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                             THE GOOSE-STEP








                                  THE
                               GOOSE-STEP

                     A Study of American Education

                                   BY
                             UPTON SINCLAIR

                               AUTHOR OF
             “THE BRASS CHECK,” “THE PROFITS OF RELIGION,”
                           “THE JUNGLE,” ETC.




[Illustration]




                        PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR
                          PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

                         WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTORS
                        _THE ECONOMY BOOK SHOP_
                   33 SOUTH CLARK ST., CHICAGO, ILL.








                         COPYRIGHT, 1922. 1923
                                   BY
                             UPTON SINCLAIR

                                  ---

                         _All rights reserved_.

                                  ---

       First edition, February, 1923, 10,000 copies, clothbound.
       Second edition, February, 1923, 8,000 copies, paperbound.




                                CONTENTS

       CHAPTER                                              PAGE
                  INTRODUCTORY                              ix-x

               I. The Little Gosling                           1

              II. The College Goose                            4

             III. The University Goose                         9

              IV. The Goose-steppers                          15

               V. Interlocking Directorates                   18

              VI. The University of the House of Morgan       23

             VII. The Interlocking President                  29

            VIII. The Scholar in Politics                     34

              IX. Nicholas Miraculous                         40

               X. The Lightning-change Artist                 44

              XI. The Twilight Zone                           49

             XII. The Academic Department Store               54

            XIII. The Empire of Dullness                      58

             XIV. The University of Lee-Higginson             62

              XV. The Harvard Tradition                       67

             XVI. Free Speech But—                            72

            XVII. Interference                                77

           XVIII. The Laski Lampoon                           82

             XIX. Raking the Dust-heaps                       88

              XX. The University of U. G. I.                  91

             XXI. Stealing a Trust Fund                       97

            XXII. Professor Billy Sunday                     102

           XXIII. The Triumph of Death                       107

            XXIV. The Tiger’s Lair                           111

             XXV. Peacocks and Slums                         115

            XXVI. The Bull-dog’s Den                         121

           XXVII. The University of the Black Hand           126

          XXVIII. The Fortress of Medievalism                132

            XXIX. The Dean of Imperialism                    137

             XXX. The Mob of Little Haters                   141

            XXXI. The Drill Sergeant on the Campus           145

           XXXII. The Story of Stanford                      152

          XXXIII. The Wind of Freedom                        157

           XXXIV. The Stanford Skeleton                      162

            XXXV. The University of the Lumber Trust         168

           XXXVI. The University of the Chimes               174

          XXXVII. The Universities of the Anaconda           179

         XXXVIII. The University of the Latter-Day Saints    184

           XXXIX. The Mining Camp University                 188

              XL. The Colleges of the Smelter Trust          192

             XLI. A Land Grant College                       197

            XLII. An Agricultural Melodrama                  203

           XLIII. The University of Wheat                    206

            XLIV. The University of the Ore Trust            209

             XLV. The Academic Wink                          216

            XLVI. Introducing a University President         222

           XLVII. Introducing a Board of Regents             227

          XLVIII. The Price of Liberty                       230

            XLIX. The People and Their University            235

               L. Education F. O. B. Chicago                 240

              LI. The University of Standard Oil             243

             LII. Little Halls for Radicals                  249

            LIII. The University of Judge Gary               254

             LIV. The University of the Grand Duchess        258

              LV. The University of Automobiles              263

             LVI. The University of the Steel Trust          271

            LVII. The University of Heaven                   277

           LVIII. The Harpooner of Whales                    282

             LIX. An Academic Tragedy                        287

              LX. The Geography Line                         291

             LXI. A Leap into the Limelight                  295

            LXII. The Process of Fordization                 302

           LXIII. Intellectual Dry-rot                       306

            LXIV. The University of Jabbergrab               313

             LXV. The Growth of Jabbergrab                   319

            LXVI. Jabbergrab in Journalism                   323

           LXVII. The City Colleges                          329

          LXVIII. The Large Mushrooms                        334

            LXIX. The Little Toadstools                      339

             LXX. God and Mammon                             345

            LXXI. The Orange-outang Hunters                  351

           LXXII. The Academic Pogrom                        356

          LXXIII. The Semi-Simian Mob                        363

           LXXIV. The Rah-rah Boys                           370

            LXXV. The Social Traitors                        377

           LXXVI. Prexy                                      382

          LXXVII. Damn the Faculty                           390

         LXXVIII. Small Souls                                395

           LXXIX. The World of “Hush”                        399

            LXXX. The Foundations of Fraud                   407

           LXXXI. The Bolshevik Hunters                      412

          LXXXII. The Helen Ghouls                           418

         LXXXIII. The Shepard’s Crook                        424

          LXXXIV. Cities of Refuge                           428

           LXXXV. The Academic Rabbits                       436

          LXXXVI. Workers’ Education                         440

         LXXXVII. The Spider and the Fly                     445

        LXXXVIII. The Workers’ Colleges                      450

          LXXXIX. The Professors’ Union                      454

              XC. The Professors’ Strike                     459

             XCI. Educating the Educators                    464

            XCII. The League of Youth                        470

           XCIII. The Open Forum                             473




                              INTRODUCTORY


Six hundred thousand young people are attending colleges and
universities in America. They are the pick of our coming generation;
they are the future of our country. If they are wisely and soundly
taught, America will be great and happy; if they are misguided and
mistaught, no power can save us.

What is the so-called “higher education” of these United States? You
have taken it, for the most part, on faith. It is something which has
come to be; it is big and impressive, and you are impressed. Every year
you pay a hundred million dollars of public funds to help maintain it,
and half that amount in tuition fees for your sons and daughters. You
take it for granted that this money is honestly and wisely used; that
the students are getting the best, the “highest” education the money can
buy.

Suppose I were to tell you that this educational machine has been
stolen? That a bandit crew have got hold of it and have set it to work,
not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but
for ends very far from these? That our six hundred thousand young people
are being taught, deliberately and of set purpose, not wisdom but folly,
not justice but greed, not freedom but slavery, not love but hate?

For the past year I have been studying American Education. I have read
on the subject—books, pamphlets, reports, speeches, letters, newspaper
and magazine articles—not less than five or six million words. I have
traveled over America from coast to coast and back again, for the sole
purpose of talking with educators and those interested in education. I
have stopped in twenty-five American cities, and have questioned not
less than a thousand people—school teachers and principals,
superintendents and board members, pupils and parents, college
professors and students and alumni, presidents and chancellors and deans
and regents and trustees and governors and curators and fellows and
overseers and founders and donors and whatever else they call
themselves. This mass of information I have turned over and over in my
mind, sorting it, organizing it—until now, I really know something about
American Education.

I do not intend in this book to expound my ideas on the subject; to
argue with you as to what education might be, or ought to be; to
persuade you to any dogma or point of view. I intend merely to put
before you the facts; to say, this is what American Education now is.
This is what is going on in the college and university world. This is
what is being done to your sons and daughters; and what the sons and
daughters think about it; and what the instructors think about it. Here
is the situation: make up your own mind, whether it suits you, or
whether you want it changed.




                             THE GOOSE-STEP

                    _A Study of American Education_




                               CHAPTER I
                           THE LITTLE GOSLING


Once upon a time there was a little boy; a little boy unusually eager,
and curious about the world he lived in. He was a nuisance to old
gentlemen who wanted to read their newspaper; but young men liked to
carry him on their shoulders and maul him about in romps, old ladies
liked to make ginger cakes for him, and other boys liked to play
“shinny” with him, and race on roller skates, and “hook” potatoes from
the corner grocery and roast them in forbidden fires on vacant lots. The
little boy lived in a crowded part of the city of New York, in what is
called a “flat”; that is, a group of little boxes, enclosed in a large
box called a “flat-house.” Every morning this little boy’s mother saw to
his scrubbing, with special attention to his ears, both inside and back,
and put a clean white collar on him, and packed his lunch-box with two
sandwiches and a piece of cake and an apple, and started him off to
school.

The school was a vast building—or so it seemed to the little boy. It had
stone staircases with iron railings, and big rooms with rows of little
desks, blackboards, maps of strange countries, and pictures of George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Aurora driving her chariot.
Everywhere you went in this school you formed in line and marched; you
talked in chorus, everybody saying the same thing as nearly at the same
instant as could be contrived. The little boy found that a delightful
arrangement, for he liked other boys, and the more of them there were,
the better. He kept step happily, and sat with glee in the assembly
room, and clapped when the others clapped, and laughed when they
laughed, and joined with them in shouting:

              Oh, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,
              The—ee home of the Bra—ave and the Free—ee!

The rest of the day the little boy sat in a crowded classroom, learning
things. The first thing he learned was that you must be quiet—otherwise
the teacher, passing down the aisle, would crack your knuckles with a
ruler. Another thing was that you must raise your hand if you wanted to
speak. Maybe these things were necessary, but the little boy did not
learn why they were necessary; in school all you learned was that things
were so. For example, if you wanted to divide one fraction by another,
you turned the second fraction upside down; it seemed an odd procedure,
but if you asked the reason for it, the teacher would be apt to answer
in a way that caused the other little boys to laugh at you—something
which is very painful.

The teacher would give out a series of problems in “mental
arithmetic”—tricks which you had been taught, and you wrote the answers
on your slate, and then marched in line past the teacher’s desk, and if
you had done it according to rule, you got a check on your slate. You
learned the great purpose of life was these “marks.” If you got good
ones, your teacher smiled at you, your parents praised you at home, you
had a sense of triumph over other little boys who were stupid. You
enjoyed this triumph, because no one ever suggested to you that it was
cruel to laugh at your weaker fellows. In fact, the system appeared to
be designed to bring out your superiority, and to increase the
humiliation of the others.

In this school everything in the world had been conveniently arranged in
packages, which could be stowed away in your mind and made the subject
of a “mark.” Columbus discovered America in 1492; the Declaration of
Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; Switzerland was bounded on the
north by Germany. This business of “boundings” appeared in little
diagrams; Switzerland was yellow and Germany pink, and no one burdened
your mind with the idea that these spots of color represented places
where human beings lived. At this same time the little boy was going to
Sunday school, where he learned something called “the creed,” with a
sentence declaring that “from Thency shall come to judge the quick and
the dead.” The little boy pondered hard, but never made sure whether
“Thency” was the name of a person or a place.

Some thirty-five years have passed, but the little boy still remembers
the personalities of these teachers. There was a middle-aged lady, stout
and amiable, and always dressed in black; then one who was angular and
irritable; then one who had pretty brown eyes and hair, but to the
puzzlement of the little boy had also the beginnings of a mustache. Next
came a young man with a real mustache, and pale, washed-out eyes and
complexion; but he was dreadfully dull. The novelty had worn off the
school by this time, and the boy had got tired of stowing away packages
of facts in his mind. He had become so expert that he was able to do two
years’ work in one, and at the age of twelve was ready for what was
called the City College. But he was judged too young, and had to take
one year in the grammar school all over. The fates took pity on him, and
gave him as teacher for that year a jolly Irish gentleman, so full of
interest in his boys that he did not keep the rules. If you wanted to
ask him questions you asked, and without first raising your hand; you
might even get into an argument with him, as with any boy, and if he
caught you whispering to your neighbor, his method of correcting you was
novel, but highly effective—he would let fly a piece of chalk at your
head, and you would grin, and the class would howl with delight.

In this strange, happy group the little boy went by the nick-name of
“Chappie”; for the school was located on the East side of New York, and
most of the boys were “tough,” and had never before heard the English
language correctly spoken by a boy. “Chappie” owned a collection of one
or two hundred story-books which had been given him by aunts and uncles
and cousins at a succession of Christmases and birthdays. The priceless
treasure, when he left the school, became the foundation of a class
library, to the vast delight of the other boys and of the Irish teacher.
So the boy ended his grammar-school life in a blaze of glory, and went
away thinking the public school system a most admirable affair.




                               CHAPTER II
                           THE COLLEGE GOOSE


The College of the City of New York at that time occupied an old brick
building on Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. It gave a five
years’ course, leading up to a college degree; but the first two or
three years were the same as high school years at present. The boy went
there, not because he knew anything about it, nor because he knew what
he wanted, but because that was the way the machinery was built; he was
turned out of the grammar school hopper, and into the city college
hopper. In his earliest days it had been his intention to become the
driver of a hook-and-ladder truck; later on he had decided to follow his
ancestors to Annapolis; now he had in mind to be a lawyer; but first of
all he wanted to be “educated.”

Most of the students in this college were Jews. I didn’t know why this
was; in fact, I hardly knew _that_ it was, because I didn’t know the
difference between Jews and Gentiles. They came from poor families, and
most of them worked hard; they lived at home, so there was little of
what is called “college life” about our education. There were feeble
attempts made to get up “college spirit”; now and then a group of lads
would run about the streets emitting yells, but their efforts were
feeble, and struck me as silly. In the course of time one of the better
dressed members of my class came to me with mysterious hints about a
“fraternity.” I didn’t know what a “fraternity” was, and anyhow, I had
no money to spare; I was living on four dollars and a half a week, and
earning it by writing jokes and sketches for the newspapers.

I took six or eight courses each half year at the college, and as I
recall them, my principal impression is of their incredible dullness.
For example, the tired little gentleman who taught me what was called
“English”; I remember a book of lessons, each lesson consisting of
thirty or forty sentences containing grammatical errors. I would open
the book and run down the list; I would see all the grammatical errors
in the first three minutes, and for the remaining fifty-seven minutes
was required to sit and listen while one member of the class after
another was called on to explain and correct one of the errors. The
cruelty of this procedure lay in the fact that you never knew at what
moment your name would be called, and you would have to know what was
the next sentence. If you didn’t know, you were not “paying attention,”
and you got a zero. I tried all kinds of psychological tricks to compel
myself to follow that dreary routine, but was powerless to chain my mind
to it.

Then there was “history”; first the history of the world, ancient and
modern, and then the history of England. I remember the tall, stringy
old gentleman who taught us lists of names and dates, which we recited
one hour and forgot the next. Here, if you were caught not paying
attention, it was possible to use your wits and “get by.” I remember one
bright moment when we were discussing the birth of the first prince of
Wales. Said the professor: “How did it happen that an English prince,
the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” The student, caught
unawares by this singular question, stammered, “Why—er—why—his mother
was there!”

Also there were the physics classes; rather less dull, because they
included “experiments,” which exhibited the peculiarities of natural
forces—sparks and smoke, and noises of explosions major or minor. But
why these things happened, or what they meant, was never understood by
anyone, and whether an explosion was major or minor was entirely a
matter of luck. I remember composing a poem for the college paper,
dealing with the effect of physics upon a poet’s mind:

                  He learned that the painted rainbow,
                    God’s promise, as poets feign,
                  Was transverse oscillations
                    Turning somersaults in rain.

And then there was drawing. We sat in a big studio, in front of plaster
casts of historic faces, and we made smudges supposed to resemble them.
On this subject, also, I wrote some verses, portraying the plight of a
student who forgot which cast he was copying, and paced up and down
before them, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno or King Henry of
Navarre?”

I studied a number of complicated technical subjects—perspective and
mechanical drawing and surveying—though now, thirty years later, I could
not survey my front porch. I studied mathematics, from simple addition
to differential calculus. The addition I still remember; but if I were
asked to do the simplest problem in algebra I should not have an idea
how to set about it.

I remember with vividness the men who put me through these various
torments; young men, some feeble, some impatient, but always
uninterested in what they were doing; old men, kind and lovable, or
irritable and angry, but all of them hopeless so far as concerned the
task of teaching anybody anything of any use. Every morning we spent
half an hour in what was called “chapel,” and the old men, the members
of the faculty, were lined up on the platform, and remain to this hour
the most vivid line of human faces stored in my memory. It was their
duty to listen to student oratory; and so perfect had been the
discipline of their lives that they were able to sit without moving a
muscle, or giving the least sign of what they must have felt.

Sooner or later we came into the class-rooms of these old men, and each
in turn did what he could for us. I remember the professor of German,
lovable, genial, highly cultured. During the two years that I studied
with him, I learned perhaps two hundred words—certainly no more than I
could have learned in two days of active study under an intelligent
system. Little things he taught me that were not in the course, for
example by a slight frown when he saw me trimming my finger-nails in
class.

And then the professor of Greek, a white-whiskered old terror. For three
years he had me five hours per week, and today I could not read a
sentence from a child’s primer in Greek, though I still know the letters
and the sounds. I suppose there are Greek words which I have looked up
in the dictionary a thousand times, yet it never occurred to any human
being to point out to me that I might save time and trouble by learning
the meaning of the words once for all. I marvel when I realize that it
was possible for me to read “The Acharnians” of Aristophanes, line by
line, and hardly once get a smile out of it, nor have it occur to me
that there was any resemblance between what happened in that play, and
the fight against Tammany Hall and the Hearst newspapers which was going
on in the world about me.

And then the professor of Latin; he also was a terror, though his
whiskers were brown. He was a prominent Catholic propagandist, editor of
“The Catholic Encyclopedia,” and conceived a dislike for me because I
refused to believe things just because they were told me. I can see this
old gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims:
“Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!” Five hours a week for
five years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I
read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could
read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. I
look at a page of the language, and the words are as familiar to me as
my own English, but I don’t know what they mean, unless they happen to
be the same as the English.

And then the professor of chemistry; an extremely irascible old
gentleman with only one arm. There was a rumor to the effect that he had
lost the other through the misbehavior of chemicals, but I never
investigated the matter. I learned that chemistry consists of mixing
liquids in test-tubes, and seeing that various colored “precipitates”
result. After you do this you write down formulas, showing that a part
of one chemical has got switched over to the other chemical; but why
these things happen, or how anybody knows that they happen, was
something entirely beyond my comprehension, and which neither the
professor of chemistry nor his three assistants ever explained to any
member of my class. My most vivid recollection of this class has to do
with the close of the hour, when a group of us would gather with our
various test-tubes, and each put up a nickel, and guess a color; then we
would mix the contents of the tubes in one big tube, and shake them up,
and the fellow who guessed the right color won the “pot.”

And then the professor of literature. Perhaps you think I should have
had some success in classes of literature; but that only shows how
little you know about college. A new professor came in just as I reached
this class, and I learned in after years that he had got his appointment
through the Tammany machine. A bouncing and somewhat vulgar little man,
he was an ardent and argumentative Catholic, and his idea of conducting
a class of literature was to find out if there was anything in the
subject which could in any way be connected with Catholic doctrine and
history, and if so, to bring out that aspect of the subject. Thus I
learned that Milton, though undoubtedly a great poet, had cruelly lied
about the popes; also I learned that Chaucer was positively not a
Wyckliffite. I had not the remotest idea what a Wyckliffite was, but got
the general impression that it was something terrible, and I was quite
willing to believe the best of Chaucer, in spite of his perverse way of
spelling English words. As part of the process of disciplining our taste
in literature, we were required to learn poems by heart, and this
professor selected poems which had something to do with Catholicism.
Seeing that most of us were Jews, this was irritating, but we got what
fun we could out of our predicament. At that time there was a popular
music-hall song, with a chorus: “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”; so we used to
go about the corridors of our college chanting to this lively tune a
poem by Austin Dobson:

                 Missal of the Gothic age,
                 Missal with the blazoned page,
                 Whence, O Missal, hither come,
                 From what dim scriptorium?

                 Whose the name that wrought thee thus,
                 Ambrose or Theophilus,
                 Bending, through the waning light,
                 O’er thy vellum scraped and white!

I hope you know the tune of “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” so that you may
get the full cultural benefit from this recitation!

However, my little Catholic professor of literature did one thing for
me; he let me know of the existence of a poet by the name of Shelley. We
read “The Skylark” and “The Cloud” in class, and there came over me a
realization of the ghastly farce I was going through in this college. I
was near the end of my senior year, but my store of patience gave out,
and I presented a letter to the faculty, stating that I was obliged to
earn my own living, and requesting that I be allowed two months’ leave
of absence. The statement was strictly true, but the implication, that I
was going to spend the two months in earning money, was not true; I
spent the two months sitting on the bed in an eight by ten hall bedroom
in a lodging-house, reading Shelley’s poetry and Emerson’s Essays and
the prose of Ruskin and Carlyle. I went back to college and made up my
lost months in a week or two, and passed my examinations without either
credit or discredit—ranking just in the middle of my class.

I take it that the purpose of education is to discover the special
aptitudes of the student, and to foster them. And here was I, a man with
one special aptitude; here were a score of teachers, with whom I had
been in daily contact for five years; yet I am sure, if these teachers
had been told that one man in the class of ’97 would come to be known
throughout the civilized world in less than nine years, they would have
guessed more than half my class-mates before they guessed me. I am not
so egotistical as to imagine that I was the only man in that class who
had special aptitudes; if none of the others have developed any, I think
I know the reason—the machine had rolled them flat!




                              CHAPTER III
                          THE UNIVERSITY GOOSE


Columbia University at the time I went to it had just moved up to its
new buildings on Morningside Heights. The center of the group was a
magnificent white marble library, built almost entirely for display, and
with but little relation to books and those who were to use them. But of
this I had no suspicion; I had come now to the real headquarters of
education, and I studied the fascinating lists of courses, and my heart
leaped, because I was free to choose whatever I wished of all this
feast. I was a proud “bachelor of arts,” and declared my intention of
becoming a still prouder “master of arts.” To achieve the feat I must
complete a year’s course, consisting of a “major” subject and two
“minors,” and I must also compose a “thesis.” To register for all this I
paid a hundred and fifty dollars, earned by a newly discovered talent
for writing dime novels.

My major subject was English; and as part of the work Professor George
Rice Carpenter undertook to teach me the art of composition. This was an
undergraduate course, taken by students of Columbia College, and so I
had a chance to see how they were taught. To my dismay I found it
exactly the same dreary routine that I had been through at my City
College. Our professor would set us a topic on which to write a “theme”:
“Should College Students Take Part in Athletics;” or perhaps, “A
Description of the Country in Winter.” My own efforts at this task were
pitiful, and I was angrily aware that they were pitiful; I did not care
anything about the matters on which I was asked to write, and I could
never in my life write about anything I did not care about. I stood some
six weeks of it, and then went to the professor and told him I wanted to
drop the course.

So I discovered one of the embarrassments of the American college
system. Students are supposed to choose courses, but no provision is
made for them to sample the wares and make an intelligent selection. If
anybody finds he has made a mistake, he is in the same plight as if he
has married the wrong girl; he can not get out without hurting the
girl’s feelings, and I, unhappy blunderer in the undergraduate machine,
had to hurt the feelings of Professor Carpenter. “I don’t know what you
want,” said he, “or how you think you are going to get it; but this one
thing I can tell you positively—you don’t know how to write.” To which I
answered humbly, of course; that was why I had to come to him. But I had
become convinced that I wasn’t going to learn in that way, and my mind
was made up to drop the course.

Also I took a course in poetry with William Peterfield Trent. The
predecessors of Milton were the subject of our investigation, I
remember, and perhaps they were uninteresting poets—anyhow, the lectures
about them certainly were. I stood it for a month or two, and then we
came upon a grammatical error in one of our poets. “You will find such
things occasionally,” said the professor. “There is a line in
Byron—‘There let him lay’—and I have an impression that I once came upon
a similar error in Shelley. Some day before long I plan to read Shelley
through and see if I can find it.” And that finished me. Shelley was my
dearest friend in all the world, and I imagined a man confronting the
record of his ecstasies, seeking a grammatical error! I quit that
course.

Also I had started one in French. It was the same dreary routine I had
gone through for five years in Latin; translating little foolish
sentences by looking up words in the dictionary. I seriously meant to
read French, so stayed long enough to get the accent correctly, and then
retired, and got myself a note-book and set to work to hammer the
meaning of French words into my head. In another six weeks I had read
half a dozen of the best French novels, and in the course of the next
year I read all the standard French classics. I did the same thing with
German; having already got the pronunciation, I proceeded to teach
myself words, and in a year or two had got to know German literature as
well as English.

Most of my experience at Columbia consisted of beginning courses, and
dropping them after a few weeks. At the end I figured up that I had
sampled over forty courses. I finished five or six, but never took an
examination in one. And this was no mere whim or idleness on my part; it
was a deliberate judgment upon the university and its methods. I had
made the discovery that, being registered for a master’s degree, and not
having completed the necessary courses, I was free to register for new
courses the second year, without paying additional tuition fees; and
failing to complete the courses the second year, I was free to register
for the third year, and so on.

Thus I worked out my system—education in spite of the educators! I would
start a course, and get a preliminary view of the subject, and the list
of the required readings; then I would go off by myself and do the
readings. Almost invariably there was one book which the professor used
as a text-book, and his lectures were nothing but an inadequate résumé
thereof. At the beginning of his course on the drama Brander Matthews
would say “Gentlemen, I make it a point of honor with you not to read my
book—‘The Development of the Drama,’ until after you have finished my
course!”

Brander Matthews was a new type to me, the literary “man of the world.”
His mind was a store-house of gossip about the theater and the
stage-world, and I was interested, and eagerly read the plays. I knew
that Brander was not my kind of man, that his world was not for me; but
what kind of world I was going to choose, or to make for myself, I did
not at that time know. As I dwell on these days, I see before me his
loose, rather shambling figure, with a queerly shaped brown beard and a
cigarette dangling from the lower lip. I do not know how this dangling
was contrived, but I doubt if I ever saw the professor at a lecture that
he did not have that cigarette in position as he talked. Brander is the
beau ideal of the successful college professor, metropolitan style; a
clubman, easy-going and cynical, but not too much so for propriety;
wealthy enough to be received at the dinners of trustees, and witty
enough to be welcome anywhere. He is a bitter reactionary, and has
become one of President Butler’s most active henchmen; his reputation as
author of more than forty books is made use of by the New York “Times”
for an occasional job of assassinating a liberal writer.

With Nicholas Murray Butler I took a course in the critical philosophy.
At this time he was a modest professor, and his dazzling career lay in
the future. I shall have many impolite things to say about Butler, so
let me make it plain that there is nothing personal in my attitude; to
me he was always affable. He possesses a subtle mind, and uses it
thoroughly. With him I read “The Critique of Pure Reason” twice through
and as a work of supererogation I read also the impossible German. I had
had a little metaphysics before this, and was now pleased to have Kant
demonstrate that I had wasted my time. I took seriously what I read, and
assumed that my professor was taking seriously what he taught; so
imagine my bewilderment when shortly afterwards I learned that Professor
Butler had left the Presbyterian church, and had joined the Episcopal
church, as one of the steps necessary to becoming president of Columbia
University. It gave me a shock, because I knew he had no belief whatever
in any of the dogmas of the Christian religion, and had completely
demonstrated to me the impossibility of any valid knowledge concerning
immortality, free will or a First Cause.

Another “man of the world” type of professor whom I encountered was
Harry Thurston Peck, who gave me a course in Roman civilization of the
Augustan age. It was so like America that it was terrifying, but
Professor Peck I am sure was entirely unterrified. He was widely read in
the literature of decadence, and from him I heard the names of strange
writers, from Petronius and Boccaccio to Zola and Gautier. It was a
world of grim and cruel depravity, but one had sooner or later to know
that it existed, and to steel one’s soul for a new endeavor to save the
race. Poor Harry Peck was not steeled enough, and he broke the first
rule of the “man of the world,” and got found out. A woman sued him for
breach of promise, and published his letters in the newspapers. There
were some who thought he should not have been assumed to be guilty,
merely because a blackmailer accused him; but the powers which ruled
Columbia thought otherwise, and Professor Peck was driven out, and
committed suicide.

It was a peculiar thing, which I observed as time went on—every single
man who had had anything worth-while of any sort to teach me was forced
out of Columbia University in some manner or other. The ones that stayed
were the dull ones, or the worldly and cunning ones. Carpenter stayed
until he died, and Brander Matthews, and Butler, and Trent, who purposed
to read through the works of Shelley to find a grammatical error, and
John Erskine, whom I knew as a timid and conventional “researcher,” and
who, I am told, has been chosen by Butler as his heir-apparent. But Peck
went—and Hyslop, and Spingarn, and Robinson, and MacDowell, and
Woodberry.

James Hyslop gave me a course in what he called “practical ethics,” and
this was a curious affair. In the first part he discussed abstract rules
of conduct—regardless of the fact that there can be no such things. In
the second part he attempted to apply these rules to New York City
politics, explaining the methods by which Tammany politicians got their
graft, and devising elaborate laws and electoral arrangements whereby
these politicians could be kept out of office, or made to be good while
in. The professor was a frail and ascetic-looking little man with a
feeble black beard. It was painfully clear to me that the politicians
were more clever than he, and would devise a hundred ways of countering
his program before he had got it into action.

Now, as I look back upon this course, the thing which strikes me as
marvelous is that never once in a whole year of instruction did the
professor drop a hint concerning the economic basis of political
corruption. The politicians got money—yes, of course; but who paid them
the money, and what did the payers get out of it? In other words, what
part was Big Business playing in the undermining of American public
life? I took an entire course in “practical ethics” at Columbia
University in the year ’99 or 1900—two hours a week for nine months—and
never once did I hear that question mentioned, either by the professor
or by any of the graduate students in that class!

You would have thought that this would have made James Hyslop safe for
life; but alas! the poor man became too anxious concerning the growth of
Socialism throughout the world, and decided that the way to counter it
was to renew the faith of the people in heaven and hell. You may find
his ideas on this point quoted in “The Profits of Religion,” page 224.
He took to studying spiritualism, and the newspapers took him up, and
the university authorities, who tolerate no sort of eccentricity,
politely slid him out of his job.

After his recent visit to the United States, H. G. Wells wrote that the
most vital mind he had met was James Harvey Robinson, author of “The
Mind in the Making.” Twenty-two or three years ago I took with Professor
Robinson a course in the history of the Renaissance and Reformation. It
was a great period, when the mind of the race was breaking the shackles
of mediæval tyranny in religion, politics, and thought. I read with
eagerness about John Huss and Wyckliffe, Erasmus and Luther. I still
hope for such heroes and for such an awakening in my own modern world;
meantime, I observe that Professor Robinson, unable to stand the
mediævalism of Columbia, has handed in his resignation.

Then MacDowell, the composer. Edward MacDowell was the first authentic
man of genius I met; he is the only American musician whose work has won
fame abroad. He was a man as well as an artist, and his courses in
general musical culture were a rare delight. After much urging, he
consented to play us parts of his own works, and discuss them with us.
Needless to say, this was not orthodox academic procedure, and the
college authorities, who do not recognize genius less than a hundred
years away, would not give proper credits for work with MacDowell. The
composer’s beautiful dream of a center of musical education came to
nothing, and he retired, broken-hearted. As I described the tragedy at
the time, he ran into Nicholas Murray Butler and was killed.

Finally, George Edward Woodberry, who was in the field of letters what
MacDowell was in music, a master not merely of criticism but of
creation; also a charming spirit and a friend to students. He gave a
course in what he called comparative literature, and made us acquainted
with Plato, Cervantes, Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, and Shelley. He was a
truly liberalizing influence, and so popular among the men that the
Columbia machine hated him heartily. I was taking Brander Matthews’
course at the same time as Woodberry’s, and would hear Matthews sneer at
Woodberry’s “idealism,” and at his methods of teaching. A year later
Woodberry was forced out, under circumstances which I shall presently
narrate.




                               CHAPTER IV
                           THE GOOSE-STEPPERS


In the year 1901 I was twenty-one years of age, and was ready to quit
Columbia. The great university had become to me nothing but a library
full of books, and some empty class-rooms in which to sit while reading
them. No longer was I lured by elaborate prospectuses, setting forth
lists of “courses”; I had tried forty of them, and knew that nine-tenths
of them were dull. The great institution was a hollow shell, a body
without a soul, a mass of brick and stone held together by red tape.

But before I went out into the world, I made one final test of the
place. I knew by this time exactly what I wanted to do in the world; I
wanted to create literature. I had an overwhelming impulse, so intense
that it had completely ruined me as a hack-writer; my “half-dime” novels
had become impossible to me, and the question of how I was to earn my
living was a serious one.

And here was a great university, devoted to the furthering of all the
liberal arts. This university had trained me to love and reverence the
great writers of the past; what was its attitude to the great writers of
the future? The university controlled and awarded a vast number of
scholarships and fellowships in all branches of learning; that is to
say, it offered support to young men while they equipped themselves to
understand and teach the writings of the past. But what about the
writings of the future? What aid would the university give to these? I
was planning to spend the summer writing a novel, and the idea occurred
to me: Would Columbia University accept a novel as a thesis or
dissertation, or as evidence of merit and of work accomplished, in
competition for any fellowship or endowment under its control?

I made this proposition to the proper authorities at Columbia, the heads
of the various departments of literature, and to the president’s office
as well; and I received one unanimous decision: there was no fellowship
or endowment under the control of the university which could be won by
any kind of creative writing, but only by “scholarship”—that is to say,
by writing about the work of other people!

I was not satisfied entirely. It occurred to me—maybe there was some
other university in this broad land of freedom which might have a more
liberal and intelligent policy than Columbia; so I set out on a campaign
to test out the question. I wrote to the authorities at Harvard, and at
Yale, and at Princeton, and Cornell, and Stanford, and the University of
Pennsylvania, and Chicago, and Wisconsin and California, and I know not
what others. I did not let up until I had made quite certain that among
all the hundreds of millions of dollars of endowment at the disposal of
the great American universities, there was not one dollar which could be
won by a piece of creative literature, nor one university president who
was interested in the possibility that there might be a man of genius
actually alive in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

So I went out into the world to make my own way, and to fight for the
preservation of my own talent. I had given the academic authorities nine
years in which to do what they could to me, so I might fairly lay claim
to be a completely educated man. I look back now, and see myself as I
was, and I shudder—not merely for myself, but for all other products of
the educational machine. I think of the things I didn’t know, and of the
pains and perils to which my ignorance exposed me! I knew nothing
whatever about hygiene and health; everything of that sort I had to
learn by painful error. I knew nothing about women; I had met only three
or four beside my mother, and had no idea how to deal with them. I knew
as much about sex as was known to the ancient religious ascetics, but
nothing of modern discoveries or theories on the subject.

More significant yet, I knew nothing about modern literature in any
language; I had acquired a supreme and top-lofty contempt for it, and
was embarrassed when I happened to read “Sentimental Tommy,” and
discovered that someone had written a work of genius in my own time! I
knew nothing about modern history; so far as my mind was concerned, the
world had come to an end with the Franco-Prussian war, and nothing had
happened since. Of course, there was the daily paper, but I didn’t know
what this daily paper was, who made it, or what relation it had to me. I
knew that politics was rotten, but I didn’t know the cause of this
rottenness, nor had I any idea what to do about it. I knew nothing about
money, the life-blood of society, nor the part it plays in the life of
modern men. I knew nothing about business, except that I despised it,
and shrank in agony of spirit from contact with business people. All
that I knew about labor was a few tags of prejudice which I had picked
up from newspapers.

Most significant of all to me personally, I was unaware that the modern
revolutionary movement existed. I was all ready for it, but I was as
much alone in the world as Shelley a hundred years before me. I knew, of
course, that there had been Socialism in ancient times, for I had read
Plato, and been amused by his quaint suggestions for the reconstruction
of the world. Also I knew that there had been dreamers and cranks in
America who went off and tried to found Utopian commonwealths. It was
safe for me to be told about these experiments, because they had failed.
I had heard the names of Marx and Lassalle, and had a vague idea of them
as dreadful men, who met in the back rooms of beer-gardens, and
conspired, and made dynamite bombs, and practised free love. That they
had any relationship to my life, that they had anything to teach me,
that they had founded a movement which embraced all the future—of this I
was as ignorant as I was of the civilization of Dahomey, or the
topography of the far side of the moon.

I went out into the world, and learned about these matters, by most
painful experience; and then I looked back upon my education, and
understood many things which had previously been dark. One question I
asked myself: was all that deficiency accidental, or was it deliberate?
Was it merely the ignorance of those who taught me, or was there some
reason why they did not teach me all they knew? I have come to
understand that the latter is the case. Our educational system is not a
public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is
not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America
capitalist. To establish this thesis is the purpose of “The Goose-step.”

And first a few words as to the title. We spent some thirty billions of
treasure, and a hundred thousand young lives, to put down the German
autocracy; being told, and devoutly believing, that we were thereby
banishing from the earth a certain evil thing known as Kultur. It was
not merely a physical thing, the drilling of a whole population for the
aggrandizement of a military caste; it was a spiritual thing, a regimen
of autocratic dogmatism. The best expression of it upon which I have
come in my readings is that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Prussian
philosopher and apostle of Nationalism; I quote two sentences, from a
long discourse: “To compel men to a state of right, to put them under
the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred duty of
every man who has the knowledge and the power.... He is the master,
armed with compulsion and appointed by God.” I ask you to read those
sentences over, to bear them in mind as you follow chapter after chapter
of this book; see if I am not right in my contention that what we did,
when we thought we were banishing the Goose-step from the world, was to
bring it to our own land, and put ourselves under its sway—our thinking,
and, more dreadful yet, the teaching of our younger generation.




                               CHAPTER V
                       INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATES


The first step toward the intelligent study of American education is to
consider the country in which this education grows. We are told upon
good authority that men do not gather figs from thistles; we are also
told that we cannot understand the cultural institutions of any country
unless we know its economic and social conditions.

If you want to learn about America, the plutocratic empire, come with me
and meet the emperor and his princes and lords; come to the Customs
House in New York City, early in the year 1913. The memory of our busy
age is short, so perhaps it will mean nothing to you if I say that the
Pujo Committee of the House of Representatives is in session. They sit
in a solemn row, eleven solemn legislators; and into the witness chair
step one after another the masters of this plutocratic empire: J. P.
Morgan senior, a bulbous-nosed and surly-tempered old man whom everyone
in the room knows to be the emperor; George F. Baker, president of the
First National Bank of New York, the second richest man in the world;
William Rockefeller, brother of the richest man in the world; George M.
Reynolds, president of the Continental National Bank of Chicago, the
second largest bank in America; Henry P. Davison, Jacob Schiff—so on
through a long list.

They are being questioned by a small, frail-looking Jewish lawyer named
Samuel Untermyer. All his life he has been one of them, he has been in
the game with them and made his millions; he knows every trick and turn
of their minds, every corner where their money is hidden—and now he
turns against them and exposes them to the world. They hate him, but he
has them at his mercy, and step by step he shows us the machinery of our
industrial and financial life, the thing which he calls the Money Trust,
and which I call the plutocratic empire.

There is one phrase which makes the whole argument of the Pujo Report,
and that phrase is “interlocking directorates.” Interlocking
directorates are the device whereby three great banks in New York, with
two trust companies under their control, manage the financial affairs
and direct the policies of a hundred and twelve key corporations of
America. The three banks are J. P. Morgan and Company, the First
National Bank, and the National City Bank; and the two trust companies
are the Guaranty and the Equitable. Please fix these five concerns in
your mind, for we shall come back to them in almost every chapter of
this book. Their directors sit upon the boards of the corporations,
sometimes several on each board, and their orders are obeyed because
they control credit, which is the life-blood of our business world. Said
George M. Reynolds, in his testimony, speaking of the control of
American finance: “I believe it lies in the hands of a dozen men; and I
plead guilty to being one, in the last analysis, of these men.”

Such was the situation in 1913; and now, America has fought and won a
war, and become the financial master of the world. The wealth of America
was estimated in 1912 at a hundred and twenty-seven billions; in 1920 it
was estimated at five hundred billions, greater than the combined wealth
of the British Empire, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, and Japan. At the
same time that wealth has increased, so has the concentration of its
control. If the Pujo Committee were to conduct another inquiry in the
year 1922, it would find exactly the same interlocking directorates,
only more of them; and it would find that the financial empire
controlled by three great banks and two trust companies has grown from
twenty-two billions to not less than seventy-five, and probably close to
a hundred billions of dollars.

Just how do these interlocking directorates work? A picture of their
method was drawn in Harper’s Weekly by Louis D. Brandeis, at that time
an anti-corporation lawyer of Boston, and now a Justice of the United
States Supreme Court. Said Mr. Brandeis:

  Mr. J. P. Morgan (or a partner), a director of the New York, New Haven
  and Hartford Railroad, causes that company to sell to J. P. Morgan and
  Company an issue of bonds. J. P. Morgan and Company borrow the money
  with which to pay for those bonds from the Guaranty Trust Company, of
  which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director. J. P. Morgan and
  Company sell the bonds to the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, of
  which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director. The New Haven spends
  the proceeds of the bonds in purchasing steel from the United States
  Steel Corporation, of which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director.
  The United States Steel Corporation spends the proceeds of the rails
  in purchasing electrical supplies from the General Electric Company,
  of which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director. The General Electric
  Company sells the supplies to the Western Union Telegraph Company, a
  subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and in
  both Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is director. The Telegraph Company has
  a special wire contract with the Reading, in which Mr. Morgan (or a
  partner) is a director—

So on to the Pullman Company and the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Mr.
Brandeis points out how “all these concerns patronize one another; they
all market their securities through J. P. Morgan and Company, they
deposit their funds with J. P. Morgan and Company, and J. P. Morgan and
Company use the funds of each in further transactions.”

But Mr. Brandeis stops his story too soon; he ought to show us some of
the wider ramifications of these directorates. He ought to picture Mr.
Morgan (or a partner) falling ill, and being treated in St. Luke’s
Hospital, in which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a trustee, and by a
physician who is also a trustee, and who was educated in the College of
Physicians and Surgeons, of which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a
trustee. He ought to picture Mr. Morgan dying, and being buried from
Trinity Church, in which several of his partners are vestrymen, and
having his funeral oration preached by a bishop who is a stockholder in
his bank, and reported in newspapers whose bonds repose in his vaults.
Mr. Brandeis might say about all these persons and institutions just
what he says about the Steel Corporation and the General Electric
Company and the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Baldwin
Locomotive Works—they all patronize one another and they all deposit
their funds with J. P. Morgan and Company.

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh
generations should be trained to its service. Therefore the interlocking
directorate has need of an educational system, and has provided it
complete. There is a great university, of which Mr. Morgan was all his
active life a trustee, also his son-in-law and one or two of his
attorneys and several of his bankers. The president of this university
is a director in one of Mr. Morgan’s life insurance companies, and is
interlocked with Mr. Morgan’s bishop, and Mr. Morgan’s physician, and
Mr. Morgan’s newspaper. If the president of the university writes a
book, telling the American people to be good and humble servants of the
plutocracy, this book may be published by a concern in which Mr. Morgan
(or a partner) is a director, and the paper may be bought from the
International Paper Company, in which Mr. Morgan has a director through
the Guaranty Trust Company. If you visit the town where the paper is
made, you will find that the president of the school board is a director
in the local bank, which deposits its funds with the Guaranty Trust
Company at a low rate of interest, to be reloaned by Mr. Morgan at a
high rate of interest. The superintendent of the schools will be a
graduate of Mr. Morgan’s university, and will have been recommended to
the school board president by Mr. Morgan’s dean of education. Both the
board and president and the school superintendent will insure their
lives in the company of which Mr. Morgan’s university president is a
director; and the school books selected in that town will be published
by a concern in which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director, and they
will be written by Mr. Morgan’s university’s dean of education, and they
will be praised in the journal of education founded by Mr. Morgan’s
university president; also they will be praised by Mr. Morgan’s
newspaper and magazine editors. The superintendent of schools will give
promotion to teachers who take the university’s summer courses, and will
cause the high school pupils to aspire to that university. Once a year
he will attend the convention of the National Educational Association,
and will elect as president a man who is a graduate of Mr. Morgan’s
university, and also a member of Mr. Morgan’s church, and a reader of
Mr. Morgan’s newspaper, and of Mr. Morgan’s university’s president’s
educational journal, and a patron of Mr. Morgan’s university presidents’
life insurance company, and a depositor in a bank which pays him no
interest, but sends his money to the Guaranty Trust Company for Mr.
Morgan to loan at a high rate of interest. And when the Republican
party, of which Mr. Morgan (or a partner) is a director, nominates the
president of Mr. Morgan’s university for vice-president of the United
States, Mr. Morgan’s bishop will bless the proceedings, and Mr. Morgan’s
newspapers will report them, and Mr. Morgan’s school superintendent will
invite the children to a picnic to hear Mr. Morgan’s candidates’
campaign speeches on a phonograph, and to drink lemonade paid for by Mr.
Morgan’s campaign committee, out of the funds of the life insurance
company of which Mr. Morgan’s university president is director.

Such is the system of the interlocking directorates; such is, in
skeleton form, that department of the plutocratic empire which calls
itself American Education. And if you don’t believe me, just come along
and let me show you—not merely the skeleton of this beast, but the
nerves and the brains, the blood and the meat, the hair and the hide,
the teeth and the claws of it.




                               CHAPTER VI
                 THE UNIVERSITY OF THE HOUSE OF MORGAN


The headquarters of the American plutocracy is, of course, New York
City. Here are the three central banks, and here the hundred and twelve
corporations have their offices, and the interlocking directors roll
about in their padded limousines and collect their gold eagles and
half-eagles with the minimum of trouble and delay. According to the Pujo
Committee, the banks and trust companies of New York, all interlocked
with the House of Morgan, had over five billion dollars’ worth of
resources, which was nearly one-fourth of the bank resources of the
country. This did not include the House of Morgan itself, which was, and
is, a private institution. These figures, of course, seem puny since the
world war; in that war the House of Morgan alone is reputed to have made
a billion dollars from its war purchases for the British government, and
if the Pujo Committee were to inquire at the present time it would find
the banking resources of New York City somewhere between fifteen and
twenty-five billions of dollars.

It is inevitable that this headquarters of our plutocratic empire should
be also the headquarters of our plutocratic education. The interlocking
directors could not discommode themselves by taking long journeys;
therefore they selected themselves a spacious site on Morningside
Heights, and there stands the palatial University of the House of
Morgan, which sets the standard for the higher education of America.
Other universities, we shall find, vary from the ideal; there are some
which have old traditions, there are others which permit modern
eccentricities; but in Columbia you have plutocracy, perfect, complete
and final, and as I shall presently show, the rest of America’s
educational system comes more and more to be modeled upon it. Columbia’s
educational experts take charge of the school and college systems of the
country, and the production of plutocratic ideas becomes an industry as
thoroughly established, as completely systematized and standardized as
the production of automobiles or sausages.

Needless to say, the University of the House of Morgan is completely
provided with funds; its resources are estimated at over seventy-five
million dollars and its annual income is over seven million. A
considerable part of its endowment is invested in stocks and bonds,
under the supervision of the interlocking directors. I have a
typewritten list of these holdings, which occupies more than twenty
pages, and includes practically all the important railroads and
industrial corporations in the United States. Whoever you are, and
wherever you live in America, you cannot spend a day, you can hardly
spend an hour of your life, without paying tribute to Columbia
University. In order to collect the material for this book I took a
journey of seven thousand miles, and traveled on fourteen railroads. I
observe that every one of these railroads is included in the lists, so
on every mile of my journey I was helping to build up the Columbia
machine. I helped to build it up when I lit the gas in my lodging-house
room in New York; for Columbia University owns $58,000 worth of New York
Gas and Electric Light, Heat and Power Company’s 4 per cent bonds; I
helped to build it up when I telephoned my friends to make engagements,
for Columbia University owns $50,000 worth of the New York Telephone
Company’s 4½ per cent bonds; I helped to build it up when I took a
spoonful of sugar with my breakfast, for Columbia University owns some
shares in the American Sugar Refining Company, and also in the Cuba Cane
Sugar Corporation.

The great university stops at nothing, however small: “five and ten cent
stores,” and the Park and Tilford Grocery Company, and the Liggett and
Myers Tobacco Company. I have on my desk a letter from a woman, telling
me how the Standard Oil Company has been dispossessing homesteaders from
the oil lands of California; Columbia University is profiting by these
robberies, because it owns $25,000 worth of the gold debenture bonds of
the Standard Oil Company of California. Recently I met a pitiful human
wreck who had given all but his life to the Bethlehem Steel Company;
Columbia University took a part of this man’s health and happiness.
Crossing the desert on my way home, in the baking heat of summer I saw
far out in the barren mountains a huge copper smelter, vomiting clouds
of yellow smoke into the air. We in the Pullman sat in our
shirt-sleeves, with electric fans playing and white-clad waiters
bringing us cool drinks, but even so, we suffered from the heat; yet,
out there in those lonely wastes men toil in front of furnace fires, and
when they drop they are turned to mummies in the baking sand and their
names are not recorded. Not a thought of them came into the minds of the
passengers in the transcontinental train; and, needless to say, no
thought of them troubles the minds of the thirty thousand seekers of the
higher learning who flock to Columbia University every year. With serene
consciences these young people cultivate the graces of life, upon the
income of $49,000 worth of stock in the American Smelters Securities
Company.

This University of the House of Morgan is run by a board of trustees.
Under the law these trustees are the absolute sovereign, the
administrators of the property, responsible to no one. They cannot be
removed, no matter what they do, and they are self-perpetuating, they
appoint their own successors. Their charter, be it noted, is a contract
with the state, and can never be altered or revised. Such was the
decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dartmouth case, way
back in 1819.

Who are the members of this board? The first thing to be noted about
them is that there is only one educator, and that is the president of
the university, an ex-officio member. Not one of them is a scholar, nor
familiar with the life of the intellect. There is one engineer, one
physician, and one bishop; there are ten corporation lawyers, and eight
classified as bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants
and manufacturers. Without exception they are the interlocking directors
of the Pujo charts. The chairman of the board is William Barclay
Parsons, engineer of the subway, and director in numerous corporations.
The youngest member of the board is Marcellus Hartley Dodge, who was
elected when he was 26 years old, and was a director of the Equitable
Life while still an undergraduate at Columbia; he is a son-in-law of
William Rockefeller, and is chairman of the Remington Arms Company and
Union Metallic Cartridge Company. He is said to have cleaned up
twenty-four million in one deal in Midvale Steel, and in October, 1916,
he is credited with making two million by cornering the market in
munitions machinery. Frederick R. Coudert is one of the most prominent
attorneys of the plutocracy, a director in the National Surety and
Equitable Trust. Herbert L. Satterlee is a Morgan attorney and a Morgan
son-in-law. Robert S. Lovett is chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad,
and director of a dozen other roads. Newcomb Carlton, president of the
Western Union Telegraph Company, guides the affairs of a great
university in spite of the fact that he is not a college man. Reverend
William T. Manning is an ex-officio member, one might say, being the
bishop of the church of J. P. Morgan and Company. You must understand
that Columbia is descended from Kings College, an Episcopal institution,
and the bishop, and three vestrymen of Old Trinity are on its board.
Pierpont Morgan, the elder, was on all his life, and Stephen Baker,
president of the Bank of Manhattan and the Bank of the Metropolis, is
still on. A study of those who have held office on the board of
Columbia, from 1900 to 1922, shows fifty-nine persons classified as
follows: bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants and
manufacturers, 20; lawyers, 21; ministers, 8; physicians, 6; educators,
1; engineers, 3. The six physicians were on because of their connection
with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a branch of Columbia.

How rich in their own right are the particular Money Trust lords who run
this great University it is not possible to determine, because these
gentlemen, for the most part, keep their affairs secret. But in the list
of those who have died during twenty-two years we have means for an
estimate, for the property of many of these was listed in the probate
courts of New York and appraised by the transfer tax appraisers. A study
of these records has been made by Henry R. Linville, president of the
Teachers’ Union, and he has courteously placed the manuscript at my
disposal. There are twenty-one trustees who have died and been
appraised, and the list of their stocks and bonds fills a total of
twenty-three typewritten pages, and shows that the total wealth on which
they paid an inheritance tax amounted to one hundred and seventy-three
million dollars, an average of over eight million each. I note among the
list five members of the clergy of Jesus Christ, and I am sure that if
He had visited their parishes He would have been delighted at their
state of affluence—He could hardly have told it from His heavenly courts
with their streets of gold. The poorest of these clergy was Bishop
Burch, who left $37,840; second came the Reverend Coe, who left $80,683;
next came the Reverend Greer, who left $172,619; next came the Reverend
Dix, rector of Trinity, who left $269,637; and finally, Bishop Potter,
my own bishop, whose train I carried when I was a little boy, in the
solemn ceremonials of the church. I was dully awe-stricken, but not so
much as I would have been if I had realized that I was carrying the
train of $380,568. Such sums loom big in the imagination of a little
boy; but they don’t amount to so much on the board of a university where
you associate with the elder Morgan, who left seventy-eight millions,
and with John S. Kennedy, banker of the Gould interests, who left
sixty-five millions.

You might possibly think that our interlocking directors would be so
busy with the task of managing our industries and our government that
they would not have time to superintend our education; but that would be
underestimating their diligence and foresight. They do the job and they
do it personally, not trusting it to subordinates. In the office of the
Teachers’ Union of New York I inspected a chart, dealing with the
interlocking directorates of Columbia University; and except by the
label, you could not tell it from the charts in the three volumes of the
Pujo Reports. It is the same thing, and the men shown are the same men.
They serve J. P Morgan and Company as directors in the coal trust, the
steel trust, the railroad trust; they serve also on the boards of
schools, colleges, and universities through the United States. You could
not tell a chart of the Columbia trustees from a chart of the New York
Central Railroad, or the Remington Arms Company. You could not tell a
chart of Harvard University from a chart of Lee, Higginson and Company,
the banking house of Boston. You could not tell a chart of the
University of Pennsylvania from a chart of the United Gas Improvement
Company. You could not tell a chart of the University of Pittsburgh from
a chart of the United States Steel Corporation. You could not tell a
chart of the University of California from one of the Hydro-Electric
Power Trust, one of Denver University from the Colorado Fuel and Iron
Company, one of the University of Montana from the Anaconda Copper
Company, one of the University of Minnesota from the Ore Trust. These
corporations are one, their interests are one, and their purposes are
one.

Evans Clark, a preceptor in Princeton University—until he made this
survey—collected the facts as to the financial interests of governing
boards of the largest American universities—seven of which were
privately controlled and twenty-two state controlled. He found that the
plutocratic class, or those intimately connected therewith—bankers,
manufacturers, merchants, public utility officers, financiers, great
publishers and lawyers—composed 56 per cent of the membership of the
privately controlled boards, and 68 per cent of the publicly controlled
boards. Says Mr. Clark: “Of the other two great economic groups in
society there is little or no representation. The farmers total between
6 per cent in private and 4 per cent in public boards, while no
representative of labor has a place on any board, public or private. And
finally, no college professor is a trustee of the college in which he
serves, while only fourteen out of 649 are professors in other
institutions. Of these, six are Harvard professors on the Radcliffe
board (the women’s college connected with Harvard). We have allowed the
education of our youth to fall into the absolute control of a group of
men who represent not only a minority of the total population but have,
at the same time, enormous economic and business stakes in what kind of
an education it shall be.”

And this condition prevails right through the list of our colleges,
regardless of size, or where they are located or how financed. This was
shown by Scott Nearing in an exhaustive study, reported in “School and
Society” for September 8, 1917. He wrote to the governing bodies of all
colleges and universities in the United States having more than five
hundred students. There are 189 such institutions, and 143 of these
supplied the lists of trustees with their occupations. The total number
of trustees was 2,470. There were 208 merchants, 196 manufacturers, 112
capitalists, 6 contractors, 32 real estate men, 26 insurance men, 115
corporation officials, 202 bankers, 15 brokers, and 18 publishers,
making for the plutocratic group a total of 930. There were 111 doctors,
514 lawyers, 125 educators, 353 ministers, 8 authors, 43 editors, 70
scientists, 13 social workers and 32 judges, making a total for the
professional group of 1,269. For the miscellaneous group there were 94
retired business men, 3 salesmen, 123 farmers, 46 home-keepers, 3
mechanics, and 2 librarians, making a total of 271. For the purpose of
this inquiry the lawyers belong, not with the professional class, but
with the commercial and financial class, whose retainers they are. That
makes a total of 1,444 of that class, or 58 per cent. In the state
universities the commercial class had a total of 477 out of 776, or 61
per cent. And this, you will note, without counting the retired business
men, who are certainly no less plutocratic in their mentality than the
active ones; without counting the many doctors, ministers, editors, and
educators who are just as plutocratic as the bankers. How plutocratic an
educator can be when he is well paid for it is the next proposition we
have to prove to you.




                              CHAPTER VII
                       THE INTERLOCKING PRESIDENT


We have investigated the governing board of the University of the House
of Morgan. We have next to investigate the president they have selected
to carry out their will. Naturally, they would seek the most plutocratic
college president in the most plutocratic country of the world. They
sought him and they found him; his name is Nicholas Murray Butler,
abbreviated by his subordinates to “Nicholas Miraculous.” I am going to
sketch his career and describe his character; and as what I say will be
bitter, I repeat that I bear him no personal ill-will. If I pillory him,
it is as a type, the representative, champion and creator of what I
regard as false and cruel ideals. His influence must be destroyed, if
America is to live as anything worthwhile, kindly or beautiful. For this
reason I have made a detailed study of him, and present here a full
length portrait. If some of it seems too personal, bear in mind the
explanation; you will understand every aspect of our higher education
more clearly, if you know, thoroughly and intimately, one specimen of
the ideal interlocking university president.

Nicholas Murray Butler was born in Paterson, N. J., and his father was a
mechanic. This is nothing to his discredit, quite the contrary; the only
thing to his discredit is the fact that he is ashamed of it, and tries
to suppress it. When he was candidate for vice-president in 1912 it was
given out that he was descended from the old Murray family of New York,
which gave the name to aristocratic Murray Hill; and this I am assured
is not the fact. He has been all his life what is called a “climber.”
Ordinarily I hate puns on people’s names, but the name of Butler seems
to have been a special act of Providence. His toadying to the rich and
powerful is so conspicuous that it defeats its own ends, and brings him
the contempt of men whose intimacy he wishes to gain. George L. Rives,
former corporation counsel of New York City, and chairman of the board
of Columbia University for many years, said of him: “Butler is a great
man, but the damnedest fool I know; he values himself for his worst
qualities.”

Here is a man with a first-class brain, a driving, executive worker,
capable in anything he puts his mind to, but utterly overpowered by the
presence of great wealth. He serves the rich, and they despise him. The
rich themselves, you understand, are not in awe of wealth; at least, if
they are, they hide the fact. They are sometimes willing to meet plain,
ordinary human beings as equals, and when they see a man boot-licking
them because of their wealth they sneer at him behind his back, and
sometimes to his face. At the Union Club they joke about Butler, with
his crude talk about “the right people.” They observe that he will never
go anywhere to a dinner party unless there are to be prominent people
present, unless he has some prestige to gain from it. He has been
married twice, and both times he has married money; his present wife is
a Catholic, and she and her sister are tireless society ladies, “doing
St. James’ and that kind of thin.”

Butler became a teacher, then school superintendent, then instructor in
Columbia College, then professor of philosophy in the university, then
dean, and now president. This would seem to most men a splendid
career—especially considering the perquisites which have gone with it.
The interlocking trustees built for their favorite a splendid mansion,
costing over three hundred thousand dollars—paying for it out of the
trust funds of the university. This mansion is free from taxation, upon
the theory that it is used for educational purposes; but Professor
Cattell publishes the statement that Butler uses it “for social climbing
and political intrigues.” No one has ever been able to find out what
portion of the trust funds of the university is paid to its president as
salary. In addition, it is generally rumored at Columbia that Butler has
accepted gifts from his trustees and other wealthy admirers.

But all this has not been sufficient for our ambitious educator. He has
craved political honors; seeking them tirelessly, begging for them with
abject insistence. He has been candidate for vice-president with Taft,
and has been several times candidate for the Presidential nomination.
All these things he has taken with the most desperate seriousness,
utterly unable to understand why the politicians tell him he cannot be
elected. He would go down to Washington to plead, and Jim Wadsworth,
young aristocrat who runs the up-state political machine of New York,
would “kick him about.” He would travel over the country addressing
banquets of the “best people,” telling them how the country should be
saved, and how he was the man to save it; at the same time he would go
down to the common people, and pose as one of them. If you want to
succeed in America, you must be what is called a “joiner”; so Butler
joined the Elks, and a man who was present at this adventure told me
about it. The Elks gathered, a vast herd; they had come to hear a great
educator, and it was to be a highbrow affair for once in their lives,
and they were solemn about it, expecting to be uplifted from their
primitive Elkhood. Instead of which, the great educator flopped to their
level, or below it. He tried to “jolly” them, telling them that he was
“a regular fellow,” “one of the boys,” and that it was “all right for a
man to have a good time now and then.” Of course, the Elks were
disgusted.

In one of President Butler’s published speeches I find him sneering at
the progressives as “declaimers and sandlot orators and perpetual
candidates for office.” What this refers to is men like Roosevelt and
LaFollette, who go out to the people and seek election. It does not
apply to those who go in secret to the homes and offices of political
corruptionists and wire-pullers, there to plead, almost on their knees,
for nominations and favors. A prominent Republican politician of New
York said to me: “He begged in my office for two hours. He told me he
had the support of this man and that, and then I inquired and found it
was not so.”

It is embarrassing to find so many people asserting that the president
of Columbia University does not always tell the truth. It will be still
more embarrassing to have to state that most of the presidents of
colleges and universities in the United States do not always tell the
truth. A curious fact which I observed in my travels over the
country—there was hardly a single college head about whom I was not
told: “He is a liar.” I believe there are no effects without causes, and
I have tried to analyze the factors in the life of college heads which
compel them to lie. I shall present these to you in due course; for the
present suffice it to say that a man who has held the highest offices in
New York state told me how Butler had assured him that Pierpont Morgan
had promised to “back Butler to the limit for President,” and later this
politician ascertained that no such promise had been given. Butler
stated that he had the unqualified endorsement of another man; the
politician questioned him closely—the matter had been settled only
yesterday afternoon, so Butler declared. As soon as Butler left, this
politician called up the man on the telephone, and ascertained that the
man had not seen Butler for a month, and had made no promise.

Also, my informant had attended a caucus of the Republican party at the
Republican Club in New York City, when President Butler was intriguing
for the nomination for President. Butler came out from that caucus and
was surrounded by a group of reporters, who asked him: “Was Theodore
Roosevelt’s name proposed?” Roosevelt, you understand, was Butler’s most
dreaded rival, and to keep him from getting the nomination was the first
aim of every reactionary leader in the country. Said President Butler to
the assembled reporters: “Gentlemen, you can take this one thing from
me—Theodore Roosevelt’s name was positively not mentioned in this
caucus.” But, so my informant declared, Roosevelt’s name had been
mentioned only a few minutes before in the caucus, and President Butler
had opposed it! It is worth noting that Butler denounced Roosevelt and
abused him with almost insane violence; but when Roosevelt died he made
lovely speeches about him, and hailed himself as the true heir of the
Roosevelt tradition. He sought the support of one of Roosevelt’s close
relatives on this basis, and the report was spread among newspaper men
that he had got it.

Nicholas Murray Butler considers himself the intellectual leader of the
American plutocracy; he takes that rôle quite frankly, and enacts it
with grave solemnity, lending the support of his academic authority to
the plutocracy’s instinctive greed. There has never been a more complete
Tory in our public life; to him there is no “people,” there is only “the
mob,” and he never wearies of thundering against it. “In working out
this program we must take care to protect ourselves against the mob.”
Socialism “would constitute a mob.” “Doubtless the mob will prefer
cheering to its own whoopings,” etc.—all this fifteen years ago, in one
speech at the University of California. President Wheeler of that
university remarked to a friend of mine that this speech might have been
made by Kaiser Wilhelm; and Wheeler ought to have known, for he had been
the Kaiser’s intimate.

And the fifteen years that have passed have made no change in our
miraculous Nicholas. As I write, Senator LaFollette addresses the
convention of the American Federation of Labor, and says: “A century and
a half ago our forefathers shed their blood in order that they might
establish on this continent a government deriving its just powers from
the consent of the governed, in which the will of the people, expressed
through their duly elected representatives, should be sovereign.”

And instantly our interlocking president rushes to the rescue. Before
the convention of the New Jersey Bar Association he exclaims: “Our
forefathers did nothing of the sort. They took good care to do something
quite different.” And the Associated Press takes that and sends it all
over the United States, and ninety-nine out of a hundred good Americans
read it, and say, reverently: “A great university president says so; it
must be true.”




                              CHAPTER VIII
                        THE SCHOLAR IN POLITICS


What is the function of an American university president? Apparently it
is to travel about the country, and summon the captains and the kings of
finance, and dine in their splendid banquet halls, and lay down to them
the law and the gospel of predation. I consult the name of Nicholas
Murray Butler in the New York Public Library, and I find a long list of
pamphlets, each one immortalizing a plutocratic feast; the Annual
Luncheon of the Associated Press, 1916; the Annual Dinner of the
Commercial Club of Kansas City, 1908, the Annual Dinner of the
Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, 1917, the Annual Dinner of the
Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Springfield, Mass., 1917, the
Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York,
1911, the Annual Dinner of the American Bankers’ Association—and so on.
In addressing these mighty men of money there is no cruelty which our
interlocking president will not endorse and defend, no vileness of
slander he will not perpetrate against those who struggle for justice in
our commercial hell. “Political patent medicine men,” he calls us; and
he tells the masters of the clubs and bayonets, the gas-bombs and
machine-guns that we seek our ends “by some means—violent if possible,
peaceable if necessary”; he tells about Socialists “whose conception of
government is a sort of glorified lynching.”

And all this, you understand, not referring to the Bolsheviks; this in
the days of the “Bull Moose”! In his speech before the Republican State
Convention in 1912 President Butler portrayed the struggle with the
Progressives as one “to decide whether our government is to be
Republican or Cossack”! He discussed proposals to amend the
constitution, saying it was like “proposing amendments to the
multiplication table”! In the year 1911 we find him before the 143d
Annual Banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, stating that “our
business men are attacked,” and that this constitutes “civil war.” Our
political conventions are being besieged “by every crude, senseless,
half-baked scheme in the country”—a terrifying situation, and what is to
be done about it? The orator is ready with the answer: “Why should not
the associated business men of the United States unite to demand that
the next political campaign be conducted with a view to their oversight
and protection?”

The associated business men of the United States thought this was fine
advice, so through the agency of their Grand Old Party they nominated
Nicholas Murray Butler for the office of vice-president of the United
States. In that campaign Butler called one of his opponents, Theodore
Roosevelt, a demagog, and the other, Woodrow Wilson, a charlatan; and he
triumphantly polled the electoral votes of the states of Utah and
Vermont, a total of eight out of a possible four hundred and ninety-one.

But did that end the political ambitions of our interlocking president?
It did not. He gave an honorary degree to the senator who had helped him
carry the state of Utah, and continued diligently to cultivate the rich
and powerful. In 1916 we find him in the field again, and this time his
ambitions have swelled, he wishes to be President of the United States.
In 1920 he wishes it still more ardently; his campaign managers solemnly
assure the world that he will take nothing less. The “Literary Digest”
conducted a straw vote in the spring of 1920 to find out what the
American people wanted; 211,000 of them wanted General Wood, 164,000
wanted Senator Johnson, 20,000 of them wanted poor old Taft, and how
many of them do you think wanted Nicholas Miraculous? 2,369! But did
that trouble our interlocking president? It did not; because, you see,
he knows that the politicians nominate what the interlocking directorate
bids them nominate, and the people choose the least bad of the two
interlocking candidates—if they can find out which that is.

So President Butler’s campaign continued, and with the help of D. O.
Mills, the banker, and Elihu Root, the fox, and Bill Barnes, the
infamous, he corralled the sixty-eight delegates of the New York state
machine, and a few days before they departed for the Chicago convention
we find President Butler giving them a dinner and making them a speech
at the Republican Club. They went to Chicago, and in the hotel rooms
where the wires were pulled President Butler argued and pleaded and
fought, but in vain. One of the most prominent Republicans in the United
States described these scenes to me, and told of the pitiful, impotent
fury of Butler when finally Harding was nominated. He stormed about the
room, denouncing this man and that man. “Look what I did for him, this,
that and the other thing—and what he has done for me!” And when the
delegation returned from Chicago, Butler received the newspaper
reporters and poured out his balked egotism in a statement which
startled the country. He denounced the campaign backers of General Wood,
“a motley group of stock-gamblers, oil and mining promoters, munition
makers, and other like persons.” These men, he said, had “with reckless
audacity started out to buy the Presidency.” He went on to picture the
New York delegation, the heroic sixty-eight who had stood by President
Butler and saved the nation’s honor.

Then, of course, there was the devil let loose! General Wood came out in
the next day’s paper, denouncing Butler’s statement as “a vicious and
malicious falsehood.” It was necessary, said General Wood, “to brand a
faker and denounce a lie.” And also there was Procter, Ivory Soap
magnate, and General Wood’s principal backer, denouncing “this
self-seeking and cowardly attack.” President Butler was interviewed by
the New York “Times,” and was dignified. “I am sorry that General Wood
lost his temper. It does not sound well.” He went on to point out that
the New York “World” had exposed the corruptionists who were putting up
the money for General Wood; and this made lively material for the
Democratic campaign—you can imagine!

There was a hurried session of the trustees of the University of the
House of Morgan a day or two after that break of President Butler’s. I
have been told on the best authority what went on there; but you don’t
need to be told, you can imagine it. The interlocking president had
denounced “stock-gamblers,” and here on his board was one who had made
two million by cornering the market! He had denounced “mining
promoters,” and here was a director in three mining companies! He had
denounced “munition makers,” and here was the chairman of Remington Arms
and Union Metallic Cartridge! The trustees laid down the law, either an
apology or a resignation; and so, a couple of days later, the New York
newspapers published a statement from President Butler as follows:

“I am convinced that my word, spoken under the strain, turmoil and
fatigue of the Chicago convention, and in sharp revolt against the power
of money in politics, was both unbecoming and unwarranted and that I
should, and do, apologize to each and every one who felt hurt by what I
said.”

The American people may have failed to appreciate the services of the
president of their greatest university, but the plutocracy has
appreciated him, and has showered upon him all the honors at its
command. He has received honorary degrees from no less than twenty-five
universities; he is a trustee of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
and of the New York Life Insurance Company—the interlocking directorate!
He is a member of fifteen clubs, and author of eight books of speeches.
He has traveled abroad, and has been honored at Oxford and Cambridge, at
Strassburg and Breslau. He is a Commander of the Red Eagle (with star)
of Prussia, this honor dating from the year 1910.

In 1917-18 Nicholas Murray Butler was, of course, a vehement Hun-hunter;
he was also vehement in denouncing American Socialists, on the basis of
their supposed pro-Germanism. But let us go back ten years, to the time
when the seeds of the World War were being sown. What then was the
attitude of American Socialists, and what was the attitude of President
Butler?

In the year 1907 the author of “The Goose-step” published a study of
world conditions, “The Industrial Republic,” in which he showed how the
German Kaiser was drilling his people to make war on the world. The
English edition of this book was barred from Germany by the Kaiser’s
government. The book showed how the German Socialists were struggling
against their autocrat, and appealed to Americans to give their sympathy
and support. I quote:

  I do not think that we shall sleep forever; I do not think that the
  memories of Jefferson and Lincoln will call to us in vain forever; but
  assuredly there never was in all American history a sign of torpor so
  deep, of degeneration so frightful, as this fact that in such a
  crisis, when the down-trodden millions of the German Empire are
  struggling to free themselves from the tyranny of military and
  personal government, there should come to them not one breath of
  sympathy from the people of the American Republic! And all our
  interest, all our attention, is for that strutting turkey-cock, the
  war-lord whose mailed fist holds them down! That monstrous creature,
  with his insane egotism, his blustering and his swaggering, his curled
  mustachios and military poses! An epileptic degenerate....

And so on. It was strong language, but it seemed stronger than it does
now. And let us ask, who were the American glorifiers of the Kaiser at
whom these words were aimed? Head and front among them was Nicholas
Murray Butler! In that same year of 1907 President Butler was spending
the summer in Germany—arranging for the “epileptic degenerate” to send a
“Kaiser professor” to Columbia University, to heighten his prestige with
the American people! I have taken the trouble to look up this errand of
President Butler in Germany, and I quote one sample of what our
representative told the German people about their ruler. In the
“Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung,” October 4, 1907, I read as follows:

  A second more spirited honorer (Verehrer) of the Kaiser, Professor N.
  M. Butler, the president of Columbia University, returns home today,
  after a long sojourn in Germany. He explained among other things: “I
  was twice invited to the Imperial table, and I can only explain that
  the idea prevailing in America that the Kaiser is undependable is
  entirely erroneous. On the contrary, his personality has something
  uncommonly winning, and he possesses at the same time a democratic
  streak in his nature. The industrial and political activity, not
  merely of his own land, but of the entire world, awakens his most
  eager interest. He is a genuine statesman, and if he were not Kaiser
  he would surely become president.”

And then President Butler came home, and when some one jeered at the
Kaiser in the New York “Times,” he rushed to the rescue with a letter
full of glowing and eloquent praise; detailing all the virtues which a
great ruler and statesman might possess, and pointing out the Kaiser as
the sum of them all. It culminated with the sentence: “He would have
been chosen monarch or chief executive by popular vote of any modern
people among whom his lot might have been cast.”

In enthusiasm for Wilhelm our Miraculous Nicholas had been forestalled
by Harvard University, which had already established an exchange
professorship, and had got another Kaiser professor in the person of
Muensterberg, the eminent psychologist of the plutocracy, who used to
delight his employers by analyzing labor agitators in jail, and proving
by up-to-date psychological tests that they had done whatever crimes
they were accused of. There was bitter rivalry between these two Kaiser
professors, and still more bitter rivalry between the Harvard professor
and the Columbia professor in Berlin. For, of course, these exalted
scholars did not go to represent the American people, they went to
represent the plutocratic empire, and they did not appeal to the German
people, they appealed to the Kaiser’s court. The wives of these two
professors got into a scrap over the question of court precedence, and
denounced each other in the newspapers, and a Frenchman, writing a book
about Germany, described the Kaiser’s court chamberlain as “bewailing in
disgust the presence of increasing numbers of rich and well-gowned
American women who got on their knees to royalty, and on all occasions
betrayed their total lack of breeding and good manners.”

But, you see, a German court chamberlain fails to realize the drabness
of life in America, where the wives of eminent scholars have no way to
demonstrate their superiority over one another, and when they come to
places where there are courts and ceremonials they can hardly be blamed
if the glory goes to their heads. We can hardly blame President Butler,
because, after having had an eight-hour session with Kaiser Wilhelm, he
hailed his host as one of the greatest statesmen of all time; but I
think we may blame him just a little because he failed to imitate any of
the good things which the Kaiser had done, and chose only the despotic
things for his praise. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm had established
old-age pensions and unemployment insurance in Germany, and had
abolished child labor from the country; but President Butler came home
and in a telegram to the Illinois Bankers’ Association denounced the
child labor law in such ferocious terms that even the interlocking
directors were shocked, and refused to read the telegram at their
meeting, or to give it to the press!




                               CHAPTER IX
                          NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS


We are now familiar with the social and political career of Nicholas
Murray Butler; we have next to observe him as an educational
administrator. We shall devote generous space to the study, for the
reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and
richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for
all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success
is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a
university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success
means to the faculty, the students, and the general public.

In David Warfield’s play, “The Auctioneer,” there is a scene in a
second-hand clothing shop. The clerk comes up to the proprietor with a
coat in his hand, and whispers: “How much?” “Eleven eighty-five,” says
the proprietor. But the clerk whispers, “Buying, not selling.” “Oh!”
says the proprietor, with a sudden change of tone. “Two dollars!” I am
reminded of this when I follow President Butler from the great world of
public affairs to the inside of his university. When he is interviewing
political statesmen and millionaire backers and trustees, he values them
at eleven eighty-five, but when he is talking to his professors and
instructors, he values them at thirty cents. I have talked with some
twenty men who have been or still are, under him, and I have their
adjectives in my note-book—“hard, insensitive, vulgar, materialistic.”
“Insolence in conversation and letters” is the phrase used by Professor
Cattell, while one of Butler’s deans said to me: “Men of refinement
cannot stand his air of extreme prosperity and power.”

He rules the university as an absolute autocrat; he permits no slightest
interference with his will. He furiously attacks or cunningly intrigues
against anyone who shows any trace of interference, nor does he rest
until he has disgraced the man and driven him from the university. His
“Faculty Council” is a farce, because it has only advisory powers, and
he overrides it when he sees fit. He makes promises to his faculty, to
allow them this and that and the other kind of freedom and authority,
but when the time for action comes he does exactly what he pleases.

One of his favorite devices is to use the trustees as a club over the
heads of his faculty. Whatever is done, it is the trustees who have done
it; but no one ever knows what Butler has said to the trustees, or what
he has advised them to do. No member of the faculty has a seat on the
board, or ever gets near the board except he is summoned to be
browbeaten for his opinions. Says Professor Joel E. Spingarn, in a
pamphlet on this subject:

  Moreover, all the officers of the university hold their positions “at
  the pleasure of the trustees.” This phrase has not as yet received
  final adjudication by any court of highest resort, but it is
  interpreted by the trustees to mean that the tenure of the
  professorial office is absolutely at their whim. No personal hearing
  is ever given by them to any member of the teaching staff, and a
  professor may learn of their intentions only after they have made
  their final decision of dismissal. This further increases the immense
  power of the president, since it is possible for him to prejudice the
  minds of the trustees against any officer toward whom his own feelings
  are unfriendly or of whom, for any reason, he entertains an
  unfavorable opinion.

And Professor Spingarn goes on to show how the problems of academic
freedom are handled by a committee of the trustees, whose meetings only
three or four attend. These are Butler’s intimates, in one or two cases
his creatures. Says Professor Spingarn:

  Under such a system, it is small wonder that the president is
  surrounded by sycophants, since sycophancy is a condition of official
  favor; small wonder that intellectual freedom and personal courage
  dwindle, explaining, if not justifying, the jibe of European scholars
  that there are three sexes in America, men, women and professors;
  small wonder that permission to give utterance to mild theories of
  parlor Socialism is mistaken by American universities for superb
  freedom of action. But whatever may be the defects or the virtues of
  this system, it fails utterly unless the president is, as it were, a
  transparent medium between the teaching corps and the trustees. If he
  misrepresents the conditions of the university; if he distorts the
  communications entrusted to him for presentation to the trustees; if
  he uses his position to serve the ends of spite or rancor or his own
  ambition, hapless indeed (in Milton’s words) is the race of men whose
  misfortune it is to have understanding.

The gravest offense which a man can commit at Butler’s university is to
interfere in any way with the administration, to criticize it even
privately; the safe thing is to have no ideas about this or anything
else, and to be a perfect cog in the machine. At luncheon, in the
Faculty Club, if you have criticisms you make them to your most intimate
friends, and in whispers; and whoever and whatever you may be, you make
your reports on schedule time, you perform your duly and precisely
appointed functions. You are in a great education factory, with the
whirr of its machinery all about you. It makes no difference if you are
the foremost musician of genius that America has ever produced; you may
be in the midst of composing your greatest sonata, but you must come at
a certain hour to make your reports, and also you must not expect that
an ornamental subject like music will be taken seriously, or its
students granted full credits. If you protest about these matters you
will receive cruel and insulting letters from the president, and if you
don’t like that, out you go.

Nor does it make any difference if you are a great poet, an inspired
critic and teacher of youth, like George Edward Woodberry. You will be
forbidden to give courses at convenient hours and on interesting
subjects, because you will draw all the students away from rival
professors in your department, who do not happen to be teachers of
genius, but are henchmen and political favorites of the president. If
you persist in having your own way, you will have your assistant taken
from you and your undergraduate courses abolished; and if your students
revolt and raise an uproar in the newspapers, the ring-leaders will be
expelled. But you will not get back your assistant—no, not even though
your students may offer to subscribe the money to pay for the assistant
out of their own pockets! Not even though a Standard Oil millionaire may
offer to endow the chair of the assistant in perpetuity!

Consider the experience of Professor Joel E. Spingarn, a distinguished
poet and scholar, who took Professor Woodberry’s place in the department
of comparative literature, and filled it for many years acceptably. A
member of the department of Latin, Professor Harry Thurston Peck, was
sued by a woman for breach of promise, and his letters were given to the
newspapers. Professor Peck declared that the woman was a blackmailer,
and most of the faculty at Columbia thought that he should not be judged
guilty until the charge was proven; but Butler got rid of Peck,
incidentally publishing statements about him which caused Peck to sue
him for libel. Professor Spingarn was outraged at Butler’s proceedings,
and introduced in the faculty of philosophy a resolution testifying to
the academic services of Professor Peck, who had been twenty-two years
with Columbia. This, of course, was a declaration of war upon the
administration, and Butler made to Spingarn the threat: “If you don’t
drop this matter you will get into trouble.” Within ten days thereafter
he notified Spingarn that a committee of the trustees had voted to
abolish his chair. Professor Spingarn published a pamphlet, in which he
gave the history of the case, and the entire correspondence with Butler.
I quote from his comments:

  It would be disheartening to a proud son of Columbia to linger over
  all the details of official trickery and deception, of threat and
  insult, of manners even worse than morals; but it would be unjust to
  those who love Columbia’s honor to hide from them the fact that, in
  the course of this single incident, the president of their alma mater
  told at least five deliberate falsehoods, broke at least three
  deliberate promises, and denied his own statements whenever it served
  his purpose to do so. It is without rancor, and with deep regret, that
  Professor Spingarn feels obliged to state these facts, and to express
  his mature conviction that the word or promise of President Butler is
  absolutely worthless unless it is recorded in writing and that even a
  written document offers no certain safeguard against evasion or
  distortion. It is to this executive, with this code of honor, that
  Columbia entrusts all avenues of communication between the subservient
  faculties and the governing trustees.

  This is not a history or an estimate of President Butler’s
  administration of Columbia; it is merely the record of a single abuse.
  But the record would be incomplete if it were not clearly made known
  that the facts, so far from being exceptional, are typical of his
  executive career. It is not merely that Columbia’s greatest teachers,
  poets, musicians, have been lost to the university from the very
  outset as a result of his methods and his policies. The real scandal
  is worse than this. It is that in the conduct of its affairs a great
  university, so far from being above the commercialism of its
  industrial environment, actually employs methods that would be spurned
  in the humblest of business undertakings. Even the decencies of
  ordinary business are not always observed; and the poor scholar,
  unfamiliar with methods such as these, falls an easy prey. No device,
  however unworthy, is regarded as forbidden by custom or by honor. A
  professor may be asked to send in a purely formal resignation as a
  compliment to the prospective new head of his department, and then be
  dumbfounded to have his letter acted upon by the president immediately
  upon its receipt, and before the new head is actually appointed. A
  professor may be induced to come to Columbia by the assurance of the
  president that the usual contract, “for three years or during the
  pleasure of the trustees,” involves an actual obligation for three
  years on the part of the university, while another professor holding
  the same contract with the university may find his chair abolished, on
  the recommendation of the president, at the end of two years. These
  are actual cases.

Shortly after this Spingarn incident President Butler completed the
tenth year of his administration at Columbia, and a banquet was held at
the Hotel Astor, attended by some two hundred members of the faculty.
“It was an evening of much felicitation,” the New York “Times” reported
(May 16, 1911), but there were “almost imperceptible references” to the
recent conflicts. The “Times” report goes on to quote some jovial
remarks by Professor Seligman, head of the department of political
science. I quote:

  Prof. Seligman regaled the diners with some anecdotes of the days when
  Dr. Butler was an undergraduate. He told of a student to whom was
  spared the embarrassment of reciting by pulling the gong and getting
  the class dismissed. He said he did not know who that student was, but
  admitted that he had his suspicions, as he did in the case of the same
  student getting to the head of his class by making a ten out of his
  zero on the professor’s record.

The above anecdote proves once more the ancient truth, that the child is
father to the man; it would seem that by careful watching of one’s
classmates one can pick out those students who are destined to grow up
into college presidents who do not always tells the truth.




                               CHAPTER X
                      THE LIGHTNING-CHANGE ARTIST


President Butler’s career at Columbia has been like that of a drunken
motorist in a crowded street; he has left behind him a trail of corpses.
In the course of twenty years of office he has managed to expel or force
to withdraw some two score men, including most of the best in the place.
The cases of MacDowell and Woodberry occurred in 1902, the cases of Peck
and Spingarn in 1910 and 1911. Beginning in 1917 there was a sudden
series of casualties; but before these can be clearly explained, it is
necessary that the reader should be made acquainted with another aspect
of the career of Nicholas Miraculous—as pacifist and prophet of the
Capitalist International.

Butler’s friend, Carnegie, put up ten million dollars to establish a
foundation in the cause of universal peace; and Butler became a trustee.
The pointed question has been asked whether the Carnegie Peace
Foundation pays for the elaborate banquets which President Butler serves
to peace delegates in his home. Needless to say, when you have half a
million dollars a year to administer, you can hire a great many
secretaries, and print a great deal of literature, and give a great many
champagne banquets, and make a great splurge in the world. Butler
engaged a young man, Leon Fraser, to organize a peace movement in the
colleges, and had him made an instructor in the department of political
science at Columbia. We shall see in a minute what happened to this
young man.

In the summer of 1914 Butler went to Europe to continue his peace
work—but not with entire success. He came home in September, very much
horrified at what had happened in Europe, and to the students at the
opening of the university he made a speech in which you find him at his
best, with his clear, keen mind and driving energy. He denounced the
war-makers in language which left nothing to be desired. One thing this
war had done, he said; it had “put a final end to the contention, always
stupid and often insincere, that huge armaments are an insurance against
war and an aid in maintaining peace. This argument was invented by the
war-makers who had munitions of war to sell.... Since war is an affair
of governments and of armies, one result of the present war should be to
make the manufacture and sale of munitions of war a government monopoly
hereafter.... How anyone not fit subject for a madhouse, can find in the
awful events now happening in Europe a reason for increasing the
military and naval establishments and expenditures of the United States
is to me wholly inconceivable. Militarism—there is the enemy!”

Good for Nicholas Miraculous, you say! That is the sort of college
president we want in America! But in the cold light of the morning after
our pacifist orator thought it over. Perhaps he remembered his
interlocking directorate—the grim-visaged, growling wild boar, old
Pierpont Morgan, preparing to make his billion dollars out of the
British government; young Marcellus Hartley Dodge, chairman of Remington
Arms and Union Metallic Cartridge, getting ready to clean up his
millions by cornering the market in munitions machinery! How awkward to
meet Marcellus Hartley on the board, after talking about “the
contention, always stupid and often insincere ... invented by war-makers
who have munitions of war to sell!” Also, Butler was expecting to be
Republican candidate for president two years from date; and it would not
be easy to carry Elihu Root and Bill Barnes and Jim Wadsworth for a
government monopoly of Remington Arms and Union Metallic Cartridge, to
say nothing of Bethlehem and Carnegie Steel!

So President Butler sat himself down and edited his eloquence. The
passages I have quoted are from the speech as given to the newspapers,
September 24, 1914; but now see how it reads as published in Butler’s
book, “America in Ferment.” “The contention, always stupid and often
insincere,” is softened to “the contention, always made with more
emphasis than reasonableness.” The argument which was “invented by the
war-makers who have munitions of war to sell” now becomes an argument
which was “invented by those who really believe in war and in armaments
as ends in themselves.” That lets out Marcellus Hartley, you see; in
fact, it lets out Butler’s friend the Kaiser, and everybody in the world
since Genghis Khan. The proposed plank for the Republican party’s
presidential platform, providing for a government monopoly of the
manufacture and sale of munitions of war, has been dropped overboard and
lost forever; while the phrase about “increasing the military and naval
establishments and expenditures of the United States” has been deftly
turned into “asking the United States to desist from its attempts to
promote a new international order in the world!” Let nobody expect that
Nicholas Miraculous will abandon his charge of that half million dollars
a year of Carnegie money!

After this you will be prepared for any amount of hedging. President
Butler had for ten years been conducting with President Wheeler of the
University of California an ardent rivalry for the affections of the
Kaiser; but now the interlocking directorate is going to “can the
Kaiser,” and their university president is going to enlist in the
speech-making brigade. Wheeler of California is three thousand miles
away from the seat of authority, but Butler gets the “tip” in time, and
saves himself by climbing out on the faces of those who took seriously
his belief in universal peace.

For example, Leon Fraser, the young instructor who has been set to work
organizing peace societies in American colleges, including Columbia!
President Butler had sent a dean to ask Professor Beard to take Fraser
into his department; now he sent the dean to ask Beard to drop Fraser
again. Professor Beard, who has a capacity for indignation, told the
dean that Fraser had done what he had been employed to do, and had done
it sincerely and capably, therefore it was his intention to propose
Fraser for a full professorship; and then Beard showed the dean to the
door. Beard took the matter to the members of his department, and they
agreed unanimously that Fraser should be promoted.

Knowing Butler as you now do, you will understand that he marked two
more victims on his blacklist. One was Fraser and the other was Beard.
Fraser was got rid of quickly; as soon as America entered the war,
Butler announced that Columbia would not need so many professors, so he
dropped three, Fraser among them. Subsequently he took back the other
two; but Fraser meantime had enlisted. The dean remarked to a friend of
mine, a Columbia professor, how fortunate it was that Fraser had gone to
the war, so that a scandal over the question of his dismissal had been
avoided. “Yes,” replied my friend, “and wouldn’t it be fortunate if he
were shot to pieces, so that he could never come back and tell how
Columbia treated him?”

The next experience in order of time is that of Professors Cattell and
Dana; but since we have seen Beard put on the blacklist, perhaps we had
better finish his story. Charles A. Beard is a sincere and determined
fighter; incidentally, he is one of America’s leading economists and
scholars. There was an uproar in the newspapers over the charge that a
labor leader, speaking at a civic center in a New York public school,
had said: “To hell with the stars and stripes.” He didn’t really say it,
as you may read in “The Brass Check,” page 344. But the New York papers
reported that he said it, so it was proposed to close all the civic
centers in the schools. Professor Beard at a public meeting stated that
he did not think it was wise to close all the schools to the public,
just because one labor leader was reported to have said, “To hell with
the stars and stripes.” So next morning one of the New York newspapers
reported that Professor Beard of Columbia University had defended a
labor leader for saying “To hell with the stars and stripes.”

So now behold our professor summoned before the interlocking trustees in
solemn conclave! They demanded to know what he had said, and he told
them, and then, thinking that the incident was closed, he started to
leave the room. But one of them called to him, and to the consternation
of this leading economist and scholar, he was grilled for half an hour
concerning his beliefs and teachings, by two members of the
board—Frederick R. Coudert, lawyer, and director of a trust company, a
safe deposit company and a surety company; and Francis S. Bangs, lawyer,
and director in five express companies, a trust company, a savings bank,
and a water power corporation. They demanded his views on war and peace,
on Americanism and the constitution, on capitalism and the rights of
property; and when they had satisfied themselves that he did not believe
anything for which he could be arrested, they dismissed him, with orders
to warn all others in his department “against teachings likely to
inculcate disrespect for American institutions.” Professor Beard went
back to his colleagues, and reported this extraordinary scene, and the
members of his department burst into roars of laughter; asking whether
among the “American institutions” for which they were to “teach respect”
the trustees included Tammany Hall and the pork barrel!

Shortly after this it was announced that the trustees had appointed a
special committee to investigate the ideas which were being taught at
Columbia. “The Committee on the State of Teaching,” it was called, and
its members were four lawyers and one banker. The response of the
faculty was to meet and protest, and appoint a committee of nine to
defend themselves. The Faculty Council adopted a very strong resolution
on the subject of academic freedom—which resolution, be it noted, was
afterwards suppressed.

The Columbia faculty at this time was preparing for real action, and
Butler had his hands full smoothing them down. He sent one of his deans
to see Professor Beard, and plead with him not to push the issue; the
trustees had learned their lesson, said Butler, the incident would never
be repeated. Also, if Beard forced the matter he would greatly
inconvenience Butler, who was just then in trouble with his trustees
because of his pacifist activities. No more professors would be
dismissed from Columbia, except with the consent of their departments,
so Butler promised; but he kept this promise no more than he kept
others. Soon afterwards he got rid of Leon Fraser, and after that of
another member of the faculty. Butler had promised that all nominations
for promotion should come from the faculty; but soon afterwards he sent
an ambassador to Beard, to say that a certain man whom the department
proposed to promote would be refused promotion by the trustees; so the
man was not named for promotion—and Butler was able to go on saying that
all moves for promotion in Columbia came from the various departments!
Professor Beard had had enough, and handed in his resignation, in which
he paid his respects to “the few obscure and willful trustees who now
dominate the university and terrorize the young instructors.” Discussing
the subject of academic tenure, he said: “The status of a professor in
Columbia is lower than that of a manual laborer.”




                               CHAPTER XI
                           THE TWILIGHT ZONE


A well known American scientist made to me the statement that there has
not been a man of distinction called to Columbia in ten years, nor has
one arisen there. To attribute so much to Butler and his interlocking
trustees might seem to credit them with superhuman maleficence; but the
scientist explained the phenomenon, as follows: American university
teachers are greatly underpaid; there is no first class man who could
not get more money if he turned his energies to other pursuits. If he
stays as a teacher it is because he loves the work, and is willing to
accept his reward in other forms—in the respect of his fellow men. But
if he finds that he has no standing and no power; if he sees himself and
his colleagues browbeaten and insulted by commercial persons; if he
knows that all the world pays no attention to his opinions, assuming him
to be the puppet of commercial persons—then the dignity of the academic
life is gone, and nothing is left but an inadequate money reward.

What you have at Columbia is a host of inferior men, dwelling, as one
phrased it to me, in “a twilight zone of mediocrity”; dull pedants,
raking over the dust heaps of learning and occupying their minds with
petty problems of administration. They have full power to decide whether
Greek shall be given in nine courses or nine and one-half, also whether
it shall count for four credits or four and a quarter. “And we love
that,” said one to me, with a bitter sneer.

The standing of Columbia University in the field of science under the
regime of the interlocking president was interestingly revealed by a
study published in “Science” in 1906, and continued in 1910: “A
Statistical Study of American Men of Science,” by J. McKeen Cattell,
Professor of Psychology in Columbia University. It so happens that
Professor Cattell has become President Butler’s most vigorous opponent;
but this investigation had no special reference to Columbia, and the
method of conducting it was such as to preclude favoritism. A list of
the thousand leading men of American science was obtained by writing to
ten leading men in twelve different branches of science, and asking them
to name the most eminent representatives of their science in the
country. The one thousand leaders thus selected were studied from
various points of view, their ages, the countries from which they came,
the institutions at which they studied, the institutions with which they
were connected. Of these leaders it appeared that thirty-eight had taken
their doctorate degrees at Columbia, while 102 had taken their degrees
at Johns Hopkins; 78 had studied at Columbia, while 237 had studied at
Harvard. In 1905 Columbia had 60 of the thousand leaders on its faculty,
while Harvard had 66 and Yale 26; but in 1910 Columbia had 48, a loss of
12, while Harvard had 79, a gain of 13 and Yale had 38, a gain of 12. In
the listing of 1910 it appeared that 238 scientific men had gained a
place among the leaders, while 201 had lost their standing in that
group. A study of the institutions with which these men were connected
revealed an extraordinary state of affairs. Among the Harvard men 22 had
won their way to the first thousand; among the Chicago men 13 had won;
while among Columbia men, with a much larger faculty, only 8 had won. On
the other hand, 6 Harvard men had lost their standing, and 3 Chicago
men, while 12 Columbia men had lost—more than in any other institution
in the United States! So much for academic autocracy!

Another table presented a study of the ratio between the number of
distinguished men at each institution and the total number of the
faculty at that institution. Disregarding fractions, it appeared that
one man in every seven at Harvard belonged among the first thousand, one
man in every six at Chicago, one in every five at Johns Hopkins, one in
every two at Clark—and one in every thirteen at Columbia! Taking the
ratio of distinguished men to the number of students, it appeared that
there was one distinguished scientist for every twenty-one students at
Johns Hopkins, and one for every ninety-six students at Columbia.
Considering the matter in relation to the value of buildings and
grounds, it appeared that Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a
distinguished scientist for every $53,000 worth of buildings and
grounds, while Columbia had one for every $259,000 worth. Considering
the matter in relation to income, it appeared that Johns Hopkins had a
distinguished man for every $10,000 of income, while Columbia had one
for every $45,000. Before I finish with this book I expect to show you
that all the colleges in the United States are plutocratic; but there
are some which are less plutocratic than others, and the above figures
will show you exactly what the plutocratic policy does, when it has its
way completely, to crush the life of the intellect, and turn a great
institution of learning into a thing of bricks and mortar without a
soul.

There are some fifteen hundred men on the Columbia faculty; but you can
count upon the fingers of one hand the men of any originality and force
of character. John Dewey has stayed on; being the foremost educator in
the country, it would make a terrible fuss if he were to go. Butler
notes that Dewey takes no part in the internal politics of the
university, but politely resigned from a faculty committee to supervise
expulsions, when he discovered that this committee was to have no power.
There is one other professor at Columbia who is known to be a Socialist;
a very quiet one, who has retired from the Socialist party, and is
writing an abstract work on metaphysics. He is useful to Butler and the
whole crowd of the interlocking directorate, because whenever the
question of academic freedom is raised, they can say: “Look at Montague,
he is a Socialist!”

Similarly, in the worst days of reaction in Germany, they used to have
in their universities what were called “renommir professoren,” that is
to say, “boast professors,” or, as we should say in vulgar American,
“shirtfronts.” In the same way, whenever Bismarck was conducting his
campaigns against the Jews, he was always careful to have one Jew in the
cabinet. I count over these “renommir professoren” in American
universities; two at Columbia, one at Chicago, two at Wisconsin, one at
Stanford, and one at Clark, expecting to be fired; a very young man at
Johns Hopkins, and two old ladies at Wellesley. That is the complete
list, so far as my investigations reveal; ten out of a total of some
forty thousand college and university teachers—and that shows how much
American colleges and universities have to make a pretense of caring
about freedom!

Exactly how does the plutocratic regime operate to eliminate originality
and power? The process is perfectly shown in the case of Professor
Goodnow, now president of Johns Hopkins University. Goodnow taught
administrative law at Columbia, and when Professor Burgess withdrew,
Goodnow was the choice of the faculty for the Ruggles professorship, one
of the most important chairs in Columbia. Butler had promised the
faculty that each department should decide its own promotions, but he
was worried about Goodnow, because Goodnow had published a book in which
he set forth the dangerous idea that the constitution of the United
States as it now exists is not final. Goodnow studied the constitution
as the product of a certain social environment, and that maddens Butler.
“Don’t you think there are some things we can call settled?” he
remarked, irritably, to one of my informants. So the trustees, without
consulting the faculty of political science, passed over Goodnow, and
appointed one of the interlocking directors! William D. Guthrie, law
partner of one of the trustees, a corporation lawyer, rich, smooth,
hard, and ignorant, was selected to come once a week during half a
semester, and give a lecture interpreting the constitution as the
interlocking directorate wants it interpreted—a permanent bulwark
against any kind of change in property relations. He did none of the
work of an ordinary college professor, but conferred upon the university
his plutocratic prestige for the sum of seventy-five hundred dollars a
year.

Or consider the testimony of Bayard Boyesen, who was a member of the
Columbia faculty for several years, and whose father was one of
Columbia’s oldest and most honored professors. Says young Boyesen, in a
letter to me:

  You speak of whispering at the Faculty Club. It was worse than that. I
  have on several occasions seen professors, after beginning luncheon at
  one table, rise and go to another because the talk had turned, not to
  radical propaganda, but to a purely intellectual discussion of such
  subjects as Socialism, Syndicalism and the like. I was on at least
  twenty occasions asked by different professors and instructors to hold
  as confidential the ideas they had expounded to me as their own.

  To show the utter cowardice of many of the professors, I will relate a
  personal incident. During my third year as instructor at Columbia, I
  resigned in order to have all my time for other work, but was
  persuaded by a senior professor of my department to remain. He wrote
  me a very strong letter in praise of my work and guaranteed me a full
  professorship for the following year. When, however, I got into
  trouble with the trustees because of radical speeches made before
  audiences of laboring men, and because of a pamphlet I had written on
  education, the professor came to me and asked me to return the letter
  he had sent me. Very evidently, he feared that I might jeopardize his
  position if I quoted from it. And this man had told me that he could
  hardly see his way to remaining at Columbia unless I was there to help
  in building up a department sadly in need of rejuvenation.

  An illustration of how Columbia gets rid of its “undesirables.” I was
  told by Professor Ashley Thorndike of my department (English) that a
  charge had been preferred against me by Dr. Butler acting for the
  trustees, and that therefore I could not be recommended for
  appointment the following year. He refused to tell me what the charge
  was, on the ground that he was pledged not to reveal it. I thereupon
  wrote to Dr. Butler requesting an interview. His secretary wrote that
  the president was too busy to see me. I then threatened to bring the
  matter to court, for though an instructor’s tenure of office is for
  one year only, I felt sure that the trustees had no right to make a
  charge of any kind against me without giving me an opportunity to
  answer it. After this, I obtained an interview with the president,
  during which he said that no charges of any sort had been made and
  that it was purely a departmental matter. He refused, however, to put
  this into writing, though he several times reiterated it. I returned
  to Professor Thorndike, and told him, as politely as circumstances
  would allow, that either he or Dr. Butler had “misinformed” me. He
  replied evasively that a man of my intelligence should have understood
  the whole matter from the beginning, and added significantly that I
  had been warned before in regard to my outside activities. I finally
  obtained from him an oral statement that there were no charges against
  me, as well as a grudging apology for the “misunderstanding.”




                              CHAPTER XII
                     THE ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT STORE


I have several times mentioned in this narrative Professor Cattell and
his opinions of Columbia. My story would not be complete without an
account of his adventures, for he was the one man who gave the
interlocking directors a real fight.

James McKeen Cattell was a teacher at Columbia for twenty-six years. He
was the first professor of psychology in any university in the world; he
is the editor of four leading scientific journals. Cattell objected to
some of Butler’s methods, such as the appointment of an unfit professor
in his division, because this man brought with him a gift of a hundred
thousand dollars. Cattell was left to learn of this appointment from the
newspapers, and when he protested, Butler wrote him insolent letters,
trying to force him to resign, as he had done with MacDowell and
Woodberry. But Cattell stuck, whereupon Butler took from him the use of
six rooms, a laboratory of psychological research which had been built
with funds obtained by Cattell. The income of a trust fund of one
hundred thousand dollars, which Cattell had got “to increase the
facilities of his department,” was taken to pay Cattell’s own salary.

Cattell then withdrew as head of his department, and took no more part
in Columbia’s politics. But he published articles criticizing the
Carnegie pension scheme, in which Butler was a leading spirit. He showed
how it was used to control the university professor, as seniority rights
and pensions are used to keep employes in order. So in 1910 a resolution
proposing to dismiss Cattell was before the trustees. In 1913 he
published a book on “University Control,” in which he demonstrated that
85 per cent of the members of college and university faculties are
dissatisfied with the present system of the management of scholars by
business men. In punishment for this the trustees voted to retire him on
a pension—taking the step without the knowledge of the faculty. There
was unanimous protest, and the trustees yielded. In 1917 Professor
Cattell wrote a letter to members of the Faculty Club, referring to “our
much-climbing and many-talented president.” This, of course, was lese
majesté, and for the third time a resolution proposing to dismiss
Professor Cattell was presented to the trustees; but action was
postponed, on the recommendation of a committee of deans and professors.

Nicholas Miraculous bided his time, and several months later came the
chance to get rid of Cattell and at the same time to exhibit his new
patriotism. Cattell wrote a letter to a congressman, in support of
pending legislation exempting from combatant service in Europe
conscripts who objected to war. The interlocking trustees, who had
already conscripted themselves to make money out of the war, took the
position that in writing this letter Cattell had committed a crime, and
they suddenly dismissed him from the university. In spite of his
twenty-six years’ service, they did not even take the trouble to notify
him what they proposed to do, but left him to learn of their action from
a newspaper reporter who waked him in the middle of the night. The
trustees declared that a professor could not take a stand on any public
question as his own personal opinion; to which Cattell replied: “When
trustees announce that no statement can be made by a teacher that is not
affirmed by Columbia University, they challenge the intellectual
integrity of every teacher.”

