FDR, patron saint of contemporary liberalism, was decidedly NOT sympathetic to the struggle of teachers.
In Jonathan Alter's eminently fair and fascinating biography of Roosevelt and his First Hundred Days in office, The Defining Moment, we come across this rather striking nugget...
"Shortly after the Inaugural, Josephus Daniels, FDR's old boss at the Navy Department, wrote him to urge that he join a campaign to prevent cutting teachers' salaries even further...Roosevelt's reply to Daniels was cool: ' The past decade has seen a very large increase in teachers' salaries, and even if all the teachers were cut 15 percent like government employees, they would still be getting relatively more than in 1914!' In April, five thousand unpaid Chicago teachers occupied banks and City Hall...The president was unmoved."
Interesting...
