for thirteen days when she was vice president of the union, but she was the public voice because a majority of the kids were black.
She was the black vice president at the time. The president was an Irishman named Bob Healey who was white. And he just very wisely made sure that Jacky was the person who went up against the black lady, who was the school superintendent, who would get up and say, you know these teachers are hurting black children. Well, the fact the majority of teachers were black too was sort of irrelevant in the ruling class line of about what was real and what wasn’t. We went on strike for what I think was ten days. And then in 1987 Jacky brought us out for nineteen days in September, the longest strike in Chicago’s schools history. And in each one we won and held back this assault that’s been going on ever since on our pay benefits [and] working conditions. Then Jacky died of breast cancer in 1994 and it’s been downhill ever since. Her successor (Tom Reece) was a wimp. I ran against him and, he was, he was a white guy, but he ran as a black guy, and Jacky’s successor. It was bizarre. I still got about forty percent of the vote but I lost the election.
You lost the election?
GS: In 1994 for president of Chicago Teachers Union. Yeah, that was the last time I ran. I ran in ’88 against Jackie herself.
Really?
And got forty percent and for two years she wouldn’t speak to me, because I ran against her. Then later before her death, we became kind of friends because I kept telling her, I said this is deep. This involves shit like South Africa and you know if you went – and then she did go.
In 1999 I published these tests called the CASE Tests in Substance and by that time Mayor Richard Daley had consolidated his control over the public schools, and they wanted to destroy me if they could. So they suspended me and charged me with copyright infringement – we published the actual test to show how dumb they were. And um, they eventually fired me in August 2000. They formally took a vote to fire me as a teacher after twenty-eight years, at a board of education meeting. Only one labor movement leader – labor union leader in Chicago stood up at that meeting and talked in my defense. His name was Jarvis Williams. He was president of Local 46 of the Service Employees Union. And he compared what I had done to Nelson Mandela whom he knew personally. He was a black guy who was head of the janitors – of the Service Employees Intl’ Union representatives of the public school janitors. I just remembered that. And Jarvis got up and he said, you need people who are going to stand up and say what is right, even if you disagree with him, blah, blah, blah. Well, a couple years later, they forced Jarvis Williams out. Andy Stern was consolidating the Service Employees, and the Local 46 was dissolved. It was one of the most powerful black unions in Chicago. Jarvis was one of the most powerful black labor leaders of Chicago. Jarvis is put into retirement at a very nice pension and they made Local 46 became a part of an amalgamated 1274 Local 73 Service Employees, which is currently under a white woman named, Christine Boardman. Instead of just representing the janitors and other people like that in Chicago Public Schools, they represent everything from bus drivers in Gary, Indiana to the toll takers on the Illinois Tollway. But, that’s a real proud moment, now that I think about it, when Jarvis Williams got up at the Chicago Board of Education meeting and did that for me. But Jarvis was forced out about five or six years ago, under that thing that Andy Stern was creating with SEIU. Um, but Jarvis would remember those details and he – I have a hunch that he had a lot more to do with the anti-apartheid movement. You can Google a lot of stuff about it; because they have been having a civil war inside for the past couple years. But, um, Andy Stern, who is now leaving as president of SEIU according to the New York Times, visited the White House to talk to the President 20 times since Obama was inaugurated. That’s SEIU. But locally SEIU was a much different thing ten years ago when Jarvis was running Local 46.
What did you teach in the Chicago Public Schools?
Depends on when. If they – you know, if you’re a white guy and you’re teaching in Chicago’s vast ghettos. The first day – until you get a reputation in the school, the kids know you’re not friendly. So, in 1980 I had just gotten to Marshall High School on the West side. There had been like seven substitute teachers and I arrived just before the 1980 presidential election. So I’m the white guy that they don’t expect is going to last long.
Kids come in and say, after Election Day, when Reagan won, you’re going to put us back into slavery now.
I said, well, you don’t know me very well, but I should explain to you over time when we get to know each other. (Laughs) No, but why do you think the election of Reagan means you’re going to wind up slaves again? And it turns out the precincts across the West side went around and told black voters that they had to vote against Reagan because he was going to reinstitute black slavery.
Uh, and the kids at least, a lot of the kids believed it. So, you asked what you teach – some of what you teach depends on the number of books, because my principle was every child should have a book to take home and read tonight. Well not – most of the schools that I taught at they didn’t have enough books. They used class sets. You know, you have thirty books for the room; kid can’t take it home, and then the kids who want to study or fall in love with the book, wind up stealing the book from their own public school. It was bizarre.