These ferocious old men who had conscripted themselves to make money out
of the war were not content to get rid of a too-independent professor;
they wished to brand him for life, so they rushed to the press with a
statement charging him with “treason,” “sedition,” and “obstruction to
the enforcement of the laws of the United States.” And this although
Professor Cattell was actively engaged in psychological work for the
army, and his only son who was of war age had already volunteered!
Professor Cattell, in his counter-statement, referred to the trustees as
“men whose horizon is bounded by the two sides of Wall Street with
Trinity Church at the end.” He described the university as a place
“overrun with intrigue and secret diplomacy.” He said of President
Butler: “He has run the university as a department store, playing the
part of both proprietor and floor walker to the faculty, while an errand
boy to the trustees.”[A] Cattell brought suit for libel and threatened
to sue for the pension to which he was entitled. The trustees waited
several years, until the libel case was about to come up for trial, and
then admitted their guilt by paying forty-five thousand dollars of the
university’s money.

-----

Footnote A:

  The statements concerning Columbia University in the above paragraph
  were contained in a confidential statement sent by Professor Cattell
  to some of the Columbia faculty. In fairness to Professor Cattell, I
  wish to state that he did not furnish me with this statement, either
  directly or indirectly, and I have not asked his permission to quote
  from it.

-----

With Professor Cattell there went out Professor H. W. L. Dana, a
grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and of Richard Henry Dana; his
crime was that he had belonged to the People’s Council—with the
knowledge of President Butler. Shortly after this went Beard, and Henry
Mussey, one of Columbia’s most loved professors; also my old teacher,
James Harvey Robinson.

I write the above, and then the door-bell of my home rings, and there
enters another man who went out—Leon Ardzrooni, an Armenian with an
irrepressible sense of humor, who for two years was a professor of
economics. I do not have to ask Ardzrooni about his success as a
teacher, because his reputation has preceded him. He brought Columbia
twelve thousand dollars a year in tuition fees, of which they paid him
three thousand to lecture on labor problems; and every now and then they
would send for him and make anxious faces over the fact that he taught
the realities of modern industry. Professor Seligman, his dean, heard
the distressing report that he made some of his young ladies—graduate
students out of Barnard—“unhappy.” “It would be all right for older
people,” said Professor Seligman; “but not for the young, who are so
impressionable.” Said Ardzrooni; “What’s the use of teaching them when
they’re so old that I can’t make any impression?”

The students asked him about an I. W. W. strike, and he told how such a
matter appeared to the strikers. “Don’t they get enough to eat?” asked
one, a young army officer. “Yes, I suppose so,” said the professor; “but
so do the owners get enough to eat. That isn’t the only issue.”
Professor Ardzrooni gave that answer at ten o’clock in the morning, and
at twelve he went to the Faculty Club for lunch, and there on the faces
of his colleagues he saw written the dreadful tidings—he had been
reported! The busy telephone system of the university had informed the
whole campus that the genial Armenian had been discovered to be a member
of the I. W. W.; he had boasted to his classes of carrying a red card,
and all his colleagues were so sorry for him!

Ardzrooni was summoned before Butler, and instead of taking it meekly,
he demanded a showdown. Who was it that accused him of belonging to the
I. W. W. and of carrying a red card? Butler refused to tell him, evading
the issue, so the professor went on the warpath. It happens that he is a
rich man, not dependent upon anybody’s favor, so he went to Woodbridge,
dean of the faculty, announcing that he was going to bring suit against
the university that very day; he would put Butler on the witness stand,
and find out whether a college professor has any rights, or can be
slandered at will!

Instantly, of course, the whole machinery of intimidation collapsed; it
had never occurred to anyone that a college professor might act like a
man! They would drop the whole matter, say nothing more about the red
card, give Ardzrooni promotion and increase his salary—anything to keep
out of court! The professor of labor problems laughed at them, and
following the example of all other self-respecting men, went out into
the free world.




                              CHAPTER XIII
                         THE EMPIRE OF DULLNESS


Those who have stayed in the great academic department-store have stayed
under the shadow of disgrace; branded as men who love their pitiful
salaries more than they love their self-respect and dignity as scholars,
more than they love the cause of democracy and justice throughout the
world. They stay on the terms that the voice of democracy and justice is
silent among them, while the voice of reaction bellows with brazen
throat.

I have shown you the plutocratic president storming the banquet halls of
merchants and manufacturers and bankers, pouring out what Gutzon
Borglum, the sculptor, described as “his sweeping intolerance of free
speech and of organization by those not of his belief.” And everything
in Columbia or connected with Columbia has been stamped with the impress
of Butler’s hard materialism, his cold and calculating snobbery. He uses
the prestige of his university to confer honors on reaction both at home
and abroad. In 1912 he honored Senator Underwood, praising him to the
skies as the leader of democracy—this in the hope of keeping Woodrow
Wilson from getting the Democratic nomination for president. In 1922 we
find him glorifying an Episcopal bishop, the rector of Trinity Church,
the governor of the Federal Reserve Board, a Belgian baron, a Portuguese
viscount, the Chinese ambassador, and Paderewski, apostle of Polish
militarism!

With the help of his millionaire trustees Butler has built up an alumni
machine, and the alumni paper is the organ of his personal glory. He has
built up a faculty machine, of men who understand that they are free so
long as they agree with their president, and who go forth to carry out
the president’s will wherever the Columbia influence reaches—which is
throughout the entire school and college system of our plutocratic
empire.

Butler, you understand, was head of the department of education at
Columbia; he fixed the policy of this department, making it a machine
for the turning out of “educational experts,” trained to see life as a
battleground of money-ambition, and to run the schools as efficient
factories. Butler edited the “Educational Review,” and the present
editor is a Columbia man, and his puppet. I shall take you with me
before long for a trip over the United States, and show you the Tammany
Hall of education; the league of superintendents, and the politicians of
the National Educational Association, financed by the book companies and
other big grafters, and combining with the chambers of commerce and
professional patriots to drive out liberalism in education as in
politics, and resist every new idea in every department of human thought
and activity. They are backed by the political machines of special
privilege, and protected and glorified by the “Brass Check” press; and
everywhere you find Columbia men the leading advocates of routine, red
tape, and reaction.

I turn over my notes; the people of New York are struggling in the grip
of rapacious landlords, and here comes Samuel McCune Lindsay, Professor
of Social Legislation at Columbia University, with a pamphlet to
demonstrate that there is really no shortage of apartments, but on the
contrary a surplus of thirty thousand. The Lockwood Commission puts the
professor on the stand and draws out the fact that he was paid five
hundred dollars by the Real Estate Board for the writing of this
pamphlet. Samuel Untermyer, counsel of the commission, characterizes
Prof. Lindsay’s figures as “absurd,” and forces the professor to admit
that he made no actual investigation, and has “no practical knowledge.”

I turn to another page. Dr. Albert Shiels is superintendent of the
public schools of Los Angeles in the year 1919, and at the height of the
White Terror in America he publishes in President Butler’s “Educational
Review” an article denouncing the Soviet government. At a mass meeting
in Los Angeles the chairman states that he has made count of the errors
of fact in this article, and they total one hundred and twenty-four.
Louise Bryant, just returned from Russia, is at the meeting, and the
audience votes to send a challenge to Dr. Shiels to debate with her.
Someone in the audience puts up a two hundred dollar Liberty Bond to pay
Dr. Shiels, and the audience contributes over twelve hundred dollars to
give publicity to the debate. Dr. Shiels is invited to appear, and his
answer is: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place
Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions”—an
answer which so delights President Butler that he calls Dr. Shiels to
New York, to become Associate Director of the Institute of Educational
Research of Columbia University!

Yet another case: The people of North Dakota are trying to take over the
education of their own children and liberalize the school system of
their state; and here comes George D. Strayer, professor of Educational
Administration at Columbia University, addressing the legislative
committee of the state educational committee, Minot, North Dakota, April
18, 1919, attacking the proposed new laws, and laying out a complete
program of pedagogical toryism. No violation of academic propriety for a
Columbia professor to take part in politics—provided it is on the side
of special privilege!

Nor is it a violation of academic propriety if a Columbia professor
rushes into the capitalistic press, provided he rushes in in defense of
his masters. In the New York “Times” for May 22, 1922, I find Professor
James C. Egbert, Director of University Extension and Director of the
School of Business of Columbia University, spreading himself to the
extent of three columns on the subject of “labor education.” There was
no slightest occasion for this professor to spread himself; nobody asked
his opinion, he did not even have the pretext of a public address before
some bankers’ association. The only camouflage which the Times provides
is the phrase, “in a recent interview”—that is, in this precise present
interview with the Times! After which the Times goes on to publish
nearly three columns of the professor’s manuscript, with nothing but
quotation marks to keep up the pretense that it is an “interview.” Says
the professor: “The educational system devised by the labor unions has
virtually broken down”—which is a plain lie. The professor then goes on
to say that the proper place for the labor unions to come for their
education is to the established universities. I read the professor’s
three columns of eloquence, and realize that I learned the whole thing
when I was three years old, in two lines of nursery rhyme:

                   “‘Won’t you come into my parlor?’
                   Said the spider to the fly.”

What is the final product of all this system we have been studying? It
may be stated in one word, which is dullness. Some men are hired, and
they are hired because they are dull, and will do dull work; and they do
it. The student comes to college, full of eagerness and hope, and he
finds it dull. He has no idea why it should be so; it is incredible to
him that men should be selected because they are dull, and should be
fired if they prove to be anything but dull. All he sees is the
dullness, and he hates it, and “cuts” it as much as he can, and goes off
to practice football or get drunk. I quote one more paragraph from the
letter of Bayard Boyesen:

  There is nothing tending to make a teacher so enthusiastic and
  optimistic as any average class of freshmen, the great majority of
  whom come to Columbia eager, alert and responsive to every contact
  with beauty, nobility, aspiration and high endeavor; and there is
  nothing tending to make the teacher so disappointed and pessimistic as
  to see these same young men, after they have been blunted and
  flattened, go out with smiles of cynical superiority, to take their
  allotted places in the world of American business.

All this wealth, all this magnificence, stone and concrete and white
marble—and inside it dullness and death! You read about the millions
given for education, and rejoice, thinking it means progress; but all
that the millions can buy is—dullness and death! Look at Nicholas Murray
Butler, with a ten million dollar peace foundation, which he uses to
finance the writing of a history of the war! Half a million dollars a
year, donated to bring peace to mankind, and now, in the greatest crisis
of history, Butler sets a man to writing a history of a war!

If you think I exaggerate when I state that the Columbia system means
the deliberate exclusion of new ideas, and of living, creative
attitudes, listen to our plutocratic president himself, laying down the
law on the subject of education: “The duty of one generation is to pass
on to the next, unimpaired, the institutions it has inherited from its
forbears.” Just so! To keep mankind as it has been, forever and ever,
world without end, amen! Is it anybody’s duty to discover new truth and
complete man’s mastery over nature? Is it anybody’s duty to inspire us,
that we may cease to be the bloody-handed savages that history has left
us? Is it anybody’s business to bring order out of our commercial
anarchy, and use the collective powers of mankind for the making instead
of the destroying of life? It is nobody’s business to do these things;
what we go to college for is to learn about our ancestors, and become
what they were—the pitiful victims of blind instincts.




                              CHAPTER XIV
                    THE UNIVERSITY OF LEE-HIGGINSON


There is a saying that when you go to Philadelphia they ask you who your
grandfather was, and when you go to New York they ask you what you are
worth, and when you go to Boston they ask you what you know. We are now
going to the hub of America’s intellectual life, and make ourselves
familiar with our most highly cultured university.

We shall begin, as before, by investigating those who run it; and
straightway we shall get a shock. We shall find not merely the
interlocking directorate—the princes, and the dukes, and the barons; we
shall find the emperor himself, none other than J. Pierpont Morgan! I
was puzzled when I studied the affairs of Columbia, for I knew that the
elder Morgan had been on the board until his death, and I could not
imagine how President Butler managed to overlook his son and heir. When
I came to study Harvard I discovered the reason; the younger Morgan was
graduated from Harvard in 1889. The purpose of such interchanges of
royalty is, of course, to cement the bonds of empire.

The house of J. P. Morgan & Company is closely allied with the Boston
banking house of Lee, Higginson & Company. Mr. Morgan was reelected to
the Harvard board in 1917, along with Francis Lee Higginson, Jr., of
Lee, Higginson & Company; Eliot Wadsworth, representative of Stone &
Webster, an allied banking house; Howard Elliott, then president and now
chairman of the New Haven, a Morgan railroad; and, finally, a prominent
corporation lawyer in San Francisco, representing the interlocking
directorate in that city.

In his discussion of the Pujo report Justice Brandeis wrote that
“Concentration of banking capital has proceeded even farther in Boston
than in New York.” He goes on to tell of three great banking concerns,
with their interlocking directorates, controlling ninety-two per cent of
Boston’s money resources. These concerns competed in minor and local
matters, said Mr. Brandeis, but they were all allied with Morgan.
“Financial concentration seems to have found its highest exemplification
in Boston.” And exactly the same thing is true of the concentration of
control of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and the group of smaller colleges located in Eastern
Massachusetts. They are all “State Street”—this being the Boston
equivalent of “Wall Street.”

In 1916 the New York Evening Post, at that time in rebellion against the
House of Morgan, published an interesting study of the financial
connections of the governing board of Harvard. There are six members of
the Harvard corporation, known as the “fellows,” and these are appointed
for life. In addition, there are thirty “overseers,” elected by the
whole body of graduates. The New York “Evening Post” examined these
latter, and found eleven capitalists and seven lawyers, a generous
majority for the plutocracy. Nor was there much danger to the plutocracy
from some of the others; those classified as “public men” including
Senator Lodge and F. A. Delano, ex-president of several railroads.

A year later the “Evening Post” made a further examination, considering
not merely the fellows and the overseers, but the nine directors of the
Harvard Alumni Association, the nine members of the Association’s
nominating committee, twenty candidates for overseers who had just been
called, and six who had just been called as candidates for directors of
the Association. That made a body of eighty Harvard graduates, forty of
them Boston men, and twenty-nine of these forty being financial men, or
attorneys for the State Street houses. All but six were connected with
the three interlocked financial institutions; twenty were connected with
Lee, Higginson & Company or its institutions—nine with the Old Colony
Trust Company, the great Lee-Higginson bank, five with Lee, Higginson &
Company itself, four directors in another Lee-Higginson bank, six
directors in a Lee-Higginson savings bank, six in another Lee-Higginson
savings bank, four in a Lee-Higginson insurance company, and six
attorneys for these. “State Street,” you see, is like Virginia; the old
families have been intermarrying for so long that everybody is related
to everybody else.

A Harvard graduate wrote to the New York “Evening Post,” “Harvard has
assets to be invested of about thirty-four million dollars. Is that the
reason why practically five-sixths of the Boston business representation
(of Harvard) is affiliated with investment banking concerns, or is it
because they wish to use Harvard as a knighthood for their friends?” The
“Evening Post” went on politely to say that it did not believe this was
the case; the financial domination of Harvard had resulted by accident!
But this bit of humor did not save the “Evening Post” from the wrath of
the interlocking directorate. The paper offended also by opposing
America’s entry into the war—and so the valuable advertising business of
Lee, Higginson & Co. was withdrawn, and shortly afterwards the owner of
the paper was forced to sell out to Mr. Lamont, a partner of the House
of Morgan. This story is in “The Brass Check,” page 248. To complete it
we should note the part played by Harvard in the swallowing. It was a
Harvard overseer who bought the “Evening Post”; another overseer is now
president and trustee of the “Evening Post” company, and a third
overseer is also a trustee of the “Evening Post” company!

Also, it will be worth while to notice the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, until recently a part of Harvard. This is one of the most
marvelous collections of plutocrats ever assembled in the world; it
includes the president of the Powder Trust, and his cousin Mr. Coleman
du Pont, who is emperor of the State of Delaware; also Mr. Eastman, the
kodak king; two of our greatest international bankers, Mr. Otto Kahn and
Mr. Frank Vanderlip; Mr. Howard Elliott, chairman of the New Haven, Mr.
Elisha Lee, vice-president of the Pennsylvania; both members of the firm
of Stone and Webster, with all of its enormous electrical interests;
also nine other electrical bankers, two officials of the General
Electric Company, one big electrical manufacturer, and six others who
are interested in electric railways. Make particular note of this mass
of electrical connections, because in succeeding chapters you will find
several amusing instances of the influence of electric light and
electric railway interests upon the policy and teaching of both Harvard
and Massachusetts Tech.

As we have seen, the endowment of Harvard was estimated at thirty-four
millions of dollars in 1917, and since then there has been a campaign in
which nearly fifteen millions was raised. This money is under the
direction of the Morgan-Lee-Higginson directorate, and needless to say
is largely invested in Morgan-Lee-Higginson enterprises. We are told by
some friends of Harvard that Harvard stands for “liberalism” in American
education; do you suppose that Harvard stands for “liberalism” in
American industry? Do you suppose that the votes of Harvard
administrators are cast for policies of justice and democracy in the
enterprises it exploits? If you suppose that, you are extremely naive.
The Harvard votes are cast, just as any other votes of any other
business concerns are cast, for the largest amount of dividends for
Harvard. For example, Harvard owns twenty-five hundred shares in a
Boston department store; has Harvard done anything to humanize the
management of that store? It has not. Harvard likewise operates a mine.
Harvard has a graduate business school and trains executives to run
mines—on the basis of getting the maximum production at the lowest cost,
and maintaining the present system of industrial feudalism.

I take these facts concerning the Harvard investments from a paper by
Harry Emerson Wildes, a Harvard graduate. It is interesting to note that
Mr. Wildes at the time he made this study was doing voluntary publicity
work for the alumni group which was raising Harvard funds in
Philadelphia; and Mr. Wildes was “dropped” immediately after this study
saw the light!

We have seen how Columbia owns stocks and bonds in American railroads,
public service corporations, and industrial corporations of all sorts.
Exactly the same thing is true of Harvard. Says Mr. Wildes:

  Twelve separate cities feed the Harvard purse from their traction
  lines, and more than half a hundred pay tribute from their lighting,
  heating, gas and power plants. Harvard has two million dollars in the
  traction game. The two-cent transfer charge on New York City trolleys
  goes to pay the interest on three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth
  of traction bonds in Harvard ownership, and Boston ten-cent fare goes
  partially to Harvard’s third of a million in Boston traction bonds.

Mr. Wildes goes on to study the effect of these investments upon
Harvard, and the effect which Harvard, through the power of these
investments, might have upon the industrial life of the country. I
cannot present the subject better than he has done, so I quote his
words:

  With rapid transit lines throughout the nation in a state of rising
  fares, and continual labor strife taking place, the intervention of a
  conciliatory investor holding any such amounts might aid in bringing
  better harmony between the companies on the one hand and the public
  and the workmen on the other. But nothing has been done by Harvard
  University, nor by any educational body in the land, to work for the
  friendship of either public or labor towards the transit lines....

  How strenuously the influence of Harvard will be thrown on the side of
  limitation of armaments and the ending of war may be gauged by the
  total of more than a million dollars’ worth of ordnance bonds and
  munitions stock owned by the corporation. And, as these are largely in
  great steel corporations such as Bethlehem, Midvale and Illinois, the
  attitude of the college heads towards the move for unionizing workers
  can be clearly understood.

  When railroad brotherhoods put forth a plan for guild operation of the
  lines, they face a mighty opposition from security investors. The
  eight million dollars which Harvard holds in railroad stock and bonds
  would be affected by victory for the Plumb Plan. The professors of
  economics and particularly of railroad operation and finance can
  scarcely be expected to imbue their scholars with a holy zeal for the
  securing of the Brotherhood aims....

  Evidence of the patriotic ardor of the financiers directing Harvard’s
  investments may be readily seen in the fact that only one per cent of
  the funds of the university is invested in the Liberty Loans. The
  total of United States bonds held is less than half of that spent for
  bonds of five foreign nations. Intervention in Mexico would perhaps be
  pleasing to the authorities, since they hold a total of nearly one
  hundred thousand dollars in Mexican government bonds. So, also, is the
  pacification of Central America through the stationing of American
  marines and blue-jackets in those lands. Meddling of our State
  Department in the internal affairs of Costa Rica, Honduras, San
  Salvador and the rest helps to uphold the value of another one hundred
  thousand dollars’ worth of United Fruit Company bonds.[B] This company
  notoriously controls entire nations in Central America and sets up or
  deposes presidents at its whim. There is scarcely a large community
  north of Panama that is not in some degree tapped by the Harvard
  treasury. The American college is becoming the strongest single force
  in the world. Its management is almost entirely in the hands of
  international bankers or men dependent upon that group.

-----

Footnote B:

  These bonds have just been paid off, but the ability to pay them off
  was of course assured by American intervention.

-----

Such are the business facts underlying Harvard University; such are the
roots of the plant, and we shall now examine its flowers.




                               CHAPTER XV
                         THE HARVARD TRADITION


Harvard has a tradition, which is a part of the tradition of New
England; it is one of scholarship, of respect for the dignity of
learning. Money counts in New England, but money is not enough, so you
will be told; you must have culture also, and the prestige of the
intellectual life. More than that, in New England is found that quality
which must necessarily go with belief in the intellectual life, the
quality of open-mindedness, the willingness to consider new ideas.

Such is the tradition; and first, it will pay us to ask, how did the
tradition originate? Was it made by Harvard University? Or was it made
by Charles Sumner, anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, who was
found unfit to be a professor in the Harvard Law School, and wrote to
his brother: “I am too much of a reformer in law to be trusted in a post
of such commanding influence as this has now become.” Was it made by
Harvard, or by Wendell Phillips, who, according to his biographer,
Sears, denounced “the restraint of Harvard, which he attributed to
affiliation with the commercial interests of Boston, and the silence
they imposed on anti-slavery sentiments.” Was it made by Harvard or by
William Lloyd Garrison, who was dragged through the streets of Boston
with a rope about his neck, by a silk-hatted mob of State Streeters,
many of them of course from Harvard?

Sumner, Phillips and Garrison were extremists, you may say; and the best
traditions are not made by such. They are made by scholars, who lead
retired lives and guide others by the power of thought. Very well; New
England has had no more revered scholar, no more keen thinker than
Emerson. Emerson was gentle, Emerson was dignified, and you will find
Emerson a part of the Harvard tradition—one of its halls bears his name.
So let us see what Emerson had to report about the Harvard of his time;
how much credit he gives it for progress in the anti-slavery days.
Writing in 1861, in “The Celebration of the Intellect,” Emerson said:
“Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State Street votes
it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted there, which goes
to adorn Boston Whiggism—is it geology, astronomy, poetry, antiquities,
art, rhetoric? But that which it exists for, to be a fountain of
novelties out of heaven, a Delphos uttering warning and ravishing
oracles to lift and lead mankind—that it shall not be permitted to do or
to think of. On the contrary, every generosity of thought is suspect and
has a bad name. And all the youths come out decrepit citizens; not a
prophet, not a poet, not a daimon, but is gagged and stifled or driven
away.”

And precisely that is what we have to report about the Harvard of the
time of capitalistic reaction, which is 1922. For thirteen years Harvard
has been under the administration of a cultured corporation lawyer of
Boston, who has generally carried out the politics of his State Street
associates in all essential matters, and has preserved just as much
reputation for liberalism as can be preserved—safely.

A. Lawrence Lowell is not, like Nicholas Murray Butler, a climber and a
toady; he could not be a climber, because he was born on a mountaintop,
and there was no place to climb to—he could only stay where he was or
descend. He belongs to the Lowell family, who are among the Boston
Brahmins, and it would not occur to him that any millionaire could
confer a favor upon Harvard University, or upon the president of Harvard
University. On the other hand, it does occur to him that Harvard is a
close corporation, a family affair of the vested interests of New
England, which cover an enormous financial power with a decorous coating
of refined exclusiveness.

Before the days of President Lowell, Harvard was presided over by
Charles W. Eliot, a scholar who believed to some extent in a safe and
reasonable freedom of opinion—using his own freedom to glorify the
“great American hero” known as the “scab.” President Lowell has
inherited the Eliot tradition, and in my travels about the country I
heard many rumors as to how he had stood by his professors in time of
stress. When I got to Harvard, and turned these rumors into fact, I
found an amusing situation. No circus rider who keeps his footing on two
horses has ever done a more deft and delicate feat of balancing than
President Lowell, with one foot on the Eliot tradition and the other
foot on the House of Lee-Higginson.

They will tell you proudly that professors are not let out of Harvard
because of their opinions; and that is sometimes true. One reason is,
because the Harvard teaching staff is selected with meticulous care, and
because, when the new man comes to Harvard he comes under the influence
of a subtle but powerful atmosphere of good form. It is not crude
materialism, as in Columbia; it is cleverly compounded of high
intellectual and social qualities, and it is brought to the young
educators’ attention with humor and good fellowship. A friend of mine, a
Harvard man who knows the game, described to me from personal experience
how the State Street pressure operates. Somebody in Lee-Higginson calls
President Lowell on the telephone and says: “How can we get So-and-so to
put up the money for that chair, if young This-or-that gets his name in
the newspapers as lecturing to workingmen?” President Lowell smiles and
says he will see about it, and the young instructor is invited to dinner
and amiably shown how the most liberal university in America cannot run
entirely without money. The young instructor sees the point, and the
president goes away, thinking to himself: “Thank God we are not as
Columbia!”

Even down to the humblest freshman such pressure is conveyed. There are
things that “are not done” at Harvard; and you would be surprised to
know how minute is the supervision. You might not think it was a grave
offense for a student, wearing a soft shirt in summer-time, to leave the
top button unfastened; but a student friend of mine, who had ideas of
the simple life—going back to nature and all that—was coldly asked by
Dean Gay: “Is the button of your shirt open by mistake, or is the button
missing?” And when he did not take this delicate hint, Professor Richard
C. Cabot told another student that he might help the young man by
advising him to close the top button of his shirt. I am advised that
Harvard men will call this story “rot”; therefore I specify that I have
it in writing from the man to whom it happened.

And if they are so careful about shirt-buttons, they would hardly be
careless about public speeches. A couple of years ago the Harvard
Liberal Club made so bold as to invite Wilfred Humphries, a mild little
gentleman who served with the Y. M. C. A., to tell about his experiences
in Russia; whereupon the president of the Liberal Club received a letter
from the secretary to the Corporation of Harvard, politely pointing out
that there was likely to be embarrassment to the university, and would
the president of the club kindly call upon the secretary, in order to
provide him with arguments, “in case the press takes the thing up in a
way which might embarrass the progress of the Endowment Fund Campaign.”
Just as deftly as that, you see!

I found that Harvard’s reputation for liberalism was based upon the
custom of President Lowell to take into his institution men who had been
expelled from other colleges. I was impressed by this, until Harvard men
explained to me how it is managed. The basis of it is a painstaking
inquiry into the character and opinions of those men, to make sure there
is nothing really dangerous about them. In some cases they are men who
have offended local interests, with which “State Street” has little
concern. Others are men of ability who have offended religious
prejudices in the provinces; the tradition of Harvard is Unitarian, and
nobody is shocked by the idea that his ancestors swung from the
tree-tops by their tails. The State of Texas has just passed a law
providing for the expulsion of professors who teach that idea, so in due
course you may hear of Harvard taking over some Texas scholar.

How men are investigated before they are taken into Harvard is a matter
about which I happen to know from a man who underwent the ordeal. I will
call my informant Professor Smith, and he was head of a department in a
leading university. Appointed on a public service commission, he
discovered that the local gas company was engaged in swindling the city.
The facts got into the newspapers, and this public spirited professor
was on the verge of being expelled by his trustees, several of whom were
“in gas.” Some friends of his put the matter before President Lowell,
and Lowell made inquiry, and ascertained that Smith was a liberal of the
very mildest sort, well connected and affable, in every way worthy to
associate with the best families, and to train their sons; so Professor
Smith received a letter, asking him if he would come to Cambridge and
make the acquaintance of President Lowell. He made the journey, and
found himself a guest at a dinner party in the home of one of the
interlocking directorate. President Lowell was seated next to him, and
they chatted on many subjects, but only once did they touch on the
subject of Smith and his qualifications.

“By the way,” said Lowell (I reproduce the conversation from careful
notes). “I understand you had some little unpleasantness in your home
city.”

“Quite a good deal of it,” replied Smith.

“I’m not quite clear about it,” said Lowell. “It had something to do
with the gas company, did it not?”

“Yes,” replied Smith.

“It was merely gas? It had nothing to do with electricity?”

“Oh, no,” said Smith. “Nothing whatever.”

“You are sure the electric light company was not involved?”

“Quite sure. They are separate concerns.”

“I see,” said Lowell, and talked about the European situation.

So Professor Smith went home, and told a friend about the matter; the
friend made him repeat it over, word for word, and then burst out
laughing. “Don’t you see the point?” he asked; but Smith saw no point
whatever.

“Don’t you know that gas companies and electric light companies are
sometimes rivals?” inquired the friend. “You can light your house with
either gas or electricity; you can cook with either gas or electricity,
you can heat with either gas or electricity.”

“Yes, of course,” said Smith, still unenlightened.

“Well, you attacked the gas company,” said the friend. “You did not
attack the Edison Electric Company of your city, which happens to be a
part of the electric trust which covers the entire United States.
Harvard is all tied up with this electrical trust, and Massachusetts
Tech still more so, and Lee, Higginson & Company are its bankers.
President Lowell was perfectly willing for you to fight your local gas
company, but he wanted to make sure that you hadn’t trod on the toes of
Harvard’s leading industry! You will get your invitation to Harvard,
I’ll wager.”

And, sure enough, the invitation came a few days later! To complete the
humor of the story, the fact of the invitation became known at once
among the faculty of Professor Smith’s university, and had the effect of
instantly killing the talk of Professor Smith’s being asked to resign!

I tell this incident as it was told to me. Standing by itself it might
not mean much; but before we finish with Harvard we shall have plenty of
evidence to prove that when the electric men play a tune, the
Lee-Higginson university dances. President Lowell, I am told, did not
know the difference between a mathematician and an astronomer; when
Pickering died, he proposed to put in a mathematician, and was naively
surprised when it was explained to him that modern astronomy has gone so
far that an observatory cannot be run by a mathematician, however
expert. But ignorant as our Boston Brahmin may be about the stars of the
milky way, it is certain that he knows all about the stars of State
Street, he has them carefully charted and plotted, and neither he nor
any member of his faculty ever bumps into them.




                              CHAPTER XVI
                            FREE SPEECH BUT—


We have referred to the Harvard Liberal Club, an organization formed by
some graduates who sympathized with the cause of social justice. This
club brought speakers to Harvard, and got itself into the newspapers
several times; for example, during the anti-red hysteria they heard an
address from Federal Judge Anderson, who denounced the Palmer raids as
crimes against the constitution. This caused President Lowell great
annoyance, but he could not control the club, because it was a graduate
organization. He demanded that it abandon the name Harvard, saying it
might cause people to get a wrong idea of the university. Inquiries were
made to ascertain if legal measures could be taken; and when he found
that such measures wouldn’t work, he came to one of its meetings, very
courteous and deeply interested, trying to steer it into ways of
academic propriety. “We are all liberals at Harvard,” he said—an old,
old formula! For a generation the British labor party has been hearing
from the Tories: “We are all Socialists in England.”

Just how much of a liberal President Lowell is, of his own impulse and
from his own conviction, was shown at the time that Louis D. Brandeis
was nominated by President Wilson for the Supreme Court. Brandeis is a
graduate of the Harvard Law School, and was a prosperous corporation
lawyer in Boston; a man of European culture and charming manners, he was
the darling of Harvard, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew. The Lees
and the Higginsons took him up—until suddenly he ran into the New Haven
railroad! Then the other crowd, the Kidders and the Peabodys, took him
up—until he ran into the gas company! After that everybody dropped him,
and if he had not been a man of wealth he would have been ruined. When
he was proposed for the Supreme Court, a committee of lawyers, with
Austen G. Fox, a Harvard man, at their head, took up the fight against
him in the United States Senate. This fight didn’t involve Harvard, and
there was no reason for President Lowell to meddle in it; but he made it
his personal fight, and a fight of the most determined and bitter
character.

In 1918 there was a great strike in the Lawrence textile mills, and this
made a delicate situation, because Harvard holds six hundred thousand
dollars’ worth of woolen mill loans and mortgages, and an equal amount
of bonds and stocks. It seemed natural, therefore, to the overseers that
Harvard students should go out as militiamen to crush this strike; it
did not seem natural to them that members of the Liberal Club should
call meetings and invite strike leaders to tell the students of the
university their side of the case. But the members of this Liberal Club
persisted, and when the district attorney accused the strikers of
violence, they appointed a committee to interview him and get his facts.
They gave a dinner, to which they invited the directors of the mills to
meet the strike-leaders; they appointed a committee to consider terms of
settlement, and in the end they forced a compromise.

Things like this caused most intense annoyance to the interlocking
directorate. This was voiced to a Harvard man of my acquaintance, one of
the organizers of the Liberal Club, by a Harvard graduate whose father
has been a Harvard overseer, and is one of Massachusetts’ most
distinguished jurists. In the Harvard Club of Boston my friend was
challenged to say what he meant by a liberal; and when his definition
was not found satisfactory, the Harvard graduate exclaimed: “A liberal?
I’ll tell you what a liberal is! A liberal is a —- —— —— —— —— ——!” In
order to reproduce the scene you will have to fill these blanks, not
with the ordinary terms of abuse used by longshoremen and lumber-jacks,
but with the most obscene expletives which your imagination can invent.

Such is the present attitude of the ruling class of Harvard toward the
issue of free speech. The attitude of the students was delightfully set
forth by an editorial in the Harvard “Crimson,” at the time of the
Liberal Club lecture of Wilfred Humphries, Y. M. C. A. worker from
Russia. The “Crimson” was for Free Speech—But! What the “Crimson” wished
to forbid was “propaganda”; and it made clear that by this term it meant
any and all protest against things established. Said the cautious young
editor: “Not prohibited by law, propaganda creeps in and is accepted by
many as an almost essential part of freedom of speech!” This is as
persuasive as the communications of the Harvard Union to the liberal
students, barring various radicals from the platform, on the ground that
the Union did not permit “partisan” speakers: the Union’s idea of
non-partisan speakers being such well-poised and judicious conservatives
as Admiral Sims and Detective Burns! As the old saying runs: “Orthodoxy
is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy!” There is a standing rule at
Harvard barring “outside” speakers who discuss “contentious
contemporaneous questions of politics or economics”; and this rule was
used to bar Mrs. Pankhurst!

I tell you of these petty incidents of discrimination; and yet, if we
are to keep our sense of proportion, we must state that in the totality
of American universities, Harvard ranks, from the point of view of
academic liberalism, among the three or four best. There was no
interference with its professors during the war hysteria—and I found but
one other large institution, the University of Chicago, of which this
statement may be made. Also, Harvard has to its credit one post-war
case, in which academic freedom was gravely involved, and in which the
Harvard tradition proved itself still alive. This is a curious and
dramatic story, and I will tell it in detail.

In the summer of 1918 the United States Army invaded Archangel in
Northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia, seizing the
territory of a friendly people and killing its inhabitants without the
declaration of war required by the constitution of the United States.
This invasion was the blackest crime in American public history, and was
denounced by many of our leading thinkers. Also it was denounced by five
obscure Russian Jews, mere children in age, living in the East-side
slums of New York City. Four boys and a girl printed a leaflet, asking
the American people not to kill their Russian compatriots, and they
distributed these leaflets in public—for which crime they were arrested,
taken to prison, and beaten and tortured so severely that one of them
died a few days later. The surviving four were placed on trial, and
after a hideous travesty of justice were given sentences of from fifteen
to twenty years in prison.

This is known as the “Abrams case,” and it stood as one of our greatest
judicial scandals. Among others who protested was Professor Zechariah
Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School. He published in the “Harvard Law
Review,” April, 1920, an article entitled “A Contemporary State Trial”;
and subsequently he embodied this article as a chapter in his book on
“Freedom of Speech.” Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School, with
Professors Frankfurter, Chafee and Sayre (President Wilson’s
son-in-law), also the librarian of the Law School, signed a petition for
executive clemency in this Abrams case. These actions excited great
indignation among the interlocking directorates, and Mr. Austen G. Fox,
a Harvard graduate and Wall Street lawyer, drew up a protest to the
Harvard board of overseers, which protest was signed by twenty prominent
corporation lawyers, all Harvard men, including Mr. Peter B. Olney, a
prominent Tammany politician; Mr. Beekman Winthrop, ex-governor of Porto
Rico, and Mr. Joseph H. Choate, Jr., recently notorious in connection
with the scandals of the Alien Property Custodian. The overseers
referred the matter to the “Committee to Visit the Law School,” which
consists of fourteen prominent servants of the plutocracy, including a
number of judges. The result was a “conference,” in reality a solemn
trial, which occupied an entire day and evening, May 22, 1921, at the
Harvard Club in Boston. Mr. Fox appeared, with a committee of his
supporters and a mass of documents in the case; also the United States
attorney and his assistant, serving as witnesses.

President Lowell’s attitude on this occasion is described to me as that
of “a hen protecting her brood against an old Fox.” Professor Chafee
himself tells me that President Lowell stood by him all through the
“conference,” and made Mr. Fox uncomfortable by well-directed inquiries.
Mr. Fox’s principal charge was that Professor Chafee had taken his
quotations of testimony at the Abrams trial from the official record
submitted to the Supreme Court in the defendant’s appeal, instead of
going to the prosecuting attorney and getting the complete stenographic
record. And lo and behold, when Mr. Fox came to confront the fourteen
Harvard judges, it transpired that he himself had committed a similar
blunder, only far worse! He accused the five professors at the Law
School of having made false representations in their petition to
President Wilson; but instead of going to the office of his friend the
government prosecutor, and getting a photographic reproduction of the
petition as signed by the professors, Mr. Fox presented in evidence a
four-page circular, printed by the Abrams defense, containing a
fac-simile of the petition, with the signatures of the five professors;
the statements which Mr. Fox claimed were inaccurate were printed on the
reverse side of this circular. But it was easy for the professors to
show that they had nothing to do with the circular or its statements.
The document had been compiled by the Abrams defense some time after the
professors signed the petition. Mr. Fox, champion of strict legal
accuracy, had based his charge upon a piece of propaganda literature,
for which the professors had been no more responsible than he!

It is interesting to note how the interlocking newspapers of Boston
handled this incident. It was, as you can understand, a most sensational
piece of news; but it was an “inside” story, a family dispute of the
interlocking directorate. The only newspaper which gave any account of
the indictment of the professors was the Hearst paper, which is to a
certain extent an outlaw institution, and publishes sensational news
concerning the plutocracy, when the interests of Mr. Hearst and his
group are not involved. But no other Boston newspaper published the news
about this trial at the time that it took place; the first account was
in the Boston “Herald,” nearly two months later, after the story was
stale!

It was an amazing demonstration of the power of the Boston plutocracy;
and it affords us curious evidence of the consequences of news
suppression. I heard about the Chafee trial all the way from California
to Massachusetts, and back again; and every time I heard it, I heard a
different version—and always from some one who knew it positively, on
the very best authority. These guardians of the dignity of Harvard
thought that by keeping the story quiet they were helping the cause of
academic freedom; but what they really did was to set loose a flood of
wild rumors, for the most part discreditable to themselves. Of course,
they may say that they do not care about gossip; but why is it not just
as important to educate people about Harvard, as to educate them about
the ancient Egyptians and Greeks?




                              CHAPTER XVII
                              INTERFERENCE


We have seen President Lowell’s behavior when a group of Wall Street
lawyers attempted to dictate to his university. We have next to
investigate his attitude when it is his own intimates and financial
supporters who are being attacked; when it is, not Wall Street, but
State Street, which calls to him for help. Here again our Boston Brahmin
has put himself on record, with exactly the same self-will and
decisiveness—but, unfortunately, on the other side! We were promised
some more evidence on the subject of Harvard in relation to
Lee-Higginson and Edison Electric. Now we are to have it.

I am indebted for the details of the incident to Mr. Morris Llewellyn
Cooke, an engineer of Philadelphia who was Director of Public Works
under a reform administration. For a series of five years Mr. Cooke had
been a regular lecturer at the Graduate School of Business
Administration of Harvard University. He prepared two lectures on the
public utility problem in American cities, which he gave at a number of
universities, and was invited to give at Harvard. Mr. Cooke took the
precaution to inquire whether he would be free “to discuss conditions
exactly as they exist in the public utility field.” The reply was, in
the magnificent Harvard manner: “I am desirous that your lectures be
both specific and frank. I am anxious for the students to see clearly
the real relation of local public utilities to the municipalities, and
vice versa, and am not considering whether your remarks may hurt any
one’s feelings.”

Mr. Cooke came and delivered his two lectures, and was announced to give
them again; but four months later came a letter from the dean of the
Graduate School, saying: “Mr. Lowell feels, and I agree with him, that
in view of the use you made of your invitation to come here this last
year, we cannot renew the invitation.” Mr. Cooke then wrote to President
Lowell to find out what was the matter, and was told that he had
violated academic ethics by giving to the press an abstract of his
lectures. In answering President Lowell, Mr. Cooke pointed out that six
weeks prior to giving the lectures he had written on three separate
occasions to the Graduate School, giving notice of his intention to
publish an abstract of his remarks, because officials in other cities
wished the information on public utilities which he had accumulated.
“Trusting that if this is not entirely satisfactory to you, you will so
advise me at your convenience,” etc. The reply from the Business School
had been: “I note that you intend to publish these two lectures later,
which will be perfectly satisfactory to us.”

President Lowell now condescended to explain to Mr. Cooke wherein he had
offended; he had violated “academic customs ... not in the least
peculiar to Harvard, but true in all universities.” Mr. Cooke thereupon
wrote to universities all over the United States; he obtained statements
from a score or two of university professors, deans and presidents,
showing that not only was there no such custom, but that it was a quite
common custom for lecturers at universities to make abstracts of their
lectures and furnish these to the press. The authorities quoted include
the president of the University of Wisconsin, and a dean who is now
president; Professor Dewey of Columbia, Hoxie of Chicago—and Frankfurter
of President Lowell’s own university! Theodore Roosevelt wrote:

  Until I received your letter, I knew nothing whatever of any rule
  prohibiting the remarks of academic lecturers from being published in
  the periodical press or in other ways being quoted as material used in
  the lecture room.

If you really want to test the sincerity of President Lowell’s
statement, here is the way to do it: Imagine Theodore Roosevelt,
distinguished Harvard alumnus, coming to his alma mater to deliver a
lecture on “The Duties of the College Man as a Citizen,” and preparing a
summary of his lecture and giving it to the press; and then imagine him
receiving from President Lowell a letter rebuking him for his action,
and informing him that because of it he would not again be invited to
speak at Harvard!

No, we shall have to examine Mr. Cooke’s lectures, for some other reason
why his career as a Harvard lecturer was so suddenly cut short. Mr.
Cooke has printed the lectures in pamphlet form under the title
“Snapping Cords.” On page 9 I find a statement of the over-valuation of
public utilities in Philadelphia, and note that the Philadelphia
Electric Company has securities to the amount of over fifty million
dollars upon an actual valuation of less than twenty-five million. And
this is an Edison concern, allied with Boston Edison and Lee Higginson!
I turn to page 12, and learn how the National Electric Light
Association, the society of electrical engineers, is being used as a
dummy by the electric light interests. I turn to page 14, and find the
American Electric Railway Association shown up as planning to corrupt
American education, creating a financed Bureau of Public Relations for
the self-stated purpose of “influencing the sources of public education
particularly by (a) lectures on the Chautauqua circuit and (b) formation
of a committee of prominent technical educators to promote the formation
and teaching of correct principles on public service questions in
technical and economic departments at American colleges, through courses
of lectures and otherwise.”

The tactless Mr. Cooke goes on to examine the activities of “prominent
technical educators” who have lent themselves to this program. Among the
names I find—can such a thing be possible?—George F. Swain, professor of
civil engineering in the Graduate School of Applied Science of Harvard
University! Professor Swain, it appears, has done “valuation work” for
Mr. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad—our interlocking directorate, you
perceive! You may not know what “valuation work” consists of; it is the
job of determining how much money you shall pay for your water, light,
gas and transportation, and needless to say, the utility corporations
want the valuation put as high as possible. Mr. Cooke, since the
incidents here narrated, put through a rate case whereby the
Philadelphia Electric Company collects from the city and the people of
that city one million dollars _less_ per year. So you see just what an
ornery cuss Mr. Cooke is!

Professor Swain lays out “principles” for the doing of this ticklish
“valuation work.”[C] One of his “principles” is that when anything has
increased in value, the increased valuation shall be allowed the
corporations, but when anything has decreased in value there shall be no
corresponding decrease in the valuation! (We used to play this game when
we were children; we called it “Heads I win and tails you lose.”)
Another of Professor Swain’s “principles” is that when states, counties
or cities have helped to pay the cost of grade crossings, the railroads
shall be credited with the full value of these grade crossings. (We used
to play that game also when we were children; we called it “Findings is
keepings.”) Needless to say, a man who is so clever as to get away with
things like that regards himself as superior to the rest of us, who let
him get away with it. So, as president of the American Society of Civil
Engineers, Professor Swain voices his distrust of democratic ideals, and
informs the engineers that “present-day humanitarianism leads to race
degeneracy.”

-----

Footnote C:

  See record of hearing, May 3, 1920, at State House, Trenton, N. J.,
  before Governor Edwards, on motion of City of Jersey City for removal
  of Public Service Commission.

And then I turn on to page 35 of the pamphlet, and stumble on still more
tactless conduct on the part of this dreadful Mr. Cooke. He tells us
about Dugald C. Jackson, professor of electrical engineering at Harvard
University,[D] who also does this fancy “valuation work.” Says Mr.
Cooke: “Professor Jackson has never really been so much a university
professor as a corporate employe giving courses in universities. While
he probably receives five thousand dollars from his present teaching
post he must receive at least four times this amount from his corporate
clients—charging as he does one hundred dollars a day for his own time
and a percentage on the time of his assistants!”

-----

Footnote D:

  Professor Jackson, in qualifying as an expert before the Pennsylvania
  Public Service Commission, introduced himself by the single statement
  that he was “professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute
  of Technology and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and
  professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University.” It should
  be explained that he held the last two positions only ex-officio, by
  virtue of the affiliation of the two institutions which existed for a
  few years.

-----

Mr. Cooke goes on to show that before taking up teaching, Professor
Jackson was a chief engineer for the Edison General Electric Company. In
1910, while a professor at Harvard, he rendered a report showing that
the Chicago Telephone Company was running behind over eight hundred
thousand dollars per year; but two years later it was proven that the
company could afford a reduction in rates of seven hundred thousand
dollars per year! Again, Professor Jackson rendered a report showing
that the Buffalo General Electric Company had a valuation of $4,966,000;
but the state commission subsequently fixed the valuation at $3,194,000.
He valued three thousand municipal arc lamps at $21.70 each, but the New
York commission showed that the actual cost of these lamps was $13.53.
Says Mr. Cooke:

“What constitutes being employed by a corporation? Professor Jackson is
to all intents and purposes consulting engineer in chief as to rates and
valuations to the entire electrical industry in the United States. He
has made inventories of the Boston Edison Company and the New York
Edison Company. He is now engaged in doing similar work for the
Philadelphia Electric Company. These three companies have a combined
gross annual income of thirty-five million dollars.”

Do you see the “nigger in the woodpile” now? If you are a mine guard or
strike-breaking gunman, experienced in shooting up the tent-colonies of
striking miners, the corporations will pay you five dollars a day and
board for your services. If you are a “prominent technical educator,”
with a string of university degrees and titles, who can enable the great
corporations to swindle the public out of tens of millions of dollars
every year, then you can command a salary of a hundred dollars a day,
with a percentage on the time of your assistants. That is what a college
education is for; and if you think that an over-cynical statement, I ask
you to read the whole of this book before you decide!

And what is a college president for? A college president is paid by the
interlocking directorate to take their “consulting engineers” and
“valuation experts” and cover them with a mantle of respectability,
enabling them to do their dirty work in the name of education and public
service. And if any freak individual comes along, trying to break in and
spoil the game, the function of a college president is to furnish what
the college football player knows as “interference“—tripping the fellow
up, slugging him, maiming him. In football there are strict rules
against fouls; but in this game of plutocratic education “everything
goes.”




                             CHAPTER XVIII
                           THE LASKI LAMPOON


A more recent test of Harvard University was made by Harold J. Laski, a
brilliant young writer whom President Lowell in an unguarded moment
admitted to teach political science. Laski holds unorthodox ideas
concerning the modern capitalist state; he thinks it may not be the
divinely appointed instrument which it considers itself. Laski raised
this question in his Harvard classes, which caused tremendous excitement
in State Street. The Harvard “drive” for sixteen millions was on, and a
number of people wrote that they would give no money to Harvard while
Laski was on its teaching staff. On the other hand, a Chicago lawyer
wrote that his son had never taken any interest in his studies
previously, but that since he had come under Laski’s influence he had
become a serious student; this lawyer sent fifty thousand dollars to
make up the losses. The controversy got into the Boston newspapers, and
President Lowell stood by Laski; no Harvard professor should be driven
out because of his opinions. “Thank God we are not as Columbia!”

I asked a Cambridge friend about President Lowell’s heroism, and he took
a cynical view of it. Lowell is the author of a book interpreting the
British constitution, and has a reputation in England based on this
book; he has received an Oxford degree, and hopes some day to be
ambassador. In England people really believe in free speech, and
practice their beliefs; and Laski, it happens, is a Manchester Jew, his
family associated with the present ruling group in England. Also, Laski
himself wields a capable pen, and is not the sort of man one chooses for
an enemy. If Laski were to go home and state that he had been expelled
from President Lowell’s university because of disbelief in the modern
state, what would become of Lowell’s English reputation? Said my friend:
“If Laski had been a German Jew, or a Russian Jew”—and he smiled.

As to the overseers and their handling of the case, Professor Laski
writes me that they were very nice to him. “I was simply invited to a
dinner at which we exchanged opinions in a friendly fashion. My only
doubt there was a doubt whether the committee realized how very
conservative my opinions really were in this changing social world. Like
most business men, they had little or no knowledge of the results of
modern social science.”

The climax came with the Boston police strike in the fall of 1919. This
was a very curious illustration of the part which the Harvard plutocracy
plays in the public life of Boston, so pardon me if I tell the story in
some detail. You know how the cost of living doubled all over the
country, while the wages of public servants increased very little. The
policemen of Boston were not able to live on their wages; they begged
for an increase, and the police commissioner promised them the increase
if they would wait until after the war. They waited; and then the police
commissioner tried to keep his promise, and the mayor and the Democratic
administration worked out a settlement. But the Harvard plutocracy,
which runs the government of the state, decided not to permit that
settlement, but to force a strike of the policemen, so that they could
smash the policemen’s union. The late Murray Crane, senator and
millionaire, holder of a Harvard LL. D., planned the job in the Union
Club of Boston, together with Kidder, Peabody & Co., the bankers.
Governor Coolidge, the tool of Crane, upset the arrangements made by the
mayor of Boston, and the mayor was so furious that he “pasted the
governor one in the eye”—the inside reason why Coolidge disappeared so
mysteriously during the strike. But the newspapers of the interlocking
directorate celebrated him as the hero of the affair, and he became
vice-president of the United States on a wave of glory!

The strike came, and according to the standard American technique of
strike-breaking, hoodlums were turned loose at the right moment, to
throw stones and terrify the public. The whole affair was obviously
stage-managed; nothing was stolen, and no real harm was done. Insiders
assured me that all the time the “riots” were going on, there was a safe
reserve of police locked up in the police-station, waiting in case
things should go too far. The Boston policemen were represented as
traitors to society, and a wave of fury swept the country—including
Harvard, which holds hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Boston
city bonds, also securities of Boston public service corporations. These
properties must be protected; so a “Harvard Emergency Committee” was
formed, headed by the professor who had first reported to the overseers
Professor Laski’s too great zeal in outside activities. Needless to say,
no one complained about the “outside activities” of this anti-strike
professor; on the contrary, President Lowell issued a resounding call to
Harvard men to help smash the policemen’s strike.

Incidentally, Harvard men smashed Harold J. Laski, who had the temerity
to interject himself into this class war. Laski went to Boston and made
a speech to the strikers’ wives, expressing sympathy with their cause;
whereat all Boston raged. “I would like to ask you something, Mr.
Laski,” said President Lowell, at a dinner party. “Why did you make that
speech?” “Why, Mr. Lowell,” said Laski, smiling, “I made it because
there is a general impression throughout the labor world that Harvard is
a capitalistic institution, and I wanted to show that it is not true.”
Laski was only twenty-six years old at the time, and it took some nerve,
you must admit. How to get this young incendiary out of Harvard was the
next job of the interlocking directorate.

Meet Mr. James Thomas Williams, Jr., of Boston. Mr. Williams was
graduated from Columbia University in the same year that I quit it; he
then joined the Associated Press, and now serves the interlocking
directorate as editor of the Boston “Evening Transcript,” the paper
which is read by every Tory in New England. You may learn more about
this paper by consulting pages 284, 306, 307 and 379 of “The Brass
Check.” Also, perhaps I should tell you a little incident which happened
after “The Brass Check” came out. Desiring to test the capitalist
newspapers, I made up a dignified advertisement of the book—nothing
abusive or sensational, merely opinions from leading journals of Europe.
I sent this advertisement, with a perfectly good check, to the Boston
“Evening Transcript,” and the check was returned to me, with the
statement that the “Transcript” thought it best not to publish the
advertisement, because of the possibility of being sued for libel.

I was puzzled at first, wondering what paper might sue the Boston
“Evening Transcript” for publishing an advertisement of “The Brass
Check.” Then I remembered that in the book I had accused a Boston
newspaper of having shared in the slush funds of the New York, New
Haven, and Hartford Railroad; also of having suppressed reports of
Justice Brandeis’ exposures of the Boston Gas Company, at the same time
publishing page advertisements from this gas company; also of having
published advertisements of “Harvard Beer, 1,000 Pure,” at the same time
suppressing news of the fact that the federal government was prosecuting
the manufacturers of Harvard Beer for violation of the pure food laws.
So I understood that the Boston “Evening Transcript” was afraid of being
sued by the Boston “Evening Transcript.”

Now behold the editor of this fine old Tory newspaper rushing to the
defense of his interlocking directorate. Mr. Laski must be driven from
Harvard, and Mr. Williams knows exactly how to do it. He interviews the
editors of the Harvard “Crimson” and “Advocate;” finally in the editors
of the “Lampoon,” he finds a group who will carry out his ideas. The
result is an issue of that paper, January 16, 1920, known to history as
the “Laski Lampoon.” If ever there was a fouler product of class venom,
it has not yet come under my eye.

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Harold J. Laski, but I form an
idea of him from a score of pictures in this publication. From a
painting on the cover I gather he is a short, thin, naked young skeleton
with a paunch; he wears large glasses, and has a fringe of whiskers, or
long hair, and a red dawn behind him, serving as a halo. From another
picture, a piece of clay modelling, I am puzzled about the whiskers, or
hairs, because I do not know whether they are little worms or pieces of
spaghetti. From other cartoons I gather that Professor Laski sometimes
wears clothes, and does not wear them entirely in the Harvard manner;
that is, his clothes do not fit him, and his hat has too broad a brim,
and is not worn entirely straight on his head. I gather that he
sometimes smokes cigarettes, a vice entirely unknown in refined
undergraduate circles.

Also Mr. Laski is described to me in a hundred or so sketches, verses
and witticisms. He is “the great indoor agitator”; he is “a member of
the firm of Lenin, Trotski and Laski.” This evil young man, you must
understand, holds the idea that the people of Russia should be permitted
to work out their own revolution in their own way, and that American
troops should not be sent in to attack them in Archangel and Siberia
without a declaration of war. This makes him a “Bolshevik”; this makes
him “Laski de Lenin,” and “Ivan Itchykoff,” and the author of “The
Constitution of the Russian Itchocracy,” and of the “Autobiographia
Laskivia.” “Love had to go. One love was bad enough, but thirty or forty
were insupportable. I had tried it and I knew.” He is invited to “sing a
song of Bolsheviks,” and he tells us that “Comrade Lenin has a hundred
and forty-eight motor cars, and Comrade Trotsky has fifty-two.” He is
“Cataline,” and again he is “Professor Moses Smartelikoff”—the “Moses”
meaning that he is a Jew, and the rest that he thinks differently from
Harvard. Such thinking must not be allowed to get a start, say our
cautious young undergraduates:

             The moral, oh ye masters, is, without a doubt,
             Stop infection early; kick the first one out.

And here are more verses, addressed to our unpopular professor:

            As you sit there, growing prouder,
                With your skillful tongue awag,
            As your piping voice grows louder,
                Preaching Socialistic gag—
            Stop a moment, let us warn you,
                    Nature’s freak,
            That we loathe you and we scorn you, Bolshevik!

Harold Laski was scheduled to give a lecture at Yale, and when he got
there he found this copy of the “Lampoon” on sale all over town,
together with a reprint of an editorial in the “Transcript” denouncing
him. He was young, and rather sensitive, and naturally it occurred to
him that he was wasting his talents upon Harvard. He would be allowed to
stay there, he told a friend of mine, but he would never be promoted, he
would have no career. On the other hand, the University of London
offered him a full professorship at a higher salary, in a part of the
world where men may think what they please about the capitalist state.
Laski resigned; and so cleverly the job had been managed—he had quit of
his own free will, and the great university could go on boasting that
its professors are not forced out because of their opinions! As a
commentary on this story, I am sure you will be interested in an extract
from a letter from Laski, dated August 16, 1922:

  The results of the American atmosphere are quite clear.

  1. Many men deliberately adopt reactionary views to secure promotion.

  2. Many more never express opinions lest the penalty be exacted.

  3. Those who do are penalized when the chance of promotion comes.

  I am very much impressed by the contrast between the general freedom
  of the English academic atmosphere and the illiberalism of America.
  Three of my colleagues at the London School of Economics are labor
  candidates; business men predominate on the governing body; but
  interference is never dreamed of. At Oxford and Cambridge the widest
  range of view prevails. But alumni do not protest, and if they do,
  they are told to mind their own business. In America, one always feels
  hampered by the sense of a control outside; in England you never feel
  that it is necessary to watch your tongue. No ox treads upon it.




                              CHAPTER XIX
                         RAKING THE DUST-HEAPS


We have studied the “Laski Lampoon” to see what we can learn about
Professor Laski. Let us now examine it to see what we can learn about
Harvard. You remember the student who was compelled to button his
collar; so you would expect to find Harvard objecting to a radical
professor who did not wear the right kind of tie, and did not get his
clothes from the right tailor. The “Lampoon” refers again and again to
this, both in verse and drawings; it speaks of Laski’s “creed of
charming untidiness”; and if you want to know about Harvard’s creed of
charming tidiness, turn to the advertising portions of this paper. One
cannot publish an American magazine without advertisements, and the
“Laski Lampoon” is almost up to the standard of the “Saturday Evening
Post”—it has fifteen pages of reading matter and thirty-nine of
advertisements!

Some of this matter we may assume was contributed as a means of helping
to save our alma mater from Bolshevism; for example, the page of the
Baldwin Locomotive Works, and the page of the United Shoe Machinery
Company, and the quarter-page of the Boston “Evening Transcript,”
telling us: “This paper stands unflinchingly at home and abroad for
‘straight Americanism,’ for the cultivation of ‘an American character,’
which the First American called ‘the Cement that binds the Union.’“ But
the rest are the advertisements of concerns which expect to sell things;
and as they spend enormous sums in this way, they make it their business
to get the returns, and know how to appeal to each group. So here we
learn what Harvard men like, and why they did not like Professor Laski!
“Follow the Arrow and you follow the style in collars,” we are told, and
on another page: “_Correctness_ dominates the style policies of these
stores.” Here are the usual handsome, haughty young men in “the
Kuppenheimer clothes,” and here is the specially proper “Brogue Boot.”

Wishing to see just what Harvard men spend their money for, I take the
trouble to classify this advertising. There are seven and one-half pages
devoted to clothing, three and three-fourths devoted to luxurious
hotels, three and one-half devoted to automobiles, and three and
one-half to investments of the interlocking directorate, including an
invitation to gamble in German marks. One and one-half pages are given
to tobacco, one and one-fourth to candy, one and one-fourth to games and
sporting goods, one to jewels, one to movies, three-fourths to music,
one-fourth to the “Transcript,” one-fourth to art, and one-fourth to
books. From the above we may reckon that Harvard students spend thirty
times as much on clothes as they spend on books, and fourteen times as
much on motor cars as on art. Such is the state of “culture” when
teaching is dominated by a vested class, which fears ideas, and forbids
all thinking save what is certified to be harmless.

It is a truism in the affairs of the mind, that when you bar one truth,
you bar all; and when you refuse to permit students to use their minds,
when you withdraw from them the vital stimulus of intellectual
conflict—then they go off and get drunk. The last “senior picnic” at
Harvard was “a glorified booze party,” so I was told by several who
attended. There was a ball game, and certain prominent residents of the
“Gold Coast” amused themselves by circulating among the crowd, making
filthy remarks to girls. Some of the students became indignant, and
wished to take the matter up, knowing that the remedy for such evils
lies in publicity. But Mr. Frederick J. Allen, secretary to the
Corporation—the same gentleman who made the tactful inquiry about the
Wilfred Humphries lecture—pleaded with them to spare the good name of
the university. So of course there will be another “glorified booze
party” next year; and, needless to say, there will be the useful efforts
to make certain that Harvard men do not think any new or vital thought
about the issues which are shaping the mind of the world.

Class ignorance, class fear, and class repression are written over the
modern curricula at Harvard, as at all other American universities. It
proclaims that it opens its doors to all classes of the community, and
sets forth statistics to prove that it is not a rich man’s affair; yet
it has among its thirty overseers only three or four educators, not one
woman, not one representative of agriculture, and not one of labor! The
modern revolutionary movement is not explained to the students; and so
they go out, ready to believe the grotesque falsehoods which are served
up to them in the Boston “Evening Transcript” and the Providence
“Journal”; ready to be led into any sort of lynching bee by the hundred
per cent profiteers.

There was one young graduate of Harvard who managed to chop his way out
of this glacier of cultured prejudice, and went over to Russia and gave
his life for the revolution. His generous spirit will wipe out in
Russian history the infamies committed by American capitalist government
against the workers of Russia. He is in every way as beautiful and
inspiring a figure as Lafayette, and he will live in the imaginations of
the Russian people, precisely as Lafayette lives in ours. A hundred
years from now he will be Harvard’s proudest product; but what has
Harvard snobbery to say about him today? During the endowment drive for
sixteen million dollars, carried on three years ago, Harvard boasted of
its “hundred per cent record” for patriotism—but adding three words, for
which it will blush to the end of history: “EXCEPT JOHN REED.”

No, the modern revolutionary movement is not interpreted at the
university of Lee-Higginson. What is interpreted? I have a list of some
of the titles of “theses in English,” accepted for the Ph.D. degree by
Harvard University in the last ten years, and representing Harvard’s
view of general culture. Slaves in Boston’s great department store, in
which Harvard University owns twenty-five hundred shares of stock, be
reconciled to your long hours and low wages and sentence to die of
tuberculosis—because upon the wealth which you produce some learned
person has prepared for mankind full data on “The Strong Verb in
Chaucer.” Policemen who have had your strike smashed by Harvard
students, rest content with your starvation wages—because one of these
students has enlightened mankind on “The Syntax of the Infinitive in
Shakespeare.” Girls who work in the textile mills, who walk the streets
of the “she-towns” of New England and part with your virtue for the
price of a sandwich, be rejoiced—because you have made it possible for
humanity to be informed concerning “The Subjunctive in Layamon’s
‘Brut.’” Men who slave twelve hours a day in front of blazing white
furnaces of Bethlehem, Midvale and Illinois Steel, cheer up and take a
fresh grip on your shovels—you are making it possible for mankind to
acquire exact knowledge concerning “The Beginnings of the Epistolary
Novel in the Romance Languages.” Miners, who toil in the bowels of the
earth in hourly danger of maiming and suffocation, be reconciled to the
failure of a great university to install safety devices to protect your
lives—because that money has gone to the collecting and editing of
“Political Ballads Issued During the Administration of Sir Robert
Walpole.” Peons, who quiver under the lash of the masters’ whip beneath
tropic suns in Central America, be docile—because your labors helped to
pay off the bonds of the United Fruit Company, so that a Harvard scholar
might win a teaching position by compiling “Chapters in the History of
Literary Patronage from Chaucer to Caxton.”




                               CHAPTER XX
                       THE UNIVERSITY OF U. G. I.


Having visited the city in which they ask you what you are worth, and
the city in which they ask you what you know, we have next to visit the
city in which they ask you who your grandfather was. We shall find that
in these modern days the purpose of the inquiry is to find out if your
grandfather was rich. If your grandfather was poor, it will be necessary
for you to become richer before you get what you want in that city.

In order to reach Philadelphia from Boston we take the New York, New
Haven & Hartford Railroad, which is a Morgan road with a recent Harvard
overseer for chairman, a Brown trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale
president for director, and a member of the Yale advisory board, a
Washburn College trustee, a Wellesley trustee, a Pratt Institute
trustee, and two Harvard visitors for directors. The second part of our
journey is on the Pennsylvania Railroad, which is a Morgan road and is
interlocked with the Guaranty Trust Company, Massachusetts Tech, Johns
Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, the United
States Steel Corporation, Bryn Mawr College, Wilson College, Carnegie
Tech, the Girard Trust Company of Philadelphia and the University of
Pennsylvania. Or, if we prefer, we can take the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad, which has a Johns Hopkins trustee for president, and another
Johns Hopkins trustee for director, a Pittsburgh trustee, a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Rutgers trustee, a Teachers’ College and
a Lehigh trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First
National Bank director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors and a
trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. Or we can take the Reading
Railroad, which is Morgan and University of Pennsylvania, University of
Pittsburgh, Swarthmore and Pennsylvania State; or the Philadelphia,
Baltimore and Washington, which is University of Pennsylvania, Equitable
Life, and Johns Hopkins.

We arrive in Philadelphia, which means the City of Brotherly Love, and
observe in every down-town city block its ideals embodied in especially
large men in blue uniform, riding on especially large horses and
carrying especially large clubs, also revolvers scarcely concealed.
Philadelphia is located in the state of Pennsylvania, which means Penn’s
Woodland, and was named after a radical pacifist. All over these
woodlands now ride the state constabulary, and club the heads of persons
such as William Penn whenever they show themselves in action.

In the New York branch of our plutocratic empire of education we found
the emperor, and in the Boston branch we found his son; in Philadelphia
we find the eldest of the grand dukes. The office of J. P. Morgan &
Company in that city is known as Drexel & Company, and Philadelphia’s
great university is presided over by Mr. Edward T. Stotesbury, head of
Drexel & Company, and partner in J. P. Morgan & Company of New York. Mr.
Stotesbury is the chief investment banker of that part of the country;
he is president of three railroads and director in about twenty, also in
about twenty coal companies, and as many financial institutions, banks,
trust companies, safe deposit and insurance companies, also the Baldwin
Locomotive Works and the Cambria Steel Company. The laws of the United
States strictly forbid railroads to own coal companies, and vice versa,
but the interlocking directorate has defied this law for a generation,
and Mr. Stotesbury is one of the principal defiers.

This eldest of the grand dukes is active in their Grand Ducal party,
having taken the job of raising the money to buy the presidency of the
United States in 1904 and 1908. He is also a patron of the graces of
life; he spent fourteen thousand dollars for a trotting horse in a city
in which tens of thousands of little children go to school hungry every
day; he is so little ashamed of this performance that he caused it to be
embodied in his biography in “Who’s Who.” As second grand duke of his
university, Mr. Stotesbury has the son of old “Pete” Widener,
Philadelphia’s traction king; as assistants on the board of this
university he has a partner in his banking firm, and a choice assortment
of plutocrats, totalling as follows: five bankers, three lawyers, two
public utility officials, two corporation officials, three
manufacturers, an insurance and coal mining man, a publisher, an
architect, an engineer, two doctors, two judges, and a senator. It is
difficult to classify these trustees exactly, because the functions of
the various members overlap; most of the bankers are in the coal
business, the lawyers are directors in banks, the architect is an
exbanker, the engineer is director of a power company and a trolley
company, while the publisher is president of a steel company and a
railroad, and director of a national bank. One of the public utility
officials is the brother of Senator Penrose, one of the most
aristocratic political corruptionists America ever had; one of the
lawyers, Wickersham, was Taft’s attorney general; the senator is George
Wharton Pepper, chief lackey to the plutocracy of Pennsylvania. Another
lawyer is general counsel and active vice-president of the United Gas
Improvement Company; two of the bankers are directors in that company.
Another of the bankers is a sugar smuggler, and one of the manufacturers
helped in the effort to buy a presidential nomination for General Wood.

One could not get a more plutocratic board than this; and the
significant thing about it is that they are nearly all of them active,
hard-fighting plutocrats; no retired bandits fattening on their
accumulated loot, but hard campaigners, living in the saddle, riding day
by day to combat. They are the banking men, the coal men, the gas men,
the railroad men, who are robbing the public and crushing labor hour by
hour, and the control they exercise over their educational system is of
the instant, vigilant, smashing kind which you would expect from
military men on hard service.

It is a little difficult to find a satisfactory name for a university in
which so many plutocratic interests are so completely represented. I
might call it the University of Morgan-Drexel, or I might call it the
University of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and be entirely just and exact.
After studying its management and history, I realize that its most
active single interest is the United Gas Improvement Company of
Philadelphia, known as U. G. I. You must not think of this as a local
gas company; it is a great chain of corporations, ruling over three
hundred cities and towns, and with a total investment of five hundred
millions of dollars. Of the seven directors of this concern, Mr.
Stotesbury and two others are on the board of the university, and a
fourth left only last year; also an attorney for the U. G. I. is on the
board. Mr. Randall Morgan, vice president of the U. G. I., is chairman
of the finance committee of the university, the all-powerful position.

Some eighteen years ago Lincoln Steffens described the City of Brotherly
Love in an article entitled “Philadelphia Corrupt and Contented.” He
told how the political ring voted dead dogs and Negro babies at
elections, and how they played poker in hotel rooms for the franchises
and public privileges of the city. Philadelphia was corrupt in those
days, but it was not really contented; for the people had assembled with
ropes in their hands, to mob their city councilmen who were giving away
a franchise to the U. G. I. But since those days the war has come, and
taught our rulers how to handle social discontent. There was a general
strike in the City of Brotherly Love, and it was smashed; the little
Socialist bookstore was raided, the books burned and everybody who sold
them jailed, and now Philadelphia is truly contented, and where the
interlocking directorate used to plunder in tens of millions it now
plunders in hundreds.[E]

[Footnote E: In April, 1922, all the officers and directors of the
United Gas Improvement Company, and its subsidiaries, were indicted by
the Federal grand jury in New York for criminal activities. This grand
jury took testimony for over four weeks, hearing city officials from all
over the Eastern and Central states. The charges listed in the
indictment were that the U. G. I. “(1) instituted and caused to be
instituted unwarranted, vexatious and tortuous litigation against
competitors for the purpose of injuring and intimidating them and
preventing them from continuing to engage in the industry; (2)
instigating the false arrest of competitors and falsely charged said
competitors with counterfeiting trade-marks; (3) acquired control of
competing companies wherever possible and operated said companies as
ostensible but not real competitors of the United Gas Improvement
Company; (4) secretly and fraudulently acquired stock control of
competing companies and eliminated competition on the part of said
companies; (5) entered or caused to be entered collusive bids for
contracts for furnishing and maintaining incandescent gas street lamps
by two or more companies belonging to the United Gas Improvement
Company, each company falsely representing itself to be independent and
not connected with any other company bidding for the same contract; (6)
concealed and denied ownership of various subsidiary companies, and
operated said companies ostensibly as competitors but in fact as
unlawful instruments in accomplishing the objects of the combination and
monopoly; (7) circulated or caused to be circulated false and misleading
reports concerning competitors for the purpose of preventing
competition; (8) molested, injured, and interfered with competitors for
the purpose of intimidating and discouraging them and preventing them
from continuing as competitors in the industry; (9) entered into
contracts with competitors whereby said competitors agreed to refrain
from competition.” The prosecutions were called off by Attorney-General
Daugherty, the particular government official whom President Harding has
appointed for the protecting of big business criminals in the United
States.]

From the beginning the U. G. I. has been vigilant in holding down the
professors in its university. As early as 1886 Professor Edmund J. James
prepared a paper in which he showed the excessive cost of gas furnished
by private companies; for this he was severely mishandled. Later on,
when a syndicate was formed to steal the waterworks from the city of
Philadelphia, they offered Professor James twenty thousand dollars to
keep still on the subject of municipal waterworks; and when he declined
this most generous proposition, they let him go to the University of
Chicago.

Next, in 1898, Professor Leo S. Rowe, now director of the Pan-American
Union, published a paper on Philadelphia’s experiences with its gas
supply. Mr. Clark, one of the vice-presidents of the U. G. I., took
great offense at these statements and made desperate efforts to compel
Mr. Rowe to change them. Professor E. W. Bemis of the University of
Chicago has stated over his own signature as follows: “Failing in this
endeavor, he, Clark, became much excited, and declared to me that if
Professor Rowe did not change or withdraw the account, he would lose all
social and scientific standing in Philadelphia and at the University of
Pennsylvania. Mr. Clark added that he was positive of this, because he
was in close touch with both the city and the university.” Bear in mind,
if you can, the name of this injudicious Professor Bemis, because we
shall hear about him and his adventures at the University of Chicago.

A friend of mine in Philadelphia, who was in touch with this
controversy, told me the curious experience of a young instructor, who
is now connected with the State Department at Washington. This
instructor dug out information concerning certain defects in the charter
of the U. G. I.; and when the directors of the company learned what he
had got, they treated him to “the finest dinner on earth.” “One thing we
want to suggest that you change,” etc. “Well,” said the young
instructor, “I got this out of an ordinance.” He went to his dean with
the facts, and the dean found he was right and told him to stick by it.
This dean was Lewis, another man who got into trouble in the university,
and had a ten years’ campaign to hold his job, because he persisted in
taking part in the activities of the Progressive party. The young
instructor turned his material over to Professor Rowe, and Rowe made use
of it, and as a result his salary was held down for years; none of his
young instructors could get promoted, and he was handicapped at every
turn. Finally, when he was doing war work for the government, and
Secretary McAdoo asked for further leave of absence, an ugly answer was
returned by the university, and Professor Rowe was forced to withdraw.

Next came the adventure of Professor Clyde King, who in 1912 made the
discovery that the U. G. I. was robbing the government of the city of
half a million dollars a year, by delivering gas of less than twenty-two
candlepower, the quality specified in its lease. They worked this little
scheme through the chief of the Bureau of Gas, and the exposure made a
terrific scandal in Philadelphia. This chief had ten thousand dollars a
year for his department, and he himself drew fifty-five hundred of this,
and had five assistants, and only one doing any work. Professor King
took records as to the gas tests, and proved that the U. G. I. had
notice in advance, by a secret telephone code, and they pumped in benzol
vapor to improve the quality of the gas.[F] The president of the gas
company, of course, denied that he knew anything about it. The
vice-president and active head of the gas company, a trustee of the
university, made desperate efforts to suppress this scandal, but he
failed; and as a result of the exposure, the chief of the gas bureau was
fired—and three months afterwards was given an honorary degree by
Muhlenberg College, at Allentown, Pa.

-----

Footnote F:

  See files of Public Service Commission, City of Philadelphia.

-----

You may have been puzzled as you read this book to understand why the
plutocracy should be so anxious to own universities and colleges; but
now you can understand. If you own a university or college, neither you
nor your friends can ever be sent to jail, and no matter what crimes you
may commit, you can always be made respectable again. This was proven in
the case of the gas chief, for shortly afterwards the U. G. I. came back
into control of the city, and the gas chief was reappointed to his
office! It is interesting to note that the grand duke of Muhlenberg
College who arranged this honor for the gas chief is Colonel Trexler,
president of a lumber company, a cement company, a trolley company and a
telephone company, and author of the wittiest remark now current in the
educational world: “I believe that colleges should grow by degrees!”




                              CHAPTER XXI
                         STEALING A TRUST FUND


Before we go on with this story we should make the acquaintance of the
executive head of the University of U. G. I., who bears the title of
provost instead of president. From 1911 to 1921 he was Edgar Smith, a
former professor of chemistry, who had been all his life an active
henchman of the interlocking directorate and its political machine. He
attended the Chicago convention in 1912 as a delegate from Pennsylvania,
and voted for Taft as a candidate. He was intimate with the
contractor-politician who ran the political machine of Philadelphia; he
defended this man in public, and freely defended other political crooks,
while denying his deans and professors the right to take part in
politics in opposition to such crooks. When he took office the trustees
promised they would finance the university, but this promise was not
kept, so he had to go to the politicians every year and spend weeks
begging for a subsidy, and being scolded for the improper activities of
his faculty.

In his attitude to his trustees this provost was the ideal of
subservience. He publicly declared that he himself had “no policy”; he
placed the responsibility of action on those who asserted the right and
had the power to act—that is to say, the trustees. He referred to them
always as “the administration,” and in all public matters he took to
them an attitude of touching deference. Thus, speaking at a banquet of
the Pennsylvania alumni in New York, he said: “Tonight you will not
expect me to occupy much of your time, for our trustees are your real
guests, and you desire to hear from them.” Needless to say, such a type
of mind is religious, and wedded to all things dull. Provost Smith never
wearied of telling his audiences that he was a believer in “an old
fashioned education”—with “four years each of Latin, Greek and
Mathematics, and from four to three years of English, French and
German.”

In administering the university, this aged-minded provost made it his
function to carry to the trustees all manner of scandal concerning his
radical professors—such as the fact that one of them was accustomed to
dig in his garden on Sunday! Also he would bring back to the professors
pitiful accounts of the embarrassments to which he was exposed. His
attitude is illustrated by a statement he made to three professors whom
he summoned to his office at the time the U. G. I. was under attack.
“Gentlemen, what business have academic people to be meddling in
political questions? Suppose, for illustration, that I, as a chemist,
should discover that some big slaughtering company was putting formalin
in its sausage; now, surely, that would be none of my business!”

Said one of the professors: “My answer would be that if I were to find
such a condition, I should have no right to go to sleep until something
was done about it.”

As a result of this attitude, the dean who had charge of these
professors was allowed no funds at all; he would have to go to the
provost if he wanted to have a cupboard built in some store-room, and
whenever he went, he would find his boss with newspaper clippings on his
desk. “Now, Young, how can we get any results with this kind of thing
going on?”

It so happened that fate had played upon poor Provost Smith a cruel
prank. Some forty years ago there lived in Philadelphia a truly liberal
capitalist, who in his will left six hundred thousand dollars to found
the Wharton School of Finance at the university. He laid down what the
school was to teach as follows:

  The immorality and practical inexpediency of seeking to acquire wealth
  by winning it from another rather than earning it through some sort of
  service to one’s fellowmen.

  The deep comfort and healthfulness of pecuniary independence, whether
  the scale of affairs be small or great.

  The necessity of rigorously punishing by legal penalties and by social
  exclusion those persons who commit frauds, betray trusts or steal
  public funds, directly or indirectly. The fatal consequence to a
  community of any weak toleration of such offenses must be most
  distinctly pointed out and enforced.

And then the shrewd old rascal, evidently knowing his business
associates thoroughly, added this amazing provision.

  The grantees covenant that these things shall be done, and that the
  failure to comply with these stipulations shall be deemed such a
  default as to cause reversion in the manner hereinafter provided.

Now, you understand that the first principle of the interlocking
directorate is never to let go of money on which it gets its hands. It
is accustomed to misappropriating funds, and turning public funds to its
own uses; a little thing like a deed of trust would not stand in its
way. What it failed to realize in the case of this Wharton trust was the
uncomfortable amount of agitation and publicity which would be involved.
If the trustees of the University of U. G. I. had realized what was
coming to them, they would have made up that six hundred thousand
dollars by raising the price of gas in Philadelphia.

For the effect of the deed of trust was to bring in a number of ardent
young teachers who took seriously the words of the dead founder, and
believed they had rights in the place. They shamelessly attacked the U.
G. I., as I have narrated; they attacked other interests of the
interlocking trustees in the same reckless way. For example, Professor
Thomas Conway proved how the street railways were being plundered and
ruined. He was unanimously recommended by his faculty for promotion, but
this recommendation was held up for three years by the trustees. During
these three years the trustees were engaged in selling a street railway
at an inflated valuation to the New Haven, and were putting through
another “deal” of the same sort in Indiana!

Or take the case of Dr. Ward W. Pierson, who showed before the public
service commission how the coal companies were charging $1.70 per ton
transportation charges on coal, whereas the actual cost was only 55
cents; and here was our university, with two-thirds of its trustees
interested in the mining and transporting of coal! Here was a coal
operator about to give a large sum of money to the university, and
withdrawing it! Dr. Pierson also was recommended for promotion, and
waited three years, and meantime the scandal bureau of the interlocking
directorate was put to work on him, and he was charged with a grave
offense. His colleagues investigated the charge, and proved it to be
absolutely without foundation.

Next came the case of Scott Nearing, who had begun his career as
secretary to the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee. At this time
Pennsylvania had more working children than any other state in the
union. For example, there was Helen Sissack, a girl of twelve working in
a silk mill, walking three miles from her home to start work at six
o’clock at night, finishing work at six in the morning, and walking
three miles back. Nearing became an instructor at the Wharton School,
but went on opposing child labor, and the president of the Pennsylvania
Manufacturers’ Association attacked him, and the dean of the Wharton
School was instructed by the provost of the university to instruct
Nearing to stop his child labor talks. The university was scolded by a
newspaper belonging to Joseph R. Grundy, woolen manufacturer and
political boss, and this sent the provost into another panic.

After several years of strife, Nearing promised to be “good” for a year,
and he was “good” for two years; that is, he made no outside speeches;
but it didn’t help him, because what he said in his class-rooms was
reported by the students, and reached the ears of the interlocking
trustees. The standard time for promotion in the Wharton School is five
years, but Nearing waited eight years, and along with his promotion he
got a notice from the provost that the period of his appointment was for
one year at a time! Randall Morgan, vice-president of the U. G. I., and
trustee of the University of U. G. I., remarked to a friend of mine: “He
may stay until he’s bald-headed, but he’ll never get promoted.” Another
trustee said to Nearing: “We’ll give you young fellows rope and you’ll
hang yourselves. There’ll be no dismissals.” This was E. B. Morris,
president of the Girard Trust Company, a Morgan concern, with Mr.
Stotesbury, the grand duke, for a director; also chairman of the Cambria
Steel Company, of which Mr. Stotesbury is a director; also director of
the Pennsylvania Steel Company.

The provost thought he knew how to handle this matter. He said to one of
his henchmen: “Load him with administrative work, so that he can’t
lecture. ‘Squeeze’ him.“ This is a term which they understand at
plutocratic universities; to “squeeze” you is to make changes in your
curriculum, so as to make your courses less important; to take them out
of the required list, or to give required French at the same hour, so
that nobody will be free to come to your courses; or to put them at
inconvenient hours, say at three o’clock in the afternoon, when nobody
likes to come. If you are a professor, they will “squeeze” your young
men; you will be unable to get promotions and proper salaries for your
subordinates, or equipment or proper supplies for your department.

You may find the adventures of Scott Nearing set forth in a book called
“The Nearing Case,” by Lightner Witmer, a professor at the university.
It is interesting to note that Professor Witmer paid for the publication
of this book by being “squeezed” himself, and by having his young men
“squeezed.” Scott Nearing, ring-leader of the agitation, they kept on a
salary of fifteen hundred dollars—and at the same time they delicately
called his attention to an opening which presented itself at another
university, where he might get three thousand dollars! “What a shame
about that nice young Nearing fellow!” said Professor Lingelbach of the
department of history. “He might have been getting seven or eight
thousand dollars now, if he had held his tongue!” But on another
occasion this venerable professor argued in a faculty discussion that
there was no suppression of free speech at the University of
Pennsylvania. Somebody put to him the question, suppose he wanted to
join in municipal research work, to take up gas or street railways. Yes,
everybody present admitted, that might make a difference!




                              CHAPTER XXII
                         PROFESSOR BILLY SUNDAY


No study of the University of Pennsylvania would be complete which
failed to mention that it was founded by Benjamin Franklin, and gave an
honorary degree to Thomas Paine. Franklin’s doctrines, political and
religious, could not be taught in any university in America today, while
as for Paine, he could not keep out of jail in any state of the Union.
Theodore Roosevelt described Paine as “a filthy little atheist,” which
makes one think of Agassiz’s student, who defined a lobster as “a red
fish that swims backwards.” There were only three things wrong with the
definition, said Agassiz; a lobster is not red, it is not a fish, and it
does not swim backwards. Thomas Paine was not filthy, he was not little,
and he wrote: “I believe in one God and no more.” Paine first proposed
the Declaration of Independence, he saved the American Revolution by his
eloquence, and he will come into his own when Americans are free men.
Meantime, the great university which honored him would not dare to
mention his name, and his place in the academic sunshine is taken by the
Rev. William A. Sunday, D.D.

For the benefit of posterity, I explain that Sunday was an incredibly
vulgar and blatant religious revivalist, who abused the labor movement
and extolled the rich, and was used by the interlocking directorate to
keep the eyes of the masses fixed on heaven. They carried him from one
city to another all over the United States, and in Philadelphia they
financed for him a four weeks’ campaign. Sunday had already received the
degree of doctor of divinity from one American college; he was now
welcomed with open arms by the University of Pennsylvania, which had
barred Samuel Gompers from speaking, and more recently has barred James
Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor.

About the reception of the Rev. Billy, you may read in his biography, a
chapter headed “A Wonderful Day in a Great University.” “The greatest
day of his crowded life,” the biographer comments, and quotes a few
samples of the eloquence whereby the great evangelist promoted the cause
of culture and scholarship. “Oh, Jesus, isn’t this a fine bunch?” he
began his closing prayer. “Hot Cakes Off the Griddle” was the title of
his address, and he portrayed the wife of Pilate—“one of those
miserable, pliable, plastic, two-faced, two-by-four, lick-spittle,
toot-my-own-horn sort of women”; and then Pilate himself—“one of those
rathole, pin-headed, pliable, stand-pat, free-lunch, pie-counter
politicians.” Speaking in the largest auditorium of the university,
before the assembled students and instructors, Billy Sunday declared
that “Jesus Christ is either the son of God or the natural offspring of
a Jewish harlot.”

You will appreciate this even more when you learn that one of the
underground charges laid against Scott Nearing was that he, when asked
privately by a student for his opinion of the Episcopal Academy, had
said that he would rather send a son of his to hell than to the academy.
This shocked a trustee, Mr. Bell, Republican machine politician and
ex-attorney general, who had never heard such language used in political
life. But Mr. Bell did not object to the Rev. Sunday stating that
ex-President Eliot of Harvard University was a man “so low-down he would
need an aeroplane to get into hell.” Poor President Eliot, it should be
explained, is a Unitarian—that is the reason he gets cussed![G]

-----

Footnote G:

  Ordinarily a man’s domestic misfortunes are not proper basis for
  attack upon his ideas; but when a man sets himself up as a teacher of
  the young, when he claims that he has the one true and valid moral
  system, and pours out virulent abuse upon all who differ with his
  ideas—then it seems reasonable to call attention to the fact that the
  son of the evangelist, William A. Sunday, Jr., has been arrested in
  the city of Los Angeles twice within the past fortnight. The first
  time he was fined two hundred dollars for reckless driving of an
  automobile; the second time his home was raided, and he and seven of
  his guests were arrested upon complaint of the neighborhood that they
  have been conducting drunken debauches for many weeks.

-----

Mr. Bell is not the only pious politician on this pious board. Senator
George Wharton Pepper is a devout Episcopalian, leader of the church of
J. P. Morgan and Company in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr. Pepper is so
pious that he does not believe in education, he believes only in
religion. In his book, “A Voice From the Crowd,” he says: “Subtract God
and you get—not secular education, but no education at all.” Again he
says: “The teacher who interprets all of life in terms of brotherhood is
responsible for leading the students to forget God.” So, needless to
say, Mr. Pepper was annoyed when Scott Nearing caused to be published in
the Philadelphia “North American” a letter addressed to Billy Sunday,
advocating the godless idea of brotherhood. Read Nearing’s evil words:

  You have declared your interest in the salvation of Philadelphia.

  Look around you and ask yourself what salvation means here.

  The city is filled with unemployment and poverty; multitudes are
  literally starving; thousands of little children toil in the city’s
  factories and stores; its workers, a third of a million strong, have
  no workmen’s compensation law for their protection. Meanwhile the
  railroad interests which control the hard coal fields are reaping
  exorbitant profits; the traction company exacts the highest fares paid
  by the people of any American city; the manufacturers, intrenched at
  Harrisburg, are fighting tooth and claw to prevent the passage of
  up-to-date labor laws, and the vested interests are placing property
  rights above men’s souls.

  These monstrous offenses against humanity—this defiance of the spirit
  of Christ’s gospel—exist today in the city which hears your message.

  And further: the well-fed people, whose ease and luxury are built upon
  this poverty, child labor and exploitation, sit in your congregation,
  contribute to your campaign funds, entertain you socially, and invite
  you to hold prayer meetings in their homes.

  These are they that bind grievous burdens on men’s shoulders, that
  make clean the outside of the cup and the platter—the devourers of
  widows’ houses, against whom Christ hurled His curses.

  Here is Dives; yonder is Lazarus. And it is Dives who has made your
  campaign financially possible.

  Make no mistake! The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees of
  Philadelphia will never crucify you while you deal in theological
  pleasantries. Has it occurred to you that their kindness is a return
  for your services in helping them to divert attention from real,
  pressing worldly injustice to heavenly bliss? Turn your oratorical
  brilliancy for a moment against low wages, over-work, unemployment,
  monopoly and special privilege.

  Before you leave Philadelphia will you speak these truths?

  We pray “Thy Kingdom come on earth.” While men are underpaid, while
  women are overworked, while children grow up in squalor, while
  exploitation and social injustice remain, the Kingdom of God never can
  come on earth and never will.

It was after the publication of this blasphemy that our interlocking
trustees decided that Scott Nearing must go. They knew that the young
professor’s colleagues were solidly behind him, and they also knew that
there had been no room in Logan Hall big enough to hold the crowds of
students who thronged to his lectures. So they must be cunning, and wait
until both instructors and students had scattered to the country, and
there was no longer a chance of organized action. On June 14 they voted
not to reappoint Nearing, and the provost wrote him a brief note
advising him of this action; at the same time the trustees voted
privately that they would make no statement on the subject—regular
gum-shoe work, such as they were accustomed to use when they put a bill
through their city council, stealing the socks off the feet of William
Penn’s statue!

But some of the alumni got together and formed a committee, and wrote
letters to all the trustees, and also wrote letters to the press, and
before long the newspaper reporters were dogging the trustees, trying to
“smoke them out.” “Why should we make an explanation of what we choose
to do as trustees?” demanded Mr. J. Levering Jones, trust company and
street railway company and insurance company director and Republican
machine politician. “The University of Pennsylvania is not a public
institution.” And then the reporters got after the pious Senator Pepper,
who also denied that the university was a public institution. The people
of the state were putting up a million dollars a year for it—they are
now putting up a million and a half; but they have no say as to how this
million dollars is spent! The professors of the university were in the
same position as Senator Pepper’s secretary, so this pious man declared;
he had the same right to discharge them, and they had no more right to
demand an explanation. Nor were the trustees obliged to pay attention to
the provisions of the Wharton trust deed—in spite of the indignant
protests of Mr. Morris, one of the trustees of the Wharton estate.

The agitation continued, and little by little these trustees were smoked
out and forced to reveal themselves. Terrible rumors were spread as to
what Scott Nearing had done. He had questioned a student, the son of a
Philadelphia judge, and not liking the student’s answers, had sneered:
“That is the kind of ignorance you would expect to find in judicial
circles.” The above statement being widely quoted by the trustees,
Nearing’s colleagues produced a signed statement from the student, that
he had never met Professor Nearing or spoken to him; he had sat in
Nearing’s classes, but had never been asked any oral questions by him.

The real reason behind the whole proceeding was revealed by a legislator
up in Harrisburg, who got drunk at the Majestic Hotel and told how “Joe”
Grundy, woolen manufacturer of Bristol, and president of the State
Manufacturers’ Association, had fixed it up with Senator Buckman, his
political boss, that the university should not get its annual
appropriation until Nearing was fired. So Nearing was fired, and stayed
fired, and that was the end of it. Several of his colleagues quit the
university; the rest of them raised a fund to pay Nearing a year’s
salary, as tribute of their admiration; but they themselves stayed on
and behaved themselves, and there has been no more disturbance at the
Wharton School. The University of Pennsylvania professors no longer go
out and lecture against child labor, they no longer serve on public
commissions—or if they do, their findings are what the interlocking
directorate wishes found. There are no longer graft exposures in
Philadelphia; as one professor remarked to me: “It’s all inside the
heads of people who don’t tell!” And this same professor reported an
exclamation which came from the lips of his dean: “Oh, how I hate
reformers!”




                             CHAPTER XXIII
                          THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH


What is the intellectual state of the University of U. G. I. at the
present moment? I questioned four different professors about it—taking
the precaution to meet each one secretly, not letting even the others
know about it. Always I got the same report, frequently backed by the
same anecdotes. Some one had gone to the head of a department in the
Wharton School to say that the “Young Democracy” group of students
wanted to arrange a debate, to have one of their professors answer the
Socialist arguments of Scott Nearing. “I should like to do it,” replied
the department head. “It’s just what I believe in, but I am very busy,
and have plans to have my department expanded; I don’t believe in
pussy-footing, but there’s no use throwing away a chance to get some
good work done.” In other words, this man did not even dare to debate
_against_ Scott Nearing, for fear of offending his trustees! In the
Greek department a young instructor did not dare join the “Young
Democracy” group, though this was an open forum, strictly non-political;
he would give his money, he said, but not his name, it was too
dangerous. “They never interfere with my teaching Greek,” he added.

Keep hidden, that is the wise policy; keep your head down. Anything you
say may get into the newspapers, and get in wrong. A leader of the
striking longshoremen was arrested and clubbed, and a student tried to
raise bail. “Penn Man Defends Radical,” ran the scare headlines. And
some one told me a mournful story, one that I heard over and over again
in the colleges and universities I visited. You know in country
settlements they have the traditional “village idiot”; likewise in every
college and university they have some unhappy, beaten man, who made a
mistake once in his youth, and has never been able to atone for it. At
the University of U. G. I. there is a young professor, whose students
wished to debate the McNamara case; they asked him for advice on each
side of the debate, and he made suggestions, and tried to explain how
the use of violence would appear to a labor leader. For this he was
hauled up before the trustees and brow-beaten. He has never got beyond
the rank of assistant professor, and is a broken man. He was an active
party Socialist, but now does nothing, and if he writes a letter to a
newspaper on a public question, he dares not sign his own name to it.

The trustees may not pay much attention to the teaching of Greek, but
they watch the economics and history departments like hawks. A friend of
mine, not a professor, told of taking a motor ride with one of these
trustees, who referred to a Wharton School professor as “that pizen
pup.”

“What ideas of his do you object to?” asked my friend.

“Oh, all kinds of ideas; that Ireland should be free, for example. As
near as I can get it, he believes just what my cook believes.”

Said my friend: “You are mistaken about the man. He’s really a lovable
fellow; if you knew him you would like him. But, naturally, you don’t
meet him. You have an unwritten law—he would have to ask permission of
his dean or of the provost before he met you; otherwise he would commit
an unthinkable offense.”

“Well,” replied the trustee, “he’s unscientific, and anyhow, he doesn’t
get along with the boys.”

My friend said: “But that’s because his curriculum was changed so that
he can’t get any boys.”

“Well, anyhow,” said the trustee, “he’s not the calibre of man we want
for full professor.”

A woman friend of mine was present at a tea party where the head of a
department in the University of U. G. I. told about a proposed
appointment in the political science department. The man under
discussion was connected with the State Department in Washington. He was
wealthy, said this dean, and had a good social position; his wife’s
mother had especially important social connections. He was right on
Russia, he was right on Japan, he was right on reparations; he had
written the recent note of Secretary Hughes to the Bolshevist delegation
at Genoa, and Hughes had passed this note with only two or three
emendations. Such is the atmosphere in the high-up circles of our
plutocratic education; such are the standards of eminence! I am informed
on the best authority that this sturdy opponent of the Soviet government
in our State Department received three flattering offers from leading
Eastern universities, as soon as it became known that he was the author
of that Hughes note!

Such is the way the game is played. As one professor remarked to me:
“Knowing the ropes as I do, I could get any sort of promotion, any sort
of honors—and that not by worthy work, not by any true contribution to
science, but simply by knowing the interests, and being unscrupulous
enough. It is a situation which destroys the morals of every man who
knows about it.” And another said: “There is not a man in the Wharton
School today who truly respects himself.”

Such are the instructors; and the students are what you would expect.
One professor said to me: “Not five per cent of my men are thinking
about public questions. They take what I teach them as cows in the
pasture take rain, something to be endured but not thought about. They
come from high schools where they have heard no discussions of vital
questions. I have talked with thousands of them; ask anybody in the
university and you will get the same answer—their mental life is as dead
as the tomb.”

Another professor told how one of his colleagues had brought into his
class a former lecturer of the Y. M. C. A. in Siberia, who described to
the students the behavior of Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, one of the
pets of our State Department. The lecturer had traveled in Semenoff’s
train, and had been invited to tea, and Semenoff came in with his tunic
spotted with blood, explaining that he had just dispatched a carload of
prisoners. He had shot them, one by one, with his own revolver, and left
the dead for the American troops to bury. There had been some discussion
of the incident in the class, and not a man there thought there was
anything wrong about it. “They never batted an eye,” said my informant.

Such are the triumphs of plutocratic education; and lest you doubt this,
I mention that the students proved their convictions by action. They
kidnapped a Russian student, a quiet and unobtrusive fellow, a
Socialist, not a Communist; they carried him in an automobile some
fifteen miles outside the city, beat him until he was helpless, and left
him to get back as best he could. This was punishment for expressing the
opinion that the Russian people should be permitted to work out their
own destiny in their own way. For things such as this the state of
Pennsylvania contributes a subsidy of a million and a half dollars a
year!

The interlocking trustees are so sure of their power that they ventured
recently to give to all the world a demonstration of it. The old provost
retired, and they cast about for a new one, and offered to the American
academic world the gravest insult it has yet sustained. You might spend
much time searching through the names of prominent people in America,
before you found one less fitted to be head of a great university than
Leonard Wood; a second-rate regimental surgeon at the Presidio in San
Francisco, who had the fortune to become the favorite of Theodore
Roosevelt, and was by him rushed to a high command in the army, against
the unanimous protest of army men. In 1920 he was picked out by a group
of millionaire adventurers as their candidate for president; these men
were shown by the New York “World” to have spent millions to buy him the
nomination. They failed; and perhaps to soothe the general’s wounded
feelings the trustees of U. G. I. selected him for the highest honor in
their gift. Also, Harvard has just made him an overseer—the interlocking
process in a new form!

At the University of Pennsylvania the General receives twenty-five
thousand dollars per year. He has not yet condescended to honor the
university with his presence, but his duties are performed by an
assistant provost, at six or eight thousand. As faculty men explained to
me, the one thing which makes it possible to tolerate the indignities of
management by business men, is the fact that the president is always a
professional educator, a man who has been one of them and understands
their problems. But here is a man who has never been an educator, and is
not even a graduate of a university; a military autocrat, utterly out of
sympathy with true ideals of education. So the professor is pushed one
step lower in the social scale, his status of inferiority is fixed; and
at the University of U. G. I. everybody sits still and holds his breath,
waiting for the Grand Duke of Drexel-Morgan to die, and leave his
millions to his dead university!

P. S. As this goes to press, General Wood resigns.




                              CHAPTER XXIV
                            THE TIGER’S LAIR


For four years during my early life as a writer I lived—first in a tent,
then in a little cabin which I built, then in an old farm-house—in the
wooded hills about five miles north of Princeton. I wrote “Manassas”
there, and “The Jungle.” For “Manassas” I used the Princeton library, so
I spent a great deal of time about the place, and got to know it very
well. I dwell on those days, and visions rise of elegant country
gentlemen’s estates, deep shade-trees and smooth cool lawns with
peacocks and lyre-birds strutting about; and the campus, with elegant
young gentlemen lounging, garbed with costly simplicity and elaborately
studied carelessness. I remember the warm perfumed evenings of spring,
with the singing on the steps of “Old North”; the bonfires and parades
and rejoicings over athletic victories; the grave ceremonials of
commencement, and the speeches full of exalted sentiments. I remember a
tall black-coated figure—I never saw it without a shining silk
hat—striding about the grounds, or standing on the steps of “Prexy’s
house,” responding to a serenade, and reminding the students how they
were destined to go out and be leaders in the battle for all things
noble and true and grand.

Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and
come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future
come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The
public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw
what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and
silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not
mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there
had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this
eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a
tragedy to mankind might have been averted!

I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his
professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke,
poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of
the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met
some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had
literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria
the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man
discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name
of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was
away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even
now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the
theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in
a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had
never happened to anybody.

The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture,
the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling
about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable
English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school
and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford,
and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river,
reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two.
Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery
in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it;
no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs
run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is
presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our
empire of education.

The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor
Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest
country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank,
one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a
director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential
Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It
was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and
lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago
stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen.

The second grand duke of Princeton is Cyrus H. McCormick, head of the
International Harvester Company, also a director in the National City
Bank. The third grand duke is William Cooper Procter, the Ivory Soap
magnate, who tried to buy the presidency of the United States for
General Wood. Mr. Procter is also a director in the National City
Bank—quite a smell of Standard Oil on the Tiger’s coat, you notice! The
fourth grand duke is Robert Garrett, the biggest banker of Baltimore,
whose brownstone mansion was one of the wonders of my childhood.

All the above are life-trustees of Princeton; and to assist them they
have two more bankers, and a Philadelphia lawyer who is a director in
the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the Lehigh Railroad and the Lehigh
Coal Company; a cotton manufacturer who is a member of the Republican
Campaign Committee; a Pittsburgh merchant who is director in a national
bank; the secretary-treasurer of the United Railroads of New Jersey; the
president of the United States Trust Company; a publisher who is a
director of two banks, a lawyer who is director of two insurance
companies, and another who is chairman of a railroad, and another who is
attorney for the Prudential Life. No unsound or subversive ideas need
apply at Princeton! And the just reward of all this respectability was
reaped when H. C. Frick, the steel king, died, and left a great part of
his fortune to the university.

Woodrow Wilson made a lot of trouble for these super-plutocratic
trustees. He saw that the club system was destroying the intellectual
life of the university, and he tried to break it up and introduce a
system under which the rich students would at least know the names of
the less rich ones. He was bitterly fought at every point by the society
group, led by Andrew West, head of the Latin department, and dean of the
Graduate School, a college politician who is genial to people he can
use, but is a bitter partisan of reaction. This Dean West had a vision
of a hyper-exclusive school for graduate students, an ivory tower of
classical culture, and he got Mr. Procter, who owns a tower of ivory
soap, to offer half a million dollars for this purpose. But Woodrow
Wilson objected to the plan and delayed it, and Mr. Procter became angry
and withdrew his money—which caused a furious hullabaloo among the
Princeton plutocracy, led by Mr. Taylor Pyne, the first grand duke.

For some time the conflict raged, and it was settled in a peculiar way.
Dean West got somebody to offer three millions for the proposed school;
and that licked Woodrow, and Woodrow bowed his head in submission. It
had been possible to hesitate over half a million, but three
millions—“flesh and blood cooden bear it!” I am quoting from the
delightful scene in Thackeray’s “Yellowplush Papers,” where “Chawls,”
who is in the service of the Honorable Algernon Deuceace, is being
tempted to do some rascality for “his Exlnsy the Right Honorable Earl of
Crabs.” At first he resists the temptation; but then his Exlnsy “lugs
out a crisp, fluttering, snowy HUNDRED-PUN NOTE! ‘You shall have this;
and I will, moreover, take you into my service and give you double your
present wages.’

“Flesh and blood cooden bear it. ‘My lord,’ says I, laying my hand upon
my busm, ‘only give me security, and I’m yours forever.’

“The old noblemin grin’d, and pattid me on the shoulder. ‘Right, my
lad,’ says he, ‘right—you’re a nice promising youth. Here is the best
security.’ And he pulls out his pocketbook, returns the hundred-pun
bill, and takes out one for fifty. ‘Here is half today; tomorrow you
shall have the remainder.’” And so Dean West became the master of the
Graduate School of Princeton; according to the terms of the gift he and
another man hold the purse-strings. Up with the aristocratic tradition,
and good-bye to elegant and studied carelessness! Everybody in the
Graduate School of Princeton must wear an academic gown for dinner!

They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian
clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a
timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in
his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of
slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for
the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the
other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist
on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the
throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that
we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was
educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about
one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia,
Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen!
These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale,
Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt
and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser!




                              CHAPTER XXV
                           PEACOCKS AND SLUMS


Evans Clark, now of the Labor Bureau in New York, was for three years a
“preceptor” at Princeton, and tried to interest the young men in what
was going on in the outside world; among other things he assigned them
Walter Lippmann’s “Preface to Politics” as a book to read. I remember
that I made a diligent “go” at this book, to find out what Lippmann
meant and what he wanted; but I never could, and I doubt if any
Princeton under-graduate could do more. However, Professor William Starr
Myers of the department of history, a popular orator at ladies’ clubs,
thought it was a terrible book, and pleaded with Clark that he was
“taking an unfair advantage of immature minds!” A professor at another
university, who knows Professor Myers well, tells me that “he is, next
to Cal Coolidge and Ole Hanson, the most consummate ass on radicalism in
the country. He is the lion of the afternoon pink teas.”

As always, where you have smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds
on them, you also have vile and filthy slums, in which babies die of
typhoid and dysentery, and little children grow up crooked and poisoned
for life. In this elegant aristocratic university town are some of the
worst slums in the world; the Rev. Edward A. Steiner, author of “The
Trail of the Immigrant,” was brought to Princeton to preach, and he
inspected them, and writes me: “The housing conditions at Princeton were
about as I have found in the most congested district of New York. Under
the shadow of three million dollar dormitories were tenements of the
worst type. They were occupied by colored and white help.”[H]

There was a young social worker, Nell Vincent by name, who was called to
act as secretary to the charity organization society of the town. Some
common laborers, working on the college buildings, went on strike and
began picketing. It was a spontaneous strike, by Italians and other
foreigners, and Miss Vincent, who knew their wives and children, tried
to organize them, and spoke to them at a meeting, urging them to refrain
from violence and abide by the law. The news of this came to the charity
organization trustees, and there was a terrible fuss; some of the
prominent members of the faculty summoned Miss Vincent to appear before
the board, and challenged her for stirring up trouble in the town. One
charge they brought against her was that she had never been to church;
another was that while living on a “good” street, she had invited the
poor to visit her, and the wives and families of Italian laborers
trailing up to her door had “lowered the social tone of the street.” She
had brought into Princeton a critical sentiment, which was most
distressing to the authorities of a fashionable university. One
professor’s wife reported that the attitude of the Italians had entirely
changed; she no longer had any pleasure in distributing charity to them,
they did not love her any more. President Hibben finally succeeded in
patching up the trouble; but he told Miss Vincent, referring to some of
the university trustees who are members of the charity board, “You have
no idea how I had to argue with them!” In a letter to me Miss Vincent
uses the phrase, “the exquisite lie that is Princeton.”

In connection with this strike Evans Clark tells an anecdote which
throws a bright light on Princeton education. He was invited by a
student to lunch on Prospect avenue, where all the rich clubs are. The
strikers had quit work on a club building, and were picketing this
building, riding up and down on bicycles. “What are those men doing?”
asked the student, and Clark explained—they were pickets. “What are
pickets?” was the next question. They went inside, continuing their
conversation at the club dining-table; here were a score of college men,
and all asked questions, and hardly one knew what the word “picket”
means, and hardly one knew there was a strike of the laborers working on
Princeton’s exclusive new club!

-----

Footnote H:

  “Some Unsolved Social Problems of a University Town,” by Arthur Evans
  Wood, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan;
  a thesis of the University of Pennsylvania, published by C. W. Graham,
  Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1920. This document gives a detailed study of
  Princeton slums. On page 32 it appears that the infant mortality rate
  of Princeton in 1916 was 150 per thousand, as against 96 per thousand
  in New York City.

-----

Six or seven years ago we had a chance to make war on Mexico; and the
former president of Princeton took us part way in, while the then
president of Princeton tried furiously to get us all the way in. It
happened that Norman Angell, the English writer and pacifist, was
invited to Princeton to lecture, and made some casual reference to the
militarist propaganda against Mexico—and so got himself into a
bewildering experience. Picture him, a foreigner from a land of
politeness, an invited guest at a university supposed to represent
culture and urbanity; and the president of this university, a clergyman
of Jesus Christ, springs up in the audience and challenges him. “Do you
believe in murder? Do you believe in allowing American citizens to be
murdered in Mexico?”

The lecturer tries politely to answer, but is not allowed to finish.
“Answer me, yes or no!” cries the president of Princeton. “Do you
believe in murder?” And when the Englishman still fails to answer yes or
no, the shepherd of Jesus shakes his finger at him, trembling with rage
and screaming again and again, “Answer me, yes or no! Do you believe in
murder?” Both Evans Clark and his wife were witnesses of this
extraordinary scene, and described it to me in detail, not resenting my
incredulity, but patiently assuring me that they were not exaggerating,
it happened just so. And a letter from Mr. Angell substantiates it.

In the year 1916 arrangements had been made to have President David
Starr Jordan of Stanford speak in a hall on the campus; but President
Hibben, a life-long friend of Jordan’s, refused him the use of the
building, and he had to speak in the Presbyterian church. Two or three
students had organized an anti-war society, and they invited Professor
Henry Mussey of Columbia, but could not get either a college hall or a
church of Jesus Christ; they rented an obscure room in the labor
quarters of the town, and here the lecture took place. It had not gone
very far before Frank Jewett Mather, professor of art—sixty years of
age, and old enough to know better, you would think—stuck in his head,
and then slammed the door with a loud noise. Apparently he went off for
reinforcements, for ten minutes later he flung the door open, and
entered with a professor of French and another professor. These three
stamped over the hall, up one aisle and down another, shouting comments
on the lecturer’s remarks, and not stopping at personal insults. In
order to appreciate the scene you would have to know Henry Mussey—so
gentle and charming, rosy-faced, smiling like a cherub just arrived from
heaven. And here was Evans Clark, a young preceptor, presiding, and he
had to get up several times and ask three full professors of his
university to behave themselves like gentlemen! Finally, they marched
out, shouting “Vive la France!” “Was this before we went into the war?”
I asked, and the answer was: “It was after Princeton went into the war,
but before the rest of the United States did.”

Also Mr. Clark’s wife told me some of her adventures. She is Frieda
Kirchwey, daughter of a former dean of the Columbia University Law
School; she is one of the editors of the “Nation,” and as lovely a
person as you will find. But you know how it is with these proper
society people, their imaginations always run to foulness concerning
people who differ with them; they cannot see how anybody who refuses to
believe in class privilege and wage slavery can lead a decent life.
Before the Clarks had been at Princeton a few months, a head of one of
the departments asked if it was true, as reported, that their marriage
was a trial one! Then, in a railroad train, sitting behind two socially
exclusive professors’ wives, Frieda Kirchwey became acquainted with
Princeton ideas about herself. At this time she had a job in New York
and commuted every day; the trip takes an hour and a half each way, and
you must admit that a woman who stands that all the year round must love
her husband a good deal. But here sat the two ladies, gossiping about
pacifism, and the moral obloquy attendant thereon. “My dear,” said one,
“they say he’s married, but nobody ever sees her; she doesn’t live with
him—except maybe on vacations, of course. Nobody knows where he picked
her up.”

To balance this, you should have a glimpse of the morals of Princeton’s
chosen ones. Let me remind you that President Hibben is a clergyman, and
that Dean West of the Graduate School, who makes the students wear
academic gowns at dinner, is a clergyman’s son. Now read the following
paragraph from a letter of Miss Vincent:

  You of course are familiar with the time-honored custom of college
  commencements, class tents in and around which old grads let loose and
  get messed up generally, with booze and women. Well, in Princeton
  these tents are set up on vacant lots around in the town, and the
  townspeople feel that it is a most degrading influence upon their
  children, who hear the ribald songs and see sights that even grown
  people stay within doors to avoid if possible, during this grand and
  glorious reunion of the sons of Princeton. A protest as to this
  condition came up at a civic meeting. A committee of which I was
  chairman was appointed to meet Dean McClenahan of Princeton and the
  dean of the Graduate School. We met. The genial dean of the Graduate
  School after a few innocent questions said, “Why yes, Miss Vincent,
  you see we can’t very well have the reunion tents on the campus,
  because it would reflect upon the university’s good name, and would
  influence parents against it. But we do need to foster the reunions,
  because we need the support of the old graduates to keep up the
  college spirit.”

You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest
of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out;
that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no
taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter
from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits
that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of
view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He
still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best
work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.”
He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and
circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I
should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of
more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He
stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In
order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that
Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at
Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years
educational director of the National Security League!

In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect
illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill
tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and
dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political
science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the
facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton
professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to
speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the
fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan,
former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our
history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for
the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the
metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of
brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put
up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much
appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a
trustee as well as a professor!

I talked with the wife of a Princeton instructor, who was performing
some clerical duties for her husband, and thereby had opportunities to
“listen in” on Princeton education. She tells me of juniors and seniors
in the great fashionable university, who would ask naive and childish
questions about things that were going on in the world, revealing
ignorance of which grammar school children would be ashamed. These
elegant young idlers had been to college for three years, some of them
four years, and had not learned to read a newspaper! Yet they were all
eager to go to war, for a cause of which they understood nothing, and of
which their leaders understood no more—as they proved to us before they
got us out of the mess.

Two years later there came as it were a colossal volcanic eruption,
whereby Princeton culture, Princeton ideals and Princeton pieties were
exploded over the entire globe. At present writing it appears that it
will take mankind a hundred years to recover from the disasters that
resulted. You, plain working men or business men who glance at this
book, and think that college stupidity and corruption does not concern
you, take this one fact and ponder it: millions of German and Austrian
babies are hopelessly deformed by rickets, tens of millions of Russian
peasants have perished of starvation, three hundred billions of human
treasure and thirty million human lives were thrown away to no
purpose—because, forty-five years ago, one student of Princeton College,
Thomas Woodrow Wilson by name, was studying Hebrew, Greek, and imbecile
theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and
social engineering!




                              CHAPTER XXVI
                           THE BULL-DOG’S DEN


A short journey on Mr. Morgan’s Pennsylvania Railroad, with its Johns
Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wilson, Lafayette, Rutgers,
Teachers’ College, Lehigh, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts Tech and University
of Pennsylvania directors, and another short journey on Mr. Morgan’s New
Haven Railroad, with its recent Harvard overseer for chairman, a Brown
trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale president for director, and a
member of the Yale advisory board, a Washburn trustee, a Wellesley
trustee, a Pratt Institute trustee and two Harvard visitors for
directors, and we find ourselves at the home of Princeton’s age-long
rival, Old Eli; another carefully guarded fortress of the plutocracy, a
ruling class munition factory, turning out mental bombs and poison gas
for use in the class war.

There was a time when Yale was called “democratic.” This did not mean,
of course, that the students had any use for the “muckers” of the town
of New Haven, but merely that all the students knew one another; they
were all bound for the top, and all stood together. But the secret
societies came in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where
the sons of millionaires draw apart and live exclusive lives. These
secret societies run not merely the student life, they run the
institution, through the alumni who belonged to the societies when they
were undergraduates, and are now getting their sons and their friends’
sons in, and doing everything to hold up the power of “Skull and Bones.”

For this new imitation piracy the young fellows begin their training
long before they see the college; there are eight or ten fashionable
preparatory schools, which also have their fraternities, so that the
lads are intriguing and wire-pulling and imitating one another’s
imbecilities before they get out of short trousers. It is a rigid caste
system, a set of artificial ideals and standards—clothes, accent,
athletic prestige, money-spending, all the arcana of snobbery. The older
fellows are watching, criticizing, patronizing; you “make” the proper
“frat” at your “prep” school, and then go to the great university,
knowing that you are watched every moment by sharply critical eyes. For
a year or two you bend every thought and effort to being just exactly
what the great social leaders dictate; and then comes the day of
anguish, when the “tapping” is done, and you are swept on to a lifetime
of triumph, or cast down into everlasting humiliation.

The standards of these fashionable societies permit you to get drunk and
to acquire your due share of venereal disease, but they do not permit
you to wear the wrong color tie, or to use the wrong kind of slang, or
to smoke the wrong tobacco. Needless to say, they permit no smallest
trace of eccentricity in ideas, and here we have a mob sentiment which
supplants all academic discipline. Fifteen or twenty years ago Alexander
Irvine was pastor of a church at New Haven, and thrilled some students
with visions of social reform. Jack London came in 1905, and gave his
famous lecture, “Revolution,” and prominent society students sat up all
night to wrangle with him. But the war has swept all this away, there is
no longer any trace of liberalism at Yale that I could find. Instead,
there is discipline and herd sentiment. “This is the way we do it at
Yale,” and woe to the youngster who tries to do it differently!

One of its products of which Yale does not boast is Sinclair Lewis. (He
ran away, and came to Helicon Hall to learn about Socialism!) He told me
how the men in his class hated compulsory chapel, and proposed to
organize and protest; they would get up early in the morning and march
through the gateway, and defy the authorities. To a man they “cussed”
the chapel; yet, so completely did the spirit of Yale conquer them, when
they came to be seniors, and had to vote on college customs, they voted
for compulsory chapel! “After all, it’s a good thing, it helps to get
the men together and make college spirit!”

Yale was founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”—that is to say, the
slave trade; and it stands today four square on wage slavery. It has an
endowment of thirty-two million dollars; and needless to say, the
interlocking directorate is in full charge. The board includes: the
president of the New York Trust Company, who is a director in a trolley
company, a fire insurance company, and a securities company; the
president of the Merchants’ National Bank of Boston; the president of
the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of New York; the president of the
Westinghouse Company of Pittsburgh; a Chicago dry goods merchant, who is
a director of a great railroad system and a national bank; a silk
manufacturer who is a bank trustee; the publisher of a leading
newspaper, also a director of the Associated Press and two insurance
corporations; another newspaper publisher who is a director in the Erie
Railroad; the chief counsel of the Connecticut Trolley Company; and, to
make the group entirely safe and conservative, four ministers of the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite recently I saw a document which was sent
out to the Yale alumni, asking their opinions on a group of candidates
for the new elections; and at the top of the list stood the name of
America’s prize Tory, ex-President and Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court William Howard Taft.

Taft is a Yale man, and is proud to boast himself a pupil of the late
William Graham Sumner, professor of political economy, and a prime
minister in the empire of plutocratic education. I doubt if there has
ever been a more capitalistic economist than Sumner, a man who took a
ghoulish delight in the glorifying of commercialism. He is the author of
a book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”; reading this book you
discover that what the rich owe is to enjoy their riches, while what the
poor owe is to keep out of the way. Never that I know of has stark
brutal selfishness been so deified, and covered by the mantle of
science. “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to
take care of his or her own self.” Such was the first commandment
according to Sumner; and the second was like unto it: “Mind your own
business.”

Of course, to such a man there was no person so irritating as a
“reformer” of any sort, and he never wearied of pouring out ridicule
upon the man who imagined he could do anything to make society better.
“Society does not need any care or supervision,” decreed the all-wise
professor, and that settled it; the hard young Roman rulers thronged to
his classes, and absorbed his gospel of the wolf-pack, and went out with
their minds encased in a triple-plated Harveyized steel armor of
prejudice, ready to commit any crimes that might be necessary to the
preserving of their privileges. Today the pupils of Professor Sumner are
walking upon the faces of labor and stamping out the hopes of mankind in
hundreds of the leading industries of the country, and in the highest
posts of the government, from the United States Supreme Court down. Such
a man is worth many billions of dollars to the plutocrats; they pay him
a few thousand a year, and tickle his vanity with solemnly conferred
degrees and an academic robe to wear, and at the end of his thirty years
of service the editors of the “Yale Review” celebrate him in a series of
articles as “Pioneer—Teacher—Inspirer—Idealist—Man—and Veteran.”

Professor Sumner’s place is now ably taken by one of his pupils,
Professor Albert G. Keller, author of “Societal Evolution,” which a
well-known American sociologist describes to me as “a lengthy example of
secondary rationalization to prove the immorality of social reform.” In
case you do not understand these scientific technicalities, let me
explain that Professor Keller is employed by the New England plutocracy
to act as intellectual night-watchman for their property; and that
having got his orders what to teach, he then invents an elaborate set of
reasons to convince himself and the world that this is the right thing
to teach, and that in so teaching he is protecting society.

Meantime, what of the men at Yale who happen to have some vision of
social service and human sympathy? I managed to find one who had been
there, and for a while thought he was going to make a success in the
great university. He invented during the war a device to destroy
submarines, and the United States government took it up. Word came to
the interlocking trustees, and the secretary of the corporation, Mr.
Anson Phelps Stokes, sent for the professor in haste. There was a story
in this—some advertising for Old Eli! Simon Lake, a Yale man, had
invented the submarine, and now another Yale man was to wipe it out!
“For God, for country, and for Yale!” Mr. Stokes with eager fingers
began turning the pages of an encyclopedia, to find out the date of
Simon Lake’s invention, and the date of his sojourn in the university!

But this bit of favor was quickly lost, when the professor took up the
troubles of his colleagues, who found it impossible to exist upon their
salaries, with the cost of living going up day by day. My friend had
spent ten years preparing himself for university teaching; he had spent
eight years teaching at Clark, at Harvard and at Yale, and now he was
getting fourteen hundred dollars! He insisted that he and his colleagues
should get more; and the secretary was irritated by this agitation. Mr.
Stokes comes from a wealthy family himself, but believes that other
people should wait for their rewards in heaven. He wrote my friend that
college professors should not interfere with matters which are not their
own business; also that he had never advised Yale instructors to get
married!

What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns
Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation
wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the
plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University,
a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the
open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining
that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. So you see, we are
literally realizing the sarcastic observation of Professor Spingarn,
that there are three sexes in America—men, women and professors. There
is only one step more to be taken, and I expect some morning to pick up
my paper and read that the president of some great university has
announced that, inasmuch as college professors who cannot afford to
marry sometimes set bad moral examples for the students, it is now
ordained that none but eunuchs need apply for jobs. If this arrangement
has proved useful to the ruling classes of Turkey, and for the choir
boys of the Vatican, why should it not be given a trial in our
plutocratic empire?




                             CHAPTER XXVII
                    THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLACK HAND


We have completed a survey of our five largest Eastern universities,
Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale; we shall now cross
the continent, to the Western domains of our interlocking directorate.
We may begin our journey on the New York Central, which is a
Vanderbilt-Morgan road, and has a Columbia and a Cornell and a Rochester
University trustee for directors, a recent Yale and New York University
trustee for director, a Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president,
and a Cornell trustee for vice-president, also a Guaranty Trust and two
National City Bank directors; and continue it on the Michigan Central
under the same auspices; then on the Illinois Central, which has a
Columbia trustee and an Armour Institute trustee and a recent University
of Chicago trustee, and a Knox and a Rockford College trustee for
directors, and one First National, one Guaranty Trust, and two National
City Bank directors; then on the Missouri Pacific, with a Brown
University and a Vassar College and a Middlebury College trustee for
directors, and a New York University council member for director and a
Massachusetts Tech trustee for vice-president, and one Equitable Trust
and two Guaranty Trust directors; finishing on the Union Pacific, which
has a Columbia trustee for chairman, also a Rutgers College trustee and
two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors,
also two Equitable Trust, two Guaranty Trust, and three National City
Bank directors. We may announce our coming by the Western Union, which
has a Columbia trustee for president, and on its directorate two
Columbia trustees, a Princeton trustee, a Massachusetts Tech and Hebrew
Tech trustee, and a recent Harvard overseer. Arriving in San Francisco
we shall be welcomed by the interlocking directorate in charge of
railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electricity, land, water, gas—and
education.

Across the bay from San Francisco, high up above the city of Berkeley,
stands the University of California, a medieval fortress from which the
intellectual life of the state is dominated; and here also we find one
of the grand dukes of the plutocracy in charge—Mr. William H. Crocker,
whose father looted the Southern Pacific railroads, covering all
California. Mr. Crocker is a “social leader,” and active head of the
Republican political machine, which runs the government and is run by
the finance of the state. We shall feel at home with Mr. Crocker, when
we discover that he is a director of the Equitable Trust Company of New
York, one of the five great banking institutions of the Money Trust, and
that he sits on this board with Mr. Coudert, attorney for the plutocracy
and trustee of Columbia University; also when we learn that he was a
director of the Parkside Land Company, all of whose officers were
indicted in the San Francisco graft scandal.

Associated with Mr. Crocker in the running of the University of
California is Mortimer Fleishhacker, the biggest banker in San
Francisco, president of the Anglo-California Trust Company, and first
vice-president of the Anglo and London National Bank. I can give you a
glimpse of this gentleman’s activities, for the other day I met a young
newspaper man who had shipped on one of the fishing vessels which
constitute the “hell fleet of the Pacific.” Mr. Fleishhacker is
vice-president of the Union Fish Company, which is paying men $5 a ton
for catching and salting cod, which are sold in San Francisco for $160 a
ton, the incidental costs being practically nothing. Mr. Fleishhacker is
also vice-president of the Alaska Canning Company, whose workers are
hired by a Chinese contractor for $34 a month and board—which consists
of two meals a day of scurvy diet, and only one cup of water a day. In
the canning factories they work from 3 a. m. to 9 p. m., and they sleep
in ramshackle bunkhouses, with no heat, no light and tide water wetting
the floor. Eight of them died of small-pox while my friend was there.

As aid on his university board Mr. Fleishhacker has his attorney, Mr.
Guy C. Earl, vice-president of two power companies and two electric
companies, and a very crude and subservient newspaper, the Los Angeles
“Express”; also Mr. Dickson, proprietor of this same “Express.” Also we
find the president of San Francisco’s gas company, Mr. Britten, an
active enemy of every public ownership movement; Mr. Moffitt,
vice-president of the First National Bank, an honest believer in
capitalism at its worst, and a furious reactionary; also Mr. Bowles,
president of the First National Bank of Oakland, and director in a
railway, a water company, and a timber company; also Mr. Cochran,
vice-president of the Southern California Edison Company, president of a
life insurance company, a director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank, and a
director in half a dozen large financial institutions; also Mr. Foster,
another director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank. Mr. Foster lives in Marin
county, just north of the university, and is known as the Duke of Marin;
so you see these medieval titles are not entirely the product of my
muck-raking imagination.

In addition to these seven, there are two wealthy corporation attorneys,
one of them counsel for the Catholic Church, and for the grafters who
were put on trial in 1910; a Catholic priest who is a close adviser of
the archbishop who runs the San Francisco school system; and the wife of
Sartori, one of the largest bankers in Los Angeles, who, as I happen to
know, helped to finance the concession-hunting expedition of Vanderlip
in Kamtchatka. These are the appointed regents; and in addition there
are some who hold ex-officio—the Governor of the state, the Lieutenant
Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, etc. These do not matter, being
merely machine politicians, selected by Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker
and two or three others in private conference, nominated by these
gentlemen’s newspapers, and elected by these gentlemen’s checks.

Besides the state government and the university, and their own banks and
railroads, Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker control for the interlocking
directorate a vast network of gas and electric companies, street
railways, land companies, and power companies. The recent development of
water power has made this the dominant industry of the state, and the
means whereby the other industries are subordinated. Mr. Fleishhacker is
president of the Great Western Power Company, and of the California
Electric Generating Company, and a director in the Northwestern Electric
Company; while his attorney, Mr. Earl, also a trustee of the university,
is vice-president of two of these concerns. Eight other regents are
active directors of such power companies; and we shall see shortly how
they use their university as a propaganda department against power
development by the state. Mr. Foster, the Duke of Marin, is president of
the ferry company, and a director of the United Railroads of San
Francisco, which has been a leading agency in corrupting the city for
the past twenty years. Mr. Crocker is a director in the committee which
is now trying to reorganize these United Railroads, after the looters
have got through with them. We shall see how these gentlemen use their
university as a strike-breaking agency for the benefit of their street
railways, their ferries and their gas and electric companies.

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.”

How this organization puts pressure on university professors is a matter
about which you do not have to take my word; you may have the word of
Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. In the
San Francisco “Call” for January 20, 1922, I find an article occupying
the top of seven columns, “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men
of San Francisco.” This is a report of a luncheon at the St. Francis
Hotel, in which Mr. Haldeman explained his work to the president and
vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a group of such
leading interlocking directors. Said Mr. Haldeman: “Through the children
of the best business families throughout the land, who are attending
universities, we are having students of radical tendencies watched. We
are receiving reports of what is going on, both as to students and
teachers that uphold radical doctrines and views.”

So here is the spy system in our universities; college boys and girls
set to tale-bearing on their fellows and on their teachers! On such
ignorant and garbled reports professors in the University of California
are black-listed for promotion; or they are quietly let out without
explanation—or with just a lie or two. When they apply for jobs in other
places, letters are written to keep them from getting those jobs. School
teachers are black-listed over the entire state; students in the
university who graduate with honors are unable to get teaching
positions, because the employment system maintained by the university is
under the control of this kid-gloved Black Hand.

The active manager of this organization until a few months ago was Mr.
Woodworth Clum, a lawyer, author of a pamphlet, “America Is Calling,”
the substance of which is that America is calling her school children to
mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. Mr.
Clum was formerly secretary of the Greater Iowa Association, at a salary
of ten thousand dollars a year; also secretary to the Iowa Commission to
the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He left the state after a three years’
controversy over the fact that this Commission had failed to file a
proper statement of its expenditure of public funds with the state
accountant, twenty thousand dollars being missing; also after a
typewriter belonging to the Commission had been traced to the office of
the Greater Iowa Association; also after Mr. Clum had walked across the
street and brutally struck in the face a Civil War veteran, wearing a
Grand Army button, because this old man was deaf and did not hear a band
playing the Star-Spangled Banner some distance away, and therefore had
failed to remove his hat.

Now, here is Mr. Clum’s new organization, the kid-gloved Black Hand of
California, working in close alliance with the “open-shoppers” and labor
union smashers of the state, and holding over school teachers and
college professors the lash, not merely of black-list, slander and
starvation, but of sentence to fourteen years in prison. For you must
understand that we have a “criminal syndicalism” law in California, and
this is applied to you, not merely if you belong to a radical labor
union, but if you take any action on behalf of the victims of the Black
Hand. This organization has a private army of sluggers, called the
“citizens’ police,” which maintains a standing offer of fifty dollars
for every arrest of a “radical,” and three hundred dollars for every
conviction. As I write this book, one J. P. McDonald is arrested at Long
Beach, California, for asking signatures to a petition to President
Harding for the release of political prisoners—this petition being one
which was signed by three hundred thousand American citizens and
presented to the President by a delegation of some thirty leaders of
liberal thought. Holding over this workingman’s head the threat of
prosecution for “criminal syndicalism,” the police persuaded him to
plead guilty to vagrancy—though he had money in his pocket and a job.
They promised him he would get thirty days, and the judge gave him six
months, and grinned at him. Such is California, described by Romain
Rolland as “Land of Orange Groves and Jails”; and such is the atmosphere
of espionage and terrorism in which is conducted the University of the
Black Hand.




                             CHAPTER XXVIII
                      THE FORTRESS OF MEDIEVALISM


My first visit to Berkeley was in the winter of 1909-10. I had come to
see a professor—I shall not name him, since he does not welcome
publicity; suffice it to say that he is one of the world’s leading
scientists, and in any country in Europe would be named among a dozen
greatest contributors to advanced knowledge. He was educated in Europe,
and had come to the great California university, thinking he would be
welcomed as at home. Shortly after his arrival came “Charter Day,” and
he was invited to a grand academic banquet, a function which he
described to me with infinite amusement.

There was a table of honor across the front of the room, raised above
the others, and at this table sat the president of the university, and
on his right hand the grand duke of the interlocking regents, and on his
left hand the second grand duke, and all the robber lords and barons of
the state carefully ranged according to their financial standing, looked
up in the latest Moody’s Manual, or Dun or Bradstreet, or wherever it is
that you find these things. At the other tables, tapering away from the
royal presence, were placed the deans and heads of departments, the
professors, the assistant professors, the instructors, all graded
according to the amount of their salaries, and any slightest variation
in the order of precedence jealously looked out for and resented. My
friend the scientist was put in his pecuniary proper place; the fact
that he was a master mind who would have occupied the seat of honor at
any function of any university faculty in Europe, made no slightest
difference; he was not even asked to meet the interlocking regents, nor
were they aware of his existence. The president met such great ones, and
shook hands with them, for he was a fifteen thousand dollar a year man;
but my scientist friend was only a four or five thousand dollar a year
man, and was expected to stay with his own kind.

Also, while on this visit to Berkeley, I talked with the wife of a
professor; the ladies, you know, have an especially acute sense for
social matters, and often have a pungent way of expressing what they
feel. This lady had been walking on the beach at Del Monte, the
exclusive resort of the California plutocracy. Perhaps she wasn’t meant
to be there; anyhow, there came strolling toward her the president of
the university, with two or three of the wives of his wealthiest
regents. They were coquettishly and elaborately got up, and he was
indulging in elephantine playfulness, talking to them about “getting
their tootsies wet”—crude efforts of a man of majesty and learning to
descend to social dalliance. He stopped in front of the wife of his
professor and spoke to her, but did not introduce her to the other
ladies, a grave and intentional discourtesy. Instead of that, he looked
at her sternly and said: “I wish you to know that I have no use whatever
for science.”

This, you must understand, to the wife of a man who was supposed to be
discovering some of nature’s most vital secrets! I asked in bewilderment
just what could have been the motive for such a remark, and the
explanation was that scientists sometimes think themselves of
importance, and it is necessary to academic discipline that they should
be put in their place. This same scientist was instrumental in bringing
to the university half a dozen of the greatest men of Europe as
lecturers—Arrhenius, de Vries, Sir William Ramsay. They were paid
inadequately for their long journey, and my friend suggested that it
might be a good idea to reward them with an honorary degree. Said
President Wheeler, with instant decision: “I give no degrees to
scientists!” “Whom do you give them to?” asked my friend, and the answer
was: “I give them to people of importance—to statesmen, public men,
college presidents.” This was Benjamin Ide Wheeler, ex-professor to the
German Kaiser, and tireless singer of the Kaiser’s praises, holder of a
Heidelberg degree, and of honorary degrees from all the great Eastern
centers of the interlocking directorate, Princeton, Harvard, Brown,
Yale, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth and Columbia. He called himself a
liberal, but never enough to offend Mrs. Hearst, who gave the university
a Greek theater, with her son’s name carved across the front of the
stage.

While I was in Berkeley there was a scandal at the university, because
of the sudden appointment of a new professor to be dean of the Graduate
School. This was David P. Barrows, now president of the university, and
a person whose career is of interest to us. He is a product of the
University of California, and was finished in Nicholas Murray Butler’s
educational enameling machine. Thence he went to be superintendent of
schools of the city of Manila, and later on director of education for
the Philippine Islands. Having received a thorough training in
imperialism, he came home to proclaim the gospel of the mailed fist in
our empire of raisins and prunes.

Dean Barrows was a fighting man, and became immediately active in
university politics. You may be startled to hear that anything so
dubious as “politics” exists in a university; but if you believe in
applied imperialism, and start to apply it to those about you, you are
apt to find some of them resisting, and you will have to put them down,
and put up others who are willing to obey you and promote your
interests. So Barrows became a tireless university politician, and he
and his subordinates also became active in the outside politics of their
city and state. As it happens, Berkeley had a large working class
population, and a strong Socialist sentiment, and naturally there is no
higher duty that an imperialist college dean can perform than to crush
Socialism in his home town.

I have described the university as a medieval fortress on a hill. You
thought, no doubt, I was just slinging language; but consider the
situation. The university has nothing to do with Berkeley, it is not a
part of the city, it pays no taxes, either to city or state;
nevertheless, it lays claim to run the affairs of the city, and does so.
If there are any charters or city contracts to be drawn, the university
professors do it, and they do it in the interests of the university, and
of the university’s interlocking regents. If there is a school
superintendent or a mayor to be selected, the university machine is
ready with a university man. It is the established custom that one
member of the school board of Berkeley shall be a university professor,
and you always find this professor voting on the side of reaction and
special privilege. For example, the law provides that insurance on
school buildings be placed with the companies which make the lowest
bids; the school board wished to violate this law, and a Socialist
member of the school board fought for a whole day to prevent the
violation, and was beaten by the vote of the university professor. When
election time comes round, the university goes into the campaign as one
man to “smash the Socialists.” The university machine circulates
slanders against the Socialist administration, and university students
are registered and voted wholesale for the plutocracy. The university
machine selects the local judges, and the Key Route, a street railroad,
puts up the money to elect them—this money being voted by directors who
are university regents. In one campaign Stitt Wilson, Socialist mayor of
Berkeley, read from the platform the affidavit of a student to the
effect that the president of the student body had stated that he had
received five thousand dollars from the Key Route, to be used on the
campus to beat the Socialist ticket.

Of course the Key Route expects to be paid back for this, and presents
its bill whenever there is a strike of its workers. It would be too much
to expect that the interlocking directorate should own and run a
university, and then, in an emergency like a strike, should see eight or
ten thousand young men sitting by entirely idle, except for fool
studies. When strikes occur, the interlocking newspapers paint
terrifying pictures of the public emergency, and the interlocking deans
organize the students and give them special credits for the time they
spend as “great American heroes.” In 1913 came a gas and electric
strike, and the president of the gas company, a member of the board of
regents, called on his university for help, and the boys from the
engineering department were given credit for a full semester’s work for
their services as “scabs.” After that, when the Socialists proposed a
measure to have the regents elected by the people, the labor leaders of
California said they weren’t interested; working men didn’t go to
college, so why should they bother about such matters?

And just as this University of the Black Hand seeks to run the city, so
also it seeks to run the state. Just now there is a bitter struggle
under way, over a bill to enable cities and towns to combine and develop
water power for their own use. The special interests of California are
fighting this measure tooth and nail; and prominent among them are the
ten university regents who are interested in power companies. Do these
gentlemen fail to make use of their university in the struggle? If you
expect such a thing, you do not know our empire of raisins and prunes!

The farmers of this empire are organized into farm bureaus at state
expense. These bureaus are supposed to be run by the farmers themselves,
but the university appoints “experts,” and the state pays them to act as
advisers and guiding lights to the farm bureaus. During this campaign it
was observed that resolutions against the hydro-electric power bill kept
coming in from the farm bureaus; which seemed unaccountable, because in
the state legislature the farmers’ bloc was unanimous for the bill. The
mystery was traced down, and in every case it was discovered that the
treacherous resolution had come from the “experts”—university men,
appointed by university regents in the interest of their privately owned
power plants! And at the same time in San Francisco, Mr. Crocker, grand
duke of the regents, is starting a campaign to get Rudolph Spreckles, a
liberal capitalist, out of control of the First National Bank, because
Mr. Spreckles has committed the crime of supporting this power bill!




                              CHAPTER XXIX
                        THE DEAN OF IMPERIALISM


We return to David P. Barrows to follow his career as he rises to the
heights of academic prominence and power. For seven years he stumped the
state of California, proclaiming the destiny of the Stars and Stripes to
float from the North Pole to the South. The world was to be divided up,
it was our business to get our share; we should win because we were
better organized, more efficient; the world would not tolerate small
nations; strong men must rule. And presently came a chance for strong
men to rule in Mexico; but the strong men had at their head a weakling
by the name of Woodrow Wilson, who refused to act. You might think there
would be some impropriety, some violation of military precedence, in a
university dean’s attacking a former university president, who had
become President of the United States; but when Woodrow Wilson took Vera
Cruz, and then refused to take the rest of Mexico, Dean Barrows rushed
to the front, denouncing him before chambers of commerce, and being
reported in the interlocking newspapers.

We shall note in the course of this book many cases of college
professors forbidden to take part in “outside activities,” and
especially to get themselves into the newspapers. The professor’s place
is the classroom, we are told; and to this there is only one
exception—when the professor is advocating more loot for the exploiters
who pay him his salary. Shortly after this Vera Cruz affair the San
Francisco “Star” published some revelations concerning our imperialist
dean, stating that at the very time he was campaigning for intervention,
he was vice-president of the Vera Cruz Land & Cattle Company. A friend
who knows Dean Barrows well, defended him to me by the statement that
his holdings in this company were not valuable. When I asked how
valuable they might have become if the United States had conquered
Mexico, my friend changed the subject.

The next part of the world to be divided up was Siberia, and our
imperialist dean was made a colonel, and put in charge of the Army
Intelligence Service. So far as I know, he has not told the full story
of his adventures in Siberia, but we may glean hints in the press of
China and Japan, which charged that Colonel Barrows was an accomplice of
Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, in a plot to separate Mongolia from the
Chinese Empire and place it under the rule of Semenoff and the American
concession-hunters. The situation in Siberia at this time was a
complicated one. Kolchak was the official representative of the allies,
fighting the Bolsheviki with American money and supplies. Semenoff
revolted against Kolchak, and set himself up as an independent bandit,
controlling a part of Mongolia. He was intimate with Colonel Barrows at
this time, and a leading Chinese journalist wrote an article in
“Millard’s Review,” in which he referred to Barrows as “an unscrupulous
and unprincipled American adventurer.” It was rumored at this time, and
has since been thoroughly proven, that Semenoff entered the pay of the
Japanese, and was used by them in their Siberian intrigues; Colonel
Barrows himself admitted this in an interview published in the San
Francisco “Chronicle,” April 15, 1922.

Semenoff was in America at this time, backed by the Japanese intriguers,
but supposed to represent the anti-Bolshevik cause. Naturally he was
welcomed by his friend, Colonel Barrows, and ardently defended in the
interlocking newspapers. Certain “Bolshevik” agitators pointed out that
Semenoff had fired upon and murdered a number of American soldiers; and
just what does our academic colonel think about the murdering of
American soldiers by a Cossack bandit in Japanese pay? Our colonel
declares that he investigated the matter, and that it was merely owing
to “a misunderstanding”; General Semenoff wanted to move a train across
a sector at Chita, where the Americans refused to let him go, and so he
shot and killed a few American soldiers. That is all! The colonel
describes Semenoff as “a man of iron, both in courage and military
leadership. He was brave.... Semenoff did not thing (evidently a
misprint in the newspaper) of which I disapproved. He accepted the help
of the Japanese ... but even in this he was helpless; when the allies
refused their aid, he was compelled to accept Japanese assistance....
Whatever he did, it was with the sole aim of beating the Bolsheviki,
whom he hated.”

This was at the time that Senator Borah was exposing Semenoff’s
infamies. Borah read extracts from a speech by an American Railway
Commission officer, who stated that Semenoff “carried with him on his
so-called ‘summer car’ a harem of thirty of the most beautiful women I
ever saw.” Mr. Borah offered to show a picture of the car, and we wonder
if this was one of the things which Colonel Barrows saw, when he saw
“not thing” of which he disapproved! Colonel Morrow, in command of the
American troops at Chita, stated that Semenoff’s own Cossacks had
estimated that Semenoff had slaughtered one hundred thousand
non-combatants in Siberia. Colonel Morrow testified to “the extreme
cruelty and wholesale murders” of Semenoff; this on April 12, three days
before the Barrows interview. Also General Graves, commander of the
American Siberian expedition, used the phrase “wholesale murderer,” and
described “grim murder trains, which took men out to be shot along the
side track and buried in common graves; American soldiers ruthlessly
murdered; an American lieutenant held virtual prisoner forty hours,”
etc. All this was fully reported in the press, and was in President
Barrows’ newspapers several days before he made his statement that
Semenoff had done “not thing” of which he, Barrows, disapproved. To
quote from the San Francisco “Examiner,” April 13, 1922:

  It is part of the testimony that prisoners captured by Semenoff’s army
  in their raids upon villages were taken by trainloads to places which
  Colonel Morrow designated as “Semenoff’s slaughter houses” and there
  shot down by the wholesale.

All this Colonel Barrows had every opportunity to see, and in it he saw
“not thing” that he disapproved; so you see that our “dean of political
science” is no fragile mollycoddle, no bespectacled professor living a
closet life, but a real, red-blooded, two-fisted man of action. Coming
back to California, fresh from “Semenoff’s slaughter houses,” Colonel
Barrows proceeded to advocate the setting up similar establishments on
the campus of his university. Speaking before a convention of the State
High School Association, he advocated that the Bolsheviki should be
stood against the wall and shot. “There is only one way to deal with
Bolshevism—fight it. Force is the only way. The time has come to treat
them with militarism; I believe in killing the Bolsheviki.” Then Captain
Schuyler, one of the intelligence officers whom Barrows brought back
with him, spoke his sentiments: “If a man stood before me and declared
himself a Bolshevist, I would shoot him on the spot, like a mad dog.”

Naturally, that made considerable fuss in Berkeley; for the city had a
Socialist mayor and school board only a couple of years previously, and
the chambers of commerce and the professional patriots were doing their
best to establish the term “Bolsheviki” as including, not merely all
Socialists, but everybody who believed in the initiative and referendum,
or in government ownership of railroads. So the Socialists of Berkeley
challenged Barrows to a debate. He accepted, and the Socialists tried
first to get the university hall, and then the high school auditorium;
but the president of the Berkeley board of education—a dentist,
described to me by another school board member as rarely attending a
session without the smell of liquor on his breath—opposed the use of the
building, and advocated that all Socialists should be “driven into the
bay.” Finally, however, the use of the auditorium was obtained; it would
only seat twelve hundred people, whereas between eight and ten thousand
came.

This was July 30, 1919, at the time when “Bolsheviki” by thousands were
being clubbed over the heads and thrown into jail all over the United
States. The mayor and the chief of police of Berkeley sat on the
platform, and two auto loads of secret service men attended; an effort
was made to start a riot and raid the Socialists, a scheme which was
averted by the quickness of Mrs. Elvina Beals, who presided at the
meeting. Mrs. Beals was for many years a Socialist member of the school
board, and the people of Berkeley know her. In the course of the debate,
Dean Barrows advocated that the American government should conquer
Siberia and Russia for Kolchak, and he asked whether the Socialists of
Berkeley would support a strike to prevent the shipment of ammunition to
Siberia. They answered with a roar that they would; and so Dean Barrows
retired, and did no more debating with these Berkeley “Bolsheviki.”




                              CHAPTER XXX
                        THE MOB OF LITTLE HATERS


President Wheeler having been intimate with the German kaiser, and
ardent in his defense, the interlocking regents wanted somebody else to
attend to their interests in war-time. What more natural than to turn to
their Dean of Imperialism? They made him president, and he put “ginger”
into the system of military training. Twelve thousand students get a
free education, but must pay for it by taking two years of military
training, fifty-five hours a year. A part of this training consists in
learning to plunge a bayonet into an imitation human body, and you must
growl savagely while you do this, and one student found it so realistic
that he fainted and was dismissed from the university.

Under President Barrows’ administration the best land of the university
has been taken for an artillery field, and Strawberry Canyon, the one
beauty spot available for nature lovers, has been taken for a million
dollar “stadium,” to be used for athletic tourneys. One professor
resigned in protest against this vandalism; but President Barrows
believes ardently in athletics, because it trains those strong young men
who are to carry the flag from the North Pole to the South. He publicly
stated that one advantage of having a big university is that you have
abundant material from which to select athletic teams. In other parts of
the world, when you hear of the “classics,” you think of Homer and
Virgil; but in California the “classics” are the annual
Stanford-California foot-ball game, and the intercollegiate track-meet,
and the Pacific Coast tennis doubles.

I visited the university this spring, and was invited to a fraternity
house. These well-groomed young gladiators did not know quite how to
talk to a Socialist author, so between courses of the dinner they
relieved their embarrassment by singing, or rather shouting in very loud
tones—and I observed that their songs invariably dealt with fighting
somebody. I asked a student about to graduate what he thought of his
classmates, and his answer was, “They are a mob of little haters. They
hate the Germans, they hate the Russians, they hate the Socialists, they
hate the Japs. They are ready to hate the French or the English any time
they are told to; and always they hate Stanford.”

Stanford, you understand, is a rival university, and they carry in
triumph a battle-ax which they captured from this enemy many years ago;
their military president and professors encourage this kind of play
ferocity, as training for the setting up of slaughter-houses later on.
These future world conquerors are pleased to portray themselves under
the terrifying symbol of the Golden Bear. Almost every college is some
kind of wild animal, you know; Princeton is a Tiger, and Yale is a
Bull-dog, and they all sing songs about eating somebody up. At Harvard
they tell you that the motto Veritas, means “To hell with Yale,” and at
New Haven they pledge their devotion in a carefully ordered climax, “For
God, for country, and for Yale.”

Needless to say, the university authorities see to it that no modern
ideas get access to these young barbarians all at play. President
Barrows’ first act as president was to forbid Raymond Robins to speak at
the university; he knew that Robins had been in Russia, and learned some
things which President Barrows also learned, but did not tell. The kind
of speaker Barrows wants for his students he found in General Joffre,
whom he welcomed with open arms, making a grandiloquent speech about “a
soldier president welcoming a soldier hero.” The students thronged to
hear the Marshal, though they could not understand him; and they mobbed
young Herman Meyling for offering Socialist literature for sale.
“Intolerance is a virtue in war-time,” says President Barrows; and, of
course, all time is war-time to an imperialist.

The keen young commercialists of this school of hate are thoroughly
imbued with the psychology of the dominant classes; even the boys who
come from the working class are on the way to the top, and the quicker
they learn to feel like gentlemen, the better fraternity they will
“make.” “I think organized labor should be killed,” said one
undergraduate to a friend of mine. So they are eager for strike-breaking
expeditions, and their “soldier president” has kept alive this
university tradition. When the electric workers went on strike, the
mayor of Berkeley smashed the strike with university boys.

And then came the seamen’s strike, which proved a more serious matter;
it is a lark to run a dynamo or a trolley car for a few days, but to
ship on a steamer is something you can’t get out of, and some
unfortunate boys who were trapped by the knavish university machine into
shipping as seamen on the Matson Line and the Dollar Line paid for their
blunder with their lives. Others of them came home thoroughly trained
radicals—having learned more in a few months below deck on a steamship
than they would have learned in a hundred years in the lap of their alma
mater. Some of the steamships broke down at sea, and the capitalist
newspapers were filled with scare stories about sabotage; but of course
the real reason was inexperienced labor. On the steamship Ohio the chief
engineer was a Washington athlete, the second engineer was a Boston
dental student, and the third engineer an undergraduate student of the
University of California!

All the time, you understand, the secret agents of the Better America
Federation are watching the university. When they find the least trace
of an unorthodox idea they report it, and the unorthodox person if he be
a student, fails to pass his examination, or if he be an instructor he
is let out upon any handy pretext. (All appointments in the university
are for one year only; even the full professors have no tenure!). Take,
for example, the case of three young instructors of English, whose
conscience prompted them to sign a petition to the President for
revision of the sentences of political prisoners. They were summoned
before the acting heads of the university, and implored to withdraw
their signatures. There was a bill before the legislature to increase
the salaries of all professors, and loyalty to their colleagues should
prompt them not to jeopardize this bill! One of them, Witter Bynner, the
poet, asked if he might announce that the deans requested that he place
the interests of the university above the interests of the country.
Later, after Barrows had come in, it was intimated to these evil three
that their contracts with the university would not be renewed. But this,
of course, was not because of their unorthodox ideas; oh, no—they were
not wanted because they had failed to qualify themselves for higher
degrees by doing “research work!”

Just what is meant by “research work” in the University of California?
It means the digging out of absurd details about far off and long dead
writings, such as “the use of _tu_ and _vous_ in Molière.” This is the
kind of thing you must do if you want to rise to prominence in a
university of the interlocking directorate. With what desperate
seriousness they take such work you may learn from a program submitted
to the department of English by the dean of the summer session. This
program quotes the president of Northwestern University as follows:

  When you consider the value of your personal research, you will
  without any doubt regret that you have not paid more attention to this
  phase of your activities. You will discover that distinction in a
  professor is usually founded on successful research; that men for our
  faculty positions are selected largely on the basis of research
  ability; that the most essential credential is a research degree; that
  promotions within the faculty are based very largely on research
  accomplishments; that the only official record made by the university
  of the members of this faculty is the record of the publications of
  each member of the faculty; that the administration officers scan this
  list from year to year to see which men are engaged in production
  research; that research is looked upon with favor by every one of your
  associates.

So on through a long chant in praise of research, research, research.
And the dean who quotes this adds:

  All this is absolutely true of the University of California. We may
  deplore this emphasis upon research, but it is a fact, a fact which
  must be reckoned with in our plans for ourselves, for one another, and
  for the department.

What the poor dean means when he says “it is a fact,” is simply that it
is the administration policy, and no one has the courage to oppose it.
The authorities of the university know no vital thing for scholars to
do, and are in terror of all genuine activities of the spirit; therefore
they sentence men to spend their lives rooting in the garbage heaps of
man’s past history, while their students go to hell with canned jazz and
boot-leg whiskey and “petting parties.” Apparently some of the faculty
are likewise not puritanical, for an undergraduate publication, “The
Laughing Horse,” remarked last spring that “the professors of Latin and
Greek would much rather see a leg-show than the ‘Medea’ of Euripides.”

There was one instructor at the university who made a real and
successful effort to lift the thoughts of students above “leg-shows.”
That was Witter Bynner, one of our distinguished poets, and incidentally
a most lovable and delightful human being. He was invited to the
university as a special lecturer on poetry, and made an extraordinary
success. But, alas, he was one of the men who signed the petition for
the political prisoners; also he wrote twelve lines of rather stunning
poetry, which you may find as a frontispiece to the volume, “Debs and
the Poets.” As Bynner says: “Certain eminent citizens demanded my
dismissal and brought upon me attacks of every imaginable kind,
personal, social and professional.” Bynner’s year at the university
expired; and the authorities did not ask him to stay on. The students
organized a class of their own, and begged him to meet them, outside the
campus; also they issued a volume of verse in his honor. Come back to
the University of California a hundred years from now and you will find
that Witter Bynner has become an object of “research!”




                              CHAPTER XXXI
                    THE DRILL SERGEANT ON THE CAMPUS


These great military universities come to be run more and more on the
lines of an army; everything rigid, precise and formal, all emergencies
provided for, all policies fixed. The passion of the military mind for
uniformity and regimentation is comically exhibited in an article
published by President Barrows in the University of California
“Chronicle,” April, 1922, entitled “What Are the Prospects of the
University Professor?” It was read before the Board of Alumni Visitors,
who must have been edified, to note how completely the professor’s life
had been laid out for him by his thoughtful superiors. Colonel Barrows
has a vision of the American college professor, taking in this country
the place of the ruling classes of Britain, who govern “by reason of
rank, breeding and traditional influence.” With the idea of attracting
that kind of man, President Barrows submits a schedule of his life,
showing how much he will receive every year, when he will marry and have
a family, when he will travel, what degrees he will get. The president
does not specify what he is to eat, but he will assuredly not eat much,
with a wife and “one or more children” on a salary starting at a hundred
and fifty dollars a month.

One detail in this article intrigued me, so I wrote President Barrows a
letter, as follows:

  You state the salary of the young instructor, and say: “It has
  permitted him to marry and to provide for the birth of one or more
  children.” The question which this suggests to me, and which you do
  not answer, is how many more children? Manifestly, the salary
  suggested would not make possible the raising of more than two, or
  three at the outside; but the young professor is 29 or 30 years of
  age, and he might have eight or ten children. What I should like to
  know is, what would happen to him if he did so? It is a fact that most
  of your professors don’t, and there seems to be in your article the
  implicit understanding that they mustn’t; so I am forced to assume
  that you favor what is known as Birth Control, and tacitly recommend
  it. I am one of those who believe that the methods of Birth Control
  ought to be made known, not merely to the cultured classes, but to the
  working classes, and I should like to know the stand of the president
  of the University of California on this subject. Will you answer for
  publication these two specific questions: First, do you recognize that
  your article implies the prevention of conception by the married
  instructors of your university? Second, would you advocate legislation
  to permit working class families to obtain a knowledge of these same
  methods?

President Barrows is usually rather free about taking up controversies,
but on this occasion he for some reason thought it best to lie low![I]

-----

Footnote I:

  When this chapter was published serially, President Barrows was
  interviewed by a reporter for the San Francisco “Daily News.” He said:
  “As for Upton Sinclair, I received a lengthy letter from him not long
  ago asking me to debate on some very stupid subjects. As there seemed
  to be no sense in the letter, I paid no attention to him.” The reader
  will be able to judge for himself whether there was any sense in my
  letter; also of the likelihood that President Barrows really thought
  there was no sense in it. For my part, I think the above statement
  puts President Barrows in the classification of those college
  presidents who do not always tell the truth.

-----

Being devoted to the training of young aristocrats, this school of
imperialism has no great fondness for the vulgar modern activities known
as “extension work.” “University extension,” be it explained, consists
in traveling about, giving education to tiresome common people, who had
no leisure to get it when they were young, and so lack those British
qualifications of “rank, breeding and traditional influence.” At the
University of California was a “regular” professor by the name of Ira
Howerth, who was engaged in extension work, and took this work with
plebeian seriousness; all over the state women’s clubs and labor unions
clamored for his lectures, and his efforts to comply with their demands
led to endless conflict with the university authorities. The “consulting
committee” did everything to handicap him; he was forbidden to address
clubs in the city of Berkeley, and was refused the use of university
rooms, and of the library. He could get no appropriations; and when
finally the pressure of the people forced the legislature to grant
funds, the authorities resented this, and blamed Howerth as the cause of
money being “forced upon them.”

In the year 1917, during the Charter Day exercises, Professor Howerth
asked that some part of the time be given to the extension work. They
gave him Friday night, the end of the week’s activities, and on that
night they arranged a big banquet in San Francisco, expecting to take
all the people away. But Howerth invited President Van Hise of Wisconsin
and Oswald Garrison Villard, and had the biggest meeting of the week. Of
course, the university authorities were furious.

I can testify to Professor Howerth’s competence as a teacher, for I had
the pleasure of attending some of his lectures in Pasadena. They were
given in the Board of Trade rooms, where to a large audience of mature
men and women the professor gave intelligent explanations of the
sociology of Lester Ward. Here we were on the home ground of the Black
Hand, and it seemed to me inconceivable that the regents would permit
this kind of thing to go on; and they did not.

In bringing an end to it, they chose the most insulting and humiliating
method possible. Professor Howerth had his Sabbatical year, and while he
was in Paris, eleven days before the end of his leave of absence, he
received a letter from the president of the university, telling him that
he was “fired.” He made so bold as to return, and discovered that a
report which he had prepared before leaving, describing the development
of the extension work, had been taken over by another professor, and
signed by that professor’s name, and issued by the university, with no
credit given to Professor Howerth. He made every effort to find out what
were the charges against him, but could not get one word. He appeared
before the finance committee of the regents—five of our interlocking
directors, with Mr. Earl, attorney to Banker Fleishhacker, as chairman.
Professor Howerth stated his case, asking what wrong he had done. Said
Chairman Earl: “Has anybody anything to say on that?” No one had
anything to say, and the committee went on with the order of business,
leaving Professor Howerth standing there like a whipped school boy.

Such is the dignity of the teaching profession in the University of the
Black Hand. And what is the standing of scholarship? On that point hear
the weird experience of Professor Kiang, an eminent Chinese scholar,
formerly of the University of Pekin, who was invited to teach his native
language and literature to Californians for the munificent salary of
eighty dollars a month. Professor Kiang presented to the university an
extremely valuable library of Chinese books, which collection the
university casually accepted. It happened that Witter Bynner was once
asked by President Wheeler and Colonel Barrows whom he had found the
most interesting man in the place. “Undoubtedly Kiang,” responded
Bynner; and the two gentlemen looked disconcerted. “Kiang?” exclaimed
Wheeler, “Why he only gets eighty dollars a month!” Within a few days
the Oriental professor’s salary was raised to a hundred dollars a month!

Returning to China on a visit, Professor Kiang had an uncomfortable
experience. On the steamer an American borrowed a hundred dollars from
him, promising to return it at the journey’s end. Later, in China, when
Professor Kiang needed his money, the man turned on him with angry
threats, saying that he was known to be living with a woman not his
wife, and that the man would report him to the university and cause him
to lose his job.

Now, the situation regarding Professor Kiang’s wife was that for eight
years his first wife had been hopelessly insane. In many parts of
America you can divorce a wife who is insane, but in China you do not do
this, because to divorce a woman is to inflict both upon her and her
relatives a most dreadful disgrace. Insanity not being the woman’s
fault, nor the fault of her relatives, it is unthinkable in China to
seek a divorce for such a reason. What you do is to avail yourself of
the privilege of having a second wife. As a rule the Westernized Chinese
have but one wife, but in a case such as this they would have two, and
the second wife would be treated with especial consideration because of
the particular circumstances. When Professor Kiang married again, the
relatives of his first wife attended the ceremony, and this same
attitude to the matter was manifested by everyone. Witter Bynner went to
China with Kiang, to collaborate with him in translating Chinese poetry
into English, and Bynner writes:

  I can testify that the second wife has been signally honored; she was
  the first woman, for instance, to address a body similar to our
  chambers of commerce in the capital of Kiang’s native province, and
  she broke another precedent by addressing, together with her husband,
  the officers of Wu Pei-fu’s army. Wu Pei-fu is now, as you know, the
  Dictator of Pekin and more or less of China. It will interest you to
  know that he and his leading generals, being Christians, were
  concerned to know whether there might be any conflict between
  Socialism and Christianity, and found them upon investigation to be
  expressions of the same thing. If there were any objections to Kiang’s
  second wife, Wu Pei-fu, as a Christian, might have been expected to
  feel it. Perhaps his being a Socialist, however, incapacitates him for
  true morality!

It had been understood that Professor Kiang was to return to the
University of California; but now the Black Hand got busy. Not merely
was there a flaw in Kiang’s marriage certificate; also, he was a leading
Chinese Socialist, one of the founders of that movement in his own
country. So he received from President Barrows a cruel and insolent
letter, informing him that he was not to return. It was practically the
same thing as the Gorki story, and both Gorki and Kiang were enemies of
the interlocking directorate. But Semenoff was their friend, so you do
not find Colonel Barrows, in espousing his Cossack hero, mentioning the
fact that Semenoff was traveling in America with a lady not his wife;
still less do you find him mentioning those thirty most beautiful women
in Semenoff’s “summer car!”

Becoming aware of the Black Hand and its power in the institution,
independent-minded men seek other occupations; the sycophants and the
sluggards remain, and as a result, the quality of the teaching goes
down. Every year the boys and girls pour in from the cities and ranches
of California, and they are commanded to study dull subjects under dull
instructors, and they prefer football and flirtation. In Berkeley there
are twelve thousand, and in the Southern branch in Los Angeles four or
five thousand more. Immorality is more common than scholarship; the
conditions have become a scandal throughout the state, and our
imperialist president finds himself with a peck of trouble on his hands,
a board of quarreling regents who cannot agree what is to be done. There
is a flaw, apparently, in Colonel Barrows’ doctrine of the strong man;
the strong man does not always rule—especially when he is a stupid man!
So our “soldier president” has just asked to be excused from his job,
and allowed to become once more a humble Professor of Political
Ignorance.

P. S.—After this book has been put into type an interesting development
occurs at Berkeley. The editors of an independent student publication,
the “Laughing Horse,” asked my permission to quote extracts from these
chapters, and they printed six or eight pages in their issue of
November, 1922. The publication created great excitement at the
university, and a senior student by the name of Butler went to a
magistrate and swore out a warrant for the arrest of Roy Chanslor, the
“Laughing Horse” editor, upon the charge of publishing obscene matter.
The pretext was another article in the magazine, a letter from D. H.
Lawrence, the English novelist, reviewing and strongly condemning as
immoral a novel by Ben Hecht. But the real reason was obviously the
passages from “The Goose-step.” The “Daily Californian,” the student
paper, gave the thing away, denouncing “the printing of disgusting
articles by Upton Sinclair and other perverted ‘knockers.’ To jolt the
university they hurled and blatted the most unprecedented compilations
of lies that has (sic) yet found expression in these parts. At first the
students rose in righteous wrath to ‘tar and feather’ the perpetrators
of such foul, insane blusterings.”

I am informed that the action against Chanslor was instigated by a high
official of the university. The student, Butler, is a son of the
president of the California State Bar Association; on the eve of the
trial his father came to Berkeley and declared with indignation that his
son was being made a tool of, and worse, was being made a fool of. The
magistrate threw out the complaint, as it failed to contain the
necessary legal technicalities. Chanslor was summoned before the
Undergraduate Student Affairs Committee; he stood upon his rights, and a
day or two later was summoned before President Barrows and expelled from
the university. I quote an account of the matter, sent to me by one of
the editors of the “Laughing Horse”:

  Barrows said he was doing so by a recommendation from the Student
  Affairs Committee, and gave as his reason not only the D. H. Lawrence
  letter but the poem by Witter Bynner, “Little Fly.” He did not mention
  the excerpts from “The Goose-step.” How Barrows can have the face to
  expel any student from the university for obscenity is quite beyond
  me! I, myself, saw Barrows sit through a “Smoker Rally” (the men’s
  rally before the Big Game with Stanford), at which the football
  coaches and prominent alumni told the most vulgar and filthy stories
  that anyone ever heard. The speaker of the evening, an alumnus from
  Pasadena, told one story that I remember that one would hear only in
  the coarsest society. Moreover, the campus comic monthly, “The
  Pelican,” prints thinly disguised obscenities of all sorts that is
  countenanced without a murmur. Yet Barrows solemnly upbraided Chanslor
  for printing this frank, straightforward and really highly moral
  letter. Apparently everyone has been cautioned not to let any
  indignation over your exposé creep into the case again.

I also quote one paragraph from a letter addressed to President Barrows,
written by Roy Chanslor after his expulsion. I think it says about all
there is to say on the subject:

  You have apparently confused the sincere and fine and beautiful
  expression of a great artist and a brilliant and original thinker with
  the crude vulgarities and obvious obscenities regularly on tap at
  smoker rallies, and with the corrupt literature which I have heard is
  sold to those who desire it by bell-boys and train-boys. At the smoker
  rally held late in November, the night before the annual
  California-Stanford football game, it did not strike my attention that
  you did anything to stop the bawdy stories and the frankly vulgar
  exhibition of dancing which a student in black-face gave with a dummy
  stuffed to represent a woman, but it did strike my attention that you
  sat through the spectacle in a seat in the front row, tacitly, by your
  silence, countenancing the whole affair. This spectacle, which was
  frankly vulgar and obscene, apparently did not arouse in you any of
  the moral indignation which the letter of Mr. Lawrence did, a letter
  which I repeat is not obscene or corrupt or degenerate, but fine and
  sincere and beautiful.




                             CHAPTER XXXII
                         THE STORY OF STANFORD


Thirty miles south of San Francisco, sheltered behind the coast range of
mountains, lies the great institution with whose students the “Golden
Bear” does its fighting. Stanford University was founded by one of the
“Big Four” railroad kings, who for forty years or more plundered the
people of California. Like other railroad kings, Leland Stanford amused
himself by purchasing racehorses and state legislators, but he differed
from the rest in that he had a respect for knowledge. He wanted to be a
trustee of the University of California, and when he failed, he decided
to start a rival institution. When his only son died in early youth, the
heart-broken old man chose this means of perpetuating the boy’s name,
and he pledged to Leland Stanford, Jr., University his land, his
racehorses, and a part of his railroad stock; also a valuable asset in
the form of David Starr Jordan, a scientist and teacher with some real
interest in democracy.

Senator Stanford died in the midst of the panic of 1893, and his
university was in a predicament; there was no money on hand, and it was
impossible to sell any land, and parasites and blackmailers gathered in
a swarm—relatives and friends, legislators whom the senator had kept on
his payroll, newspaper editors and publishers he had used. The editor of
one San Jose newspaper sent in a bill for twenty-five hundred dollars
advertising—he had printed news about the opening of the university!
Senator Stanford left a hundred thousand dollars to every relative he
could find, hoping thereby to buy them off; but within twenty-four hours
of his death one of his relatives in New York forged his name to a check
for a hundred thousand dollars; another relative, a woman, was shot by
her husband, a gambler, because she did not get her money quickly
enough!

The only way to keep the university safe was to make it Mrs. Stanford’s
personal property; all the professors were listed as her private
servants—a device which some other presidents of universities might be
interested to make note of! For years the institution was supported from
Mrs. Stanford’s income, eked out by the occasional selling of a
racehorse. The job of running a university and a racing stable in
combination offered a diversified task for the widow of a railroad king
and a specialist in ichthyology. The senator had been offered a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for “Palo Alto,” a prize stallion; the offer
was refused—and next year the stallion died!

The university owned a fourth interest in the Central Pacific Railroad,
now a portion of the Southern Pacific; the other fourths were owned by
the Crocker estate, the Hopkins estate, and Collis P. Huntington, the
prize grabber of them all, who resented the university as an insult to
his lack of culture. He would “stop that circus some day,” he used to
say; describing it as “putting a two thousand dollar education into a
two hundred dollar boy.” Some years previously he had proposed that in
order to determine the value of the Central Pacific stock, each of the
four holders should put some of it on the market; this was done, and
Huntington secretly bought it all, and then turned Stanford out and had
himself made president of the road. Dr. Jordan described Huntington’s
motto as: “Anything is mine that is not nailed down, and nothing is
nailed that I can pry loose.” After Stanford’s death he tried to buy the
university holdings in the railroad for three million dollars; but the
university held on—and had better luck than Johns Hopkins University,
which was left a big block of Baltimore and Ohio stock by its founder,
and was frozen out by the big fellows, and did not get a dollar.
Ultimately the Stanford stock was sold to James Speyer for sixteen
millions.

Many and curious were the efforts made to get Mrs. Stanford’s money away
from her university. A preacher came and delivered a sermon about her
dead boy, in which he compared him to the youthful Jesus Christ—but he
did not get her millions for Methodism! The Catholics came, and they
deeply impressed the old lady’s failing mind with their bells and
incense and colored lights—but they did not persuade her to move the
Stanford girl-students to their school at Menlo Park! Bearing in mind
these tragedies averted, we may forgive our ichthyological diplomat for
some of the minor atrocities which he was unable to avert: for example,
the great bronze statue of Senator Stanford, with his wife and son
kneeling dutifully at his feet. This group is known to the irreverent
students as the “Holy Trinity,” and it used to stand in the middle of
the campus; but the elements were also irreverent, and so it has been
moved indoors, and fills the rotunda of the museum.

I do not know where in the world you can find a more curious and
pathetic monument to human vanity than the family rooms of this Stanford
museum; rooms full of great glass cases, filled with the domestic
implements and the clothes, the toys and the trophies of the tribe of
Stanford. Case No. One: The senator’s uniform, his military vest,
gloves, sword and pistols, which he never had occasion to use except on
parade. Case No. Two: the crockery and lamps used by the Stanford family
at all stages of its career. Case No. Three: the skirts and other
wearing apparel of Mrs. Stanford’s sisters—all these objects patiently
classified and labeled in the old lady’s handwriting. Case No. Four: the
photographs of the senator’s racehorses, the cups they won, and the
hoofs and ears of many of them. Case No. Five: sixty-two photographs of
the Stanford family—this not counting the photographs in other cases.
Case No. Six: the baby paintings, the chess set, and eight of the canes
of the only begotten son. Case No. Seven: his baby shoes, toilet set,
pens and cups. Case No. Eight: his boxing gloves, fishing lines, rifles,
magic lanterns. Case No. Nine: his wood carvings and other apparatus.
Case No. Ten: his toy boats and trains. Case No. Eleven: his soldiers,
cannon, drum. Poor, feeble lad, spoon-fed and coddled, he beat his
little drum, but the drum-sticks fell from his nerveless fingers. If he
had grown up he would have wasted the Stanford fortune, as the Pullman
boys, and the Goulds, and the Thaws, and the Crokers, and the Whitneys,
and the MCCormicks, and so many others. Instead, he died, and the world
has a university!

We continue our walk about the room. Case No. Twelve: the fans which
Mrs. Stanford wielded in a lifetime of fascination. Case No. Thirteen:
her souvenir spoons and necklaces. Case No. Fourteen: the senator’s
chair, and the canes which he carried, all carefully labeled as to where
he purchased them and carried them. A plain and humble author, I have
been able to go through life so far without ever owning a cane; but it
appears that a senator and railroad king must have twenty-four elaborate
and expensive ones; and posterity must have a fireproof building in
which to preserve them, and great steel doors, such as you find in the
vaults of a bank, to keep them safe from thieves. If you have not seen
enough, come downstairs, and inspect more of Leland’s toys, including
his old-fashioned bicycle. The students declare that somewhere in this
museum is hidden a model of Leland’s last breakfast of fried ham and
eggs; but this, of course, may be just youthful waggery.[J]

-----

Footnote J:

  A woman friend who has lived for sixteen years in Palo Alto swears to
  me that she has been shown, in the secret rooms of the museum, a
  porcelain plate containing a porcelain bologna sausage and a porcelain
  fried egg!

-----

We are told not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, and the saying should
perhaps apply to a university. We can hardly expect that a vain old
lady, put in charge of an institution of learning for ten or fifteen
years, would not busy herself to see that evil ideas were kept out of
it. In the Bryan campaign of 1896, there rose up in the university a big
bold fellow by the name of Ross, who actively favored Free Silver—which
meant the cutting in half of the wealth of all the interlocking
directors, except those who owned silver mines. Subsequently this bold
bad man made speeches opposing oriental immigration, whereas he knew
that Senator Stanford had been an ardent advocate of cheap Chinese
labor. Also he said to some of his students in the university that “a
railroad deal is a railroad steal!” So Mrs. Stanford served notice on
her president that Professor Ross must go; and this at the perilous time
when the Catholic cohorts were gathering, with their bells and incense
and colored lights and other magic spells! I could appreciate that
President Jordan was speaking from the depths of his heart when he said
to me: “The best thing that the founder of a university can do is to die
and let others run it!”

The radical professor was let out, and there was a terrific uproar, and
several others resigned. The controversy lasted all through the academic
year. Professor G. E. Howard, head of the department of history,
ventured to make a sarcastic reference to the incident in a lecture to a
class, and some weeks later received a letter from the president, asking
for his resignation; this was followed by a number of other
resignations, chiefly in Professor Howard’s department. This series of
events caused so much injury to Stanford’s reputation that the
authorities made a desperate effort to counteract the effects. The story
of what they did is told me by Professor A. O. Lovejoy, now of the
department of philosophy of Johns Hopkins, and at that time professor of
philosophy at Stanford. I quote from his letter:

  Late in the academic year, near the beginning of which Professor Ross
  was dismissed, a statement addressed to the public and designed for
  signature by members of the Stanford faculty was drawn—by whom I do
  not know—and an attempt was made to secure the signatures of all
  members (I believe) above the rank of instructor. Each teacher was
  invited to come separately to the office of one of the senior
  professors, a close personal friend of President Jordan; was there
  shown certain correspondence between Mrs. Stanford and President
  Jordan, which had not been made public; and was thereupon invited to
  sign the statement—which was to the effect that the signers, having
  seen certain unpublished documents, had arrived at the conclusion that
  President Jordan was justified in the dismissal of Professor Ross and
  that there was no question of academic freedom involved in the case.
  It was perfectly well understood by me, and I think by all who were
  shown the letters, that we were desired by the university authorities
  to sign the “round-robin”; and it was intimated that if any, after
  seeing the correspondence, should reach a conclusion contrary to that
  in the “round-robin,” they were at least expected to keep silence.

  Because of this last intimation I myself for some time refused to have
  the letters shown me; and consented finally to examine them only after
  stipulating that I should retain complete freedom to take such action
  afterwards as the circumstances might seem to me to require. When I
  read the letters they appeared to me to prove precisely the opposite
  to the two propositions contained in the statement to the public. They
  showed clearly (a) that President Jordan—-who under the existing
  constitution of the university was the official responsible in such
  matters—had been originally altogether unwilling to dismiss Ross, and
  had consented to do so only under pressure from Mrs. Stanford; (b)
  that the express grounds of Mrs. Stanford’s objection to Ross were
  certain public utterances of his, and that, therefore, the question of
  academic freedom was distinctly involved. I drew up a short statement
  to this effect, and after the “round-robin” was published,
  communicated it to the newspapers, at the same time declining the
  reappointment of which I had previously been notified. I was thereupon
  directed to discontinue my courses immediately. About the same time
  another man—-one of the best scholars and the most effective teachers
  in his department—-who had refused to sign, and was known to
  disapprove strongly of the administration’s conduct, but who had given
  no public expression of his opinion, was notified that he would not be
  reappointed; and it was currently reported in the faculty that the
  vice-president, then acting president, of the university, Dr. Branner,
  had announced a policy of (in his own phrase) “shaking off the loose
  plaster.”

Professor Lovejoy goes on to tell how some years later, when he was
visiting Palo Alto, “one of the signers of the collective statement to
the public told me that he had signed with great reluctance, and with a
sense of humiliation, but, since he had a family of young children, he
had not felt that he could afford to risk the loss of his position. I
cannot, of course, give this man’s name.” Professor Lovejoy calls
attention to the fact that practically all the men who resigned were
either unmarried or were married men without children. It might seem as
if Francis Bacon, a scholar himself, had foreseen the plutocratic empire
of American education when he wrote, three hundred years ago: “He that
hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”




                             CHAPTER XXXIII
                          THE WIND OF FREEDOM


The poor old lady died at last, but she did not leave her fortune to be
adminstered by an eminent ichthyologist, badly tainted with democracy
and pacifism. On the contrary, she left it to a board of fifteen
trustees—the usual interlocking directorate. As first grand duke we find
none other than Mr. Timothy Hopkins, son of Senator Stanford’s colleague
in the “Big Four.” Mr. Hopkins is president of a milling company, and
director in a trust company, an ice company, and a telephone and
telegraph company. As second grand duke there is Mr. Frank B. Anderson,
president of the Bank of California, the great Standard Oil institution
of the state. I am told that Mr. Anderson is there to represent the
Morgan interests. He is vice-president of another bank, and director in
three gas and electric companies, and in numerous other great concerns,
including the Spring Valley Water Company, celebrated in the San
Francisco graft prosecutions.

Mr. Bourn, the president of this company, is also on the board; and Mr.
Grant, described to me by a friend who knows him as “an idle
millionaire, the son of an old money grubber”; but he can’t really be so
idle, being vice-president of a gas company and an oil company, chairman
of a power company, director of the Bank of California, another bank, a
trust company, another power company, a gas and electric company,
another gas company, and a steel company. Also there is Mr. Nickel, “who
married forty million dollars,” and is a director of the Bank of
California, president of an irrigation company, a live stock company,
and of the greatest land company in California; also Mr. Newhall, the
son of an old-time auctioneer, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary,
vice-president of a great land company. In addition to these, there are
three prominent corporation lawyers, two judges, both very conservative,
a banker, an insurance man, and Mr. Herbert Hoover, than whom the
plutocracy has no more faithful servant in these United States. One of
the corporation lawyers, T. T. C. Gregory, is that Captain Gregory who
was Mr. Hoover’s representative in Hungary, and used his control of the
distribution of the relief funds and supplies furnished by the American
people, for the purpose of breaking the revolution of the workers of
Hungary, and bringing into power the infamous Horthy, who drowned the
hopes of the Hungarian workers in a sea of blood. Few blacker deeds have
been committed by American class-greed; but such is the state of our
public opinion, that Captain Gregory came home and boasted of it in a
series of articles in “World’s Work,” and Mr. Hoover stood back of him,
and the Stanford trustees elected him to their exclusive board, and made
him their secretary!

Such are the men in charge of the Stanford millions. David Starr Jordan
has retired, and the great university is governed from the cozy
arm-chairs of the Pacific Union Club of San Francisco. As president they
have appointed a physician, Dr. Wilbur, who learned the Goose-step at
two of the Kaiser’s universities. He aspires to be, like Colonel
Barrows, “a man on horseback.” In the days before America entered the
war some of the students of Stanford were taking military training, and
I am informed by one who was present at the graduating ceremonies that
President Wilbur shook hands with all those who were in uniform, and
refused to shake hands with those who were not in uniform. More
recently, at an alumni reunion, he gave a curious proof of the abject
condition of spirit to which the lackeys of the plutocracy have come. He
was describing how he went to the dock in New York to welcome Herbert
Hoover home from abroad; said President Wilbur: “I saw one of America’s
biggest bankers throw his arms around him, and I said to myself: ‘At
last Stanford has arrived’!” The gentleman who tells me of this
incident, a scholar and a scientist, reports: “He said it in sweet
unconsciousness, and at least half a dozen of my friends turned in my
direction and gave me appreciative glances.”

Stanford was founded for the purpose of giving the young people of
California a free education; that was the basis of its democratic
spirit—but the interlocking trustees have now decided to exclude all
those common people who cannot pay two hundred and twenty-five dollars a
year. So the tone of the place is rapidly altering, and on my recent
visit one member of the senior class remarked to me, “I have seen such a
change in my four years that I’m glad I’m through.” Two years ago a
group of the students wished to start a liberal club for free
discussion. A Chinese student writes me what happened, and I quote from
his letter, leaving his quaint English as it stands, because the fine
spirit of the writer shines through it so very clearly.

  Then we received discouraging advices from outsiders, principally from
  faculty members. None was willing to encourage us of such study.
  Occasionally individuals received discourtesy from their society,
  because of being connected to this movement. For instance, I was
  dismissed from a position soon after I was found out that I was “an
  ardent student of Socialism.” Another illustration, I was short in
  finance once. Went to see the Dean of Man to ask for a loan from the
  university. Was at first refused this request because I was reported
  to that office being “socialistic in belief.” Shortly after, a great
  majority of us left Stanford on account of their graduation, the
  movement died down gradually.

Now it is starting once more. I have a letter from another student, who
is going to try again, in spite of warning from the older students that
it may result in his not getting his diploma. The motto of Stanford used
to be “the wind of freedom blows”; but this sentiment was expressed in
German, and so a few years ago the trustees dropped it. Of course we
know that talk about “freedom” nowadays is German propaganda, or else
Bolshevik.

In the effort to introduce a little democracy into the faculty,
President Jordan established an Academic Council, which was supposed to
deal with questions suitable to the intelligence of professors. The
educational affairs of the state were in a bad way, and some professors
thought that was a proper subject for their attention. The Progressive
administration of Hiram Johnson had just come into power, and the
academic council adopted a resolution, favoring a commission to
reorganize the educational system of the state. But the interlocking
trustees would not stand for any dealings between their professors and a
state administration which was pledged to put them out of politics.
Grand Duke Timothy Hopkins came hurrying down, and ordered the Academic
Council to withdraw their resolution—which they did. To one of the
professors Mr. Hopkins made the grim statement, “We are coming back;”
meaning thereby that the railroad and other big grafters were going to
take over the government of California again—which they have done.

In her decree concerning the Stanford trust, Mrs. Stanford laid down the
rule, phrased as a request, that no Stanford professor “shall
electioneer among or seek to dominate other professors or the students
for the success of any political party or candidate in any political
contest.” This rule, like all other such rules, is interpreted to mean
that Stanford professors renounce their rights as citizens—when they do
not happen to agree with the politics of the plutocratic trustees. Thus
I note that no one makes any objection when President Wilbur joins with
President Barrows of California in issuing a manifesto to the people of
the state, opposing some of the constitutional amendments now being
submitted to the ballot. Neither do the Stanford authorities object that
Professor “Jimmie” Hyde spends two months campaigning with Mr. Moore,
candidate of the power interests and other reactionary business groups
for the Republican nomination for senator.

I have shown you the University of California regents dominating
politics and finance through the great companies which turn water power
into electricity and distribute it over the state. I have shown you the
University of California helping these power companies to defeat the
bill for the public development and operation of hydro-electric power.
And now we come to Stanford and we find one trustee heavily interested
in power companies, and several others in electric companies, and others
acting as bankers, lawyers and judges for such companies. And what does
Stanford have to say officially on the campaign for this hydro-electric
power bill?

There is in California a “League of Municipalities,” an official
organization of the communities of the state. They hold a convention
once a year; the officials of cities and towns attend as delegates,
and deal with all matters concerning the welfare of their
communities—sanitation, health, paving, taxes, public utilities, etc.
This summer Stanford University extended the hospitality of its
buildings for the sessions of the convention, and of its dormitories
as lodgings for the delegates; but the faculty of the University and
the citizens of Palo Alto learned to their surprise that one of the
sessions of the convention was to be held at the Community House in
the town of Palo Alto, instead of being held in the university hall. I
have a letter from a gentleman who was present as an official guest at
this session, and he explains the mysterious change of location.

  At its opening the President, Mayor Louis Bartlett, of Berkeley, said
  that the delegates should be informed why this particular session was
  being held in a different place from the others, and then proceeded to
  read a letter from President Newhall of the Board of Trustees, asking
  them to omit the Water and Power Act from their program in the
  University buildings, as the university did not wish to be understood
  as taking sides, and any action they might take might be interpreted,
  incorrectly, as being the action of the university. There appeared to
  be no objection to the danger of the university’s being similarly
  misunderstood in regard to half a dozen other proposed constitutional
  amendments! The stupid officers of the League didn’t take the hint, as
  gentlemen should, and drop the offending subject from the program
  entirely. They merely called the session meeting in the Community
  House in Palo Alto (which has nobly served as an open forum upon other
  critical occasions) and there we listened to a vigorous debate all
  afternoon, led by Rudolph Spreckels and Francis J. Heney on the one
  side and Allison Ware and Eustace Cullinan on the other, at the close
  of which a vote was taken which was unanimous for the Water and Power
  Act, with the exception of the vote of San Francisco, the most
  prominent figure in whose delegation was Supervisor (ex-Mayor) Eugene
  Schmitz—with some public corporation corruption record!




                             CHAPTER XXXIV
                         THE STANFORD SKELETON


I have referred to the dissatisfaction of Grand Duke Timothy Hopkins at
the coming into power of a progressive government in California. This
event was especially embarrassing to the Stanford trustees, because of a
family skeleton which for many years they had been hiding in their
academic closet. You understand that these high-up masters of finance
have an elaborate system for plundering the railroads and public utility
companies which they control. They have holding companies and investment
companies and subsidiary concerns of various sorts, whereby they skim
off the cream of the profits, without interference by public
commissions. Nobody but a few insiders today can form any idea where the
profits of an American railroad or public utility corporation are going,
or what should be the income from any particular investment. And now,
here are these same smooth gentlemen administering the investments of a
university; what more natural than that it should occur to them to
handle these funds in the same manner?

Apparently old Senator Stanford foresaw this, for his trust deed
provided that the Governor of the state should receive a complete report
each year upon the financial affairs of the trust. But the Governor of
the state never received that complete report. For many years the
faculty of Stanford, who were living on short rations, could get no
statement whatever; the trustees allowed the university the lump sum of
eight hundred thousand dollars a year, and no explanations. Finally,
about 1908, after some years of agitation, a statement was prepared and
circulated at a board meeting. It was the first financial statement
which President Jordan had ever seen, and he badly wanted a copy of it,
so he “swiped” it—at least so he told a member of the faculty, who told
me. He called a meeting of the full professors, to whom he gave certain
figures purporting to be the income of the university trust as
communicated to him, but one of the professors who had made a detailed
study of the court schedule of Mrs. Stanford’s estate pointed out that
the interest on the bonds there scheduled amounted to more than the
purported total submitted by President Jordan—this not counting other
sources of income. And Trustee Crothers, in a letter to me, admits that
during the period he held the Pacific Improvement stock in trust the
income from this one item amounted to two million dollars in thirty-one
months, which is just about eight hundred thousand dollars a year! After
that nothing more appears to have been heard or seen of this financial
statement.

These facts are known to many who are interested in the university; they
were known to Thorstein Veblen, who was a professor in Stanford for
three years. In 1918 Veblen published a book entitled, “The Higher
Learning in America,” in which he referred briefly to this scandal. But
his sense of politeness toward the university caused him to withhold its
name—which got him into trouble with Professor Brander Matthews. If I
tell you this story, it will lead us off the trail of Stanford for a
page or two; but it will teach us about the prestige of universities and
how it is maintained, and we shall thus be better able to understand the
Stanford skeleton, and how it has been kept hidden all these years.

I am told by a person high up in Columbia University that it was
Nicholas Murray Butler, sitting in his high watch-tower and keeping
guard over his empire of education, who first saw this dangerous book of
Veblen’s, and turned it over to his henchman, Brander Matthews, to be
“slated.” Matthews wrote what was supposed to be a book review, but was
really an assassination, and the New York “Times,” which exists to
perform these little services for the plutocracy, gave it prominence.
Matthews found one trivial grammatical error in Veblen’s book, and
another printer’s error which could be laid to Veblen; on this basis he
accused of illiteracy the most brilliant economic satirist in the world!
Because of Veblen’s politeness in failing to name Stanford, Brander
Matthews described him as “a creature who creeps up stealthily with a
stiletto to deal a stab in the back.” Says Matthews: “On page 67 and on
page 70 Mr. Veblen seems to suggest that there are boards of trustees
whose members make a personal profit out of the funds entrusted to them;
the insinuation is hedged about with weazel words—i. e., ‘instances of
the kind are not wholly unknown, though _presumably_ (!) exceptional.’”

To appreciate this extreme piety of Professor Brander Matthews, you
would have to see him, as I have, dangling a cigarette from his lower
lip as he lectures to his students, and causing these prematurely wise
young men to chuckle at his worldly wit. For Brander is a club man and
cynic, one of the very shrewdest, and he knows what butters parsnips. If
in the bosom of the Century Club he and his friend, Nicholas Miraculous,
were to hear a story about a member of a school board getting advance
information and buying up real estate, or about a college trustee
handling the investment of trust funds in such a way as to make “honest
graft” out of it, the two of them would tip each other a wink. But when
they are talking for publication—when they set out to assassinate a
dangerous radical—the two cronies take on an air of innocent
trustfulness which has not been met with in the world since Moses
Primrose came home from the fair with his gross of green spectacles with
silver rims and shagreen cases!

For my part I don’t want to take any chance of being called “a creature
who creeps up stealthily with a stiletto to deal a stab in the back!”
Whatever my old friend Professor Matthews may say about me when he comes
to assassinate this book in the New York “Times,” let him at least put
me under his other classification—that more respectable person “who
comes straight at us with a bowie knife in his hand.” Before I finish
this volume I shall give Professor Matthews several cases of university
and college trustees misusing funds; in a succeeding volume, I shall
show him school board members getting commissions from book companies,
and buying up land to sell to the public for school sites. If Professor
Matthews will obtain a copy of a printed report made in 1908 to Mayor
Taylor of San Francisco by a graft investigating committee, he will find
it proven that one of the regents of the University of California
invested university funds in a “French Restaurant” building on the
corner of Geary and Mason streets, constructed by him with a view to its
use as a house of assignation. And if that seems too far off for
Professor Matthews, let him investigate the properties in New York City
on which his own university holds its mortgages, and he will find that
one of them at least was being used as a disorderly house last spring!
Or let him run up to Rochester, where the university is moving out to a
magnificent new site, furnished by Mr. Eastman, the kodak king, and all
around that site he will find that members of the board of trustees and
their relatives and friends have been making money buying up real estate
on advance information. Or let him visit the Connecticut College for
Women, at New London, and hear the story of Frederick Sykes, the recent
president, who discovered that the trustees were stealing the funds of
the college, even to the coal, and tried to interfere with them and was
fired from his job! One of the trustees was a high school principal, and
the board furnished him an automobile to go out and collect funds. He
never got any funds, but continued to use the car, and when the scandal
was exposed, it was explained that he had arranged to have the price of
the car returned to the college in his will. The grand duke who ran this
board of trustees was a multi-millionaire, who had set them a bad
example by living a dissolute life. He wanted an inn-keeper’s wife, and
paid the inn-keeper forty thousand dollars to get a divorce from her;
then the grand duke married the lady, and got an honorary degree from
his college!

With this much of preliminary, we return to Stanford, to see just what
this super-plutocratic board of trustees has done. To begin with, let me
explain that the holding concern devised by the “Big Four” plunderers of
the Central-Southern Pacific, for the purpose of skimming off the cream
of the profits, was known as the Pacific Improvement Company. The
affairs of this concern have been kept a dark secret; the holdings of
Stanford in Pacific Improvement stock were not made over to the Stanford
trust by Mrs. Stanford, but were placed in the hands of Judge Crothers,
a trustee, and by him turned over to the Stanford trust after Mrs.
Stanford died. In the last annual report of the treasurer of the
university, I find the value of this holding listed at one hundred
dollars for twenty-five hundred shares, with “dividends from earnings”
for the year of $2,482.44, and “liquidation dividends” of two hundred
and seventy-five thousand dollars. That is a pretty good earning
capacity for a hundred dollars’ worth of stock, you must admit! You see
how the big insiders operate—no one knows what this stock is really
worth. In his letter to me Trustee Crothers admits that “there were a
number of reasons why Mrs. Stanford did not wish the whole world, nor
even all of the trustees of the university to know the terms ... of the
Pacific Improvement trust.” No probate courts, or inheritance tax
appraisers, or other unfriendly investigators were ever to have a chance
to stick their noses into Pacific Improvement!

Next, these super-plutocratic trustees turned over to Stanford
University the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars a year, without
explanation, and this sum of money was deposited in the Union Trust
Company of San Francisco without interest. Let Professor Brander
Matthews inquire around among his banker friends in New York, and find
out how much they would be willing to pay him in the way of interest on
a deposit account, amounting at its maximum to eight hundred thousand
dollars a year! I am informed that when Mr. Anderson came into the
board, representing the Morgan interests in the Standard Oil Bank of
California, he pointed out that that arrangement was not a profitable
one for the university. Also, I am told by a Stanford professor, in
whose rigid integrity I have many reasons for trusting, that he once
heard one of these trustees state angrily that the board had that
afternoon made a loan of five hundred thousand dollars to one of their
own members, at a ridiculously low rate of interest on the real estate
security offered. Afterwards the trustee who had borrowed this money got
into trouble, and no one knows how much money the university lost. In
the last president’s report I find a “capital decrease” recorded of
$17,320 on Sacramento Northern Railway bonds. I also find an item,
“Stock not recorded on books, when acquired in 1919 at Northern Electric
Company reorganization.” This is only one sample—nobody knows how many
other items are “not recorded on books!”

There are other matters of record which can be verified by anyone. These
trustees are the high-up members of the California plutocracy, the
shrewdest business men the state possesses; they work diligently for
their own financial interests, and have vastly increased their personal
fortunes during the last thirty years. But what have they done for
Stanford? They have made failures of the most important business
transactions they have managed for the university. The president of the
board of trustees is one of the richest ranchers in California, and
there are on the board officials and directors of several of the state’s
colossal land companies; how comes it that men like Mr. Newhall and Mr.
Nickel have never been able to tell Stanford how to make a success of
its big ranches? The Palo Alto, Vina and Gridley ranches all failed, and
the last two were finally sold at sacrifice prices. There were something
like a hundred thousand acres, sold for about four million dollars,
which is forty dollars an acre. The Gridley ranch was sold at a price so
low that every piece of it was almost immediately saleable at an advance
about forty per cent, without further subdivision; a great part of this
land is now being held for two hundred and seventy-five dollars an acre.

And these same first-class business men have carried on elaborate
building programs at the peak of high prices; they have leased a
wonderful building site for a long term of years, with the privilege of
buying at any time during the life of the lease, at a price set at the
beginning of the lease! They have killed Stanford as a democratic
institution, and brought it close to the rocks of bankruptcy, by
starting a medical school in San Francisco, against the judgment of the
best experts, and allowing the expenses of that school to swallow up the
funds of Stanford. That they had doubt as to the success of the medical
school was shown by their resolution in 1908, to the effect that this
school should never be allowed to take more than twenty-five thousand
dollars a year out of Stanford’s funds. But in the last president’s
report I find the medical school with a minus balance of a hundred and
nineteen thousand dollars—and this does not include the expenses of the
instruction at Palo Alto, comprising the first four or five years of the
course. For instance, the biological group alone shows a deficit of a
hundred and thirty thousand dollars!

So much for the handling of the Stanford trust. If I had a life-time in
which to study universities, I should like to see what care has been
taken with the funds of the University of the United Gas Improvement
Company of Philadelphia, and with those of the University of the Steel
Trust, at Pittsburgh, and with those of the University of Heaven, at
Syracuse, and with those of the Mining-Camp University at Denver. I
should like to settle down in New York and make a thorough financial
study of the University of the House of Morgan, and tell Professor Moses
Primrose the names of all those trustees and professors who got advance
news of the moving of the university to Morningside Heights; I should
like to raise a fund and have a search made of the title records, and
give him a list of the various lots and parcels of land which now belong
to Barnard College, and figure up the total of the fortunes cleared by
the insiders who purchased the old insane asylum which stood on that
site! But maybe Professor Moses Primrose would call that “honest graft!”




                              CHAPTER XXXV
                   THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LUMBER TRUST


We take the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was plundered by the
founder of Stanford, aided by the father of a Stanford trustee and the
father of a California trustee, and which now has a Rutgers College
trustee, an Equitable Trust, a Guaranty Trust, and a National City Bank
director. We travel north for a day and a little more, and find
ourselves in a country ruled with iron hand by three great lumber
companies, and the interlocking banks which finance them. The
headquarters of this oligarchy of the Northwest are at Portland and
Seattle, and we begin with the former city. You expect, perhaps, to find
a lumber country crude and wild; but you will find in Portland an old
city with a long-established aristocracy, as much concerned with its
ancestors as Philadelphia.

Fifteen years ago there was a strong movement for social justice in
Oregon, led by reformers who fondly imagined that if you gave the people
the powers of direct legislation they would have the intelligence to
protect their own interests. We see now that the hope was delusive; the
people have not the intelligence to help themselves, and the
interlocking directorate is vigorously occupied to see that they do not
get this intelligence. To this end they utilize two institutions, Reed
College in Portland, which is privately endowed, and the University of
Oregon, located in the neighboring town of Eugene. As we have seen with
Eastern universities, it makes no particle of difference whether an
institution is directly owned and controlled by the plutocracy, or
indirectly controlled through the plutocracy’s political machine.

The grand duke who attends to the education of Oregon is Mr. A. L.
Mills, president of the First National Bank of Portland, and vice
president of a trust company and an insurance company which handle the
finances of the state. Mr. Mills is an active and efficient ruler; as
his right-hand man he maintains a political boss, Gus Moser, and through
him he beat the teachers’ tenure law in Oregon, denouncing it as a move
to establish a “teachers’ soviet.” He called in the Black Hand from
California to his aid, and the pamphlets of Mr. Clum were distributed in
Oregon, and a law was put through the legislature to compel teachers to
take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, the flag, and the state.
There is as yet no law requiring any oath of loyalty to truth, to
freedom, and to justice.

In Reed College was a president, Foster, who had progressive ideas. He
hired a liberal young professor who had just been fired from the
University of Washington, Joseph K. Hart, now one of the editors of “The
Survey”; and for three years the interlocking trustees fought to get rid
of Professor Hart, and of Foster, who stood by Hart. Under such
circumstances the regular procedure is to starve out the college; but
they could not very well do it in this case, because they owned all the
real estate surrounding the college, and the college was the main source
of the real estate’s value. Nevertheless, the editor of the Portland
“Oregonian,” the old Tory newspaper which manages the thinking of the
people of Oregon, laid down the law that Reed College should get no
publicity so long as Hart and Foster stayed.

The interlocking trustee who runs Reed College is Mr. James B. Kerr, who
studied law in the office of an ancient reactionary, Senator Spooner,
and is general counsel for Mr. Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad
Company. Mr. Kerr evolved from his legal mind a scheme to have a larger
board of regents, taking in the former trustees, and making them a
minority; so President Foster retired, and Professor Hart, who was away
doing war work, was authorized to stay away![K] A professor of history
from the University of Washington was asked to become the new president,
and when he was installed, Mr. Mills, in his role as general overseer of
education, attended the ceremonies and made the principal address, in
which he laid down the law to the new incumbent: “The business men of
Oregon wish the youth of the state to become this and not that, we wish
them to be ‘shaped’ in this way and not that way.” Educators who were
present described to me the insolence, not merely of the grand duke’s
words, but of his manner. The board of regents of Reed College now
consists of Mr. Kerr; Mr. Ladd, chairman of the Ladd and Tilton Bank; an
elderly department store proprietor; a reactionary judge; and a retired
clergyman.

-----

Footnote K:

  One professor vigorously denies that this was the purpose of the
  enlarging of the board; but no one can deny that this was the effect.
  When I submit this comment to this gentleman, he tells me that it is
  “misleading.” At the same time he gives me an opportunity to test his
  accuracy. He says: “It is my recollection that Mr. Hart was not
  encouraged by the council to expect the increased salary, which he
  demanded as a condition of his return.” I submitted this proposition
  to Professor Hart, who replied:

  “I hope Professor X’s memory is usually more reliable than this. No
  question of salary was involved. Frankly, I do not _know_ what was
  involved. I was on leave of absence, in the East. My leave of absence
  covered the academic year 1919-20. Toward the middle of the year,
  finding that I was anxious to remain in the East another year, I asked
  the college authorities for an extension of my leave for another year.
  You can see that that request involved no financial obligation on the
  part of the college, as I was on leave without pay and merely asked
  for a continuance of that status for another year. That was the whole
  question. Moreover, the college authorities were never courteous
  enough to tell me what had happened in the case. However, a friend in
  the faculty who knew of the discussions wrote me that the council felt
  that in view of the general situation it was best for me not to come
  back to the college, and that therefore extending my leave would be an
  empty form. Those are the facts.”

-----

Next for the state university. Here we have to deal with a “war case.” I
do not plan to make use of “war cases” as such, for I realize that
intolerance in war time becomes what Barrows of California said it ought
to be—a virtue. The only war cases to which I shall refer are those in
which the war was a pretext, and the real motive was to get rid of an
enemy of the plutocracy. My investigations indicate that this kind of
war case constitutes one hundred per cent of the total. There may have
been some professors in American universities and colleges who
sympathized with the German Kaiser and desired to see him win; all I can
say is that I have not come upon such a case.

At the University of Oregon was Mr. Allen Eaton, one of the most
public-spirited young teachers it has been my fortune to hear about.
There was an epidemic of typhoid in the town of Eugene, and eighty of
the students were ill, and more than two hundred of the
townspeople—twenty-two of them died within a fortnight. Mr. Eaton
ascertained from the physicians of the town that the city water was
contaminated, and so he published an article advising everyone to boil
the water before drinking it. The water supply was controlled by a
private water company, in which the banks were interested, also
prominent members of the Eugene Commercial Club. Mr. Eaton’s banker and
others of these citizens undertook to “persuade” him to keep quiet about
the epidemic; “so much talk is giving the town a black eye.” They made
threats which forced the young professor either to “knuckle down” or to
fight in the open. He chose the latter course, and he forced municipal
ownership of the waterworks; a modern filtration system was installed,
and in ten years there has not been a single case of typhoid traceable
to the city water. We shall find in the course of this book many boards
of trustees laying down the law that university professors are not
allowed to take part in politics, but I think you must admit that in
this case it might fairly be claimed that Mr. Eaton was forced into
politics to protect his own self-respect.

He was six times elected to the Oregon state legislature, his chief
local opponent being a hard-boiled politician in the hire of the
Southern Pacific Railroad. Eaton made in the legislature an immaculate
record; he exposed and abolished a wasteful type of road which the
contractors were building in the state; he planned the Oregon building
at the San Francisco Exposition, the most beautiful building on the
grounds; he labored to introduce art into county fairs—and if you know
what an American county fair is you can understand what a job the young
instructor had! All this time his pay stayed low and promotion was
lacking; nevertheless, he gave lectures for the people at the university
and all over the state, and taught them what true art means—the people’s
own creation of beauty in their daily lives.

People who have lived all their lives in Oregon assure me that there has
never been a man, either in the university or in the state legislature,
who has done as much for education as Allen Eaton did. He undertook a
campaign to increase the appropriation for the university; the governor
of the state opposed him—this gentleman, being wealthy, sent his
children to a fashionable university in the East. Eaton put through a
bill to raise the appropriation from $47,500 to $125,000, and when the
governor vetoed the proposition, he directed a state-wide referendum
campaign and carried the measure. He worked equally hard for the public
schools; but at the same time he committed the crime of forcing the
taxation of water-power sites, and advocating the direct election of
United States senators. Still worse, he committed the crime of carrying
to the Supreme Court of the state a case which kept the Southern Pacific
Railroad from stealing sixty-six million dollars worth of timber-lands
from the people of Oregon. Mr. Eaton is not a lawyer, but he got lawyers
to help him, and he won the case; so the special interests of Oregon
were out to “get” him at any price.

When the war came it happened that Allen Eaton was in Chicago, and he
attended the convention of the People’s Council. He took no part in the
affair, not being himself a pacifist; but he wrote an honest account of
the proceedings for the Portland “Journal,” and so the large scale
grafters got their chance. The Commercial Club of Eugene adopted a set
of resolutions, bringing seven separate charges of disloyalty; the
Spanish War Veterans endorsed the charges, and the regents of the
university were summoned in solemn conclave, and Mr. Eaton appeared for
trial, with the Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Commercial Club of
Eugene as the prosecutors. Every one of the charges was disproven in
every detail. The president of the university stood by Mr. Eaton, and
the faculty of the university adopted a resolution in his support. The
regents themselves admitted his innocence, for they stated that they
“did not intend to accuse him of intending disloyalty to his
government.” Nevertheless, they accepted his resignation, giving him
less than ten days’ notice in which to shape his life plans—the Chamber
of Commerce was in that much of a hurry!

Mr. Eaton ran for the legislature again, and among the super-patriots
who set out to compass his defeat was a leading banker, who shortly
afterwards was arrested for setting fire to a building in which he had
stored a quantity of potatoes, held as an unsuccessful war-speculation;
also a hundred percent sheriff, whose boast was that he had broken up a
public meeting in defense of Mr. Eaton. At the very time he did this he
had in his pockets forty-five hundred dollars which he had stolen from
the county; a little later this was discovered and he was forced to
leave overnight!

It might be worth while to mention that at the very time that Allen
Eaton was fired from the University of Oregon, Professor Foerster of the
University of Munich, an ardent pacifist, was denouncing the German
government and being widely quoted by the allies; he was ostracized by
the entire faculty of his university—nevertheless, the Kaiser’s
government let him continue to teach, because in Germany they really
understand what academic freedom is, and stand by the principle. In all
Great Britain there was only one case during the war of interference
with academic freedom, and that was the case of Bertrand Russell, who
was prosecuted and sent to prison for his pacifist activities. But in
America, which understands no kind of freedom except the freedom of mobs
to suppress anybody they do not like, I know of just two great
universities in which some man or group of men were not hounded from
their positions, for pointing out this or that unwelcome truth to the
public.