So, I would always fight like crazy for the book, to make sure everybody could take home a book. And I always budgeted, I told people you had to budget 120 – 140 %. You’re going to have a hundred kids in this class; you’re going to need 140 books because children, especially in this community, where everything is disrupted, we’re going to lose them. Or if the kid gets killed, I am not going to ask mom to bring the book back. I mean, I had a kid one day you know, he was – we were in the middle of Huckleberry Finn, he had finally passed the test; Monday morning, turns out the kid had been murdered the night before in a gang fight. And you know, you’re supposed to write down which books the family is supposed to return. I’m not going to do that. I mean, that’s nuts. So if you lose a book, you’ve got to budget for having enough books. When you are teaching a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it's kind of, you know, wishy-washy, you can have a lot of fun with that, because the central theme is race. You can also have fun with the fact that Harper Lee, for all her brilliance, didn’t render black dialect too well when she does that confrontational scene in the black church. The housekeeper, Capurnika, takes the two white kids to the black church and they have a confrontation with one of the black people. And the dialect is just a little bit – a white person’s version. And see we can have a little bit of that conversation – with the class, once you know the class. You know, um, I mean there are a lot of things you can teach. I rarely taught history and social studies. I mostly taught English.
I taught shop for a while, drafting. You know, you teach whatever they are going to pay you to teach. But you can do a lot with literature. You know Moby Dick is one of the most incredible. People say Moby Dick? If you teach Moby Dick as a metaphor for the struggle for America to find its way in a multi-racial world, it’s an incredible thing. You teach Huck Finn as the story for what it’s like to be white; and try to deal with whiteness. You can’t cut out the N-word because Huck and the white people around him are using it – that’s the way they talked.
But you got to get the kids to the point in the book where Huck sits there and says – if you remember it – Huck says, well I guess I’m going to go to Hell because all the Christians say if you steal someone’s property like I’m helping to steal Jim, you go to Hell. He says well I guess I’m going to go to hell. That’s an incredible white thing, right? It’s right there in Mark Twain. Later you can go about how Mark Twain did all the ant-imperialist agitation against the Philippines invasion. He wrote some of the best stuff about the horrors of the Belgian occupation of the Congo and the brutality of it. But Huck Finn. You got to deal with Huck Finn. And there is a lot of use of the word nigger in Huck Finn. And a lot of people go, well you can’t; you got to. Anyway, it depends on what you teach. But I don’t believe that teaching should be primarily preaching.
You can teach in the context of a reality that the kids can learn from. That’s all. That’s how I teach; or how I used to teach. I’ve been blacklisted for ten years. They fired me in August 2000, they black-listed me in the city and suburbs. I went for suburban jobs teaching.
Why did they fire you?
Because I violated the Board of Education’s copyright, by publishing six of the CASE tests. It’s on the old Substance website. There’s a 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision by Richard Posner, nineteen pages long, where he denounces me and uses me as an adjective. He said I’m an extremist. If I had figured out a compromise instead of publishing the whole thing, he might have listened to my argument. But because I said you have to publish the entire tests to see how ridiculous it is – You can’t just publish the stupidest questions, because I mean, anybody could say oh well we had one stupid question. No they didn’t. No they haven’t used that test since but they accused me and sued me for a million dollars. They said it cost them a million dollars to develop this pile of garbage, and that I had destroyed the value of it by publishing it. I said it was worthless to begin with. It was a waste of the taxpayers' money. And we did the city a favor by showing how that example of how the money was wasted.
(Former President) Barack (Obama) used to come around the Union a lot when I was working for the Union.
And the biggest thing was that our focus was on that pension fund and that as a model for all the pensions that had the control. You know, just to frame that, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund has twelve trustees who decide on all the policies. Six of those are elected by the active teachers who are working in the Chicago Schools. Three are elected by the pensioners; two are by the board and one by the principles. So, you have a democratic chance to actually influence that policy, you have to elect people to the trustees at the CTPF.
What was it like protesting in Chicago in those days?
We marched against segregation and racism during the anti-apartheid years 1976 and marched into Marquette Park as a group called the Martin Luther King Jr. Movement Coalition. Marquette Park at the time was 100% white and there was a Nazi Office right there at the 71st and Rockwell. And on the wall of the building, a three flat, was painted the swastika and it said niggers, go home, in like five foot high letters. So we get to march and we had a permit, but only 200 of us were allowed to march and they provided six police officers.
We went to the corner of 71st and California, somebody from the city of Chicago conveniently dumped a load of concrete on the edge of the park so that people could throw stuff at us, and there were 2,000 white people there trying to kill us.
Minimum 2,000. I mean, so the sky was filled with shit. And, and, so, I remember distinctly, this is the kind of thing that’s valuable. Two things; one, is the leaders of the march, which was a couple of Black ministers and this lawyer I know, had moved ahead of the march about ten feet so they were getting pummeled the worst, but we had to stay in the street because most of the marchers were black. And if you were black you were color coded for destruction if you went onto the sidewalk. And I thought you know, those people are still standing, that’s really admirable. And I’m ducking shit too, but you know, I’m just looking at them thinking this. And then I noticed this one white guy who was a real outspoken activist type, he disappeared into the white side of the sidewalk. I suddenly saw him over there being white. It was an incredible example of how white can be a privilege, so that he could get out of the street and become white, he would.