                             CHAPTER XXXVI
                      THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CHIMES


We move a couple of hundred miles farther north to Seattle. It may be
difficult to believe that there was ever a time when students in an
American university took an active interest in the people’s rights, and
declined to receive favors from wholesale corrupters of public life; but
such was actually the case ten years ago, at the height of the
Progressive movement in the state of Washington.

The grand duke who ran the higher education of that state was Colonel
Blethen, publisher of the Seattle “Times,” an exceptional old scoundrel
who had manipulated street railways in Minnesota, and then brought his
fortune to Seattle and bought a newspaper, which he used for the rawest
kind of blackmailing, by a “strong arm” advertising department. Colonel
Blethen had been made a member of the board of regents of the
university; and in the effort to rehabilitate himself and his family
name, he spent twelve thousand dollars for a set of chimes, which he
presented to the university with the stipulation that they were to be
known by his name.

The students of the university did not feel grateful; fifty-one of them
composed and signed a letter of protest which was inserted in the
student daily, and put on the presses, when the printer “tipped off”
Colonel Blethen’s university president, and the presses were stopped.
The students took the letter to the city and there printed it and
distributed it. The editor of the college paper refused to publish again
until he could publish the letter. When ordered by the authorities to
issue the paper, he did so with a blank space where the letter had been!

Colonel Blethen’s president was a gentleman named Kane—bear his name in
mind, if you can, as we shall have some adventures with him at the
University of North Dakota. President Kane accepted the chimes, and a
solemn ceremony of dedication was performed—with the students
distributing handbills of protest on the outskirts of the crowd! If you
consider the coincidence of Times, chimes and crimes, you will
understand that the young men were literally driven to writing verses.
The ones they made strike me as exceptionally good, so I quote two
stanzas.

                              ALL IS WELL

  Recommended to friends of the University of Washington as a suitable
  Dedication Ode for the Blethen Chimes:

                   Clang the Chimes—clang the Chimes,
                   Help to glorify The Times;
                   And the fame to which it’s heir
                   —All the sins that “dailies” dare—
                   Swell aloud from college walls;
                   Peal through all the college halls.
                   Slander’s pence and scandal’s dimes
                   Here transform to silver chimes
                   That shall tell, as they swell,
                   All is well; all—is—well....

                   Champion of the den and sty!
                   Daily forty-page-long-lie!
                   Yet, despite its thousand crimes,
                   Praise The Times; clang its Chimes.
                   Let them charm the ear of Youth;
                   Let them swell its jeers at Truth
                   And in Truth’s own court proclaim
                   Gold is power; brass is fame;
                   Watch The Times go on and sell
                   All the news that’s fit—(for h—).
                   All is well; All—is—well.

The protest had been orderly and dignified—the only violence being
committed by one of the regents, who had dragged a student about, trying
to tear his papers away from him and denouncing him for what he was
doing. The student body was thoroughly roused, and more than seven
hundred signed a letter endorsing the protest. Blethen had come on to
the campus to make a speech, and the students had heckled him and as one
of them told me “had him on the run.” The university authorities now
barred all save invited speakers, and the president ordained that the
teaching of progressive ideas at the university must cease, and there
was to be no student criticism of president or regents, or their acts.
The whole controversy was reviewed by the regents, who endorsed what the
president had done.

We have spoken of Professor Hart, and how he was dropped from Reed. At
this time Hart was at the University of Washington, and an incident will
illustrate the feeling of all parties. Hart sat at luncheon in the
Faculty Club, when President Kane entered and told of the action of the
regents. Said Hart, “They think they can get away with it?” To which the
president answered: “Aren’t they the authorities?” Said Hart: “Do you
realize that there are a thousand students in this university who have
votes, and may hold the balance of power at the next election?”

Evidently the regents thought the same thing; it was the year of the
Roosevelt revolt, and the Progressives were certain of carrying the
state. A few days before the election, the Seattle “Post-Intelligencer,”
owned by the transportation lines and the Seattle National Bank, dug up
a story to the effect that the Progressive candidate had divorced his
wife. They mailed out ten thousand post cards to the women of the state:
“Do you want a divorced man for governor?” As a result, the Democrats
carried the election by eight hundred votes. They threw out two regents
who had supported the students, and later on, as a result of the
controversy, the governor turned out the entire board and put in four
standpat business men, with a Catholic M. D. at the head. This gentleman
made a desperate effort to have a Catholic chosen as president of the
university, but finally compromised upon a High Church Episcopalian of
Catholic extraction, a product of Nicholas Murray Butler’s finishing
machine.

Professor Hart was at this time one of the most popular members of the
faculty with the students, a lecturer widely known throughout the state;
he was now told that his inability to get along with his colleagues in
his department was a reason for his dismissal. They gave him a year’s
leave of absence, though he did not want it; then they set out to find a
substitute, and he applied for the job of substitute! Finally, they let
out all three professors in the department, including Hart; a little
later they took back one of them, the dean! A great many people thought
this was a trick, and Hart’s students protested bitterly, but in vain.
They paid Hart an unusual tribute of appreciation, organizing a
publishing company to finance his book on social service.

Old Colonel Blethen of the “Times” is dead, and the University of the
Chimes now has as its first grand duke a gentleman who is president of a
bank, a commercial company, an investment company, an irrigating
company, and a mortgage and a loan company; he is assisted by a
politician and lobbyist, chairman of the appropriations committee of the
state legislature. In twenty-five years, I am informed, there has never
been a farmer or a labor representative on the board! The university
remains a place of low standards, no academic achievements, and
perpetual cheap advertising by the administration. Three different men
have written me to tell how they have been strangled—but always warning
me not to use their names—not even to tell the details of their
experiences! One writes about another professor, not in any sense a
radical, but who tells the truth about public questions, and as a result
has been an object of attack for twenty-five years:

  Most of the time it has been under cover and has consisted in efforts
  to bring pressure to bear on the president and board of regents. But a
  number of times it has come out into the open. A governor some years
  ago in his inaugural address announced his determination to bring
  about the removal of Professor ——, and a few times an effort has been
  made in the legislature to make elimination of his department a
  condition of legislative support for the university. But while a good
  deal of publicity was given to these more spectacular assaults on
  academic freedom, they had little effect except perhaps to strengthen
  the administrative conviction that such departments were a good deal
  of a nuisance. Far more effective are the ever active forces which are
  working silently without any publicity upon those in control—president
  and regents. Nor does the failure to exercise power to remove indicate
  necessarily lack of real influence. There are many ways of
  disciplining an obstreperous faculty member without actual removal. A
  president in his control of salaries, distribution of library and
  other departmental funds may withhold from an offending faculty member
  opportunities accorded to those who have not incurred his displeasure.
  In the course of my experience as a faculty member I have seen a good
  deal of the sinister side of university control.

And peace reigns in the country of the Lumber Trust. Last year the big
lumber companies cut wages, and on an investment of three millions they
paid dividends of seven millions. At Port Angeles they are bringing in
ship-loads of Japanese labor, in defiance of the law. The lumber-jacks
and the blanket-stiffs work in hourly peril of life and limb; they sleep
in filthy bunks and eat rotten food, and if they attempt to organize and
better their conditions, their organizations are destroyed and their
meeting halls sacked by mobs of business men. If they appeal to the
public authorities they are laughed at; if they appeal to the public
their voices are unheard; if they exercise the elemental right of
self-defense, as they did at Centralia, they are shot, or beaten to
death, or castrated with pocket knives and hanged, or tried before a mob
jury and sentenced to ten or twenty years in jail. These things are
done, not as acts of primitive barbarism, but as a business system; they
are planned by the interlocking directorate, sitting in padded
arm-chairs around tables in directors’ rooms; they are carried out by
efficient executives telephoning from mahogany desks. Such is the rule
of the Lumber Trust; and at the University of the Lumber Trust the
professors know all about it; they go to their classes and teach what
their masters tell them to teach, and on behalf of justice and humanity
they utter not one single peep.




                             CHAPTER XXXVII
                    THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE ANACONDA


We take the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr. Morgan himself for
a director, also two Morgan partners, one of them a recent Harvard
overseer and a Massachusetts Tech trustee, and the other a Harvard
overseer and Smith College trustee; also an Amherst trustee, a Hampton
trustee, a Union Theological Seminary director, a Cornell trustee, and
three First National Bank directors. We travel East until we come to the
mining country; first, Montana, which has been swallowed whole by an
enormous corporation, appropriately called the Anaconda. The people of
this state maintain a university, scattered in four widely separated
places, in order to please various real estate interests.

The State Board of Education, which runs matters for the Anaconda,
contains the following appointed members: the personal attorney of
Senator Clark, sometimes called the richest man in the world, and
certainly the worst corruptionist who ever broke into the United States
Senate; another attorney for big business, a hard fighting reactionary,
who “grilled” a professor of the university law school for the crime of
not giving his son high marks; another corporation lawyer, and a fourth
lawyer who is a mild progressive; two merchants of the aggressive
Chamber of Commerce type; one rich and conservative farmer; and one very
subservient school principal.

The chancellor of the university up to last year was Edward C. Elliott,
and he had to handle not merely this board, but the politicians of the
Anaconda who run the state legislature; he had to go to them every year
to beg for appropriations, and he had the bright thought that he would
try to have an annual tax provided for higher education in the state. He
suggested to Louis Levine, his professor of economics, to make a study
of the whole tax problem in Montana. Professor Levine set to
work—beginning with the subject of mining companies and their
contributions, or lack of contributions, to the state taxes! In the
course of the year 1918 occurred a state tax conference, and Professor
Levine addressed it, and was furiously attacked by a representative of
the Anaconda Copper Company, which had packed the conference with its
lawyers and lobbyists.

Toward the end of the year Professor Levine completed his report on mine
taxation, in which he proved that the great corporations paid only a
small percentage of the taxes they owed the state. He submitted this
report to the chancellor, who read it and had a desperate case of “cold
feet.” His contract was about to come up for renewal, and he decided
that he had better shift the responsibility to the State Board of
Education, which governs the university. Professor Levine agreed to
this, but on the stipulation that if the board declined to publish the
document, he should be free to publish it himself. He took the position
that if he submitted to pressure in this issue, he would lose the moral
right to lecture to classes of young people.

Now began a bitter struggle behind the scenes, with the governor of the
state and a senator-henchman of the Anaconda striving frantically to
keep the report from appearing. Finally the poor chancellor wrote to
Levine, forbidding him to publish the report; Levine answered that there
had been a definite understanding, made in the presence of President
Sisson of Montana State University, that Levine was to be free to
publish the report if he so desired. Accordingly he published it,[L] and
the chancellor, in a rage, immediately “fired” him.

-----

Footnote L:

  Taxation of Mines in Montana: B. W. Huebsch, New York. The book won
  the commendation of Professor Seligman of Columbia, America’s leading
  conservative authority on taxation.

-----

This was about as clear a case of the violation of academic freedom as
had ever occurred in America. The matter created a great scandal, and
this scandal caused pain to the faculty of the university. A committee
of professors took the matter up, and reported, somewhat plaintively:

“It must have been foreseen that the enforcement of this order would
lead to all of the undesirable publicity which has attended this whole
affair, and which has brought down upon the University of Montana the
condemnation of some of the most widely read newspapers and periodicals
of the country, and which has made the university stand in the minds of
people throughout the United States as a horrible example of
narrow-mindedness, bigotry and intolerance.... Not only have the members
of the faculty of the State University been made to feel that they have
lost all independence of thought and action, which are (sic) absolutely
essential to the maintenance of a university’s morale, but the day is
far distant when the University of Montana will be able to attract to
its faculties broad-minded and eminent scholars of independence and
initiative.”

Also the American Association of University Professors took up the
matter and sent out a representative to mediate. The State Board of
Education could not face the public clamor; doubtless, also, they
reasoned that the report was out, and their mining companies had
sustained all the harm possible. They tactfully voted that both sides
were right; the chancellor had acted properly in firing Professor
Levine, but Levine should now be reinstated, and paid for the time he
had been fired! The state legislature appointed a committee to
investigate the university, and especially the teaching of “Socialism”
in its economics department. This committee met privately in the empty
bar-room of Helena’s biggest hotel, and learned from Professor Levine
that co-operative marketing by farmers is not the entire program of the
Third International. After giving this information, Professor Levine
resigned.

In the University of Montana law school was a young professor by the
name of Arthur Fisher, son of the ex-Secretary of the Interior. He was a
splendid teacher, popular with the students and with the faculty; but he
associated himself with the Farmer-Labor movement, an effort of the
people of the Northwestern states to take the control of their affairs
away from the corporations. A former president of the university, who
had been kicked out by the Anaconda, had started a liberal newspaper,
the “New Northwest,” and Professor Fisher became interested in this and
thereby stirred the fury of the “Missoulian,” a newspaper of the
Anaconda, which discovered that Fisher was a Bolshevist, and that he was
“financing the paper with the street-car graft of his father”—Fisher’s
father being a man who had spent a large part of his life opposing the
street-car graft in Chicago. In the spring of 1921 the “Missoulian” dug
up the fact that Fisher had made a speech in Chicago during the war,
urging that the United States should force the allies to define their
war aims. That, of course, was “pro-German,” and the American
Legion—swallowed by the Anaconda—took up the issue, and demanded
Fisher’s scalp.

A faculty committee of the university spent a good part of the summer on
this problem, and vindicated the young professor on every point; but the
chancellor—who still had to get his appropriations every year from an
Anaconda legislature—mutilated the report of his faculty committee
before he submitted it to the state board of education; and he and his
board and the attorney general of the state of Anaconda worked out a
most ingenious solution—they gave the radical young professor a
compulsory leave of absence at full pay; they forbid him to teach law at
the university, but they pay him the state’s money while he edits the
“New Northwest!” And the interlocking directorate were so much pleased
with this ingenuity of Chancellor Elliott that they called him to become
president of Purdue University at a higher salary!

We move down to Moscow, Idaho, where we find another university of the
Copper Trust. Five years ago this university had a president named
Brannon, described to me by a friend as “a liberal conservative, an
educator and a scientist.” The politicians who run the state are the Day
brothers, mining kings; they starved the university, and their henchmen,
who controlled the school funds, refused to pay the university’s bills.
They tried to reduce the president’s salary, though he had a contract;
he resigned, but there was such an uproar in the state that they had to
recede. Senator Day’s whole family, including the ladies, now took up
the intrigue against President Brannon; they caused an investigation of
the bursar, and when the accounts were reported all right, they sent
back their investigators with instructions to find something wrong. A
prominent newspaper publisher served notice that he must have the
university printing or he would make trouble; and it is reported on good
authority that on this occasion President Brannon said a “cuss” word.
Anyhow, he was forced to resign, though no charges had been brought
against him. Dean Ayres, and another dean who had supported him, went at
the same time. We shall meet President Brannon again before long at
Beloit, and it will appear that he has learned his lesson; for this
time, when the interlocking directorate gives him orders, he obeys!

The educational affairs of Idaho, both school and university, are in the
hands of Dr. E. A. Bryan, chief administrative officer of the State
Board of Education. I have before me a very sumptuous pamphlet, printed
by this board a few months ago at the expense of the people of Idaho. It
contains an address by Dr. Bryan, entitled “The Foes of Democracy,” and
has as a frontispiece the portrait of an exceedingly handsome but
stern-looking hundred per cent American. Dr. Bryan has discovered four
dangerous foes of democracy: first, the “reds”; second, the “radicals”;
third, the “profiteers”; and fourth, the “robber barons.” Just what is
the difference between a “red” and a “radical” I do not know, and Dr.
Bryan does not enable me to find out. Apparently a “radical” is a person
who advises labor unions to use strikes to “injure the public.” It is
manifest that there can be no strike which does not injure the public;
Dr. Bryan is a bit muddled, but it is clear what he means, that as
strikes grow more big, they also grow more inconvenient. I find him
equally muddled on the subject of the “profiteer”; because, while he
tells us not to make “an excess profit,” he does not tell us what “an
excess profit” is, nor how there can be such a thing in a competitive
world. Apparently it is the same thing as in the case of strikes:
profiteering has got too big! But that big strikes might be a
consequence of big profiteering has apparently not penetrated Dr.
Bryan’s handsome head.

Also I seek in vain to find out the difference between the “profiteers”
and the “robber barons.” All I can gather is that there are bad men in
the world, and they abuse their power. It is Dr. Bryan’s idea that they
will read his pamphlet, and reform, and then all will be well. May I
suggest that he send copies of his pamphlet to the Day brothers, and
also to the Day wives, who run the mining and the education of Idaho?

The significant thing about the pamphlet, aside from its feebleness of
thought, is the amount of space which it gives to the various kinds of
evil persons. The “reds” get eleven pages, the “radicals” get four and a
half, the “profiteers” get one and a quarter, and the “robber barons”
get two and a half. I took the trouble to figure this out, and it
appears that the head of Idaho’s educational machine considers that
eighty per cent of the perils to present-day American life comes from
the poor, and less than twenty per cent from the rich. So I am not
surprised to receive a letter from a university professor, telling me
that “in Idaho, when a successor to President Lindley of the state
university at Moscow was being sought, the state commissioner of
education, Dr. Bryan, requested a Stanford professor to come and meet
the regents. He did this and was _not_ appointed, because of certain
views in reference to the present economic order. Dr. Bryan told me this
himself.” I suggest that Dr. Bryan should issue a new edition of his
pamphlet, listing a fifth variety of “foes of democracy,” in the shape
of university authorities who train the youth of the country to be
henchmen and lackeys of the profiteers and the robber barons.




                            CHAPTER XXXVIII
                THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS


We next take the Union Pacific Railroad, with its Columbia trustee for
chairman, and a Rutgers trustee and two Massachusetts Tech trustees and
a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors, two Equitable Trust Company
directors, two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and three National City
Bank directors; and find ourselves in Salt Lake City, in the domain of
another group of mining kings, working in alliance with one of the
weirdest religious organizations that have ever sanctified America, the
Church of the Latter-Day Saints. This is not a book on religion, so we
shall merely say that the Mormons are hard-working people, who have
heaped up enormous treasures, and have turned the control of these
treasures over to the heads of their church. So here is a group of pious
plutocrats, who run the financial, political, religious and educational
life of the State of Utah.

Also, of course, they run the state university. Mr. Richard Young, the
son of Joseph Young, was until quite recently chairman of the board of
regents of the University of Utah, and also trustee of the Brigham Young
University. He is a prominent stand-pat politician, and made it his
business to see that the professors of his university said nothing
impolite about the Copper Trust, or the Smelter Trust, or the Public
Utility Trust, or the Latter-Day Sanctity Trust.

Seven years ago his activities culminated in a violent row. Two
professors were fired without warning, and the resentment of the faculty
was so great that sixteen others resigned, and the control of the
university by the church and the corporations received a thorough
ventilation. It appeared that professors had been admonished and
punished for various strange reasons—such as mentioning the important
part played by the English church in English literature; making a
private criticism of a Mormon woman at a social gathering; or making an
impolite remark concerning the cuspidor shown in a painting of Brigham
Young, patriarch of the Mormon religion!

The two professors who had been fired were accused of criticizing the
university president; also, it was charged that one of them had remarked
in a private conversation: “Isn’t it too bad that we have a man like
Richard Young as chairman of the board of regents.” The witnesses who
told of the criticism of the president of the university were never
called, and the president was never required to name them. The regents,
in an elaborate public statement on the controversy, brushed this demand
aside by saying that whenever there was disagreement between the
president and members of the faculty, they would settle the issue by
deciding, not who was right, nor who told the truth, but who was the
most useful to the university!

This affair was investigated by a committee of seven professors,
representing the American Association of University Professors, who
issued an eighty-two page report, covering every detail of the
controversy. From this evidence it appears that the charges against the
professors were false; and it appears that the president was to be
numbered among those many university heads who do not always tell the
truth. A student at commencement had delivered an address, advocating “a
public utilities commission, and investigation into the methods of
mining and industrial corporations.” The interlocking directors were
furious over this, and the governor of the state set to work to find out
what professors had approved it. The president of the university denied
that the governor had engaged in any such activities; but the report
produces a mass of evidence, making it perfectly clear that the
president’s statement was untrue.

Also, it appears that the interlocking regents were not above evasion of
the truth. They denied knowing that the faculty of the university had
adopted a petition for redress of grievances—and this although full
details about the faculty action had been published in the newspapers
nine or ten days before the regents met! By keeping at it, the committee
of professors extracted a few admissions from these saintly plutocrats;
thus, they got Chairman Young to admit over his own signature “that the
president had warned a certain prominent professor that his activity in
behalf of a public utilities bill might injure the university; that he
advised an instructor against participating in a political campaign, and
enjoined a partisan rally on the campus.”

It must be a difficult matter, running a university in the capital of
the Latter-Day Saints. You have to know that your wealthy regents are
living in polygamous relationships, which differ from those maintained
by wealthy regents in other parts of the country in that they are crimes
under the United States law, but acts of holiness under the church law;
and you have to know in just what ways to know about these semi-secret
families, and in just what ways to be ignorant of them. Outside is all
the world, laughing at you; and naturally you are sensitive to that
laughter, and your professors are still more so. They cannot be entirely
unaware of modern thought; and so you have to summon them to your office
and plead with them, pointing out how certain regents object that they
“have been teaching against the experiences of Joseph Smith.” You have
to get them “to bring into class discussions and explanations of the
term God or deity, if they can conscientiously do so.” You have to
explain to them that unless they “can conscientiously do so,” the
legislature will withhold appropriations, and they will not get their
salaries.

And then, when the Latter-Day Grafters put pressure upon you, you have
to remove a competent professor from the head of your Department of
English, and put in a bishop of the Mormon church, the distinguished
editor of “The Juvenile Instructor, a monthly magazine devoted to the
interests of the Sunday Schools of the Mormon church”; also author of
“The Restoration of the Gospel, a volume of Mormon apologetics,
consisting chiefly of lessons prepared for the Young Ladies’ Improvement
Association, 1910-1911, with an introduction by Joseph F. Smith, Jr., of
the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, 1912.” And when your professors object to
things like this, your interlocking regents retire you, and put the
brother of the Mormon bishop into your place!

That is what happened at the University of Utah; Mr. Richard Young,
grand saint of the board of regents, put in as president of his
institution Mr. J. A. Widstoe, M. A., author of “Joseph Smith, the
Scientist,” in which he proves that the Mormon founder anticipated all
modern science—excepting only Darwinism, which is taboo by the Church!
Now Mr. Richard Young has gone to his eternal reward as grand saint, and
his place is taken by Mr. Waldemar Van Cott, attorney for the Rio Grande
Railroad and the Utah Fuel Company, and the most active agent in the
attack on the liberal professors. President Widstoe has been promoted to
“apostle” of the Church, and his place as head of the university has
been taken by Dr. George Thomas, professor of economics. What kind of
economics they now teach at the university is summed up for me by a
lawyer of Salt Lake City, who was formerly on the faculty of the
institution. He says:

“Let it be noted that the Mormon church is a business institution. It
owns and controls properties, banks, commercial institutions and
industries. It is conservative. It is a foe of all doctrines and plans
that might weaken property rights. Also, let it be noted that the
organization of the Mormon church is perfect and that those who hold
power depend upon the doctrines of the church for their tenure upon
power and influence.”

And then I take up the catalogue of the university, to see what they are
teaching their three thousand students, and I find that they are
catholic in their tastes. As courses leading to university degrees, they
include commerce and finance, commercial art, business bookkeeping and
stenography, auto mechanics, carpentering and plumbing! Three professors
at the university write me that conditions under the new administration
are greatly improved. One professor asserts that there is now complete
freedom. I trust he will not think me unduly skeptical if I say that I
would attach more weight to his experiences if he were teaching, say
economics, instead of “ancient language and literature.”




                             CHAPTER XXXIX
                       THE MINING CAMP UNIVERSITY


We continue our journey on the Union Pacific Railroad, and come to the
metropolis of the Rocky Mountains, a city entirely surrounded by gold
mines, silver mines, coal mines and copper mines, and entirely
controlled by hard-fighting piratical gentlemen who have seized these
hidden treasures. Denver is only a generation removed from the mining
camp stage of civilization, and mining camp manners and morals still
prevail in its financial, political and educational life. In other
portions of the United States you find the great captains of industry
hiring politicians to run the state and city governments for them; but
in Colorado up to quite recently they did their own dirty work—you would
find the grand dukes of the interlocking directorate, Evans of traction,
Doherty of gas and electric, Field of telephones, Cheesman of water,
Guggenheim of copper, themselves the political bosses, hiring their
thugs and repeaters and ballot box stuffers, and paying their own cash
to their newspaper editors, clergymen and college presidents. These
mighty chieftains used to fall out and quarrel and turn their
scandal-bureaus loose on one another, so it was always easy to learn the
insides of Denver finance, politics and education.

The leading prejudice factory of the State of Colorado has been the
University of Denver, founded by the father of William G. Evans,
traction magnate and Republican boss. Mr. Evans made himself president
of the board of trustees of the university, and selected to run the
institution an extremely venomous and abusive Methodist clergyman by the
name of Buchtel. In running the government of Denver, Mr. Evans worked
in alliance with the gamblers and the keepers of brothels and wine-rooms
for the seducing of young girls; the violations of law became so
flagrant that the political gang operating under Evans found its power
threatened, and cast about for some candidate for governor to take the
curse off them, and selected the Reverend Henry Augustus Buchtel, D.D.,
LL.D., chancellor of their university. As the Denver “Post” delicately
phrased it, “They reached up in the House of God and pulled down the
poor old chancellor to cover up the rottenness of their machine.”

There was a meeting of the chancellor with Mr. Evans and his political
henchmen. One of the purposes of his nomination was that his candidacy
might aid Simon Guggenheim, head of the Smelter Trust, to buy his way
into the United States Senate. The chancellor accepted the nomination,
and invited all present to rise, join hands and sing: “Blest Be the Tie
That Binds.” You may find this anecdote in “The Beast,” by Ben B.
Lindsey, Judge of the Children’s Court of Denver—that is, you may find
it if you can find a copy of the book, which its publishers mysteriously
ceased to push. Says Lindsey:

  The tie that binds the Beast and the Church? Yes, and the Beast and
  the College! During the Peabody campaign (according to the “Rocky
  Mountain News”) a young student named Reed had been practically driven
  from the Denver University because he criticized the corporation
  Governor. Later a university professor was sent to Europe to gather
  data which was used in the campaign against municipal ownership in
  Denver; and the professor was “exposed but not forced into
  retirement.” Later still, Buchtel reprimanded a student named Bell for
  volunteering as a worker in one of our Juvenile Court campaigns. Mr.
  Evans was president of the Board of Trustees of the University, and
  the Reverend Henry Augustus Buchtel was his Chancellor.

  The use of Buchtel in the campaign that followed was a huge success.
  Everywhere people said to me: “Why, the Chancellor will never stand
  for the sale of the senatorship to Guggenheim!” Or the “dear
  chancellor” will never permit this or that undesirable thing in
  politics. But Buchtel had already admitted to a ministerial friend
  that he believed Guggenheim ought to be elected—though he said nothing
  of it from the platform, you may be sure. After he was Governor, he
  not only endorsed Guggenheim but vigorously defended the Legislature
  for electing Guggenheim, honored Evans with a place on the
  gubernatorial staff, and gave a public dinner to the corporation heads
  who had most profited by the rule of the System in the state. They
  reciprocated by sending the Denver University handsome donations;
  Evans led with $10,000, and Guggenheim, Hughes and others followed
  with fat checks.

  The keeper of a gambling hell, whom I summoned to my court and forced
  to make restitution to one of his victims, said to me: “I have some
  respect for Mayor Speer. He tells these preachers that he believes in
  our policy of open gambling. But I have nothing but contempt for that
  old stiff up in the State House who talks about ‘the word of God,’ and
  gets his nomination from a boss who protects _us_, and gets elected on
  money that _we_ contributed to the organization!” It is one of the
  saddest aspects of this use of the Church that The Beast gains
  respectability thereby, and the Church contempt....

  Buchtel was elected. His candidacy proved a successful disguise for
  the Guggenheim “deal,” and the “church element” was used as well as
  “the dive element.” A corporation legislature was put in power. It
  only remained for the corporations to deliver the United States
  senatorship to Guggenheim “for value received,” and to betray the
  nation as they had betrayed the state.

  Simon Guggenheim had no more claim to represent Colorado in the Senate
  at Washington than John D. Rockefeller has—or Baron Rothschild. He was
  the head of the Smelter Trust, and he had been financially interested,
  of course, in the election of Peabody in 1904, and the defeat of the
  eight-hour law and the suppression of the eight-hour strike. These
  things entitled him to the gratitude of the corporations only. He was
  unknown to the people of Colorado. He had never been heard of by them
  except in a newspaper interview. He had not, as far as I know, ever
  spoken or written a word publicly on politics. “I don’t know much
  about the political game,” he told one of his campaign managers, “but
  I have the money. I know _that_ game.” He does.

That was fifteen years ago, and they did their bribery in the old-style
way. Guggenheim paid the campaign expenses of a majority of the Colorado
legislators. At present the State of Colorado is run by Phipps, the
steel king, and they do not have to buy the legislators, for it is the
people who elect the United States senators, and they have bought up all
the institutions upon which the people depend. They have bought the Y.
M. C. A. and the churches by “donations,” and they have bought the
universities in Colorado by giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to
them. Because Lindsey exposed this new style of bribery, the Phipps
machine ordered all of Lindsey’s child welfare bills killed by the state
legislature.

And of course in their university they watch incessantly to make sure
that no dangerous ideas reach the students. Last summer there was a
meeting of all the clergymen of Denver on the campus of the university
to listen to Dr. Harry Ward, general secretary of the Social Service
Commission of the Federated Council Churches of America. The chancellor
intervened at the last minute and forbade Ward to speak, denouncing him
as “a menace to the present social order.” Instead, he got copies of a
report on the steel strike, which Judge Gary had had prepared by one of
his kept clergymen, as a reply to the attack by the Inter-Church World
Movement. Every member of the graduating class of 1921 received a copy
of this report, being solemnly called in to receive it personally from
the hands of the chancellor. A professor at the university, who had been
scheduled to speak at the church of a Socialist clergyman in Denver, was
called up and warned that if he wished to have a career at the
university he must avoid that kind of thing. Shortly after this a
representative of the Rockefeller education fund was invited to luncheon
at the university, and the chancellor made a public appeal to him for
funds, on the ground of his services in barring Dr. Ward. This was a
trifle too raw, and the chancellor did not get his money!

The old man has just been retired; but the same gang still rules the
board of trustees, with Evans the infamous as grand duke. As assistant
he has an attorney for the “Big Four” corporations which run the city of
Denver, who spends his spare time leading crusades against the “reds”;
also a prominent banker, a corporation lawyer, a real estate speculator,
a capitalistic preacher, a corporation lawyer from Pueblo, a millionaire
oil man and lawyer, a millionaire miner and banker—and finally, as Grand
Duke junior, “Boss” Evans’ son, John.




                               CHAPTER XL
                   THE COLLEGES OF THE SMELTER TRUST


The interlocking directorate of Colorado maintains also a state
university at Boulder, on the Colorado and Southern Railroad; which road
has a trustee of Williams College for president, and a General
Theological Seminary trustee for director. The standards of academic
freedom prevailing at the University of Colorado are very interestingly
revealed in a case which occurred seven years ago.

During the coal strike of 1914, the operators and their militia set
aside the constitution of the United States in the Southern counties of
the state, and one professor at the law school took a stand against
their action. The operators had burned and suffocated three women and
eleven children at Ludlow, and Professor James W. Brewster accepted the
chairmanship of a public committee to investigate the strike situation.
In peril, not merely of his job, but of his life, he spent several weeks
in the coal fields, questioning witnesses and bringing out evidence. He
was the means of forcing an investigation by Congress, and he appeared
and testified before the Congressional Committee. His subsequent
dismissal from the university was investigated by the American
Association of University Professors, and their report lies before me. I
will state briefly the facts admitted, and the contentions of both
parties to the dispute, and leave it for the reader to form his own
conclusions.

Professor Brewster was nearly fifty-nine years of age, and the president
of the university claims that on this account his appointment to the
university had been merely temporary, and that this was fully made clear
to Professor Brewster. Professor Brewster denies that he had any such
understanding. It was admitted by both the president and the dean of the
law school that Brewster’s teaching was “entirely satisfactory.” Says
the report:

  The testimony of students in his law classes is that Professor
  Brewster in the class room adhered strictly to the subjects he was
  teaching and made no allusions whatever to industrial questions. The
  courses that he was teaching did not in any way involve the issues
  that were then agitating Colorado. Immediately after Professor
  Brewster’s testifying in December he was abusively attacked by several
  Colorado newspapers in unrestrained language and with the most
  unreasonable distortion and exaggeration of the tenor of his
  testimony. According to the testimony of President Farrand, E. M.
  Ammons, then Governor of Colorado, called up President Farrand by
  telephone soon after Mr. Brewster’s appearance before the Commission
  in Denver, and urged the immediate dismissal of Professor Brewster
  because of his testimony.

The president of the university asserts that he refused the governor’s
request. That was in December, 1914; in May, 1915, Professor Brewster
was invited to come to Washington, to give his testimony before the
United States Commission on Industrial Relations. Professor Brewster
went to the president of the university, and stated that he had been
able to arrange for a colleague to take his classes for the few days of
his absence. As to what happened next there is a disagreement. Professor
Brewster claims that the president told him that if he went to
Washington his connection with the university must cease at once. The
president, in his statement to the committee of the association, gives
his version of the interview as follows:

  I told him that I regarded the publicity which had attended his former
  testimony as detrimental in its effect upon the university. In the
  inflamed condition of public sentiment in Colorado at that time it was
  exploited in a way which I regarded as unfortunate. His connection
  with the university was made prominent in the inaccurate publicity
  which resulted and the institution was drawn thereby into a
  controversy, and an attitude attributed to the university as an
  institution, which I regarded as unwarranted and unfortunate. In
  further discussion of this point and in illustrating the prejudice
  aroused by the testimony, I cited the feeling expressed by members of
  the Legislature and reported to me during the legislative session of
  1915. I used some expression to the effect that his public statements
  regarding the industrial situation had been an obstacle in the
  university’s effort to obtain additional support from the Legislature.
  I did not, as I recall it, lay any stress upon this and mentioned it
  incidentally as an illustration and matter of interest at the moment.
  I stated that in view of the inaccurate publicity and the involvement
  of the university at the time of his previous appearance before the
  Federal Commission, I thought it would be desirable, in case he
  decided to go to Washington, that a statement should be issued
  indicating the temporary nature of his connection with the university
  and that that connection would naturally terminate at the end of the
  academic year.

The outcome of the matter was that Professor Brewster decided not to go
to Washington; nevertheless, he was dropped from the University of
Colorado. It is interesting to note that among those who were retained
at the University was Dr. John Chase, who will live in American history
as the man responsible for the Ludlow massacre. He was adjutant-general
of the Colorado militia at the time, and an unscrupulous partisan of the
coal operators. Among the regents at the time was Mr. C. C. Parks,
politician, banker, coal company director, and furious opponent of the
strikers. Among the law faculty who fought Professor Brewster was
Professor A. A. Reed, whose law partner was engaged in prosecuting a
number of the former strikers. Professor Reed, a former bank president,
was at this time an official of a national bank in Denver, and a
director of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, Mr. Rockefeller’s concern
which put through the Ludlow massacre. I am interested to note that
another member of the faculty who is not objected to is Professor L. W.
Cole, director of the School of Social Service, who last summer
recommended to the students of his summer school Vice-President
Coolidge’s magazine articles on the “Red menace,” a farrago of
foolishness gathered by the Lusk committee and their secret agents.

Also we ought to have a glance at Colorado College, located at Colorado
Springs; a co-educational institution started by the Congregational
Church, and now conducted by the interlocking directorate. They had a
first-class business man for president, but there were brought against
him “serious charges of indiscreet and improper conduct toward two women
employed in the college offices.” Now, of course, the business men who
run the government of Colorado, in conjunction with the brothels and
wine-rooms, understand that college presidents have to have their little
pleasures in off hours; but some of the faculty thought that college
presidents ought to have these pleasures somewhere off the campus. They
endeavored privately to force the resignation of the president; whereat
the trustees became furious, and fired a dean who had been active in the
matter. When the students organized and protested, they contemptuously
rejected the students’ demands.

This matter likewise was investigated by the American Association of
University Professors, and it happened that I studied their report
before I knew anything about the trustees and their financial position.
It was rather funny; I read what the trustees said to the professors,
and how they behaved in the various conferences; I read their letters,
and found myself thinking: this must be a rich man, and so must this;
here must be the grand duke, the fellow who runs the place! Then I
looked them up in “Who’s Who,” and, sure enough, there they were—Mr.
Philip B. Stewart, mining and public utility magnate, an active
Republican politician; and Mr. Irving Howbert, president of a bank, a
gold mining company and a railroad, also an active Republican
politician!

Would you like to hear one of these grand dukes addressing his college
professors, gathered together to be taught their place? Listen to the
affidavit of Professor George M. Howe:

  The meeting was opened by Mr. P. B. Stewart, chairman of the executive
  committee of the Board. Mr. Stewart berated us soundly for what we had
  done.... His mains points were that we had been guilty of sending
  libelous matter through the mail, for which we might well be sent to
  the penitentiary; that we had given the slanderous charges against Dr.
  Slocum into the hands of persons who should know nothing of them,
  since our letters would come into the hands of private secretaries of
  the men to whom they were sent; and that we had made the completion of
  the five hundred thousand dollar fund for the College impossible,
  since the Trustees, who were large contributors, would now withhold
  their subscriptions. His purpose was apparently to make us feel that
  our conduct had been thoroughly idiotic and ill-advised in every
  respect.

And then hear the summing up of the American Association of University
Professors:

“The committee feels constrained to remark, further, that the attitude
of the majority of the members of the Board of Trustees and of the Board
as a body towards the faculty has been characterized by grave
discourtesy, a lack of openness and candor, and an habitual disregard of
the fact that the administrative officers and teaching staff of a
college have large and definite moral responsibilities in relation to
the internal conditions and standards of the institution with which they
are connected.”

The outcome of the whole matter was that the graduating class of the
college fell off from eighty to twenty-six; but the interlocking
trustees waited. They held the purse-strings, and they knew that the
incident would be forgotten, and the students would come back—which they
did.

Also the plutocracy of Colorado maintains an institution for training
its engineers and mining experts; this is the Colorado School of Mines,
located at Golden. Here also there was trouble, because on “Senior Day”
some of the students got drunk and beat up a member of the faculty at a
baseball game. Naturally, the president and the faculty resented this,
and they suspended five of the students, and there was a great uproar,
culminating in a student strike. This incident also was investigated by
the Association of University Professors, and I studied the report
before I knew anything about the various trustees. Here again I was able
to pick out the grand duke by his bad manners, and by the way everybody
cringed before him when he came down from Cripple Creek to deal with the
row. He is Mr. A. E. Carlton, president of four banks and of several
mining companies.

Naturally, so great a man realized the absurdity of suspending the sons
of the plutocracy, merely for the beating up of a college professor!
With the help of Captain Smith, another member of the board, he settled
the strike by reinstating the suspended students and forcing the
resignation of the protesting president. The board put in a former
president of the college, who had been dismissed for cause, but who was
exactly the sort of fellow they wanted, as you can see from the sworn
testimony of seven different professors, to the effect that he had
lowered the teaching standards of the college by insisting again and
again that the sons of the plutocracy should be given passing marks
after they had failed. The committee of university professors states
that “Professor H. B. Patton, for twenty-four years a member of the
faculty, informed the Committee that President Alderson condoned
cheating on the part of a son of an influential Denver citizen.” Says
Professor Albert G. Wolf: “Many students at the school during Alderson’s
administration were allowed to pass, after having failed in their
studies, because they were either athletes or relations of influential
men of Colorado.” Says Professor Stephen Worrell: “President Alderson
arbitrarily raised the grades of some of the men I had either
conditioned or failed.... Subsequent investigation revealed that the men
whose grades had been raised were relatives of prominent politicians in
the State. I found on inquiry that the same thing had happened to other
members of the faculty, but that they had all accepted the situation as
inevitable.”

This controversy was settled by the dismissal of several of the
protesting professors, and by the appointment of a committee of the
state legislature, which investigated the situation and reported in the
following apposite words:

  In conclusion, your Committee finds that the management and
  administration of the School of Mines is efficient, the trustees,
  officers, and faculty competent, well qualified, and trustworthy, and
  that the institution, members, officers, faculty, and trustees are
  entitled to the support, respect, and encouragement of the citizens of
  this State, the alumni of the institution, and the general public.
  Your Committee is of the opinion that the institution will flourish
  and its excellent reputation be maintained if it receives the
  encouragement and patronage to which it is so justly entitled.




                              CHAPTER XLI
                          A LAND GRANT COLLEGE


We travel Northeast, and leave the mining country. On the lonely plains
of the state of North Dakota we find men toiling for long hours, and
raising a hundred million bushels of wheat every year. They mill very
little wheat, but ship it away to the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and
St. Paul; and then import their own flour: which means that from the
time the wheat leaves his land the farmer is paying tribute to a chain
of exploiters—elevator men, railroads, speculators, millers, and the
bankers who furnish the capital for these operations. The same situation
prevails throughout the prairie states, and so here you have a
well-matured class struggle between the dwellers in the country and the
dwellers in the towns. Ever since the Civil War the farmers have been
struggling to free themselves from the “money devil.” Wave after wave of
revolt has risen, and sunk again, but always the masters of credit have
managed to hold on. They have done this by owning or subsidizing the
newspapers, the agricultural weeklies and the general magazines, and
also by controlling the schools and colleges in which the farmers’
children are educated.

Writing in 1916, Gilson Gardner stated that the United States Bureau of
Education had approximately two hundred employes, and out of this number
one hundred and thirty appeared on the official rolls as drawing a
salary of one dollar per year. “The source from which these men are paid
is unknown. It is known in general, however, that some of them get their
salaries from the Rockefeller General Education Board and some from the
Sage Foundation or other endowments of private capital. The reports made
by these employes go out as government experiment publications with the
full prestige of official endorsement upon them.”

One of the government employes who is not a corporation hireling is
Professor W. J. Spillman, chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,
and editor of a farm paper. Professor Spillman states that a wealthy
friend came to him, with a statement that the Rockefeller General
Education Board was seeking to control the educational institutions of
the country, to see that the men employed in them were “right.” They had
been successful with the smaller institutions, but some of the larger
ones had held out, and Rockefeller was now adding a hundred million
dollars to the foundation, “for the express purpose of forcing his money
into these big institutions. He is looking for a man who can put this
across. I think you are just the man for the place. There is a fat
salary in it for the man who can do the thing,” and so on. Professor
Spillman expressed some doubt of the Rockefellers being able to
accomplish their purpose, and the friend explained that the removal of
the unsatisfactory educators would be brought about as the result of
“local dissatisfaction.”

You will call this a “cock and bull story”; but just notice—in the years
1915 and 1916 there were nine liberal presidents of Western colleges
turned out of their jobs, and at least twenty professors, mostly of
economics and sociology! Do you really think that the masters of the
Money Trust, having bought up the last newspaper and the last popular
magazine, would overlook your schools and colleges? If so, you are
exactly the kind of foolish person they count upon you to be!

Most influential among the farmers are the so-called “land grant
colleges,” which, way back in the days of President Lincoln, received
from Congress large grants of government land for their support. Much of
this land was stolen outright by the grafters. I am told that in Maine
large tracts of the most valuable timber land were sold for a mere song,
and without advertisement; exactly the same thing was done in Michigan,
Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon—these land steals form the basis of the
power of those old aristocratic families whom we found running Reed
College and the University of Oregon. From what I know of my United
States, I feel quite sure that an investigation in any state between
Maine and Oregon would reveal the same kind of thing.

Anyhow, here are these land grant colleges, some of them big and
prosperous, educating the farmers’ boys, and as yet not aspiring to the
snobbery of the big universities. The interlocking directorate wishes to
get hold of these institutions, and to see that dangerous thoughts are
kept out. I purpose to show you what they did in one state; I bespeak
your careful attention, because the story of one is the story of all,
and in reading about North Dakota you will also be reading about Maine,
Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado and
Oregon.

John H. Worst, at that time lieutenant-governor of North Dakota, became
president of the Agricultural College in 1895. It was a small
institution at that time; by seventeen years of hard work he built it up
until he had over twelve hundred students. Also he conducted, in
connection with the college, a government experiment station, in which
he had some devoted scientists. One of these, Professor E. F. Ladd, now
United States Senator put in office by the Non-Partisan League, was a
chemist, who became state pure food commissioner, and carried on a
vigorous campaign against light weights and short measures, and the
adulterating and misbranding of food. He went to the shelves of the
grocery stores, and showed that the stomachs of the people of North
Dakota were made a dumping-ground for timothy seed, gelatine and coal
tar dyes. He exposed the use of dangerous poisons in patent medicines,
and denounced the practice of bleaching flour—nor was he content to
prove these things in his laboratory, he went out and taught the people
of the state, and helped to put through laws against these practices. As
a result, he incurred the mortal enmity of whiskey rectifiers,
baking-powder manufacturers, paint manufacturers, the Beef Trust and the
Milling Trust. I talked with Senator Ladd in Washington in June, 1922,
and he told me that the last libel suit filed against him—for one
hundred thousand dollars—had been dismissed on the fourteenth of the
previous April; prior to that time, for twenty-two years he had never
been free from libel suits and injunctions. At one time there had been
six hanging over his head, and never one had been filed by a citizen of
North Dakota, nor had he ever lost one.

Next, meet Professor H. C. Bolley, who is my dream of a scientist; a
long, lean, keen old gentleman, a demon for the hunting out of
knowledge, and an untamed champion of the people’s cause. I met him in
Fargo, and asked him if he would tell me his story, and there came a few
more wrinkles on his thin face. “I have been in this for twenty-two
years,” he said, “and maybe it will be my fate to be kicked out for
talking to Upton Sinclair!” Then the old professor thrust out an eager
finger: “This is the question I am asking: Is a college professor a
citizen? Or does he part with his rights, and become some kind of
subject when he takes a college job? I made up my mind that I was going
to stay a citizen, and exercise every one of the rights of a citizen,
including the right to go out and talk to my fellow-citizens, to educate
them, and organize them to protect their rights against all-comers. That
is all there is to my story.”

Professor Bolley is one of the leading plant pathologists of the United
States; it was he who first discovered the causes of most of the
diseases which plague the farms of North Dakota—of “rust” and “smut” and
“root rots” in wheat and other cereals, of potato “scab” and flax
“wilt”—and he worked out remedies for these troubles, and taught them to
the people. He proved that “flax wilt” is due to “sick” soil—and that
seemed a terrible thing to the land interests and the railroads, who
were making money out of getting new farmers into North Dakota. These
speculators were not interested in having Professor Bolley cure the
“sick” soil; it paid them better if the farmers went into bankruptcy
every few years. The discoveries of Professor Bolley were worth hundreds
of millions to the farmers of the Northwest. He made discoveries about
flaxseed, and the linseed crushers and paint makers tried to buy his
services—they were used to buying professors. Bolley had them put the
money into the institution, with the provision that it was to be
employed for his researches. We shall presently see how his enemies
tried to take it away from him.

Also, this professor-citizen took up the question of the grading of
wheat, the sorest point with the Northwestern farmers. They are
absolutely at the mercy of the elevator men and the millers, and the
whole thing is one colossal swindle. Professor Bolley knows wheat as
well as any other man in the world, and he showed the tricks to the
farmers. In the first place, the wheat all gets mixed up in the
elevators, and there is no way to tell Smith’s from Jones’s.
Nevertheless, the farce of “grading” goes on, and its effect is to beat
down the price to the farmer. The millers say they must have Number One
Red Spring—but there is not enough of this produced in America to feed
one big city! What determines the mixture is the percentage of protein,
starch, and gluten, and they test the flour as it comes through the
mill, and when this or that ingredient is needed, they let in wheat of a
certain kind, regardless of its “grade.” That which they grade as “D,”
and buy as “feed” wheat, just because it is shrunken, may be the richest
of all in proteins, and be used in their best brands of flour.

It is a fact that a great part of the flour is made from “rejected”
wheat; and the sole point of the rejecting is to lower the price. I
asked, “What is the price of rejected wheat?” and the answer was, “It is
a bottomless pit—you can buy it for anything.” They reject wheat if
there is water in it—but they have to put water in it themselves in
order to mill it! They reject it for smut—but they use it just the same,
because the brush that takes off the bran also takes off the smut! They
even use the mouldy wheat, because they bleach it. Many times Professor
Bolley found them rejecting wheat for smut, and he would go to that
neighborhood and learn there was little or no smut to be found there,
and the elevator men made no effort to keep the wheat with smut separate
from the rest. The elevator and grading workers would tell him that they
had received word—there was too much wheat on the market, and they were
to buy only “rejected” wheat—as an act of charity to those poor farmers
who had got smut into their wheat; but the effect of this action was to
force more farmers into ruin.

Professor Bolley was invited to accompany fifty scientists, including
some from Europe, to inspect the flour mills in the “Twin Cities.” Here
came the prize “boosters” of the millers, setting forth the wonders of
the place and the extreme precautions they took to use only the very
finest wheat—they were making their best flour. Professor Bolley dipped
his hand into one hopper and then into another, and carried home samples
of this wheat. Fifty per cent of it consisted of amber durum, which they
rejected, seven per cent of another rejected kind, and the balance of a
very inferior grade of winter wheat; no hard spring wheat in the sample!
And yet the millers would invite Professor Bolley to the Chamber of
Commerce, to tell them how they could teach the farmers to raise better
wheat! Professor Bolley went to Russia and spent a year collecting hardy
wheats; the Siberian wheat which he brought home thrived, but the
millers said it was worthless—and they bought it cheap. Then the farmers
stopped growing it; whereupon the millers suddenly decided that this
Siberian wheat was good; the climate had changed it, they said!

Meantime, Professor Ladd had set up a model bakery and a flour mill at
the experiment station, and on the basis of his demonstrations,
President Worst was showing the farmers of North Dakota how they could
save the sum of fifty-five million dollars a year, by setting up
elevators and mills, and exporting flour instead of wheat. In this
demonstration lay the beginnings of the Nonpartisan League movement, and
the masters of the Money Trust perceived that they must crush these
rebel educators. How they tried to do it is the story we have next to
hear.




                              CHAPTER XLII
                       AN AGRICULTURAL MELODRAMA


In January, 1911, there was held in the Twin Cities a gathering of the
interlocking directorate, called by A. R. Rogers, lumber magnate, Howe,
the elevator man, and a group of the big bankers; afterwards they got in
the late “Jesse James” Hill, the railroad king of the Northwest. These
gentlemen worked out a scheme, and wrote their checks for five thousand
each. One of them threw in a remark: “It would be worth twenty-five
thousand a year of any man’s money to get Bolley out of the state, or to
keep his damned mouth shut.”

They were going to “educate” the farmers of North Dakota, and they
called their movement the “Hundred Dollar An Acre Club,” subsequently
changing it to the “Better Farming Association.” They appointed an
executive committee consisting of Rogers, the lumberman, Howe, the
elevator man, one farmer, and eighteen North Dakota bankers, with the
president of the First National Bank of Fargo at their head! These
bankers were borrowing money in Wall Street at six per cent and lending
it to the farmers of their state at ten per cent, which represented a
profit of twelve million dollars a year to them.

As manager of their program of “education” they selected one Thomas
Cooper, at a larger salary than any “educator” in North Dakota had ever
been paid before. Forty-five thousand dollars a year was pledged, and
Mr. Cooper set to work to “educate” the farmers as to the wickedness of
Ladd, Bolley, and others. After three years the balance-sheet of the
organization showed liabilities of forty thousand dollars, and assets of
one brilliant idea. The bankers of the organization went to that other
group of bankers who comprised the trustees of the North Dakota
Agricultural College, and proposed that the college should take over Mr.
Cooper and his salary and his deficit, and should give him entire
control of the experiment station and extension division, and joint
authority over the instruction division, with eighteen North Dakota
bankers as an advisory board! This little job was put through in 1913,
and the exact facts were hidden from the people of North Dakota, and two
years later the Nonpartisan League newspapers had to steal the documents
in the case in order to make them known!

Now behold Mr. Cooper and his eighteen bankers in control of a state
experiment station! The first thing they do is to lock Professor Bolley
out of his laboratories, and the poor janitor is somewhat bewildered,
not knowing whom to let in! They even take away from his department the
research money which he had got from the linseed crushers! They forbid
Ladd and Bolley to go to the state capital while the state legislature
is in session. They issue a written order forbidding them to publish
press bulletins or newspaper articles until these have received the O.
K. of Mr. Cooper; and when Professor Bolley submits bulletins they chop
them to pieces and publish them in such garbled form that they make
nonsense. For four years they publish nothing at all of Bolley’s work.

The brunt of the struggle fell on President Worst, not because he had
done anything himself, but because he stood by his professors. In the
fall of 1914 Worst was in Washington, attending a convention of the
agricultural colleges, and the board passed a secret resolution
promoting him to be president-emeritus—an honorary degree hitherto
unknown in North Dakota agricultural culture. They had conceived the
clever idea of putting Ladd in his place, because this would pacify the
people, and they believed that Ladd would prove a poor executive, and
would be unable to hold on. They came to Ladd and begged him to accept,
and assured him that Worst had consented—which was not true.

When the governor of the state learned what they had done, he fell into
a panic, and ordered them to rescind the action, and for a year
thereafter they backed and filled and argued, trying to persuade Worst
to resign and Ladd to take his place. In the following year Governor
Hanna, himself a prominent banker and director in many corporations,
appointed a new board of regents, with a banker as president, and
another banker and his lawyer making the majority. To this new board
President Worst protested against the disorganization in the
institution, and proposed some division of authority. The interlocking
newspapers lied about what he had said, and the board again got up the
nerve to kick him upstairs. The students met, and in mass conventions
denounced and protested, and the board spent three days badgering them
trying to find out who had written an editorial of protest.

Finally, Worst went out and Ladd came in—on condition that he was to
have complete authority, and that Professor Bolley was to remain.
Senator Ladd tells me that as soon as he had been elected, and in the
very room where these conditions had been agreed to, one member of the
board asked him to get rid of Bolley, and called him a “damned fool”
when he refused. After that there was never a single meeting of the
board that they did not pick a row with him over this issue. Soon they
began asking him to resign; at first they asked him to write his
resignation, and later they wrote it for him—all they asked him to do
was to sign it!

Also there were filed some forty odd charges of unprofessional conduct
against Professor Bolley, whom they had now discovered to be “crazy.”
They gave this “crazy” man a busy time for several years. Two members of
the board came to Fargo, to demand that Bolley should be fired; then an
investigating committee of the faculty was appointed, which completely
exonerated him. But the board insisted that this was a partisan
committee; they appointed a committee of their own members, and this
committee called on the chairman of the faculty committee, and abused
him for not making a proper investigation; then they went to Bolley, and
took up one question after another, and Bolley refuted each. After three
hours one member of the board said: “Well, I think it’s time to quit.”
The second said: “If you are satisfied, I am.” The board received this
report of complete exoneration from its committee, and decided they
would have to discontinue the procedure—but they refused to exonerate
Bolley! The controversy was carried to the national government, and the
Department of Agriculture appointed a committee, which also
investigated, and could find nothing wrong with the “crazy” professor.

This whole story of Bolley makes you think of the melodramas we used to
see on the Bowery, where the heroine is tied to a railroad track, or
tied on a log which is going into a saw-mill, and the rescuers come
galloping up on horseback at the instant when the villain seems
triumphant. In the fall of 1916 the Non-partisan League swept the State
of North Dakota, and on January 1, 1917, Lynn Frasier came galloping
into the governorship of North Dakota, and the farmers of the state got
the results of Professor Bolley’s experiments once more. Thunders of
applause from the gallery!




                             CHAPTER XLIII
                        THE UNIVERSITY OF WHEAT


The state of North Dakota is small in population, likewise in its
influence in the academic world; but its story is important, because its
people have blazed a path upon which the rest of us are destined to
travel for the next decade. What has happened in North Dakota education
will happen in hundreds of our institutions, and therefore it is
desirable that academic liberals should know the story.

The University of North Dakota is located at Grand Forks. The president
from 1909 to 1913 was Frank L. McVey, who was chairman of a tax
commission in Minnesota, and got in the way of “Jesse James” Hill, and
was shunted off to North Dakota to get rid of him. That he was not a
dangerous radical may be judged from the fact that in 1912 he objected
to three of his professors taking part in the Progressive movement. In
1914 Professor Lewinsohn of the law school resigned his position with a
dignified statement, and the president replied by a letter, in which he
set up the contention that college professors are in the same position
as judges.

The grand duke of the board of regents at this time was Judge N. C.
Young, railroad attorney. Needless to say, Judge Young did not refrain
from politics; on the contrary, he ran the Republican machine of the
state—and incidentally never hesitated to denounce the liberals at his
university. Judge Young’s assistant was Mr. Tracy Bangs, aggressive
attorney for the Northern States Power Company and the Northwestern Bell
Telephone Company. Mr. Bangs defended in a murder case the son of a rich
farmer, and got his client off on a plea of “self-defense,” despite the
fact that the victim, a farm-hand, had been shot in the back. Thereupon,
several hundred of Mr. Bangs’ fellow citizens, including many university
professors, signed a petition to the grand jury, charging him with
jury-bribing and demanding his indictment. One professor, A. J. Ladd,
asked him to resign from the board of trustees while he was under this
indictment. Mr. Bangs did not resign, but he bided his time, and as I
write he is seeing to it that Professor A. J. Ladd is separated from the
university!

In 1915, when the Non-partisan League was started, the university
“opposed it by nature”—so a former professor phrased it to me. One man,
Professor Gillette, consented to speak at the first meeting of the
league, and his life has been one long struggle with the reactionaries
ever since. In 1917 President McVey resigned, and the board hastened to
nominate his successor, before the Non-partisans got in and appointed
Frederick C. Howe! They selected President Kane of the University of
Washington—upon the reputation which he had made for himself by
forgiving the crimes and accepting the chimes of the Seattle “Times.”

A professor at North Dakota, who got to know President Kane very well,
describes him to me in these words: “He has less sense of honor than any
man I ever knew.” It was not long before he had proved his incapacity in
North Dakota, and there was a storm of protest concerning him; by way of
defending himself he set up the claim that the opposition was due to his
refusal to appoint nominees of the Non-partisan League to posts as
teachers. The statement was absurd on the face of it, because all
nominations were made by the heads of departments; but it served to
bring the support of the reactionaries. I am told on good authority that
President Kane made a deal with the I. V. A.—“Independent Voters’
Association,” camouflage for big business—that he was to be retained and
allowed to “swing the axe,” in return for his using the university
influence against the Non-partisan League.

The president had an organization all ready-made, in the fraternities
and sororities; and in 1920, when the faculty petitioned for his
removal, he and his reactionaries went to these groups for support. They
incited a student rebellion—and I find this especially significant, in
view of the insistence of all interlocking trustees and newspapers upon
academic order and authority. What could be more shocking to a believer
in propriety than for college students to organize and try to force the
hands of their superiors? But of course that does not apply in a case
where the sons of bankers and railroad attorneys and public utility
magnates are endeavoring to cripple a political movement of “rubes” and
“hicks” and “hayseeds.”

The active agent in this student rebellion was the wife of an employe of
the Grand Forks “Herald,” whose owner, Mr. Jerry Bacon, represents the
Twin City milling and railroad interests in North Dakota. Mr. Bacon had
fought the movement for faculty control, calling it “sovietism in the
university.” I am told by one of his friends that in this matter of the
student uprising he went up to Minneapolis and got his orders from Louis
Hill, son and heir of “Jesse James.” Whether he got the money from Mr.
Hill I do not know, but I do know that the presses of his newspaper
printed cards, supposed to be voicing the students of the university,
urging the student-body to refuse to attend classes of those professors
who demanded the president’s resignation. A student strike to keep
President Kane in office! It must have been much pleasanter for him than
that other strike, back in Washington, when the students made rhymes
denouncing the crimes and rejecting the chimes of the Seattle “Times”!

Last year, when the “I. V. A.” came into power, the new Governor Nestos
came to the university to deliver the Founders’ Day address, and
revealed the new scheme of his crowd—to “get” the liberal professors on
the issue of religion. In the North Dakota legislature a representative
of the “I. V. A.” had proclaimed the terrible tidings that the state
library was circulating “The Profits of Religion.” He described the
pages referring to the Catholic political machine as “so sacrilegious,
so terrible, that I would not read it in this house or any other place.”
According to the Bismarck “Tribune,” he “called the attention of every
minister in North Dakota to this book”—apparently overlooking the
inconsistency of asking the ministers to read the book, and at the same
time forbidding the state library to furnish it to them!

Now came Governor Nestos, accusing the professors of “undermining the
faith of the students”; and President Kane wrote letters to three of the
liberals, O. G. Libby, A. J. Ladd, and Dean Willis of the Law
School—several pages of virulent abuse, culminating in the announcement
of their dismissal. Under the constitution, this matter should have been
taken up by the dean, and the professors had the right of appeal to the
university council. This council appointed a committee, consisting
exclusively of Kane supporters; nevertheless, after hearing the
evidence, this committee unanimously exonerated the professors, and the
board of administration did the same. The board tried to settle the
matter by requesting both Kane and the professors to resign, but the
railroad attorneys who are now running the university will not permit
that. The struggle is still on, and the outcome uncertain as I write.
One man who has got away tells me how it feels to teach under the
control of big business in North Dakota:

“It means the surrender, not merely of your mind, but of your character;
a man who stands it for two or three years becomes wholly unfit to
influence the young. It has been less than a year since I left, yet I
have had letters from probably twelve men at the university, asking me
to help them to get positions elsewhere!”

Finally, in justice to the liberal professors, I think I should state
that no person now at the university has furnished me any information
about it. Several were asked to do so, and declined.




                              CHAPTER XLIV
                    THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ORE TRUST


Let us continue East on the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr.
Morgan and two of his partners for directors, a recent Harvard overseer
and Massachusetts Tech trustee for chairman, a Harvard overseer and
Smith College trustee, a Cornell trustee, an Amherst trustee, a Hampton
trustee and a Union Theological Seminary trustee for directors, also
three First National Bank directors; and we come to the “Twin Cities,”
from which the Northwestern grain country is run. Here we are in one of
the strongholds of the Steel Trust, also of the Lumber Trust and the
grain speculators. Minnesota contains a great part of the iron ore of
the United States, and the Steel Trust owns it all, and in alliance with
the millers and the lumbermen, it runs the government of the state, and
of course the state university. The university had a most wonderful
endowment of government land, covered with the finest white and Norway
pine. The Lumber Trust wanted this timber, and they got practically all
of it. Likewise the Steel Trust wanted the ore that was under the land,
and they got it; and sometimes it happened that the officials who sold
this land at bargain prices were also trustees of the university.

For a generation the grand duke who ran the University of Minnesota was
John S. Pillsbury, co-author with his two brothers of a famous work
entitled “Pillsbury’s Best,” widely known all over the United States. I
had better abandon this feeble jest and be explicit, stating that
Governor Pillsbury belonged to a family of flour manufacturers, the
founders of the Milling Trust. Governor Pillsbury himself went in more
especially for lumber; he got fraudulent possession of more public lands
than any other person in the state, and gave some of the profits to the
university, and so is called the “father of the university.” Now he is
dead, and the grand duke of his institution is his son-in-law, Fred B.
Snyder, president of a mining company and director of the biggest bank
and trust company in Minneapolis. As his right-hand man he has Pierce
Butler, railroad attorney, a hard-fisted and aggressive agent of the
plutocracy, counsel for the Great Northern Railroad. As his assistants
he has the vice-president of a national bank in Duluth, who is director
of another national bank and a large owner of land and mines; the
biggest dry-goods wholesaler in Minneapolis, director in the city
traction lines; a water-power financier; the wife and daughter-in-law of
two mining and lumber magnates; a physician, son-in-law of “Jesse James”
Hill, the railroad king; and another very wealthy physician, on whose
yacht on the Mississippi River the regents sometimes hold their
meetings.

I remember Lincoln Steffens, telling twenty years ago of the Shame of
the Cities, describing how the politicians in Pittsburgh would travel to
Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and other cities, to find out the
latest wrinkles in graft, with a view to applying them at home. It
occurs to me that the interlocking regents of Minnesota must have sent a
commission to study methods at the University of Pennsylvania; for when
I asked Minnesota professors to tell me what happened to them, I heard
the same story that I had heard in the Wharton School of Finance, told
in the very same phrases.

If you displease your superiors of the Milling Trust, you may get no
changes in your courses, but may have to teach large classes of
freshmen, over and over again the same weary routine, until your heart
breaks. You ask for more advanced classes, and you do not get them; you
do not get promotions or increases in salary, and when you inquire the
reason, your superiors are politely vague. If you still do not take the
hint and abandon your independent manners and beliefs, the head of your
department sends for you and tells you that he is very sorry, but there
are a lot of cranks running the state just now. “Here I have a letter
from the dean, who has it from the president, who has it from a regent.”
If your superior happens to like you, he offers you one more opportunity
to recant, or he offers “to land you at Wisconsin”; he will give you “a
bully recommendation,” it will be “a fine opportunity for you.” If, on
the other hand, he does not happen to like you, then you pick up your
evening paper, and read a scare headline on the front page, to the
effect that you have been dismissed from the university for conduct
unbecoming the academic profession.

There were some students who thought it would be interesting to have an
“open discussion club.” They were handicapped by many regulations; and,
quite casually, the dean of student affairs would stroll in on their
meetings, to keep watch over them. One of the students went to a member
of the faculty, and asked him if he would come and explain to the
students the doctrines of Karl Marx; the professor smiled, and answered
that he wanted to stay at the university. I am happy to be able to say
that the students were not so timid as the professor, and they now meet
quite openly, calling themselves the “Seekers.”

They have had several grave mishaps at this University of the Ore Trust.
First, a man came and registered in the classes, and was discovered to
be a Communist! The man had been brought to the United States when he
was three years old, and so he was an alien, and was slated for
deportation. But the government was in an embarrassing position; the man
did not know what country to claim, and the government couldn’t find
out, and didn’t know where to send him! Needless to say, however, the
university got rid of him in a hurry.

They had for three years a Harvard Ph.D., educated in England; after the
fashion of Englishmen, he was a member of the Fabian Society, and
thought he had a perfect right to his political views, just the same as
if he had been at Oxford. He began working for the Committee of
Forty-eight, making speeches at other places, and so he got into the
newspapers. The head of his department sent for him: “We have to keep
out of the newspapers; look at me, I have been here twelve years, and I
have never got into them!” But this instructor would not change his evil
practices, so he too had to be got rid of.

Meet Professor John Henry Gray, one of the most distinguished economists
in the United States. Professor Gray was for fifteen years at
Northwestern University, and for fifteen at the University of Minnesota.
He is not a Socialist, but an extremely mild liberal, a quiet man and a
patient worker, who gets the facts on his subject and sets them forth
regardless of consequences. He has been selected to represent the United
States government on many economic commissions abroad—at the
International Cooperative Congress at Manchester, 1902; at the
International Congress on Insurance for Laboring Men, at Düsseldorf, and
the International Congress of Commerce and Industry, at Ostend. He was
appointed on a commission of the National Civic Federation in 1905, to
study municipal ownership abroad; again, in 1911-1914, to investigate
the regulation of public service corporations. He is associate editor of
two economic journals—I might go on to give a long list of his honors
and positions. But Professor Gray had the bad taste to become converted
to the doctrines of municipal ownership, and the still worse taste,
while working for the government in Washington during the war, to
interfere with some of the interlocking directors from his home state,
engaged in their usual practice of robbing the government. So Professor
Gray’s life at the university became a torment.

They removed him from the leadership of his department, saying that he
had no executive ability and couldn’t keep order. They would move him
from one room to another, and subject him to every humiliation. He was
sixty-three years of age, and would soon be entitled to a pension, so he
held on; but he never got a “raise,” and he was told that he never would
get it, nor would any man he recommended ever get it. They brought in a
subordinate from the census bureau in Washington, and paid this man
$1,500 a year more than Professor Gray was getting. They “reorganized”
his department, deposing him from the headship, and combining it with a
“School of Business,” and so finally succeeded in making him resign.

Or consider the strange experience of a young instructor of chemistry
named Bernard Dietrichson. He had a dispute with his dean, and two
members of the law faculty were appointed by the regents to make an
inquiry. This committee reported that the department had been seriously
mismanaged by the dean, and that Mr. Dietrichson “had done nothing to
merit discipline or dismissal.” This report was received by a committee
of the regents, with Pierce Butler, chief bully of the board of regents,
in charge. It issued a decision, stating that it had examined the
findings of the investigating committee of lawyers, and that on the
basis of these findings it held that there had been no mismanagement by
the dean, and that Mr. Dietrichson ought to be dismissed! The regents’
committee then suppressed the text of the findings of the investigating
committee; but unfortunately for Mr. Butler, the document containing the
suppressed facts came into the hands of Dietrichson, and he published
it. Thereupon, the dean of the chemistry department was dismissed, and
the department reorganized—a complete confession that Dietrichson was
right. Nevertheless, he is still out of the university!

More money is appropriated for the University of the Ore Trust, more
buildings are erected, more students come piling in; but the soul of the
place is poisoned. There is no solidarity in the faculty, there is only
intrigue, jealousy and fear. There is an elaborate system of outside
spying, and no one knows whom to trust. If you go to the faculty club
and listen to the gossip about your associates, and take part in the
petty politics of your department, then you are respectable, and they
let you alone; but if you don’t do these things, then they know you must
be some kind of crank, and it is the business of the spies to find out
what you are doing with your spare time, and whether you have any
dangerous ideas. If you make a public address, there will be volunteer
patriotic organizations taking notes of your remarks, and a copy will be
sent to the president of the university, or perhaps to the grand dukes
of the board.

Meetings of the board of regents are by law required to be public, but
they get around this by the simple device of having “executive
sessions”—and once in a while a champagne picnic on Dr. Mayo’s private
yacht! A member of the faculty will be hauled up—he has never seen one
of the regents before, and has no idea who has accused him, or what are
the accusations. They do not scruple to ask him the most personal
questions, not merely about his beliefs, but about his private life. Is
it true that he is separated from his wife? Is it true that he took a
young lady to dinner? They will call in his dean and his fellow
professors, and if the charge is a serious one, he is decapitated in
advance. Here sit the angry plutocrats, brutal, full of hate—“I
understand this”—“Is it true that”—and so on. “Did you vote for Debs?”
“Did you belong to the Progressive party?” “Do you believe in God?”
“Have you studied the constitution of the United States?” “Do you
believe in abolishing the capitalistic system?” “What church do you go
to?”

Sometimes a professor gets “sore,” and tells these mighty ones to go to
hell; after that he can get no job in any American university. I was
told of a leading authority on state government taxation and political
science who is now making washboards. This man was listed as a “war
case;” that is to say, he had served on a charter commission in
Minneapolis, and had put through certain franchise provisions opposed by
the public service companies; so when the war came he was called
unpatriotic. He writes me as follows:

  Usually the intimidation of a professor is so veiled and vague that he
  hardly knows what is wrong. A certain significant remark dropped at
  the right time, a certain coldness of attitude, failure to be included
  in certain social affairs, a certain slowness to get well earned
  increases, granted with gusto to others, many other little hints that
  his views do not meet with favor in certain quarters will serve to
  curb many a man with wife and babies to provide for. For instance,
  there were a score or more called before the regents at the time I
  was, every one of whom had opposed our entrance into the war and had
  not changed views as to the wisdom or justice of our going in, but
  they were willing to disavow their attitude, when confronted with
  instant dismissal. Some of these men told me they had to lie or starve
  their wives and babies, and they took the easier road.

Another man, a former professor, writes me of the present head of the
university: “He does not hesitate to use the black-list to ruin a man’s
career.” A professor now at the university writes me a long letter,
telling me, among other cases, of a man summoned before the regents and
later commanded to resign, for having stated in a private conversation
to an old acquaintance that “now that the war is over, we ought to set
the political prisoners free”; this man defended himself, and managed to
hold on; but another instructor, an able man, was placed in peril of his
job for having presided at a political meeting in his home ward, in
favor of the labor candidate for mayor. This man was ousted a year
later, under circumstances to be narrated.

You will wish to know something about the spy-system, maintained by the
“Citizen’s Alliance,” with the cooperation of the trustees; so I submit
a statement from Mr. Fred W. Bentley, who was for three years an
instructor. His statement is dated August 20, 1919, and the essential
parts of it are as follows:

  One day last spring, I do not remember the exact date, I was called to
  the ’phone in my office, Room No. 111, Main Engineering Building, by a
  stranger who said his name was Miller. He first stated that he had a
  private matter to talk about, and asked if it were safe to talk to me
  where I was. I informed him that he could talk to me anywhere, that I
  had nothing to cover up.

  He then told me that he was interested in a little enterprise and that
  some of my friends had recommended me to him as one who might help him
  a little financially. He said that he had never had the pleasure of
  meeting me but that he knew some of my friends. He asked me if I knew
  a man (I don’t remember the name) who ran a saloon on Seventh Street,
  but I informed him that I did not. He asked me if I had seen the
  publication called “Hunger” and I informed him that I had seen someone
  selling it on the street but that I had not read it.

  He said that they were trying to get out another edition and would
  have to have some machine (I don’t remember what he called it) and
  asked if I would make a contribution toward it. I told him I didn’t
  mind giving a dollar or two, and he asked me if I would leave it with
  State Secretary Dirba, which I promised to do.

  A few days after that I saw Dirba and asked him if he had been
  approached in the matter and he said he had not. I told Dirba that if
  anyone did come to him to send the party to me, and thought nothing
  further of the matter until one day, sometime later, Dean Allen came
  to me in the drafting room and told me that the Board of Regents was
  meeting in the president’s office and wanted to see me. I went
  immediately with Dean Allen to the meeting of the board, where I was
  informed that charges of disloyalty had been preferred against me.
  When I inquired what they were I learned that the above ’phone
  conversation was the basis for the charges.

  After a few questions relative to the “Hunger” incident, President
  Burton and the members of the board proceeded to ask numerous
  questions as to my opinions on many topics, social, political and
  economic, all of which were none of their business, the more so since
  I was teaching Drawing, Descriptive Geometry, and Machine Design, and
  was never called upon to address the students on any other subject.

  I cannot, of course, remember all their questions but some of them
  were as follows

  Are you a Socialist? Do you belong to the Socialist Party? Have you
  attended any of the meetings at Commonwealth Hall? Have you ever
  belonged to the I. W. W.? Have you ever attended any of the I. W. W.
  meetings? Do you favor Trade Unionism or Industrial Unionism? Are
  there many Industrial Unionists in the A. F. of L.? Do you believe in
  bringing about the social change you advocate by education or
  violence? Do you believe in the confiscation of property? Have you
  read the constitution of Soviet Russia? Do you think it right that the
  employers of labor in Russia should be denied the right to vote? Are
  there many men of the faculty who believe as you do, etc.?

There is nothing to add to this, except that Mr. Bentley was not
reappointed to the university—and was left to learn this fact by
accident, from a friend! He had worked for three years at a very low
salary, upon the promise that he would soon be made a professor; but now
they dropped him—and so late in the year that he could not apply for a
position elsewhere.




                              CHAPTER XLV
                           THE ACADEMIC WINK


They have had a series of presidents at the University of the Ore Trust.
The old president was Northrop, an amiable gentleman, much liked by the
faculty because he did not understand the modern card-filing system.
Then came Vincent, one of the “go-getters.” A professor whom he “got”
writes me: “He apparently felt that he held a mandate to break the
hearts of the men who had served under Northrop.” As a result of faculty
clamor, an “advisory committee” was established, but the method of
appointing this was ingeniously contrived so that Vincent had the power
to keep off any liberals. This committee met in secret, and my
correspondent describes to me its operation:

  A poor devil, Professor A, who had been teaching for a small salary in
  hopes of promotion, would receive some fine morning a notice from
  headquarters that his contract was terminated at the end of the year.
  Professor B would be advised that he had one year more to serve,
  during which time he had better be looking for a new place. Professor
  C would be notified that his salary would not be increased. Smothered
  with rage, disappointment and despair, he would rush to the president
  of the university to know in what particular he had erred or sinned.
  The president in his unctuous way would inform the professor that he
  was sorry for what had been done but could do nothing, because the
  matter lay in the hands of the advisory committee, with which he could
  not interfere. Our victim would then set out to find the advisory
  committee, but as it was made up of nine members and had adjourned, he
  could not locate it. He would continue his search, and perchance find
  one of the members of the illustrious committee. Upon his making
  inquiry as to why and to what purpose he would be assured of the
  member’s sympathy, but would be told that there was an understanding
  among the members of the advisory committee that nothing should be
  said as to what was done in the sessions or how the members voted. The
  disappointed pedagogue could get nothing from anybody; there was no
  one responsible; he had been sandbagged in a dark alley, but who did
  the job he could not learn.

Vincent was called to become head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Then
came Marion LeRoy Burton, a former clergyman, and president of Smith
College for young ladies, a “booster” from way back, an inspirationalist
of the Chautauqua school; the university gave him a grand reception,
with bands and torches. He said in the hearing of an acquaintance of
mine that he was going to make Minnesota a gentleman’s school of the
Yale type. What actually exists is a great academic department-store.
Sinclair Lewis described it to me—“They sell you two yards of Latin and
half a yard of Greek, and a bored young instructor hands it out over the
counter.” Lewis heard President Burton addressing a meeting of the
plutocracy to raise funds, and telling the touching story of his life—he
was a little boy who carried newspapers on cold mornings, and now he had
fifteen thousand dollars a year, and a big house, and a retiring
pension—a wonderful country is America!

Another friend of mine heard President Burton make a speech in Denver,
before a gathering of business men called the “Mile High Club.” He said
that at his university the students were allowed to think, but they were
“guided in their thinking”; and the business men got the point and
chuckled. His speech was a series of cheap jokes and hackneyed
utterances, delivered with fervid eloquence. His type of scholarship you
may judge from the titles of some of the books which he has produced:
“The Secret of Achievement”; “The Life Which Is Life Indeed”; “On Being
Divine.”

Last year President Burton got tired of his regents, and accepted a
higher salary at the University of Michigan, where we shall meet him
again. His place has been taken by one of the university’s own
professors, who was supposed to act as a rubber-stamp to the
interlocking regents, but is now behind the scenes engaged in the usual
struggle with Grand Bully Butler. President Coffman is not even allowed
to make appointments to the university—to say nothing of allowing the
heads of departments to do so. The names are brought up before the board
of regents, and these wary gentlemen go over the man’s list of degrees
and his record, and then Grand Duke Snyder says: “That seems good, but
is he all right generally?” meaning, of course, has he any “dangerous
ideas.”

In the fall of 1919 the inspirational President Burton delivered some of
those wonderful high-sounding phrases, which are a part of our
university swindle. He said that “integrity” must be the chief
characteristic of university men and women. Whereupon a college paper,
“The Foolscap,” was moved to a little plain speaking. It said:

  Academic freedom, to be sure, exists here at Minnesota as at other
  equally “ideal” universities. Our president has publicly announced
  that fact. Our faculty and the student body enthusiastically applauded
  that announcement. This academic freedom, however, is of so peculiar a
  nature that no one member of the faculty is free publicly to discuss
  it. The president may speak of it with an engaging boldness; the
  students may speak of it (and do) with a fine ironic scorn; but
  members of the faculty, those to whom is intrusted our instruction in
  “all forms of knowledge,” those even whom we address as “Professor”
  and “Dean,” they dare not utter their true opinion concerning it;
  their mouths are effectually sealed. This the students know. They have
  seen the flush of shame and anger rise to the cheeks of embarrassed
  teachers who could reply to audacious undergraduate taunts of
  insincerity and dishonesty only with mortified silence. They have
  seen, at that moment when vigorous applause gave generous approval to
  our president’s insistence on academic freedom, at that very moment
  when enthusiasm for truth was at its highest, at that very moment they
  saw instructors wink at their colleagues, and deans look meaningly at
  some understanding friend. Students, both inside and outside the class
  room, are particularly observant of the actions of their instructors.
  They know when deans applaud because they have to; when professors say
  things they do not mean. They know that even while they listen to talk
  of academic freedom they see men annually relieved of their academic
  burdens for having dared to utter what they deemed to be the truth.
  These students know the colleges from which such instructors were
  dismissed. They know the names of these instructors. They know the
  cause for which they were dismissed. They know, also, that such is the
  state of academic freedom at our university that, even as we go to
  press, at least one professor in the academic college—a professor,
  too, whose discreet devotion to facts, and whose cautious refusal to
  permit the slightest classroom interpretation thereof, make his
  potentially excellent subject an inexpressible bore—that at least this
  one professor is trembling with fear and anger because of official
  intimation that he had entertained opinions for which his institution
  did not stand.

This publication made a tremendous uproar in the university. For, of
course, all university influence depends upon the keeping up of a
pretense of freedom; the public must believe in these mighty captains of
erudition and must not see them wink as they use their high-sounding
words. A faculty committee of five members was appointed to investigate
the statements made. This committee interviewed a great number of
university people, members of the faculty of all ranks, both men and
women, also students and alumni. They submitted a report, of which I
quote parts. You note the carefully guarded phrases:

  A great deal of evidence has been presented to your committee which
  indicates the existence in our academic community of a sense of
  restraint and repression of a kind and degree distinctly unfavorable
  to a sound and intellectual life. This is already indicated by the
  vote taken at the meeting of the faculty on February 16. The
  investigation of the committee has served to confirm and verify this
  impression of a condition that cannot be described as wholesome. Fears
  have been disclosed to the committee, which if recounted in detail
  might seem to many members of the faculty absurd and unbelievable, and
  which perhaps could not be entertained by others, either because of
  the possession of greater courage, or of a greater security of tenure,
  or because of the fact that their own convictions are in happier
  conformity with the ruling opinion. Nevertheless, the undoubted
  presence of these fears in the minds of many members of the faculty
  constitutes a psychological atmosphere depressing in its influence,
  and calculated to have a deleterious effect upon the sincerity and
  quality of the teaching done under a sense of it....

  It has become of late a frequent experience that complaint on the part
  of some person or organization outside the university leads to an
  investigation, formal or informal, of the views or activities of some
  member of the faculty. Commonly, it may be taken for granted that the
  activities complained of are wholly within the discretion of a teacher
  and the rights of a citizen. The mere knowledge, however, that such
  complaints are under investigation, creates a sense of intimidation,
  felt most strongly, of course, by the more inexperienced members of
  the faculty whose academic tenure is less secure....

  Much of the fear prevalent on the campus is due to reports of the
  manner in which investigations have been conducted by the regents, the
  attitude exhibited not always having been sufficiently clear and
  consistent to be wholly reassuring. Doubtless such impressions are
  sometimes due to mere inadvertencies; but the fact is that a member of
  the faculty, when summoned to answer charges preferred, frequently
  finds himself unjustifiably on the defensive....

  Evidence has been brought to the attention of your committee which
  plainly indicates the use of espionage by external forces that
  continually attempt to exert pressure upon the authorities as to
  university teaching and personnel. Your committee is firmly of the
  opinion that such pressure is not in the public interest. The invasion
  by private detectives of the domain of academic life and thought is
  scarcely compatible with the maintenance of a sound and wholesome
  intellectual spirit. The methods and point of view of these people may
  be illustrated by your committee’s own experience. Early in the course
  of this investigation, one of these agents sought and obtained an
  interview with a member of your committee, in which he volunteered the
  information that the “Foolscap” editorial (which, as it subsequently
  developed, he had not even read) was a piece of political propaganda,
  that he knew the particular party headquarters whence it came, and
  that it was certain he could discover the real author concealed behind
  the editorial screen. He offered, accordingly, on the assumption that
  your committee was interested, not in the question of fact raised by
  the editorial, but rather in the exposure and punishment of a
  quasi-criminal conspiracy supposedly involved in its publication, to
  worm himself into the confidence of the editor of the “Foolscap” and
  to procure for your committee by betrayal of this confidence the name
  of the guilty propagandist author. It is deplorable to note the
  constantly extending nets of private spy systems in civil life, and it
  is to be hoped that the threatened invasion of academic life by this
  sinister influence may be prevented. No thoughtful person can fail to
  see how blighting would be its influence, when once firmly
  established, in the destruction of mutual confidence, and in rendering
  impossible that frankness of discussion and opinion without which the
  intellectual life is not freely nourished and stimulated.

There remains only to state what action the faculty took in this matter.
One member of the committee tells me about it:

  They postponed action until such a time as the committee was ready to
  report again to a closed faculty meeting giving specific instances of
  lack of academic freedom, with names and dates. The committee, having
  decided to present three typical cases in detail to the faculty, asked
  the president to summon a meeting. He passed the buck to the committee
  of the deans known as the senate. The deans thought it inopportune to
  call the meeting at that particular time, it being just prior to the
  June examinations. Summer vacation ensued. In September, when college
  re-opened, one of the five committeemen had gone East for a year as an
  exchange professor; another had been retired as a Carnegie pensioner
  on account of his age; a third, though still drawing a salary as a
  member of the faculty, had received notice of his dismissal; and the
  other two saw the futility of trying to bring the matter up again.

Also I ought to add what action the regents took. They kicked out of the
university the young instructor who had been most active in preparing
the report. He has written me about the circumstances of his dismissal:

  Nothing specific was sent to me. But, by what chain of circumstances
  need not be told, I saw with my own eyes a letter from Pierce Butler
  addressed to President Burton asking for my decapitation. The neatest
  thing you ever saw—not a direct order, and not even a request for my
  dismissal, but a carefully worded statement to the effect that it
  seemed to him (Butler) regrettable that the name of the university had
  been linked up in the press with the name of myself. That was all. But
  Burton sent it down the line of officials as a positive decree and my
  fate at Minnesota was settled. Usually, as you perhaps are aware, the
  thing is done by word of mouth only. Butler, of course, never imagined
  that this letter would reach my eyes.

Mr. Butler remains grand bully of the university; but here also we are
at the “big scene” in the melodrama—the villain has the heroine
helpless, but in the distance we hear the galloping hoofs of the
rescuer’s horses! The farmers of Minnesota with their Non-partisan
League, and the workers of the cities with their unions, have got
together into the Farmer-Labor party, and they have just elected their
own United States senator. Before long they may also elect a governor of
their state, and the University of the Ore Trust may become the
University of the people of Minnesota.

P.S.—As this book is going to the printer President Harding, wishing to
show the public exactly how contemptuous of public opinion it is
possible for a public official to be, sends in the nomination of Grand
Bully Butler for justice of the United States Supreme Court!




                              CHAPTER XLVI
                   INTRODUCING A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT


From the University of Minnesota we take the Chicago and Northwestern
Railroad, which has a Princeton trustee and a recent New York University
and Yale trustee for directors, and two National City Bank directors.
Overnight we come to Madison, Wisconsin, where for the first time we
find an institution of higher education which has partly emerged from
under the shadow of the White Terror. The reason for this is one
man—Senator LaFollette, who for forty years has been fighting the battle
of the people in his state. LaFollette has not always had his way; he
has been in again and out again half a dozen times; but the thought of
him is never out of the minds of the reactionaries, and many things they
have wished to do in their university they have not dared to do. So at
Wisconsin are two professors who are “rank” Socialists, and perhaps a
dozen others more or less on the way to “rankness.” Just now the state
administration is LaFollette’s, but the administration of the university
is reactionary, a relic of the war hysteria.

The grand duke of the plutocratic element of the board is Mr. A. J.
Horlick, whose contribution to American scholarship is a brand of malted
milk, with a picture of a cow from which the commodity is understood to
be derived. Quite recently the president of the University of Wisconsin
announced that no one would be permitted to address the university who
had not supported the government during the war. Mr. Horlick has proven
his right to be numbered among the hundred percent patriots, the firm of
which he is head having been indicted by the United States government
and fined fifty thousand dollars for the hoarding of flour. (Query: Is
malted milk made out of flour?)

The most active reactionary upon the board is Mr. Harry J. Butler, a
railroad attorney of Madison; he is ably seconded by Dr. Seaman, a
physician, anti-LaFollette candidate for governor last year; also by a
wholesale grocer, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, two other
attorneys, and a manufacturer’s wife. For many years the university had
a liberal president; since his death they have had an elderly zoologist
of reactionary temper, who deftly dodges trouble by “passing the buck”
to his board. The liberals, inside the university and out, are biding
their time; they strengthened their hold on the state at the recent
election, and now hope to get one or two more members of the board, so
that when a new president is chosen he may be of their kind.

Last winter it was rumored that I was coming East, and the students of
the Social Science Club asked if I would deliver an address at the
university. Before I had time to answer, I learned from newspaper
clippings that the president of the university had announced that I was
not a proper person to be heard by the students, and would not be
granted the use of a hall. I have to spend some time every day declining
invitations to deliver lectures, and the elderly Wisconsin zoologist
might have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had waited before he
spoke. Of course, when he told me I couldn’t come, I felt compelled to
go.

President Birge had stated in the Madison “Capital-Times” that “Upton
Sinclair’s attack on journalism could only be fairly expounded if a
representative of the Associated Press or other organized journalistic
body were present at the same time to answer.” Apparently it was the
president’s idea that I never talked on any subject but the newspapers,
which of course was underestimating the range of my discontent. However,
I wired the “Capital-Times,” asking them to convey to their president
the information, “I have been trying in every possible way to inveigle
the Associated Press into answering ‘The Brass Check’ in any manner they
might choose. I have publicly challenged them and their leading
representatives a dozen different times. If President Birge will
persuade the Associated Press to send a representative to debate with
me, he will confer upon me the greatest favor I could name.”

President Birge made no answer to this, and on Friday, April 28th, when
I arrived in Madison, I learned that the students of the Social Science
Club had arranged that the meeting should be held on the following
Monday in the high school auditorium. I thought it would be interesting
to collect a university president for this book, so the first thing I
did was to go and pay a call on Dr. Birge.

I am told that in his own line he is a distinguished scientist, and his
friends at the university explained that he is accustomed to being
treated with extreme deference. I am sorry to say that I missed this
point. I considered that I had been attacked in the newspapers entirely
without provocation, and I was not willing to be content with polite
evasions. In trying to get at the facts, I felt that I was acting in a
public cause, and I was not thinking about the personality of a
university president, any more than I was thinking about my own.

He is a rather small man, with small dark eyes, and he sat at his big
desk, watching me uncomfortably. I asked him what reasons he had for
pronouncing the ban upon me, and he could only say it was my reputation.
I asked him where he had got his impression of my reputation, and of
course he had to admit that he had got it from the capitalist
newspapers. I asked if he had read any book of mine, and at first he
said he had not, then he thought he had read “The Jungle,” but had
forgotten it.

“Oh, no, President Birge,” I answered. “Nobody that has read ‘The
Jungle’ has ever forgotten it.” And I could see that this was not the
answer he had expected.

I asked him on what he based his impression that I had exaggerated in
“The Brass Check.” He admitted that he had not read the book; whereat I
remarked: “You have spoiled my score!” I explained that I had traveled
from Pasadena to Madison, and stopped at nine cities on the way, and in
each place I had talked to from ten to twenty educators—school teachers
and college professors—and so far every person had read “The Brass
Check.” “I thought I was going to get to New York with a hundred percent
record!” President Birge murmured sympathetically.

“You will realize,” I added, “that it strikes me as significant that the
one person who thinks the book isn’t true is the person who hasn’t read
it.”

I went on to tell about the many and various efforts I had made to lure
the Associated Press into the arena. Before publishing the book I had
submitted to Mr. Melville E. Stone, then general manager of the
Associated Press, four questions for him to answer. He had previously
written that he would be glad to answer any questions, but he fell
silent when he read the questions I sent. I had written to Mr. Stone’s
assistant, now general manager, calling his attention to the book, and
asking for an answer on various points. At the annual convention of the
Associated Press, held in New York in April, 1921, after “The Brass
Check” had been out more than a year, it was officially announced in the
“Editor and Publisher,” and also in the New York “Evening Post,” that
the Associated Press had a committee investigating “The Brass Check,”
and was shortly to issue a complete report upon the book. A couple of
months later, when this report failed to appear, I wrote the Associated
Press asking what had become of it, and when they failed to reply, I
published my letter and sent a copy of it to the managing editor of
every Associated Press newspaper in the United States—but without
getting a reply from a single one!

Only a couple of weeks before I met President Birge, another annual
convention of the Associated Press took place in New York, and I
repeated my challenge to this gathering, and sent a copy to every
managing editor, and also every publisher, of the thirteen hundred
Associated Press newspapers in the United States. No attention was paid
to these communications, and not one single Associated Press newspaper
was willing to demand that the Associated Press should produce the
report on “The Brass Check,” which it had officially announced it was
preparing.

I showed President Birge also how the students of his own Social Science
Club had tried in vain to get the Associated Press to answer me. Their
first request, that the Associated Press should send a representative to
meet me on a university platform, had met with no reply; a second and
very sharp letter had brought the response that no responsible newspaper
man would be willing to meet me on a platform. Any newspaper man will
realize the absurdity of this statement. The A. P. could find a man in
any city—if they could furnish him with the facts!

Then I set forth to President Birge my qualifications as an orator in
university halls; as it happened, I came within his specifications, in
that I had supported the government during the war. I came of a long
line of American ancestors; my grandfather and my great-grandfather had
been captains in the United States Navy, and my great-great-grandfather
had commanded the frigate “Constitution.” I had had nine years of
college and university life, and was a married man of good moral
character. Also, I mentioned that it was not my intention to discuss the
newspapers, but to lecture on “The College Student and the Modern
Crisis.” All these facts the elderly zoologist politely received, and
told me that if I would embody them in a letter to him he would oblige
me by a reply not later than noon of the next day.

I wrote the letter, and received the reply, which was that President
Birge would not change his decision, but that if the board of regents
saw fit to grant my request, they would be at liberty to do so.
Thereupon I gave to the press my letter to President Birge and his
reply, and also an interview in which I stated that the president had
afforded me an exceedingly good example of my thesis “that educational
institutions are controlled by special privilege,” and that I would give
up my intention of lecturing on “The College Student and the Modern
Crisis” in Madison, and instead would discuss the subject of free speech
in universities. The effect of which announcement was that the
superintendent of the high school took fright, and withdrew permission
for me to speak in his auditorium!




                             CHAPTER XLVII
                     INTRODUCING A BOARD OF REGENTS


On Tuesday morning the regents of the University of Wisconsin held a
session; and I assumed that, having made the acquaintance of a
university president, you might also be interested in interviewing a
board of regents. I looked up the statutes of the state of Wisconsin,
and ascertained that under the law all meetings of the board are public.
So I went to the administration building at ten o’clock on Tuesday
morning, the hour set for the meeting—and to my great surprise
discovered the ladies and gentlemen of the august board meeting behind
locked doors!

It appears that whenever they have a ticklish question to discuss, they
evade the law by calling it a meeting of a “committee.” I am in position
to testify that the meeting of the “committee” was a meeting of exactly
the same individuals as later constituted a meeting of the “board”; also
I am in position to testify that they discussed exactly the same
subject, because the anteroom in which I was invited to sit and wait was
so near to the meeting-room, that I could hear the voices when they were
raised, and I knew that they were discussing the subject of my proposed
speech. I handed to the secretary of the board a formal request for a
hearing, and then waited. At a quarter past ten, the secretary of the
board came to the anteroom, which was occupied by myself and half a
dozen newspaper reporters, and requested that we should go downstairs
and wait, as it was not proper for us to be “listening in on the
proceedings of the board.” Naturally I was not gratified by this remark,
as I had been sitting quietly in the chair which had been indicated to
me as the proper chair for me to occupy, and I had not been told that it
was my duty to stuff cotton into my ears.

However, I went downstairs, and waited another half hour, and then I
wrote another note, stating briefly that I protested against the board
settling a question in secret meeting, when the law required that their
proceedings should be public. After that I waited another hour, and then
the secretary informed me that the meeting of the board of regents was
now about to begin, and that the “public” was welcome to enter. I
entered the room where the ladies and gentlemen of the board had been
violating the law of their state for an hour and three-quarters, and I
was informed that the board would be pleased to give me ten minutes in
which to present my case.

I have made it my practice to use most careful courtesy in dealing with
my enemies, so as to put them in the wrong. I dutifully rehearsed to the
regents my qualifications as a university orator, after which the board
proceeded to question me, the two active questioners being Mr. Butler,
the railroad attorney, and Dr. Seaman, the reactionary candidate for
governor. The latter wanted to know if I had been correctly quoted in
the newspaper interview, in which I had charged that President Birge
“had been influenced by money” in his decision against me.

Pardon me if I go into details on this point. We have seen several
university professors being cross-questioned by boards of regents, and
it will be worth while for us to have exact knowledge of how these
inquisitions are conducted. You would have thought that Dr. Seaman,
being a man prominent in public life, would have taken the trouble to
provide himself with a copy of the interview about which he intended to
cross-question me; but he had not done so, and I, as it happens, do not
go about with copies of my newspaper interviews in my pocket. I was
embarrassed by Dr. Seaman’s question, and could only explain that I had
no recollection of having made any such statement about President Birge,
and that certainly I could have no such idea about him. Newspaper
reports were frequently inaccurate. What I had intended to say and
should have said was that in his decision concerning me President Birge
had “acted in the interest of special privilege.” Later, when I went out
from the board, and got a copy of the interview, I discovered that this
is exactly what I was reported to have said, and that Dr. Seaman had
been misquoting me in a public session of the board, with half a dozen
newspaper reporters diligently taking notes!

President Birge arose and asked on what ground I could have made such a
statement about him. My answer was that he had shown his attitude of
sympathy with special privilege by many things he had said in our long
interview; also he had shown a very strong prejudice against the enemies
of special privilege.

“How, for example?” he asked.

I answered: “If I were a person disposed to take personal offense, I
would have considered myself outraged by the remark you made to me, that
without having read any of my books you had come to the conclusion that
I was a person ‘accustomed to pep up and exaggerate his statements in
order to create a sensation and to increase the sale of his books.’” (I
loathe the expression “pep up,” and beg the reader to understand that I
am quoting a university president.)

At this President Birge became much excited, saying that this had been a
confidential conversation; he had given me his personal opinion of my
reputation at my request, and I now proceeded to tell it in the presence
of newspaper reporters—and he was a man old enough to be my father!

I answered that I did not see that age had anything to do with the
matter, nor could I understand how our interview could be regarded as
“confidential”; I had come to him, a public official, acting in a public
matter. There could have been nothing “personal” between us, for I did
not know President Birge, I had never even heard his name until I read
his interview in a Madison newspaper, stating that I was an unfit person
to address the university students.

Said President Birge: “I did not say you were unfit.”

Said I: “I don’t know what your word was, but your action was certainly
to that effect.”

Then Attorney Butler spoke up, and wanted to know if I had threatened
that if I were not permitted the use of a university building I would
attack President Birge and the university in some other hall. To this I
said that my action followed automatically from the situation. I had
come to Madison for the purpose of delivering to the students an address
entitled: “The College Student and the Modern Crisis.” If the university
would permit me to deliver this address, I should deliver it. If they
wouldn’t permit me to deliver this address, I should naturally have to
discuss the question of why they took such action. Mr. Butler’s answer
was that nobody should come to the university, with his consent, and try
to bulldoze the board of regents by any kind of threat.

The board offered me an additional five minutes, if I wished it, but I
answered that the greatest virtue in an orator was to know when he had
said his say. I thanked them and retired; and that afternoon they held
another session, and Mr. Butler and Dr. Seaman, ably seconded by the
bathtub manufacturer and the wholesale grocer, voted that I should be
refused the use of the gymnasium. The seven other members of the board
voted that President Birge should be requested to grant me the use of
the gymnasium. President Birge himself did not vote, and I am sorry to
state that the malted milk regent was absent and did not get recorded.
Needless to say, all this publicity—it filled many columns of Madison’s
two newspapers for five days—resulted in the gymnasium’s being packed on
Wednesday evening. Some two thousand students heard my scheduled
address, and asked me questions for an hour afterwards, and the walls of
the building did not collapse, nor have any of the students since thrown
any bombs.

Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and
played each of its members in turn, and beat them in straight sets; and
I am told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational
incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on
the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and don’t know his
name; but he assured me, with deep conviction, that I had made a grave
blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the
speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough
to hold the crowd!




                             CHAPTER XLVIII
                          THE PRICE OF LIBERTY


The University of Wisconsin has the reputation of being the most liberal
institution of higher education in the United States, and on the whole I
think the reputation is deserved. I have shown what a struggle it took
to introduce one little impulse of new thinking into the place; and you
must realize that every mite of freedom has been won by the same
struggle, and the maintaining of it depends upon somebody’s willingness
to be disagreeable. I talked with one professor, who is known throughout
the United States as a writer and lecturer, not a Socialist, but a
tireless advocate of social justice. This man has won, and he holds
grimly the right to have his own say and his own way. He assigns to his
graduate students “The Brass Check” as required reading, and as their
thesis they make a study of some capitalist newspaper in its handling of
half a dozen crucial public issues, such as the steel strike and Mexican
intervention.

The rub comes when the professor goes outside and lectures to city clubs
and chambers of commerce, and gets into the newspapers in favor of the
recognition of Soviet Russia. Then all the reactionaries in the state
clamor for his scalp. He said to me: “They say a fox learns to enjoy
being chased, and in the same way I have had to learn to enjoy
outmatching my enemies. I feel that I am being stalked by a band of
thugs; I have to set out deliberately and consciously to build up my
prestige throughout the state, to keep myself in the public mind, so
that my enemies won’t dare go beyond abusing me. Manifestly, that means
that academic freedom is only for the man who has a tough skin and can
be happy in a fight. The young man, also the weak man, is helpless; if
he tries to tell the truth about anything, he’ll have to go out and
write life insurance for a living.”

Such is the judgment, after nearly two decades’ experience, of one of
America’s freest college professors, in America’s freest university.
That many men should fail in such a test is inevitable. There is another
professor in the university, an elderly man, who began his career as a
Socialist of the academic type; he is the author of standard books on
Socialism, and all through the years when he made his reputation he
recognized the unearned increment of land as a grave form of social
injustice. He has now changed his views, and has become the tamest of
conservatives, a pitiable figure. It happened recently that a friend of
mine was in his office, and discovered an economic basis for this
transformation. Some one wanted to buy some lots from the old professor;
and the price was two thousand dollars each, he said. He listened to
some protest of the would-be purchaser; then he said: “I know; the price
was eighteen hundred a couple of weeks ago, but it has now gone up.”

He hung up the receiver, and blandly explained to my friend that he was
the fortunate possessor of a tongue of land between two lakes which
blocked the development of the city of Madison, and real estate values
were increasing there very rapidly! To a student of my acquaintance this
old gentleman recently made the statement that “one who talks about
unearned increment shows by that very act that he has not brains enough
to be a graduate student.” It is interesting to note that when the
President of the United States was appointing a commission to settle an
important public question, it was this man he selected to represent the
economists of the United States.

They had their war hysteria in Wisconsin, as everywhere. Senator
LaFollette made a speech in which he said we had “a grievance” against
the German Government, and the Associated Press took out the word “a”
and substituted the word “no”—such a little lie, but it caused the whole
country to shriek for LaFollette’s blood. A petition for his expulsion
from the senate was circulated among the university faculty—the same
thing the German reactionaries did with their university professors at
the outbreak of the war. It is not recorded how many professors in
Germany refused to sign; but there were six courageous men at Wisconsin.
One of these was Professor Kahlenberg, whose father refused military
service in Germany. Professor Kahlenberg lost the leadership of the
chemistry department, and most of his worthwhile courses, and has not
yet regained them.

Also, there was George F. Comings, a lecturer in the Extension
Department, who after the war advocated an amnesty resolution at a
meeting of the American Association of Equity, a farmers’ organization.
The resolution was laid on the table; letters of protest were written to
the board of regents, and the lecturer was summoned to appear before the
regents to submit to a rebuke. He refused to appear, and was dismissed,
and became candidate for lieutenant-governor of the LaFollette party,
receiving the largest majority of any candidate on the ticket. When Kate
Richards O’Hare was refused permission to speak in a university hall,
Lieutenant-Governor Comings introduced her, and defended her from
organized rowdies, at a meeting in the assembly chamber of the state
capitol. He presided at a dinner of the Federated Press, at which I
spoke in Madison, and presented a resolution in favor of free speech. It
is interesting to note that while he was in the university his most
ardent opponent was a very wealthy dean, who is interested in several
banks and a power company, and sells stock to the other professors.

Some thirty years ago, during a controversy over academic freedom, the
board of regents of Wisconsin adopted a resolution, as follows:
“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we
believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever
encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which
alone the truth can be found.” A tablet containing this statement was
presented by the class of 1910, but it was hidden in the cellar, covered
with dust for many years, because the regents refused to allow it to be
placed upon the building. It is now in place on Bascom Hall; and during
the controversy over my address, the regents reaffirmed this motto as
the policy of the board. But they refused to permit a committee of
students and the faculty to determine what speakers should be heard. It
appears that their understanding of freedom is the ancient one of
freedom for those who rule.

I have referred to the fate of the weaker and the younger members of the
faculty. Let me tell you one story; I do it with much hesitation,
because the man who told it to me begged me not to repeat it, and I can
only do so by taking care to give no hint of his identity. Suffice it to
say that he is a young instructor, a self-made and self-taught man, who
has worked his way up from bitter poverty in the face of severe physical
handicaps. Life has meant continual suffering to him, but he is one of
those natures which manage to use their trials as a means of
self-discipline. He is one of the gentlest and sweetest natures it has
ever been my fortune to meet. I wish he were a bold man and a fighter,
but it happens to be the essence of his nature to shrink from strife and
notoriety.

I introduce to you another gentleman, who loves attention, and does not
hesitate to thrust himself forward—the Honorable David Jayne Hill,
ex-president of Rochester University and ex-ambassador to Germany; a
public personage of wealth and reactionary views, who founded an
organization, the National Association for Constitutional Government,
for the purpose of distributing his convictions to the people of the
United States. The National Association for Constitutional Government,
with David Jayne Hill as president, mailed out to all educators in the
United States a pamphlet by David Jayne Hill, setting forth the
importance of preserving those features in the constitution of the
United States which enable the rich to become richer and compel the poor
to become poorer. Along with the pamphlet went a personal letter,
inviting the recipient to express his opinion of the views set forth in
the pamphlet, and stating, among other things, that the pamphlet was not
circulated for propaganda purposes, but purely to ascertain the views of
others upon the question.

The young instructor received a copy of this letter; his opinion was
asked for, and he gave it; he said that he thought the views expressed
in the pamphlet were wrong, and he added: “When you state that you are
not circulating it for propaganda purposes, I must say plainly that I
think you are lying.”

Let me point out that the young instructor did not rush to the
newspapers with this opinion; he wrote it in a private letter, at
request. He was specifically invited to say frankly what he thought, and
he said frankly what he thought, to the organization which asked his
opinion and no one else.

But, of course, he had insulted one of the great moguls of the
plutocracy; he had committed lese majesté in its grossest form. It is
easy to imagine what happened; the huffy mogul sent the letter to some
mogul regent, or perhaps to a mogul administrator, and before many days
the young instructor was summoned to appear before his mogul dean. Maybe
you imagine that the dean pointed out in a friendly way that the
youngster had been injudicious in using a short and ugly word, and ought
to use longer words while he was connected with a state university. If
that is what you imagine, you know very little about universities.

What actually happened was something I had to drag from the young man by
half an hour of tactful questioning. It was evident that the experience
had been a cruel one; he did not want to think about it, he could not
speak about it without his hands trembling, and his voice also. He had
been stormed at and denounced, he had been told that he was a fool and a
puppy, and that he should there and then take his pen in hand and write
an abject apology to the great mogul he had so insulted. And here was a
young man trying to exist upon the pitiful salary of a university
instructor, and with a young wife expecting a baby. He demanded
twenty-four hours to think it over, and he went away and wrestled it out
with himself. He wrote the letter, and since that time has retired into
his own shell; he never thinks about public questions, he writes no
letters to anyone, he hardly even reads a newspaper, but lives and
labors in a little specialty, where he hopes to make some contribution
to human knowledge. Meantime, the dean who did this thing is one of the
most prominent and powerful persons in the university, in charge of the
moral destinies of several thousand future citizens of the state of
Wisconsin. And that is what “academic freedom” means in America’s freest
university!




                              CHAPTER XLIX
                    THE PEOPLE AND THEIR UNIVERSITY


I do not want anyone who reads this book to get the idea that I am so
naive as to imagine that there is no enemy of freedom of teaching save
economic privilege. I know there are others, and all I am doing is
tackle the biggest one first. If I work for the control of universities
by organized farmers and labor unions, it is not because I am unaware
that these groups have their interests and prejudices, but merely
because I believe that these groups can learn to understand true freedom
and justice, whereas I know that a plutocratic class has never been able
to learn anything at any time in human history.

In the University of Wisconsin it is interestingly shown that as soon as
you break down the rule of special privilege, you find yourself
confronted by various kinds of mass prejudice and group interest. The
people of the state consider that they own a university, and they expect
this university to do their way. The question arises—who shall set the
standards, the voters, or the faculty, who think they know more? The
Wisconsin farmer drives up to Madison in his automobile, and demands an
interview with a dean, saying: “Here I am supporting this university by
my taxes, and here you’ve gone and flunked my son!” The farmers’
organizations keep jealous watch over the percentage of “flunkings,” and
if it is too high, they say the university is being made into a place of
academic snobbery. And maybe they are right—it is not so easy to say!

A former state superintendent of education in Wisconsin told me a funny
story. It was proposed to have the normal schools teach engineering, but
President Van Hise of the university said this was impossible; the
university alone could teach engineering, it had mysteriously and
mystically efficient methods of doing so. The superintendent met an
instructor who had recently been taken on in this school, and thinking
he would like to know about these special methods, he asked: “How did
they tell you to teach engineering?”

“They didn’t tell me anything,” said the instructor.

“You mean they gave you no special instructions about how you were to
teach?”

“Nothing at all,” said the other; then he thought—“Oh, yes, to be sure,
they told me to flunk one-third of the students and send them to the
Agricultural School!”

Also there are the religious organizations, clamoring for their share of
power. There is the so-called “Fundamentalist” movement in the Baptist
church, an organization which combines theological with economic
obscurantism, and wages vigorous war against the teaching of modern
ideas. Professor Otto is giving a course on “Man and Nature,” an
elementary survey of evolution, the most popular course in the
university. The Baptists denounce him as an atheist, and all the
religious organizations have got together to demand that the university
shall drop this course. The place is surrounded by a veritable
fortification of religious establishments, all carrying on instruction
of their own, and all trying to break into the state institution. There
is the Wesleyan Foundation, which hires “student pastors,” and is giving
courses off the campus, and wants these courses to count as university
credits. They have succeeded in arranging this at the University of
Illinois; why not at Wisconsin? There are the Catholics, with a million
dollar endowment, a chapel and dormitories, also clamoring for their
share of university power and prestige. There is a Lutheran building, an
Episcopal chapter-house, and so on. These religious movements are now
opened with an official university convocation, and they are pushing,
pushing all the time, trying to keep modern science away from the
people.

Also, of course, the militarists have been lifted up by the war wave.
Wisconsin is compelled to have military training, being a “land grant”
institution. So the campus is troubled by the clamor of young men
preparing themselves for slaughter. Officers strut about with artificial
pomposity—I say artificial, because I suspect they are ex-real estate
men and Rotary Club members. However, their disguise serves them with
the khaki-clad sheep who rush here and there in response to barked-out
orders, and have their photographs taken in long lines, to send home to
mamma and papa on the farm. I wandered about watching them; and for
variety I came upon a madman, standing all alone on the campus, leaping
up like a jumping-jack, shooting his two arms this way and that, and
making silence through a megaphone. I was puzzled, until I saw a
moving-picture operator taking the scene; it was a “cheer leader” having
himself perpetuated!

They have, of course, their athletic craze at Wisconsin, as everywhere
else. Enormous sums are handled, and there is the usual graft;
favoritism in jobs, free tickets and passes, and the “scalping” of
these. There is the usual professionalism, with easy jobs for athletes
pretending to go through college. There are the usual fraternities and
sororities, organized into little snobbish groups, and busy with student
politics, “log-rolling” and “back-scratching.” If the purpose of the
university is to prepare students for what they are to meet in outside
life, these things, of course, have their place.

They have a daily paper, the “Cardinal,” and I discovered that here also
the students are getting a complete training in the ways of the outside
world. The “Cardinal” is supposed to be the publication of the student
body, and those who edit it are supposed to do the work for the honor
and the experience. But large sums are taken in and no one knows where
they go. There was an investigation by the student senate, and the
findings were kept secret. One student on the board persisted in asking
questions, and he was expelled; he ran for re-election, and on the very
day of election the paper published an elaborate attack upon his
integrity; his answer was published the day after his defeat! The paper
refused publication of another student’s article, demanding to know the
circulation of the paper and the salaries paid to the editors, if any.
It developed that the business manager had borrowed three hundred and
seventy dollars from the paper without security, and that there had been
other such loans not specified. A pretty complete training for
capitalist journalism and politics!

Here, as everywhere, it is the fraternity and sorority groups which run
the student body. They bring from their wealthy homes the usual
reactionary opinions; and the last reactionary governor, Philipp by
name, laid down the ideal of a university a couple of years ago—the
mothers and fathers of Wisconsin might rest assured that their
university would send their sons and daughters home with the same ideas
they had when they came! I picked up a couple of issues of the
“Wisconsin Octopus,” a humorous monthly published by the student body.
Here is a little sketch, which might have been taken from the “Saturday
Evening Post,” showing a long-haired student in spectacles, listening
enraptured to a frantic Bolshevist orator on a soap-box, while another
figure, labeled “Stude Body,” turns away in disgust. This heads an
editorial, “Boost Wisconsin.” “Empty heads are the cause of mental
revolution,” says this wise editor—forgetting about stomachs. He
denounces “a small group, yet a very insistent and annoying group,”
which is attacking its alma mater. “Wisconsin welcomes criticism, but
criticism made in a holy and healthy manner. Wisconsin has no room for
knockers. They are not welcome.... Let those with radical thoughts keep
them to themselves.”

I turn to the front cover of this satisfied publication; it portrays a
table in a lobster palace, with a semi-nude girl-student at a
supper-party with a man-student. There is a quart bottle of liquor on
the table, and another in a bucket of ice beside the table, and the
man-student has fallen asleep, dead drunk. Such is student life
according to the “Wisconsin Octopus” for May, 1922. And in case this
issue be not representative, I take up that of January, 1922. This also
portrays on the cover a semi-nude girl-student at a “prom” with a young
man-student, who can scarcely be distinguished from the one in the
“Arrow” collar advertisement on the back cover. The frontispiece of the
issue consists of a drawing entitled: “The Clock Watcher,” and we
discover that a “clock watcher” is a man-student observing the ankles of
a girl-student. On the next page we find a poem, which speaks for
itself:

                  Absinth makes the heart grow fonder,
                  Make the lights go blinking yonder,
                  Makes one lamp-post seem like ten,
                  Absent absinth, come again.

On the next page we find a cartoon, portraying a semi-nude girl-student,
sunk in a lounging chair, smoking a cigarette; we are told:

                      A good woman’s a good woman,
                      But a smoke’s a smoke.

On the next page we find some sketches, seeming to indicate that the
“prom” is a kind of college kissing game, and that at the end of this
game the girl lies in a drunken swoon. Later on we find three drawings,
“The Famous Prom Soak,” which tell us in three funny ways that the
“prom” is a place where both boys and girls get drunk and have a
headache the next morning. A little farther on occurs an illustration of
a boy and girl who are conversing:

  “I know something that beats the Prom.”

  “What?”

  “Buy a car, and park some place.”

A little later we learn: “If it’s stag, it’s a souse-party.” A little
later we see a girl walking on an electric-light wire, and it is
explained to us, “A modern girl can’t be shocked.”

I think I have quoted enough. I leave it to the impartial reader to
decide the question—whose heads are empty at the University of
Wisconsin? Is it the little group of devoted idealists of the Social
Science Club, who in the face of ridicule and scolding have brought a
series of writers and public men, both radical and conservative, to
discuss modern problems before the student body? Or is it the little set
of snobbish fraternity men, who run the social and political life of the
university, and edit its publications for the advertising of their own
sensuality and cynicism?




                               CHAPTER L
                       EDUCATION F. O. B. CHICAGO


There was one American captain of industry with a monstrously developed
bump of acquisitiveness; as he described himself: “I am a great clamorer
for dividends.” It was frequently charged that in the early days his
clamoring—or at any rate that of his subordinates—did not stop at arson
and burglary; it is certain that it did not stop at railroad rebates,
“midnight tariffs,” and numerous other violations of law. By such means
he made himself master of the oil industry of the country, and was on
the way to acquiring the railways and the banks and the Child’s
restaurants. He had made one or two hundred millions of dollars, and was
busily turning it into one or two billions; but he found rising against
him a clamor of public execration, and the poor rich man, whose second
most conspicuous bump was of fear, began casting about for some way to
take the curse off himself.

About that time he met an educator—one of these typical American
combinations of financial shrewdness and moral fervor, a veritable
wizard of a money-getter, a “vamp” in trousers, a grand, impressive,
inspirational Chautauqua potentate. The old oil king was completely
captivated. We can imagine him going home to the privacy of the royal
bed-chamber, or wherever it is that oil kings and queens exchange
domestic confidences. “Say, Laura, I met a fellow today—by crackie, he’s
a wonder! He’s a professor of Semitics, or pyrotechnics, or something or
other, I forget just what—but he knows everything there is, and he’s
going to build me a university and make me the greatest philanthropist
in America!”

“Now, John,” says the oil queen, “you better be careful and hold on to
your money. The Lord is able to take care of people’s souls, and they
don’t need this newfangled modern learning.”

“That’s all right, my dear,” says the oil king, “but every business has
to advertise. I figured out that this is the cheapest yet. And, besides,
I always wished I’d had an education, so that you and I might get
invited out to dinner-parties, and not have everybody laugh at us the
way they do.”

This oil king had a pathetic trust in education, as something you could
buy ready-made for cash, the same as a political machine or a state
railroad commission. If anybody tried to put off on him an oil-field
that had got salt water in, he would know the difference; but it did not
occur to him that there might be fakes in education, or that a petroleum
philanthropist might not be able to order the whole of the human spirit,
F. O. B. Chicago, thirty days net.

I picture the educational “he-vamp,” President Harper, calling into
consultation some fellow-faker in the architectural line. Says the
architectural wizard: “I suppose this old bird will want something plain
and economical—the biggest floor-space for his money.”

“Not on your life,” says the educational wizard. “He wants something he
never saw before; he’s going in for culture. You know I specialize in
these old things—Hebrew and Greek and Assyrian and Sanskrit and
Egyptian——”

“How would it do to give him a row of pyramids?” says the architectural
wizard.

“No,” says the educational wizard, “he would think that was heathen.
He’s a religious old bird—a Baptist, like me; that’s how I got him, in
fact—met him at an ice cream festival.”

“Oh, well then, it’s plain,” says the architectural wizard. “What we
want is real old Gothic—stained-glass windows, mullioned, and
crenellated battlements, and moated draw-bridges—”

“That sounds great!” says the educational wizard. “What does it look
like?”

“I’ll have one of my office boys get you up a sketch this afternoon,”
says the architectural wizard. “It’s a good style from our point of
view, because it uses about four times as much stone per square foot of
floor-space, and stone is where we get our rake-off.”

A thousand years ago, you understand, men rode over the earth, clad in
heavy iron armor, like hard-shell crabs. Every joint had to be tightly
covered, lest a flying arrow should pierce the crack; and when they
built themselves homes they were moved by this same terror of swift
arrows, so they made the windows narrow and deep. They built the walls
of thick stone to withstand the pounding of battering-rams, and to hold
up the enormous weight of the pile. Such was the origin of “Gothic”
architecture; and I do not know any better way to expose to you the
elaborate system of buncombe which is called “higher education” than to
state that here in twentieth century America, where we know of bows and
arrows only in poetry, and have the materials and the skill to build
structures of steel and glass, big and airy and bright as day—we
deliberately go and reproduce the architectural monstrosities, the
intellectual and spiritual deformities of a thousand years ago, and
compel modern chemists and biologists and engineers to do their research
work by artificial light, for fear of arrows which ceased to fly when
the last Indian was penned up in a reservation.

Not alone at the University of Chicago do you find stone towers with
crenellated battlements—that is, notches through which arrows may be
fired, and stones and flaming Standard Oil hurled down; you find them at
college after college all over the United States. I look up some
pictures I happen to have—here they are at Princeton and at Syracuse and
at Colorado! You find Columbia University spending several millions for
a huge Roman temple of white marble, called a library—a structure which
is magnificent for picture post-card purposes, but which gives about ten
per cent of the shelf-room that should have been bought for the money,
and compels everybody in the main reading-room to use electric lights
most of the day!

I recall one of my earliest radical impulses, derived from the spectacle
I used to see when I stayed late in the afternoon in this library
building. From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with
buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures
crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up
the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths.
Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might
have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and
there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more
about money than humanity.

Of course, we know what such persons will answer; the old women were
glad to get the work. In the same way they answer that chemists and
biologists and engineers are glad to get a chance to do research work,
even at cost of their eyesight. At the University of Chicago they
discovered that men were anxious to get such work, even at the cost of
their health. In his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” Thorstein
Veblen tells of an incident which happened in a certain laboratory
“dedicated to one of the branches of biological science.” Having been
for ten years a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Veblen
felt under the necessity of withholding names; but I am not under the
same necessity, and I make so bold as to state that it occurred in the
Hull Biological Laboratory of the University of Chicago.

The building was supposed to be ventilated by a hot air system; fresh
air was taken in from the outside, and warmed over steam coils, and
distributed through the building. It began to be noted that members of
the scientific staff were mysteriously falling sick. They would be
forced to stay at home, or to take a vacation; they would get well, and
then come back and get sick again. Finally, one professor went rooting
about in the basement of the building, and made the discovery that the
university authorities, in order to save the cost of heating, had
boarded up the outside intake, so that the air which passed through the
steam-coils was being derived in part from a manhole leading to a sewer.
The great capitalist university had found it too costly to heat its
Gothic halls—playfully described by Veblen as “heavy ceiled, ill-lighted
lobbies, which might have served as a mustering place for a body of
unruly men at arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today than
so many inconvenient flag-stones to be crossed in coming and going.”




                               CHAPTER LI
                     THE UNIVERSITY OF STANDARD OIL


Providence arranged it that soon after the University of Chicago was
built, the oil king’s digestion gave out, and he retired to the country
to live on graham crackers and milk and play golf all day. The job of
turning his two hundred million dollars into two billions was left to
his efficient subordinates, and they were not so much interested in the
old man’s advertising ventures, so that the university was left to run
itself. Veblen describes its spirit as “a ravenous megalomania.” For
years President Harper followed the plan of buying everything he wanted,
and sending the bill to John D. But that was stopped, and now the
running of the university is seen to by the usual board of interlocking
directors, mostly elderly Baptists. They have had in past times some
first-rate scientists; what they have now is a faculty of aged dotards,
who set the tone of the place, and the young men try to act dotards to
the best of their ability.

They are sensitive on the subject of petroleum at the university; they
blush at mention of the word, and do not admit the conventional
book-plates showing the lamp of knowledge. Some time ago a wag composed
a “doxology” for use by the students, and the young radicals have fun
with this—

                Praise God from whom oil blessings flow,
                Praise him, oil creatures here below,
                Praise him above, ye heavenly host,
                Praise Father, Son—but John the most.

I met one professor at the University of Chicago who insisted that
teaching was entirely free. He added, with some asperity: “Of course you
will do the Bemis story! We shall never hear the end of the Bemis
story.”

“Too bad!” I said, sympathetically. “I haven’t heard that story; what is
it?”

“Just a piece of slander,” said the professor. “I know positively that
the case of Bemis was not a case of academic freedom at all, and he
himself admits it.”

That was something definite. I ascertained that Edward W. Bemis is an
economist and engineer, with offices in Chicago and New York, so I wrote
and asked him about the matter. I quote his letter, and leave it for you
to form your own judgment:

  I was called from Vanderbilt University to the University of Chicago
  to the chair of Associate Professor of Economics and Sociology, at the
  opening of the University of Chicago in October, 1892. In March, 1895,
  President Harper informed me that the trustees had dropped me from the
  faculty the previous December, to take effect in July, 1895. He
  informed me then and in subsequent conversations that my attitude on
  public utility and labor questions was the cause, and that if he cared
  to talk about the reasons for my dismissal, I could not secure any
  other college position in the country.

  A great deal was made of the matter in the newspapers all over this
  country, under the heading of College Freedom, and many papers took it
  up. I did teach after that, for two years, 1897-9, in the Kansas State
  Agricultural College, but, finding no openings in the larger
  universities, I turned my attention exclusively to the investigation
  of public utility questions, and to assisting states, cities and
  commissions in such matters. I found a congenial field as head of the
  Cleveland, Ohio, Water Department, under Tom L. Johnson, from
  September, 1901, to 1910, and have since then spent my strength on
  building up an organization of engineers and accountants devoted to
  assisting cities and states and other public bodies, including the
  national government, in appraisals and rate adjustments of public
  utilities.

  I received no calls for teaching, save as above mentioned, since I was
  forced out of the University of Chicago, and for over twenty years
  have sought none. I have never been a Socialist, or an extremist along
  any line, but have investigated and to some degree favored public
  ownership of public utilities, and have had a friendly relation with
  the American labor movement.

  My opposition to the efforts of certain Chicago utilities to secure
  lighting and street railway franchises, while I was at the University
  of Chicago, and the public address which I made during the famous
  Pullman strike in 1894, wherein I did not endorse the strike but did
  say that the railroads had often boycotted each other, violated law,
  etc., as well as had the men, were features assigned by President
  Harper for the opposition to me, resulting in my dismissal by the
  trustees of the university.

A professor at the University of Chicago who read this manuscript
volunteered to get for me the university’s side of the story, and he
wrote me:

  At the time of his “dismissal” Bemis was in the extension division.
  His appointment ran out and he was offered re-appointment, his
  remuneration to come from the fees of students. This action might, of
  course, be described in Mr. Bemis’ phrase, “dropped me from the
  faculty.”

I submitted that statement to Professor Bemis, who answered by wire:

  My letter which you quote is absolutely correct. No proposition for
  continuance of my work, half of which was to advanced students within
  the university walls, was ever made to me.

Another of the casualties of Mr. Rockefeller’s university was Professor
Triggs, as I have told in “The Brass Check,” and I gather they were not
sorry when Veblen moved West. I was told that one professor had recently
been “on the carpet for excess of radical zeal,” and I wrote to ask him
if this was true. He answered that the trouble he had got into was for
being away too much. Said he: “I have never known of anyone at Chicago
being interfered with in any way ‘for excess of radical zeal.’ To be
sure, no such excess exists.” Which I find a charming reply!

To the same effect is the testimony of John C. Kennedy, formerly a
professor at the University of Chicago. Questioned by Chairman Walsh of
the Industrial Relations Commission, Professor Kennedy stated concerning
the faculty: “A sincere desire to deal with fundamental conditions does
not seem to be there in most cases.... I think they are a poor crowd
among which to look for leaders to bring about any fundamental change in
social conditions.” The reason for Professor Kennedy’s discontent was
that he had been engaged by the University of Chicago Settlement to make
a survey of labor and living conditions among the Stockyards workers. He
had prepared an elaborate and thoroughly documented report, which
several of the packers found satisfactory; but Swift & Company—which has
a member of the firm on the board of the University of Chicago—objected
that Professor Kennedy had drawn “political conclusions” from his data;
that is, he had suggested a remedy for the evil conditions in the
Stockyards, for the workers to organize to protect themselves! These
portions of the report were cut out before it was published, and the
whole matter was hushed up, both by the university authorities and by
the newspapers of the interlocking directorate in Chicago.

They have one “renommir professor” at Chicago, and are very proud of
him. I don’t think I exaggerate in saying that out of the score of
faculty members I talked with on the subject of academic freedom, not
one failed to mention Robert Morss Lovett as the university’s
certificate of emancipation from Standard Oil. Out of the warmth of his
big heart Professor Lovett gives his help to Hindoo revolutionists
thrown into jail, and to Russian sweat-shop workers clubbed over the
head by the police. I asked him to read this manuscript, and he tells me
that he thinks I am too severe upon the university. He wonders what I
will have to say about places like Minnesota and Illinois, which are so
much worse. To avoid misunderstanding, let me state that I have not been
able to find a single one of the great American universities which is
truly liberal or truly free; but there are degrees of badness among
them, and the University of Chicago is one of the best. I have no desire
to deny it due credit, therefore I note Professor Lovett’s comment—that
during the early days of the university President Harper stood for
liberalism in religion, and thereby lost much Baptist money; also that
the university made an enviable record during the war, in that there was
no interference with the private views of any professor on this
question.

Shortly after the war there developed a strong movement to refuse
diplomas to about a dozen of the students who were accused of radical
activities, but this movement was defeated at the last minute. I talked
with several of these students, and with others who are now struggling
to defend ideas of social justice at the university. They had a little
paper, called “Chanticleer,” and were so indiscreet as to reprint an
article from the Seattle “Union Record” praising the paper. So the
student daily hailed them as the “boy Bolsheviks” of the university, and
both students and professors joined in a campaign of ridicule and
sneering. The climax came with the fourth issue, containing an article
by Clarence Darrow; not twenty students could be found to distribute
this. Among the most active in attacking the little paper was a dean who
has just died; he never lost an opportunity to denounce the radicals,
and gave no scholarships or honors to such. I am presenting in this book
many cases of college professors “let out” for speaking intemperately
about conservatives; I am wondering if anyone will answer me by telling
of a single professor “let out” from an American college for speaking
intemperately about radicals!

I talked with another professor at Chicago, who does not want his name
used. I asked him what he thought about the status of his profession,
and he gave the best description of academic freedom in America that I
have yet come upon. He said: “We are good cows; we stand quietly in our
stanchions, and give down our milk at regular hours. We are free,
because we have no desire to do anything but what we are told we ought
to do. And we die of premature senility.”

They have another professor at the University of Chicago who is not
entirely satisfied with America as it is, and that is Robert Herrick,
the novelist. He expressed the fear that I might try to write the same
kind of book as “The Brass Check”; that is, to show direct pressure of
financial interests upon college professors—whereas the way it is done
is by class feeling, by the tradition of academic dignity, the prestige
of old and established things, “the tone of the house.” I took the
liberty of telling Professor Herrick of a few cases I had collected, and
he admitted that he had had no idea there were things like that going
on.

Robert Herrick would, of course, never fail in urbanity and
graciousness; but fundamentally, I think he is more pessimistic about
American education than I am. He said: “Universities can’t get money
except by getting great numbers of students; so they dare not set any
higher standards than rival institutions in the same neighborhood. So
the American soul stays flabby; all that counts is show, and in every
department you get by with superficiality. It is a lunch-counter system
of education; read a novel and get a credit; then go out into the world,
and use your college prestige to make a fortune; and then give your name
to a college building. We do absolutely nothing for men and women who
come to college, in the way of giving them true culture, higher
standards of thought or conduct. I go to any university club and look
over the alumni, and I see that we have given them no distinction—in
dress, in speech, in morals, in ideas. You cannot tell them from the
bathtub salesmen or the agents of barbers’ supplies you meet in the
lobby of the Blackstone Hotel.”

The above is from a man who has been teaching for twenty-nine years at
the University of Chicago; and you may compare it with the pungent
remark of Professor Cattell, who was a teacher for twenty-six years at
Columbia: “The average university club in America could more easily
dispense with its library than with its bar.”




                              CHAPTER LII
                       LITTLE HALLS FOR RADICALS


The touchiest problem with all academic authorities is that of “outside
speakers.” They can handle their own professors; by care in selecting
instructors, and weeding out the undesirables before they get prestige,
they can keep dangerous ideas from creeping into the classrooms. But it
always happens there are half a dozen students who come from Socialist
homes, and these get together and call themselves some society with a
college name, and start inviting labor agitators and literary
self-advertisers, to disturb the dignity and calm of scholarship. This
puts the university administration in a dilemma; they are damned if they
do and damned if they don’t. If they refuse to let the radical
propagandist in, there is a howl that they are repressing freedom of
thought; on the other hand, if they do let him in, who can figure what
millionaire may be led to alter his will?

There is always a little group of disturbers at every large university;
and those at Chicago were moved to invite Upton Sinclair to come to
their campus and repeat his Wisconsin performance. I was not present at
the consultation between the president of the University of Chicago and
his loyal and efficient secretary; but I have been able to imagine the
scene. You understand, there isn’t a particle of prejudice against
radicals, and we have absolute freedom of speech at our university, we
are willing for the students to hear anyone they wish; but we decide
that we had better minimize the trouble by confining this literary
self-advertiser to a small hall, so that students will not announce the
meeting, and the newspapers won’t hear about it, and the wealthy
trustees and donors may not know that it has happened.

But the day before the lecture there is excitement in our president’s
office—Upton Sinclair has arrived in Chicago, and has telephoned asking
for an interview. He comes; and we discover that he has shaved off the
bushy black Bolshevik whiskers in which we had every right to expect to
find him; also he has left off his red necktie, and has adopted a gentle
and seductive smile—you know how cunning these Bolsheviks are! Our
president’s secretary tries to smooth him down—tells him what a great
novelist he is, and how delighted we are to have him speak at our
university, and how, of course, there is no particle of prejudice
against radicals. Then he is taken into the dark Gothic chamber where
our aged president sits by the dim light of arrow-proof windows.

Harry Pratt Judson has been at our university since it was founded
thirty years ago, and is a holder of ten college degrees, and a high
interlocking director in all the Rockefeller foundations for the
guidance of American intellectual life. Also he is the author of a
manual for college presidents entitled: “The Higher Education as a
Training for Business,” a book which deserves to be required reading for
every course in educational administration, a standard guide to the art
of persuading the rich to put up their money for mullioned windows and
crenellated battlements and moated draw-bridges. There has to be
somebody to keep the interlocking directorate aware of the importance of
culture, and Harry Pratt Judson is the boy for this job; showing how a
college education really does pay in dollars and cents, and putting it
in language so simple that the basest pork merchant over at the “yards”
can get the point. Says our President Judson: “Men buy and sell, not
merely for fun, but for profit.” And again: “A reputation for honest
dealing with customers is a valuable asset.” And again: “The habit of
sustained mental application is got only by persistently applying the
mind to work in a systematic way.” Can any one deny these statements? If
so, let him speak, or forever after hold his peace, while we, the
administration of the University of Chicago, assert and declare that our
Harry Pratt Judson is an educated educator and an inspired
inspirationalist.

The Bolshevik author enters the presidential sanctum, still with that
evil seductive smile. He explains that he has spoken to an audience of
two thousand people at the University of Wisconsin, and fears that a
hall seating only two hundred people will not accommodate those who wish
to hear him at Chicago. He understands there is a large auditorium,
Mandel Hall, which seats thirteen hundred——

“Ah, yes,” says our president, with that urbanity which distinguishes
him, “but we are accustomed to reserve Mandel Hall for speakers who are
invited by the university.”

“Well,” says the Bolshevik author—could anyone imagine the impudence?—“I
should be perfectly willing to be invited by the university.”

“I’m afraid that could hardly be arranged,” says our president, as
sweetly as ever. “Of course, Mr. Sinclair, you understand that we are
quite willing for our students to listen to anyone’s ideas; we have
absolute freedom of speech at this university, but we have our
established traditions regarding the use of our halls, and you could not
expect us to make an exception in your case.”

“Well,” says the Bolshevik author, “it would seem, President Judson,
that your idea of freedom of speech is that the radicals have a small
hall and the conservatives a large hall.”

But even that does not cause our president to waver in his urbanity. He
is an old and wise man, accustomed to handling many crude people—you
cannot imagine the things he has had said to him by pork merchants! He
smiles his gentle, rebuking smile, and says: “You must admit, Mr.
Sinclair, it would be better for you to have a hall that is too small
than to have one that is too large.”

To this the fellow answers that he is willing to take the risk. So our
president sees there is nothing to be gained by prolonging the
discussion, and tells him in plain words that the hall which has been
assigned him is the only hall he can have.

The Bolshevik author goes out, and doubtless would like to denounce us
in the newspapers, but our interlocking trustees have seen to that—they
own all the newspapers in Chicago, and Upton Sinclair stays in the city
a week, and not one pays any attention to his presence. More than that,
we have got things so arranged all over the United States that Upton
Sinclair can spend three months traveling over the country, stopping at
twenty-five cities, and in all that time have only two newspaper
reporters come to ask him for an interview!

However, we know that he is a dangerous customer, and we watch with some
trepidation to see what he will do. On the evening of the lecture we go
to the hall, and fifteen minutes before the time set we find a state of
affairs—truly, we don’t know whether to be amused or irritated. We can’t
think how the students managed to hear about this unadvertised lecture,
and it is a distressing thing to see so many young people with a craving
for unwholesome sensation. They have packed the little hall; the aisles
are solid with them; they are hanging from our mullioned windows, and
blocking all the corridors outside the many doors. And all the time more
of them coming!

The Bolshevik author arrives, accompanied by two or three professors. We
have always said that these “reds” ought to be kicked off the faculty,
and now we see the consequences of tolerating them! The author shoves
his way to the platform, and—we tremble with indignation even now as we
recall his proceedings—he tells the students about his interview with
our august president, and states plainly that he thinks we have
discriminated against him because he is a radical. He asserts, on the
authority of several students, that no difficulty has ever before been
raised about giving Mandel Hall for speakers invited by students; also
he mentions that the university has barred Raymond Robins and
Rabindranath Tagore. And we note that a large percentage of the audience
laugh and applaud, as if they thought such fellows ought to be heard! He
goes on to say that outside is a beautiful warm spring evening, and a
quadrangle with soft green grass, and thick Gothic walls to shelter it
from the wind. If they will go outside and squat, he will come and talk
to them, and there will be plenty of room for everyone who wishes to
hear his self-laudations.

The students laugh and cheer—what can you expect of young people, who
have little sense of dignity, and think this is a lark? They troop
outside, and more come running up from all directions. Never in the
thirty years of our university has there been such a violation of
propriety. For an hour the man delivers a rankly socialistic harangue to
fifteen hundred students, and when he tries to stop, they clamor for him
to go on, they crowd about and ask him questions, and he is kept talking
until eleven o’clock at night, telling our young men and women about
strikes and graft—all the most dangerous ideas, which we have been
working so hard to keep away from them! Even things right here in
Chicago—the fact that our biggest newspapers have their buildings upon
land which they have stolen from the city schools; the fact that our
school-board has been stealing several millions of dollars of the
people’s money, while a clerk of our city jail has got away with three
thousand dollars belonging to his prisoners!

However, we are happy to say that some of our students resisted these
Bolshevik blandishments, and gave proof of the principles we have
instilled into them. We have a university paper called the “Daily
Maroon,” which the radicals impudently dub the “Moron.” This paper next
day had a report of the meeting, and it certainly was delightful the way
they gave it to the oratorical author: “His talk was a more or less
skilful combination of a frenzied street corner gathering (to be sure,
there was no soap-box), and a lecture in Political Economy on capital
and labor and the feudal system. All the old platitudes used for the
last decade in liberal workmen’s papers were repeated.” You will not
fail to appreciate the gentlemanly tone of that rebuke; and then, this
most cruel cut of all: “One is tempted, too, to wonder what kind of
novels Mr. Sinclair writes; if they are as full of mistakes in grammar
as his address last night, his publishers must be gray around the
temples.” Reading the above, we were so much pleased that we sent marked
copies to all the directors of the Standard Oil Company and the packers,
so that our friends might have proof that the better classes of our
students do not read socialistic books.

That was the end of the incident, except for a trick which the wretched
Bolshevik played upon us. Would you believe it, he wasn’t cowed by the
rebuke of the “Daily Maroon,” but actually tried to seduce our student
body next afternoon by engaging in a tennis match with the champion of
our university. Our champion beat him, though by an effort so mighty
that it split his pants. But all the time the author was being beaten,
he kept up a hypocritical pretense of good nature, intending thereby to
win the regard of our young and unsophisticated undergraduates. In this
purpose we are sorry to say he seemed to be successful, for next day the
“Daily Maroon” appeared with a grave editorial, in which it took back at
least a portion of the previous day’s well-deserved rebuke:

  Upton Sinclair plays tennis more pleasingly than he talks or writes.
  Although he lost two sets to Captain Frankenstein yesterday afternoon,
  he did it with a grace that does not characterize his books and
  speeches. He played and lost like a sportsman. He gave no evident sign
  of petty displeasure at being defeated. One admires manliness, and one
  finds far more of it in witnessing Mr. Sinclair on the tennis court
  than in reading one of his tearful harangues of the yellow press
  which, he declares, has hounded him, and suppressed his thoughts.

All we can say about that is, how fortunate that so few Bolsheviks take
part in athletics!




                              CHAPTER LIII
                      THE UNIVERSITY OF JUDGE GARY


There is another great ruling class munition-factory in the vicinity of
Chicago, Northwestern University, at Evanston, Illinois. It is one of
those terrible places, of which there are scores in the United States,
which began as little church institutions, and by the grace of graft
have grown to enormous size. Northwestern is Methodist, and has some ten
thousand strictly pious students, and over six hundred instructors, and
not a rag of an idea to cover its bare bones. The man who was until last
year its president fitted himself for that office by being the
university’s “Director of the Bureau of Salesmanship Research.” The
first vice-president of the university is the general counsel of the
Illinois Steel Company; the third vice-president is vice-president of
the Illinois Steel Company; while the grand duke is the very grandest of
all grand dukes in the United States—that prince of open shoppers and
potentate of reaction, Judge Gary, chairman of the United States Steel
Corporation!

For many years previously the leading grand duke was James A. Patten,
the grain speculator, whose million dollar corner in wheat was the
sensation of my boyhood. Mr. Patten began life as a clerk in a country
store, and his claim to direct a great educational institution is based
upon his acquaintance with the grain commission business, one of the
most thoroughly organized of American swindles. Mr. Patten is director
of two national banks, a trust company, a grain company, and an Edison
company. He is a malignant “open shopper,” and during his reign at
Northwestern waged incessant war upon two or three liberals who got into
the place.

One of these men was Professor Gray, whom we have already met at the
University of Minnesota. Gray managed to stick at Northwestern for
sixteen years. He taught economics; a liberal colleague taught
psychology, and the president of the university remarked to a friend of
mine that these were the two hardest departments he had to administer,
because one touched on religion and the other on the pocket-book! Gray
was handicapped in the usual way by low salaries and lack of promotion
for himself and his assistants. For many years he tried to get Harry
Ward as assistant, but could never manage it.

Mr. Patten was twice elected mayor of Evanston, and when he ran again,
Professor Gray, who was a Progressive, talked against him, and led the
Progressive forces in the legislature that drove Patten’s chairman out.
Naturally, that caused Mr. Patten intense annoyance. He had given the
university a gymnasium, and a generous share of the millions he had
extracted from the bread supply of the American people. So he demanded
that the president should support him; and the president sent for Gray,
and proceeded to administer a rebuke. Gray asked: “Are you speaking
officially or as an individual?”

The climax of the affair was that Gray asked to meet Patten and thresh
the matter out face to face. They met at luncheon, and Patten presented
his complaint. He was sore because Gray had quoted him as saying with
regard to the pious students of the university—“it had cost more to get
out the Bible vote than any other.” “But,” said Gray, “you did say that,
didn’t you?” Patten admitted that he had said it, so Professor Gray
finally offered to settle the matter by writing a letter to both the
Evanston newspapers, stating exactly what Mr. Patten admitted he had
said, and exactly what he denied; but Patten was not satisfied with this
settlement of the difficulty!

A little later Professor Gray was appointed by the National Civic
Federation as one of a committee of economists to investigate municipal
ownership in Europe. They were all supposed to be reactionaries, and
their findings were supposed to be what they knew the National Civic
Federation wanted; but Professor Gray had the wretched taste to become
converted to the doctrines of municipal ownership by the facts he
observed in Europe, and he so stated in his report. When he got a proof
of this report he found that it had been doctored in the office of Mr.
Ralph Easley, the very ardent “open shopper” and hundred per cent
plutocratic secretary of that organization. The professor had to
threaten a law-suit against the National Civic Federation in order to
force them to correct the report.

Also, Gray had a “run-in” with Charles Deering, Harvester Trust magnate,
the second grand duke of the board. Deering asked Gray to speak against
a strike of the Harvester Trust workers, and said that he purposed to
put this strike down with guns. “Yes, Mr. Deering,” said the professor,
“but suppose the day comes when you are under the sod and the other
fellow has the guns.” Needless to say, the authorities of Northwestern
were glad when this too popular professor received an offer from the
University of Minnesota, which had come for the moment under a liberal
administration. A friend of mine was present at a private luncheon, at
which Mr. Patten made the statement that he had got rid of Gray, and was
now going to get rid of another man.

This especially pious university is the one we mentioned as having
established a rule that only bachelors are to be accepted as teachers;
also the one which we found officially declaring that excellence in a
college professor lies, not in his being able to teach, but in his
diligence in raking in the dust-heaps of history. Last spring they gave
their grand duke the usual honorary degree, and took occasion to have
him instruct their ten thousand students in the principles of American
piety. A copy of the address lies before me, one of those beautifully
but mysteriously printed pamphlets which bear the name of no publisher
and no purchase price, but manage to get circulated by hundreds of
thousands of copies all over the country.

The subject of Judge Gary’s address is “Ethics in Business,” and he
begins by making some curious admissions. There was a time, “not many
years ago, perhaps not much more than a score,” when in American
business “the rule of might over right prevailed.... Competition was
tyrannical and destructive. Weaker competitors were forced out of
business, often by means not only unethical but severe and brutal. The
graves of insolvents were strewn along the paths of industrial
development and operation. The financially strong grew stronger and
richer.”

Of course you understand what all this means; it is an amiable
preliminary to the statement which Judge Gary is going to make, that now
all these evil things have changed, this wicked time has passed! But I
would like to put to Judge Gary the question: how did it happen to pass?
Who brought it about, and what were you, Judge Gary, doing at the time?
Were you going about the country, telling boys and girls in colleges
about the need of business reform? The question answers itself. At that
time Judge Gary was head of the Federal Steel Company, and busily
engaged in organizing the Steel Trust, the most perfect illustration in
America of the evils he refers to. Also he was engaged in denouncing as
agitators and disturbers of the public peace the very men, from Theodore
Roosevelt down, whose labors on behalf of reform he now pretends to
justify and accept.

In those wicked days, he tells the students, the masters of industry
“did not give to employes just consideration. The wage rates were
adjusted strictly in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. The
welfare of the workmen was decided almost entirely from the standpoint
of utility and profit.” But now, all that is over. “The large majority
of business men now conduct their affairs” on the basis “that employes
are associates rather than servants, and should be treated
accordingly.... Conscientious treatment of employes which secures their
respect and confidence will tend to increase their loyalty and
efficiency.” And this from the man who continues to maintain throughout
the greatest industry in America a twelve-hour day, with a
twenty-four-hour day once a week! Who uses all the power of his colossal
organization to deny to his employes the most essential of all
industrial rights—the right to organize for their own protection! Who,
as an incident to this policy, maintains the most widespread and most
infamous system of espionage and terrorism that has ever been known in
an Anglo-Saxon country! This man, who pays more money to spies and
provocateurs in one year than the czar of all the Russians paid in
ten—this man, whose hands are slimy with the blood of union organizers
shot down in cold blood, whose lips are foul with ten thousand lies,
told about his wage-slaves during the last steel strike—this man has the
insolence to stand up before a commencement audience at a “Christian”
university, and declare that justice and kindness now prevail in
American big business, and that wage rates are no longer “adjusted
strictly in accordance with the laws of supply and demand!”

Such is the state of social conscience in the greatest educational
institution of the Methodist church in America; but, thank God, the
entire church no longer applauds this re-crucifixion of Jesus. The
Inter-church Federation has issued a report on the steel strike; and if
you want to know just how honest a man Judge Gary is, take the trouble
to read their account of the handling of this strike by his Pittsburgh
newspapers. After that you will be able to get the full humor of the
comment of Bishop McConnell of the Methodist church upon the giving of
the degree to Gary. At the “Evanston Conference” the bishop said that
the conferring of this degree did not mean any intellectual attainments
on the part of the recipient; “it merely means that for certain specific
and well-known purposes you are giving him a degree.” In other words,
you are selling your soul for the price of a building!




                              CHAPTER LIV
                  THE UNIVERSITY OF THE GRAND DUCHESS


We take the Illinois Central Railroad, with its Columbia trustee, a
recent University of Chicago trustee, a Knox College and a Rockford
College trustee, and an Armour Institute trustee, and one First
National, one Guaranty Trust, and two National City Bank directors, and
find ourselves in the town of Urbana, where the state university is
located. Here is another of these terrible mushroom places, with a
thousand instructors, and ten thousand students exposed to all the
ravages of commercialism. I first heard of this university after the
publication of “The Jungle,” when the Chicago packers flew to their
interlocking regents for protection, and a committee of the university
faculty was appointed to inspect the stockyards and report that
everything was all right. In return for this, Mr. Armour gave some money
for a veterinary college, and Mr. Armour’s partner, Arthur Meeker, was
made a regent, and his portrait now hangs in the Sanhedrim where the
interlocking regents meet.

This University of Illinois has made itself conspicuous in the
glorification of trade; they have a whole college devoted thereto, with
an especially large building, and ten years ago they had a solemn
ceremonial in which they dedicated this temple to Mammon. The affair was
known as a “Conference on Commercial Education and Business Progress,”
and doubtless it caused great progress in the business of getting
contributions from the plutocracy and its politicians. It lasted two
days, and was addressed by such dignitaries as the president of the
Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the president of the Chicago
Association of Commerce, the dean of the College of Commerce and
Administration of the University of Chicago, and the President of the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, who was, and still is,
chief operating engineer of Edison Electric. There was an invocation to
the God of Commerce by the Reverend President of Knox College, and an
address by the President of the Illinois Bankers’ Association, who
opened the Hall of Fame of the University by presenting a portrait of a
lately deceased banker; then there was a prayer of dedication to the God
of Bankers by the Reverend President McClelland; and on the evening of
the last day there was a banquet tendered by the Commercial Club of
Urbana, with all the big business potentates above-mentioned listed as
“honored guests,” and preceded by an invocation to the God of
Gastronomy.

The university traditions thus established have been reverently
cherished. In 1916 the college put on three lectures, under the auspices
of the Chicago Board of Trade, dealing with the art of gambling in the
staff of your life and mine. A gentleman living in Urbana writes me:

  These lectures were illustrated by lantern slides, conspicuous among
  which was one giving the signals used on the Board of Trade in the
  rapid gambling when the Board is in session. This was minutely dwelt
  upon and the manual code of signs fully explained. After the close of
  the lecture I went to a fine old professorial acquaintance. I said: “I
  know now where my children are taught grain-gambling. If they are to
  be gamblers I want them to be first-class gamblers. Where do you teach
  poker, baccarat and other games?” He said: “Upon my word, I never knew
  any such thing was carried on by the University of Illinois.” He
  appeared much disconcerted, blushing greatly.

Needless to say, such an institution is profoundly and reverently
religious. It is at this place that the various sects have been able to
get credits for their teachings. The laws of the state prohibit
religious instruction in public institutions; nevertheless, you can go
to the University of Illinois and study in the Bible classes of the
Baptists, or the Methodists, or the Lutherans, or the Campbellites, or
the Seventh Day Adventists—and some day, no doubt, the Holy Rollers; you
may learn about how Jonah swallowed the whale, and how David killed Cock
Robin with his little bow and arrow; and as a reward for these labors
you may receive a university degree—having just as much cultural
significance as if it were conferred by the king of Dahomey.

I visited Urbana, and took occasion to inspect a file of the student
paper, “The Daily Illini.” A Jewish student had written to this paper a
polite and respectful letter, suggesting that the university authorities
should open the libraries and tennis courts on Sunday, for the benefit
of such as might care to make use of them. The reply was a letter from
the “dean of men,” a piece of insolent rudeness. With elaborate sneering
he informed the heathen student that he lived in a Christian community,
and must make up his mind that this community intended “to preserve the
Christian traditions.”

Of course, there would be no use talking about a little thing like the
constitution of the United States to so mighty a person as a dean of men
in a state university. Nevertheless, I mention in passing that our
forefathers put into the constitution a provision that “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion”; and this,
according to decisions of the Supreme Court, means state legislatures
and all bodies deriving their authority therefrom, including regents of
state universities and their presidents and deans. Perhaps it will be
more to the point if I quote the second letter of the Jewish student,
who suggested that the dean of men should investigate how students
really pass their Sunday afternoons and evenings at Illinois: “Shooting
craps in the privacy of one’s room, playing cards amidst dense clouds of
smoke, or shimmying to the strains of some horrible piece of canned
jazz.”

The board of this university is distinguished in that it has a grand
duchess, who makes her home in Urbana, and runs both the university and
the town. She is Mrs. Mary E. Busey, wife of a former Democratic
congressman; she is president of the Busey National Bank, and a large
landowner, and in the year 1913, while a regent, she sold a tract of
land to the university for $160,000 or $1,000 per acre, while land
adjoining the tract was purchased for $600 per acre. Mrs. Busey herself
attended these meetings and voted for this purchase from herself.
(Attention Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University!)

For president of her university Mrs. Busey selected an aged and
venerable product of the university’s own regime, who began his career
twenty-eight years ago as director of the School of Commerce. He is
David Kinley, locally known as “King David.” I am told by several who
have been his victims that he never fails to question an applicant for a
position as to whether he is a Socialist. “This is no time for
disloyalty,” he says; nor will it ever be such a time while King David
reigns.

Before the war the university was not so careful, and agitators and
disturbers of the academic peace crept in. There was one young member of
the faculty who had acquired at the University of Oxford the evil habit
of going without his hat, and in October, 1917, the dean of the Graduate
School delivered an address to the graduate students, formally
condemning this practice. Other members of the faculty were seen to be
smoking on the street—whereas we have learned from the Jewish student
that university smoking is done only at poker and jazz parties. Another
member was reported to the president by the dean of the college, on the
charge of having accepted an invitation to speak on the topic,
“Philosophical Reasons for the Non-existence of God.” Fortunately, he
was able to prove that he had not accepted such an invitation; also that
he had not received it.

Another member of the faculty received an elaborate letter from the head
of the sociological department, reporting several evil remarks he was
said to have made to other professors, regarding his having taken some
whiskey with him on a camping trip, and other such matters. This
professor was placed on trial before his dean, and was acquitted of the
evil remarks. Later there were dreadful allegations concerning members
of the faculty having been seen to be drinking at a supper-party at the
country club. All the servants of the club were interviewed by a faculty
committee, and denied the charges, and the agitation died down.
Nevertheless, the activities of the scandal bureau continued, and the
grand duchess became fearfully wrought up. Another investigation was
conducted, this time by secret service agents of the United States
government. Five professors were summoned, one of them a lady, Miss
Shepherd, and she was told that she was “a rank, rotten, vicious
Socialist and Anarchist.” Mrs. Busey was terribly upset, and wrung her
hands, exclaiming, “To think that members of my faculty should behave in
this way!” “My faculty?” questioned Professor Tolman. “Do you mean to
say we are your hired servants?” “Well,” replied Mrs. Busey, “you are in
my employ!” This was one of the incidents I mentioned to Professor
Robert Herrick, who lives in his ivory tower at the University of
Chicago, only a hundred miles away, and thinks that college professors
are controlled by “the tone of the house,” and never get direct orders
from the plutocracy!

The upshot of the matter was a formal trial before the interlocking
regents, with the dean of the Graduate School presiding. A great array
of witnesses were summoned, and several of the victims described the
scene to me. The affair was carried through with the utmost solemnity;
the master of ceremonies would enter and announce: “Two witnesses wait
without.” The two witnesses would be led in, and questioned as to what
evil things they knew about the radical professors. One old lady, wife
of a high-up faculty-member, had a dreadful charge: “Well, they sit next
us in the Faculty Club, and it’s very unpleasant; Mr. Stevens laughs a
great deal!”

The ceremonies lasted from ten o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock
at night, and every now and then the accused professors would demand a
chance to cross-question this or that witness, and they would be told:
“Wait; you will have your chance.” Witness after witness testified as to
their political and religious beliefs, but they themselves were given no
chance to be heard, neither were they permitted to call any witnesses
for their side. Late at night the proceedings were adjourned, and the
chance they had been promised was never given.

Even with this one-sided procedure, nothing wrong could be found with
them, and the report of the regents exonerated them completely.
Nevertheless, two of them were let out at the end of the year, and a
third, Professor Richard C. Tolman, resigned. It is amusing to note that
the charge against him had been disloyalty to his government, and as
soon as he quit the university he was taken by his government into its
most difficult and confidential service—the Department of Chemical
Warfare! Apparently he gave satisfaction, for his government made him a
major, and later on put him in charge of nitrogen fixation work.




                               CHAPTER LV
                     THE UNIVERSITY OF AUTOMOBILES


We take the Wabash Railroad to Detroit, traveling under the protection
of a Columbia University trustee; and from Detroit we take the Michigan
Central Railroad, with a Columbia trustee, a Cornell trustee, a
Rochester trustee and a recent Yale and New York University trustee for
directors and two First National, two Guaranty Trust, and two National
City Bank directors; and so we arrive at Ann Arbor, home of the
University of Michigan. In the upper peninsula of this State are
enormous deposits of copper, with a great trust, Calumet and Hecla, in
charge of the region. We shall feel at home here, because the enterprise
is financed by Lee-Higginson, and all the old Boston families, the
Shaws, Agassizs, Higginsons and Lowells, got in on the ground floor. So
now when strikers have to be shot down or kidnapped, we find highly
cultured graduates of Harvard in charge of the job; when they have to be
lied about, the Associated Press is ready, with a Harvard graduate as
general manager—see “The Brass Check,” pages 358-361.

In the lower peninsula are great manufacturing cities, including
Detroit, headquarters of the automobile industry. The grand duke of the
state university is Frank B. Leland, president of the United Savings
Bank and brother of a great motor magnate. As his right-hand agent and
local manager at Ann Arbor he has Mr. Junius P. Beal, former owner of
the Ann Arbor “Times,” prominent Republican politician, director of a
bank and an insurance company, and owner of most of the saloon property
in Detroit; also Judge Murfin, a leading stand-pat politician; a doctor,
who is also an active politician; the manager of the Grand Rapids street
railways, who is interested in banks; and a Bay City manufacturer, who
is president of a national bank.

No account of education in Michigan would be complete which did not
mention Senator Newberry, the especial darling of the plutocracy of the
state. Newberry is the son-in-law of A. V. Barnes, president of the
American Book Company, which is the school-book trust, the most
important single agency in the corrupting of American education. We
shall come to know this American Book Company intimately when we deal
with our public schools. Suffice it for the moment to say that when
ex-Secretary of the Navy Newberry bought his way into the United States
Senate, he used money which had been pilfered from the school children
of the United States. Mr. Fred Cody, henchman of Newberry, and convicted
with him, is an American Book Company agent, while his brother, Frank
Cody, is superintendent of schools in Detroit. You see what a tight
little system they have in Michigan!

As president of the university they had until two years ago a native
son, who began teaching there fifty years ago. He is described to me by
one who had much dealings with him as a typical “go-getter,” with the
mentality of a hardware sales agent; very expert at getting money from
the rich, but in the realm of the intellect “a bouncing old fool.” A
year or two ago they got in Marion LeRoy Burton, the great
inspirationalist whom we met at the University of Minnesota. We saw him
introduced there with brass bands and fireworks, and I have a friend who
saw the same thing happen at Ann Arbor; these inspirationalists, it
seems, live always in the glare of fireworks and the blare of brass
bands—or else the sound of their own eloquence, which is the same thing.

The University of Michigan is another of these huge educational
department stores, a by-product of the sudden prosperity of the
automobile business. Its spirit was interestingly revealed by the
Detroit “News” of two years ago, at which time the enrollment amounted
to twelve thousand. Said the “News:”

  Whether it is wise or best for the individual and society is difficult
  to decide; but it is true and very natural indeed that for nearly all
  of these young persons an education is not greatly worth while if at
  the end of the college course or soon thereafter it can not be
  translated into good pay and the material comforts of life. The old
  ideal of education as an end in itself, as the deepening and
  broadening of one’s view of life, as the acquiring of a certain amount
  and kind of culture, has gone from among us.

At this university they have, of course, all the usual paraphernalia of
fraternities and sororities and “student activities”; also they have an
oversupply of what passes for religion in a commercial age. There are
five or six hundred instructors, employed to prepare boys and girls for
money-making, and a few fond idealists, who struggle to introduce a
little understanding of the intellectual life. At this, as at other
universities, you hear wailing about the impossibility of getting
college students to study; so you would have thought that when a man
came along who proved himself a wizard at that art, the harassed
authorities would have grappled him to their hearts. I put it to you,
overworked and troubled college professor, in whatever part of America
you may be: suppose some one put to you the task of getting seventy-five
college boys to come to you, begging you to teach them in off hours, and
outside the regular classes, and without any credits; offering to rent
rooms for the purpose, clean them up themselves, buy lumber and saw it
and build benches with their own hands—would you say you know how to do
that? Suppose you were asked if you could spend hundreds of hours in
intimate association with such students, and never once hear a dirty
story, never once hear talk about football or society politics, never
see a man light a cigarette—would you say that any man alive could do
such a thing? Suppose it were up to you to get yourself invited to the
toughest fraternity-house on the campus, to read the Bible to the men
between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, and have everybody in the
fraternity-house attend, and even bring in crowds from the other
fraternity-houses—would you think that could be done in any American
university? And if a man were doing all these things, would you say that
he ought to be made dean of men, and then, as quickly as possible,
president of the university—or would you say that he ought to be fired
from the university in disgrace? Of course it would depend; before
giving your answer, you have to know whether the man is a Socialist!

He is; and so he was driven from the University of Automobiles. His
story was told to me by some of his former students, who ask me not to
use his name; he has another job, and might very easily lose that. So
let us call him Smithfield. He began teaching at Ann Arbor fifteen years
ago, starting in on rhetoric. Naturally, the way to make rhetoric
interesting is to see how it is used by live writers; so Smithfield and
his classes would read H. G. Wells, and the plays and prefaces of
Bernard Shaw, and the essays of John Stuart Mill. He would set his
classes interesting stunts to do; a passage from Wells to write over in
the style of Milton, or one of Shakespeare in the manner of Carlyle. His
classes grew, and when he turned them over to others they fell off. The
head of the department brought him three boys, sons of the interlocking
directorate, who could not pass; Smithfield taught them, and they
passed. “It’s a marvel,” said the professor; “I don’t see how you do
it.”

But parents began to complain. Their children were coming home with
different ideas; they were learning real things about modern life,
instead of the pretenses the parents were used to! A nephew of Mr. Henry
Leland, of Lincoln Motors, brought to Mr. Bulkley, the banker, at that
time a regent, the dreadful story that Smithfield was a Socialist; so
the president of the university summoned him in haste: “My dear
Smithfield,” said he, “can’t you see that if you were to divide
everything up, it would not be many years before the more able people
had got possession of everything again?” Such was the mentality of the
aged native product; and he was backed by Mr. Beal, the resident regent,
owner of banks and saloon real estate. The boys had to come to this
latter to ask for the use of a hall for a lecture by some unorthodox
person, and they would regularly be asked this question about dividing
up!

Matters got so serious, with complaints of rich parents, that there was
a formal investigation by a committee. Thirty students were corralled
and questioned by five members of the faculty. “Have you ever read a
Socialist book? Have you ever been to a Socialist lecture? Where did you
get these ideas? Were you taught Socialism by Professor Smithfield?” One
and all, the boys testified that Smithfield had never taught them
Socialism; he had taught them to think. He had been tireless in
impressing upon them that they should learn to hold their minds in
suspense, and to judge for themselves; they should test new ideas, and
accept what they found convincing to their reason. As a result of this
investigation, one of the deans informed Smithfield that he had been
suspended by the regents, but this statement turned out not to be
true—not yet!

These professors were charming fellows in their social life; but when
they were offended in their class prejudices, they became vindictive.
They were incensed against Professor William E. Bohn, who was a
candidate on the Socialist ticket, and made a speech at Kalamazoo, which
was taken up by the capitalist press. Professor Bohn’s manuscript showed
that he did not say what the papers accused him of saying, and many
members of the audience substantiated his statement, nevertheless he was
fired. About this same time they barred Jane Addams from speaking in a
college building; she was arguing for woman suffrage, and that was a
contentious political question, unfit for student ears!

For thirteen years Smithfield was in perpetual hot water, being “called
up” and cautioned and pleaded with by the authorities. “What is the
matter?” he asked of his dean. “Can’t I teach?” The answer was, “You
teach too God-damned well.” This was Mortimer E. Cooley, a high-up
authority in the engineering world, one of those valuation wizards about
whom we learned in our study of Harvard. Dean Cooley has been interested
all his life in privately owned public utilities, and he stated his
point of view to one of his professors: “An engineer owes his first duty
to the man who employs him.” In the pamphlet, “Snapping Cords,” by
Morris L. Cooke, of Philadelphia, it is narrated how Professor Cooley
serves his masters; he went to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and
told these students that “in 1911 the average rate of return on all the
capital (of all utility corporations) was but 2.3 per cent.” Mr. Cooke
cites a circular of Henry L. Doherty & Company, New York investment
bankers, giving a table of net earnings of such corporations for the ten
years from 1902, to 1912, and they amount to: gas and electric, 8.45;
industrials, 7.79; railroads, 4.25 per cent. Mr. Cooke adds the
important note that the securities of such utility corporations are from
fifty to one hundred per cent in excess of invested capital!

Dean Cooley was troubled, because he could not get his engineering
students to take any interest in ideas. They ought to have a little more
culture than the average business men, he thought; so he tried to get
them to read Shakespeare and Milton, but in vain; he tried to get them
to read Darwin and Huxley, but in vain. Chemistry and physics they got
in the laboratory, but they had no biology and wanted none. Smithfield
tried them on the social sciences, introducing them to Bertrand Russell
and Bernard Shaw; and these hustling young engineers suddenly discovered
that literature had something to do with life. In six semesters this
teacher had eight sections, over two hundred students. But every bit of
this was abolished by the university authorities, under pressure of the
plutocracy of automobiles, railroads and banks.

It was then that Smithfield’s students took matters into their own
hands. They asked if he would meet with them for talks, and they started
an open forum, renting some rooms above a drug store, and doing all the
work themselves. They cut out smoking and drinking, and took to debating
social problems. As one of them phrased it to me, “We let loose a spirit
of real knowledge, and if we could have gone on, we should have changed
the social order in ten years.” But, of course, that is exactly what the
plutocracy of Michigan did not intend to have happen; they are going to
keep the present social order—which means that we are going to have
civil war in America, with the horrors we have seen in Russia and
Ireland.

Some boys came to Smithfield, saying they would like to meet on Sunday
mornings and study religion. Smithfield thought he would like to know
something about religion himself; so they got together and began to read
the Bible. Of course they read it with their eyes open; they studied the
class struggle in ancient Judea, the Hebrews enslaved by the plutocracy
of Rome, the Hebrew proletariat enslaved by their own exploiters, with
the help of priests and preachers of institutionalized religion. You can
see the same thing in Ann Arbor and Detroit, so Professor Smithfield’s
boys discovered the Bible to be “live stuff.”

Presently came the Y. M. C. A. hand-shakers, seeking to introduce Bible
study into the fraternity-houses. They would select some fraternity man
to read the Bible between five and six o’clock in the afternoon; and
then it was the Alpha Deltas, who boast themselves the toughest bunch in
town, came to Smithfield and asked him to read to them. All the other
classes petered out, and came to nothing; and naturally the “Y” people
were sore, because a radical was able to hold his classes while they
could not.

Professor Smithfield’s attitude toward the war was about the same as my
own; that is, he swallowed the allies’ propaganda sufficiently to think
there might be a greater hope for democracy if the allies were to win.
He made speeches, and sold Liberty Bonds, and his enemies could not get
him on this issue. So the scandal bureau was put to work. Professor
Smithfield’s wife was a teacher of swimming in the public schools of
Detroit, and presently it began to be rumored that she had had a
red-headed baby. One of the students told me the origin of this
red-headed baby story, but I forget it; maybe the wife had been seen to
pat a red-headed baby on the street, or maybe she had taken care of a
red-headed baby for some friend—any little thing like that will do for
the scandal bureau. It happens that the wife is likewise a Socialist,
and in 1919 she answered some questions which students asked her about
the Newberry case. As we have seen, the superintendent of schools in
Detroit is a brother to Newberry’s leading henchman, so Mrs. Smithfield
lost her position as a teacher of swimming.

Shortly afterwards her husband lost his position as a teacher of modern
ideas. They did not notify Smithfield himself, but the newspapers got
hold of it, and the reporters interviewed his dean, and also Regent
Beal, and both declared the report was untrue, it was a mistake. The
dean told Smithfield it was a mistake; but shortly afterwards Smithfield
discovered that it was the truth. And if you want to know why college
teaching is dull, and why college students drink and smoke and gamble
and go to “petting-parties,” you have the whole answer in this
experience of one live and interesting teacher.

They have a newspaper at the university, the “Michigan Daily,” and on
Sunday they publish an eight-page literary supplement of very excellent
quality. In October, 1922, a senior student, G. D. Eaton, published in
this supplement a review of John Kenneth Turner’s book, “Shall It Be
Again?” an exposure of the dishonesties of the late war, based upon
documents, and therefore not to be answered. The student who reviewed it
had been an ardent patriot, and had endeavored to enlist; being rejected
as under weight, he managed to get in by a trick, and performed his
military duties competently. He was invalided, and is at the university
as a ward of the Federal Board of Vocational Rehabilitation. Immediately
on the appearance of his review, President Burton summoned the faculty
members of the Board of Control of Student Publications, and directed
this board to dismiss Eaton at once, the declared reason being one
sentence in the review: “Most history professors are senile, simple and
misguided asses.” A faculty member visited the offices of all three
student publications, and not merely forbade that Eaton should
contribute to any of these papers, but forbade that the papers should
mention his dismissal in any way. The Dean of Students endeavored to
have the government withdraw support from Eaton, so that he would have
to quit the university. Extraordinary efforts were made to keep the case
from getting into the newspapers; but a month later the Detroit “Free
Press” got hold of the story, and gave young Eaton a little course in
practical journalism. They got an interview with him, and from this
interview they cut everything that might be favorable to his case; as
the rest was not unfavorable enough, they embellished it with fourteen
distinct falsehoods, which Mr. Eaton lists in a letter to me. Also I
ought to mention that this returned soldier was mobbed and badly beaten
by the students for an article in the “Smart Set,” discussing the
university. His successor as editor has been forbidden to publish an
article proving that freedom of opinion among the students is not
desired or permitted.




                              CHAPTER LVI
                   THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STEEL TRUST


We set out for Pittsburgh; and we can take either the Baltimore and
Ohio, with a Johns Hopkins trustee for president and another Johns
Hopkins trustee for director, also a Pittsburgh trustee, a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Teacher’s College trustee, a Lehigh
trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First National Bank
director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania; or we can take the Pennsylvania Railroad,
which is interlocked with the Guaranty Trust Company, Massachusetts
Tech, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, the United States Steel
Corporation, Bryn Mawr College, Wilson College, the University of
Pennsylvania, the Girard Trust Company, and the University of
Pittsburgh. It is this Pittsburgh institution we are now going to
investigate, and we shall have no difficulty in tracing its financial
connections. As one of the professors remarked to me, “At Pittsburgh the
plumbing is all open.”

He might also have added that this plumbing has been “swiped.” In other
universities the members of the plutocracy who run things have put up at
least a part of the funds; in Pittsburgh they have made the people put
up the funds, while the interlocking directorate takes the honors and
emoluments. We saw Judge Gary being made a learned doctor of laws at
Northwestern University; and that was not so bad, because everybody
understands that this particular title is merely a compliment for
big-wigs and money-bags. But at the University of Pittsburgh they made
him a doctor of science, which is supposed to be a real degree; and if
you could plumb the depths of Judge Gary’s ignorance on every subject
except making money and killing men, you would appreciate the absurdity
of this academic performance.

The grand duke of Pittsburgh is Mr. A. W. Mellon, Secretary of the
United States Treasury, and reputed to be the third richest man in the
country; he is president of the Mellon National Bank, and vice-president
or director in a list of fifty-five great financial and industrial
organizations. As second grand duke he has his brother, Mr. R. B.
Mellon, vice-president of his bank, and vice-president or director of
fifty-six organizations—beating his brother by one! As active assistant
they have Mr. Babcock, mayor of Pittsburgh, lumber magnate and director
in a long list of corporations. There are twenty-seven other members of
this regal board, and any time a full meeting was held, they could
transact the business of most of the banks and steel companies of
Allegheny county. The typewritten list of their directorates, which lies
before me, fills ten solid pages. I know you don’t want to hear it all,
so I will just give a glimpse, here and there: a steel king, whose
father left him sixty millions; the treasurer of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, western lines; a coal operator, vice-president of a national
bank; the chairman of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; a steel
magnate; a physician who married Standard Oil; the head financier of the
Thaw family; the chairman of a foundry company; a president of seven oil
companies; another representative of the Thaw family; the owner of
several newspapers; the president of an electric company; the president
of a foundry company; the manager of several aluminum companies, Mellon
enterprises; the president of the Heinz pickle palaces; a real estate
and coal man; the president of a national bank and three coal companies;
the president of a Mellon trust company; a United States senator and
Mellon attorney; a young steel magnate; the president of the Carnegie
Steel Company; two corporation lawyers; the head of the Carnegie
Institute, a Presbyterian clergyman, and the Episcopal bishop, who has
just fled from the smoky hell of the steel-country to his eternal
reward.

We saw at the University of Pennsylvania a peculiar arrangement, whereby
a private institution, entirely controlled by private plutocrats,
receives a subsidy every year from the state, and spends this money for
anti-social purposes. At Pittsburgh we see the same arrangement; the
state contributes nearly a million dollars a year to be expended by
these steel and oil and coal and railroad and money kings. This means in
practice that every year the chancellor of the university has to make a
deal with the political bosses. Finding himself inadequate to the task,
he has turned it over to a firm of lawyers, one member of which was
speaker of the legislature, and afterwards candidate for the Republican
nomination for governor. Those who put through the appropriation get ten
per cent of it; this is known as the “cut,” and is a regular custom—even
the public hospitals in Pennsylvania have to pay such tribute. There is
a network of graft, involving every kind of organization in the state;
the saloons, the doctors, the fraternal organizations—anybody who wants
special privilege or freedom to break the laws has to put up bribes. The
lawmakers protest against this or that steal, but when the orders come,
they vote. How big is the rake-off we may judge from the fact that the
mayor of Pittsburgh put up six hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars
to secure his election to an office which pays a salary of eleven
thousand dollars a year!

The people are helpless; they have no idea what is going on, because
they have no newspapers, the so-called newspapers of Pittsburgh being
merely house organs of the steel companies. The papers have an
association regulating their output and prices, also the number of
editions. They have agreed to issue no “extras,” and have put up a bond
of ten thousand dollars, which they forfeit if they violate this
agreement. At the time of the steel strike they flooded the country with
hysterical lies about the strikers; the record stands complete in the
report of the Interchurch Federation.

Pittsburgh University is another mushroom establishment, with five
thousand students and no ideas. The steel kings condescend to run it,
but they do not patronize it; the interlocking trustees send their sons,
not to Pittsburgh, but to the big Eastern universities. “Pitt” is
bitterly jealous of “Penn,” which is old and aristocratic and athletic.
For a time Pennsylvania refused to play football with them, and they
went to the state legislature, seeking to have this made a condition of
the state appropriations for their rival!

The chancellor of the university was a preacher named McCormick, but he
failed to “get the dough,” so he quit, and they put in ex-President
Bowman of Iowa University, a product of the Columbia University
educational machine. Bowman is known as “Mellon’s man,” but he also has
failed as a “vamp.” It appears that somebody tried to work a little
scheme on Grand Duke Mellon; it was announced in the newspapers that he
had made a gift of land worth two million dollars. The papers played it
up, with pictures of the Mellon brothers and fatuous interviews with
Chancellor Bowman. But Mr. Mellon came out with the statement that all
he had promised to do was to put up a hundred thousand dollars to secure
an option on the property. They are hard-fisted fellows, these steel
men, and as the saying is, they “have to be shown.” They can see that it
is worthwhile to train experts in steel-making, so Carnegie Tech is
taken care of; but when it comes to general culture, this Latin and
Greek stuff and highbrow ologies—they let the legislature do it!

The professors tell a story about Mayor Babcock, lumber magnate and
interlocking trustee. Chancellor McCormick wanted to advance a young man
in the chemistry department over the head of his senior, who was a Jew.
He explained in a meeting of the trustees that it would look all right,
because the Jew was not a Ph. D. Mr. Babcock, deputy grand duke of the
board, had fallen asleep, and now he opened his eyes suddenly. “Ph. D?
What the hell’s that?”

Needless to say, they don’t waste much time fooling about academic
freedom at the University of Pittsburgh. The nearest approach to a
radical that ever got into the place is a professor at the law school,
one of the twelve lawyers who signed the protest against
Attorney-General Palmer’s raids on the constitution of the United
States. There was a terrible uproar in Pittsburgh over this. The
professor received a letter of protest from the chancellor, and was
called in for a long argument. The new chancellor came in at this time,
and at the first meeting of the board he started his money “spiel.”
“Gentlemen,” said he, “the first duty before the university is to raise
six and a half million dollars.” But Mr. Babcock thought that the board
had another duty, which was to listen to him curse the radical
professor. The secret service department of the Steel Trust was put to
work, and there was a report on this professor, and he lost his chance
to become head of his department. “We must lie low now,” said the
chancellor. “We have a big program ahead.”

Needless to say, they are very devout at this University of the Steel
Trust. One of their grand dukes was the elder Mr. Heinz, distinguished
author of “Fifty-seven Varieties,” and proud owner of sixty-eight pickle
factories and forty-five branch houses. Mr. Heinz was an eminent
Presbyterian, and head of the World’s Sunday School Association, and
left a quarter of a million dollars to Pittsburgh University for a
building to teach Sunday School work. Naturally, therefore, it seemed a
dreadful thing to the interlocking trustees that the church should turn
traitor to their interests. Trustee Follansbee furiously attacked the
Interchurch World Movement report on the steel strike; at a meeting in
New York he said that it had set back the cause of Christianity fifty
years. And when the United States Senate sent out a committee to
investigate the strike—then suddenly the fighting steel kings discovered
what a handy thing it is to own an educational machine! Mayor Babcock
gave the senators a grand dinner-party, to which he invited his
chancellor and some of his trustees and deans, and these eminent and
disinterested gentlemen loaded the senators up with information
concerning the Bolshevik uprising in Western Pennsylvania.

Needless to say, there are no liberal movements of the students at this
university, and no “outside speakers” bringing them improper ideas. A
recent graduate writes to me:

  One cannot describe the stupidity and ignorance of the students. Most
  of them could never see beyond themselves; most of them attended
  school to avoid working, for the sake of the diploma which at least
  would give them more pay, if not secure them a better job, and some
  even because they could not think of a better, easier, and happier way
  to spend four years. The professors and instructors were even worse,
  there being hardly one who could inspire a student.

Also needless to say, there is no organization of the professors; the
university has the “open shop” as well as “open plumbing.” At the time
of the Scott Nearing affair at Pennsylvania, there was a strong movement
for faculty representation, and several of the men who stood for this
movement were charged with insubordination and fired; others, who stood
by the authorities in order to curry favor, got promotions. A University
Council was established, but it proved a tender plant, and did not
survive in the smoke-laden atmosphere of the steel country. Chancellor
Bowman has now laid down the law, that all appointments are subject to
annual renewal; teachers are no different from other employes, and he
intends to run the university like a business concern. This is the sort
of talk that brings satisfaction to steel kings!

I was told about a professor who was brought before the chancellor, upon
the charge of having destroyed the religious faith of one of his
students. The boy’s father had complained, and it developed that the
professor, in a private talk with the boy, had been asked and had
answered questions about the divinity of Jesus. There was a solemn
council of the chancellor, the dean, and all the professors in this
department, and the chancellor drew up a statement for the professors to
sign, to the effect that they would do everything in their power to
avoid tampering with the religious faith of the students. They refused;
the utmost they were willing to sign was an agreement that they would
not go out of their way to tamper with the religious faith of their
students.

These men, of course, are teaching the scientific method, which is
incompatible with revelation; they know it, and the chancellor knows it;
all he asks is to avoid trouble with parents and interlocking trustees
who are making money out of the system of private monopoly, and wish to
keep the thoughts of their wage-slaves upon their future heaven and off
their present hell. A friend of mine tells me that, at the time of the
Braddock shootings the Pittsburgh professors “talked like
Bolsheviks”—but only among themselves! When it comes to public talking,
that is attended to by people like Mayor Garland, a former trustee, who
at a big meeting of faculty, students and alumni declared that “in a
community like Pittsburgh, which depends upon a high tariff for its
prosperity, it would be very wrong for any professor to advocate free
trade.” A friend of mine asks: “Was he joking?” I answer that one might
as well expect to hear a convocation of Catholic prelates joking about
the Immaculate Conception.

And while we are in this neighborhood we ought to make note of the
curious experience of Prof. G. F. Gundelfinger, author of “Ten Years at
Yale,” who was assistant professor of mathematics at the Carnegie
Institute of Technology, and wrote a personal letter to the president
protesting against an indecent orgy of the students, publicly conducted
and led by the president. The letter was sent to the president’s home,
and was opened by his wife; Professor Gundelfinger was fired a few days
later. He made a public fight, and the trustees dismissed the
president—but they did not take Professor Gundelfinger back!




                              CHAPTER LVII
                        THE UNIVERSITY OF HEAVEN


We travel to Buffalo by the Pennsylvania Railroad, and from Buffalo we
continue our journey by way of the New York Central Railroad, which has
a Columbia trustee and a Cornell trustee and a Rochester trustee for
directors, a recent Yale and New York University trustee for director, a
Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president, a Guaranty Trust director
and two National City Bank directors; and so we arrive at the University
of Heaven, which has God Almighty for a director.

Thirty years ago there was nothing here; now there are a score of
elaborate buildings, and six thousand students. Never has there been
such a series of grand dukes and duchesses as at this university; Mr.
John D. Archbold, president of the Standard Oil Company, and Huyler, the
candy king, and Samuel Bowne, the cod liver oil king, and L. C. Smith,
the typewriter king, and Mrs. Russell Sage, the charity queen, and E. L.
French, head of Crucible Steel and the Halcombe Steel Company. At
present they have as their chief duke Horace S. Wilkinson, steel
magnate, one of the leading powers in the steamship lines of the Great
Lakes. As assistants there are half a dozen prominent business men of
the town, including the two leading merchants; a former brewer of New
York, who is head of a great asphalt company and a sugar company; Mrs.
Bowne, the widow of Samuel Bowne; Mr. Childs, the coal tar king; Mr.
Flaccus, the Pittsburgh glass magnate; the Honorable Louis Marshall,
millionaire lawyer of New York; the Honorable Edgar T. Brackett, leading
politician of Saratoga Springs, headquarters of New York state’s
gambling and political conventions; and the Reverend Ezra Squier Tipple,
D.D., Ph.D., president of Drew Theological Seminary, professor of
practical theology, and author of the “Drew Sermons, Series One and
Two,” and of the “Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts, Series One, Two and
Three.”

All this has grown out of the genius of one man, the Reverend James
Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., chancellor of the
University of Heaven. He made it, unassisted save by God.

What is Heaven—in the plutocratic sense? It is a place whose streets are
paved with gold and flowing with milk and honey. It is inhabited
exclusively by the elect, all others having been cast into outer
darkness. It is a place entirely under the control of the “right
people”; all unorthodox thoughts are barred, “chapel” is conducted every
morning, and if anybody does not like the way we run things, he can go
to hell.

Some time ago I made you acquainted with the ideal university president
of the metropolitan plutocracy, Nicholas Murray Butler; a man of the
world, dignified and urbane, his religion of the Episcopalian variety,
reserved and proper. Compared with him, Chancellor Day of Syracuse
University is provincial and naive, representing the adoration of wealth
in its primitive, instinctive form. His emotions flow with child-like
enthusiasm; his denomination might be described as evangelical
Mammonism. His fervor is such that he is not ashamed to bear testimony
before the world; to raise his hands in public and shout: “Money, money!
Hallelujah! Amen!” This chancellor brings to the support of his
plutocracy the direct personal revelation of the Almighty. When he makes
commencement orations, or gives interviews to the interlocking press, or
sends telegrams of congratulation to the murderers of strikers, he
brings to their support the latest decisions and interpretations of the
Throne of Grace. “God has made the rich of this world to serve Him....
He has shown them a way to have this world’s goods and to be rich
towards God.... God wants the rich man.... Christ’s doctrines have made
the world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches.” These are
from the chancellor’s book, “The Raid on Prosperity”; you can find more
of it quoted in “The Profits of Religion.”

Recently he has published another book, “My Neighbor the Workingman,”
and in this book we find God in a bloodthirsty mood. It appears that the
radicals are taking advantage of our courts, which “assume innocence
until guilt is proved.” There must be “a suspension of this order of
things,” God says; “we have found no foe more worthy of extermination.”
Strikes, God teaches us, are efforts to make labor superior to law; “the
strike is a conspiracy and nothing less.” Yet when labor proposes to use
legal methods, God does not seem to like it any better; we find Him
discussing the founding of the Labor Party in Chicago, and speaking of
the delegates as “these Simian descendants”—and just after He has made
His chief complaint against strikers, that they call non-union men bad
names! God portrays the Socialist utopia: “The soap-box orators, in the
tramp’s unclean rags, will take charge of the banks, and the bomb-makers
can be started to run the factories.” Opposed to this is God’s own
utopia, and you may take your choice: “The rich and the poor dwell
together. There is divine wisdom in the plan. They always have so lived.
They always will so live. Noble characters are in both. It must be the
divine order.”

This chancellor of the University of Heaven was providentially equipped
for his rôle. He stands about six and a half feet high, and broad in
proportion, with the face of a Jupiter commanding the lightnings. He has
a magnificent rolling voice, so that Jehovah’s commands are heard as
usual amid the thunders of Sinai. He is a masterful personality; he
knows instantly what God wants, and he goes after the bacon and gets it
for God, and every plutocrat, meeting him, recognizes him as the ideal
person to take charge of the thinking of posterity.

No nonsense is tolerated at Syracuse; they know what truth is, and how
it should be taught, and you teach it that way or you get out, the
quicker the better. Early in the chancellor’s administration he
discovered that John R. Commons was tolerant toward free silver, and he
fired him, giving as his reason that the professor was tolerant towards
Sunday baseball! Every year he discovers that several others are
tolerant towards something ungodly, and he fires them. There is no
“tenure” or faculty control, or stuff of that sort; it is the chancellor
who pays the salaries, and the chancellor who decides what the various
men are worth—and he generally decides they are not worth much. He said
at a faculty meeting, “You fellows needn’t think you mean anything to
me; I could replace you all in an hour and a half.”

This is his regular manner toward his faculty; he subjects them to the
most incredible indignities. For example, he gave the degree of doctor
of science to one of his grand dukes, Mr. E. L. French, president of
Crucible Steel. At a faculty meeting at which this project was brought
up, one of the professors ventured to suggest that it might be better to
make it an LL.D., which is generally understood as having an honorary
significance, instead of an Sc.D., which is understood to indicate
actual achievement in the scientific field. Chancellor Day pointed at
the objector a finger which trembled with rage, and shouted: “Sit down
and shut up!” This was Professor E. N. Pattee, and I find him still
listed in the Syracuse catalogue as “director of the chemical
laboratory,” so I presume that he sat down and shut up as directed.

Several people described to me the eloquence of the chancellor’s
sermons, with the tremolo stop which reduces his auditors to tears. I
asked one of them, “Does he believe in his religion?” The answer was:
“No more than I do. He has no particle of Christianity or of faith; he
uses it merely as a shield.” To his faculty its purpose appears to be to
beat down their salaries. If you go into his office to ask for a raise,
he will glare at you and pound on the desk, shouting: “What’s this I
hear about you, John Smith? Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus?
Have you been saying that you distrust the verbal inspiration of the
Pentateuch?” Or maybe he will say: “I want you to understand, young man,
I have been hearing reports about you. You were seen walking on the
street with Professor So-and-So’s wife!” Or maybe he will say: “I have
taken the trouble to inquire, and I find that you subscribe to the
‘Nation’ and the ‘New Republic.’”

Heaven, from the point of view of college professors, is an intellectual
sweatshop. I was told of a professor of geology, who was there for
twenty years, and finally got up the nerve to ask for a raise, and he
got fifty dollars a year. Another professor asked for a raise, but the
chancellor discovered that this man had written a book, and he said: “A
man who has written a book ought not to expect promotion; it shows that
he had spare time on his hands.” All contracts with the university are
verbal, and you take the chancellor’s word for your fate. It may seem a
dreadful thing to say about heaven, but the fact remains that a number
of the chancellor’s faculty, both past and present, unite in placing him
among those college heads who do not always tell the truth.

A few years ago he got rid of his treasurer, Mr. W. W. Porter, who had
served the university for nineteen years. The chancellor published a
series of accusations against Mr. Porter, and the latter replied in a
printed statement of twelve thousand words, which I have before me. It
is a dignified and frank and convincing document. Mr. Porter bears
testimony to that same “wrath and vindictive spirit and methods” upon
which all authorities agree. He goes on to give the documents and
figures of a series of petty grafts perpetrated by the chancellor: For
example he states that laborers worked on the chancellor’s farm, and
were paid out of the university treasury amounts aggregating $710.82;
also, that the chancellor sold this farm to the university “at cost,”
and when the treasurer asked for proper vouchers, “he immediately flew
into a passion, stating that his word was sufficient”; also, that a
member of the chancellor’s family purchased a building, and leased it to
the university, to be used as a book-store, at an excessive rental;
also, that the chancellor sold his old automobile to the university at
an excessive price; “the chancellor sold horses, wagons, harness, etc.,
at various times to the university, making out bills in favor of himself
and receipting the same, acting as both seller and purchaser.” We might
go on to summarize twelve closely printed sheets of this kind of thing;
but space is limited, so we content ourselves by stating that we know
where this document is, and we will submit it to Professor Brander
Matthews on demand!




                             CHAPTER LVIII
                        THE HARPOONER OF WHALES


For a score of years the worst scandal at Syracuse was a sort of
Rasputin, whom the chancellor maintained at the university as his
intimate and confidant. The man was a Nova-Scotia herring fisherman,
originally hired by the late Dean French to split wood and mow lawns. It
is generally whispered at Syracuse that he must have found out something
about the chancellor; at any rate, he was suddenly promoted to become
superintendent of buildings and grounds, and became the chief power
behind the throne. Dean Kent of the Engineering College, the most
distinguished man who has ever been on the Syracuse faculty, criticized
the inefficient heating and care of the buildings, whereupon this man
demanded his dismissal, and incredible as it may seem, secured it. The
incident almost caused a strike of the students of the engineering
school. One professor writes me:

  No picture of the chancellor’s regime would be perfect without the
  portrayal of a half-dozen or more prominent members of the faculty
  waiting in the ante-room outside the chancellor’s office, having been
  told that the chancellor was too busy to see anyone. While they are
  waiting patiently, the chancellor’s favorite struts through this room,
  dressed in a jaunty suit, jostles against members of the faculty in an
  arrogant manner without apologies, does not even knock at the door,
  enters and engages the chancellor in conversation, interspersed with
  ribald laughter, for an hour or more. This was almost a weekly
  occurrence for a generation.

And when someone made bold to criticize the chancellor for making an
intimate of this low character, he flew into a passion and declared that
anyone who so criticized him was criticizing Jesus; for had not Jesus
chosen his friends among fishermen? So the intimacy continued; and last
summer it came to a climax. The story is told in a letter from a friend
at Syracuse, who is accurately informed concerning affairs at the
university. I quote:

  For some weeks Mr. Spencer, the manager of the dormitory grocery
  store, has been missing considerable quantities of groceries and
  meats. He made repeated complaints to the police, but nothing was
  accomplished. At length the situation became so bad that two
  detectives were stationed nightly at the store. Two weeks ago last
  Friday night about ten in the evening an automobile stopped about a
  block from the store, the driver then entered the building, and when
  he was well loaded with plunder, the detectives closed in. To their
  surprise they found that they had bagged the chancellor’s favorite. He
  was taken to the police station and examined, and his house was
  searched, where more groceries were found. Hurlbut Smith, now
  president of the board of trustees, was sent for, and at his request
  the matter was kept out of the papers, because the pledges to the
  university emergency fund are being paid so slowly, that he feared the
  effect of such an incident. The chancellor and his favorite are now
  trying to bulldoze Mr. Spencer, manager of the store, into the
  statement that the chancellor’s favorite often came to the store, took
  groceries and left a slip for them; but Spencer down to date has not
  made this statement, perhaps because he is not a liar.

  Later: the board of trustees forced the “resignation” of the favorite.
  The chancellor stormed at the trustees, and two all-day sessions were
  held over the issue. His old legal supporter, Louis Marshall, tried
  all the wiles of a spell-binder on the trustees for over an hour, but
  could get only three votes for the chancellor’s favorite. The
  chancellor has now made him his chauffeur and butler; but he will have
  to go down-town for groceries hereafter!

The chancellor’s furious rages, the vileness of his language, and the
slanders which he circulates about men who displease him—these things
would be incredible, but for the fact that man after man unites in
testifying from personal knowledge. Thus, Professor A. G. Webster, now
of Clark University, tells of seeing the chancellor insult one of his
professors on the campus; and subsequently Professor Webster mentioned
this incident in a letter to the Boston “Herald,” whereupon the
chancellor wrote to the “Herald” in scathing terms, denying all
knowledge of the incident or of Professor Webster. But, as it happened,
Webster had in his files a letter from the chancellor, offering to
appoint him head of the department of physics!

Dr. Homer A. Harvey, a physician practising at Batavia, New York, was a
brilliant professor of Romance languages at Syracuse, and was studying
medicine in his off-hours, taking various courses at the university.
After two years the chancellor discovered this grave offense, and his
first step was to deposit the professor’s salary-check in the bank,
short the amount of a recent increase in salary. The professor did not
discover this until some of his checks were returned by the bank; then
followed an interview with the chancellor, in which the young instructor
was stormed at and denounced, and commanded instantly to abandon his
studies at the medical college. He refused to do so, and resigned his
teaching position. The chancellor flew into a dreadful rage, but the
young instructor walked out, and completed his medical studies and got
his degree. A year later he wrote to the chancellor about another
matter, and received a suave and sympathetic letter, disclaiming all
knowledge of the late unpleasantness. Dr. Harvey declined to accept this
statement, whereupon the chancellor flew into a rage, and wrote a second
and furious letter, bringing a great number of false charges against Dr.
Harvey—and incidentally revealing a complete and detailed knowledge of
the unpleasantness which he had just denied! Shortly after that Dr.
Harvey learned that reports were being circulated at Syracuse, to the
effect that at the time of graduation he had “been caught cheating at
the finals, and had been brazen enough to boast openly of it.” Dr.
Harvey adds: “The source of that falsehood I have no difficulty in
surmising.”

And the same despotic methods which the chancellor applies to his
faculty he applies to his students—to everyone, in fact, but his rich
donors. A student who had been working in industry during the summer
started a “discussion club” in one of the dormitories. It was only a few
hours before he was “on the mat” before the chancellor. “Young man,
study your books. Do what you are told at this university.” Some of the
students took to meeting secretly at the home of one of the professors,
and they brought a Socialist from town to explain his ideas. The
chancellor’s spies brought word of this, and he stormed into a faculty
meeting. “This place is honeycombed with sedition!” Still worse was the
situation when they took a straw vote for president in 1920, and it was
discovered that four of the students had voted for Debs. The newspapers
got word of this, and shouted for blood.

Recently the University of Heaven had a sensational experience. An
instructor became insane, and shot and killed the dean who had
discharged him. Chancellor Day has long ago adopted the thesis,
generally popular among the plutocracy, that all Socialists are
lunatics; he now committed what his professor of formal logic would
explain to him as “the fallacy of the undistributed middle term.” He
jumped to the conclusion that because all Socialists are lunatics,
therefore all lunatics are Socialists, and he trumpeted to the world the
announcement that his dean had fallen victim to a Bolshevik assassin. To
the bewildered editor of “Zion’s Herald,” a very pious Methodist paper
of Boston, the chancellor announced that he had a right to “see red”; he
had seen a pool of blood beneath the body of his slain professor!

The chancellor has personally excluded all radical and liberal
publications from the library. Every book which deals with the subject
of government ownership opposes that doctrine; all others have been
systematically cleaned out. The chancellor even carries his hatred of
labor unions to the point of crippling the university. Workingmen have
been changed two or three times in one week; the chancellor set the
maximum price that a workingman is worth at twenty-eight cents an hour,
and as a result, the boilers of the heating plant were ruined, and the
cost was four thousand dollars.

There is the same strenuous watching, with the help of spies and
stool-pigeons, over the religious life of the university. Judge Gary was
brought there last summer, to preach his piety to the students, who have
chapel every morning, and “are expected to attend regularly the Sabbath
church service of the denomination to which they belong.” The chancellor
received a protest from some minister, whose daughter had learned
something about evolution, and he announced to the faculty: “You men are
hired to teach your subject; don’t try to teach theology.” Then,
observing a cold silence from this group of scientists, he added: “I
don’t expect you to change your opinions, but do, for God’s sake, be as
pious as you can!”

The old rascal is decidedly cynical among his intimates, fond of telling
smutty stories, and willing even to joke about the educational game. His
professor of psychology came to him, telling him about the wonderful new
intelligence tests which some universities were using in place of
examinations. “Fine!” said the chancellor. “We’ll use them, but don’t
let them affect admissions. We want to give everybody a cheap education.
Tell them it’s a good one, and they won’t know the difference.”
Confronted by the usual trouble of raising funds, he let himself be
persuaded to try an appeal for small donations from a large number of
the alumni; but the results did not equal the cost of the circulars, and
the chancellor remarked at a faculty meeting: “I never went fishing for
small fish with a net; I went out and stuck my harpoon into a whale.”

In the days of his prime our vicegerent of Heaven was really a whale of
a whaler; but he met with one great disappointment, which appears to
have wrecked his career. He spent twenty years cultivating the president
of the Standard Oil Company. He chiseled off the label of one of his
buildings, the College of Liberal Arts, and labeled it the John Dustin
Archbold College. He got Archbold to give him a stadium and a gymnasium,
also a mansion to live in; but he hoped for more than that, and for ten
years he whispered to his faculty: “Be careful now, behave yourselves,
we have a great endowment coming.” But Archbold died and left him
nothing, and all the family could be got to put up was half a million
dollars.

From that time on the chancellor’s star began to wane. The university
had been running into debt, and some time ago the banks refused to carry
it any further, and the grand dukes refused to “come across.” The alumni
would do nothing, for they share in the detestation with which the
chancellor is regarded by the faculty and students. In order to confound
his enemies, the chancellor hired a firm of professional money-raisers,
who undertook to get six million dollars in thirty-six weeks for
Syracuse. But before they had gone very far they realized that no one
would put up money, so long as the chancellor remained in office; they
told him so, and he dismissed them for incompetence. They sued for
thirty-six thousand dollars still due, and it was shown that the
chancellor had spent a huge sum of the university’s money on this
fiasco, and without getting a penny of return.

The debts of the university now amounted to a million and a half, and so
matters came to a head. The interlocking trustees had done everything
they could think of to persuade the aged whale-hunter to resign, but all
their efforts failed, so they worked out a most ingenious scheme. One
morning the chancellor opened his copy of the Syracuse “Post-Standard”
at breakfast, and there, to his consternation, he found himself
confronted with an elaborate front-page article to the effect that he
had resigned. There was his picture, and there were columns upon columns
of laudatory articles about himself, written by his leading teachers and
his leading grand dukes and duchesses. Never was there such a series of
panegyrics of a triumphantly retiring chancellor!

All the Syracuse newspapers had it, and what was the poor man to do?
Should he dump out all that milk and honey into the dirt, and make for
himself a horrible scandal? He bowed to his fate, and the trustees
appointed Dean Peck as acting chancellor; but shortly afterwards Dean
Peck died of heart-trouble, and our whale-hunter moved back into his
office. There was no one with authority to keep him out, and he set the
university carpenters at work making alterations on his new home and
made to his faculty the triumphant announcement: “You see, gentlemen,
God has vindicated me; He has struck Peck down, in order that I may
return to my position!” Such is the University of Heaven; and we close
with the familiar comment: “Heaven for climate, hell for company.”

P. S.—While this chapter is being prepared for the printer, the
chancellor resigns once more. Whether this time it is permanent, only
God knows.




                              CHAPTER LIX
                          AN ACADEMIC TRAGEDY


We continue on the New York Central Railroad to Albany, and then take
the Boston & Albany, which is leased to the New York Central, and has a
Harvard “visitor,” a recent Harvard overseer, a Massachusetts Tech
trustee, and a trustee of Clark University for directors. It is to this
latter university we are bound, to study one of the tragedies of our
academic history.

In the gold rush of ’49, a hardware and furniture dealer of
Massachusetts went out to California, and established a monopoly in his
line and made a fortune. He came back home, expecting to be welcomed by
the aristocracy of his state; but they snubbed him, and so he turned his
thoughts to education. He endowed a university, and put at the head of
it one of the most original and fertile minds that have ever appeared in
the educational field in America. President G. Stanley Hall of Clark
University has been interested in almost every branch of advanced
science; he is the author of great works on adolescence and senescence,
and was the first to introduce psychoanalysis into academic teaching. He
brought Freud and Jung to America, and even made so bold as to apply the
psychoanalytic method to Jesus Christ. Instead of making Clark the usual
academic department-store, he made it a place where the most advanced
men in every field of science found a home, and where students came to
specialize in the highest and most difficult branches of knowledge.

The founder was a plain old boy, and gave them two plain brick
buildings, modeled on his “Boston Store,” the great retail establishment
of Worcester. So undistinguished are these buildings that the story is
told of a farmer driving by, learning that this was Clark University,
and exclaiming: “Christ! I thought it was the jail!” Yet these brick
buildings carried the name of American science all over the world. We
saw in our study of Columbia University that the great home of the
plutocracy had one distinguished scientist for every thirteen members of
its faculty, whereas the poor and unpretentious Clark had the highest
standing of any university in the United States, having one
distinguished scientist for every two members of its faculty!

This was not what the old hardware and furniture merchant had wanted; he
did not understand what was going on, and saw no sense in a professor of
mathematics who filled six blackboards with a complicated demonstration,
nor in a professor of chemistry who discovered substances with names
that filled whole lines of print. He quarreled with President Hall, and
cut off most of the funds of the university, and started a second
institution, Clark College, where poor boys could get an education in
three years; to this latter institution he left a large part of his
money. Of course, there was no other plutocrat in America who cared for
what President Hall was doing, so for a generation Clark University was
starved for funds. Nevertheless, many of the scientists stayed, because
it was a place where they could do their work in their own way. They
were free not merely to teach their own specialties, but to help run
their university. Never in America has there been such an unruly
faculty; men would pound on the table, and shake their fists in the
president’s face, calling him a great number of impolite names, and
threatening to resign; but he would argue it out with them, and they
would stay on.

The strongest emotion which animated old Jonas Clark was a hatred of the
plutocracy of Worcester, which had scorned him. More than anything else,
he wanted to make certain that this plutocracy should never get hold of
his university or his college. Concerning the university he laid down
the law in his will:

  And I also declare in this connection, that it is my earnest desire,
  will and direction, that the said university, in its practical
  management, as well as in theory, may be wholly free from every kind
  of denominational or sectarian control, bias or limitation, and that
  its doors may be ever open to all classes and persons, whatsoever may
  be their religious faith or political sympathies, or to whatever
  creed, sect, or party they may belong, and I especially charge upon my
  executors and said trustees, and the said mayor to secure the
  enforcement of this clause of my will by applications to the Court as
  above provided, or otherwise by every means in their power.

Such is the purpose for which Clark was founded. Its founder is dead,
and two years ago its great president retired at the age of
seventy-four, and the tragedy of America’s most intellectual university
can be told in one sentence—the plutocracy of Worcester has got it!

There are eight members of the board of trustees today. The grand duke
is Mr. A. G. Bullock of Worcester, chairman of a life insurance company,
president of a railroad and a railroad investment company, trustee of a
savings bank, director of the Boston & Albany Railroad, two other
railroads, a gas company, a Boston trust company and a Boston security
company. The second grand duke is Mr. F. H. Dewey, lawyer, president of
the Mechanics’ National Bank and of the Worcester street railways,
president of five other street railway companies and a steam railway,
trustee for a savings bank and a national bank, vice-president of a gas
company and two railroads, director of three railroads, an investment
company, an insurance company, and a telephone and telegraph company.
The third grand duke is Mr. C. H. Thurber, business manager of Ginn &
Company, school book publishers, the largest and most active competitors
of the American Book Company. Mr. Thurber’s political views are
described to me by one who knows him well: “Anybody more liberal than
ex-President Taft is a Bolshevik to him.”

These three constitute the finance committee and run the university. As
assistants they have Judge Parker, one of the most notorious of the
aristocratic corporation lawyers of Massachusetts, counsel for the men
who smashed the Boston police strike; Chief Justice Rugg of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court, a former Worcester lawyer and a very
conservative individualist; Mr. Aiken, a high-up interlocking director,
formerly of Worcester, but now president of the National Shawmut Bank of
Boston; a cautious young lawyer of Worcester, in partnership with Judge
Rugg’s son; and another young man, who has just been appointed to the
board, and is expected to serve as another dummy.

This board is a close corporation, self-perpetuating, with no elected
representative of faculty or alumni. For twenty years the finance
committee has had charge of the investing of the endowment, and I should
like to call the especial attention of Professor Brander Matthews of
Columbia University to what they have done. I am not intimately familiar
with the changing standards of American high finance, but I do not know
whether the administration of this finance committee is what would be
described in banking circles as “honest graft” or “dishonest graft.”
They have invested the funds of the university through their own banks,
railways, trolley lines and gas companies, and have paid the university
four per cent interest on the funds, while neighboring institutions have
been getting five or six per cent. For example, the treasurer of
Wesleyan University writes: “All the invested funds of the university
netted us last year 5.71%. This will show you, of course, that we carry
very small balances in our banks and make no investments through them.”
As we have seen, Clark University has been making investments through
the banks, and it has thereby lost 1.71% on $4,700,000, or $80,370 per
year for twenty years, a total of $1,607,400, which went to make fat the
banks of Worcester instead of to educate the students of Clark. Also I
took the trouble to inquire concerning the State Mutual Life Assurance
Company of Worcester, and I find that for the year 1921 it realized
5.51% on its book assets. Mr. Bullock is chairman of this concern, and
his son is vice-president and general counsel; and you see how much
better they do for themselves than they do for Clark!

The treasurer of Clark is the head of a big Worcester bank, and his
reports of the university’s finances were not audited; this
irresponsibility continued for some time, and this year Chief Justice
Rugg asked that the report be audited in future. I am told by a former
professor that it is almost impossible to get hold of a copy of this
treasurer’s report, and when you do get it you find it a mass of
enigmas. Thus the university carries one large block of New Haven stock
at 200, and another at 110! Mr. Dewey, the lawyer who handles the
finances of the university, is one of the shrewd big business
manipulators of Massachusetts. He and Bullock were with the Mellon crowd
which manipulated the legislature, and Dewey was head of the New England
Investment Company, the holding concern for the New Haven Railroad, the
device whereby the big investors skimmed off the cream from that huge
system, and left the “widows and orphans” hungry. It is only the
peculiar workings of our system of justice which enabled these able
gentlemen to escape the penitentiary; and you find that their university
has large holdings in all these half broken-down railroads—the Boston
and Maine, the Vermont Valley, the Norwich and Worcester, the Providence
and Worcester—and more than a hundred thousand dollars in Mr. Dewey’s
gas company!




                               CHAPTER LX
                           THE GEOGRAPHY LINE


Needless to say, Clark University had been for a generation a cause of
indignation to the town of Worcester, which is the largest manufacturing
center in New England, and next to Pittsburgh the most notorious “kept
city” and “open shop” town in America. Clark regarded Worcester as the
Mammon of Unrighteousness, while Worcester regarded Clark as a nest of
atheism, infidelity, and Bolshevism. An American university with no
stadium, no gymnasium, and no chapel, no “eleven” and no “nine,” no
rowing crew and no “petting-parties”! Obviously, no gentleman would send
his son to such a place; it would be left for “muckers” and Bolsheviks.
One of the trustees expressed his opinion of the matter to a student
with whom I talked: “The college would fare better if it turned out a
winning football team than if it had eleven of the most famous
scientists in the country. That’s what the public wants, and that’s the
way to get the money.”

When President Hall resigned, the plutocracy of Worcester perceived that
their chance had come. They arranged for the president of Clark College
to resign at the same time, and they cast about for some man of their
own type to take charge of both institutions. The selection was made by
Mr. Thurber, business manager of Ginn & Company; and again I don’t know
whether I should describe it as “honest” or “dishonest” graft. One of
the principal “lines” of Ginn & Company is the Frye-Atwood elementary
school geographies, which are handsomely illustrated, and have been sold
to the extent of over half a million copies to school boards throughout
the United States. The author of these books was a professor of
geography, first at the University of Chicago, then at Harvard. It
occurred to Mr. Thurber what an admirable thing it would be, if, instead
of advertising these geographies as written by a professor at Harvard,
he could advertise them as written by the president of Clark University!
Also if he could use Clark University as a place for tea-parties to
entertain visiting delegations of school superintendents and teachers
desirous of meeting the distinguished author of Ginn & Company’s leading
“line”!

Of course I don’t mean literally “tea-parties”; in the educational world
these publicity enterprises proceed under the decorous title of Summer
Schools. Elaborate advertising campaigns are undertaken, the praises of
this or that particular “line” are seductively set forth, and the
schoolmarms flock from all over the United States—likewise the
principals and the high-up superintendents—and they meet the
distinguished authors of school books, and listen to their patriotic
eloquence, and go home singing the wonders of the various “lines.” Then
when the new orders are placed for text-books, the enterprising salesmen
are on hand to get the business.

Mr. Thurber announced that he had a new president for Clark College and
Clark University; he announced it at the commencement dinner, and there
was consternation on the faces of everybody present, because nobody had
ever heard of Wallace Walter Atwood, professor of physiography at
Harvard University, and author of “The Mineral Resources of Southwestern
Alaska,” and “The Glaciation of the Uinta and Wasatch Mountains.” I am
told that one of Professor Atwood’s colleagues at Harvard, hearing the
news, remarked: “I suppose Clark thinks it is getting a geographer and
an educator; Clark will find it has neither.” And Clark did! President
Atwood may be a well-informed man in his narrow specialty; certainly he
fulfils the ideal of the interlocking trustees, in that he is a hundred
percent pious and a hundred percent patriotic and a hundred percent
plutocratic. But when it comes to the administration of a university,
and to broad questions of public welfare—I have cast about and tested
all the terms in my vocabulary, but I have been unable to find any one
word to describe the ignorant crudity and childish absurdity of this
former Harvard physiographer.

He announced at the very beginning that he had no interest in being the
president of a poor man’s university; he was going to start a “drive”
for funds, and make Clark a normal and respectable place. In an address
to the students he set forth the advantages of a technical education,
using the standard phrases of the “go-getters”: “As an expert witness
you can sometimes get as much as a hundred dollars a day.” This to a
group of men whose chief pride was that they had a real understanding of
the intellectual life! One student came to him to ask for time to pay
his tuition fee. “Why do you come here if you can’t pay what you owe?”
asked the president, sharply. On the other hand, to a famous athlete,
member of a wealthy family, who had found it impossible to pass his
examinations, he said: “Don’t worry too much about that; we all get by
in the end; it took me five years to get through myself.”

At the formal inauguration ceremony President Atwood announced—doubtless
with a sly wink at Mr. Thurber on the platform—that he was going to make
Clark University the great center of American geographic and
physiographic education. Now I have no desire to deny the importance of
these subjects; they are interesting specialties and have their place;
but when some one sets out to raise them into major sciences, we may be
sure that we are dealing with a buncombe artist, and may look with
certainty for commercial motives. In the Clark University bulletin we
find the commercial ideal set forth in the plainest possible language:
“Many of the universities and colleges of this country are now calling
for trained geographers. Commissioners of education, normal schools, and
high schools are looking for men or women who can serve as supervisors
or as special teachers of geography. The large financial houses are
endeavoring to train men in commercial geography in their own schools.
The departments of the government are now using trained geographers, and
the Civil Service Commission has recently recognized the profession of
geography”—etc., etc.

Under President Atwood’s regime the graduate work in mathematics and
biology has ceased. The two best psychologists are gone, and the
department has declined to nothing. The department of chemistry is
undermanned and woefully deficient in equipment. History and the social
sciences are even worse off, and no adequate work in government is
offered, in spite of the fact that the will of the founder specifies the
preparing of useful citizens as the first task of the university.
Instead of that—we have geography! There is an independent “Graduate
School of Geography,” free from faculty control and headed by President
Atwood himself, with a professor of meteorology and climatology, and a
lecturer in anthropogeography—delicious mouthful for schoolmarms to take
home to Main Street!—also four other professors and lecturers, and four
more listed as “offering closely related work.” There are twenty-one
courses in this Graduate School, and a “special series” of six lectures,
besides a program of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, described as a
“Conference on Russian Affairs,” with five lecturers, including Mr. A.
J. Sack, ex-chief of Ambassador Bakmetieff’s lie-factory! In addition to
this, there is the Summer School, with only one course in psychology,
and only two in education, and only two in social science—but with
twelve in geography! And worse yet, there is to be a “Correspondence
School,” with endless courses in the Frye-Atwood geographies, for rural
school and grade teachers, with the horrified and agonized faculty of
the university compelled to give university credits for this commercial
work!

Men who can thus turn culture into cash are seldom permitted to hide
their light under a bushel in capitalist society. President Atwood has
also become editor of a magazine; or rather director of the “Institute
of International Information,” a contrivance for getting subscriptions
to a magazine called “Our World.” In its pages you may find a picture of
our worthy physiographer in full academic regalia, holding one of his
geography books, decorated with ribbons, clasped in his hands. For four
dollars you may join this “Institution,” and get the magazine for a
year, and “have the privilege of asking any question of international
significance, etc.” The funniest thing about the proposition is that our
pious and super-respectable president of a reformed atheist university
is here working hand in hand with and advertised alongside of Mr. Arthur
Bullard. Surely President Atwood does not know who this terrible
creature Bullard is—an international revolutionary conspirator who,
concealing himself under the alias of “Albert Edwards,” endeavored to
undermine American institutions by a Socialist novel called “Comrade
Yetta,” and a most shocking “free love” novel, “A Man’s World!”




                              CHAPTER LXI
                       A LEAP INTO THE LIMELIGHT


The program of converting Clark University into an advertising
department of Ginn & Company proceeded merrily so far as concerned Ginn
& Company; but it caused great distress to the faculty of the
university, which held a series of meetings and prepared a memorandum to
the board of trustees, in which they bitterly denounced the new policy.
Also there were signs of revolt among the students; even the Rotary
clubs and other business organizations of Worcester began to tire of a
diet of geography, fried, boiled and hashed for three meals a day. I
have not been admitted to the inside of President Atwood’s psychology,
but some of his professors suspect that he began to realize that
something desperate must be done, and resorted to the favorite device of
George M. Cohan, who, whenever one of his plays began to lag, would come
dancing out on the stage with an American flag.

The students at Clark maintain a Liberal Club, and invite speakers of
all points of view to discuss public questions before them. They are
accustomed to question these men and tear their arguments to pieces, and
if the men cannot thoroughly document their statements, they have an
unhappy time. That the students really conduct an open forum is proven
by the fact that they brought not merely Harry Laidler to defend
Socialism, but the Reverend Murlin, president of Boston University, to
speak against it. They invited Frank Tannenbaum to defend the radical
movement, and they invited the Reverend Dr. Wyland of Worcester to
denounce it. Dr. Wyland’s point of view on social questions is
sufficiently revealed by the fact that in the Worcester “Telegram” he
referred to Scott Nearing’s “licentious and seditious utterances”—and
this without having attended Nearing’s lecture!

It was early in 1922 that the Liberal Club announced a coming lecture by
Scott Nearing, and obtained President Atwood’s consent for it. A few
days before the lecture President Atwood summoned the president of the
club, and told him that there was to be a geography lecture that evening
and asked that the Nearing address be shifted to a different and smaller
hall. President Atwood himself, of course, went to the geography
lecture; when it was over he came to the hall where Nearing had been
speaking for an hour and a half to some three hundred people. I am told
that on the steps of the building he met a high-up society lady of
Worcester, wife of one of the interlocking directors. This lady was
trembling with indignation, and told President Atwood about the horrible
thing that was going on in the hall—a Bolshevist speaker was shamelessly
defaming the American people.

President Atwood went in, and listened to the address for about three
minutes. Scott Nearing was discussing the control of American
intellectual life by the plutocracy, and, as it happened, he had just
got to the subject of educational institutions, and was describing the
contents of “The Higher Learning in America,” by Thorstein Veblen—who
happens to be Atwood’s brother-in-law. Atwood listened, and his bosom
swelled. Some poet has described Opportunity as a beautiful caparisoned
white horse, which gallops by and stops for a moment in front of a man,
and then gallops on. At this moment Atwood perceived that the steed had
halted before him; here was the way to make the Frye-Atwood geographies
known, not merely to all the schoolmarms of the United States, but to
all leaders of patriotic thought all over the world! President Atwood
leaped upon the horse—and rode into the limelight!

What he did was to rise up in the audience, and tell the president of
the Liberal Club to stop the lecture. He had to repeat this several
times before the bewildered student got his meaning; then the student
went upon the platform and told Nearing to stop, and Nearing politely
did so. In talking about the matter with Nearing, I told him that I
thought he had made a mistake; he should have insisted upon his right to
finish his lecture—and I was assured by students at Clark that if he had
done this, the audience would have politely put the president of the
university out of the hall. But it didn’t happen that way; Nearing
stopped, and President Atwood went to the front of the platform and
informed the audience that the meeting was dismissed. He said this three
times, while the amazed people stared at him. He turned and instructed
the janitor to “blink” the lights, so as to compel the audience to
leave.

There were half a dozen of the faculty present, also the venerable
scholar, ex-President G. Stanley Hall. One of the professors came
forward and remarked that it seemed rather late to dismiss the meeting.
President Atwood answered: “We can’t have these things going on here.”

“Why not?” asked the professor.

“This is no proper audience to hear such remarks.”

“But the audience consists of at least fifty percent college men.”

“Yes,” said President Atwood, “that’s the worst of it.” And he pounded
on the wall in his excitement. “This kind of thing must be stopped! I am
going to crush it with every means in my power!”

The author of the Frye-Atwood geographies was new to Clark University,
and does not possess the mentality to understand the place; he was
genuinely bewildered by the uproar which followed. The students called
mass meetings of protest; they organized and appointed committees, and
proceeded in vigorous and determined fashion to make good their right of
free speech. The incident, of course, was telegraphed all over the
country, and brought back upon the head of the unhappy physiographer a
storm of ridicule and denunciation. He fled from it, and shut himself up
in his house. The student committee could not get access to him; but
finally they dug him out, and put him on the griddle.

I talked with a member of this committee, and he told me how the
president had called to see him at a fraternity house, almost weeping,
and saying that his life had been threatened. Next day he received a
delegation from the student-body, and made them a prepared speech, in
which he said: “I deeply and sincerely regret the dramatic manner in
which I interrupted Dr. Nearing.” But a day or two later he appeared
before a mass meeting of the whole student-body, and read them an
address entitled “Extra-Curricula Activities and Academic Freedom,” in
the course of which he said that Scott Nearing had “maligned the moral
integrity of the American people,” and added: “I know that I should have
closed that meeting. I do not regret that I have shown in a positive way
that I disapprove of such influences within the halls of the
university.” To a committee of the students he stated that he had
evidence of “a world-wide plot to bring Bolshevism from the street
corner into the colleges,” and this evidence he intended to lay before
the board of trustees. He intimated that the liberal professors at Clark
were privy to this conspiracy; but when the time came for him to produce
the “goods,” all he had was the absurd magazine articles of Cal
Coolidge!

You see, the poor fellow is utterly ignorant of the problems with which
he is trying to deal; a child in his mentality, he was talking to
students who had been trained in the social sciences, and were
accustomed to do their own thinking, and to produce evidence for their
statements. These students persisted in pinning him down as to what he
meant by freedom of speech and of teaching, and they succeeded in
extracting from him one extraordinary piece of obscurantist dogma. He
said to them: “If, in teaching geology I had in my class Lutherans who
believed in an actual six day creation of the earth, I could only state
that scientists were aware that the earth is very old and it is our
theory, nothing but theory, that it evolved through countless eons; but
as to its actual creation, whether or not it took six days we do not
know. I could say nothing which seemed to contradict the beliefs which
they had gained in the home.”

Another student who had a session with him made very careful notes, and
has placed these at my disposal. Said President Atwood: “When I came to
this college and found that you had no chapel, I was shocked to the
depths of my soul. My father was a minister, and I regard religion as
the fundamental basis of all education.” The student replied by
informing his president that the study of religion formed an essential
part of all the sociology courses at Clark. Said the student: “Do you
suppose that many members of the student-body agreed with what Nearing
said?” “No,” replied President Atwood, “maybe not, but they would have
if they had a chance to hear him.” The student laughed at this, and told
him that if he had let the meeting alone and sat quietly, he would have
heard Scott Nearing questioned and made to back his assertions, if he
could. The president was told about the misadventure of the Reverend
Wyland, who had come to talk against Bolshevism, without knowing a
single thing about the subject; he had been questioned and backed into a
corner, and when he got off the platform he was “as limp as a rag.” But
somehow that did not satisfy President Atwood!

How simple-minded he is you may perceive from the fact that he allowed a
professor of his geography department, coming forward in his defense, to
point out that Harvard, by holding on to Laski, had lost more than a
million dollars! He went before the Rotary Club at Worcester, which
received him with tumultuous cheering; he was their kind of man! Also
the Reverend Wyland defended him—with the result that the student
glee-club canceled a concert at Wyland’s church. The clergyman gave out
to the press a statement that the reason for the canceling was that not
enough tickets had been sold! President Atwood called off the weekly
assembly, because he dared not face the students; they might refuse to
sing, he said. They used to cheer him on the campus, but now they passed
him in silence; when he addressed them at the mass meeting, there were
present not merely the state police, but a number of private detectives.
The newspapers had scare headlines: “POLICE PROTECT COLLEGE PRESIDENT
FROM STUDENTS.”

An interesting aspect of this affair is the behavior of the kept press
of Worcester. One of the students said to me: “I read ‘The Brass Check,’
and I couldn’t believe it, but now I know it is true, because I saw the
Worcester newspapers do practically everything that you told about.”
Throughout the whole affair the students were orderly and dignified; yet
their local newspapers sent over the country wild tales about riots and
threats. The Worcester “Telegram,” in its first account of the incident,
ran the headline: “SPEAKER FLAYS SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, GOVERNMENT”—whereas
Scott Nearing had not once mentioned the government. Next day the
“Telegram” quoted the president of the Liberal Club as saying: “If we
could raise enough money we would engage Upton Sinclair.” This anecdote
is told in the “Clark College Monthly,” a student paper, which declares:
“This statement is without the slightest foundation in fact. Asked by a
reporter if the Liberal Club planned to have any more radical speakers,
as for example, Upton Sinclair, Fraser had replied: ‘Why, he is in
California’; and thus grows the mighty oak!”

One day more, and the “Telegram” buried the students’ official statement
in an obscure page, and ran the headline: “STUDENTS TALK STRIKE, PREXY
SAYS, ‘LET THEM TRY IT’!” The Springfield “Union” declared that the
“notorious Scott Nearing was delivering an anarchistic lecture.”
Throughout the whole affair both these papers referred to the
student-body by such phrases as “irresponsible college boys,”
“make-believe radicals,” “children who should be spanked,” and “sincere
young people of an impressionable age”; entirely concealing the fact
that the average age of Clark students, including the freshman class, is
twenty-one years, while the average of the Liberal Club members at the
time of the Nearing lecture was twenty-five and six-tenths years.

To conclude the story: the protests of the students availed them
nothing. The author of the Frye-Atwood geographies announced his
intention to oversee their activities and their thoughts; and he has
done so. He did not announce his intention to get rid of the professors
who had publicly opposed him, but he proceeded to make it so
uncomfortable for them that they would hasten to remove themselves. The
great tragedy of American academic life is the lack of solidarity of the
faculty. Even the more courageous and public-spirited men among the
Clark faculty did not seem to feel that they owed a duty to the
institution and its traditions; instead of proceeding to organize the
faculty, and to stand as a unit against the degradation of Clark, what
has happened is that six of the best men have resigned in as many
months; they have found congenial places in other institutions, and
their colleagues are left to their fate. As John Jay Chapman puts it:

“The average professor in an American college will look on at an act of
injustice done to a brother professor by their college president with
the same unconcern as the rabbit who is not attacked watches the ferret
pursue his brother up and down through the warren to a predestinate and
horrible death. We know, of course, that it would cost the non-attacked
rabbit his place to express sympathy for the martyr; and the
non-attacked is poor, and has offspring, and hopes of advancement.”

The students, of course, are helpless; no student-body can ever control
an institution, except for a brief period, by some violent outburst. The
best trained and most intelligent men go out every year, and a new crop
of youngsters come in, who know nothing of the traditions of the
institution; nor can they find out what is going on in the outside
world, since the librarian of the university keeps the “Nation” and the
“New Republic” hidden away in the basement, among the obscene literature
which can only be got by special signed request! So all that the
interlocking directorate has to do is to sit tight and hold on to the
purse-strings. In two or three years the last trace of the Clark
tradition will be forgotten, and the university which stood at the head
of America’s scientific life will be one more of the regulation standard
educational department-stores—but distinguished by the fact that every
summer it conducts geographical tea-parties, at which the distinguished
author of the Frye-Atwood geographies tells the assembled fifth-grade
schoolmarms that “the great object of you teachers is to prepare the
minds of youth to stand firm against the great wave of radicalism which
is sweeping American institutions off the face of the earth.”




                              CHAPTER LXII
                       THE PROCESS OF FORDIZATION


While we are contemplating academic tragedies, let us take our familiar
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, with a Johns Hopkins trustee for president
and another Johns Hopkins trustee for director, also a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Teachers’ College trustee, a Lehigh
trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First National Bank
director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors and a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania. We travel to Baltimore, where we shall find
another university fallen upon exactly the same pitiful fate as Clark;
save that the interlocking trustees have handled the matter more deftly,
and have not made themselves a scandal in the newspapers.

Johns Hopkins University was founded by an old Quaker, who left three
and a half millions to endow a university, with a medical school as an
integral part. He had the wisdom to call in a great educator, Daniel
Coit Gilman, who did in Baltimore exactly what Stanley Hall did at
Worcester; the money, instead of being spent on buildings, was spent on
men. I doubt if any institution in America has made as great a
reputation with as miserable a physical equipment as Johns Hopkins
University. Recently a friend of mine was walking down the street with a
stranger to Baltimore, and my friend remarked: “There is Johns Hopkins.”

The other looked, and thought my friend was joking. “Why, that must be a
‘nigger school,’” he said.

“That is Johns Hopkins.” And the other asked: “Where is the rest of it?”
But there was no rest of it; these old buildings were the whole thing.
But to this place came live young men of ability, some of them for
almost nothing, because here the intellectual life was honored, and
scientific investigators could do their own work in their own way.

The business men of Baltimore regarded Johns Hopkins exactly as the
business men of Worcester regarded Clark. It was opened without prayer;
therefore it was an atheist university, a terrible place. Now that the
work is done and the reputation made, of course they are proud of Johns
Hopkins, as well they may be, since it and the “Star-Spangled Banner”
are Baltimore’s only contributions to world culture—unless some day they
count H. L. Mencken and the author of “The Goose-step,” both of whom
were born there!

Some twenty years ago Gilman retired from Johns Hopkins, to start the
Carnegie Institution at the age of seventy. For ten years the university
was administered by one of its professors; then the interlocking
trustees cast about for some one of their own type of mentality, and
pitched upon Professor Goodnow, formerly of the Columbia Law School. As
we have seen, Goodnow did not get along with Nicholas Miraculous, but
that was a long time ago, and the servants of the plutocracy gain in
wisdom and caution as they grow older. Professor Goodnow had been legal
adviser to the Chinese government, and had recommended that they should
not attempt to found a republic—the last word of an American scholar to
a people struggling for freedom! President Goodnow possesses a rather
uncouth and forbidding personality, and I am told that he is a poor
speaker, but he is a favorite orator at Merchants’ and Manufacturers’
Association banquets, because he tells them what they like to hear; also
because he has set out to make Johns Hopkins what they like a university
to be—an elegant country-club with athletics and “college spirit” and
“rah-rah-stuff.”

They have moved out to a magnificent new site at Homewood, and have
fifteen million dollars, and all the beautiful buildings which are the
price of a university’s soul. The board of trustees has as its chief
grand duke Mr. Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad. As president the board has Mr. R. Brent Keyser, copper
magnate, and director of Mr. Willard’s railroad, also of a bank. There
is Mr. Levering, coffee merchant, and president of a national bank; also
Mr. Blanchard Randall, a merchant, director of a national bank, a trust
company, an insurance company, and a railroad, and reported to have made
a million dollars out of one speculation during the war; also Judge
Harlan, reactionary politician, counsel for a trust company; Mr. Woods,
a steel magnate; Mr. Griswold, a prominent financier; Mr. White,
another; Mr. Theodore Marburg, ex-minister to Belgium; and Newton D.
Baker, who called himself a radical, but forgot it when he became a
cabinet member.

Also I ought to mention one of the hidden influences in the university,
Bishop Murray of the Episcopal church, a sort of pope of reaction in
Baltimore, a bigoted mediaevalist who drove the Reverend Richard Hogue,
secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, from his pulpit
in Baltimore, and broke up the church open forum by publishing in the
Baltimore newspapers advertisements carefully veiled so as not quite to
be libelous. Now the bishop is busy immortalizing himself by building a
twelve million dollar cathedral; giving lawn parties to the rich, and
making speeches explaining how the great structure is to be four hundred
feet long and to have the highest tower east of the Mississippi. As a
Johns Hopkins professor phrased it to me: “The church is running to
plant; and so is the university.”

Mr. H. L. Mencken, who lives in Baltimore and watches from a high tower,
told me what has happened under the new regime. “It is a process of
Fordization. The university has a campus, and the usual outfit of
uplifters; it has a summer school, with advertising and journalism and
gas engineering and folk-singing and pedagogy and counter-point taught
in six weeks, and every known kind of Main Street stuff. It has gone
flop at one crack to the level of Ohio Wesleyan; it is a technical high
school for the manufacturing of ten-thousand-dollar-a-year Chautauqua
fakers.” Mr. Mencken insists that a student got his doctorate degree for
marking on a curve the vocabulary of Latin students after six months’
training. Also he told me the tragic tale of a professor of psychology,
who “had a hyena of a wife,” and some other woman made love to him, and
his wife started a divorce suit, and he had to leave the new Baltimore
Chautauqua. On the other hand, a gentleman who was for many years one of
the most prominent members of the board of trustees held that position
in spite of the fact that everybody in Baltimore society knew that he
was living with another woman while he had a wife. He still holds a
position on the bishop’s committee to raise funds for the cathedral!

On the outskirts of Johns Hopkins hovers Miss Elizabeth Gilman, daughter
of the former president, a gentle but indefatigable ghost, troubling the
uneasy souls of the new Chautauqua-masters. Miss Gilman is a Socialist,
and an ardent champion of starving wives and children of strikers. She
sees her father’s great university in process of being kidnapped, and
now and then her distress breaks out into pamphlet or leaflet form.
During a strike of the typographical union, Miss Gilman wrote to
President Goodnow, protesting against the university’s having its
printing done in anti-union shops, but he coldly declined to have
anything to do with “questions of that sort.” I went to see Miss Gilman,
to ask her to tell me about her experiences. She could not bring herself
to do it, and, I think, in order to be fair to her, I ought to say that
it is to others I owe what I have written here. I persuaded Miss Gilman
to state over her own signature her opinion of the new Johns Hopkins,
and this she did, as follows:

  The university has been to me more like a sister than an institution.
  I gloried in what she stood for and in what she accomplished. During
  the last few years it seems to me that she has lost much of her
  intellectual leadership in America, at the very time when academic
  freedom and democratic principles need brave champions. The fine new
  buildings and campus have not to my mind compensated for a
  considerable lowering of intellectual ideals and accomplishments.
  Money getting is horribly dangerous to institutions as well as to
  individuals, and the Johns Hopkins University has been out to get
  money. It is true that this money has been given for education and not
  for profit, and yet even so, there may be the insidious temptation of
  adopting purely business standards. We need in Baltimore, as well as
  throughout the country, courageous, untrammelled leadership, as
  expressed in the motto of the Johns Hopkins University, “The truth
  shall make you free.” My hope is that a new cycle may be at hand, and
  that the Johns Hopkins University will again lead in all that is best
  and highest.

I talked with three Johns Hopkins professors, and had a curious
experience with each one in turn. Each told me of some feeble little
effort he had made at liberalism, and how deftly and subtly he had been
sat down upon by the university authorities. I made notes of the little
anecdotes, planning to tell them here, without names, to show you how
the proprieties are maintained by privilege; but to my great grief, each
professor came to me in turn, or wrote to me subsequently, to ask that I
should not use anything of what he had told me—the anecdote would
certainly be recognized, and his career of usefulness might be hampered.
Such pitiful little stories—and such pitiful little fears!

I found only one professor at Johns Hopkins who was willing to be quoted
in my book. This gentleman I met at luncheon in the University Club of
Baltimore, and he indulged himself in bitter sneers at the so-called
“radical” type of professor. I myself could name about twelve really
radical American college professors; but from the talk of this Johns
Hopkins professor you would have thought there were thousands. To be a
“radical” was the way to get promotion, said this Johns Hopkins man; to
attract notoriety to yourself and make yourself somebody. Once you had
got the name for being a radical, then the trustees wouldn’t dare to
fire you, because that would be a violation of academic freedom. I
smiled gently, promising this sarcastic gentleman that I would send him
a copy of my book when it was written, and let him see how his
statements sounded side by side with the facts! How do you think they
sound?




                             CHAPTER LXIII
                          INTELLECTUAL DRY-ROT


There are a few other universities, which in past times have established
reputations in America; for example, Cornell University, located at
Ithaca, New York, on the Lackawanna Railroad, with a Cornell trustee, a
Columbia trustee, and a Princeton trustee; also on the Lehigh Railroad,
with a trustee and recent president of Lehigh College, a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee of Lafayette College for
directors. Cornell today has some six thousand students, and as choice
an outfit of trustees as a plutocratic imagination could invent. The
grand duke is Mr. George F. Baker, reputed to be, next to Rockefeller,
the richest man in America. I might take a page of this book to list all
the various institutions of which Mr. Baker is an interlocking director.
He is president of the First National Bank of New York, one of the three
great institutions of the Money Trust, and also a trustee of the Mutual
Life Insurance Company, a great treasure-chest. He is director in a
dozen railroads, and his son is director in many more.

Next to Mr. Baker stands Mr. Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem
Steel, and H. H. Westinghouse, chairman of the Westinghouse Company. It
will suffice to indicate a few of the others—the head of the biggest
bank in Ithaca; the head of a great machinery company, president of a
national bank; a corporation lawyer and bank director; a metal
manufacturer, director of many railroads; an ex-governor and prominent
Republican politician; the chairman of the Bankers’ Trust Company of
Buffalo, president of a steamship company, a lumber company and a
railroad company; the vice-president and counsel of the New York Central
Railroad; a prominent corporation lawyer; a judge, ex-mayor of Ithaca,
and director of a national bank; the president of a national bank and
director of half a dozen others; the president of the Ithaca Trust
Company, director of many other banks; an official of Mr. Schwab’s
shipbuilding corporation; the chief justice, and another justice, of the
New York Court of Appeals; and, finally, that Major Seaman whose heroic
defense of the Chicago packers you may read about in Chapter IV of “The
Brass Check.”

Not so very long ago Cornell had a famous president, Schurman, who had
studied the Goose-step in three of the Kaiser’s universities. I received
an interesting account of him from Mr. W. E. Zeuch, who was on the
Cornell faculty, when the Bolshevik-hunters got hold of some letters,
written to him by another professor. This other professor was quite a
“red,” and Zeuch was trying to “tame him down”; the letters of Zeuch
were not published, but he was represented as a Bolshevist, and his
scalp was demanded. Cornell at this time was in the midst of a “drive”
for ten millions, and a lumber magnate wrote to President Schurman that
so long as Zeuch remained he would not lead the “drive.” The economics
department of the university appointed a committee, which endorsed Zeuch
and declared that a contract had been made, and that the university
should stand by a competent man. In twenty-five years the university had
never rejected the decision of such a faculty committee; nevertheless,
President Schurman proposed that Zeuch should resign from the faculty,
and accept a position as a “fellow,” to do the same amount of work and
receive the same salary!

Also they had a flurry at Cornell over Thorstein Veblen three or four
years ago. He had been scheduled for appointment; his courses had been
listed, and the members of the economics department had sent out to
various colleges a circular letter calling attention to the fact that
Veblen was to come to Cornell, and that graduate students could get work
with him there. But the interlocking trustees got busy, and the call was
countermanded. Nevertheless, in the interest of discrimination it must
be specified that Cornell is to be numbered among our less illiberal
universities. One professor made so bold during the war as to advocate
the financing of the war by taxation rather than by bonds. This would
have meant that the plutocracy would have to pay at least a part of the
costs instead of collecting it all by installments from you and me. The
trustees of the university heard this professor explain his ideas; they
did not take action to recommend this policy to the country—but they
refrained from firing the professor. Also there is another professor, an
elderly gentleman, who is a great favorite with the students, who take
his liberal ideas with playful good humor. Several of this old
gentleman’s friends assured me that he would tell me the story of his
twenty-five years’ struggle for the right to think for himself; but
apparently the old professor decided that he did not want to have any
more struggles!

Henrik Willem Van Loon, author of “The Story of Mankind,” was also a
member of this Cornell faculty, and gave me an amusing account of the
atmosphere of the place. President Schurman was selling four hundred
thousand dollars worth of education per year, “training boys to become
superintendents of sewage disposal plants and presidents of Rotary
clubs.” Van Loon was gravely rebuked by Schurman, because of a humorous
remark which created a scandal; he had been writing on the blackboard,
when a thunderstorm had come up, and he playfully compared himself to
Moses writing the Ten Commandments amid the thunders of Sinai. Van Loon
swears it is true, and I am compelled to believe him—that when he asked
to see the Dante collection they took him to inspect an electric manure
sprayer!

Or take Brown University, located at Providence, Rhode Island, on the
familiar New Haven Railroad. Here is an extremely wealthy institution,
catering to the sons of the plutocracy, and almost as snobbish as
Princeton. It was built in part out of Rockefeller money, and the man
who has been its president for the last twenty-three years is a Baptist
clergyman, for ten years pastor of Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue church in
New York. For “chancellor” the university has an extremely wealthy
cotton manufacturer, president of a bank; for treasurer it has the
president of the Providence Banking Company, also treasurer of the
United Traction and Electric Company, and of the Rumford Chemical Works.
The three most active grand dukes of the board are Mr. Bedford, chairman
of the Standard Oil Company, who represents the Rockefeller interests;
Mr. Sharpe, head of the Brown & Sharpe Company, the largest
manufacturers of tools in the United States; and Mr. Metcalf, a big
textile manufacturer, president of the Providence “Journal” Company.

Also there is the manager of the Brown & Sharpe Company; the president
of the Cadillac Motor Car Company; the head of a big New York banking
company, president of a railroad and a coal company, director of three
railroads, three trust companies, a milk company, a patent medicine
company, and a brick company; a very wealthy manufacturing chemist; an
influential New England textile manufacturer; a steel magnate; a lawyer,
who is president of a land company and secretary of several railroads
and trust companies; the treasurer of the largest textile manufacturing
company in New England, who is director in half a dozen others, and in
half a dozen of the largest financial institutions; another Providence
banker; and, finally, Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes. Mr. Hughes
first came under my observation when I studied the life insurance
scandals in New York City. I noted that he sternly carried these
investigations to the point necessary to put Morgan and his group in
control, and stopped exactly at that point. For this service he was
awarded a national reputation and the governorship of New York State. He
has since occupied the Supreme Court bench, and come within a few votes
of being president, and is now guiding the foreign affairs of our
country, making a desperate and almost a successful effort to exceed the
futility of the Wilson administration.

What happens to a great and wealthy university under such a regime?
Brown has a high tradition, derived from Roger Williams, most famous of
New England’s religious rebels. But in 1899 its president, Andrews, was
ousted, because he had dared to back Bryan in the campaign of 1896.
Quite recently occurred a similar case, when William MacDonald,
professor of history, was forced out, to become one of the editors of
the “Nation.” Brown in its day had such outstanding men as Lester F.
Ward and Meikeljohn, now president of Amherst; but those days have
passed, and there has followed a regime of intellectual dry-rot. It is a
League of the Old Men, maintaining a caste system, based upon seniority;
any young instructor who arises to suggest a new idea is quickly taught
his place. A professor who knows the situation intimately writes:

  In the fields of history, political science, economics and sociology
  the policy under Faunce has been silent and safe decay. These
  departments were once among the most eminent in the country. Now they
  are absolutely dead. Except for some formal texts by Professor Dealey
  no important publication has come from these departments in over a
  decade. The economics department is now being made over into a
  business school to train men to make more money. The general
  educational policy throughout the institution under Faunce has been
  that of comfortable quiescence. With the exception of one man in
  physics and three biologists there has been practically no
  intellectual activity or scholarly productivity at Brown for the last
  fifteen years. This situation cannot be excused on the ground of lack
  of resources. Brown has plenty of money and pays very high salaries.
  It could get some of the best and most productive men in any line of
  research and teaching if it cared to do so. The decline of scholarly
  interests at Brown has been accompanied by a parallel growth of
  interest in and expenditures for the safer field of physical outlet,
  namely, athletics.

Under such a regime what becomes of the students? Exactly the same thing
as we found happening to students at Harvard, Wisconsin, and California;
they get drunk. In “The Book of Life,” Chapter XXX, I discussed the
morals of our young people, as set forth in an editorial in a student
paper of Brown University. Said this student editor:

  The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She
  smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells “dirty” stories.
  All in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking
  little thing.

Let us move on to Wesleyan University, located at Middletown,
Connecticut, also on the New Haven Railroad. Here is an institution with
an old-time Methodist foundation and traditions of liberalism, and the
usual board of interlocking trustees, the grand duke being a
Philadelphia manufacturer of gas meters who is most versatile, being
director in four large gas companies, two street railways, a bank, a
trust company, four insurance companies, a publishing company, a sugar
company, and a transfer company. Nine years ago his university began its
downward course, with an especially notorious case of invasion of
academic freedom. Willard C. Fisher had been a member of the faculty for
twenty years, and professor of social economics for fifteen. He was one
of those college professors who insist upon being a citizen; he served
two years as councilman in the Middletown city government, and four
years as mayor. He was not a Socialist, on the contrary, an active
opponent of Socialism; but he considered himself a servant of the
people, and did not hesitate to warn them of the economic waste and
social peril of extreme inequality of wealth and the oppression of
labor.

As a teacher in a Christian community, he considered it his duty to
assert that industrial relations should be moralized. He organized the
Consumers’ League of Connecticut, and served it for many years as
president. He developed the habit of attending legislative hearings at
the capital, and speaking in support of progressive measures, such as
workmen’s compensation, income tax, industrial sanitation, factory
inspection, and prison reform. And there, of course, he came into
conflict with the interlocking trustees and the interlocking alumni. One
influential alumnus, a wealthy manufacturer, was always a member of one
House or the other, in order to watch out for the interests of
industrial employers; and naturally it vexed him to be opposed by a
professor of his own college. He declared this vexation openly; and also
a group of Wesleyan lawyers declared their vexation, when the
legislature employed Professor Fisher to write a workmen’s compensation
measure!

Also there arose an embarrassing situation, when Professor Fisher, as
mayor of Middletown, discovered a trustee of the college to be
delinquent with public school funds of which he was the custodian.
(Memo. for Brander Matthews!) Mayor Fisher exposed this situation; nor
did he consider it necessary to suppress his disapproval of President
Shanklin’s well-known habit of taking the thoughts and utterances of
other writers and giving them to the world as his own. This president,
who has been at Wesleyan for thirteen years, got his degree from the
Garrett Bible Institute at Evanston, Illinois; but apparently a number
of other college presidents have sympathized with his lack of
distinction, because no less than ten of them have showered honorary
degrees upon him!

Matters came to a head when President Shanklin started a drive for a
million dollars. In a public discussion the president of a Hartford
trust company asked Professor Fisher if he expected to go about the
state speaking as he did, and have trust company presidents contribute
to the support of the college in which he taught. It was widely rumored
at Wesleyan that President Shanklin got contributions upon the condition
that Fisher should be kicked off the faculty. A number of men of wealth
refused to contribute on other terms; and so the president cast about
for a handy pretext.

He found one. In the course of a public address, widely reported in
Connecticut newspapers, Professor Fisher made the playful suggestion
that it might be a good idea to close all the churches for a while, to
give the people a chance to find out the difference between true
religion and church formalities. Very soon thereafter Professor Fisher
was asked to resign, and the president gave the reason—not the
suggestion of the closing of the churches, but the broad publicity given
to this suggestion by the newspapers! Professor Fisher might have stayed
and made a fight, but he had been so humiliated by the changed spirit
and atmosphere of Wesleyan, that he quit; and now the university is on
the intellectual level of the Garrett Bible Institute of Evanston,
Illinois!




                              CHAPTER LXIV
                      THE UNIVERSITY OF JABBERGRAB


Some fifteen years ago my postman brought me a puzzling communication
from Sweden; a large and expensive linen envelope, carefully sealed with
a great deal of red wax, registered, and addressed:

“Editor, Jabbergrab, Finanz-Lexikon, New York City.” At first I could
not make out why the missive was delivered to me, but then in one corner
I noted “Jabbergrab is mentioned in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Industrie-baron’'”
I recognized “Der Industriebaron” as the German title of my story, “A
Captain of Industry,” written when I was twenty-two years old; it is a
satirical biography of a great financier, and after his ignominious
death the story quotes some eulogies of his career from an imaginary
publication, “Jabbergrab: Heroes of Finance.”

I made so bold as to open the envelope, and found several sheets of
heavy foolscap paper, written in German in an exceedingly fine hand, and
giving the data for a biographical sketch of a wealthy Swedish lumber
magnate and financier. Here, in carefully tabulated and precisely
ordered form, were the minute details of his life—the enterprises with
which he had been connected, the offices he held, the properties he
owned, the names of his children, the college degrees they had earned,
the names of his race-horses and the prizes they had won, the names of
his yachts and the cups they had won—all these items duly attested and
signed by the great man himself.

Gradually it dawned over me what had happened. The man had read my
satirical story, missing the point of the satire. He thought that I
really felt all that admiration for a man of wealth and social eminence;
and reading about Jabbergrab’s “Heroes of Finance,” the desire possessed
him to have his own career immortalized in this biographical directory.
So he had sat himself down, and painfully written out the data for the
proposed sketch, and had sent it by registered mail to “Jabbergrab.”

It is the Jabbergrabs of America who have created a good part of our
“higher” education, and placed upon it the stamp of their crude and
simple faith in material success. I have shown how the spirit of
Jabbergrab has destroyed two shrines of American scientific life, Clark
University and Johns Hopkins; I purpose next to show what that spirit
does, when it has its way from the beginning, unhampered by any
intellectual traditions. I invite you to visit New York University, an
institution whose buildings are scattered about in various parts of the
city, including an office building on Washington Square, in the heart of
the clothing district, and another in Wall Street.

New York University has enrolled no less than thirteen thousand
students, and is described to me by one who works in it as “an
intellectual sweat-shop.” As chancellor it has one Brown, who learned
the Goose-step from the Kaiser, and as treasurer one Kingsley, a Wall
Street banker, interlocked with the United States Trust Company, the
Sixth Avenue Elevated Railroad, and the Union Theological Seminary. Last
year Chancellor Brown published in the New York newspapers a series of
thirty “advertising talks” on education, in the very latest “follow-up”
style. These talks came to me in a little pamphlet, with a cover all
printed over with photographs of newspaper clippings, and accompanied by
a circular, carefully disguised to look like a personal letter, and
beginning: “Dear Mr. Sinclair: You are one of the prominent citizens we
had in mind when we prepared the enclosed advertisement. What we have
learned of you encourages us to believe that this appeal of New York
University must strike a responsive chord in you.”

I may be over-suspicious, but I believe that these statements are not
entirely in accordance with the truth; I believe that if they were made
in accordance with the truth they would read this way: “You are one of
the twenty-two thousand persons whose names we have got from ‘Who’s Who
in America,’ and we are taking a chance on being able to interest you in
our university.” These necessary differences between advertising and
fact are understood and taught to the students in all university schools
of advertising.

Chancellor Brown sets forth the fact that out of his thirteen thousand
students, ten thousand are earning the money to pay for their education.
I believe that every college student in the country should do this—my
own son is doing it—so I should be the last man to sneer at New York
University’s lack of academic and social prestige. But here is the
point: self-supporting students who go to night-school in New York go in
order to increase their money-making capacity, and they judge the
education they get by that criterion, and they irresistibly mold the
educational standards of the institution they attend. So the spirit of
education becomes that of Jabbergrab—ravenous greed, veiled by buncombe
and hypocritical pretenses. That is what you have at New York
University, and the fact is made clear in Chancellor Brown’s own
pamphlet. Talk Number Sixteen is headed: “Welcome to the Advertising
Men.” Says our Chancellor of Jabbergrab:

  New York University is host today to members of the National
  Association of Teachers of Advertising, who are holding a sectional
  conference in this city while a similar conference for Western members
  is held at the University of Wisconsin. I am glad to welcome the
  members of this Association. Since I have been writing these little
  talks I have gained a feeling of warmer sympathy with all advertising
  men and their work. I have learned something of the fascinations—as
  well as the difficulties—of the profession.

So you see, our University of Jabbergrab has discovered advertising to
be a “profession”; it takes its place alongside chiropody, palmistry and
fox-trotting. If you want to know what these new “professors” are doing
to American journalism, I invite you to read Chapters XLIII-XLVII of
“The Brass Check”; I invite you to study the samples of advertising
there quoted—one of which occupied a full page in all the most popular
and respectable American magazines—and then come back to Chancellor
Brown’s pamphlet and read his statement: “Many advertising men, I am
told, were formerly teachers. The two professions seem to me to have a
great deal in common.”

I should be sorry indeed to believe that about all American teachers,
but I know it is true of some of the teachers who have been selected by
the University of Jabbergrab. For example, consider Professor William E.
Aughinbaugh, an editor of the New York “Commercial,” a director in
sixteen corporations, and for seven years “Professor of Foreign Trade”
in New York University. He boasts of having crossed the equator
thirty-six times on commercial missions, and he publishes through one of
our most esteemed publishing houses, the Century Company, an elaborately
got up book, entitled, “Advertising for Trade in Latin America.” The
price of this book is three dollars, and if you will study its maxims
and apply them, you will find it worth all that. For example:

  Latin-American advertisements are replete with the nude female form,
  which appeals strongly to all classes of readers. Due to the fact that
  a majority of the inhabitants are brunettes, or have Negro or Indian
  blood in their veins, the blonde exerts a stronger appeal to their
  imagination and for that reason should be employed when necessary or
  advisable to use such an illustration.

And so we know what the Chancellor of Jabbergrab means when he writes:

  Advertising men have it in their power to educate millions of people
  not only in an intelligent use of commodities but in well-considered
  habits of thought and action.

Let us hear Professor Aughinbaugh again:

  Reproductions of famous holy or religious paintings or scenes from the
  Bible may also be profitably used.... It occurred to me that if a
  saint could be found whose special duty was to prevent loss of life
  during seismic disturbances, much might be done through his aid to
  bring calm into these regions of terror. I selected my second name,
  “Edmund,” as the cognomen for the new assistant deity, added the
  prefix “Saint” to it, and wrote an appropriate earthquake prayer which
  was printed beneath the picture of the home-made saint. Of course each
  card contained our advertisement (of a patent medicine) which the
  supplicant for protection must have seen as he prayed.

And so we learned what the Chancellor of Jabbergrab means when he
writes:

  I can appreciate the reasons that impel any manufacturer to spread
  abroad through the columns of our newspapers and magazines the
  information about his worthy products. I can believe, too, that this
  information is often of real service to the public in guiding them to
  wise decisions regarding their expenditures and investments.

And again let us hear Professor Aughinbaugh on the subject of how to
deal with the custom-laws of the countries with which you trade:

  When I have decided upon an advertising campaign in any given
  Latin-American country, the requisite amount of cards, hangers,
  booklets, posters, banners, and other materials are boxed and shipped
  to the various ports, consigned to some man of straw. Upon their
  arrival at the local port they will be stored in the customs warehouse
  to await claim by the alleged consignee. At the expiration of sixty or
  ninety, or one hundred and twenty days, in accordance with the local
  laws, these goods will be advertised for sale to the highest bidder.
  By previous arrangement with your agent, or some merchant, who has
  been advised of the dispatch of these goods to his port, they can be
  bid in very cheaply and delivered to the person most concerned with
  their use. In Venezuela, for instance, on one shipment alone the
  duties would have amounted to much more than one thousand dollars, yet
  the local wholesale druggist bought the entire consignment at auction
  for eighty-five dollars.

And so we know exactly what the Chancellor of the University of
Jabbergrab means when he says to the “Sectional Conference of Teachers
of Advertising”:

  I believe, also, that the teachers of advertising can make a valuable
  contribution to the education of our future business men by teaching
  them how to use the force of advertising intelligently, effectively,
  and for the human benefit.

It happened that I saw Professor Aughinbaugh mentioned also as
“Professor of Foreign Trade at Columbia University.” Wishing to get the
record straight, I asked my brother-in-law, who has been helping me get
material for this book, to write Professor Aughinbaugh a note asking him
where he was a professor. Thinking that possibly he might be away, or
ill, or for some other reason might fail to reply, I asked my
brother-in-law to write also to New York University for the information.
The result was two letters: one from Professor Aughinbaugh stating that
“for two years past I have held the same position in New York University
and Columbia University. The work became too hard for me and I was
obliged to resign my professorship at New York University, now devoting
my time to Columbia University.” The second letter was from the
registrar of New York University, and stated: “Dr. William E.
Aughinbaugh was, from October 11, 1915, to June 13, 1922, Lecturer on
Foreign Trade at New York University. He did not, at any time, have
professorial status.”

Here was, obviously, a contradiction. Professor Aughinbaugh is listed in
“Who’s Who” as Professor of Foreign Trade; and “Who’s Who” states that
it publishes no information except that furnished by the person
concerned. Also, in a circular of his book, Professor Aughinbaugh is
shown as “Chairman of Foreign Trade.” Wishing to make certain about this
matter, I dictated to my secretary a formal note, calling Professor
Aughinbaugh’s attention to the discrepancies, and asking him to state
which title was correct. This note was signed by my brother-in-law and
mailed, and no reply to it has ever been received.

But some three weeks after it was mailed, there called at my office in
Pasadena a man who announced himself as an agent of the Department of
Justice, and gave the name of “A. J. Taylor.” He interviewed my
brother-in-law, a young man of twenty-one, and stated that my
brother-in-law had been writing letters of a “scurrilous and defamatory
nature” to Professor Aughinbaugh; that he had asked questions such as he
had no business to ask, that he had made “improper statements” about the
wife of Professor Aughinbaugh, and that he was to “stop writing
letters,” or he would get into serious trouble. Subsequent inquiry of
the Department of Justice in Los Angeles, of the United States Attorney
for this district, Attorney-General Daugherty in Washington, and Post
Office Inspectors of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, brought the
positive statements that no such person as “A. J. Taylor” was known, and
no investigation of any such matter had been undertaken. The Postmaster
at Pasadena stated that he had received letters from private parties in
New York, complaining of “blackmailing” letters written by my
brother-in-law; and some ten days later there came a letter from
Professor Aughinbaugh to me stating that he had learned from the postal
authorities in California that I had written to him, under my
brother-in-law’s name, and asking what was the purpose of my inquiry. I
replied, stating to Professor Aughinbaugh exactly what was my purpose,
and asking him if he would in return answer some questions of mine, as
follows:

  1. Did you send this A. J. Taylor to see my brother-in-law?

  2. Did you tell him to represent himself as an agent of the Department
  of Justice?

  3. Did you make to him any statement which would have justified him in
  the wholly false and absurd assertion that my brother-in-law had ever
  mentioned your wife?

  4. If you did send this “A. J. Taylor,” who is he, and where can he be
  located?

  5. If you did not send him, can you offer any suggestion as to how he
  learned about the correspondence between my brother-in-law and
  yourself, and what interest he had in troubling himself about the
  matter?

To these questions Professor Aughinbaugh made no answer, except to send
me in an envelope three circulars of his book, in one of which he is
described as “lecturer,” in another as “instructor,” and in another as
“chairman.” I wrote again, calling his attention to his failure to
answer, but no further response came. From the publishers of “Who’s Who”
I learn that the lecturer-instructor-chairman-professor himself
furnished them with the information concerning his status; also that he
has recently written to them asking to be recorded as no longer
“professor” but as just plain “lecturer!”




                              CHAPTER LXV
                        THE GROWTH OF JABBERGRAB


Modern industry is an enormously complicated thing, and specialized
teaching of industrial processes is just as necessary as any other kind
of education. I would not give anyone the impression that I object to
the teaching of advertising or foreign trade or finance, any more than I
object to the teaching of plumbing or manicuring fingernails. My point
is that all these arts should be taught in trade schools, and they
should be taught _as trades_. For example, the International Harvester
Company maintains an excellent school for training its employes; it does
not pretend that this school is a “university,” it does not call the
turning out of harvester machines a “profession,” and it does not
constitute a high-speed steel worker a “doctor of science.” It is when
these schools of commerce and departments of trade crowd into
universities, and take to themselves academic honors and dignities, and
exploit themselves with high-sounding phrases of religion and social
idealism, that I am moved to protest; as when I see some parasitic vine
climbing a beautiful shade-tree, spreading out over the surface of the
tree, blocking its light and air and choking it to death.

That is what is happening in the field of American higher education; it
is happening not merely at New York University and other great
“intellectual sweat-shops,” it is happening at practically every one of
our state universities and at most of our great endowed institutions. It
was Harvard which started this vile business, with a College of Commerce
and Administration; Columbia followed suit, and the plague has spread
from Maine to California. I consult a few college catalogues at random,
and I find that at the University of Illinois they are teaching
millinery, also at the University of Nebraska and the University of
Southern California. At the University of California they have a
“costume laboratory,” also a course in “jewelry.” At Boston University,
made out of the millions of Isaac Rich, the merchant, and Lee Chaflin,
the shoe manufacturer, they will teach you how to collect tips at summer
hotels. The commercial men and women who specialize in such subjects
come into the universities, and they bid against the professors of
liberal arts for power and prestige and pay—and how much chance do you
think a scholar or lover of belles-lettres stands against such people?

You understand that the president of a university, making up his salary
budget, is like all other business men, he pays what he has to pay. And
here is the Professor of Department-store Advertising pointing out that
at Goldberg & Isaacstein’s, in the shopping district, he can get fifteen
thousand a year, and he has a letter in his pocket to prove it. He will
come to the university for twelve thousand, because of his love of the
higher things of life, but he won’t take a cent less, and the president
tries once or twice and finds out that he is not bluffing. For a year
the president has been trying to get a first-class Professor of
Commercial Correspondence, who understands the three varieties of
“follow-up letters”; and the Director of his School of Business keeps
telling him that any man who really commands that precious knowledge can
get ten thousand a year. But who is there in the outside world that will
pay anything to a professor of archeology, or to a man who can explain
the Einstein theory, or a man who knows more about the life of Dante
than anyone else in America? Such men have to take what they can get,
and their salaries remain stagnant while the value of the dollar is cut
in half.

At the University of Minnesota I was told about a discussion at a
meeting of the regents. The president of the university was very anxious
to get Professor Stuart P. Sherman, well known as a conservative
literary critic. Some one remarked that Sherman would want six thousand
dollars; whereupon the grand duke of the board put down his fist on the
table. “There’s not an English man in America worth six thousand
dollars!” he declared. I am sorry I cannot state exactly what value this
gentleman sets upon the services of a grand duke of the plutocracy, but
it is at least a score of times the sum of six thousand a year. But you
see, this gentleman has all his life been buying men at their market
price, and he knows that market price, and has no idea that they have
any other value.

At the University of Chicago they have a School of Commerce, which is
growing like the weed that it is, and in their advertising literature,
with its variety of “follow-up letters,” they tell you that after two
years’ training you can command a salary of twelve thousand dollars.
This, of course, is the kind of talk that brings the business; these are
the courses which the “he-men” take. And after they have got a degree,
they become professors, and perhaps deans, and they run the university.
If it is a question of starting a drive for funds, they are the ones who
know how to get out the “literature,” they are experts in the psychology
of mendication. They understand the newspapers, and how to get favors
from them; they understand the politicians and the big business men who
run the politicians; they are the fellows after the trustees’ own
hearts, and when the time comes for the old president to be shelved, it
is one of these “go-getters” who is in line for the place. We have seen
that happen at one university after another; at the University of
Illinois President Kinley was Director of the School of Commerce, and at
Northwestern University President Scott was Director of the Bureau of
Salesmanship Research.

Let us return to our University of Jabbergrab, where these new
educational tendencies “rule the roost.” Chancellor Brown sets forth
that the “School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance” of his university
contains six thousand students, and that from it has sprung a “Graduate
School of Business Administration,” also in the last three years a
“School of Retailing.” Twenty-two department-stores and other retail
establishments in New York “have made direct connection with the
university, and thirty-seven college graduates are each morning pursuing
their studies in retailing in our class-rooms, and in the afternoon of
the same day are receiving practical experience in the various
operations of the stores themselves.” I have not attended these classes,
but I do not need to inquire what these students are learning; I can go
to the New York department-stores, and see them displaying “marked-down”
goods, which were marked up before they were marked down. I have only to
read their imbecile advertisements in the New York newspapers, setting
forth the latest fads and foibles of “Milady,” and the latest
“importations” of the latest “creations” of the keepers of French
mistresses.

New York University’s catalogue lists three professors of marketing,
five professors of finance, four professors of accounting, four of
business English, three of management, one of salesmanship, one of
merchandising, one of foreign trade, one of life insurance—and a
Director of the Wall Street Division!

Of course, this new kind of education is yet in its infancy, and we must
not expect perfection. Pick up this university catalogue ten years from
now, and you will find its deficiencies made up; you will find a
Professor of Stock-watering and an Instructor in Political Manipulation.
You will find an eloquent statement setting forth the fact that the
handling of labor has now become an enormous American industry; that
there are hundreds of large agencies for the putting down of strikes,
and salaries as high as twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year are
paid to competent masters of such work; therefore the university is
establishing a Department of Strike-Breaking, with a Professor of
Gunmanship and a Demonstrator of the Third Degree. Also there will be
eloquent “advertising talks,” explaining that business men now spend
most of their time keeping agitators out of their factories, and that
the secret service departments of great corporations have come to be the
most important part thereof; so the university is now establishing a
Department of Espionage, with a Professor of Varieties of Bolshevism,
and a Dean of Deportation Proceedings, and a Special Lecturer on
Attorney-Generalship.




                              CHAPTER LXVI
                        JABBERGRAB IN JOURNALISM


In all these new academic department-stores one of the leading
departments is that of journalism. Here they teach you how to write for
and edit newspapers; and needless to say, what the students want is to
be prepared to fill positions on the capitalist press, and their
judgment of a school of journalism is conditioned upon the salaries
secured by its graduates. The first school of this kind was started at
Columbia, with an endowment left by Joseph Pulitzer, the father of
“yellow” journalism. Being curious to know what kind of ethics Mr.
Pulitzer’s school is teaching, I pick up a publication of the Alumni
Association, “Clean Copy.” The title page contains a list of officers,
and I note the chairman’s name, and his address—prepare yourself for a
laugh!—care Ivy Lee, 61 Broadway, New York City! So we learn that the
Columbia School of Journalism is preparing students to work in the
offices of “Poison Ivy!” Its standards are such that it is willing for
an employe of “Poison Ivy” to be chairman of its Alumni, and to
advertise that fact in its paper!

When I first came in touch with Mr. Lee’s lie-factory, he was press
agent for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at a thousand dollars a month; then
he became prize poisoner for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and now he has
in New York and Washington a great publicity bureau, serving all the
railroads of the United States in their war upon the American people.
What “Poison Ivy” gets for this work I have no idea, but it must be a
generous sum; a friend of mine was looking for an apartment in New York,
and entered one of those new palatial houses just off Fifth Avenue, and
was informed by those in charge that the cheapest apartment in the place
rented for twenty-five thousand dollars a year—and one of the tenants is
Ivy L. Lee! It is interesting to note that it took a combination of our
three most aristocratic universities, Princeton, Harvard and Columbia,
to turn out this super-professor of prevarication!

Also the University of Wisconsin got in early on the journalism
business. One of its professors got out a textbook, which was used until
quite recently at Wisconsin, and is still used at many other places;
there are thousands of practicing journalists in America today who got
their ethical ideals from Professor Hyde’s text-book, which advises
students about dramatic criticism: “Very few critics are so fortunate as
to be able to say exactly what they think about a play; they must say
what the editor wants them to say.”... The dramatic critic “must praise
more cleverly, and give his copy the appearance of honest criticism.”

Needless to say, they have a school of journalism at the University of
Jabbergrab. The director of this department is James Melvin Lee, who got
his training for the teaching of journalistic ideals on the staff of
“Leslie’s,” the barber-shop weekly, and later for four years as editor
of “Judge,” the bar-room comic. Concerning Professor Lee’s journalistic
standards I have intimate knowledge, derived from a protracted
controversy over “The Brass Check”; so here I can draw you a complete
picture of Jabbergrab in action.

A controversy with Professor Lee is a good deal like fighting one of
those enchanters you read about in the fairy tales—your sword goes
straight through him, and leaves him the same as he was before. He made
his first attack on “The Brass Check” at the Brownsville Labor Forum,
and his cry was that he wanted definite facts—there were none in my
book! Again and again I supplied him with facts, and discovered the
curious phenomenon—he paid not the slightest attention to any which I
supplied; he would come again, demanding the same ones! The New York
“Globe” saw in our controversy a good journalistic stunt, and they
invited Professor Lee and myself to row it out, and gave each of us a
total of six columns. And here in the “Globe,” Professor Lee repeated
one after another all the various demands and challenges which he had
issued at the Brownsville Labor Forum—overlooking almost all the data I
had furnished him in the meantime!

For my first article in the “Globe,” I took the trouble to go over “The
Brass Check” and count the number of cases which give complete
documentation—names, places, and dates—and these came to a total of two
hundred and thirteen. In addition, there are perhaps a dozen or two
anecdotes which I narrate upon the authority of other people, being in
every case careful to name my authority. Finally, there are half a dozen
trivial incidents—such as the fact that an old college professor of mine
fell down an elevator shaft in a department-store—which I did not
document, for the reason that these incidents occurred to me in the
final revision of the book, and I could not have the files of the New
York newspapers consulted in time. Professor Lee’s method of controversy
was to pick out these few trifling incidents, and recite them to the
Brownsville audience, and to the readers of the New York “Globe,” with
elaborate challenges to me to produce this information. Thus, to a
single anecdote of Gaylord Wilshire being misrepresented by the
Associated Press, Professor Lee devoted three paragraphs in the “Globe,”
demanding at great length the names of the newspapers and the dates; I
supplied him with the names and dates of two newspapers—but to no result
that I could discover.

Both in his Brownsville address and in the “Globe” controversy he took
up my story of the Associated Press crimes in Colorado; but he was
careful to confine himself to one detail, my telegram to President
Wilson—because he was able to argue that this telegram was libelous and
that it was “self-advertising.” He made no mention of any other aspect
of the whole series of suppressions which I proved against the
Associated Press during that Colorado coal strike. Still more
significant is the fact that nowhere in these controversies could I get
him to mention the conduct of the Associated Press in the West Virginia
coal strike. The reason was obvious enough; the Associated Press had
here been so indiscreet as to come into court and submit its own
dispatches in evidence, and its poisoning of the news was proved by its
sworn official admissions. This was not the sort of “facts” that
Professor Lee was looking for, and so he never let anyone hear about
them!

Equally significant was his handling of the false report sent out by the
Associated Press, to the effect that my wife had been arrested during
our demonstration in front of the Standard Oil Building, New York,
during the Colorado coal strike. I stated in “The Brass Check” that my
wife notified the Associated Press of the falsity of this report, and
demanded a retraction. In his first letter to me Professor Lee made the
flat statement: “_The Associated Press does not have proof; it did not
receive it._” In my reply, I pointed out to Professor Lee the naïveté of
his own statement; how without one particle of evidence, he accepted the
word of the Associated Press, and turned it into a flat statement of his
own. My wife filed libel suits against thirty Associated Press
newspapers which had published the false report, and the Associated
Press was liable for every dollar that these newspapers might have to
pay. Was it humanly believable that not one of these newspapers would
notify the Associated Press of the filing of these suits? On the
contrary, was it not certain that every one of these papers, under the
advice of their attorneys, would notify the Associated Press of the
filing of the suit, and of the paper’s expectation that the Associated
Press would defend it? I sent to my New York office a copy of a
newspaper, containing an account of the filing of the suit, and
Professor Lee inspected this evidence in the presence of my New York
manager; but did this make any difference to him? It made not a
particle! When he took up the controversy in the New York “Globe,” he
brought up the same argument again: “The point at issue is whether such
attention was called to the Associated Press!”

Still funnier was what happened in the case of Professor Lee’s demand
that some one should name a newspaper which had suppressed the name of a
department-store in connection with a discreditable news item. Professor
Lee, reading “The Brass Check,” observed that most of my anecdotes of
this kind dealt with newspapers in Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee and
other cities. Therefore, he phrased his challenge at the Brownsville
Labor Forum so that it referred only to _New York_ newspapers; he called
for names, places and dates—and of course nobody at the Brownsville
Labor Forum could supply such data. In the New York “Globe” he repeated
this challenge, very proudly and very confidently. But, alas, right in
the middle of the controversy, his friends on the kept press threw him
down! On June 27 he published in the “Globe” his article headed, “Lee
Calls on Sinclair for Names, Dates, Places”; and nine days later the New
York “Evening Sun,” in its baseball edition, Wednesday, July 6, 1920,
page two, column eight, published a story about a man who had sued a
department-store and collected money from it—and nowhere in the article
was the department-store named!

Also I ought to mention the behavior of this professor of Jabbergrab in
connection with the New York “Times.” This controversy, with all the
documents, is given in a pamphlet, “The Crimes of the ‘Times,’” which
you may have for the asking. I will here mention only one or two
details. The “Times” reported Professor Lee’s Brownsville address to the
extent of two columns, quoting mainly his defense of the “Times.” I
replied in a letter, and the “Times” did to this the most dishonest
thing a newspaper can do—it refused to publish the letter, but discussed
it in an editorial, and falsified its contents! I sent the “Times” a
telegram, calling attention to the falsifications, but they refused any
sort of redress. These falsifications stand in the files of the paper;
they are listed in its index, found in every large library in the
country. Students of “The Brass Check” will come upon those falsehoods;
but they will know nothing about my answer, for my humble little
pamphlet is not catalogued in libraries. I trust therefore that the
reader will pardon me if I take two paragraphs of this book to state the
facts; especially since every step of the controversy was a test, not
merely of the “Times,” but of the Director of Journalism of New York
University.

The incident in dispute is told on page 77 of “The Brass Check,” dealing
with the publication of my novel, “The Metropolis.” The New York “Times”
had prepared a front-page news story about this novel, and the story was
killed at the last minute by Mr. Ochs, publisher of the “Times.”
Professor Lee, in his Brownsville speech, declared that this narrative
of mine was absurd upon its face. In my letter to the “Times,” I put it
up to the “Times” to say whether my narrative was true or false. The
“Times,” refusing to publish the letter, declared editorially that no
such incident had occurred. Said the “Times”: “Mr. Sinclair refers to
this tale in his letter to the ‘Times,’ but with a shifting of ground.
For his own positive statement in ‘The Brass Check’ he now substitutes
the alleged statement of a ‘publicity agent’ of a publishing house,”
etc.

Now the facts were as follows: “The Metropolis” had been published in
serial form in the “American Magazine”; and in “The Brass Check” I had
stated that it was this magazine which had arranged for the story in the
“Times.” Subsequently I recalled that it was Moffat, Yard & Company, the
publishers of the _book_, who had made the arrangements, and this
correction I noted in my letter to the “Times.” Manifestly, this made no
difference, so far as concerned the “Times”; but you see what use they
made of this “shifting of ground”! Their assertion, that I “relied upon
the alleged statement of a publicity agent of a publishing house” was a
flat falsehood; for in my letter to the “Times” I told them that “I saw
the proofs of the proposed story with my own eyes.” A day or two later I
was able to telegraph them statements from the two gentlemen who had
composed the firm of Moffat, Yard & Company, Mr. W. D. Moffat and Mr.
Robert Sterling Yard, both declaring that they plainly remembered the
preparing of the story by the “Times,” and their disappointment when
they found it did not appear as promised. The “Times” received this
testimony, but refused publication to it, and paid no attention to my
telegrams of protest!

And now, where was Professor Lee during this controversy? Professor Lee
had furnished the “Times” with the ammunition to attack me; he had
defended their journalistic practices, and they had published his
defense. Here he saw them committing a piece of the baldest journalistic
rascality—and what did he do about it? I telegraphed him again and
again, asking him to take steps to induce the newspaper to correct its
published falsehoods. Later on, I challenged him again and again to
withdraw his published endorsement of the newspaper’s ethical code. His
reply was to go before the University Settlement, and repeat his attack
upon “The Brass Check” and his defense of the “Times”—and the “Times”
once more featured his address! To the manager of my New York office
Professor Lee made the smiling statement that he was publishing a
magazine for business men, and he did not care how much I attacked him
in public—it would only help him with his business clients!

You have heard me protesting against the practice of covering
commercialists and servants of privilege with the mantle of academic
dignity; and here you see what it means, and why it is done. The New
York “Times” did not dare to answer “The Brass Check” itself; for a year
it had ignored the book—save to post in its editorial rooms a statement
that anyone found with a copy in the office would be summarily
discharged! But then came forward a personage with the high-sounding
title of “Director of the Department of Journalism of New York
University”; and the “Times” made itself into a megaphone, to carry this
hitherto negligible voice to the farthest ends of the earth!




                             CHAPTER LXVII
                           THE CITY COLLEGES


There is another crowded institution in the great metropolis, the
College of the City of New York, where I got the one degree of which I
boast. I went back there this spring, after twenty-five years, and it
was a curious experience. They have their new buildings, all in the
venerable Gothic style, with arrow-proof windows; and in the faculty
room I inspected a row of oil paintings of those old professors who had
been the chief torment of five years of my youth. They were so lifelike
it gave me a chill; I expected to see the old red-whiskered professor of
Latin, or the old white-whiskered professor of Greek, come down from his
frame and denounce me for my twenty years of socialistic agitation.

This college has grown to enormous size, with some sixteen thousand
students, and all the regulation “Main Street” courses; also there is
Hunter College for women, with four thousand more. These are the only
colleges in New York to which Jews can now get admission on their
merits, and the student membership of “C. C. N. Y.” is eighty-five
percent Jewish; the Anglo-Saxons who constitute the interlocking
trustees have a difficult time to keep down the active-minded East-side
boys. One of them, Leon Samson, ventured to ask a question of General
Webb at a “preparedness” meeting, and for this he was expelled. (He
moved on to Columbia, from which he was expelled on the basis of garbled
newspaper reports of a speech in opposition to the draft.) The students
have not been allowed to have an open forum, and the list of speakers is
sternly censored. Scott Nearing was barred, also the Reverend John
Haynes Holmes, and a lecture by Bouck White was forbidden very
dramatically an hour before it began. Incredible as it may seem, Glenn
E. Plumb was not permitted to debate the “Plumb plan” before these
students!

I found here all the regular methods for holding down the faculty. Said
one young professor: “Our president commands a cruel form of torture; he
sets you to teaching freshmen for the rest of your life.” Promotion
depends upon conformity, and dark secrets are whispered, and suffocation
befalls those upon whom suspicion lights. I talked with one professor, a
bit of a liberal, who gave me a curious picture of the operation of the
academic terror. He had been recommended by the head of his department
for promotion, but had been passed over; he went to his dean, and tried
to drag out of him what was the matter. “Do you know?” Yes, the dean
knew. “Will you tell?” No, the dean shook his head. “Will you tell me
this, then? Does this reason, whatever it is, operate next year?” No,
the dean wouldn’t tell that. But for three years it did operate, and a
live man was deprived of his right to advancement, and kept upon a dead
routine until his spirit should be broken.

I sat with three of these young professors, and one after another they
told me their stories, and I noted their phrases. “There is nothing
brutal about it; we know our places, and we keep to them; but we think
of things that we ought to be doing, and we don’t respect ourselves; we
invent sophistries to quiet our consciences, we build up a defensive
mechanism.” And one of the men told me how he had gone out during the
summer, and had got a job as a salesman. “I was trying to get over my
fear,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that I could earn a living in the
world.”

“Did you earn it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t get over my fear. I don’t want to be a
business man and have to sell things!”

They told me of the efforts of various professors to introduce courses
in literature, biology, political science. The heads of these
departments are old men, some of them in office forty years; dull,
timid, afraid of new ideas. To them everything since 1870 is worthless,
and until quite recently they would not allow any modern courses,
obviously in fear that if live teaching were introduced they would lose
their students. I picture these poor pedagogues; I picture the other old
men I knew on that faculty—exactly the same as all the other old men of
all the other old faculties of all the other old universities. Modern
life comes rushing down upon them like a storm, and they have no idea
what to do with it, how to handle it. It is a hail-storm of boys and
girls—thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. What
are they? What do they mean?—these strange, wild creatures, thrusting
themselves forward, demanding their “rights,” clamoring for new things
never heard of by old professors! Despising Tennyson, and demanding
Bernard Shaw! Doubting the Bible, disputing property rights, questioning
marriage, discussing outrageous things—divorce, birth control—actually
right out in public! I recalled Jack London’s short story, about a group
of old Indians up in Alaska, who saw the white men coming in and
undermining their ancient civilization. These Indians formed a society
to destroy the new intruders: “The League of the Old Men.” And I thought
to myself: that is what modern education is—a league of the old men to
make the young what the old want them to be!

Colleges which are located in big cities have one advantage, in that the
students more frequently live at home, and are less apt to develop that
pest known as “college spirit.” On the other hand, being in the midst of
roaring commerce, they are even less apt to think about anything but
preparation for money-making. Most of these “city colleges” and
“universities” are nothing but trade-schools: for example, the
University of Cincinnati, which boasts of four thousand students. The
same men who control this place control the banks of the city; they took
a professor of economics and made him president of a bank, raising him
from four thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand—a lesson for all
college professors to ponder! It was this institution which started the
wonderful scheme of having students spend their mornings in college
classrooms and their afternoons in factories, department-stores and
banks. More than a thousand students are now following this plan, in
some two hundred and fifty business places in Cincinnati!

Or take Washington University, in St. Louis, which also has four
thousand students. The trustees of this place were described to me by a
member of the faculty as “hard-boiled, self-made millionaires.” The
university advertises in the newspapers for students, setting forth in
plain language the increase in earning power attributable to a college
training. The students here were forbidden to organize a liberal club; a
young lawyer, a member of the faculty, is known as a Bolshevik, and when
I asked him why, he said it was because, in a group of millionaires, he
heard the opinion expressed that Judge Gary was the best man in the
country for president, and he kept silence!

The other day I received a letter from a man in Philadelphia, sending me
the advertisements of “Temple University”; I had never heard of such a
place, but I looked it up—and behold, it has over eight thousand
students, with a School of Theology, a School of Chiropody and a School
of Commerce with courses in Salesmanship, Hand-lettering, Advertising
Copy and Layout, Advertising Campaigns, Psychology of Advertising. The
president and creator of this place is Russell H. Conwell, a Baptist
preacher, one of Philadelphia’s great men, described by John Wanamaker
as “my yoke-fellow.” He is the author of a lecture entitled “Acres of
Diamonds,” which up to 1915 had been delivered five thousand times, and
had earned four million dollars. This, with a biography of the preacher
and a history of his university, is available in book form; the most
characteristically American thing which I have read since the
autobiography of P. T. Barnum; a perfect product of that combination of
commercial ecstasy and sentimental religiosity which is the soul of my
country. The title, “Acres of Diamonds,” is derived from the story of an
Arab who went out to hunt for diamonds all over the world, and never
discovered that he had acres of them on his own farm. Dr. Conwell has
discovered that you can exploit the labor of your fellow man in
Philadelphia just as well as anywhere else, and he pronounces the law of
God that “to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” I took the
trouble to go over the first forty pages of his lecture, checking off
the words which refer to wealth in its many forms—money, gold, silver,
diamonds, riches, millions, dollars, fortune, etc. You may think I am
joking, but try it for yourself; in the first forty pages of the lecture
I counted two hundred and eighteen such words! And each one of them
spoken five thousand times—more than one million words of greed uttered
to American audiences by one single preacher of Jesus!

Or take the University of Southern California, with nearly six thousand
students, located in the heart of Los Angeles, metropolis of our “land
of orange groves and jails.” I have no words to describe the ravenous
commercialism of this region, the earthly paradise of oil stock salesmen
and “realtors”; its varied and multiple greeds affect my imagination
like the sounds of a vast menagerie at feeding-time. Needless to say,
the university of this outdoor stock-exchange has all the Jabbergrab
courses: Feature Writing, and Advanced Advertising, Investments,
Commercial Banking, Credits and Collections, Corporation Finance. The
catalogue gives a list of commercial organizations which are called in
to supervise various courses; for example, the course in business
correspondence is under the patronage of the “Better Letters
Association!”

The grand duke of this institution is Mr. E. L. Doheny, jr., whose
father is the biggest oil magnate in the West, president of half a dozen
bloated Mexican and California oil companies, of which Mr. Doheny, jr.,
is vice-president. Mr. Doheny, sr., boasts of owning the biggest private
yacht in the world, and gives elaborate entertainments on this yacht,
and has photographs of himself and his guests filling pages of our
Sunday newspapers. Mr. Doheny has been vehement in support of
intervention in Mexico, and fortunes of his money have been spent in
intrigues to produce Mexican revolutions. Needless to say, therefore, he
is deeply religious; appreciating the importance of all methods of
holding down the masses, he gives a quarter of a million dollars to
build a Catholic church, while his son is on the board of trustees of a
Methodist “university.”

The articles of incorporation of this institution provide that the
trustees shall all be Methodists. They have a School of Religion, with a
big foundation, and courses in such topics as “Personality in Missions,”
“Functions and Methods of Evangelism,” and “The Pastoral Office under
Modern Conditions”—which might be more briefly phrased as “How to Handle
Doheny.” As I write, the devout young Christian commercialists of this
school engage in a mass riot with the students of the University of
California’s southern branch, and one of the students of the latter
institution has the letters “U. C.”—that is, University of
California—branded on his forehead with nitric acid. This was supposed
to have been done by the students of the rival institution; but
investigation by detectives brought out the fact that it had been done
by some of the student’s own fellows. They did not like him, because he
neglected student activities; also they wanted to discredit the
University of Southern California, by putting the job off on it. You can
learn everything at American universities—even the “frame-up”!




                             CHAPTER LXVIII
                          THE LARGE MUSHROOMS


America is half a continent, and its wealth is enormous, and there is a
constantly increasing swarm of young people who want the social prestige
which a college education gives. They have an opportunity to treat
themselves to four years of pleasant idleness on papa’s money, and they
avail themselves of that opportunity. So all over the country spring up
mushroom universities, swelling to unwieldy size, and making frantic
efforts to accumulate traditions and reputation. We have visited a dozen
of the great state universities, following our route along the Northern
tier of states. To complete our survey we should also visit the prairie
country, and see what this plutocracy of railroads and banks is doing to
its young people.

Let us begin with the University of Nebraska, the dominant institution
of the prairie country. This place contents itself with a small board of
the big insiders—Mr. Hall, president of one of the largest banks in the
state; Mr. Seymour, a banker of Elgin, and Mr. Landis, a banker of
Seward; Mr. Judson, the largest retail merchant of Omaha, and Mr. Bates,
wealthy rancher and insurance man. All of these gentlemen know money;
they know nothing whatever about education, yet they guide the thinking
of some eight thousand students. A study of promotions and salaries
reveals the usual fact, that instructors who deal with commercial
subjects have been advanced far beyond those whose humble task is the
improving of the students’ minds.

I am told of one professor who has been twenty years in the place, and
who is a liberal, though in no sense a Socialist. Being a staunch
believer in democratic institutions, he has criticized the
anti-democratic elements in the university, and has been called into
“conference” by those in control, and had the law laid down to him
concerning his teachings. He has been held back upon what amounts to a
starvation salary. Being an elderly man, he cannot make a change.
Another, a professor of economics, a widely-known authority on matters
of taxation, was appointed on a commission to study the revenue system
of the state. He proved his competence so thoroughly that he was invited
by the state legislature to appear before its committee on revenue and
taxation, and give them the benefit of his knowledge. One of this man’s
colleagues describes to me what happened:

  Back-stair influences were instantly mobilized. The professor was
  called into conference and warned not to meet with the committee,
  because it was not advisable for an instructor of the university to
  become involved in political questions. The professor insisted that he
  ought to give a law-making body the benefit of his own information.
  Suffice it to say, the professor never met with the committee, because
  it was hinted to him that dire consequences might follow. This man
  also is on a starvation salary.

Equally significant was the case of the gentleman who had charge of the
dairy department of the University of Nebraska. The dairy business of
Lincoln and vicinity is in the hands of a grasping corporation, which
flagrantly adulterates its products; so the head of the dairy department
conceived the idea of distributing the products of the College of
Agriculture at a price much below that charged by the corporation. The
dairy products of the university being genuine, there was great demand
for them, and as my informant tells me, “the upshot of the competition
on the part of the university led to a fight on the man who had charge
of the dairy department, and ultimately resulted in his dismissal.”

I explained my purpose to deal with “war cases” in this book, only when
the war was used as a pretext to get rid of liberals. There was a series
of such cases at the University of Nebraska in 1918. Several professors
were dismissed, but the records of the trial plainly show that they were
dismissed because of economic unorthodoxy. One taught mathematics, and
stated to the board of regents that he had not considered it his
business to teach his students about the war. We have noted many cases
of college professors being told that it is their duty to teach their
specialty, and not meddle in public questions; now again we note that
this rule applies only when they are advocating measures contrary to the
interests of the plutocracy. When the plutocracy wants to go to war,
then all professors have to teach war—even those who are supposed to be
teaching mathematics!

An interesting demonstration of the policy of depriving college
professors of their citizenship has just been given at the University of
Oklahoma. Here is a state of oil speculators and starving tenant
farmers. One of the products of their degradation is the squalid frenzy
known as the Ku Klux Klan; and the board of regents has just issued a
decree, declaring that the university must “keep the good-will of all
factions and parties,” and therefore members of the faculty are
forbidden to take part in the controversy over the Klan. What this means
is that they are forbidden to oppose it; I am told on good authority
that the president of this board is a member of the Klan, as also the
vice-president of the university, and about two-thirds of the faculty!
The same decree forbids members of the faculty to take part in politics;
but this does not interfere with five out of seven members of the board
of regents being actively engaged in putting down the Farmer-Labor party
by every means of intimidation and corruption.

Next let us glance at the University of Iowa, which has nearly six
thousand students, and is controlled by the railroads which run this
“rock-ribbed” Republican state. A member of the faculty writes me that
its president is “politically a Harding Republican, and personally he
has no curiosity about or sympathy with liberal thought of any kind. His
attitude toward freedom of teaching in his faculty is a purely pragmatic
one. Since his main job is to get funds from the state legislature, he
does not propose to allow the ‘indiscretions’ of a professor to damage
the cause of the university there. In other words, a professor can say
anything he wants to in the class-room, if his students don’t talk too
much and thus arouse sentiment in the state unfriendly to the
university. An ‘injudicious’ remark might cost the university a
half-million dollars in much needed appropriations.” An excellent motto
for this state of Iowa has been composed by Ellis Parker Butler, as
follows:

                   “Three millions yearly for manure,
                   And not one cent for literature.”

Or take Ohio State University, with nine thousand students. Here the
president is a clergyman—“missionary and pastor,” he describes himself;
also he is a coal merchant and farmer, vice-president of a bank and
president of an insurance company, and faculty committees have to wait
while he keeps his important business appointments. His professors are
underpaid, and when they get into debt, he doesn’t increase their
salaries, but loans them money from his City National Bank at the
prevailing rate of interest. This, you perceive, offers a quite unique
method of controlling academic activities. President Thompson, I am
told, is frequently quite kind-hearted to those who conform to primitive
Calvinism in their personal righteousness; but on the other hand, a man
who does not subject himself to the established order is sternly
disciplined—for his own good, of course, as when a child is spanked.
Ludwig Lewisohn was on the faculty for six years, and tells me of one
professor who struggled many years to pay off a debt incurred for the
funeral of his wife; another, an excellent teacher and scholar, who did
not indulge in riotous living, but found that with the increase of
prices during the war his family could hardly keep alive, delayed to pay
a bill for a pair of shoes, and the shoe store sent the bill to the
president of the university, and this guardian of the business
proprieties fired the professor, stating that he “lacked integrity.”

Lewisohn declares that at the faculty gatherings in this university he
never in his life heard a fundamental discussion of any subject;
everything was “silence and stealth.” Another professor writes,
describing the extreme patriotism prevailing: “A bugler plays taps every
Wednesday at convocation hour, and everyone is supposed to stand still
with bared head. The president is attended at all functions by his
‘military staff.’ All instructors must swear to an oath of allegiance in
the presence of a notary before they can receive their salaries.” This
correspondent tells me how a member of the staff was forced out because
he had separated from his wife; also how the “university pastors” on the
campus are trying to establish a School of Religion, at state expense,
and to get their courses listed for university credits. With a clergyman
for president, this ought to be easy; especially when the president
holds the opinion which President Thompson expressed in answer to a
suggestion that his professors ought to have more opportunity to study
and improve their education. He said that most of them held Ph. D.
degrees, therefore their education was a closed matter, and their only
duty henceforth was to teach, both in the regular session and in the
summer schools!

A gentleman who was a member of President Thompson’s faculty for more
than ten years writes me about the place as follows:

“My personal difficulties were primarily with the head of the
institution, who is a Presbyterian minister, a man who would not tell a
lie, but a man whose word cannot be depended upon; very jealous,
sensitive to criticism, apparently always your friend to your face and
your bitterest foe to your back. My observation is that ninety per cent
of the faculty at Ohio State are afraid to offend the president for fear
he will make them suffer for it, either in failing to promote them or to
raise their salaries. The result of this condition is a servile faculty
that are working harder to have a good ‘stand-in’ with the president
than they are to develop their subjects. I think another result of this
condition is to make narrow-minded, selfish, self-seeking men. One of
the reasons that prompted me to leave teaching was the little
narrow-minded individuals with whom I was compelled to associate, men
whose chief thought seemed to be, how can I get my salary raised. I am
farming now, and I must say that I find the companionship of my cows and
horses a great improvement over some of my associates in university
circles.”




                              CHAPTER LXIX
                         THE LITTLE TOADSTOOLS


So far we have been dealing with the great educational centres, which
number their students in thousands and even tens of thousands; but for
every one such institution there are scores of little places scattered
over the country, with anywhere from a hundred to a thousand students
each. In general, one can say concerning these little places that they
try to be as much like the big places as possible. They get the local
financial celebrities on their boards; they get the Gothic buildings
with arrow-proof windows, and ivy of the quickest growing variety; they
dress up their faculty in fancy robes, and their graduating students in
caps and gowns; they have their fraternities and sororities, their full
equipment of athletic teams and alumni boosters. And, just as in country
villages you find more spying and more spite than in big cities, so in
little colleges you find class greed and religious bigotry incessantly
on the watch for any trace of a new idea.

To Beloit College, in Wisconsin, befell a singular fate—it got upon its
faculty a young man of talent, who wrote a live novel. “Iron City,” by
M. H. Hedges, is a picture of life in a small college, located in a
manufacturing town, and of the ferment of modern ideas trying to break
into such a place. Mr. Hedges declares that he did not indicate Beloit
especially, and has received many letters from professors in other
college towns, saying that the cap fitted them. But the gossips of
Beloit insisted upon riveting the cap upon their own heads, and there
was a dreadful scandal.

Beloit is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, its one big industry
being the Fairbanks-Morse Manufacturing Company, the largest makers of
scales in the world. Mr. Morse is the grand duke of the Beloit board,
and has as his assistants Mr. Salmon, director of the Beloit Water, Gas
& Electric Company, and Mr. Tyrrell, head of a great knitting works in
an adjoining town; also a big Chicago wheat broker; the head of
Montgomery Ward & Company; a great paper manufacturer; a leading Chicago
insurance man; a local preacher; and a “special investigator” of the
United States Department of Justice. So you see Beloit is fully equipped
to install, not merely a college of commerce and a department of
divinity, but also a school of spying.

With the publication of “Iron City” its secret service got to work
immediately; I am told by one who was on the inside that three days
after the book was out, one of the trustees called President Brannon on
the telephone from Chicago, exclaiming: “I understand you have a
novelist on your faculty. Why do you have people like that?” In less
than a month the board of trustees had formally demanded Professor
Hedges’ resignation. President Brannon is a scientist, whom we saw
kicked out of the University of Idaho by the mining kings; he had some
liberal ideas when he came to Beloit five years ago. He liked his
novelist, and tried to save him, calling him his best teacher; but the
uproar was too great—the outraged townspeople stopped speaking to
Professor Hedges and his wife on the street. Shortly after this, three
liberal professors were driven from the institution, and the president
pleaded for them also; it is said that he threatened to resign—but I
note that they are gone, while he is still in office.

President Brannon had an interesting plan to remedy the housing shortage
and improve the community spirit in this manufacturing town. He started
a “chamber of commerce,” for the purpose of constructing a million
dollars’ worth of homes on a co-operative basis, with the help of the
labor unions. The banks, the utility company heads, and the
Fairbanks-Morse people vigorously opposed the plan and tried to head it
off; after it had got started they called up the local merchants and
other members of the new “chamber of commerce” on the telephone, and
ordered them to have nothing to do with so dangerous an undertaking,
under penalty of loss of credit at the banks. So the “chamber of
commerce” no longer exists.

There is peace now in Beloit and its college. The last danger passed
when a student was expelled after publishing in the student paper a
review of “The Brass Check”! The head of the local knitting works, one
of the ultra-religious type of trustees, comes to the college and makes
orations, being introduced as “a progressive Christian employer”;
whereas it is well known among the students that the white slave
industry of the town is recruited from girls who cannot earn living
wages in the knitting works.

These manufacturing towns are scattered over the Middle West, and they
and their colleges are very much alike. Let us have a glimpse at
Marietta College, in Ohio. The recent president of this institution was
formerly editor-in-chief of the Chicago “Inter-Ocean,” and championed
the infamous Lorimer and the greedy Yerkes. A student with whom I talked
was present in a class in sociology, to which President Hinman made the
statement that preachers should not discuss social and civic problems.
Some of the students took exception to this idea, and attempted to argue
with him, whereupon he barred discussion in that class for the rest of
the year. He fired a Y. M. C. A. secretary for the crime of having
offered to a student a ticket to “Damaged Goods”—a play which had its
opening performance in Washington, attended by President Wilson and his
wife, and all the members of the cabinet and the Supreme Court.

The grand duke of this board was Mr. W. W. Mills, local traction magnate
and capitalist, president of the First National Bank, interested in a
cabinet company, a brick company, a bridge company, a chair company, a
floral company, a paint company, and a street railway company. This
versatile gentleman also controls the two newspapers of the town, and
censors the proceedings of the state conferences of the Congregational
church. His brother, also on the board, is director in the bank and
president of the chair company. The rest of the board was made up of Mr.
Mills’ nephew, Mr. Rufus Dawes, a powerful millionaire of Chicago,
president of a dozen different gas and electric companies; and his
brother, Mr. Charles G. Dawes, president of the Central Trust Company of
Illinois, and comptroller of the currency under President McKinley; a
retired merchant, director in the Mills bank; a local railway attorney,
related to the Mills; the president of the Mills paint company; the
postmaster of the town, protégé of the Mills; an attorney for the Mills
corporations; the pastor of the Mills church; a corporation lawyer,
director in the Mills bank; and a retired minister, related by marriage
to the Mills. Professors Morse and Owens were let out of Marietta upon
suspicion of liberalism, and in explaining the various reasons, the
latter wrote: “Mr. John Mills expressed a sincere desire to wring my
neck because I remarked at a dinner where he was present that the men in
his mills are an unusually intelligent set.” This referred to the chair
company, in which conditions were especially terrible; there were cases
of married men receiving as low as seven dollars a week in wages! Says
Professor Owens:

  We were urged to be Americans, and yet if we raised our wee small
  voice in favor of a wage that would enable the workers to live up to
  accepted American standards, we were at once regarded as dangerous
  anarchists. They were utterly blind to the fact that wages should be
  raised not only in the interest of justice but of efficiency.
  Repeatedly we stated that we were entirely willing to stand by each
  and every statement we had made. If we had lied we were willing to
  suffer the penalty. But we were denied every opportunity to present
  our view of the situation, denied a hearing which one of our by-laws
  said we were entitled to.

You remember Professor Bolley of the North Dakota Agricultural College,
and his brave statement that a college professor is a citizen. For
example, may a college professor become president of his local school
board? Surely, yes!—you will say. But wait a moment; let me complete the
sentence, “May a college professor become president of his local school
board under a labor administration?” Well, now—of course—that depends!

At Rockford, Illinois, a manufacturing and commercial center, is a very
exclusive college for young ladies, with a wonderful board of trustees,
including a great agricultural implement manufacturer, another large
manufacturer, and the widow of a third; the attorney for the town’s
principal industrial enterprise, also a large stockholder in the
concern; the town’s principal merchant, its principal lumber and fuel
dealer, and the editor of its interlocking newspaper; a bank president,
a steel manufacturer, a judge, and an ex-governor of the state of
Illinois, a notorious corporation tool. May a professor in such a
college accept any sort of office under a labor administration? Let us
see!

President Maddox of Rockford College went in for liberalism and the
enlightening of the masses. He had got a very conscientious young
teacher by the name of Seba Eldridge, and gave him a couple of
impressive titles—“Head of the Social Science Department and Professor
of Economics and Sociology.” Professor Eldridge went out and did “social
work,” and presently the labor men of Rockford elected themselves a
mayor, and this mayor appointed a school board. It would seem to have
been of a representative character—a Catholic business woman of
independent mind, a Socialist ex-teacher who was a good Methodist, a
Swedish workingman, self-taught but of particular intelligence, a
building contractor of large practical experience, and finally, as
president of the board, Professor Seba Eldridge of Rockford College.
Professor Eldridge had served on a local school board of New York City,
and is author of two books, including a useful work on social
legislation; the very man for the place, you would have thought. So
thought the president of the college and the chairman of his board of
trustees; and Professor Eldridge accepted the post.

But the business men of Rockford had still to be heard from! They had
control of the board of aldermen, and they meant to smash this labor
administration, so their aldermen rejected the board of education
proposed by the mayor. Their newspapers fell to denouncing Professor
Eldridge, and the big bankers made it plain that the city of Rockford
could sell no school bonds until the board had a “business man” for its
head. The interlocking trustees came round and interviewed the
president, whereupon that gentleman suddenly changed his position, and
withdrew his approval of Professor Eldridge’s acceptance of the school
board presidency. As the school board position paid no salary, and as
the young professor had a family dependent upon him, he decided to let
the mayor name a school board president who would be confirmed by the
city council! He resigned from the college also and accepted a position
elsewhere.

Mr. Fay Lewis, who lives in Rockford, has been kind enough to supply me
with a file of newspaper clippings on this incident, which occurred in
1921. Among these clippings I find a curious illustration of the method
by which the “Morning Star” of Rockford serves its interlocking
directorate. There was a discussion before the Rotary Club between the
labor mayor of the town and a former president of the school board,
representing the business men. The newspaper reports this discussion in
full; that is to say, it quotes twenty-nine inches of what the
representative of the plutocracy had to say, and two inches of what the
labor mayor had to say in reply!

Also, I ought to give you a little glimpse into Williams College, at
Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was originally established as an
institution for poor boys. It has become the most exclusive country club
in the United States, with the possible exception of Princeton. Like
Brown University, it is a place of dry rot; the faculty is devoted to
social life and respectability, and has been rewarded by Mr. “Barney”
Baruch, who has established a summer school of politics for the purpose
of promoting the “Bankers’ International.” The president of the
University is Harry A. Garfield, son of a former president of the United
States; and as I read the proofs of this book he rushes into the
newspapers to set forth his ideas on the subject of a living wage.
Unskilled workers, it appears, should not receive a living wage for
their families, but only for themselves. Should the worker marry, the
wife should help him to earn the household income until he educates
himself out of the unskilled status—presumably by going to college and
having President Garfield show him how!

Before we conclude this chapter, you might be interested to learn what
the invention of gunpowder has done to higher education; something which
is on demonstration in the state of Delaware. This home of the powder
oligarchy ranked almost at the bottom of the list of states in matters
of education, until Mr. Coleman du Pont, the powder king, took the
matter off the hands of the people, and put up the money for a new
educational system. That was kind of Mr. du Pont, of course, and the
people of Delaware appreciate it; but it means that we have the feudal
system permanently established and officially recognized in an American
state. The powder oligarchy has a university, located at Newark, and
here was a typhoid scandal, exactly as at the University of Oregon, with
the local magnates controlling the situation, and a young instructor
persisting in telling the facts. It was Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the
People,” precisely re-enacted. On the day that one student was buried,
this young instructor published a letter, in which he accused of murder
the people who had refused to put in a sewage system. He was threatened
with tarring and feathering, and the president of the college was very
sorry he could not offer this young instructor a raise. But he always
did what the treasurer of the college wanted—and the treasurer was the
man who had blocked the efforts of the board of health to avoid a
typhoid epidemic! A gentleman who was for many years a member of the
faculty of this university writes me, in very temperate language, as
follows:

“I think the university needs an awakening to the fact that political
and social conditions in the state and nation are proper and necessary
subjects of the freest possible discussion. I also believe that, in
spite of Pierre du Pont’s altruistic attitude, the du Pont wealth stands
at the gates of opportunity in Delaware, and that some who enter
renounce, consciously or unconsciously, their personal freedom of
opinion and action. As to the du Pont control of politics, it should be
fully and forever repudiated by the people of Delaware as an insolent
attempt to enslave the state to a single great interest.”




                              CHAPTER LXX
                             GOD AND MAMMON


I have tried in the closing chapters of “The Profits of Religion,” and
also in “The Book of Life,” to make plain that I honor the religious
impulse in its true form. But that does not mean that I owe respect to
human systems which call themselves religious, and which make the
spiritual needs of mankind a basis of enslavement. I can tolerate the
business man who tells me that “money makes the mare go”; I can show him
how, under a cooperative system, money would make the mare go faster.
But I find it hard to tolerate those preachers of “personal
righteousness,” who keep the eyes of the working class uplifted to
heaven, while their pockets are picked on earth; our modern Pharisees,
who take the greatest of the world’s proletarian martyrs, and bind him
anew, and deliver him to be crucified upon a jewelled cross.

I make this explanation because we are now going to have a glance at
some of our “religious” colleges. Let us begin with Wooster, Ohio, an
institution run by the Presbyterian church. We have seen how at Clark
they are introducing a summer school, to make education pay; and we can
see what that will end in, because the college of Wooster has for many
years been run by its summer school: an absurdly crude, privately-owned,
money-making institution, which draws schoolmarms by offering gold
watches as prizes for those who bring in the greatest number of new
students, and by advertising in terms of dollars and cents the amount of
business done by its free teachers’ agency. In country newspapers it
advertises itself as “a School of Inspiration, Preparation and
Perspiration.” Fifteen hundred schoolmarms come each summer, and the
local papers explain that they are “free with their expense accounts.”
The regular college, having only five hundred students, is relatively
unimportant.

The active trustees, being local business men, naturally want to boost
the summer school; whereas the faculty of the college have absurd
notions of the dignity of true knowledge. Out of this grew a furious
quarrel, which lasted for several years. The partisans of the summer
school kicked out the excellent president of the college, who had spent
sixteen years building it up from nothing. They brought in to replace
him a shouting Y. M. C. A. evangelist of no college training, an utter
ignoramus, and so many kinds of a liar that it would take the rest of
this book to tell about it. The American Association of University
Professors investigated the affair, and devoted a hundred and thirty-six
pages to it, and the bulletin for May, 1917, is a study of the mental
processes of a religious hypocrite, shouting about the love of Jesus,
while stooping to every kind of vile and cowardly intrigue.

Also, while we are in Ohio, let us have a look at Muskingum College, at
New Concord. We may see this through the eyes of Professor Arthur S.
White, who was let out of the Department of Political Science and
Sociology this year. The charge against him was that he had created “a
critical attitude” among the students. The vice-president of the college
charged him “with having taught the students to think, and that they
were not thinking the right things.” At the very beginning of his work,
three years ago, he had explained to the students his dislike of “the
compartment method of education,” whereby students are crammed into a
certain tight mold. “I remarked that such methods were destructive of
personality, and must foster decay in our institutions. When I had
finished the whole class applauded. At the end of the hour, some eight
or ten waited to tell me that they were, and had been, victims of such
methods, and that they hoped my work would be different.” As a result of
this, Professor White’s classes in political science increased from
twenty-seven to a hundred and forty-two.

There was no fault to be found with his character or personal conduct,
nor is he a Socialist or propagandist of any sort. I quote again from
his statement: “My method was to present all the facts on every question
that were available; to analyze ideas, dogmas and institutions in the
light of their original professions and accomplishments. I tried to
respect the personality of my students, by insisting on their being free
to make a conscientious choice of their loyalties.” But, of course, this
did not fit into a college whose dean phrased the duty of the faculty:
“Our attitude toward the president should be that of the soldier to the
general, it should be the attitude that he can do no wrong.” Muskingum
is a Presbyterian institution, and in order to get the financial support
of the church, it advertises itself widely as a “safe” place for parents
to send their children. Everything must be “in accordance with our
tradition of ideals and customs.” So, of course, the professor who
taught his students to think had to move on.

Let us also move, to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where there is a little
religious toadstool in the heart of the oil country, and with a Standard
Oil board of trustees. On this Allegheny College we have a report of the
American Association of University Professors, in the bulletin for
December, 1917. The president (now president-emeritus) is a product of
Judge Gary’s Northwestern University, a Methodist clergyman, and trustee
of the Carnegie Foundation. An alumnus who got to know him writes me:
“Crawford is a man who has seemingly lost his moral perception, and
throughout his stay at Allegheny was notoriously untruthful and
untrustworthy.” For fourteen years he had a professor of English
literature by the name of Frank C. Lockwood, who was an ardent
Prohibitionist, and came into conflict with the two local grand dukes of
the board of trustees, political bosses and attorneys representing
applicants for liquor licenses in Meadville. Professor Lockwood had the
audacity to run for congress on the Prohibition ticket, with the backing
of the Progressives; and, worse yet, although he himself was a Methodist
minister, his wife joined the Unitarian church. The report does not make
clear what the interlocking trustees expected the Methodist professor to
do about this; they would hardly have been satisfied if he had divorced
his wife for being a Unitarian; maybe they expected him to beat her
until she reformed. Anyhow, the board adopted a resolution forbidding
its professors to take part in politics by becoming candidates for
public office; and, furthermore, it made clear its intention to drop
Professor Lockwood at the end of the next year—so he quit. A college
professor is not a citizen in Pennsylvania, any more than he is in
Illinois!

Let us have a look at the prairie country, the “free state” of Kansas.
At Washburn College, an institution of the Congregational church at
Topeka, we shall again find the worship of God and Mammon perfectly
blended. All the local plutocracy is represented on this board, and also
a collection of clergymen, headed by the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon,
famous throughout the Middle West as the author of “In His Steps.” The
president of Washburn is the Reverend Parley Paul Womer—I am aware this
sounds like a novel, but it isn’t. Washburn had been in financial need,
and President Womer was called in as a “fund-raiser”; he being the
perfect type of plutocratic piety, with knees calloused from constant
worship before the altar of the Golden Calf.

His record also is set down in a report of the Association. We find him
requiring one of his professors to promote a certain student, because
his father was “a prominent and well-to-do man,” and “had intimated that
if Washburn would graduate his son he might do something handsome for
the college in a financial way.” We find him continually humiliating
members of the faculty, by warning them not to do this and not to do
that “which might conceivably be displeasing to any persons from whom we
might hope for aid.” We find him refusing all reforms in the way of
faculty control, because “Washburn depends for its financial support on
business men, men of large financial interests who would be quick to
resent any appearance of Bolshevism in the administration of the
college.” We find him summarily discharging professors who opposed his
combination of boot-licking and bullying, and then lying about these
professors, and then asking that the committee of the Association should
consider these lies to be “confidential”!

Finally, matters came to a head; more than half the faculty either
resigned or were discharged, and the students rose up and began
bombarding the pious president’s house with rotten eggs. But did that
make any difference to President Womer? It did not! The smell of rotten
eggs evaporates quickly, but money endures, and he is the boy who gets
the money. His interlocking trustees stood by him, and one month after
the publication of the damning report of the Association, I find in the
Topeka “Daily Capital” a front-page story about the culmination of
President Womer’s marvelous drive to raise the endowment of Washburn to
eight hundred thousand dollars. He has raised three hundred and
seventy-five thousand outside of Topeka, and three hundred thousand
inside. Fifty thousand of this comes from Mr. Joab Mulvane, the grand
duke of the city, and according to the newspaper, “the walls of the
Chamber of Commerce shivered in the greatest uproar of applause they
ever enclosed.... President Womer received at last night’s meeting a
demonstration of cordial good-will and appreciation such as few public
men hope for in a lifetime.” “One of the greatest days in the history of
Topeka,” was Mr. Mulvane’s own characterization of the event. There are
two columns of this kind of rapture, with the names of all the donors
and the “volunteer workers,” and descriptions of parades, fireworks,
dancing, brass-bands, and the singing of “Washburn pep songs.”

Also the Catholics have their educational machine, and raise money from
wealthy Catholics for the protection both of Catholicism and of wealth.
In the city of Washington they have a great central institution. An
official of the United States Department of Education writes me:

  I made a study of the American University in Washington not long ago.
  There are a number of wealthy men on the board. They are obviously
  placed there for the usual purpose. Most of them never went to college
  themselves, and they know nothing about higher education in general or
  in particular. Now I saw no occasion to doubt their desire to do the
  best they know how for the institution. But some things they know
  about, from their associations, and others they do not. They simply
  cannot appreciate, for example, the fine zeal the founders had for the
  establishment of a great graduate university. They can see a
  considerable demand for education in law and business, and so they
  very naturally let the institution turn in this direction.
  Consequently a low grade law school and a lower grade business course
  are being established. The trustees can see some use in these courses
  and some demand. The need for a great graduate school, so patent to
  educators, the trustees are blissfully ignorant of, and I doubt very
  much whether on account of their limited educational experience they
  will ever be able to appreciate the need for such a graduate
  institution in Washington.

We move South to Durham, North Carolina, home of Trinity College, a
considerable religious institution, founded by Washington Duke, the
tobacco king. A friend of mine who knew the old gentleman tells me how
he furnished his mansion, ordering the books for his library by the size
and color of binding; and now his statue decorates a college grounds.
The present head of the family is James B., locally known as “Buck”
Duke, and it would be a poor pun to describe him as the Grand Duke of
Trinity College. He and his brother, Mr. B. N. Duke, his wife, his son
and his daughter, have all purchased the good will of North Carolina
Methodism by making public gifts to Trinity, amounting to four million
dollars; all three of the male Dukes are therefore on its board of
trustees. James B. has just given a million to the endowment, fifty
thousand towards a new school for religious training, and other sums for
gymnasium and law building. So I note in the Greensboro “Daily News” an
editorial headed: “The Duke Also Has Virtues.”

Forty years ago “Buck” Duke could not borrow ten thousand dollars in
North Carolina; today he boasts that he is worth four hundred million,
beside what his father and brother have accumulated. Assuming that his
services in providing the world with tobacco were worth a hundred
dollars a week, it would have taken a hundred and fifty-four thousand
years to earn his own share of this money. “Buck” is distinguished among
interlocking trustees in that he has had a decision of the United States
Supreme Court on his money-making methods; the exact words are that he
“persistently and continuously and consciously violated the law.” The
Supreme Court has not yet passed on the fact that a man who is worth
four hundred million dollars pays only eight hundred and twenty-eight
dollars taxes in the state where he lives in a magnificent palace!

The Methodist church is, as we know, violently opposed to the use of
tobacco, but it applies the ancient saying of one of the Roman emperors,
Pecunia non olet—money has no smell. Mr. Duke completed his purchase of
the church by a so-called donation for the support of its superannuated
ministers, and so his right to run both church and university is
undisputed. He brought in a South Carolina minister of pliant
principles, and made him president of the university, and this president
never lost an occasion to chant the praises of his grand Duke. The grand
Duke had this chief chanter made a director of his Southern railroad,
and wanted to have him made also a bishop of the church, but for three
successive years he failed; then he hired some regular lobbyists and
sent them to the Methodist General Conference—and that was the way to do
it. “Pecunia non olet”; and also, “pecunia parlat”; and also, “pecunia
ambulare equinam fecit!”—if you will let me fix up the Latin.




                              CHAPTER LXXI
                        THE ORANG-OUTANG HUNTERS


There is a part of the United States which suffered for a century or two
under the blight of Negro slavery; in consequence, from Virginia to
Texas, the population still lives in the ideas of a hundred years ago.
Here are communities which are not content to use religious dogmas as a
shield for special privilege; they really believe the dogmas, and are
willing to fight about them and to torture one another, as in the old
days. In these states there has sprung up what is called the
“Fundamentalist” movement, made up of seventeenth century Cromwellians
in modern machine-made clothing; the only difference being that whereas
the old Pilgrims wished to “come out from among them,” the idea of these
modern fanatics is to drive out the other fellow. They are carrying on
an enormous campaign in the evangelical churches, seeking to keep out of
the pulpits people who do not believe in the literal inspiration of
Scripture—in Noah’s ark, and Jonah and the whale, and Joshua blowing
down the walls of Jericho; also in the virgin birth, and the six-day
creation of man. They are especially indignant against “evolution,”
which means to them one thing, that man is descended from the
monkey—something it does not mean to any scientist.

The leader of this new fanaticism is no less a personage than the
Honorable William Jennings Bryan, the Peerless Commoner, who, having
made several hundred thousand dollars out of lecturing, is not so keen
for the breaking of the money power, but gives his time to the
preserving of the ignorance of his forefathers. Mr. Bryan has used his
enormous prestige with the legislatures of the Southern states; he came
within one vote of putting through the Kentucky legislature a bill
providing that no public appropriations should be used for salaries of
employes who teach Evolution or Darwinism. Incredible as it may seem, he
succeeded in putting through such a measure in the states of South
Carolina and Oklahoma, and he expects to make a tour of the legislatures
this winter and try with others.

These reactionaries are busy in all the Southern colleges, plying their
brooms against the tide of modern thought. They succeeded in driving
Professor Wheeler from the University of Mississippi, and Professor Rice
from the Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas. Also they are
strong among the Baptists, and at Waco, Texas, they have got possession
of a large school called Baylor University. This place had a professor
of sociology, G. S. Dow, who devoutly believed in his Baptist faith, and
earnestly protested that he did not teach that “man came from another
species”; but he published a text-book, “Introduction to the Principles
of Sociology,” in which he used some phrases of modern science, and the
howling dervishes of Texas took it up. In Fort Worth is a Baptist
preacher, who publishes a paper called the “Searchlight,” and has grown
rich out of waging war upon modern thought; in what delicate language
his controversies are carried on you may judge from one sentence,
referring to the expulsion of Professor Rice: “While the Methodists have
put their orang-outang out, we are keeping ours in!”

I really felt sorry for Professor Dow, as I read over a mass of
clippings concerning his trouble; he is such a humble and patient
Christian gentleman! But, you see, in his book he actually made
reference to “primitive man,” and we all know there was no such beast;
says the “Searchlight”: “Those of us who read our Bibles have always
thought that he was made in the image of God.” So Professor Dow was
forced to resign, and he stayed resigned, in spite of indignant protests
of his students.

The Baptists of Texas appointed a committee, which went about in these
educational institutions, submitting to every instructor a
questionnaire, and forcing the resignation of several who were too
honest in their confessions. They held a “pastors’ and laymen’s
conference,” in which they laid down “uncompromising opposition to the
teachings of Darwinian evolution, and the substitution of social service
for regeneration.” Reading their literature is to a modern man like
having a nightmare; it takes you back three hundred years in human
history, when they burned witches at the stake, and tore men to pieces
on the rack. In Texas now they burn only Negroes; but the wretched,
half-starved, rack-rented tenant-farmers and their wives are victims of
the most degrading sort of terrors. In one issue of the “Searchlight” I
find a portrait of a maniac with a big black moustache, cavorting with
clenched fists on a platform, and advertised as “the man who preaches
sin black, hell hot, life short, death certain, eternity long, and calls
sinners to a blood-bought redemption.”

In “The Profits of Religion” I have pictured the “Bootstrap-lifters,”
with their eyes uplifted to heaven while the agents of the Wholesale
Pickpockets’ Association are robbing them on earth. Just so it is with
the “Fundamentalists”; while they were getting the professor of
evolution fired from the Southern Methodist University, the public
utility interests of Texas, camouflaged as the “Texas Public Service
Information Bureau,” have been poisoning the minds of the students. They
have contrived a course of lectures, to be given by expert public
utility pickpockets—the general manager of the telephone company, the
president of the power and light company, the general manager of the
traction company—so on through a long list.

Also these Fundamentalists are active in Tennessee, where they brought
destruction to an old friend of mine, a thoroughly trained scientist and
most humane and charming gentleman, who was director of hygiene and
physician at the state university. They were cordial to him in the first
weeks, until he began attending the Unitarian church; then a pillar of
the rich Baptist church in Knoxville refused to donate to the “Y” work
at the university “so long as they had Unitarians on the faculty.” In
the hope of forcing my friend to withdraw, the president and dean
proceeded to make him unpopular by requiring all freshmen to take a
course of two hours a week in “personal hygiene” with him—and receiving
no credit for the course! Still, the professor made a success of it, and
more students came to him for treatment than he could handle; so last
spring he was unceremoniously dropped.

At Bethany, West Virginia, is a college of the religious body who call
themselves the “Disciples of Christ,” or “Christians”—to distinguish
themselves from Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other
kinds of heathen. This institution is described as “a literary, moral
and religious school,” and it now has some five hundred students, and
thirty or forty members of the faculty. They got a young professor by
the name of Croyle, in the “Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament,” and they
kept him less than a year, and then summarily fired him without notice.
The professor put the case in the hands of the American Association of
University Professors, which wrote to the president of the college and
proposed an investigation. The president’s name is Cramblet—again I have
to explain that I do not make these things up. President Cramblet
replied to the effect that he and his college did not want any
interference from professors’ associations. “For the present we are
quite sure that we can make our own rules and conduct our own affairs
better than some people who are not able to take care of their own
business.”

It is interesting to follow this story and watch the slow process of the
opening up of this religious hard shell. It took the Association about a
year and a half to do the job; they kept boring away—a little publicity
here and a threat of publicity there—until finally President Cramblet
popped open and wrote a long letter, explaining the crimes of Professor
Croyle, and agreeing to meet a committee of the Association and prove
his charges. It appeared that Professor Croyle had come from the Union
Theological Seminary, with his mind full of what in the West Virginia
mountains is known as “destructive criticism.” In one of his classes he
had explained that maybe the story of God’s plan to drown everybody in
the world except Noah and his family was not to be taken quite
literally; that night President Cramblet was called to the girls’
dormitory, “because a number of them were weeping and well-nigh
hysterical over this experience!”

It is interesting to note that the Professors’ Association does not
attempt to insist that church colleges shall maintain any standards of
freedom of teaching or of thinking. All it lays down is that “church
colleges should fully and unequivocally inform the public and their
professors of all restrictions that their tenets impose upon academic
freedom.” And it notes that this “Christian” college has now taken out
of its catalogue the statement that “Bethany seeks the latest and best
results of modern scholarship,” and that “the latest results of
archeology are used in an attempt to understand the vitality of the
Prophetic Activity!”

I close this chapter with the singular adventure of my friend, Harry
Laidler, who went a few years ago to lecture at Emory and Henry College,
one of the oldest institutions in Virginia. Laidler was secretary of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and the students had asked to hear
him, and the president had consented. It chanced, however, that an
itinerant preacher was present that morning, and he strongly disapproved
of a Socialist lecture, and took occasion to save the students from the
consequences of their wayward curiosity. He took the platform, and
lifted his hands in invocation to the Almighty, imploring Him to protect
these young minds from the heresies and false doctrines to which they
were about to be exposed!




                             CHAPTER LXXII
                          THE ACADEMIC POGROM


It is natural that in a time of reaction such as the present, every form
of organized cruelty and hatred should lift its ugly head; and so we
have in our colleges not merely campaigns of religious bigotry, but also
of race prejudice.

We know the ideal American college student. He comes from our best
families, his figure is tall and straight, and his features regular and
blank, according to the Gibson standard. He is perfectly groomed, in the
Arrow collar and the Kuppenheimer clothes and the Brogue boot. He has
always had plenty of servants to wait on him, so he does not know how to
work. He is thoroughly skilled, however, in every form of play, and has
been raised in a system of conventions which constitute “good manners.”
He comes to college to spend the four pleasantest years of his life in
the company of his social equals. His father and big brothers before him
have belonged to the right clubs, and are prominent in the alumni
association. He goes in for athletics, and for the glee club, and gets a
fraternity pin and a big Y, or whatever letter it may be, on his
sweater; he becomes a leader of his class and a social favorite, and
takes the college girls to dances in his big car, and now and then he
takes one of the town girls out into the country on summer evenings, or
to a road-house in winter. He is an expert in smoking tobacco, and
connects up with the best university boot-legger—but all quietly, of
course, and nothing to excess, except on football nights and special
occasions.

There is only one thing wrong with this four years of paradise, and that
is a lot of fool pedants and bookworms, who think they have something to
do with running the college, and worry a fellow to death stuffing his
head with old Anglo-Saxon roots and mathematical formulas, names and
dates of dead kings and battles, and peculiarities of French and Greek
irregular verbs. The young gentleman in college regards these pedants as
his natural enemies, and the outwitting of them as one of his
entertainments. If you have plenty of money you can hire sharp fellows
to study examination papers and work out the science of “getting by,”
and two weeks before examinations you shut yourself up in your room,
with a wet towel about your head and a pot of strong coffee on your
desk, and you cram your mind with the necessary mass of facts, and so
you pass. You understand the unwritten law of colleges—just as the old
French marquis understood the heavenly system, when he said that God
would think twice before he damned a gentleman like him. Make yourself a
power in athletics and in social life, and pay a certain minimum debt to
the thing called “learning,” and you may be sure that no member of the
faculty will have the insolence to “flunk” you. Such is American college
life today, and when we read in college journals and in the capitalist
press about the preservation of Anglo-Saxon traditions in our
institutions of higher education, that is what we are talking about.

But now along come a lot of fellows—and worse, a few girls as well—whose
features lack the regular vapidity of the Gibson type, but on the
contrary, have been distorted by suffering and struggle. These people
have for the last two thousand years been an oppressed race, and they
display the painful qualities which oppression causes in human beings.
Sometimes they cringe, and again, when they get power they may become
insolent. For two thousand years they have survived in the world by two
qualities, racial and religious solidarity, and commercial shrewdness.
We in America are full of the raptures of dollar-getting; but here is a
people who can make two dollars while we are making one, and can save
ten dollars while we are squandering a hundred. Being people who have
had to make their own way in the world, they are apt to be pushing and
thick-skinned; they sometimes come where they are not wanted, and do not
always take a hint to leave.

They try to break into “society”; that is, having acquired wealth, they
assume they are entitled to the perquisites of wealth. But we bar them
from our dinner-parties and our clubs, and sometimes from our hotels.
Naturally their sons and daughters turn their eyes upon our colleges;
and here is an atrocious situation. These institutions have established
no social tests, but have left their doors open for anyone who can pass
an examination. And these people take advantage of us—they actually
expect to break in among our sons and daughters, just by learning more
than our sons and daughters know! That is easy for them, you understand;
not being admitted to fraternities and glee clubs, they have nothing
better to do than to sit in their rooms and read and study. And what
chance do our “Gibson types” stand against such a proposition? They
stand no chance whatever; and so the Jews carry off the honors and the
prizes—actually, if things were allowed to go on, they would become
members of the faculty, and we should be sending our future Anglo-Saxon
conquerors to be taught by Jewish scientists and men of letters!

Such is the problem faced by our interlocking trustees and their
faculties; it is an embarrassing problem, because, in the first place,
the Jews are enormously wealthy, and they stand together, and have not
merely financial but political power. Also, they take pride in their
culture; they point out that they gave the world its first great
literature, and have given to Anglo-Saxon countries practically
everything in the way of religion which these countries consider divine.
They have contributed their due share of scientists and writers and
statesmen of modern times; also they have given to the world the
religion of the future, through the labor of Marx and Lassalle, Jaurès
and Liebknecht.

In the light of these varied facts, we cannot come out boldly and say
that we refuse to admit Jews to our universities; we find it easier to
employ those peculiar talents for prevarication which our college heads
have developed. We invent what are called “psychological tests”; we fill
our examination papers with “catch” questions—little details of language
idiom and social observance and historical tradition, with which the
Jews are less apt to be familiar. Or we conduct oral examinations,
concerning which there are no records, and therefore no proofs of
prejudice. By these means, in a couple of years we cut down the
percentage of Jews at Columbia from forty percent to twenty-two percent,
and at New York University we cut it down from fifty percent to fifteen.

Our really aristocratic university, Princeton, has never “made any
bones” about it. Very few Jews and no Negroes have been able to pass the
“examinations” for admission to Princeton. At Harvard it has always been
possible to get in by passing a much stricter examination; but even by
this method the percentage of Jews keeps creeping up, and when I was in
Harvard last spring they were talking about introducing the
“psychological tests,” as at Columbia. One student reported a
conversation with Richard Cabot, professor of “social ethics,” who said
that he did not object to the exclusion of Jews, but thought it should
be done frankly. His idea prevailed among the overseers, and shortly
afterwards a statement was issued which gives an amusing illustration of
what Harvard regards as frankness. The statement set forth that there
were more applicants for admission than Harvard was able to accommodate,
and the governing body must take some action in the matter. Then: “It is
natural that with a widespread discussion of this sort going on there
should be talk about the proportion of Jews at the college.” In the
course of the “discussion” that followed, we find President Lowell
deploring the growth of anti-Semitic feeling, and suggesting a marvelous
plan to eliminate it from American colleges—let the Jews keep away!

And then the Negro question. They have a Memorial Hall at Harvard, and
make much of their heroes who died to abolish Negro slavery. I have a
cousin who went to Harvard twenty years ago, and though he is a Southern
man, he was able to live comfortably in a dormitory in which there was a
Negro student. But a year or two ago a student engaged a room in a
freshman dormitory, and went to occupy it, and when they made the
discovery that he was a Negro, they told him that a mistake had been
made, they had no room vacant in that dormitory, or in any other
dormitory. Not until they had been exposed several times in such
evasions, did they come forward and announce that in future no Negroes
would be admitted to freshman dormitories at Harvard.

We have mentioned New York University. During the controversy over Jews
at Harvard, Chancellor Brown favored the press with the proud
announcement that there was no discrimination against Jews at
Jabbergrab; and a week or two later there was published in the “Nation”
(July 12, 1922) a letter from Mr. Joseph Girdansky, who made a
reputation as an athlete at this place, telling about the experience of
his younger brother, also an athlete, and presumably acceptable to his
fellow students, since he was elected president of the junior class.
When this result was announced, the faculty of Jabbergrab rose up and
called off the election. First, it appeared, the officers elected were
Bolshevists; second, there had been ballot-stuffing; and third, fourth
and fifth, the elections were null and void. Several Jewish boys were
threatened with expulsion for having been elected to class offices!

Mr. Girdansky went on to tell about his interview with Dean Archibald
Banton of Jabbergrab. This was two or three years ago, and the dean
quite frankly admitted that it was a Jewish question. In the elder
Girdansky’s day, said the dean, the percentage of Jews had been from two
to four, while now it had got to fifty. So the university was
introducing what it called an “Americanization plan.” Mr. Girdansky
threatened to expose this state of affairs—right in the midst of
Chancellor Brown’s advertising campaign for funds! The dean begged him
to wait until the fall, promising that the class elections would be
settled satisfactorily. They were settled by a great number of the
Jewish students leaving, and new class officers being elected, or
appointed by the faculty—all the important ones being non-Jews!

At Barnard, which is the women’s college of Columbia University, they
have a committee on admissions, which in actual practice means the dean
and the secretary, who decide upon the eligibility of girls who have
passed the examinations. Highly competent graduates of New York high
schools are left out, because they happen to be Jewesses; and in their
place girls are taken from the fashionable “finishing schools,” who are
so poor in scholarship that they have to be conditioned. I was told of
one case of a Russian Jewish girl who had been excluded and went to
Hunter College and made a brilliant record. There was some agitation
about this case, and the dean sent someone to look it up, and the report
was that “keeping her out was a good job.” The teacher who told me this
story was interested in the matter, and went over to Hunter College
herself to find out what was wrong about the girl. There were two things
the matter with her: first, she was a Socialist, and second, she had
expressed her opinion in favor of the recognition of Soviet Russia.

Also at the University of Pennsylvania the issue has been taken up. The
endowment drive was held up because the leaders wished to engraft upon
it the verbal pledge to anti-Semitic contributors that Jewish enrollment
would be curtailed. One seminary course at the university during the
past year was largely devoted, under cover, to sounding out the views of
the graduate students in economics upon the Jew menace. It was freely
stated in that course that desire to reduce the high percentage of Jews
in the Wharton School was the motive prompting the “intelligence test”
requirement for admission.

Needless to say, the academic pogrom extends not only to students, but
to professors. You may find this situation effectively set forth in a
vital criticism of America, “Up Stream,” by Ludwig Lewisohn. Mr.
Lewisohn tells how he studied under the aegis of Nicholas Murray Butler,
and made himself a master of English literature and English style. You
do not have to take his word for this; he proves it in his book. Few
indeed are the Anglo-Saxon professors in American universities who can
demonstrate equal attainments! This German-Jew was poor, his family had
made heavy sacrifices to give him an education; but he could get no
teaching position, and for a long time the Columbia professors who had
charge of his career kept from him the dark secret, that Jews are not
employed to teach literature in American universities. Lewisohn was
forced to do newspaper work, and not until years later did he get a
chance to teach at the University of Wisconsin.

Also you ought to hear the experience of Professor Kornhauser of Denison
University, at Granville, Ohio. He taught zoology, and was admitted to
have one of the best departments in this Baptist institution; he was an
active Y. M. C. A. worker, president of the Faculty Club, and commander
of the American Legion post—it is difficult to see what more a Jew might
do to take the curse off himself! He was offered an important position
at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and as the price of declining this, was
made a full professor at Denison, and spent three years building up his
department. But last April the president of the university asked him to
resign, and stated as his reason that some of the financial supporters
of the university objected to the presence of a Jew on the faculty. The
students protested, and in the effort to silence them the president
threatened that if they published anything about the case he would
refuse to recommend Professor Kornhauser for a job at any other
university. The senior class, by a vote of eighty to six, passed a
resolution asking for the president’s removal.

Also you should consider the experience of Professor Robert T. Kerlin, a
high-minded and devoted Christian gentleman, who was dismissed from the
Virginia Military Institute for having written a dignified open letter
to the governor of Arkansas, protesting against the execution of some
Negroes for the crime of having defended their lives against a mob. You
may read his letter in the files of the “Nation,” June 15, 1921.

And then, to return to the Jews, hear the strange experience of Mr. S.
S. Catell, who was an instructor in accounting at the University of
Oklahoma. Mr. Catell happens to be near-sighted, and was turned out upon
the pretext that he was unable to teach properly on this account. He
sent a questionnaire to his students, and out of a total of forty-nine,
thirty said that his work was above the average, while eighteen said it
was average; one was absent and did not reply. But this did not get Mr.
Catell restored, and so he investigated, and discovered that the head of
his department did not like Jews. The way in which the young instructor
made this discovery would seem sufficiently convincing to anyone. He met
the head of his department in the hallway of the latter’s home, and the
department head put to him a question: “Do you know who killed Jesus
Christ?” Mr. Catell, in his letter to me, says that he contented himself
with the answer: “I do not know, since it was so long ago!”

If I were a cultured Jew in America, I know what I should do. I should
not flatter the race conceit of Anglo-Saxon colleges; I should make it
my task to persuade wealthy Jews to establish an endowment and gather a
faculty of Jewish scientists and scholars—there are enough of them to
make the most wonderful faculty in the world. And then I should open the
doors of this university to seekers of knowledge of all races—save that
I should bar students who had anti-Semitic prejudice!




                             CHAPTER LXXIII
                          THE SEMI-SIMIAN MOB


Race prejudice is merely one side of the many-sided snobbery of college
life. The college is the collective prestige of a mob of socially
superior persons, and each and every one of them is interested to
protect that prestige. I asked one of the most eminent of American
scientists, a man who has lived most of his life in universities, what
is the matter with these institutions, and his answer came in an
explosion: “It is the semi-simian mob of the alumni! They have been to
college for the sake of their social position; they have gone out
utterly ignorant, and made what they call a success in the world, and
they come back once a year in a solid phalanx of philistinism, to
dominate the college and bully the trustees and the president.”

“You don’t think it’s the president’s fault, then?” I asked, and the
answer was: “It is the alumni, that semi-simian mob!”

The problem of who is to blame, the president or the alumni, is like the
ancient question: “Which comes first, the hen or the egg?” The president
makes the alumni, and the alumni make the president, and the vicious
circle continues ad infinitum. The alumnus who counts is the “successful
son,” and he values in his college those qualities which have enabled
him to succeed. The college is to him a place where he can be sure of
having his son made into the same admirable thing he knows himself to
be. The college is an insurance agency for the business and social
prosperity of his progeny. When he has got the youngsters into Groton,
and then into Harvard, and finally into the Harvard Club, they will have
made so many affiliations that nothing can hurt them; there will always
be “openings,” desirable friendships, quick promotions, favors and
honors: there will be rich girls to choose from, a welcome in homes of
luxury.

The college is to the alumnus a place in which he has invested four
years of his life, and he wants to keep up the value of that investment.
He welcomes everything which enhances that value—football victories, for
example, which fill the columns of the newspapers, and enable him to
swell out his chest and remember that he is a son of “Old Eli.” On the
other hand, if there are stories in the newspapers that his college has
become a “hot-bed” of some kind, that is a humiliation, that is a
diminution of his prestige; he calls up the president and trustees on
the telephone, and wants to know what the hell does this mean?

College is the place in which the alumnus spent the happiest years of
his life; it is the center of pleasant memories, about which to grow
sentimental. He goes back to renew old friendships, to sing old songs,
to feel tears in his eyes, delicious emotions stirring his bosom. And
just as a shrewd mother of many daughters employs their charms and
exploits the weaknesses of the male animal, so the college “alma mater”
utilizes the tender emotions of her “old boys” to separate them from
their cash. I have before me a begging circular of Yale University, got
up in the best style of the schools of advertising, attractively printed
in two colors on tinted paper. “Yale’s power lies partly in your hands,”
we are told in red ink; and then in black ink: “An Endowment to Yale:
Yourself. Interest on the Endowment: Whatever you can afford each year.”

And when the time comes for a “drive,” these herd emotions are whipped
up to frenzy. We learned these tricks in the war days, and immediately
after the war the colleges with one accord started to apply the
technique: class quotas and sectional quotas, “follow-up” letters and
daily “dope” for the press; the members of the faculty shutting their
books and turning into “gladhanders”; “prexy” making speeches to the
Rotarians and the Kiwanis and the Elks, and proving himself a “mixer.”
In 1920 I find Northwestern setting out after twenty-five millions,
Pittsburgh after sixteen, Harvard fifteen, Princeton fourteen, Cornell
ten, followed by Boston University, New York University, Oberlin, Bryn
Mawr, Massachusetts Tech—a total of more than sixty institutions,
demanding over two hundred millions of dollars. I have no objection to
colleges getting money; I am merely pointing out the price of money in a
class civilization—which is conformity to class ideas and ideals.

One of the most entertaining stories I heard on my tour of the colleges
was told by a young congressman of the modern college type, who was
graduated from one of the “little toadstools” in the Middle West. He is
a handsome fellow, and made a reputation as a quarterback, and was
selected by his alumni association to lead a campaign for funds for a
group of colleges which had combined together—Beloit, Ripon and
Lawrence, all in Wisconsin. It was his duty to travel from city to city
throughout the state; he would summon the “old boys,” and rout out the
football squads, and lecture at the Y. M. C. A.s, and call on the
clergymen of the town for the names of the likely “prospects”; he would
visit the homes of the rich, and make tennis dates with the sons, and
take the daughters driving. All his expenses were paid; he was provided
with the latest sport costumes, and automobiles without limit. He would
be invited to dinner-parties, where he would talk about the institution,
awakening tender memories in the bosom of the “old boy,” and literally
“vamping” him. He was furnished with a supply of fraternity pins, which
he allowed the girls to extract from his necktie; needless to say, he
was many times engaged. Sometimes, he told me, he even stooped to kiss
the babies. He came back in triumph, with a total of three hundred
thousand dollars to his credit. And one of his crowd made an even
greater success—he not merely got engaged, but got married to the
daughter of a multimillionaire wheat speculator; the bride gave real
estate and money to the institution, so the bridegroom’s share of the
loot was not begrudged him.

You thought perhaps I was exaggerating when I portrayed the childish
pleasure of the oil king in his Gothic buildings, with crenellated
battlements and moated draw-bridge. But that is the precise and
calculated purpose of these trappings; they are part of the vamping
equipment—they create an atmosphere and a glamour, they set the college
apart from wholesale haberdashery, or hardware, or whatever may be the
“line” of the successful son. This is the purpose of the ivy and the
college songs, the sheepskins and gold seals, the gowns and
mortar-boards and solemn processions. I have before me the picture
section of the New York “Times,” showing the installation of the new
president of Yale. It is only a photograph, but if an artist had
composed a picture of college flummery he could not have done better. In
the background are the venerable buildings, with ivy-covered walls,
memorial tablets, and huge iron gates; and here comes a procession,
headed by a solemn young official in a long black night-gown, carrying a
huge drum-major’s baton, covered with filigree like a bridal cake—a mace
of office, no doubt copied from the one used in the House of Commons.
Behind him stride the outgoing president and the incoming president—a
pair who might be labeled, like the patent medicine advertisements,
“Before and After Taking.” “Before Taking” you are a fairly capable and
intelligent looking human male, but “After Taking” you have a large
mouth, with jaw hanging down, and an expression of withered imbecility;
in both cases you wear gorgeous colored robes, and immediately behind
you, in frock-coat and silk hat, walks the grand duke of your board,
grim-faced, solemn, and paunched. Next come half a dozen army officers,
then a long double file of scholars in caps and gowns, the faculty,
carefully ordered according to the amount of their salaries. On each
side stand the rows of graduating students in their black nighties,
their heads respectfully bared, their hands folded across their tummies.

This kind of monkey-business goes on once or twice a year in every
American college and university. There is no “toadstool” so small that
it does not hasten to get up such a performance, and to contrive itself
a set of “traditions.” There is none big enough or mature enough to put
away childish things, to dispense with the tinsel and gold lace of the
scholastic life. At Harvard they have a solemn commencement day parade,
with the House of Morgan and the House of Lee-Higginson all in top hats
and swallow-tail coats—the only sign of a sense of humor being that they
forbid the taking of photographs! At Columbia, Nicholas Miraculous
appears in a rakish tam-o’-shanter, which is of almost infinite dignity,
because it signifies that he has not been content with a baker’s dozen
of honors from up-start American universities but has received the
supreme academic accolade from Oxford.

We have heard the statement that “colleges grow by degrees.” There is no
law regulating the distribution of fancy names, and they serve just as
peerages and lesser titles serve in England—to get campaign funds for
the gang in office. Through the pages of “Who’s Who in America” they are
scattered as if with a pepper-box, and a study of them is an amusing
revelation. Pick out the leading old tories in the United States, the
blind leaders of the blind who have almost tumbled our country into the
ditch; you will find everyone of them with a string of academic
dignities tacked to his name. William Howard Taft has nine, Charles E.
Hughes eleven, Woodrow Wilson ten, Leonard Wood nine, Henry Cabot Lodge
nine, William C. Sproul nine, Robert Lansing six, Elihu Root sixteen,
Herbert Hoover twenty-four. On the other hand, think of the men who have
been struggling all their lives to make this country a little bit of a
democracy: take the very truest and bravest of them—how many honorary
degrees have they? How many has Louis D. Brandeis? Not one! How many has
Robert M. LaFollette? Not one! How many have William E. Borah, Samuel
Untermyer, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Fremont Older, Frederick
C. Howe, John Haynes Holmes? Not one to divide among them!

No, the academic honors are reserved exclusively for the darlings of the
plutocracy, the henchmen and retainers of special privilege. You
remember the pious Senator Pepper, trustee of the University of U. G. I.
Six colleges have honored him—including, of course, his own. Three
honored Philander C. Knox before he died, and six honored Thomas Nelson
Page. Four have honored David Jayne Hill, Col. George Harvey, Alton B.
Parker and Frank O. Lowden; three have honored Judge Gary and A.
Mitchell Palmer, two have honored Otto Kahn, four have honored Brander
Matthews—including, of course, Columbia. We saw Columbia conferring a
degree upon Paderewski; they also conferred one upon Miller, editor of
the New York “Times,” of whom Brisbane caustically remarked that the
paper had been sold several times, and he had been sold along with it.
Senator Depew, the aged buffoon, has one, Howard Elliott has one,
Augustus Thomas has one; Owen Wister got one from the University of U.
G. I., and Booth Tarkington one from Princeton—a little wee one, he
being a mere writer of novels.

It is at the commencement ceremonies that these honors are bestowed; and
always the president makes a speech, telling the great one how great he
is. Sometimes the great one also delivers an address, and furnishes a
copy to the newspapers in advance, and so the university becomes a
center of propaganda for every form of class greed and cruelty. In the
spring of this year, while I was touring the colleges, Judge Gary fed
his pious poison to the graduating class at the University of Heaven. At
the University of the Steel Trust they gave degrees to the president of
Indiana University, and to an Episcopal clergyman, and to the chairman
of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Company—a gentleman we met
as one of the grand dukes of Brown University. “This highest honor of
the university is appropriately bestowed upon Mr. Bedford in recognition
of his activities in the development of the American petroleum
industry,” etc. At the Pennsylvania Military College degrees were
conferred upon Secretary of War Weeks and the pious Senator Pepper. Mr.
Weeks is described by the “Literary Digest” as “a banker and broker of
high standing in private life,” and he takes the occasion to give a
boost to the liquor lobby, and recommend to these budding soldier-boys
the return of Bacchus to America.

And while I am revising my manuscript for the printer, the college
hordes reassemble, and the college orators remount the rostrum, and the
broadcasting stations go into action. The world is informed by the
president of Dartmouth College that too many students are trying to get
an education in America, there is no use wasting our time on any but
superior minds. And a few days later the new head of Colgate University,
Dr. George Barton Cutten, repeals the Declaration of Independence and
overthrows the political theories of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.
Democracy is a delusion, “founded on a mistaken theory,” and more than
ever we must look to be ruled by aristocracy. “Manhood suffrage has been
our greatest and most popular failure, and now we double it by granting
universal suffrage.”

With exceptions so few as to be hardly worth mentioning, the rule holds
good that everywhere, in every issue involving a conflict between the
people and special privilege, the universities and colleges are on the
side of special privilege. In the San Francisco graft prosecutions the
University of California was almost unanimous in support of the
grafters, so much so that when Rudolph Spreckles and Francis J. Heney
entered the University Club in San Francisco, every man in the room
would get up and leave. On the other side of the continent the Harvard
alumni machine fought almost to a man against the appointment of
Brandeis to the Supreme Court; and for twenty-nine years this machine
has voiced its political ideals in the United States Senate through
Henry Cabot Lodge.

At the risk of boring you, I am going to take you to just one of the
meetings of these Harvard alumni. It is a dinner, the fortieth
anniversary of the class of 1881, held in the University Club of Boston,
June 22, 1921. The principal speaker is a distinguished member of that
class, Mr. Howard Elliott, C. E. of Harvard, and LL. D. of Middlebury
College. Mr. Elliott was at this time a Harvard overseer, and chairman
of Harvard’s favorite New Haven system; he is now also chairman of Mr.
Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad, and a trustee of Massachusetts Tech.
He is, therefore, the beau ideal of the successful son, and what he says
to his classmates after forty years’ experience in the outside world
represents the very soul of the alumni. Mr. Elliott is naively proud of
his remarks, and has had them printed in a pamphlet, which he sends
about freely. Try to enter into his primitive state of mind for a minute
or two, and read half a dozen paragraphs of his oratory:

  There is a spirit of unrest, of discontent, of extravagance, of
  idleness, of expected perfection, and impatience when we should
  remember that perfection and success are not immediately within one’s
  grasp.

  There has developed out of this a noisy effort by a relatively small
  number of people to upset and dislocate the established order of
  things and to “Fly to evils that we know not of.”

  What are called Radicalism, Socialism, Sovietism and Bolshevism are
  advocated, and too many people who should know better lend a receptive
  ear to those foolish, yet dangerous, doctrines, and thus encourage the
  ignorant, the thoughtless and the wicked.

  In schools, colleges and even in our beloved Harvard, there is some of
  this atmosphere, and it is disturbing many of the best friends of
  education and progress in the country.

  In giving young people their physical nourishment, we do not spread
  before them every kind of food and say, “Eat what you like whether it
  agrees with you or not.” We know that the physical machine can absorb
  only a certain amount and that all else is waste and trash, with the
  result that bodies are poisoned and weakened.

  In giving mental nourishment, why lay before young and impressionable
  men and women un-American doctrines and ideas that take mental time
  and energy from the study and consideration of the great fundamentals
  and eternal truths, fill the mind with unprofitable mental trash
  which, with some, result only in sowing the seeds of discontent and
  unrest? And which can result only in absolute life failure, spiritual
  and material.

The first thing we note from the above is, what an extremely low
standard of English composition prevailed at Harvard from 1877 to 1881.
The second is, upon what feeble intellectual equipment it is possible
for a man to have charge of two great American railroads. The third is,
why Mr. Howard Elliott declined an invitation to discuss the railroad
problems of the country on the same platform with Glenn E. Plumb. The
fourth is, why an advocate of special privilege tries so desperately to
avoid giving the young people of the country an opportunity to compare
his mental equipment with that of the radicals.




                             CHAPTER LXXIV
                            THE RAH-RAH BOYS


The most conspicuous of the activities of the alumni have, of course, to
do with athletics; this is the part of college life which the students
have made for themselves, and it is what college really means to the
great bulk of them. Now, the sedentary life is one of the many evils
invented by our civilization, and if college athletics meant that all
the students in the institution, both men and women, were getting a
thorough “work-out” three or four times a week, I should be willing to
say that the athletics justified the colleges. But what college
athletics really means is that two per cent of the students, or in small
colleges probably ten per cent, get an excessive amount of exercise,
sometimes to the permanent injury of their vital organs; while the great
bulk of the students are surrendered to the mob-excitements of a series
of gladiatorial combats and sporting events, which provide exercise only
for the vocal cords and the gambling instincts.

College athletics, under the spur of commercialism, has become a
monstrous cancer, which is rapidly eating out the moral and intellectual
life of our educational institutions. College rivalries have been
erected into the dignity of little wars, enlisting an elaborate cult of
loyalties and heroisms. The securing of prize athletes, the training of
them, the exploiting of them in mass combats, has become an enormous
industry, absorbing the services not merely of students and alumni, but
of a whole class of professional coaches, directors, press agents and
promoters, who are rapidly coming to dominate college life and put the
faculty on the shelf. “Drives” are instigated and funds raised for the
building of “stadiums,” and these, being a source of income, are a
continual stimulus to new activities. So this evil, also, is one which
breeds itself. The athletic alumni bring in new students for athletic
purposes, and these students increase the athletic excitement while they
are undergraduates, and go out from the institution to multiply the
athletic alumni.

I am only stating what every insider knows perfectly well, that our
college athletics today is almost universally commercialized. All the
big colleges have “alumni committees,” who are out scouting for the best
athletic material; they are watching the athletic life of all the “prep”
schools and other institutions where likely material is to be
found—including steel-mills and lumber camps. They are offering husky
men all sorts of inducements to come to the right college. The offering
of money is supposed to be forbidden, but there are very few colleges
today which do not regularly and systematically violate or evade this
rule. There are many kinds of jobs in connection with the gladiatorial
life which can be made available to the right persons, and which are or
can be made into sinecures. There are tickets to be sold and accounts
kept; there are duties as masseurs and attendants and janitors’
assistants. I know of one case, of a student who managed the
Intercollegiate track meet not so very long ago, who received eight
hundred dollars for this small service. The athletic budget of Harvard
is considerably over a million dollars a year, and football pays for it.
First-class coaches claim twenty thousand a year and get it, and
graduate managers also receive high salaries. There is a careful
pretense kept up that this gladiatorial industry is managed by students,
but in all the big universities this is a farce; the student managers
are puppets, the real masters of the industry being the alumni—business
men who bring the business point of view into sport. Anything to win!

Consider, for example, the athletic developments at Stanford University,
which have played their part in the demoralizing of that great
institution. There is a noisy bunch of alumni who have been called upon
to raise money on various occasions, and who have thus come to power,
and know it. They have cast out the honest but unpopular Rugby game, and
brought in the American game of batter and smash. They run the annual
contests with the University of California, working in alliance with the
railroads, the hotels, the restaurants, and the “sporting-houses,” which
of course make millions out of the enormous crowds of free-spending
people. The stadium at Stanford seats sixty thousand, at five dollars
apiece, so you can see how much money there is at stake, and how quickly
there grows up in the university a powerful group of students who are
nothing but sporting promoters, with the point of view and the vices of
the underworld.

Of course, everything depends upon victory, and to make certain of
victory there are professional coaches—the alumni pay the Stanford coach
ten thousand dollars a year, which is more than any professor has ever
received in the history of Stanford, and twice the salary of the
professor of clinical history. The alumni have raised a “yellow dog”
fund, to bring in professional athletes, and of course these fellows
know what they are there for, and do not waste much of their precious
time upon studies. A Stanford professor assured me that many of them did
not even bother to get text-books. The committee on scholarship was
changed, because some professors had made themselves unpopular by
refusing to lower the standards for these athletic idols.

Such was the story I was told at Stanford in April; and in July I read
in my paper that Stanford’s Board of Athletic Control is beginning the
construction of a four hundred and fifty thousand dollar men’s
dormitory, to be built out of the receipts from athletic contests. This
news appears on the “sporting” page of my newspaper, and is written by a
“sporting” man, with a “sporting” point of view. Note the haughty tone
in which the academic world is taught its place:

  This would seem to be the correct answer to the row about taking in
  gate receipts by certain academic minded professors in the East, who
  charged “commercialism.” The stadium cost Stanford approximately two
  hundred and five thousand dollars, and approximately one hundred and
  ten thousand was realized by Stanford as her share of gate receipts
  from the big game alone. A certain sum of money had already been
  advanced by the trustees to build the stadium. The crowd at this
  year’s contests in the stadium is expected to be even larger.

And of course, if Stanford has a stadium, the University of California
must have one. Her alumni and athletic boosters set to work to raise a
million dollars, using the methods of intimidation they had learned
during the war-time “drives.” One member of the faculty, full professor
and dean, became especially truculent about the meaning of “California
spirit”—to be proven by putting up money for the stadium. Students were
compelled to subscribe, and in the fall, when some of them found that
they had not been able to earn money to pay their full subscriptions,
they were refused admission to the university; that is, the university
refused to accept their registration fees, until their stadium pledges
had been paid!

Ex-President Jordan talked to me very emphatically about the athletic
evil at Stanford and at other institutions. There was a famous coach at
Stanford, who was taken to a university of the Middle West many years
ago; he gathered in among his gladiators men who were too ignorant to
speak English correctly, and some one paid them with cash, and with
promises of college promotions, which the faculty duly delivered. Thus a
certain famous football champion published in his home paper in
California the statement that he had been offered fifteen hundred
dollars and an education, to play football at this university. He went
to the Law School, with less than a high school education, and he was
graduated from the Law School the year he would only have entered
Stanford. There was a gathering of college heads in Chicago, to consider
the problem of professional athletics, and President Jordan was invited
by a professor of the university in question to tell about his
experiences with this coach. The result was that the alumni organized to
demand the resignation of this professor. Concerning one of these
gladiators President Jordan writes me: “After leaving college, he used
to stand in a San Francisco saloon where he collected small sums for
letting men feel of his muscles. He is not now living.” It would seem
that one needs more than muscle to secure survival in modern society!

That was ten or fifteen years ago, and the exploiting of muscle has
grown like all other kinds of American big business. At Princeton, which
is especially notorious for the purchasing of athletes, President Hibben
called a conference with the presidents of Yale and Harvard, to see what
could be done about it; they solemnly passed a series of resolutions to
the effect that the athletic managers must obey the amateur rules—which
they knew all about and laughed at; they laughed none the less after
this conference. I talked with a student at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, who saw at first-hand the process whereby Princeton
bought a champion hammer thrower and shot putter from that institution.
It fell to my friend to answer the telephone in the athletic association
office while the Princeton alumni were trying to get this man. The
students at Tech are bitter about the way their athletes are bought or
stolen—they haven’t as much money as Princeton. Another all-around
athlete was not allowed to run by Tech, but this did not worry him very
much—because he had such a handsome offer from Bowdoin!

To get a famous athlete is the only way these little colleges know to
“put themselves on the map.” They make desperate efforts, and sometimes
the results are comical. For example, in Kentucky is a little religious
institution known as Center College. No one had ever heard of it before,
but a couple of years ago it turned up with a carefully selected
assortment of gladiators, and beat Harvard at football. I happen to know
about one of the leading athletic lights who achieved this triumph; he
was a pool-room hanger-on before he was brought to the college, and now
that his brief day of glory is past, he is a farm-hand!

Everywhere these mighty men of muscle and money are coming to feel their
power. Speaking at an alumni meeting of the University of Pennsylvania,
a British rowing coach laid down the law to the vice-provost of the
university:

  You, Mr. Vice-provost, as representing the faculty, have told us that
  the university has added from eight buildings in ’76 to eighty now;
  that the students have grown from one thousand to seven thousand, but
  what has made your university? Why, athletics. Athletics are the
  biggest advertisement for any university, and athletics have made
  Pennsylvania. What has the faculty ever done for athletics?
  Nothing.... Get busy and alter it all.... Pressure on the faculty
  quick, and you can do it.

Thorstein Veblen, in his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” gives
an amusing illustration of the methods used to get these professional
gladiators “by” in their classes. The athletic committee, casting around
for “snap” courses, selected Italian as a likely one, and when
examination time came round the gladiators were required to read a
passage in Italian—the passage submitted being the Lord’s Prayer!
Professor Veblen does not name the university at which this happened,
but I have ascertained that it was Mr. Rockefeller’s University of
Chicago.

A curious illustration of the operation of the athletic system in our
smaller colleges is found in the January, 1922, bulletin of the American
Association of University Professors, dealing with the affairs of
Washington and Jefferson College, a religious institution located at
Washington, Pennsylvania. All these little toadstools are trying to turn
into big mushrooms, and there are two essentials to the procedure; one
is—if you will pardon the mixed metaphor—the harpooning of whales, and
the other is the winning of football victories. At Washington and
Jefferson there was one member of the faculty, a professor of chemistry
by the name of H. E. Wells, who failed to appreciate the supreme
importance of football victories in college life. He had his mind set on
the upholding of academic standards, and he ruthlessly “flunked” some
prominent athletes, who had failed to make good in their class work.

Naturally, this roused the indignation of the athletic alumni, who were
putting up their good money to pay the tuition and college fees, board
and room rent of members of the football team. (This was proved by a
committee of the trustees appointed to investigate the athletic
situation.) The athletic alumni set out to “get” the cantankerous
professor of chemistry, using for their purpose a man who was listed as
“general secretary” of the college, but had been energetic and
successful as a “field agent,” recruiting students for athletics. This
man, backed by the alumni, caused the publication in their interlocking
newspaper, the Washington “Reporter,” of an article attacking Professor
Wells’ record as a teacher, and presenting statistics as to the number
of students he had “flunked.” These statistics were entirely false, and
Professor Wells sent in a correction—which correction was, as usual,
buried in an obscure part of the paper. The American Association of
University Professors points out the important fact that the college
administration made no move to protect Professor Wells against these
false charges; on the contrary, says the report, “the administration
permitted a professor to be struck below the belt in such a way that his
popularity with students and with alumni was extensively damaged.” After
that, of course, it was easy for a committee of the athletic alumni to
appear before the trustees and charge that Professor Wells was
“unpopular among the students.” So Professor Wells was dropped by the
trustees at three months’ notice, without giving him a hearing, without
giving him a right to face his accusers, in fact without his even
knowing some of the charges against him.

Still more curious was the case of George Winchester, professor of
physics. He had raised the money for the only first class laboratory at
the college, and he had given more money than the majority of the
trustees; but he committed the offense of putting studies above
football, and for that he was punished. In March, 1918, the board of
trustees granted to Professor Winchester “a leave of absence for the
duration of the war, or so long as he remains in the service of the
allies.” After the armistice the board wrote to Professor Winchester, to
ask him when he would be ready to take up his work again, and Professor
Winchester cabled that he would be ready to resume work on July 1, 1919;
after cabling, he went to Toulon to do work with the French Admiralty.
Meantime, the athletic alumni got busy with the board, and the board
summarily dropped Professor Winchester, and appointed his successor!
Says the committee of the Professors’ Association:

  It would require stronger language than is suitable to this report to
  characterize justly the action taken. Regardless of any argument that
  might be developed to account for the extraordinary action of the
  board, it is sufficient to recount the bare fact that the board, after
  having granted a leave of absence, dismissed Professor Winchester in
  absentia, while he was in France on active service in the work for
  which leave had been granted, without a previous notification, without
  a hearing, without any redress whatsoever. It constitutes an act about
  which there can be no difference of opinion among right thinking men.




                              CHAPTER LXXV
                          THE SOCIAL TRAITORS


The failure of colleges to impart culture is a standard topic of our
time, so I shall not dwell upon it. The theme of this book is something
of far greater importance—the success of colleges in imparting a spirit
of bigotry, intolerance and suspicion toward ideas. Says a teacher in a
Pennsylvania college, who asks me not to use his name: “Our students are
climbers, strangers to idealism, or at best mere dabblers at it.” Or
consider the testimony of Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who taught at
Cornell, and later at Antioch, which is trying a novel experiment in
combining education and everyday work. Van Loon declares that he found
in the students of both colleges a profound and deeply rooted hostility
toward originality, a personal resentment toward anyone who interfered
with their standardized notions. They are taught from textbooks, and
they follow the book, and refuse to think about anything that is not in
the book.

To the same effect testifies Robert Herrick, after thirty years
experience at the University of Chicago. Our colleges follow the English
monastic tradition, says Professor Herrick; they pretend to watch over
the morals of their students, but with the crowds now thronging in, the
task is impossible, and the pretense is dishonest. No large university
would today dare attempt any real control, nor would the parents support
it; because fathers who send their sons to college with large allowances
and high-powered cars know perfectly well that these young men go on
“bats,” and that they take girls out into the country in their cars.

What discipline they get, according to Herrick, they get from one
another in their fraternities and clubs. They are uncritical, naive and
barbarous, with herd feelings instead of ideas. The first requirement is
that everyone shall be alike, a part of a mob. They teach the newcomer
the rules; he must wear a freshman cap, and if he has opinions of his
own they tell him he is too “tonguey,” and proceed to knock the nonsense
out of him. The faculty know of this, and think it is fine; they mix
with the men, and join the fraternities, and help in the production of
subservience and conformity. I quoted the above remarks to a professor
in another university, and he threw up his hands. “My God!” he cried. “I
am stupefied! My students accept everything that I say as gospel. If
only I might once discover a crank in my classes!” And he quoted the
phrase of William James, once of Harvard: “Our undisciplinables are our
proudest product.”

I have before me a letter from a professor in one of the “little
toad-stools,” Parsons College, Fairfield, Iowa. The Student Council
passed a rule, which was later approved by the faculty, that all
freshmen were to wear green caps. A hundred and fifty freshmen meekly
submitted; but there was one “conscientious objector.” My informant
writes:

  The upper classmen got together and announced that unless every
  freshman got a cap by noon of a certain day he would be subjected to
  the gauntlet of the paddling machine. I wish I could have gotten a
  picture of that mob of upper classmen on the campus of a “Christian”
  college, each provided with a club, as they lined up and forced Ball
  through the line of clubs, each taking as hearty a swat as possible—a
  fine specimen of the type of civilization we can expect from the
  leaders we are training in the Christian colleges today! What a new
  social order it will be! Through it all, the president has practically
  approved the whole procedure, from the chapel platform. Ball still
  refuses, in spite of a boycott by the student body, even his own
  fellow freshmen; and I understand a paper is to be read in chapel next
  week denouncing him, and calling for a boycott unless he submits. This
  is supposed to be the daily Christian religious service—the hour of
  devotion for the students!

Yet another professor compared his students to the crackers which are
packed in tin boxes by the wholesale bakeries; all cut from certain
patterns, and stamped with certain standard designs. We have sheltered
them from realities, and kept them ignorant of the problems they are to
confront. We have taught them a few formulas of morality, utterly
unpractical and impossible to apply—as we prove by not applying them
ourselves. From their social life the students learn what the real world
is—a place of class distinctions based upon property; they learn the
American religion—what William James calls “the worship of the
bitch-goddess Success.” They throw themselves into the social struggle
with ferocious determination to get ahead; and when they go out into the
world, they carry that spirit into the commercial struggle.

In every profession they find, of course, that the way to get ahead is
to serve the powers that rule, and to betray the general welfare. I
could take you through the professions which are taught in our
universities, one after another, and show you how the prevailing ethical
standards constitute treason to the human race. I could show you in
academic teaching how these same standards are justified, in phrases
only partly veiled. Take, Harvard, for example, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, admitted to have the highest standards of any
engineering school in America; we saw the professors in these
institutions selling themselves to predatory corporations, and laying
down high-sounding “principles,” whose sole effect and purpose is to
enable the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association to plunder the public. I
have a letter from a high official of the United States Bureau of
Education, who tells me more about these engineering traitors. He says:

  I recall one man, for example, who was called in by a water company
  for expert service in connection with the purity of the water, which
  was being questioned by the people. He contended with me that it was
  “his business” if he could find remunerative employment of that sort,
  and that he was under no obligation to give the public the benefit of
  his expert knowledge concerning the impurity of the water supply. But
  what aroused my ire more than anything else was the fact that he
  preached that kind of thing to his technical students as the standard
  of “loyalty” they should pursue toward the companies where they might
  be employed after graduation. This man was a real scientist. He was so
  thoroughly interested in his subject that he was willing to take
  considerable personal risks in conducting experiments, but he was
  sadly lacking in that social and religious conception which makes us
  realize our mutual obligations and duties.

Or take the work of inventors; they have a man at one of our greatest
universities who is a famous inventor, and he makes great scientific
discoveries, and then he goes to the big corporations and sells
them—what? The right to use his invention and spread it throughout the
world for the benefit of mankind? No; he sells them the right to
suppress the invention, and deprive mankind of the use of it for a
generation or two! You see, a new invention may mean the scrapping of a
great deal of existing machinery; if it falls into the hands of some
independent concern, it may cost the big monopolists enormous losses. So
they pay for the right to suppress it, and a great inventor is turned by
the social system into a kind of scientific blackmailer.

Or take the lawyers; surely I do not need to prove to you how the
lawyers are betraying mankind. A professor at the University of Chicago
told me of attending a class reunion, where a group of high-up
corporation lawyers got drunk and began gossiping about the tricks they
had played in their profession, and, as the professor said, it made him
physically ill. I also have heard these high-up lawyers talking; the
late James B. Dill, who was paid a million dollars to organize the Steel
Trust, spent many an evening in his home telling me the game as he had
seen it, and it began with bribery of judges, juries and legislators,
and ended with wire-tapping and burglary. The late Francis Lynde
Stetson, one of the highest paid corporation lawyers in New York, went
down to Trenton on the train with Judge Dill to beat some railroad rate
law, and he opened his suit-case playfully, showing that he had fifty
thousand dollars in new bank-notes. “That’s a fine kind of work for a
pillar of the church like you,” said Dill, and the other answered, with
a grin: “How do I know but that I may have to pay for my lunch?”

Or if you cannot believe Judge Dill, believe Judge Lindsey, who told me
about a young man who came to Denver from the Harvard Law School, full
of the fine phrases of altruism with which his teachers had filled him,
and when he learned what he had to do to practice corporation law in
Denver, he broke down in Lindsey’s office, and buried his head in his
arms and cried like a baby. Afterwards, so Lindsey writes me, “he
capitulated and joined the gang.”

Or maybe it is medicine the young man has studied. He has heard about
the nobleness of the healing art, but he has to keep an automobile, and
his wife wants to get into society, and competition is keen. There is
one way a physician can make a thousand dollars by a few minutes’ work,
and any physician who is in touch with the leisure class has women on
their knees to him every week, begging him to take their money. Dr.
William J. Robinson estimates that there are a million abortions
performed in the United States every year, so you see that our medical
schools have not steeled all their graduates against this temptation.
Now we have another one added—every physician in the United States is
made by law a dispenser of joviality, the seneschal of the castle, the
keeper of the keys to the wine-cellar!

Or maybe the graduate becomes a newspaper reporter. One of the oldest
Wall Street reporters in New York talked to me last spring, telling me a
little of the way things are going there. The newspaper reporters also
are keepers of the keys of the wine-cellar; they have police passes, and
some of them are running a bootlegging industry between New York and
Canada! Others have gone into high finance on a large scale—because, of
course, a financial reporter comes on information which is worth
thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. “Nowadays,” said my friend,
“when a Wall Street reporter gets a tip and rushes to the telephone, you
don’t hear him call his city editor; you hear him call his broker.” I
was told of one newspaper man who had the fortune to be called in when
Mr. Charles Sabin of the Guaranty Trust Company gave out some news of
the German overtures for peace, and this enterprising young man cleared
fifty thousand dollars from the information.

Or perhaps the young man becomes a college professor; if so, he hides
his convictions and makes himself a tight little snob and reactionary,
to win the favor of the college machine. He hides the truth from his
students, or he “shades” it, which is the same thing, and takes his
pitiful little bribe in the dignity of a full professorship. He turns
out class after class of young men, as ignorant of life and as helpless
against temptation as he himself was once. So reaction rules in our
country, and men who plead for social justice are slandered and
maligned, and turned into criminals in the public eye; all the agencies
of law and justice become mobs, and the Ku Klux Klan meets every night
in lonely places, and lights its fiery cross and prepares for the
wholesale slaughter of the future of mankind.

Just now the rich are having it all their own way; they can do the
killing and the bludgeoning and the jailing—and it never occurs to them
to think what an example they are setting to the workers, and what it
will mean when the tables are turned, and the disinherited of the earth
have their way for a while! It ought to be the chief function of
educators to point out things like this to the public; but that would be
“meddling in politics,” and we have seen that politics in colleges is a
privilege reserved to presidents and trustees. There are going to be
ferocious attacks made upon this book, and this seems as convenient a
place as any in which to explain what they mean. Faculty members will
rush forward to defend their institutions; in some cases, no doubt,
there will be resolutions of protest, with many signatures. They will
have some ammunition; for, of course no one can write a book of this
size, full of such masses of facts, and not make a few slips of detail.
These will be taken up and magnified into gigantic blunders, and
denunciation of them spread broadcast in the capitalist press. When you
read these things, bear one circumstance in mind: that any young
professor who wants to become a dean in a hurry, who has a vision of
himself selected as president in the course of a few years, will know
that he can find no more certain way to win favor with his overlords
than to find something wrong with this book, and then tell about it
gallantly!




                             CHAPTER LXXVI
                                 PREXY


I promised early in this book to consider how it happens that so many
college presidents are men who do not always tell the truth. We have now
seen far enough into the inside of colleges to understand the reason.
The president of a college or university is the great reconciler of
irreconcilabilities; he is the chemist who mixes oil and water, the high
priest who makes peace between God and Mammon, the circus-rider who
stands on two horses going in opposite directions; and all these things
not by choice, but ex-officio and of inescapable necessity. The college
president is a man who procures money from the rich, and uses it for the
spreading of knowledge; in fulfilling which two functions he places
himself, not merely in the line of fire of the warring forces of the
class struggle, but between the incompatible elements of human nature
itself—between greed and service, between hate and love, between body
and spirit.

Consider the rich, how they become so. Either they or their ancestors
before them have taken from others, and that which they have taken, the
others have lost. The very essence of their richness is that there are
many poor. If all were rich, there would be no sense in wealth, no power
in it, for there would be none willing to serve. It is plain to anyone
who can think that richness means possessing material things, and
excluding others from possession thereof. Of such is the kingdom of
Mammon.

And of what is the kingdom of God? In the region of the mind the
situation is exactly the opposite; the wealth of one is the wealth of
all, and the highest joy of possession is that the thing possessed may
be shared by all and be of benefit to all, with no diminution to anyone.
I am trying here to write a useful book; my pleasure is in communicating
to you what I believe to be truth, and exactly proportionate to my
success in spreading this truth is my own gratification. This applies to
Shakespeare writing a play, it applies to Beethoven composing a
symphony, it applies to Newton discovering a natural law; each gives
something which all mankind may enjoy forever, and no one’s pleasure in
“As You Like It,” or in the “Fifth Symphony,” or in an understanding of
the movements of the planets, is any less because at the same time
millions of other people are having that same pleasure.

This fact determines the attitude to life of the true scientist, the
scholar and the lover of the arts; it is as different from the attitude
of the trader, the speculator and the exploiter as black is different
from white, or night from day. There can be no greater irreconcilability
conceivable to the human mind. But now comes a new species of superman,
whose function it is to make peace between these two forces, to persuade
the lion of commerce and the lamb of learning to lie down in the same
pasture together! The name of this great American enchanter is PREXY.

How does he do it? I am moved to be blunt, and say in plain English that
he does it by being the most universal faker and the most variegated
prevaricator that has yet appeared in the civilized world. He does it by
making his entire being a conglomeration of hypocrisies and
stultifications, so that by the time he has been in office a year or two
he has told so many different kinds of falsehoods and made so many
different kinds of pretenses to so many different people, that he has
lost all understanding of what truth is, or how a man could speak it.

The college needs money. Colleges always need money, because college
students get three times as much as they pay for, and the hope of
getting social prestige, to enable them to live easy lives, brings
constantly increasing crowds each year to the college gates. So “prexy”
seeks out possible donors; “prospects,” as they are called in the slang
of mendication. He cannot go to them directly and ask for money; the man
who tries methods so crude is speedily eliminated from the list of
college presidents. The successful one is the possessor of what is
called “tact”; that is to say, he understands the weaknesses of human
nature, he is an expert in the predatory psychology, a hunter who knows
how to pierce the tough and scaly hides of old commercial monsters who
have spent a lifetime watching people trying to get their money away
from them, and have managed hitherto to resist all threats and
blandishments.

The college president has to meet these plutocratic monsters socially;
he has to be “human” to them—that is to say, he has to pretend to be
interested in them, to admire them and their ways of life. He has to
flatter their vanities, invite them to meals and find out what they like
to eat, hold their overcoats and escort them to the motorcar, be
gracious to their wives and a bit flirtatious to their daughters. After
he thinks he has sufficiently gained their confidence, he begins a
careful approach, to make these monsters realize the indispensability of
propaganda to every ruling class. There is a battle of ideas going on in
the world, dangerous notions are clamoring for attention, class hatreds
and jealousies are raising their hideous hydra heads. What safety can
there be for vested interests, unless they make it their business to see
that the new generation is taught respect for the property clauses of
the Constitution? There is no department of human thought into which
this struggle with new ideas does not penetrate, there is nothing that
universities do or teach that cannot be related, in the eloquence of
college presidents hunting money, to the cause of law and order and safe
and sane stagnation.

On that basis the college president does his “vamping”; and having got
the necessary papers signed and witnessed before a notary, he gets a
bath and a shave, and puts on clean clothes, and draws a deep breath,
and expands his chest, and confronts the world with a proclamation of
magnificent devotion to the service of truth and the welfare of mankind.
These millions which he has just collected from the aged oil dinosaur,
or steel megatherium, or beef pterodactyl, or whatever the beast may
be—these millions he is now going to spend in a free and absolutely
disinterested pursuit of understanding, with utter loyalty to scientific
facts wherever they may lead, with complete trust in democracy and the
wisdom of the people, with reverent humility before the God of Truth and
Justice and Love. This that I am pronouncing you will immediately
recognize as a standard commencement oration; delivered in the presence
of a hundred plutocrats in decent frock-coats, and five hundred faculty
members in caps and gowns, and a graduating class of a thousand young
people; published next morning to the extent of four columns in all
local newspapers, and relayed by the Associated Press to the extent of
half a column to thirteen hundred morning newspapers throughout the
United States. In the course of my trip among the colleges I was talking
with a certain eminent scientist, and I spoke of the tragedy and horror
that had befallen mankind through the failure of Woodrow Wilson to mean
any of his golden words. “My God!” said the scientist. “Didn’t you know
what all that was? Haven’t you been hearing that kind of thing for
thirty years? Didn’t you know that those speeches of Woodrow’s were
commencement orations?”

It makes no difference whether the college president is dealing
personally with the interlocking directorate, as in privately endowed
institutions, or whether he deals with the politicians who run the
government machine for these same plutocrats. As a matter of fact, the
college president who represents the so-called public institutions is in
the more humiliating position of the two; for the free lance man has an
open field, he can get himself invited to dinner-parties, and always has
the hope that some day he may run into a politer plutocrat; but the
president of a state university has no choice, he has to deal with the
“boss” whom he finds in power. He will be snubbed and insulted until the
tears run down his cheeks; and then he will go back to his deans and his
kitchen cabinet and explain what it is that the political machine
demands—the expulsion of this or that professor, the support of the
university for this candidate or that bit of graft; and the president
and his cabinet will work out the proper set of lies to tell to the
discharged professor, or to the plundered public, or to both.

Thus the college president spends his time running back and forth
between Mammon and God, known in the academic vocabulary as Business and
Learning. He pleads with the business man to make a little more
allowance for the eccentricities of the scholar; explaining the absurd
notion which men of learning have that they owe loyalty to truth and
public welfare. He points out that if the college comes to be known as a
mere tool of special privilege it loses all its dignity and authority;
it is absolutely necessary that it should maintain a pretense of
disinterestedness, it should appear to the public as a shrine of wisdom
and piety. He points out that Professor So-and-So has managed to secure
great prestige throughout the state, and if he is unceremoniously fired
it will make a terrific scandal, and perhaps cause other faculty members
to resign, and other famous scientists to stay away from the
institution.

The president says this at a dinner-party in the home of his grand duke;
and next morning he hurries off to argue with the recalcitrant
professor. He points out the humiliating need of funds—just now when the
professor’s own salary is so entirely inadequate. He begs the professor
to realize the president’s own position, the crudity of business men who
hold the purse-strings, and have no understanding of academic dignity.
He pleads for just a little discretion, just a little time—just a little
anything that will moderate the clash between greed and service, the
incompatibility of hate and love.

Either he succeeds in his purpose of persuading the professor to be less
a scientist, a citizen, and a man of honor, or else he decides, in
conference with his kitchen cabinet, that a way must be found to get rid
of this unreasonable marplot. He and his cabinet now start a campaign of
intrigue against the professor; they set going rumors calculated to
damage his prestige; they contrive traps into which to snare him; or
they wait until in the war between greed and service he gives utterance
to some plain human emotion—whereupon they find him guilty of
“indiscretion,” and announce to the public that he has shown himself to
be lacking in that “judicious” attitude of mind which is essential to
those occupying academic positions. Or perhaps they find that they have
too many men in that department; or they decide to combine the
departments of literature and obstetrics. They have a thousand different
devices, scores of which I have shown you in action. Always they tell
the professor—with their right hands upon the Bible they swear it to the
public and to the newspapers—that it is purely “an administrative
matter,” there is no question of academic freedom involved, and everyone
in their institution lives, moves and has his being in the single-minded
love of truth.

I have on my desk a letter from a Harvard professor, who tells me that
my chapters on that institution are interesting, but he thinks I
attribute too much cunning to the objects of my indignation. “These
conforming preachers and editors and teachers are more of the genus
Babbitt than of the genus Machiavelli.” This is a question of
psychology, which only the Maker of the creatures can decide. In any
case it matters little, because my purpose here is not to apportion
blame, but to point out social peril, and it matters not whether social
traitors know what they are doing—the effect of their action remains
equally destructive to society. I have called the American college and
university a ruling-class munition-factory for the manufacture of high
explosive shells and gas bombs to be used in the service of intrenched
greed and cruelty. The college president is the man who runs this
indispensable institution; and he is not one of the military leaders who
sit in swivel chairs in city offices, he is one who sallies forth in
person at the head of his armies, bravely hurling commencement bombs and
Fourth of July torpedoes.

The college president is a human radio, a walking broadcasting station,
a combination of encyclopedia and megaphone. He is that man whose
profession it is to know everything; in his one mind is summed up
ex-officio all the knowledge of all the specialties. He tells his
professors what to teach, and how to teach it, and has little birds and
whispering galleries and telepathic mediums to advise him if they obey.
He is a human card-index, an information service bureau concerning the
reputations of professors in all other institutions, and of promising
undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates, and just what they are worth, and
how much less they can be hired for. Or, if he does not possess all this
knowledge, he possesses a perfectly satisfactory substitute—the ability
to look as if he possessed it, and to act as if he possessed it. Such is
the advantage of being an autocrat; criticism does not affect you, and
whether you are right or whether you are wrong is the same thing.

The college president has acquired enormous prestige in American
capitalist society; he is a priest of the new god of science, and
newspapers and purveyors of “public opinion” unite in exalting him. He
receives the salary of a plutocrat, and arrogates to himself the
prestige and precedence that go with it. He lives on terms of equality
with business emperors and financial dukes, and conveys their will to
mankind, and perpetuates their ideals and prejudices in the coming
generation. It is a new aristocracy which has arisen among us, and they
all stand together, they and their henchmen and courtiers, against
whatever forces may threaten. I have shown how they have invented a new
set of titles of nobility, which they sell for cash, or use to exalt
their patrons and overawe you and me. We shall find it worth while to
turn over the pages of “Who’s Who in America,” and see what these mighty
ones of the earth think of one another, and what they do to flatter one
another’s pride, and to keep their own order in the public eye.

“I do not give degrees to scientists,” said Wheeler of California. “I
give them to statesmen and college presidents”; which means that these
gentry have a system of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
Wheeler managed to get scratched no less than twelve times during his
life, Eliot of Harvard eleven times, Shanklin of Wesleyan eleven times,
Smith of Pennsylvania twenty times, Lowell of Harvard twenty times,
Nicholas Miraculous twenty-five times. Descending in the scale of
plutocratic importance we find Angell of Yale with nine honorary
degrees, Faunce of Brown with nine, Schurman of Cornell eight, Judson of
Chicago seven, Day of Syracuse seven, Burton of Michigan six, Goodnow of
Johns Hopkins five. Jordan of Stanford got only four—you remember that
our icthyologist and race-horse expert was tainted with pacifism and
democracy!

You remember also the mushrooms and toadstools, and the absurdities we
discovered at these places. I look up the present and recent heads of
these institutions, and there is scarcely one who has not been able to
get his back scratched. I find Crawford of Allegheny with seven degrees,
Thompson of Ohio State with five, Mitchell of Delaware with three,
Wishart of Wooster with three, Few of Trinity with three, Garfield of
Williams with five, Conwell of Temple with two, Hixson of Allegheny with
two, Brooks of Baylor with one, Buchtel of Denver with one, Parsons of
Marietta with one, Goodnight of Bethany with one, Montgomery of
Muskingum with one. Also, it is interesting to note, you will find all
these presidents of little toad stools duly recorded in “Who’s Who.” You
may look in that volume for the best minds in our country, the men who
are serving as pioneers of social justice and democracy, and three times
out of four you will not find their names, or, when you do find them,
they are relegated, like the present writer, to a back volume. But all
presidents of colleges, no matter how insignificant or absurd, take rank
with senators and cabinet members and ambassadors and supreme court
judges and admirals and generals, and go into every volume ex officio.




                             CHAPTER LXXVII
                            DAMN THE FACULTY


We have seen the successful sons returning to shed their glory upon
their alma mater; and we have seen the successful grandsons enjoying
their four years of play at learning and work at football. Let us now
have a glimpse at the life of the scholar amid all this worldly pomp and
gladiatorial clamor, the thunder of the foot-ball captains and the
shouting of the cheer-leaders.

There are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid,
overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank and file college teacher.
Everyone has more than he—trustees and presidents, coaches and trainers,
merchants and tailors, architects and building contractors, sometimes
even masons and carpenters. A young instructor in a great endowed
university, living on a starvation wage, made to me the bitter remark:
“We are the fellows of whom the Bible speaks—we ask for bread and we are
given a stone”—he waved his hand toward a showy new structure rising on
the campus. I have before me a copy of “School and Society,” for
November 6, 1920, giving the result of an investigation: “How Professors
Live.” At the University of Illinois a hundred and sixty-seven men, or
forty per cent of those at the institution, filled out a questionnaire.
I quote a few paragraphs from those of the associate professors, each
paragraph referring to a different man:

  Old clothing is invariably made over for children. Have gardened a lot
  and kept chickens. Use butter substitutes. Wear clothing until frayed.
  Above expenses do not consider depreciation of furniture and household
  equipment.

  Using vacations to earn money. Postponing dental services. Using
  inferior grades of clothing and using them when they should be
  discarded. Cut down food in quality and quantity.

  We have no help, do our own washing and my wife makes all the
  children’s clothes, etc.

  Neglecting necessary repairs; inferior clothing, butter substitutes,
  etc. Almost no theatres, entertainments, travel or books.

  Small apartment, clothing below standard of position, entertainment
  almost eliminated, etc.

  General retrenchments (food, clothing, medical services, etc.) and the
  discontinuing of newspapers, magazines, all amusements, concerts,
  etc., that are not free. Am unable to subscribe to worthy causes
  (relief funds, etc.).

  No vacation trips. Postponed dental attention. Inferior grades of
  clothing. Cannot wear as good clothes as I did when in high school and
  college. Have not spent as much on entertainment.

  We use butter substitutes; I run a garden and sole the family’s shoes;
  my wife makes all her own clothing.

  Unable to take vacations or trips to relatives who live at distance.
  Buy no books, only clothing absolutely necessary. Self-denial in
  almost everything imaginable.

There you have nine little family tragedies, out of ninety I might have
quoted from the article, out of one or two hundred thousand that exist
in our country. So the poor professors and their wives and children
live; and above them is the world of prominence and power into which
they dream of climbing. The way of success is the way of toadying and
boot-licking, of conformity and reverence for the gods established. Do
you wonder that, as Harold Laski says, some men deliberately adopt
reactionary ideas as a means to promotion, while others, whose brains do
not permit them to be reactionary, conceal their real opinions? Do you
wonder that the young instructor comes like the chameleon to take the
color of the environment which surrounds him? However much he may be
absorbed in his books, his wife knows about the world outside, and their
children have to be reared in this world.

To show you how college professors are tempted, let me tell you an
anecdote, the experience of a teacher of political science at one of our
leading Eastern universities. I will call him Smith; and he was invited
to meet the head of one of the largest universities of the Middle West,
whom I will call Jones. President Jones had suggested that Professor
Smith should come to his institution as head of a big department, and
while Jones was in the East they met to talk it over. Said Smith,
telling me the story: “This was a big chance, and I was disposed to
accept it; but first I wanted to find out what would be my status. Of
course, I could not ask the man directly: ‘Shall I be free?’ I might as
well have asked: ‘Shall I be allowed to commit rape?’ What I did was to
set a trap; I said: ‘You know I teach a ticklish subject, public service
work; the question is, should my teaching be administrative, or should
it be policy-determining? My conception of the matter is that I should
get the data, but not determine policies.’ And you should have seen the
man’s face light up! ‘That’s it exactly!’ he said. ‘I’m so glad to have
you make the distinction! That makes the matter perfectly clear.’ And he
went home and told his faculty that I was the best man they could
possibly get!” While Professor Smith told me this story we were sitting
at dinner in a restaurant, and he added: “It happened right in this
room—at that table over there. I declined the appointment, of course.
But you see how it is; when men face temptations such as that, it breaks
down their characters in the end.”

How much direct bribery of college professors there may be, I cannot
say. A dean at the University of Wisconsin told me how a wealthy father
had offered him money to “pass” his deficient son; and I suspect that
kind of thing happens more often than it is told. But most of the time
the thing is done through what I call the “dress-suit bribe.” A college
professor is human like the rest of us; he likes a good dinner and a
good cigar; he likes to be invited to “nice” homes—and his wife likes it
still more. I know a professor at a state university who “flunked” the
son of a trustee—and this in spite of all kinds of pressure from those
above him. But the average man can hardly be expected to jeopardize his
career in a case like that. Where such temptations exist, it is a
psychological axiom that many will fall.

I have heard faculty members—mostly very young ones, or else very old
ones—assert that there is never any favoritism in college examinations;
and I have contented myself with a gentle smile. Imagine such a
situation as we saw at Columbia, when young Marcellus Hartley Dodge,
heir to untold millions, was an undergraduate. He gave to the university
a building while he was still in college, and was prepared to make a
still larger donation upon his graduation, and to become a trustee at
the age of twenty-six. And now, some little whipper-snapper of an
instructor of English composition, or of French syntax, presumes to
“flunk” Marcellus Hartley, and subject that young prince of the
plutocracy to the humiliation of stepping down among despised lower
classmen! Let the whipper-snapper try it, and he would soon find out the
meaning of that Columbia student-song whose chorus runs: “Damn the
faculty!”

Sydney Smith made the remark that there was no use expecting every
curate to be a St. Paul; and we may say, quite as safely, there is no
use expecting every college instructor to be a Charles A. Beard. Men who
are trained in colleges of snobbery come out snobs, and if at the top of
your educational system you heap all the honors upon wealth and all the
humiliations upon scholarship, you will have at the bottom of your
faculty young men who have learned what the world is, and have set
themselves the task of getting up by the methods established. I assert
that from top to bottom in our colleges and universities today wealth is
replacing knowledge, and worldly-minded and cynical members of the
faculty are catering to the rich among the students, knowing that when
these students come back as “successful sons,” they will be the persons
whose friendship counts.

The students are organized into exclusive fraternities—perfectly
ridiculous and perfectly banal things, and yet they run the social life
of the colleges, and without exception they run the alumni association,
and speak with the voice of the college in the public press. And do you
think they fail to impress the faculty? Remember, the fraternity men are
the ones with money and good clothes and good manners; they stand
together and make a gang, they do “log rolling” for one another, they
tip one another off to the “snap” courses and the “easy” teachers; they
study the psychology of the various “profs,” and advise one another how
to “work” them. They frequently take faculty members into the
fraternities, and thus get their backing for the system.

A professor at the University of Wisconsin told me a curious story. A
group of boys had failed to get into any of the fraternities, and they
had a bright idea; why not organize one for themselves? Somebody had
organized every fraternity at some time past, and there were plenty of
Greek letters still not taken up! So they proceeded to devise a new
combination, and a mystic pin, and a set of pass-words and initiation
idiocies; they rented a house, and invited some “goats” in other
colleges to follow their example.

Now at this university there was a certain young professor whom I call
Black, to distinguish him from my informant, whom I call White. Black
was a country boy, who had worked his way through college, and had
always been a non-fraternity man. Now he came to White, very much
flattered, revealing the fact that he had been invited to join a
fraternity. White asked which one, and was told—it was this one of which
White had witnessed the organizing only a year ago! It seemed just as
good to Black; and in a few years it would seem just as good to
everybody. But imagine the intellectual state of an institution when one
of its professors, a mature man, a scientist and master of an important
specialty, could be naively pleased at being invited to take part in
flummeries got up by a dozen boys not yet out of their teens, and whose
sole aim and ideal was to prove themselves superior to a mass of other
boys!

You miss the point of this story if you do not understand it as a
symptom of the disease which is poisoning our intellectual life. Every
little “fresh water college” is trying to “make” the big fraternities;
every president of every little toadstool is shaping his policy to such
ends—because that is the way to get the rich students, which is the way
to get the rich alumni, which is the way to get the money. In the big
Eastern universities, which are the fountain-heads of this imbecility,
the social competition amounts to a ravenous and frenzied war, involving
not merely the students, but the very mightiest of our academic
big-wigs. Look them up in “Who’s Who,” and you find them solemnly
recording their phi-beta-babbles and their kappa-gamma-gabbles and their
alpha-apple-pies.

And when men of science and learning come down from the thrones of
reason and take part in the jostling and the trampling and the climbing
of this silk-hatted mob—then you witness sights that make you despair
for the human race. Not so long ago the greatest thinker of our time
came to America—Albert Einstein, who happens to be a Jew, and still more
terrible to mention, a German. As fate would have it, there came to our
country at the same time another distinguished visitor, the Prince of
Monaco—a mighty potentate, his bosom covered with various ribbons and
jewelled orders. He is owner of the world’s greatest gambling-hell, at
Monte Carlo, and keeps himself out of jail just as do the
gambling-princes of New York—by owning the police.

Now the institution whose duty it is to welcome visiting scientists is
the American Academy of Science; and this institution prepared to
welcome Einstein and the Prince of Monaco at the same banquet. But,
horror of horrors, his Excellency, the Prince, refused to be received
along with a German! There was terrible excitement in academic circles.
The master of ceremonies was a high-up scientific snob, married to a
member of the Morgan family, and a pet of Nicholas Miraculous. He
decided that the invitation to Einstein must be canceled. But finally a
compromise was arrived at; His Excellency consented to come, provided
Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and
not asked to speak!

The greatest thinker of our time is a naive and childlike person, simple
and human, and he apparently had no idea what was happening to him. He
was not used to the world of what calls itself “science” in America,
with its “pushers” and “tuft-hunters,” forcing themselves to the front,
while the real workers stay in their laboratories and do their work,
suffering in silence “the insolence of office and the spurns that
patient merit from the unworthy takes.”




                            CHAPTER LXXVIII
                              SMALL SOULS


What every man and every organization of men in America want is to grow
big. If you ask why they want to grow big they are puzzled, because it
has never before happened to them to hear anybody question the moral
axiom that bigness is greatness. An office building which is twelve
stories high is twice as admirable as one which is six stories high; a
city which has a million inhabitants is twice as important as one which
has only half a million. It matters not that the additional population
may be festering in wretched slums; whatever they may be, grafters and
grabbers, drunkards and morons, a greater number of them is a thing to
be boosted for and boasted about. The city grows big in body, but in
soul it remains small.

And the same thing happens to the college. Every little college wants to
be bigger than its neighbor, and looks forward to being the biggest in
the state, and to that end employs the noisy arts of the real estate
promoter and the circus agent. An article published in “School and
Society,” April 22, 1922, tells about the activities of “field
secretaries” and “field agents” now employed by colleges. “According to
the president of one of Ohio’s state universities, only four or five of
the forty colleges in the state are able to dispense with the services
of one or more of these functionaries. Their use is apparently growing
in favor. The dean of one of Ohio’s strongest colleges confessed
regretfully that the authorities in his institution are about to yield
to the pressure being exerted within the institution to appoint a man to
‘sell the college’ to prospective students.” Crossing the prairies I
stepped from my train to get a breath of fresh air on a station
platform, and found myself confronted by an enormous sign, hailing me in
the breezy Western fashion: “Hello, this is Manhattan, Kansas, a Good
Town, home of the famous Kansas State Agricultural College, 1400 acres,
50 buildings, 433 faculty, 3500 students. Free auto camping grounds.”

The professor, needless to say, is expected to be a “good sport,” and
contribute his proper share to the “uplift” of his institution. Anything
notable that he does is seized upon and exploited by the college press
agent; and sometimes the efforts of publicity hounds to deal with
unfamiliar sciences and arts produce comical results. Professor Jacques
Loeb began to experiment in the artificial fertilization of the eggs of
sea-urchins, and this was marvelous material for stories, it went all
over the world. Hardly any of it was right, but that made no
difference—not even in academic circles; Professor Loeb’s star ascended,
and so did his salary. He was invited to the University of California to
continue his researches, and there he found the successful sons prepared
to use him as they do the Mission bells and the Bohemian Club “jinks.”
They put a “booster button” on him, and got out picture post-cards of
his laboratory, and a real estate firm started an advertising campaign
to sell lots in his neighborhood. But when they found that Loeb resented
this kind of exploitation, they lost interest in artificial
parthenogenesis, and discovered that the professor was a godless
materialist and a poor hand at teaching freshmen.

The average faculty member of course never scales the heights of fame,
never sees his portrait on picture post cards. The college grows big in
body and stays small in soul; while the professor is apt to stay small
in both body and soul. His salary does not permit a generous diet, and
his work is confining and tedious. He teaches three or four classes a
day, and corrects compositions and test-papers, and keeps records and
makes out reports, and obeys his superiors and keeps himself within the
limits of his little specialty. He leads a narrow life, withdrawn from
realities. He goes to lunch at the Faculty Club and talks “shop” with
his colleagues, men who live equally empty lives and are equally out of
touch with great events. There is gossip and intrigue and wire-pulling;
a professor at the University of Chicago heard his colleagues talk for
an hour about the fact that someone had got an increase in salary of two
or three hundred dollars. A professor at Johns Hopkins compared his
colleagues to the lotus eaters: “Peaceful, endowed and dull.”

As I write, Professor Frank C. Hankins, one of the rebels at Clark
University, hands in his resignation and formulates his criticism of the
teaching in our higher institutions:

  The teacher of social science may treat his subject matter in a purely
  formal manner, as is done in most high school courses in civics, where
  attention is given to the powers and duties of Congress, the number of
  justices in the Supreme court, etc. This is a pity; but the high
  school teacher and, unfortunately, a large number of college teachers
  of the social sciences must reckon with the “man in the street,” who
  would feel that “sacred” things were being defiled if civics courses
  discussed the origin and development of institutions, the relation of
  patriotism to war, or the relative merits of individualism and
  collectivism in social life. It is a real tragedy in the life of a
  teacher if he must squeeze all the juice out of his subject matter and
  give his pupils the dry pulp, in order to hold his job.

And to the same effect testifies Ludwig Lewisohn, out of many years
experience at Wisconsin and Ohio State. I jotted down his phrases in my
notes:

  It is like teaching from a cook-book. There are certain receipts which
  you follow. You try to explain the scientific spirit, but you find
  that in college the word “science” means cut and dried experiments
  without meaning. You teach the principles of a subject, but you never
  apply them. You explain the “Novum Organum,” for example, but you
  don’t apply Bacon’s method to the current formulas of capitalist
  imperialism. You explain the relativity of morals according to Locke,
  but you never test present-day marriage and divorce, property rights
  and the duty of obedience to the state.

And again, a professor now at Wisconsin: “You teach the facts, but you
do not interpret them; and especially you do not deal with remedies. You
teach details, not vision. You accumulate ‘learning,’ in the narrow
sense of that word; raking in the dust-heaps of the past, and producing
carefully documented treatises about absurdities.” I have given a list
of such topics in the chapter on Harvard; I ran into others here and
there—Professor E. A. Ross mentioned two theses which won degrees while
he was at Berlin—“The Linden Tree in German Literature,” and “The Hay
Supply in the Army of Frederick the Great.” Or, if Germany is too far
away, perhaps you would be interested in a Columbia thesis, composed by
a man who is now a professor at Princeton: “Metaphors Concerned with
Nature in the Prose of Aelfric”; or a Columbia thesis, by a professor
who is now at Charleston: “The Dialect Contamination in the Old English
Gospels.” Said Nietzsche: “You beat them, and they give out dust like
meal-sacks. But who could guess that their dust came from corn, and the
golden wonder of the summer fields?”

Colleges are growing like those prehistoric monsters, the size of a
freight-car, with brains that would fit inside a walnut-shell. And as
they grow, there is more and more “administration,” more and more red
tape and routine; the professor is turned into a bookkeeper and a filing
clerk. Writing in “Science,” President Maclaurin of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology drew a picture of the adventures of Isaac Newton
in a modern American university:

  The superintendent of buildings and grounds, or other competent
  authority, calls upon Mr. Newton.

  Supt.: Your theory of gravitation is hanging fire unduly. The director
  insists on a finished report, filed in his office by nine A. M. Monday
  next; summarized on one page; typewritten, and the main points
  underlined. Also a careful estimate of the cost of the research per
  student-hour.

  Newton: But there is one difficulty that has been puzzling me for
  fourteen years, and I am not quite ...

  Supt. (with snap and vigor): Guess you had better overcome that
  difficulty by Monday morning or quit.

How can dull men, absorbed in dull routine, hold the attention of large
groups of wide-awake youngsters? The answer is that they do not, and
that is the failure of our colleges. The situation is summed up in a
delightful anecdote, which was solemnly sworn to me by a college
professor who dares not let me use his name. He was doing the customary
“glad-hand” stunts at a reunion of the “old boys,” and one of these
successful sons came up to him, beaming with pleasure, and clasped his
hand in a hearty grip. “Professor Smith! Well, well, Professor Smith, I
sure am glad to see you! You have no idea what a good time I had in that
English class of yours. We read ‘Hamlet,’ you remember, but we only got
halfway through. I often find myself wondering how that play came out.”

Or, if you cannot believe that story, take the testimony of Professor C.
T. Titus of Whitman College, who tried the experiment of asking college
seniors in what state the city of St. Louis is located. There were
guesses as far apart as Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee! No wonder
that Bertrand Russell remarks that “Education has been one of the chief
obstacles to the development of intelligence.”




                             CHAPTER LXXIX
                          THE WORLD OF “HUSH”


Knowing as I do the economics of our plutocratic empire, I had a general
idea of what I should find in my tour of the colleges; but I had little
idea of the details, and went with an open mind, prepared to follow the
facts where they led. After I had visited a dozen colleges, I began to
be struck by a peculiar circumstance; not merely was I encountering
similar incidents—I was hearing the same phrases over and over! Certain
expressions became familiar, and I would wait for them; if they did not
come, I would suggest them, and note the instant response: “Yes, that’s
it exactly!”

I go over my note-book and cull out these phrases: “It is a slow
strangling.” “It is the wearing away of a stone by drops of water.” “It
is an intangible thing, an atmospheric pressure.” “It is a question of
good taste, of loyalty to the institution, to one’s colleagues.” So ran
the story, over and over, all the way from California to Massachusetts
and back again. I came to realize that the important fact about academic
freedom in America is not the extreme and dramatic cases I have been
narrating; it is the whole system of class prejudice and class
repression, which operates for the most part without its victims being
conscious of it.

I quote other statements from my note-book: “Our young instructors are
weaklings, selected as such. They seek a comfortable berth, sheltered
from the storms of the world.” “They find that promotion depends upon
conformity, and they conform.” “There is a tremendous absence of
freedom, but the victims don’t realize it; they think they are merely
being polite; before they know what has happened to them they have
become small men.” “No man who thinks can tell just when he will become
a victim, or how he will be tripped up.” “I can count an indefinite
number of friends to whom I would express myself—up to a certain point.”
“You may stay in the place for years, and then some day discover one man
to whom you dare to talk.” “Those who go out have adventures, but pity
those who stay.” “The plow-horse does not feel the rein until he tries
to step out of the furrow.” “Yes, our men are free; they are horses that
stand without hitching.” Such statements, with varying phraseology, were
made by scores of men, in as many different colleges and universities.

I sat in one group of faculty members discussing this subject, and the
conversation took a humorous turn; they started making a list of the
various offenses for which a man may be fired from an American
university. You may be fired if you don’t like your wife, or if your
wife doesn’t like you. You may be fired if you use the word revolution,
referring to anything since the eighteenth century. You may be fired if
you get into a fight with the janitor. “That happened to a very
distinguished botanist of my acquaintance,” said one professor. You may
be fired if you go to church too little, or you may be fired if you go
to church too much. I asked how the latter could be, and the explanation
was that there are aristocratic universities like Harvard and Princeton
and Pennsylvania, which follow the Episcopal tradition, and an excessive
demonstration of piety would be highly offensive. You may be fired if
you are near-sighted, and also if you are far-sighted. You may be fired
if you are discovered to have Negro blood in your veins—an incident
narrated by Alvin Johnson in the “New Republic,” under a thin veil of
fiction. You may be fired if you undertake to prove that a candidate of
the Republican party for President has Negro blood in his veins—the
singular experience of Professor W. E. Chancellor of Wooster. Of course
you will be fired if you are discovered in any irregular sex
relationship; also you may be fired if you discover the president of
your university, or one of your prominent trustees, committing a similar
offense. In general, you may be fired if you depart in any way from the
beaten track of propriety—and this whether your motives be the lowest or
the highest, whether you are subnormal or supernormal, a crank or a
genius.

And here is the all-important fact; the decision in this difficult
matter lies not in the hands of your colleagues, who know you, but in
some autocratic individual who is too important to know you, and too
busy. Says Professor George T. Ladd of Yale University, discussing the
position of the college professor:

“His whole career, and the reputation and influence which he has won by
a life of self-sacrificing labor, may at any moment be in peril through
the caprice, or cowardice, or ill-will of a single man, or of a little
group of men who have influence with that single man.”

There are many college professors who have learned to adjust themselves
to this situation, and make the best of it. They will call this book
exaggerated and even absurd; but can they deny the statement of
Professor Ladd above quoted? Can they deny that this is the situation in
ninety-five per cent of American colleges and universities? The
professors have no tenure and no security, save the kindness and good
faith of those who hold the purse-strings and rule their lives. Says
Professor Cattell in his book, “University Control”: “In certain
departments of certain universities, instructors and junior professors
are placed in a situation to which no decent domestic servant would
submit.” If you will look up this book in your library you will find in
it overwhelming evidence of the discontent of college professors with
their status. Three hundred leading men were consulted, and out of
these, eighty-five per cent agreed that the present arrangements for the
government of colleges are unsatisfactory. Says James P. Munroe, for
many years a professor at Massachusetts Tech:

  Unless American college teachers can be assured that they are no
  longer to be looked upon as mere employes paid to do the bidding of
  men who, however courteous or however eminent, have not the faculty’s
  professional knowledge of the complicated problems of education, our
  universities will suffer increasingly from a dearth of strong men, and
  teaching will remain outside the pale of the really learned
  professions. The problem is not one of wages; for no university can
  become rich enough to buy the independence of any man who is really
  worth purchasing.

Or consider the testimony of Professor E. A. Ross, of the University of
Wisconsin, in the “Publications of the American Sociological Society,”
Vol. IX, 1914, p. 166:

  I agree with Professor Nearing; academic asphyxiation is much more
  common than is generally realized. President Pritchett’s paper is, I
  think, far too optimistic. The dismissal of professors by no means
  gives the clue to the frequency of the gag in academic life. We forget
  the many who take their medicine and make no fuss. There, indeed, is
  your real tragedy. Don’t waste any pity on the men who, despite
  repeated hints and warnings, go ahead until they are dismissed. They
  will generally prove to be able to take care of themselves. Pity
  rather the men who, without giving sign or creating scandal, bow to
  the powers above and cultivate a discreet silence. There are very many
  of them. I know it, for many of them have come and told me with
  bitterness and rage of the gag that has been placed in their mouths.

  Remember, too, that the source of danger is not endowment, at least if
  the donor has kept no strings upon his gift or is dead. It is not what
  has been given but what is hoped for that influences most the policy
  of university authorities. When a sizable donation is trembling in the
  balance, when an institution has been generously remembered in the
  will of some conservative gentleman who takes an annoying interest in
  the details of its life, how the governing board of the institution
  caters to the prejudices of the potential donor and how intolerable
  and unpardonable appear untimely professorial utterances or teachings
  which put the gift in peril!

I have before me a letter from Mr. Arthur E. Holder, who is not a
college man, but a labor leader who had four years’ experience with
college men, as representative of labor on the Federal Board for
Vocational Education. Mr. Holder writes:

  My conclusion after several years’ contact with college professors and
  public school teachers is that the environment of school and college
  life is degenerating to the male species. Outside of a bare half
  dozen, these men seem to be afraid to say that their souls are their
  own. They apparently admire boldness in others, and they applaud when
  another exposes the economic evils surrounding them. They do not
  hesitate to whisper as to their experiences; but it almost always is
  followed by a caution, “Don’t say I said so,” or “This is on the
  square,” or “This is just for yourself alone,” etc.

My experience in collecting material for this book brought out the
academic situation with startling vividness. To begin with, I had the
idea that if you wanted information on any subject you had merely to
write to the people who had it. I collected from various sources the
names of one or two hundred college professors who were supposed to be
sympathetic towards social progress, and I printed a little circular
outlining my proposed book, and asking them to tell me their experiences
and conclusions. I mailed these circulars, and waited for replies; I
waited two or three months, and the number of replies I received could
be counted upon the fingers of one hand!

Of course, that might be because all these professors were satisfied
with their position, and had no information to give. But I doubted that,
and decided to travel over the country and talk personally with these
individuals. I laid out a schedule and wrote again to arrange for
interviews. Taught by experience, I explained that everything would be
strictly confidential; but even on this basis I failed to hear from
two-thirds of the men to whom I wrote. In various ways, through friends
or colleagues, I would learn that this one or that one had thought it
best to be able to say that he had never met me!

Still further insight came to me on the trip. I visited some thirty
institutions, and met men and women who had taught in two or three
hundred. Out of all these I should estimate that ninety-five per cent
accepted my offer to consider what they told me confidential, and some
even accepted my offer not to mention to their colleagues that they had
talked with me. I would not need but one or two fingers to count the
number of men and women now teaching in American colleges and
universities who told me their experiences frankly, and stated that I
might quote them by name.

Still further evidence: I came home after my seven thousand-mile
journey, and sorted out my notes, and made a list of new names and new
sources of information which had been suggested. There must have been
four hundred such names, and I wrote a letter to each one, again
enclosing my little circular and making careful promises of secrecy. Out
of these four hundred I may have heard from one hundred, and I should
estimate that three-fourths of these told me about the experiences of
other men. There are eight or ten who profess themselves fully satisfied
with the conditions under which they work, but even most of these do not
care to be quoted. A number avail themselves of my offer, not merely to
consider their communications confidential, but to send back their
letters after I have read them!

Another detail, even more significant: there would be places in my notes
concerning which I was in doubt, some statement for which I wished
additional verification, and I would write to the people I had met. I
recall them now, one after another—men with whom I sat at luncheon or
dinner in a quiet corner in some restaurant, or in their homes; some of
them talked to me for two or three hours, telling me their experiences
and the experiences of their colleagues, some shameful, some grotesque
and absurd. Many of these men promised me additional data, a clipping or
a letter or confirmation of some sort; and I write to remind them of
their promises, or to ask some new questions—and there comes no reply! I
write to some of them two or three times before I realize what is the
matter; these men are dead so far as concerns the mail! As matters now
stand, they can deny that they ever met me—many of them told me that
they would do that! But if they should send me so much as a line of
their handwriting, some day the Black Hand of the plutocracy might raid
my home and steal my papers—and then there would be ruin for them and
their families!

Can you think of stronger evidence of terrorism than this? Out of not
less than a hundred men who welcomed me with every courtesy, who
expressed cordial interest in my project, and complete agreement with my
view of the academic situation—out of these hundred men I need just the
fingers of my two hands to count the ones who have been willing to write
and answer my questions under the strictest pledge of secrecy! I take
this occasion to send my greetings to the others, and assure them that I
do not blame them too severely.

While preparing my proofs, still more evidence comes to me. In two
different cases I sent a chapter of my book to university professors for
them to revise, as they had offered to do. They dictated to their
secretaries cold and stern letters, stating that they did not care to
comply with my request; and along with these letters they sent me the
manuscript, carefully and minutely revised! They understand that I will
get the point; they have done what they promised to do, but at the same
time they have protected themselves, and have a letter which they can
display to college authorities, proving that they had nothing to do with
my nefarious book!

Another case, still more significant: the liberal professors in one
state university in the Middle West banded together and sent me a
message through a former colleague, imploring me not to tell the story
of their experiences in my book! The details of this controversy have
been given full publicity in the press, and are public property;
nevertheless, I am implored not to mention them, because it will stir up
the reactionaries once more! Another professor in a great Eastern
university, who told me how he took a public stand on an issue of
academic freedom, telegraphs forbidding me to mention his name—and this
though the story of his action has been publicly praised in the bulletin
of the American Association of University Professors, and in several of
the liberal magazines! A former professor in one of our largest Middle
Western universities begs me to omit his name in telling his story—and
this although I have newspaper clippings telling every detail! What am I
to do about cases of this sort? Whom shall I consider, the individual
professor or the public welfare? Read the man’s pitiful words:

  I realize the value to you of specific instances, and am well aware of
  how much I am asking when I request the omission of my name. But it
  means my livelihood! If I am again kicked out of educational work I
  shall never be able to accomplish such educational reforms as I have
  in mind for the future. Please don’t put me in jeopardy! Sociological
  investigation often, of course, sacrifices the individual with perfect
  equanimity; but in this instance the individual is perhaps worth
  saving. Please let me know that you will spare me.

And here is another letter from a professor at another great state
university in the Middle West:

  I am greatly interested in the subject of the book which you are
  preparing, and I gladly give you my answer to the questions contained
  in your circular, with the definite understanding, however, that you
  will not mention my name as the source of information, or in any other
  way disclose my identity. The mere fact that as a matter of
  self-preservation and of protection to my family I feel compelled to
  make this proviso—disgusting as otherwise it is to me both as a man
  and a scholar—is proof sufficient of the control which special
  privilege exercises over educators in this country.

And here is one more letter, perhaps the most significant of all. The
writer is a young scientist, who got his training at the University of
Wisconsin, where for two years he took part in the activities of the
liberal students. He tells me the effect which these two years have
produced upon all his later career. Read his analysis of “academic
freedom” among scientists; it covers the case completely, and every
fairminded scientific man who reads it will be forced to admit that it
is as exact as it is painful.

  My position was student assistant, a half time instructorship. I
  stayed at Dr. P——’s house two years, and my relations with all the
  faculty of that department were intimate and cordial always, and still
  are. I was known as a rather harmless and intellectualized radical,
  and as rather a hard worker, one who spent long hours in his
  laboratory and applied himself assiduously: being especially useful
  around a scientific department by reason of ingenuity with apparatus.
  A sufficiency of all the technical virtues, you see, and the result
  was that I was very well thought of. A taste for sociology and radical
  discussion was looked upon as an amiable and altruistic weakness,
  which might serve to give my biology a humanistic turn....

  No specific thing has ever happened since which I could lay against
  any of my professors at Madison. They have backed me cordially and
  enthusiastically whenever the occasion demanded. However, my
  reputation as a radical, still re-echoes through my career as a
  scientist; almost overshadows it. My chief professor, though he said I
  was the best man he had ever turned out, when I wanted a job, said
  also privately that he didn’t think I would ever make a scientist, I
  was interested in too many other things. Another Wisconsin professor,
  when asked about me, questioned whether I would ever “settle down to a
  scientific career,” though I had done absolutely nothing else for
  three years since I left there. A third expressed doubt, to me
  personally, that I would ever “accomplish anything.” My reputation has
  followed me through two jobs, so that when considered for the one I
  now hold, the question of my radical proclivities was again raised.
  All these things, and many others, are hard to get at objectively; but
  they sum up to a condition in which an activity incidental to three
  years study on a Ph.D thesis appears still to be of more weight in the
  eyes of the men who pride themselves on being unbiased and
  liberal-minded scientists, than anything scientific that I may have
  accomplished. Every one of them would unhesitatingly state that a
  man’s radical opinions were of no concern to them “if he did his
  work”; and no one of them would admit that any man would be “doing his
  work” if they knew he held these opinions. My own reaction is to
  pretend that I have lost interest in unconventional affairs, and to
  sedulously avoid any appearance of such interest in them in my
  professional capacity; in effect, I am one thing as a scientist, and
  another as a human being; I have dissociated most of my private
  concerns from my official ones; and the barrier between my school
  activities and any other intellectual interests is complete. I have
  two sets of ideas, two sets of friends, two modes of behavior, a
  regular double standard of morality, and I suppose I am only half a
  man in either capacity.

  This is something of a tragedy to me personally, though that is not
  the interesting thing in general. The aspect of this that has struck
  me is, how perverted the whole unconscious thought of the academic
  institution is. As I have said, this is not evidence for a book. I
  might have trouble in demonstrating that my professors were not right
  about me. But one thing is certain; that I could have spent more than
  the amount of time and energy I spent on radical activities, on any of
  a number of more or less creditable things; on Wine, Women and Song,
  on student activities, golf, poker, or just plain idleness, and never
  have attracted any discreditable attention scientifically. Those
  things my professors and colleagues would disregard, provided I kept
  up a reasonable show of professional proficiency. There is only one
  realm of relaxation or dissipation which is recognized academically as
  a vicious incursion into scientific singlemindedness and assiduity;
  and that one is an intellectual interest in social unconventionality.
  That one distraction, and that alone, is recognized as an inherent and
  incontestible enemy of _scientific_ right thinking. And the amusing
  part of it is that the scientists themselves fail to realize their own
  bias. For that is what it amounts to, even in the best of them; about
  one whole set of data, if they are not positively reactionary, then
  they not only have no positive opinions, but they impose upon
  themselves and others a negativity of opinion that amounts to a
  condition of positive prejudice.




                              CHAPTER LXXX
                        THE FOUNDATIONS OF FRAUD


I have taken you about from college to college and shown you the
interlocking trustees, using the institution for the protection of their
money-bags; also the successful sons, guarding the prestige and good
name of their alma mater. To complete the picture I now draw your
attention to the many organizations, national in their scope, which have
been formed for the purpose of keeping our educational system in the
capitalist fetters.

I begin with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
which was started seventeen years ago with a gift of ten million
dollars. Its purpose was to provide pensions for superannuated college
professors, and in his letter to the trustees Carnegie announced that
“according to expert calculation” the revenue would be ample “to provide
retiring pensions for the teachers of universities, college and
technical schools in our country, Canada and Newfoundland.” This
statement was speedily shown to be absurd; the total cost of the system
for Columbia University alone would have been twice the income of the
Foundation, and the cost for all the country would have been two hundred
times the income of the Foundation. So very speedily the Foundation was
compelled to limit the institutions included in its list, and it began
laying down rules for colleges, and assuming control of higher
education. It refused pensions to professors in the University of
Illinois unless the university would alter the conduct of its medical
school at Chicago. In like manner the governor of Ohio was informed that
the universities of the state must be “reconstructed” on lines laid down
by the Foundation. Becoming still more embarrassed for lack of funds,
the Foundation discovered that it was bad for teachers “to have the risk
of dependence lifted from them by free gifts,” and it proposed to have
the professors begin paying for their own insurance.

Now, in the first place, a slight knowledge of economics will enable
anyone to realize that a free gift of life insurance to professors at
certain institutions would not permanently benefit the professors,
because, under the stimulus of competition, this benefit would at once
be taken into account in the salaries paid by the institution. So, what
the Foundation amounts to is an endowment to certain privileged
universities, with a highly autocratic control accompanying the gift.
Under the plan as modified to compel the professor to pay for his
insurance, the plan becomes a method of binding him to the institution
and subjecting him to the administration. A part of the professor’s
salary is held out, to be repaid to him later on as a reward for good
behavior. Says Professor Cattell: “The professor who does not see eye to
eye with Wall Street and Trinity Church may be compelled to sacrifice
either his intellectual integrity or his wife and children. He is under
heavy bonds to keep the peace; but it will be the peace of the desert.”

If you are interested in this shrewd device for the enslavement of
college professors, you are referred to Professor Cattell’s book,
“Carnegie Pensions,” published in 1919. The new insurance organization
is headed by Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler, a sufficient
guarantee of its character. That the sheep have learned to recognize
these wolves in shepherd’s clothing is shown by the fact that a
questionnaire sent out by “School and Society” to a great number of
college professors, asking for their opinions, brought a vote of
thirteen in favor of the scheme and six hundred and thirty-six against
it! The American Association of University Professors appointed a
committee of twenty-four to study the scheme, and this committee
submitted two elaborate reports condemning it.

The gentleman who was appointed by Mr. Carnegie to run this Foundation,
and who worked out the scheme, is Dr. Henry Smith Pritchett; I look him
up in “Who’s Who,” and find amusing evidence of what it means to have a
strangle-hold over American institutions of learning. Dr. Pritchett goes
about like an Indian war-chief with scalps at his belt—no fewer than
eighteen honorary degrees from American colleges and universities! What
the professors think of his administration you may guess from the
comments on his last statement made by Joseph Jastrow, professor of
psychology at the University of Wisconsin. “There is the same copious
shuffling of the issues, the same lack of frankness, the same assumption
of benevolence of motive, the same disregard of accepted principle as of
actual opinion, the same aspersions and evasions.”

The next great benefactor of our educational system was Mr. John D.
Rockefeller, who has given one or two hundred millions of dollars to a
foundation for the purpose of improving our schools and colleges
according to Standard Oil ideals. The General Education Board has
millions to give to those educational institutions which conform, and it
holds over the head of every college and university president a
perpetual bribe to sell out the interests of the people. Great numbers
have accepted, a few have refused, and these have been the object of
continual intrigue. Turn back to the chapter on North Dakota, and read
the statements of Dr. W. J. Spillman of the United States Bureau of
Agricultural Economics, concerning the efforts of these Rockefeller
“educators” to dominate the land grant colleges. And let me call your
attention to a speech delivered by this courageous public servant before
the semi-annual conference of the National Board of Farm Organizations,
February 11, 1919.

In order that you may understand Dr. Spillman’s charges, I will first
make plain the economics of the situation. After the war there was a
frightful slump in values; the Federal Reserve Board, which controls our
banking system, gave unlimited credit to the Wall Street banks, which
they passed on to the big corporations, to enable them to get by the
crisis without dropping the prices of their products. The farmers were
left to “hold the sack,” and they were ruined by millions—on my trip
through the Northwest I was told of whole counties in which every single
farm was for sale for taxes. The farmers wanted to know why the price of
farm products should drop to nothing, while the price of manufactured
articles was not affected. They wanted to know the cost of producing
farm products, and they looked to the experts of the Department of
Agriculture to get these figures. On the other hand, of course, big
business decreed that the figures should not be got.

Their agent in carrying out this decree was the Secretary of
Agriculture, David F. Houston, Harvard graduate, ex-president of the
University of Texas, ex-chancellor of Washington University, and holder
of seven honorary degrees; a member of the Southern Education Board, a
subsidiary of the Rockefeller General Education Board; later chairman of
the Federal Reserve and Farm Loan Boards, and now president of the Bell
Telephone Securities Company. Dr. Spillman portrays Dr. Houston as
lying, cheating and intriguing, resorting to every device in order to
keep the facts about farming costs from being collected. Says Dr.
Spillman:

  I cannot give you the full facts about this matter without exposing
  honest and honorable men to the fury of this brutal autocrat, under
  whom they unfortunately have to serve.... Early in his administration
  there was circulated through the department a typewritten sheet said
  to have been written by a member of Mr. Rockefeller’s General
  Education Board, and which was said to represent Mr. Rockefeller’s
  views, in which Secretary Houston concurred. This sheet purported to
  outline the duties of the department. It stated that the department
  should make no investigations that would reveal the profits made by
  farmers, or that would determine the cost of producing farm products.
  No representative of the department should ever under any
  circumstances even intimate that it is possible to overproduce any
  farm product. The entire business of the department was to teach
  farmers how to produce more than they now produce.

The General Education Board, you understand, possesses unlimited funds,
it pays no taxes, and renders no accounting to anyone. Professor Cattell
stated in “Science” that it “keeps for its own private use the
information that it collects, and does not even publish the financial
statements that should be required by law from every corporation, and
first of all from those exempted from taxation.” And these funds are
used in paying fancy salaries to experts in all subjects, especially
intrigue and wire-pulling. Dr. Spillman tells how this board got charge
of the farm demonstration work in the South, and how he kept them from
getting charge of the same work in the Northern and Western states. In
order to hamper Spillman’s work, “Mr. Houston issued orders to
demonstration workers in the department not to co-operate with any
outside agency except Mr. Rockefeller’s General Education Board.”

Soon after Mr. Houston became secretary he established an office in the
department, known as the Rural Organization Service. The funds for the
initiation of this work were furnished by the General Education Board.
The important work of the Bureau of Markets was placed under this
office, and Professor T. N. Carver of Harvard was invited to become head
of the new bureau. He came to the department with real enthusiasm for
his work, and at once proceeded to outline a series of important
investigations on marketing of farm products, rural credits, and similar
subjects. But when his plans were laid before the General Education
Board by Secretary Houston they turned him down flat, with no
explanation for their action. Professor Carver was much puzzled at this,
and sought an interview with certain members of the board, for the
purpose of finding out, if possible, why they had decided to discontinue
their support; but he could get no information of any kind. He then told
them in very plain language just what he thought of the General
Education Board. Soon after this the newspapers carried a brief notice
to the effect that Professor Carver had not found his work in the
Department of Agriculture entirely congenial and would probably return
to Harvard at the end of the year. He did return to Harvard soon
thereafter. You will appreciate the gay humor of the fact that Professor
T. N. Carver of Harvard University is named by Woodworth Clum, of the
Better America Federation, the Black Hand of California, as one of two
college professors who are heroically battling against Socialism in the
colleges, and are deserving of the ardent support of all patriotic and
liberty-loving Americans!




                             CHAPTER LXXXI
                         THE BOLSHEVIK HUNTERS


We shall next have a glance at those organizations and foundations which
are frankly propagandist in their purposes, and which conduct
departments of espionage and slander. We have already seen the work of
the Better America Federation of California; there are a number of
similar institutions which are nation-wide in their activities.

You remember, in the story of the University of Wisconsin, the young
instructor whose career was placed in jeopardy by the National
Association for Constitutional Government. This organization has been
active in our educational centers, and among its publications is a
pamphlet by a prominent corporation lawyer of Washington, advocating the
establishment in all American colleges of a compulsory course in
opposition to Socialism. Nicholas Murray Butler has actually established
such a course at Columbia; it is required of freshmen, and is
camouflaged under the name of “Contemporary History.” The students have
embodied their opinion of it in the phrase, “Contemptible History.”

Also, the National Association of Manufacturers has been active. It was
this organization which was exposed, in the famous “Mulhall” letters, as
expending many millions in the bribing of Congress in the interest of
big business. This organization has sent out agents to make propaganda
in favor of commercial training in all colleges, and also to turn our
public school system into an institution for the perpetuating of a class
civilization. They call their scheme “vocational training,” and they
wish to educate the children of the poor as workers, and to exclude them
from general culture.

Also there is the National Security League, a high-up hundred per cent
organization, whose active educational head received a three years’
leave of absence from Princeton University, to carry on propaganda on
behalf of capitalist nationalism. In the beginning it was Hun-hunting,
but later it turned into a Bolshevik-hunt, with Woodrow Wilson waging a
private war in Siberia and Archangel, and Attorney-General Palmer’s
thugs clubbing the heads of men and women who dared to disbelieve in the
divine right of the plutocracy. Just now this organization is carrying
on a campaign in defense of the Supreme Court’s right to annul acts of
Congress, and defeat the will of the people in the interests of
property. It has what is called a program for “economic education”; it
proposes to have “the Constitution” taught in the public schools—meaning
thereby the inviolability of special privilege. It sends out “dope” to
the press of the country—and in this material I note an amusing
concession to the well-known habit of newspapers to falsify. The “date
line” of this press matter begins with the word “New York,” and then a
blank is left, so that newspapers may pretend to have received a long
telegram from the metropolis!

There are such organizations as this in every section of our country.
They call themselves merchants’ and manufacturers’ associations,
chambers of commerce, citizens’ alliances, national protective
associations, home defense leagues. They do not deal especially with
education, but when their attention is called to unorthodox teachings,
or to “outside activities” of college professors, they intervene with
authority. From the “National American Council” I have obtained a list
of seventy-nine such organizations, all pledged to keep the American
people in “blinkers.” Recently a number of them—the National Association
for Constitutional Government, the Public Interest League, the League
for Preservation of American Independence, the Constitutional Liberty
League, the Anti-Centralization Club—have formed themselves into one
super-organization known as the “Sentinels of the Republic.” They intend
to enlist a million patriots, their motto being “Every citizen a
sentinel, every home a sentry-box.” The object of this sentineling is to
smash the Socialists, and among the organizers are of course David Jayne
Hill and Nicholas Murray Butler.

Also, this chapter would not be complete without mention of that
immortal committee of the New York state legislature, which has given to
the English language a new word. The “Luskers” hauled radicals of all
sorts before it, raiding their homes and offices, smashing their
furniture and stealing their papers. It went particularly after the
school-teachers, and we shall meet it again when we come to the schools.
One of its chosen victims was the Rand School of Social Science, which
is really a college, but modestly refrains from calling itself such. It
is an institution in which students are frankly and shamelessly taught
to think for themselves, and the politicians of the state and city of
New York understand that their existence is jeopardized by such a place.
The first steps taken against the Rand School were to raid the place and
throw the typewriters and the teachers down the stairs. As that did not
cause the pupils to stop thinking for themselves, the Lusk committee
recommended, and the New York state legislature passed a bill, requiring
that all institutions which carry on teaching in New York state shall
have a license from the regents of the state education board; the
intention, of course, being that a license shall be issued to all
institutions in the state except the Rand School of Social Science and
the “Modern School,” organized by the followers of Ferrer.

The Rand School has refused to apply for a license under this law, and
the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, has just ruled against the
school, holding the act constitutional. The next step is to carry the
case to the Court of Appeals, and after that to the United States
Supreme Court. It is manifest that if this Lusk law is upheld, there
will be no use talking any more about academic freedom, so far as
concerns the state of New York. Common sense would suggest that the
provision in the United States Constitution, forbidding the passing of
laws interfering with freedom of speech and of the press, should cover
this case; but when you investigate the subject you find that common
sense and the plain words of the Constitution are not what count in
capitalist law. There is a provision in our Constitution forbidding
interference with “the right of the people to bear arms in time of
peace”; but that right has not prevented the courts of New York state
from upholding a law forbidding a citizen to keep a revolver in his
home! It is pleasant to be able to record that Governor Miller, who
signed these Lusk laws, was defeated for re-election in November, 1922,
by a plurality of four hundred and ten thousand votes, the largest
plurality ever cast in the history of an American state.

There are many other organizations watching our colleges. The
interlocking newspapers are vigilant, and do not always confine their
activities to their own locality. The Chicago “Tribune” has exposed and
caused the expulsion of more than one college professor. We have seen in
this book such activities on the part of the “Oregonian” of Portland and
the “Missoulian” of Montana, the Seattle “Times” and the Boston “Evening
Transcript,” the Grand Forks, North Dakota, “Herald,” the Rockford,
Illinois, “Star,” the Fort Worth, Texas, “Searchlight.”

In Rhode Island is the Providence “Journal,” whose publisher we have met
as one of the three leading trustees of Brown University. The editor of
this paper is a super-patriot, Mr. John Revelstoke Rathom, who is
tireless in war upon “radicalism” in the colleges, not merely of his own
state, but throughout New England. I find Mr. Rathom lecturing before
the Liberal Club of Clark University—the same organization which was so
bitterly denounced by the Worcester “Telegram” as Bolshevist! Mr. Rathom
put no restraint upon his contempt for the parlor Socialists; he
denounced them as “unsexed brains,” and declared that he “would not pay
them twenty-five dollars a week” on his newspaper—this being the final
test of excellence in human brains. “Still,” says Mr. Rathom, “they are
permitted to teach our young students all this filth, this infidelity to
country, this bestial doctrine.” He declared that in many places “our
public schools have become hot-beds of anarchy, instead of shrines of
liberty.”

Mr. Rathom’s title to hundred percent Americanism is secured by his
Australian birth and English education. In the days before America
entered the war, this multiple patriot took up the task of bringing us
in, and published in his paper an elaborate series of exposés of German
intrigue in our country. It read like Sherlock Holmes, and was taken up
by the interlocking press, and created an enormous sensation. Then Mr.
Rathom started a series of articles in the “World’s Work”—tales about
German spies and bomb plots, and how Mr. Rathom with his host of secret
agents had penetrated even into the German embassy at Washington! But
something happened, nobody knew what. Mr. Rathom’s narrative came to a
sudden stop, and the “World’s Work” said no more about it. It was not
until several years later that the truth was revealed; the United States
Secret Service authorities had objected to being represented as a
collection of “boobs,” and had forced Mr. Rathom to a showdown. Not
merely had they made him stop the publication of his articles; they had
made him sign an elaborate document, in which he admitted that a good
part of his material was the product of his own imagination, and the
rest had been furnished him by the Bohemian National Alliance, and the
Croatian and Serbian national societies, and other anti-German and
anti-Austrian groups in America! I quote you just one sentence of this
document, in order that you may observe the nature of a worm when it
wriggles:

  I feel that the general public opinion, which has rather unfortunately
  credited us with the actual bringing to justice of German spies and
  malefactors, has been misdirected to the extent that our only possible
  claim to valuable constructive work in the past three and one-half
  years ought in fairness to be restricted to the educational value of
  our combined efforts, and the newspaper enterprise which produced a
  great number of stories printed in our newspapers.

And then follow twenty-eight long paragraphs, in which Mr. Rathom admits
in detail the falsehoods in the “stories” he published, and winds up by
agreeing to make no more public addresses during the war! Also, one
ought not deny the honor of mention to Mr. James M. Beck, corporation
lawyer and amateur patriot. Mr. Beck holds three honorary degrees from
American universities, and is described to me by a university professor
as “the most notorious high-brow ass in the country.” He travels about
making commencement orations in our colleges, and clamoring for the
casting out of professors who fail in loyalty to the plutocracy. If you
want to know just how foolish one of these hundred percenters can make
himself in public, read the controversy of Mr. Beck with Professor
Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School concerning the Mooney case,
published in the “New Republic” for January 18, 1922.

Another hundred percenter who is much concerned with our education is a
leading corporation lawyer of Denver, Mr. Charles R. Brock, one of the
grand dukes of Denver University, where we studied the career of
Chancellor Buchtel. Mr. Brock is attorney for the “Big Four” utility
corporations, which have run the city government of Denver for a
generation; his partner was for a long time chairman of the infinitely
corrupt Democratic party of Colorado. So Mr. Brock is terribly afraid of
Socialists, and last spring I find him delivering a tirade against them
to the young ladies of the most exclusive finishing school in Denver.
Also he published in the Denver “Post” an attack upon President Thomas
of Bryn Mawr, because of her radicalism. We shall have an inside glimpse
at Miss Thomas’s activities before long, and discover the truly comical
cautiousness of her “radicalism.”

It seems to trouble these corporation gentlemen especially that women
should be venturing to think; they get after the women’s colleges again
and again. Thus, some years ago, the president of Vassar received a
letter from a high-up interlocking trustee, informing her that it had
been discovered that twenty girls in that institution had formed a
Socialist group, and that the trustee proposed to take action unless
this group was broken up. The president of Wellesley received a letter
from a prominent successful son, stating that he had learned that two
members of the faculty had voted for Debs! At Vassar they pretend to
permit freedom of discussion, but they limit the Socialist organization
to two speakers a year, while they place no restriction upon the number
of speakers brought in by the Y. M. C. A. and other groups. A lecture by
Albert Rhys Williams was canceled, upon action of the trustees, after
that friend of the Russian people had given his testimony before the
Overman committee of the United States Senate. A professor at another
woman’s college—she will not permit me to name the place—told me a funny
story of how the president was visited by a hundred percent banker, who
frightened her with the tidings that he had unearthed “radical
activities” among the faculty, and proposed to take action about it
before the trustees. He had the “goods” in his pocket, he said; and
after some persuasion, he consented to produce the “goods”—which proved
to consist of a letter from a parent, reporting one of the professors as
advising a girl to read “those Bolshevist and Anarchist magazines, the
‘Survey’ and the ‘New Republic’!”




                             CHAPTER LXXXII
                            THE HELEN GHOULS


I have reserved for a separate chapter our most active anti-socialist
organization, the National Civic Federation, a combination of
class-conscious capitalists such as Elbert H. Gary and Alton B. Parker,
with high-salaried labor leaders who have sold out their class. Once a
year these labor leaders are honored with an elaborate banquet in New
York City, where they listen to patriotic speeches from the wholesale
corrupters of our public life. This National Civic Federation has a
special department, headed by Condé B. Pallen, a Catholic lecturer, the
“Committee for the Study of Revolutionary Movements.” It runs an
elaborate system of espionage, and is perhaps the greatest single agency
for the brow-beating of college professors.

I had special opportunity to observe the workings of this enterprise,
because I served for ten years on the executive committee of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which used to receive the special
attention of Mr. Ralph M. Easley, secretary of the Federation. This
gentleman subscribed for six copies of our little monthly magazine, and
used to quote extracts from it as a means of terrifying his backers into
parting with their cash. He would list the names of the professors and
students whom we mentioned, and would stir up college presidents and
trustees and local business men and newspaper editors against them. Some
tragedies resulted from this; and often it happened that professors and
students lost interest in our work, and offered no explanation.

The most prominent of the backers of this Federation has been Mrs.
Finley J. Shepard, née Helen Gould; one of the half dozen children of
Jay Gould, the old-time railroad wrecker and Wall Street gambler. His
other children turned out wasters and wantons, but Helen was a woman of
kind heart, who gave much money to charity, and was the darling of the
New York newspapers in the days of my childhood. She married a
corporation lawyer, an official in the Gould railroads, and now she has
swallowed whole the goblin stories of those who live by scaring rich
people into putting up their money for class propaganda.

I do not mean to say that there are not men and women among the “reds”
who would be glad to overthrow the American government and abolish the
constitution, but I say that such people can only be met and overcome by
free discussion, based upon an honest resolve to bring social justice
into the world. Also, I say that the peril to our land which these
“reds” represent is not one per cent of that represented by the big
business criminals who run the National Civic Federation. I say
furthermore that the constitution of the United States and the good name
and credit of our country will not suffer as much damage from the
propaganda of Lenin and Trotsky in a hundred years as they have suffered
from the system of corruption and terrorism instituted by Ralph M.
Easley and Condé B. Pallen with the money of Helen Gould Shepard.

When I was in New York I met a man who declared that he had been present
at a luncheon-party, at which Mrs. Shepard stated that she had pledged
her entire fortune to the stamping out of radicalism from our colleges.
She was maintaining an organization for the carrying on of
“investigations” into the teaching of social questions, and the ousting
of those who taught unsound ideas. Within the last year Mrs. Shepard
herself had caused the ousting of two such men. I did not want to repeat
these statements without giving Mrs. Shepard an opportunity to confirm
or deny them, so I wrote her a polite note, asking for an interview.
This note was not answered, and a couple of months later I wrote a
detailed letter, in which I stated what I had learned from several
sources, and asked her to correct the statements if they were false. I
pointed out that when persons of great wealth spend their money for
propaganda, they enter a field which is of public concern, and the
public has a right to be informed as to what they are doing. This letter
likewise remained unanswered, so I take it as fair to assume that Mrs.
Shepard admits the truth of the statements quoted above.

In these activities she is earnestly supported by her husband, who is a
trustee of the University of Jabbergrab, and last spring was serving on
a committee appointed by the state superintendent of education to
browbeat the school teachers of the city who were suspected of
unorthodox ideas. The sessions of this committee were secret, so I was
not able to observe Mr. Shepard functioning. I have, however, a pretty
good picture of the Shepard family life, in a letter from a well-known
Methodist clergyman, who was invited to a dinner-party at the home of
Mr. and Mrs. Shepard. Their conversation was devoted almost exclusively
to “the intellectuals,” whom Mrs. Shepard “held responsible for the
present disturbance in the social order.” She gave her guest the Lusk
committee report—six large volumes, in the index of which the author of
“The Goose-step” is listed as “a violent literary Socialist.” Also, she
gave him two books attacking modern ideas in religion—which books are
published and distributed upon her bounty. Said Mr. Shepard: “It is the
business of the preacher to preach salvation and let industry alone.
When men are converted they will apply the gospel to business. My father
was a preacher. What did he know about business?” Mr. Shepard
characterized Judge Gary as “the savior of the country”; and Mrs.
Shepard declared that “the Union Theological Seminary is the greatest
menace to New York City today.” Says the clergyman: “I came away with
the idea well driven home, that the social Gospel is Socialism; that
Socialism is Bolshevism; that Bolshevism is Atheism; and that nothing
but the pure individualistic Gospel can save the nation and the world.”

You may judge from this that it is not a diverting experience to be
invited to a dinner-party at the home of the Shepards. I have before me
another document, which indicates that it is a still less diverting
experience to be invited to a cemetery with Mr. and Mrs. Shepard. This
document is a four-page leaflet, containing an address signed, “Helen
Gould Shepard,” and headed as follows:

         _At the Graves of John More and Betty Taylor, His Wife_
                     The Cemetery, Roxbury, New York
                             August 31, 1920

  Cousins of the More Family:

  We are here today to honor the memory of our ancestors, John More and
  Betty Taylor, his wife, who came from Scotland in 1722 and settled in
  the Catskill Mountains, then a very wild region.

The little speech goes on for three paragraphs, to tell about the
virtues of the John Mores; after which, for five paragraphs it proceeds
to implore the cousins of the More family not to fall victims to the
evil and insidious modern “isms” which are “threatening to carry us on
to utter catastrophe unless the Christians of the nation awaken.”
Imagine, if you can, this poor, good-hearted, feeble-minded rich lady
reading a memorial oration at the graves of her ancestors, and devoting
one-fourth of her time to reciting the bugaboo-stories sent out in the
begging letters of the National Civic Federation! Hear a sample
paragraph:

  The forces of autocratic barbarism are not confined to the Socialists,
  Anarchists and I. W. W.’s, but the cause of Lenine is more actively
  furthered either frankly or by indirection by radical,
  pseudo-intellectual writers, editors, professors, teachers and
  clergymen in our newspapers, magazines, colleges, schools and
  churches, and in some of these the enemies of democratic government
  are found to hold the very highest positions.

You will say that this is ridiculous, and you may say that it is
negligible; but I assure you that nothing is negligible in America that
has money. The wage-slaves of the railroads of the United States furnish
millions of dollars every year for Mrs. Shepard to use in circulating
such drivel, and subsidizing professional intriguers and
character-assassins. I presume that Mrs. Shepard is a tender-hearted
woman, who would be incapable of killing a mouse with her own hands.
History reports the same thing of Queen Mary; but that did not keep her
from causing Protestants to be burned at the stake. Moved by religious
terrors and class arrogance Mrs. Shepard considers herself justified in
setting in motion machinery for destroying the careers of men whose only
offense is that they resent social oppression, and venture here and
there to raise a feeble voice against it.

I have before me a letter from one such man, who has been blacklisted by
the National Civic Federation, and in consequence has been hounded from
college to college throughout the United States; I submit him as an
exhibit of Mrs. Shepard’s achievements, a scalp which she wears at her
belt. Or perhaps I might call him a series of scalps, since the poor man
has lost his job ten times in sixteen years. I refrain from giving his
name, at his request; he says: “I am perfectly capable of accumulating
enough notoriety for myself without any professional assistance.”

He goes on to tell about his adventures, one after another. He was on
the faculty of the Florida State College for Women, and was very
successful as a teacher, but it began to be noticed that his students
developed Socialist opinions, and the local newspapers took up the case,
and the board of trustees fired him, in spite of the protest of the
students. Then he went to Lenox College in Iowa, a town which had
elected a Socialist mayor. “In the spring the president called me in and
told me that he did not want me to think they had decided to drop me,
but they made no move toward holding me for another year, so I got
another job.” He went to Maryville College in Tennessee, and at the end
of the second year “monied people in the East objected to my writings”;
so he was dropped. Next he was dropped at Clark University, on account
of his opposition to the war. He went to the University of Kentucky, and
after a year of teaching was invited to give a lecture on Russia by the
college Y. M. C. A. “The head of the department said it would be as much
as his job was worth to recommend me for reappointment, and that the
same would be true of the dean and the president; so I was not
reappointed.” That was the summer of 1919, and he went to DePauw, but
before he got started the Chicago “Tribune” got after him, so that he
was “out of a job before entering upon it.”

The curious thing about all these experiences is how little the
professor himself realized the significance of them. He wrote me: “My
record does not seem to occasion special suspicion!” Again he said:
“There is no organized system of control by privilege over American
education!” As it happens, I was behind the scenes in New York, and
heard some mention of this same professor’s name. Some day we shall have
a government in this country which will indict the heads of the National
Civic Federation for criminal conspiracy, and then we may take a turn at
looking into their papers, and this professor may learn why it was that
the heads of so many colleges suddenly discovered that it would be as
much as their jobs were worth to recommend him for promotion!

P. S.—It is interesting to note that only three months later this young
professor had grown wiser. He wrote to me again, as follows:

  I have been thinking that I might have to revise my letter to you in
  one point. I said I had never encountered anything like a black-list.
  Now I am not so sure. I had to hunt another job this year (just why I
  am not perfectly sure), but failed in my efforts to land anything
  suitable. A certain proportion of the institutions to which I applied
  answered in such a way as aroused no suspicion of anything ulterior. A
  good many did not answer at all, or else merely returned my material.
  I have a notion that some of them have me spotted. In one case where I
  was asked to apply in person, the case was closed in a dubious way,
  etc.

We have one supremely successful organization for standardizing the
thoughts and morals of America, the Ku Klux Klan. The reason for its
success is that its members dress themselves in night-gowns and white
hoods, and its leaders call themselves Grand Goblins and Imperial
Kleagles. These symbols and names of terror have proven so effective,
that I wonder the idea is not taken up by the secret agents and
scandal-hounds of the National Civic Federation’s “Committee for Study
of Revolutionary Movements.” I offer the suggestion for what it is
worth; let them name themselves the Helen Ghouls, and let Mr. Condé B.
Pallen be known as the Shepard’s Watch-dog, and Mr. Ralph M. Easley as
the Shepard’s Crook! I must not suggest this latter name without
definite reason, so I set aside the next chapter to show you by what
devious devices Mr. Easley does his work of destroying the reputation of
educators who fail to recognize his plutocratic authority.




                            CHAPTER LXXXIII
                          THE SHEPARD’S CROOK


There is at Annandale, New York, an Episcopal church institution called
St. Stephen’s College, having as its president the Reverend Bernard
Iddings Bell, who was dean of the cathedral at Fond-du-lac, Wisconsin,
for five years, and chaplain of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station
during the war. President Bell is a former Socialist, who resigned from
the Church Socialist Fellowship at the outbreak of the war, but has not
abandoned his belief that the way to confute error is to understand it
and tell the truth about it, instead of to lie about it and repress it
by force.

Immediately after the war the National Civic Federation invited Bishop
Burch of the Episcopal diocese of New York to send delegates to a
conference on labor conditions, and President Bell was asked to become
one of the delegates; he declined, and wrote Bishop Burch advising him
not to send any delegates, “since to do so would be to tie up the church
officially with an organization which is suspect among most social
workers of responsibility and reliability.” As a result of this advice,
Bishop Burch sent no delegates.

Shortly afterwards word of this came to Mr. Ralph M. Easley, and he was
furiously incensed against President Bell. He met President MacCracken
of Vassar College at a dinner-party, and “in a most violent and
unrestrained manner” announced that he was going to “get this man Bell”;
St. Stephen’s College was “full of Bolshevism,” etc. From various other
people word came to President Bell that Mr. Easley was attacking St.
Stephen’s, “in the same violent and unrestrained manner, selecting
especially those persons who were liable to make financial contributions
to the college.” President Bell thereupon wrote Mr. Easley a very
courteous letter, explaining that he was under an entire misapprehension
concerning St. Stephen’s, and inviting him to come there and make an
investigation of the place, and incidentally to explain the Civic
Federation’s work to the students. Mr. Easley replied that he could not
come at once, but would take up the matter later. He never did take it
up, nor did he ever accept the invitation several times repeated by
President Bell during the controversy which followed.

What Mr. Easley did was to publish in the “National Civic Federation
Review” for January, 1920, what President Bell described as “a
vituperative article, based on false information and illegitimate
deductions.” These words were used by President Bell in a letter to
Judge Alton B. Parker, president of the Civic Federation. Said President
Bell: “I do not believe that the Civic Federation stands by this kind of
thing, and I think it is high time that someone takes your publication
in hand and teaches it the principles of honest journalism.” President
Bell went on to express his confidence in Judge Parker’s belief in
honesty and fair play; but apparently his confidence was misplaced, for
Judge Parker never answered this letter, nor any other letter on the
subject of the misdeeds of Mr. Easley. What Judge Parker did was to show
President Bell’s letter, “with violent indignation,” to the general
counsel of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in the Metropolitan
Club of New York, known as the “Millionaires.” He was surprised to learn
that this gentleman was a trustee of St. Stephen’s, and that he stood by
President Bell. The trustee undertook to obtain from President Bell a
detailed statement of the falsehoods in Mr. Easley’s article. So
President Bell wrote to his trustee, pointing out a series of ten false
statements and inferences in Mr. Easley’s attack upon the college. I
don’t suppose the reader will wish to go into these details; suffice it
to say that the clergyman proved his case thoroughly, and that his bill
of complaint traveled by way of the trustee and Judge Parker to Mr.
Easley, who wrote to President Bell, stating that he was turning the
whole correspondence over “to a committee composed of members of the
Protestant Episcopal Church who are interesting themselves in the
subject of the extent to which the revolutionary forces have permeated
that church.”

This committee consisted of an obscure lawyer by the name of Townsend,
an Episcopal clergyman by the name of Carstensen, and Mr. Everett P.
Wheeler, a New York lawyer, whose excuse is that he is eighty-two years
of age. Dr. Carstensen was courteous enough to advise President Bell
that he was serving on this committee, and asked that an anti-Bolshevist
army officer should be permitted to address the students of St.
Stephen’s College—which request President Bell cheerfully granted.

About this time happened one of the those mysterious things which may
always be counted upon to happen when you are dealing with the Helen
Ghouls and the Shepard’s Crooks. Somehow or other the news of the affair
gets to the capitalist press; somehow the capitalist press comes into
possession of the complete documents—of one side of the case! This time
it was the New York “World” which learned that a committee of the
National Civic Federation was preparing a report on Bolshevism at St.
Stephen’s, and the “World” published this report upon its front page.
Dr. Carstensen, who in the meantime had visited St. Stephen’s, wrote to
President Bell that he had refused to sign the report. He added that the
report was about to be issued officially by the National Civic
Federation; to which President Bell replied, expressing doubt that the
report would be officially issued. The publication in the New York
“World” had raised a storm among the supporters of St. Stephen’s; and,
said President Bell, “Easley is not fond of making charges the
responsibility for which he cannot easily disavow, when he discovers
that he has done something unpopular.”

Sure enough, when one of the trustees of the National Civic Federation
came out in the “World” supporting President Bell, Mr. Easley suddenly
stepped from under! He publicly denied that he had anything to do with
the attack on St. Stephen’s, and declared that the committee had no
connection with the National Civic Federation, but that the members of
the committee alone were responsible for what they had done! Imagine, if
you can, the chagrin of poor Mr. Eighty-two-year-old Everett P. Wheeler!
Mr. Wheeler wrote to President Bell to explain that he had nothing to do
with the publication, that he had protested against it to the New York
“World,” and that he considered it “a shameful abuse by a great
newspaper.” The purpose of the committee, said Mr. Wheeler, had been to
act toward President Bell “as Christian brethren, and to give you every
opportunity to explain your position. We are not without hope that we
may convince you that you have erred.”

So you can see what has happened; poor Mr. Wheeler blames the New York
“World,” but his aged mind does not go back to the question of who
supplied the “World” with the data of which it made use. Who was it, do
you think? Was it the Shepard’s Crook, employing the name and reputation
of an aged dotard, once a vigorous reformer, as a means to assail a
liberal teacher and clergyman? Telling Mr. Wheeler that he is serving on
a committee of the National Civic Federation, and that the purpose of
this committee is to prepare an appeal to President Bell, in the hope of
convincing him that he has erred; and then secretly permitting this
confidential material to reach the New York “World”; and finally when he
sees that his charges have overshot the mark, disavowing his aged tool,
and leaving him exposed to public contempt!

I conclude with President Bell’s summary of what this story shows about
Mr. Ralph M. Easley:

  1. His willingness to attack an institution and a person because of
  personal bias, and to involve the National Civic Federation in the
  task of pulling his personal chestnuts out of the fire.

  2. The absurdity of his contention that his society has never attacked
  individuals.

  3. His absolute lack of courtesy in correspondence.

  4. His willingness to circulate sub rosa information about people whom
  he does not like, and when caught at it to deny responsibility in the
  name of himself and of his Federation.

  5. His using of other people for his purposes, telling them only what
  he wishes of the controversies in which he seeks to engage their aid.
  This is especially plain in his refusal to tell the committee headed
  by Mr. Wheeler that this college was welcoming investigation and that
  it had invited him to investigate for himself or send others to
  investigate. If Mr. Wheeler had known all this it would have thrown an
  entirely different emphasis upon the whole situation.




                             CHAPTER LXXXIV
                            CITIES OF REFUGE


The reader will be ready by this time with the question: are there no
free colleges whatever in America, no institutions of higher learning
where truth is sought and respected? There are a few, and we have now to
give them credit.

We have heard Mrs. Helen Gould Shepard declaring at her dinner-table
that “the Union Theological Seminary is the greatest menace to New York
City today.” Translated into commonsense, this means that there are
professors at this institution who have come to realize the futility of
basing the moral standards of mankind upon a literal acceptance of fairy
stories, the product of the child-mind of the race; also who have read
the words of Jesus about the impossibility of serving both God and
Mammon.

Among these revolutionary theologians is Harry F. Ward, secretary of the
Social Service Federation of the Methodist church. Dr. Ward was active
in protest against the crimes of Judge Gary during the recent steel
strike, and as a result fell victim to the Helen Ghouls. A man called
upon him, being obviously not of the idealist type, but representing
himself as a lecturer on Bolshevism, wishing to verify certain facts.
After a brief conversation Dr. Ward gave the man a “calling-down,”
telling him that he was utterly ignorant of the subject with which he
pretended to deal. Not long afterwards Dr. Ward learned of a document,
issued by the National Civic Federation, but bearing no name, and
accompanied by a request for its return after reading. It was being
submitted to open shop employers and propagandists, and used as a means
of money-getting: an alleged interview with Ward, in which he was
represented as having said that Christianity would soon pass away, and
Bolshevism take its place; the full absurdity of which statement you
could not realize unless you had the fortune to know this passionately
earnest Christian clergyman. Ward had mentioned a young Y. M. C. A. man
named Hecker, as one who had first-hand knowledge of the Seattle strike,
and this document named Hecker, and was used to procure his discharge.
It was also used to bar Jerome Davis from Chautauqua platforms. When a
committee of the Inter-church Federation called upon Judge Gary, they
found the document on his desk, and he quoted from it liberally. Also it
was in the hands of Chancellor Buchtel of Denver University when he
barred Harry Ward from speaking. So far extends the reach of the
Shepard’s Crook!

There are other places in the country in which the revolutionary leaven
of Jesus is working. There is the Berkeley Divinity School at
Middletown, Connecticut, a place of open-mindedness and fine idealism,
presided over by Dean W. P. Ladd. Wild rumors were spread concerning
Bolshevist activities, and the grand duke of the trustees, Mr.
Nettleton, president of the New Haven Gas Company, took up the fight.
One of the charges was that the dean belonged to the Church League for
Industrial Democracy—among whose members are fifteen bishops of the
Episcopal church! The investigating committee of the trustees decided
that it was unwise for the dean and members of the faculty to belong to
this organization. They qualified their statement, “in the present state
of the public mind, and from the standpoint of the citizen of the
world”; to which Dean Ladd makes the pungent comment: “One would have
thought that even a citizen of the world would prefer that a member of
the faculty of a Christian divinity school should regulate his conduct,
not with reference to the world and the prevailing state of the public
mind, but according to the principles of the religion which he
professes.” Also the committee laid down the rule: “We cannot for a
moment permit any action or influence of theirs (the faculty), as
teachers, which would seem to develop Socialism as a political idea.”
And further, the committee laid down the rule: “What the teachings of
the School shall be and how they shall be taught, and under what
influences the students shall live are matters for (the trustees), if
not entirely, at least in co-operation with the dean and the faculty.”

Dean Ladd issued a counter statement, in which he frankly and completely
differs from this policy, and declares that he will not follow it. He
says:

  I cannot while I remain dean of the School be a party to a policy so
  entirely at variance with my own judgment and conviction of what is
  right. The Berkeley Divinity School is, of course, desperately in need
  of money. And trustees and others have repeatedly said that no money
  will be forthcoming so long as our present policy continues. I hope
  this is not so. But if the School has to die in a losing fight for a
  policy, one feature of which is to try to make justice and love the
  controlling motive in all social conditions, I am quite ready to say,
  with Bishop Brewster, “Then let it die!” Better so to die than to live
  on prosperously in an attitude of subservience and compromise.

The school still lives; but you may judge the drawing-power of social
idealism in America today by the fact that it has only fifteen students.
It has to exist by gifts, because its trustees invested most of its
funds in the shares of the New Haven Railroad!

Also at Oberlin, Ohio, is an old college under religious auspices,
struggling hard to preserve the high traditions of its abolitionist
founders. From its beginning in 1833 it admitted women and Negroes, and
its internal affairs have always been controlled by its faculty.
Appointments are made by the faculty and ratified by the trustees, and
so far the trustees have behaved themselves. During the war they tried
to drive out a professor on the ground that he was pro-German, but they
were only able to get one faculty vote for the proposal, and so were
forced to drop it. A professor at Oberlin writes me that the faculty is
conservative, as in all other colleges, and they naturally try to
appoint only those who conform; “but if a mistake is made there is never
a thing said to coerce his freedom in the class or out.” As a
consequence, this professor has ventured to advise his classes to read
“The Brass Check.” When the librarian declared that the library had no
funds with which to subscribe to the New York “Call,” the professor of
Hebrew advised him to take the money from the “Old Testament fund,”
explaining quite correctly that “the Old Testament is a book of
prophecy.”

Also, in Denver is the Iliff School of Theology of the Methodist church,
where several young professors are following the example of the
dangerous Harry Ward. When Ward was barred from speaking by Chancellor
Buchtel, they brought him across the street and triumphantly listened to
his message. When I came to Denver they welcomed me in a church, and
told me the story of their struggle against the infinite corruption
enthroned in Denver politics, and worshipped in Denver churches.

And then, I must not overlook the Y. M. C. A. College, located at
Springfield, Massachusetts, which through some freak of chance has
secured a phenomenal president in L. L. Doggett, who brought his old
Oberlin professor, Ballantine, to teach some truth about the Bible, and
thus caused anguish to the orthodox. The war brought President Doggett
to the conclusion that the world cannot be saved by prayer and Indian
clubs, and he went abroad and got into touch with the London School of
Economics, and other European progressives, and came back and founded an
“industrial course,” in the face of bitter opposition from a solemn,
prayerful and gymnastic faculty. The pious morons in the Association are
fighting him tooth and nail, and have, of course, curtailed their gifts
to the college. President Doggett has taken up an endowment campaign of
his own, and I cheerfully give him this “boost,” though I fear it may do
him more harm than good!

This part of my story would not be complete unless I paid tribute to the
Church League for Industrial Democracy, and to the tireless services of
Richard W. Hogue, an Episcopal clergyman who was kicked out of his
church and his open forum in Baltimore, and now travels over the
country, gathering groups of theological students and Y. M. C. A.
workers, and preaching to them the real gospel of the crucified
proletarian. He tells me that he finds increasing welcome; he tells of
several little colleges throughout the Middle West, whose faculties—and
in one or two cases, the presidents—believe in free discussion, and have
given him a hearing.

Also, there is one free law school in America—at Harvard. We have seen
Dean Pound and Professors Frankfurter, Sayre and Chafee taking a bold
stand for freedom of speech. These men fearlessly teach the evolution of
law, and suggest to their students the possibility of improvement in
American institutions. Thus, from the last report of Dean Pound I quote
a few scattered sentences, just to give you an idea of the tone:

  A clear body of law has grown up already as the result of the
  experience of a generation in the Interstate Commerce Commission, a
  body of law is forming under our eyes through the administration of
  workmen’s compensation acts by industrial commissions, and the
  exigencies of general peace and good order, if nothing else, must lead
  before long to a new body of law governing industrial disputes....
  Collective bargaining is likely to compel us to think over again the
  whole subject of juristic personality in Anglo-American law. Criminal
  law and procedure call for the best efforts of thoroughly trained
  common-law lawyers acquainted with the social science of today.... For
  much that we have had to study and to teach in the immediate past is
  already yielding in importance to these new elements in the legal
  system. Much of our nineteenth-century law will presently be as
  obsolete as the learning of real actions and of the feudal law of
  estates in land which held so large a place in the curriculum of the
  Law School a century ago, or the elaborate and involved procedural law
  which was so important fifty years later, or the pedantic law of
  bailments which has given way to a modern doctrine of the obligations
  of public service.

Needless to say, such utterances as this, from such a source, are the
cause of continually increasing distress to the legal retainers of our
plutocracy!

Also, there is a New England college of considerable reputation, whose
president has taken a firm stand for open-mindedness, and that is
Amherst. President Meikeljohn was one of the live men who got out of
Brown when it began to die. He is now trying to make one small college
in which young men are taught to think, instead of just to believe in
dogmas. He is in the midst of a fight with reactionary trustees; in 1920
they asked for his resignation, but he consulted a lawyer and told them
they had no authority in the premises. He is still in office, for how
long I do not know.

Also, there is Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, in which some professors are
making a brave struggle. This is an old co-educational institution
established by the Quakers, a sect which had more than its share of
persecution, and took pains to provide for freedom of opinion. But now
the Quakers have become rich, and there is a new kind of persecution in
the world, and shall they permit freedom of opinion about special
privilege? That Swarthmore has not been entirely liberal, you may judge
from the fact that its most conspicuous graduates are Governor Sproul of
Pennsylvania, who smashed the steel strike with his Cossacks, and
Attorney-General Palmer, who killed and buried the constitution of the
United States. The thousands of alleged radicals and helpless foreigners
who had their heads cracked by Mr. Palmer’s thugs will appreciate the
gay humor of the fact that this gentleman is a devout and active Quaker!

Governor Sproul gave to Swarthmore an astronomical observatory; the
stars are a long way off, and the governor is not afraid of anything
that might be discovered there. But Professor Robert C. Brooks of
Swarthmore put his sociological telescope upon Delaware County, in which
the college is located, and drew a diagram of the “jury wheel system,”
whereby the big political crooks managed to keep themselves out of jail.
Certain men of wealth came to the president of Swarthmore, saying: “Here
we have given five millions, and we can’t do it with a man like Brooks
running round and stirring up trouble”; so the president had a “frank
talk” with Professor Brooks.

Nevertheless, some professors are holding on both to their convictions
and their jobs, and so the place is regarded as a “hot-bed.” There is a
professor of philosophy, who is using modern literature as a door to
Plato, and tells the students to read “Man and Superman” and “The Spoon
River Anthology.” He got from this experiment a lively response; some of
the boys and girls were shocked, but they asked questions, and presently
began to think for themselves, and discovered that thinking is a
thrilling experience. I am told that the librarian of the college stays
shocked. Never before had he heard of students in college being taught
from a book like “The Spoon River Anthology.”

There is also one state institution which deserves mention—the
University of North Carolina, sometimes called the “Wisconsin of the
South.” Richard Hogue tells me that he was permitted to explain the
meaning of industrial democracy to the students of this institution. I
wrote one of the professors and received from him a letter, assuring me
that here was a place, having some twenty-five hundred students, which
was both free and democratic. I thought I would test the matter a
little, so I asked him whether a professor who was an avowed Socialist
would be tolerated, and whether the modern Socialist movement was
adequately explained to the students. My correspondent replied that he
himself was a “Christian Socialist,” but that he did not mean “as Bouck
White sees it, or even as Ward sees it.” He adds: “My experience is that
the destructive radical is a chap with a screw loose somewhere—with a
twist in his intelligence or with an excess of inflammable emotion.
Oftimes he has intellect and courage, but is emotionally unbalanced,
like Scott Nearing, for instance. Or he is intelligent and deliberately
destructive like Foster.” In comment on the above I will merely state my
own opinion; first, that Scott Nearing is the ablest economist in the
United States today; and second, that William Z. Foster is a very
constructive force in the American labor movement.

I have letters from several other professors, who are sure that their
institutions are free, and I tested them also with these questions. You
will be amused to know that one of them was a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania! He stated that professors known to be
Socialists would be permitted to teach “as scientific scholars. I
suppose if they devoted their time to propaganda they would properly be
eliminated.” Of course no mention is made of the many professors at the
University of Pennsylvania who devote their time to capitalist
propaganda—such as for example, Meade, Conway, Hess, Johnson and
Huebner.

Some of the professors who seceded from Columbia University, including
James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Thorstein Veblen, organized
a free institution known as the New School for Social Research; it was
to cater to students who really wished to study, and to dispense with
all the flummeries, including examinations and degrees. The enterprise
has not proved a financial success, for a peculiar reason. The
capitalist system does not permit people to study for the luxury of
possessing knowledge; the purpose of study is to earn a living, and to
that end you have to have a certificate that you have studied. In other
words, you must go to an institution which fits as a cog in the
educational machine. The New School for Social Research has on its
teaching staff half a dozen of the best minds in America, and its
purpose is really to teach people to think; therefore I give it a free
“boost,” and advise you that its address is 465 West 23rd Street, New
York.

There was another free college in America; it didn’t last long, but I
mention it because it was a gallant effort, and offers a model for the
future. It was known as Wire City College, and had a beautiful location
in a big house high up on the banks of the Missouri River at
Leavenworth, Kansas. Its professors, and likewise its students, were
military prisoners of the United States government, and they proceeded
to organize themselves, forming a really free college, governed by its
students and faculty. All the teachers were elected by the students, and
ran the class until they were deposed; all the papers were voluntary,
there were no examinations, and—most vital this difference from other
colleges—all the students studied.

There was a secret library of three hundred radical books, in addition
to the prison library of seven thousand respectable books. The library
reading room was the lavatory. There were lectures every evening from
seven to eight; on Monday English was taught by H. Austin Simons, a
former reporter for the Hearst newspapers; on Tuesday logic was taught
by Carl Haessler, now managing editor of the Federated Press; on
Wednesday economics was taught by Carlton Rodolf, secretary of the Marx
Institute of New York. (His students decided that he was too technical,
so they fired him.) There was also Clark Getts, later connected with the
Federated Press. On Thursday biology was taught by George Schmieder,
former high school teacher and graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania; on Friday philosophy was taught by Haessler; and on
Saturday there were discussions.

The college published a paper, the “Wire City Weekly,” also a bulletin,
clandestinely made on prison typewriters; the time-schedules were
printed by a conscientious objector in the prison printery. The
institution was conducted for several months, until finally the
authorities found out about it, and almost the entire faculty was
kidnapped and carried off to Alcatraz Island, and almost the entire
student body to Fort Douglas, Utah. So far as I know, this is the only
college in America which has thus been dealt with; but no doubt the
interlocking directorate has made note of the plan, and if free colleges
should continue to spring up, we shall get used to the wholesale
disappearance of college faculties and students.




                             CHAPTER LXXXV
                          THE ACADEMIC RABBITS


There are, of course, a large number of individual professors in
institutions of higher learning who take their stand for what they
believe to be the truth, and risk their jobs and chances of promotion. I
have mentioned the existence of eight “renommir professoren.” At
Wellesley is Vida Scudder, who “gets by” because she is a devout
Episcopalian; also Professor Ellen Hayes, who “gets by” because she is
old, and because she teaches astronomy. These reasons are not my
guesses, but were the statements of the president of the college, when
she was asked at a women’s club in Denver why she kept a notorious
Socialist and labor agitator on her faculty.

Professor Hayes got this reputation by running for office on the
Socialist party ticket; I visited her on my trip, and heard some funny
stories. Here is one of the sweetest and most lovable old ladies you
ever met, who is not mealy-mouthed about her belief in the right and
destiny of the workers to control the world’s industry for their own
benefit. She deliberately lives in a working-class neighborhood—with
rather comical results. Her neighbors are in awe of her, because she is
a college professor, and a little afraid of her, because of her bad
reputation; the one way she might get to know them, through the church,
is not available, because Professor Hayes is a scientist.

On the other side of the continent is Guido Marx of Stanford, who
shamelessly avows his sympathy with the co-operative movement, and
likewise with faculty control of universities. Professor Marx, it is
amusing to notice, teaches mechanical engineering, a subject almost as
safe as the stars. If there is a single professor in the United States
who teaches political economy and admits himself a Socialist, that
professor is a needle which I have been unable to find in our academic
hay-stack.

Of course there are many radicals who conceal their views, and
judiciously try to open the minds of their students without putting any
label upon themselves. I have told in “The Profits of Religion” about
Jowett at Oxford, who got by with the Apostles’ Creed whenever he had to
recite it in public, by inserting the words “used to” between the words
“I believe,” saying the inserted words under his breath, thus: “I _used
to_ believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” I encountered
several college professors who have equally ingenious devices for
salving their consciences in their unhappy situation. I might terrify
the plutocratic world by stating that I know two presidents of small
colleges in the United States, who in their own homes and among their
trusted friends are real “reds.” One of them, a young man recently
appointed, was asked by his assembled trustees: “What are your views on
property questions?” He answered, with an easy smile: “I fear I am far
too conservative for a man of thirty-seven”—and he got by with that! The
other one is head of a woman’s college, and was asked by her trustees:
“Are you a Socialist?” She said to me: “I could answer no with a
perfectly good conscience, for I had just made up my mind that I am a
convert to the Soviet form of political and industrial organization!”

Of course, it is perfectly possible to teach modern ideas without the
labels, and to open the minds of your students by seeing that they hear
both sides of every case. If you avoid the extremely crucial questions,
such as the I. W. W. and Russia, you can get by with this in the
majority of institutions, especially if you eschew outside activities
and never get into the newspapers. Many professors are doing this,
others have tried and slipped up, and have sacrificed promotion and
security. Many professors are rovers in the academic world, staying in
one place for two or three years, and when they are not able to stand it
any more, moving on. There is an infinite variety of degrees and
shadings in such cases; conditions differ with institutions, and with
subjects taught, and with individual teachers. Some “get away” with what
others dare not attempt. Some spoil their chances by bad manners or bad
judgment; and, of course, many others are accused of doing this. You
will seldom find a fight over a question of academic freedom where there
are not other factors present or alleged, personal weaknesses or
eccentricities. It is always easy to find defects in the characters and
temperaments of persons whose ideas are offensive to us.

Likewise, of course, it is easy to find excuses for seeking the safest
way, and holding on to our jobs. The psychoanalysts have a useful word
for mental processes of this sort—they are “rationalizations”; and the
masters of our educational system have provided an elaborate set of
“rationalizations” for college professors who wish to avoid the painful
duty of being heroes. They will be loyal to the institution and to their
colleagues. They will be scholars and not propagandists. They will be
judicious, instead of being “emotionally unbalanced, like Scott
Nearing.” They will argue that their specialty is one of unusual
importance, and they are privileged beings, set apart to work at that.
Or they will plead that social evolution takes a long time, and that
every man’s first duty is to look out for his wife and children. These,
too, are phrases which I heard over and over again, and they reveal the
psychology of the academic rabbits. You will perhaps be interested to
meet one of these rabbits, so here is part of a letter written by a
professor in a large college in New York City:

  I do not believe that there is a single group of “special privilege.”
  The human race is made up of people who are looking after their own
  interests first—some with energy and ability, some with weakness and
  folly, but not with less singleness of purpose. All such groups, in so
  far as they have ability enough, want to control education and all
  other group activities in their interest. This is perfectly
  natural.... Of course the big book corporations work for the promotion
  of their friends just as you and I do. If they put bad people into the
  schools and colleges it is the fault of the employing agencies.

Before I conclude this chapter I ought to mention one hopeful incident
which happened at Lafayette College, a religious institution located at
Easton, Pennsylvania. The president of this institution, MacCracken, is
a product of the University of Jabbergrab; he was professor of politics
there for twelve years, and has five honorary degrees. He has as the
grand duke of his trustees the president of the Hazleton National Bank
and the Hazleton Iron Works; and as first assistant he has Mr. Fred
Morgan Kirby, president of the Woolworth stores, also of a bank and a
railroad; a high-up interlocking director in railroads, lumber,
insurance, gas and electricity. Mr. Kirby decided that he did not like
modern ideas, so he gave a hundred thousand dollars to Lafayette, to
furnish a salary of seven thousand a year for the teaching of “civil
rights”; very carefully laying down his definition—“those absolute
rights of persons, such as ... the right to acquire and enjoy property
as regulated and protected by law.” Also he declared his purpose:

  That the fallacies of Socialism and kindred theories and practises
  which tend to hamper and discourage and throttle individual effort,
  and individual energy, may be exposed and avoided ... with a firm
  belief that the protection of the civil rights of individuals has
  contributed greatly to the advancement of the nation and that the
  encroachments, and threatened encroachments on these rights will
  imperil the country, and destroy the prosperity and happiness of our
  people, I, Fred Morgan Kirby, give to Lafayette College, etc.

These are high-sounding legal phrases, and we shall understand the
situation better if we put them into plain business English, as follows:

  I, Fred Morgan Kirby, having become owner of a chain of hundreds of
  stores throughout the United States, and wishing to have my
  descendants own these stores forever, seek to provide that the
  wage-slaves who work in these stores shall never organize, but shall
  come to be hired as individuals under the competitive-wage system. To
  this end I wish to hire a man to teach in a college that any
  proposition to have the Woolworth stores owned by the public, or
  democratically run by the people who work in the stores, will imperil
  the country and destroy the prosperity and happiness of America.

Mr. Kirby thought that seven thousand a year ought to buy a real high-up
professor of political science, and his college president invited a
young professor of a leading university, who asks me to omit his name in
telling the story. This professor boldly asked for an opportunity to
discuss the question with Mr. Kirby himself, so they sat down to
luncheon, the grand duke and his university president and this young
supposed-to-be rabbit. The supposed-to-be rabbit suggested that it might
not be quite fair to lay down to a man of science exactly what he should
teach forever after; which surprised Mr. Kirby, and rather hurt his
feelings. He said that when he hired a salesman, he told him what to say
and how to say it. Mr. Kirby is a nice, amiable old business gentleman,
and he asked, plaintively: “Why can’t I employ a college professor to
sell my opinions?” The professor, who is a lawyer, said that he should
be very glad to become Mr. Kirby’s attorney if invited. He would give up
teaching work and advocate Mr. Kirby’s ideas—only the fee which Mr.
Kirby offered was insufficient for a lawyer, and he would regard that
merely as a retaining fee. Then the professor turned to President
MacCracken, asking him if he did not think that possibly the terms of
the bequest might have a tendency to control the opinions of the
professor who accepted the chair. President MacCracken answered naively
that he had never thought of that. Such a dear, innocent college
president—he had given an honorary degree to A. Mitchell Palmer only a
year before this!

The deal with this professor did not go through, and—here is the
significant part of the story—President MacCracken asked one university
after another to recommend a man for that chair, and not one would do
it; not one economist of standing could be found who would accept seven
thousand dollars a year to become the salesman of Mr. Kirby’s ideas! In
the end they had to take an obscure lawyer from Washington, whom no one
had ever heard of before, or has ever heard of since. That is
encouraging—except for the poor students at Lafayette, who are
innocently swallowing Mr. Kirby’s poison!




                             CHAPTER LXXXVI
                           WORKERS’ EDUCATION


We come now to one of the most important aspects of American education,
the movement of the workers to take charge of their own minds. We have
surveyed the field, and seen that our great universities and small
colleges, with negligibly few exceptions, represent education of the
people by the plutocracy for the plutocracy. As the class struggle
intensifies, it naturally occurs to the exploited classes to have an
educational system of their own, to be run by them for their own
benefit. This is the movement known as Workers’ Education.

I have been protesting in this book against class control of thinking.
So the average American reader will be moved to say: “You object to
capitalist class education, but now you are going to favor working class
education!” There are a few words to be said on this subject before we
enter the workers’ colleges.

Let us assume for a moment that, human nature being what it is, and the
forces of capitalism being what they are, we have to have some kind of
class control of education. Which would be preferable, capitalist class
education or working class education? The first point in reply is that
the workers outnumber the capitalists in our society by a hundred to
one; education for the benefit of the workers would be, therefore,
education for the benefit of a hundred times as many people. The next
point is that the workers extend to all capitalists a cordial invitation
to become workers; whereas the capitalists extend no such invitation to
the workers. They may, of course, do it in Fourth of July speeches and
political campaign platforms, but in everyday life they do everything
possible to keep the workers from becoming capitalists, and compel them
to remain workers. If the capitalists were to accept the invitation of
the workers and become workers, we should have classes abolished in our
society, and our workers’ education would be education for the benefit
of all.

For this reason the program of the workers is generous and free, whereas
that of the capitalists is selfish and repressive. The worker is able to
face the truth, while the capitalist dares not face it. The worker has
everything to gain by the truth, while the capitalist has everything to
lose. So it happens that if you compare workers’ colleges with
capitalist colleges, you invariably find this difference: the workers’
college believes in free discussion, and will hear anybody argue about
any question; whereas the capitalist college fears free discussion, and
invents a hundred pretexts to keep the other side from being heard. I
have shown you everywhere throughout the country representatives of the
working class being denied an opportunity to present their point of view
to the students in capitalist colleges. I have never heard of a
capitalist being denied an opportunity to explain his point of view to
the students of workers’ colleges; on the contrary, I have known of many
cases of capitalists, or representatives of capitalism, being invited to
debate, and finding some excuse to decline the invitation.

In the above discussion I am using the word “workers” in the
intelligent, revolutionary sense. I do not mean the men who dig ditches
or who run machines; I mean workers of hand or brain, all those men and
women who do the useful and necessary work of the world, whether it be
digging ditches or surveying them, tending machines or inventing them,
sweeping out the buildings of a college, or teaching in its class-rooms,
or determining its policies. I am using the term workers in
contradistinction to the owners, those who live by monopolizing the
means whereby other men live, and exacting from the others a tribute for
the right to work. Also, I should explain that when I speak of labor, I
do not mean the old-style labor unions which hold the field today. I
perfectly well understand that they are products of capitalism, animated
by the greeds and jealousies of the profit system. Little by little,
however, these labor unions are forced to widen their boundaries, to
combine and take in larger groups of the workers; and at the same time
they broaden their ideals, and approach the revolutionary point of view,
which understands by social justice the right of all workers to access
to the sources of wealth, and understands by freedom the right of all
men to agitate, educate and organize for a society in which no man
exploits his fellows.

In college after college we have seen the brains of the working class
stolen away from them; we have seen young men and women who come from
the working class, and who should fight for their class and save it,
being seduced by the dress-suit bribe, the flummeries and snobberies of
academic life, and becoming traitors to their class, betrayers and even
murderers of their class. So come the organized workers to save their
own; to teach their sons and daughters, first, class loyalty, and
through that, loyalty to truth and social justice. Such is the meaning
of Workers’ Education.

We have seen the capitalist college reveal its true colors on many
occasions; but never does it reveal it more plainly than when the
workers proceed to organize their own educational system. I have shown
you Professor Egbert, Director of University Extension and Director of
the School of Business of Columbia University, displaying himself to the
extent of three columns in the New York “Times,” announcing that
“workers’ education has virtually broken down in America.” But the
interlocking professors do not content themselves with lying about labor
education in the capitalist press; they and their masters intrigue
against it, they boycott it, they turn loose their slander factories,
their Helen Ghouls and “hundred percent” mobs against it. We have seen
the typewriters and the teachers of the Rand School of Social Science
being thrown down the stairs. We shall see professors of capitalist
colleges being, figuratively speaking, thrown down the stairs for
venturing to help in labor education.

Let us take, for example, the experience of the Workers’ College of
Minneapolis, narrated in an affidavit by E. H. H. Holman, chairman of
the education committee of some of the labor unions. The Workers’
College of Minneapolis laid down a very moderate program:

  It is hereby proposed to organize an educational program for the
  workers of Minneapolis, under their own control, through which such
  educational work will be undertaken as will better fit them to serve
  society through a wider comprehension of social problems, through an
  understanding of the technique of industrial production, and through a
  better knowledge of the labor problem in general, thus to be in
  position to act effectively in the solution of pressing problems that
  grip the world today.

Not such a bad statement, you may concede. This statement was adopted in
December, 1920, and classes were organized, among them a class in public
speaking. Professor T. P. Beyer of Hamline University was asked to take
charge of this class, and he did so. There were protests in the
newspapers of the Twin Cities, and several of the interlocking regents
of Hamline gave newspaper interviews registering their indignation. It
had been stated in the contract with Professor Beyer that he was not
expected “to advocate any theories or further any propaganda.”
Nevertheless, the grand dukes of Hamline spoke, and Professor Beyer
withdrew. Shortly afterwards Mr. Holman happened to meet President
Kerfoot of Hamline University, a Methodist clergyman holding three
honorary degrees; and this gentleman said that “it would never do” to
have one of his professors linked up with radicals. “Those who
contribute the money to support Hamline would never stand for it.”

Again in Topeka, Kansas, the labor men were conducting an open forum,
and considering the project for a labor college. Some of the professors
from Washburn College took to attending this forum, and meeting these
labor leaders. The interlocking newspapers made a scandal out of it, the
intrigue being conducted by the secretary of the Merchants and
Manufacturers’ Association, who was maintaining a black-list against
union men. One of the professors at Washburn College received a
threatening letter; it was supposed to have come from the labor group,
but manifestly it came from this “M & M” agent, or some of his spies.
Anyway, the Washburn College professors were compelled to cease
attending the open forum.

In Denver the president of the newly organized labor college applied for
the use of some of the high school buildings, in the evening. The
request was turned down, on the ground that the college was too radical;
if the authorities allowed working-class people to meet in the schools,
they must also allow the capitalists to meet. In Denver, you see, they
have never opened the schools for free discussion, or for teaching the
people anything except what the politicians approve. In this case the
school authorities said that they would allow the use of the rooms,
provided they were allowed to appoint the instructors!

Johns Hopkins University moved out to its magnificent new site at
Homewood, which it had obtained by the selling of its soul. The old
buildings were left in Baltimore, and the Reverend Richard Hogue,
secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, applied for the
use of one of the buildings. They had actually begun meeting, under the
direction of one of the professors, but the university put them out by
order of the trustees. The “hundred percenters” who superintend
education in Baltimore call themselves the George Washington Society,
and they bitterly attacked one Johns Hopkins professor for taking part
in a labor college, and demanded that he be forced out of Johns Hopkins.

You may be interested to know how it comes about that a young professor
in one of our most prosperous and important universities happened to be
espousing the cause of self-education by the workers. This young
professor at the outbreak of the war was a reporter for the Richmond
“News-Leader,” and a strike was threatened in the Richmond plant of the
American Locomotive Company. The basis of the strike was the refusal of
the company officials to comply with the regulations of the War Labor
Board; and the young reporter wrote the facts, and his newspaper
published them, to the great indignation of the interlocking
directorate. In the midst of the controversy a stranger turned up—we
will call him Brown—producing credentials from the New York “World.” He
pretended to be sympathetic to the union men, and diligently sought
information concerning them. The “News-Leader” became suspicious, and
telegraphed to the New York “World,” and the answer came, “Brown is all
right.”

So Brown continued his operations for a few days longer. He suggested to
the young reporter a wonderful plan to get the facts about what the
company was doing; he and the reporter were to bribe the book-keeper,
and break into the company offices at night! Such temptations arise now
and then in the lives of newspapermen, and if it is information against
labor unions you are seeking, you may employ such methods. But this
reporter knew that you cannot commit burglaries against big business,
and his paper investigated further, and discovered that Brown was a
secret agent of the American Locomotive Company, operating under the
protection of the New York “World”! The young professor suggested that
this story would fit in “The Brass Check”; but it seems to me that it
does very well in this place—showing how a college professor who leaves
the shelter of the cloister is forced to revise his formulas concerning
large scale capitalist industry!




                            CHAPTER LXXXVII
                         THE SPIDER AND THE FLY


We have noted Professor Egbert of the University of J. P. Morgan &
Company, advising the workers to avail themselves of the existing
college system—in other words, to let the capitalists do their educating
for them. “Won’t you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly.”
Just what labor education turns into when it is superintended by the
existing educational authorities was amusingly demonstrated at Bryn
Mawr, a very aristocratic college for women located near Philadelphia,
and having the president of an insurance company for its treasurer, and
for its grand duke the president of a steel company and a trust company,
vice-president of a national bank and director of a sugar company.

We have seen President Thomas of Bryn Mawr branded in the Denver “Post”
as a dangerous radical, and we now discover the basis of the charge; she
started a movement to educate working girls! The idea was that the
brightest and most promising members of labor unions should come to Bryn
Mawr in the summer and be taught by professors from various colleges.
This, of course, was a step in the right direction, and I have no desire
to belittle it; though I should have liked to see the further provision
that at the same time the young ladies of Bryn Mawr should take the
places of the working girls in the factories.

I have no doubt whatever that this experiment was well meant; but in its
working out it revealed the impossibility of honesty under our present
class system. In raising money it was set forth that the purpose of the
plan was to bring the working girls into touch with the cultured classes
and break down the spirit of class consciousness. Then, after the money
was got, it was necessary to get the girls; and so the unions were told
that the purpose of the plan was to make the girls into more efficient
and capable leaders of unions.

Bryn Mawr has received a heavy endowment from John D. Rockefeller; a
hall is named for him, and also a gateway. The organizers of the summer
school were getting up a prospectus telling of the plan, and they put on
the cover a photograph, with the name “Rockefeller Gateway.” But at the
last moment it occurred to someone that this might not look well to the
unions, so the label “Rockefeller” was left off, and the photograph went
out with the caption, “A Gateway.”

I met three different professors who were invited to come to Bryn Mawr
and teach at this summer session; one of them, Professor H. W. L. Dana,
whom we saw turned out of Columbia University as a scapegoat for the
pacifism of Nicholas Miraculous. Professor Dana had an interview with
President Thomas, in which the terms of the engagement were laid down to
him. There were to be no social relationships with the working girls, no
tennis dates, no activities outside the classes. His subject was to be
literature, and he was to avoid dangerous writers, such as Morris,
Whitman and Ruskin; he was to teach literature as art, and not as part
of the labor movement.

On the train going home, Professor Dana decided that his academic
dignity had been infringed upon; therefore he sent a telegram to
President Thomas, saying that he was unable to agree to the terms. He
sent a copy of this telegram to Rose Schneiderman, one of the working
class leaders, who had been charged with selecting the girls: the effect
of which procedure was instant collapse on the part of President Thomas.
She wrote saying that Professor Dana had entirely misunderstood her, she
had not intended anything of the sort. Dana had asked that there should
be student representation on the board controlling the experiment, and
President Thomas now said that she had had that idea in mind all along.
So they provided a system of student representation, with an open vote,
and the balance of power in the hands of Bryn Mawr graduates, who were
helping at the summer school with the title of “tutors.” A harmless
working girl, not a trades unionist, was selected as representative of
the girls.

The union girls, of course, understood perfectly what was being done to
them; they would smile to Professor Dana and say: “You must remember,
they aren’t used to democracy. You must be gentle with them. You see,
they haven’t suffered.” (Stop and think about that beautiful phrase!).
The “tutors” would gossip among themselves, telling about funny mistakes
which the working girls had made, such as not knowing to what century
Shakespeare belonged. They would correct the table manners of the
girls—and without ever thinking that the girls also had secret laughter
over the mistakes of the “tutors.” Thus, some tutor had asked: “What do
the letters A. F. of L. stand for?”—which seemed to the working girls
quite as important a matter as the date of Shakespeare’s birth. One of
the tutors asked: “Is the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
the same as the Third International?”—and that seemed the funniest thing
in the world to these union girls.

More serious matters arose quickly; for you see, these girls have
convictions, and take them just as seriously as Bryn Mawr girls take
their table manners. The first thing they did was to go to the
chambermaids and discover that these women there were working twelve and
fourteen hours a day. They proceeded to organize the women, and the
college authorities were confronted with a demand for an eight-hour
day—which they granted! They granted a number of other things before
they got through. Teaching economics and social science to union girls
was quite a different matter from teaching it to the daughters of the
leisure class. In the winter time Bryn Mawr professors can get by with
formulas, but in these summer months they had to come down to brass
tacks; for to these girls an economic theory meant some particular
place, some particular set of circumstances: “When I was in such and
such a shop,” or, “When I was on strike in New York!” This made an
entirely new thing out of the subject of economics.

Also, it made a new thing out of literature. Professor Dana was selected
to read poetry to the girls at chapel, and poetry, as we know, is an
important source of culture. Dana read one or two poems on Russia, at
which the dean in charge seemed shocked. She asked him to read poems at
least a hundred years old. Dana thought it over, and answered that he
would do so, and next morning he read in chapel two poems which were
exactly a hundred years old—Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy,” and his

                     Men of England, wherefore plow
                     For the lords who lay ye low?

This Bryn Mawr experiment was repeated last summer, with much hurrah in
the newspapers; but needless to say, Harry Dana was not one of the
teachers, and neither was a woman professor who proved too sympathetic
to the working girls. Also a Bryn Mawr teacher, who “got the vision”
from the girls, and prepared to teach some of them in the winter time,
was omitted this year. Nevertheless, the leaven works, and two of the
“tutors,” Bryn Mawr students, were arrested during the summer school
term while picketing a clothing shop in Philadelphia, during a strike by
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Once let the rich girls realize what
the poor girls suffer, and some of the rich girls will protest!

I had a pleasant experience in Cambridge. I was guest in a home which is
the shrine of pilgrims from all over the United States—that of New
England’s favorite poet and Cambridge’s most eminent citizen, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. Here lives the poet’s grandson, who is also a
grandson of Richard Henry Dana, a born teacher, and incidentally a
warm-hearted and most lovable man. Nicholas Murray Butler has not
invited him back to Columbia; nor has it occurred to President Lowell to
invite him to step around the corner from his home and lecture on the
literature of social protest to Harvard students. Nevertheless, Harry
Dana has found some teaching to do; he travels over to the Boston Labor
College, and teaches workingmen. One Sunday morning I attended a
committee meeting of this institution—several college professors and
several labor leaders, conspiring in the home of the poet Longfellow to
overturn academic authority in the United States!

Then I traveled across the continent to my home in Pasadena, and found
that Professor John Scott had been kicked out of the Pasadena High
School in the interests of one hundred percent reaction, and with the
help of progressive labor leaders had started a workers’ college in Los
Angeles. So it goes, in one city after another; any time a group of
labor men want to save the brains of their young people, they can find a
kicked-out professor; and any time a kicked-out professor is willing to
cultivate his self-respect on a little oatmeal, he can manage to get
together a group of class-conscious labor men, and can greatly increase
his influence and effectiveness. When Dana was fired from Columbia, he
lectured to classes of six and eight hundred people at the Rand School;
while Scott Nearing assures me that continuously during the eight years
since he parted from the University of Pennsylvania, he has had not
merely larger audiences, but more serious and more interesting
audiences.




                            CHAPTER LXXXVIII
                         THE WORKERS’ COLLEGES


I begin this chapter by telling you about a very pleasant enterprise,
the resident college which has just been started by the labor education
movement, the Brookwood School at Katonah, New York. Brookwood is a
co-educational college, with a two years’ course and a year of
post-graduate work. Its aims are set forth as follows:

  Brookwood aims to train economists, statisticians, journalists,
  writers and teachers, organizers, workers and speakers, for the labor
  and farmer movements in order that these movements may have people
  coming from their own ranks, with their own point of view, who are
  fully capable by training and knowledge of exercising a genuine
  statesmanship.

Brookwood was organized by Toscan Bennett, a reformed corporation
lawyer, and his wife, a reformed suffragette. They purchased a farm,
with a beautiful old colonial building, and this summer, while I am
writing a book, they are working on new dormitories—and I wish I might
be there! If you want to find in this ugly and greedy world a place
where the true spirit of comradeship prevails, where men and women,
middle-aged and young, consecrate themselves with fervor, and also with
fun, to the service of freedom and social justice, take my advice and
pay a visit to Brookwood.

The clothing workers’ unions in New York and the coal miners in
Pennsylvania furnish most of the pupils, and pay a part of their
expenses. They are taught by the customary outfit of kicked-out college
professors and school teachers. There is Josephine Colby, who organized
the teachers of Fresno, California, and was separated from her position
by a superintendent who stated in the newspapers that he didn’t believe
in using arguments in dealing with union school teachers, the thing to
use was a baseball bat. Also there is David Saposs, who was in a student
revolt at the University of Wisconsin, when the working students
organized and got the business manager of the university fired; as a
result, Saposs was told that it would do him no good to get a degree, as
he would not be recommended for a teaching position!

Also there is A. J. Muste, a reformed Quaker clergyman, who has received
a quite unique training for his career as labor educator. I first heard
of him as a theological student, through a little mimeographed circular,
“Towards a New Preaching Order.” He and a group of three or four young
men proposed to go out into the world in the old apostolic fashion,
without scrip or purse, and bring capitalism to its knees by moral
fervor. It was a most eloquent piece of writing, and I marked this young
clergyman for a career. Next I heard of him in the Lawrence textile
strike of 1919; his “preaching order” was trying its eloquence upon the
president of the Woolen Trust, who came within an ace of going to
prison, upon the charge of having had dynamite planted in the homes of
non-union workers, as a means of discrediting the strikers. Mr. Wood did
not yield to young Muste’s apostolic fervor; on the contrary, he had his
Cossacks ride the young clergyman down on the sidewalk, and pound him
over the head with their clubs and finally throw him into jail. So Mr.
Muste preached to the strikers, and following the best apostolic
precedents, started a soup kitchen for them, performing the miracle of
the loaves and fishes with the help of checks from a few good angels
scattered over the country. After he had got through with that strike,
he was a trained labor scholar and ready to teach literature in a
workers’ college!

Four years ago there were only two or three labor colleges in the United
States, all of them in New York City; now there are six in the state of
Pennsylvania alone. A bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor,
published in June, 1921, “Education of Adult Working Classes,” lists
twenty-four such institutions, in places as widely scattered as
Washington, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Paul,
Minneapolis, Duluth and Seattle. The auspices under which these schools
are organized are: central labor unions, five; local unions, five;
international unions, five; State federations, seven; Socialist and
radical groups, one; the Women’s Trade-Union League, one.

Mr. Paul Blanshard, secretary of the Rochester Labor College, gives me
an interesting account of one such institution, and the vicissitudes
of a would-be teacher. Mr. Blanshard got his training in
class-consciousness during the textile strike at Utica several years
ago; he tried to start some classes for foreigners in English, and the
interlocking newspapers took him up, and all Utica read that he was
starting “a school in Bolshevism”! The Lusk committee went after
him—on the testimony of a police captain who was later released from
the force under grave suspicion; also of a detective in the employ of
the Helen Ghouls. Mr. Blanshard, of course, was not given a hearing,
and the scare headlines in the newspapers frightened away all his
pupils.

But the Amalgamated Clothing Workers are powerful in Rochester, and are
not so easily frightened; they joined with thirteen other unions to make
a college for Mr. Blanshard to run. They make a contribution of one cent
per month for each member, a total income of seven hundred dollars a
year—which no doubt looks extremely small to Professor Egbert of
Columbia University, which has seven millions a year. Nevertheless, on
this income the college has weekly educational mass meetings, addressed
by the livest men in the country, and attended by some fifteen hundred
workers; it publishes a four-page educational bulletin every week, and
has classes in unionism and public speaking, in English, in current
events, in economics, and in labor problems.

That is a glimpse at one city; and you will find the same thing
happening in all the others. In Portland, Oregon, the college meets in
the Labor Temple, and the Central Labor Council assesses one-twelfth of
its total revenue to save its brains for its own uses. In New York City
two of the greatest unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers
and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, have established educational
departments, and are carrying out elaborate programs for the benefit of
their members. The I. L. G. W. U. has eight “unity centers” in New York
public schools, with classes in English, the teachers assigned by the
Board of Education. It arranges independent courses in the labor
movement, economics, psychology, literature, music, health, etc. Its
“Workers’ University” meets in the Washington Irving High School, with
courses in about twenty subjects, and a registration of three hundred
students. Also there is an extension department, which arranges for
lectures, concerts, and classes of all sorts at the headquarters of the
various local unions. There are branches of this enterprise in Cleveland
and Philadelphia, and the whole thing is the growth of only four years.

In order to realize the deliberate dishonesty of Professor Egbert’s
statement that “labor education has virtually broken down in America,”
you should have attended a conference called by the Workers’ Education
Bureau of America, organized in connection with the New School for
Social Research in New York City, for the purpose of co-ordinating these
labor colleges, and furnishing them with literature and text-books. This
conference was held April 22 and 23, 1922, just one month before
Professor Egbert’s three columns of treachery were featured in the New
York “Times.” Here were eager delegates, teachers and students,
addressed by speakers as wide apart in their views as Samuel Gompers,
James Maurer, Charles A. Beard and Benjamin Schlesinger. I will list the
subjects discussed at one of the sessions, dealing with “Teaching
Methods in Workers’ Education”—this just to give you an idea of the
breadth of view and practical grip of the movement: “The Forum,” “The
Debate,” “School-room Methods,” “Discussion Methods,” “Health
Education,” “Methods of Health Education,” “The Teaching of Economics,”
“Journalism,” “Mass Education,” “Educational Aspects of Work,”
“Correspondence Education,” “Text Books,” “Public Discussion,” “Trade
Union Meetings,” “Problems of Adult Instruction.”

Also this Workers’ Education Bureau is publishing a series of volumes,
entitled “The Workers’ Bookshelf,” to serve as text-books in the labor
colleges. They are the kind of books I believe in, for they cost only
fifty cents a volume. In the “Labor Age,” New York, you will find much
news about these movements. Also you should know something about the
work in England, where it is twenty years old, and has grown to be the
brains and fighting spirit of the British labor movement. The story is
told in “An Adventure in Working Class Education,” by Albert Mansbridge,
founder and general secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association of
Great Britain. The radicals who are making over the mind of British
labor have a magazine, the “Plebs,” which American students ought to
see.

Teaching at these workers’ colleges is a very different matter from
being an old-line college professor. Here you have students who really
want to study. You are back in the twelfth century when five thousand
men thronged to Paris and sat on the hillside to listen to Abelard and
dispute with him. You are back in the old days in America, when a
college was “a student sitting one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the
other end.” You are dealing with students who, while they may be
painfully deficient in book learning, have acquired much knowledge of
life, and are accustomed to assert their point of view. It does not
occur to them to defer to authority; they only defer to facts, and you
have to produce the facts and convince them. Many times the teacher will
find that he himself has become a student, and all college professors
who have tried the adventure agreed in testifying how exhilarating they
find this.

Labor education offers to the college professor a semi-respectable way
to get into contact with the real world. So I plead with professors who
read this book to avail themselves of the opportunities existing—or if
there are none in their neighborhood, to get busy and make some. I am
told of one professor in Pennsylvania who used to travel about from town
to town teaching labor groups, a class each night in a different town.
That is real adventure, and it lies right at the gates of all our
institutions of higher learning. Try it for a year or two, and you may
find that you have built up a clientele, and no longer have to shiver in
your boots when you hear a rumor that one of your trustees has asked
whether it is true that you are a Bolshevik!




                             CHAPTER LXXXIX
                         THE PROFESSORS’ UNION


The labor movement at its present stage can, of course, not support all
the college professors who would like to be free, so it becomes
necessary to seek another remedy. This remedy is obvious; the college
professor must do what the labor men are doing—agitate, educate,
organize. The formula, “In union there is strength,” applies to brain
workers precisely as to hand workers. You would think the brain workers
ought to have the brains to realize this, but they do not, for the
reason that their class prejudices stand in the way, the anarchist
attitude which goes with the intellectual life. So it comes about that
college professors are only two or three percent organized, while coal
miners are sixty or seventy percent organized, and garment workers and
railway men from ninety to a hundred percent organized.

The union of our higher educators is known as the American Association
of University Professors, and we have seen it at work in a number of
institutions. It has a total membership of five thousand, among a
possible membership of some two hundred thousand. Thus two or three
percent of higher educators pay the cost and bear the burden of
representing the whole group. They publish a quarterly bulletin from
their headquarters at 222 Charles River Road, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and investigate cases of infringement of academic freedom, and work out
constructive programs of faculty control. I have quoted extracts from
their reports, the accuracy and honesty of which have never been
successfully challenged. So far as this work goes it is excellent, but
it represents only a feeble start upon the way.

What spoils the usefulness of the professors’ association is precisely
that feeling of class superiority, which makes them as fat rabbits to
the plutocracy. The first aim of the association has apparently been to
distinguish itself from labor unions, whereas the fact is that it is a
labor union, an organization of intellectual proletarians, who have
nothing but their brain-power to sell. Instructors at the University of
California begin on a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, at
the University of Chicago on a hundred and thirty-three dollars a month,
at the University of Illinois the same, at Yale and Michigan on a
hundred and twenty-five, and at Harvard for salaries as low as fifty and
one hundred a month—this for the glory of a Harvard record! Men who have
to keep their families, and dress as gentlemen, and purchase the tools
of a highly specialized trade upon such pay are proletarians, and the
bulk of them will remain proletarians all their lives, and the quicker
they realize it the better for them. Even though their salaries be
raised, and they be put in position to acquire a home and a few
investments, they remain dependent for the things they value most upon
an exploiting class, which dominates the industry of the country, and
therefore inevitably dominates its thought.

This being the case, the college professor’s freedom is bound up with
the freedom of the working class. He may protest to the end of time, but
his status will remain the same, until the plutocratic empire is
overthrown and industrial democracy takes its place. After that, the
status of the professor, as of all intellectual workers, will rest in
the hands of labor—and this is something which is coming, regardless of
anything the professor can do. Such being the case, it would seem
sensible for him to study the labor movement and take his place in
it—not merely in his own interest, but in the interest of the
intellectual life. I have shown you in the labor colleges working-class
leaders co-operating with college professors; and the significance of
this is not merely that educational men are helping the industrial
revolution; it is that the new forces which are preparing to take
control of society are coming to understand what the intellectual life
means, and learning to trust those who live that life. This is something
the importance of which no one can exaggerate; and so I point out to
those college professors who shut themselves up in their shell of
academic snobbery, that the time is coming, and coming soon, when they
will have cause to wish that they had not been quite so haughtily
indifferent to the heartbreak of the poor.

I have on my desk an interesting letter from a Stanford professor,
discussing a problem in etiquette which I submitted to him: the story of
a young Columbia instructor who refused to obey the casual command of
Nicholas Miraculous and escort old Pierpont Morgan to his car. Says the
Stanford professor:

  As I view it, the essence of wage-slavery lies in the acceptance (on
  both sides) of the assumption that the man who happens to “pay” the
  wages for work done thereby attains a right to dictate in the fields
  of all other thoughts and acts of the employe. This is passively so
  generally accepted that I have always refused to consider myself in
  the light of an employe of the president and board, but rather as a
  co-worker in a mutual administration of a trust in which they have
  their part and I have mine—and this despite the fact that they have
  the undoubted legal power to “dismiss” me and I have not that to
  dismiss them, this being merely one of the differentiations of
  function in the administration of the trust. Authority is an insidious
  thing. Few can possess it without being ruined, and I never heard that
  Butler was among the exceptions.

This, you will admit, is the dignified attitude of a scholar; and I have
no doubt that many college professors seek to maintain that attitude.
All I can do is to tell them how they seem to me—as men swimming against
a powerful current, and it is only a question of time before their
energy gives out and they move the way everything else is moving. An
individual may hold out, his prestige enabling him to be regarded as a
harmless eccentric; but the young man who tries to take such an attitude
will go out and write life insurance or make wash-boards.

The effect of economic inferiority is inescapable and automatic; it
produces a psychology of submission, it produces a set of customs and
manners based upon that, and Mrs. Partington, who tried to sweep back
the sea with her broom, was no more foolish than the college professor
who imagines that he can have an institution with wealthy trustees
dominating its financial existence, and preserve in that institution a
real respect for the intellectual life, or a real democratic
relationship between the trustees and their hired servants.

If this be true, then the dignity of the intellectual worker depends
upon the establishment of industrial democracy; freedom for the college
professor awaits the overthrow of the plutocratic empire. And since the
only force in our society which can achieve that overthrow is labor, it
follows that the college professor’s hopes are bound up with the
movement of the workers for freedom. A college professor who imagines
that he can work for faculty control and academic independence, while at
the same time remaining a conservative in his political and economic
ideas, is simply a man with water-tight compartments in his brain.

The forces of industrialism compel the worker to organize in larger and
larger units, and to take into solidarity a wider and wider proportion
of the population. Exactly the same forces are compelling the college
professor, first to realize himself as a class, and second, to study the
movements of other workers for freedom, to become more sympathetic
toward them, and more identified with them in interest and action.
College professors must join their own union; they must set before
themselves the same goal as miners and railwaymen—to organize one
hundred per cent of their trade, and develop a spirit of class loyalty
and class discipline. I have shown you the indignities endured by
college professors, and how pitifully they submit and hold on to their
jobs; I have shown you individuals and groups unceremoniously kicked
out, and obediently going out and seeking for new jobs. Perhaps it never
occurred to you to notice what was lacking—I have not been able to tell
about a single strike of college professors in America! There have been
several cases of student strikes—the young are impulsive, so that it has
been possible for them to act like human beings; but if there has ever
been a group of college professors in the United States who have banded
themselves together and said: “If one of us goes, all of us go,” I have
not been able to learn of that instance.

No, college professors are like actors; they have their individual
idiosyncrasies, their jealousies and personal superiorities. They do not
think of themselves as a class; each one thinks of himself as something
impossible to duplicate. An official of a school-teacher’s union
remarked to me that the price of a teacher is fifty dollars—meaning
thereby that an increase of that amount in salaries would cause a group
of teachers to foreswear their union and place themselves at the mercy
of a school-board. Just what is the price of a college professor I do
not know, but I could cite thousands of cases of men who should have
stood by a colleague in some flagrant case of oppression, but who stayed
on and got rewarded for loyalty to their masters.

The all-important fact in the situation is this; any time the college
professors of America get ready to take control of their own destinies,
and of the intellectual life of their institutions, they can do it.
There is not a college or university in the United States today which
could resists the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and
meaning business. Even Nicholas Murray Butler would bow his haughty head
if the faculty of Columbia should rise up and demand for that
plutocratic empire a system of constitutional government. Chancellor Day
may pound on the table and tell his faculty that he could replace them
in an hour and a half, but he would find that he could not replace them
in a century and a half—especially if they took another leaf out of the
notebook of labor, and set pickets at the gates of Heaven! When the
college professors of America get ready to go on strike, they will have
their reasons and their program; they will put these before the
student-body and before their colleagues in other institutions; nor will
they be so easy to intimidate with policemen’s clubs and court
injunctions as are the wage-slaves of factories and mines!

A humble beginning has been made. The American Federation of Teachers,
which is a labor union, affiliated with the American Federation of
Labor, has a local, No. 120, at the University of Montana. This union
was a result of the Levine case, and it comprises practically the entire
faculty. There is a similar local at the University of North Dakota, a
consequence of the class struggle there. And in New York City is the
Teachers’ Union of New York No. 5, which includes a number of social
minded college men, including Dewey of Columbia, Ward of the Union
Theological Seminary, and Overstreet and Stairs of the College of the
City of New York. The president of the American Federation of Teachers
writes me:

  We have had a few other collegiate and university locals but they did
  not prove very long-lived, and it was very difficult for us to get
  detailed reasons for their decline. I presume fear would account for
  most of them.




                               CHAPTER XC
                         THE PROFESSORS’ STRIKE


The final purpose of this book, you will now realize, is to bring about
a strike of college professors. The next question to be considered is,
what are the principles upon which this strike shall be based?

First and foremost, the question of tenure; which is exactly the same
thing as the claim of the worker to security in his job. The college
professor must not forfeit his standing except for cause, and upon due
and reasonable notice. He must have the right which every criminal
possesses, of knowing what are the charges against him, and of having a
hearing in which he is confronted by his accusers, and given the right
to cross-question them, and to answer their charges and prove them false
if he can. The decision in his case must rest, not with his masters and
exploiters, but with his fellow-workers; in other words, the ancient
right embodied in Magna Carta, to be tried by a jury of his peers. These
rights are elemental; there can be no freedom, no dignity or
self-respect for any man who does not possess them. They are possessed
by scholars in all other civilized countries; it is only in our sweet
land of liberty that scholars are slaves. Says James McKeen Cattell:

  That a professor’s salary should depend on the favor of a president,
  or that he should be dismissed without a hearing by a president with
  the consent of an absentee board of trustees, is a state of affairs
  not conceivable in an English or a German university.

The reason for this anomaly is that the American college has not been
organized on the principles of American government, but on those of
American business; the college is not a state, but a factory. I have
compared Columbia and Minnesota to department-stores and Clark and Johns
Hopkins to Ford factories; and in so doing I was not merely calling
names, but making a diagnosis. They are organized upon that basis, and
run upon that basis, and the problem of changing them is simply one of
the problems of Americanization. The college must become a democratic
republic, run by its citizens and workers.

That brings us to the second demand of the college professor; not merely
must he have security in his job, he must have collective control of
that job, he must say how the college shall be conducted, and what
higher education shall be. That means that he must take from the
trustees, and from their hired man, the president, the greater part of
their present functions.

I say democracy in education, and you have a vision of a great
university turned into a debating society, all the time which should be
spent in “getting things done” being devoted to squabbling and bickering
among various factions and cliques of the faculty. That will happen
sometimes, inevitably; it is one of the incidentals of all beginnings of
democracy to function. But we have been trying out democracy in this
country for three centuries, and we do not have to begin all over again
with the blunders of our childhood. We know today what a constitution
is; we understand the differences among the three functions of
government, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial; we
understand how an executive can be democratically chosen, and given
authority for a reasonable period of time, and loyally obeyed for that
time. We understand how it is possible to have a thorough and free
democratic discussion of policy, and to decide by majority vote, and
then to carry out the will of the majority. If we do not know how to do
these things, the students will teach us, for they are accustomed every
year to organize a football team, and to thresh out its policies, and
elect a captain, and then do what he says. On the football field they do
not stop to argue about signals; they play the game.

The question of a constitution for universities is one of detail; you
will find a very thorough exposition of it in Professor Cattell’s book,
“University Control.” Professor J. E. Kirkpatrick of the University of
Michigan has worked out practical suggestions. Also the matter is being
frequently discussed in “School and Society,” and in the bulletins of
the professors’ association. We have not the space in this book for
anything but a brief statement. It is a problem of reconciling the
rights of many different groups, which perform many different functions.
The largest single group upon the board of a college should obviously be
the faculty, who know most about the institution, and have its interests
most at heart. The alumni should be represented, for their interest is
real, and their services will became more valuable as colleges become
democratic, and as the spirit of class is broken in our society.
Likewise the students are entitled to representation, especially the
upper classes, which have come to know the institution. If the purpose
of the college is to train men to live and serve in a democracy, then
manifestly there should be democracy in their training; they should be
given encouragement to discuss their own needs and purposes, to arrive
at collective agreements, and to make their will effective.

So long as we have a system of private ownership of natural resources,
we shall of course have to have trustees who represent money interests.
But we should endeavor to pare down the powers of this special privilege
group as much as possible; and especially all faculty members should set
their face against the idea of any interference with teaching, or with
the opinions or outside activities of the faculty, by monied men who
represent ownership and not service in the institution.

You have followed me from college to college, listing the grand dukes
and the interlocking directors, and you have thought perhaps that I
condemn these men because they are rich, and consider that people who
have money are ipso facto unfit to have anything to do with education.
All I can answer is that I number among my friends some rich people, who
are ardently striving to abolish special privilege from the world; and
if any rich man wants to come into a college and work for faculty
control and academic freedom, for the right of service and true
scholarship to guide our education, I will bid that man welcome, and
will promise to make no complaint because he happens to be president of
six national banks, director of eight railroads, ten steel companies and
a dozen pickle factories and sausage mills. The world for which I am
working is a world of freedom and fair play; my kingdom of heaven is
open to all, and any man may do his part to make it real on earth. All
that I insist is that the rich man shall renounce his class and his
class interests; he shall turn traitor to that predatory group which now
controls our country and its thinking.

I do not expect many of the interlocking trustees to accept this
invitation. I do expect, however, that developments in our public
affairs will force a constantly increasing number of college professors
to realize the intolerable nature of their present position, and to take
up the work of educating their colleagues and the general public. These
men will come to realize the broad nature of their task; how the roots
of our academic problem go down into the very deeps of our political and
economic life. The need of the college professor is one with the need of
the citizen and the worker; and so, when you agitate for academic
democracy and freedom of teaching, you are educating the community and
taking your part in that class struggle which is the dominant fact of
our time.

You will find that the struggle calls for its heroes and its martyrs, in
universities as in factories and mines. To college professors who read
this book—and especially the young ones—I say: what is life without a
little adventure? You will not starve; no educated man need starve in
America, if he keeps command of his inner forces, and uses but a small
quantity of that shrewdness with which his enemies are so well provided.
And surely it is not too much to ask that among the two hundred thousand
instructors in American colleges there should arise just a few who are
capable of combining intelligence and self-sacrifice!

What are you? You teach history, perhaps; you handle the bones of dead
heroes, the ashes of martyrs are the stuff with which you work. Or you
teach literature; the spirits of thousands of idealists come to your
study, and cry out to you in your dreams. Or perhaps you are a
scientist; if so, remind yourself how Socrates drank the hemlock cup
with dignity, in order that men might be free to use their reason; how
Galileo was tortured in a dungeon, in order that modern science might be
born. Is it then too much to ask that you should risk your monthly pay
check, to save the minds of the young men and women of our time? Think
of these things, the next time you are summoned by your dean for a
scolding, and tell him that a college professor remains an American
citizen, and that he does not sell all his brains for two or three
hundred dollars a month!

I ask for a little personal boldness, also a little for your
institution. What if the new endowment does not come, and you cannot get
the new buildings you had hoped for? The best work of men’s brains has
been done in garrets, and not in marble halls. Remember the glorious
example of Johns Hopkins and Clark in the old days! It is really
possible for a university to remain small, and for everybody in it to
starve along and serve the unfolding spirit of man. You do not know the
possibilities of sacrifice that lie in a group of scholars and thinkers
until you try; even your students would be willing to work and earn
money for their institution, if it were put up to them as a new crusade.
Yes, and you would find here and there an alumnus who would understand
and help. I do not urge that you should refuse money when it is offered
on honest terms; all I mean is that you should make plain your policy,
that money has no voice in the control of the institution, which knows
but one loyalty—to the truth—and but one instrument—the open mind—and
but one method—investigation and free discussion. Say to your would-be
benefactors: we are educators; we know what the pursuit of knowledge is,
and we teach it; if you wish to help in that, well and good; otherwise
we go our way alone. I conclude this chapter with three stanzas written
by Ralph Chaplin, one of America’s greatest poets, whom the United
States government has held in prison for the last five years, and plans
to hold for fifteen years longer, on account of his political opinions.

            Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie—
                Dust unto dust—
            The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
                As all men must.

            Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell—
                Too strong to strive—
            Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
                Buried alive.

            But rather mourn the apathetic throng—
                The cowed and meek—
            Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong
                And dare not speak!




                              CHAPTER XCI
                        EDUCATING THE EDUCATORS


There is another group in the colleges which must help to reform them,
and that is the students. I have already shown that the student-body
alone cannot dominate a college for any length of time; but in the
student body is always a little group of thinking men, and these
constitute a leaven which can work mighty changes in a great mass of
solid dough.

The first organized effort of college students to educate themselves,
and incidentally to educate their educators, was the Intercollegiate
Socialist Society, which was founded by the writer some eighteen years
ago. That was after I had come out from nine years of college and
university life without knowing that the modern Socialist movement
existed; I resolved to do what I could to make it less easy for the
plutocracy to accomplish that feat in future. Some twenty or thirty
people got together in New York City, and elected Jack London as
president, and he delivered his famous address, “Revolution,” within the
shuddering walls of the Universities of California, Chicago, Harvard and
Yale. We were careful to specify our purpose: “to promote an intelligent
interest in the study of Socialism”; but even with that moderate
statement, only a few institutions would let us in under our own evil
name, and we had to disguise ourselves as liberal societies, and open
forums, and social science clubs.

The name Socialism became so unpopular during the recent flood-tide of
patriotism, that the organization has now called itself the League for
Industrial Democracy. It has as its directors the Reverend Norman
Thomas, editor of “The World Tomorrow,” and Harry Laidler, author of an
excellent text-book, which ought to be used in every college, “Socialism
in Thought and Action.” The purpose of the league is declared to be
“education for a new social order, based on production for use and not
for profit.” It undertakes “research work, the development of pamphlet
literature, and the thinking through of concrete problems of social
ownership.” The president is Professor Robert Morss Lovett of the
University of Chicago, and the vice-presidents are Charles P. Steinmetz,
Evans Clark, Florence Kelley and Arthur Gleason. The league holds a
winter convention in New York and a summer conference lasting a week, at
Camp Tamiment, belonging to the Rand School. The address of the league
is 70 Fifth Avenue, New York.

Recently another student organization has entered the field, the
National Student Forum, product of the labors of a group of young
Harvard liberals, with John Rothschild as secretary. They publish a
fortnightly paper, “The New Student,” at 2929 Broadway, New York; they
have drawn up a “preamble,” which is so much to the point that I quote
it in full:

“Realizing that these are times of rapid social change, the liberal
spirited students of America are building this organization as an
instrument of orderly progress.

“It is apparent to them that if the social changes now in process are to
proceed sanely, those whose education is fitting them for positions of
leadership must be better informed than hitherto regarding the
contemporary affairs of the world in which they live. The students who
founded The National Student Forum are aware that already in almost
every institution of learning there is a group of students whose
interest in social problems has brought them together into some local
organization. It is their belief that to be of influence in the student
life of America the scattered groups must effect an association through
which they may learn from one another’s experience, and publicly share
the search for new light.

“With this in mind they have founded and now maintain The National
Student Forum. They dedicate this organization to the cultivation of the
scientifically inquiring mind; they declare it unbiased in any
particular controversy, yet permitting within itself the expression of
every bias; they declare its one principle to be freedom of expression,
for they realize that without intellectual liberty the students of
America cannot attain the completeness of vision and the social
understanding which will enable them to be effective in the progress of
the community.”

As an illustration of the activities of this group I mention that the
Harvard Liberal Club, during the year 1922, had sixty luncheon speakers
in five months, including such radicals as Clark Getts, Lincoln
Steffens, Florence Kelley, Raymond Robins, Frank Tannenbaum, Roger
Baldwin, Percy Mackaye, Clare Sheridan, Norman Angell, and W. E. B.
Dubois; properly balanced by a group of respectable people, including
Admiral Sims, Hamilton Holt, President Eliot, and a nephew of Lord
Bryce. What it means to the students of one of our universities to have
such a corrective to the provincialism of its curriculum is something
which only the students themselves can tell you, after they have had a
chance to notice the difference. They come with bright eyes and eager
faces, they listen and applaud, and they stay for hours to ask
questions. They go away, knowing at least this much: that there are
ideas in the world which are not tedious and dusty, and that the free
use of the intellectual faculties can be as interesting as fraternity
gossip and waving flags at gladiatorial combats.

So to the little group who come from free-thinking homes, or from the
working classes, and do not mean to sell out their own people, I say:
face the gales of ridicule and scolding, and see to it that while you
are in college the students become acquainted with modern ideas. Get
together a little group, and invite in speakers of all shades of
opinion, and if the radical ones are barred, make an issue of it, and
agitate for freedom of discussion. Join with those members of the
faculty who are sympathetic to your point of view, extend their
influence among the student-body, and back them up in controversies with
the administration. Constitute yourself a ferment and leaven the
dough-heads! I do not mean by this that you should be “fresh,” or should
go out of your way to seek trouble. Take the time to study, and know
what you are talking about, so that when you take a position you will
not be easily put down. When you have really studied and thought, then
do not be afraid of being laughed at; for you will surely never do
anything new or worthwhile in your life without being laughed at by
fools and idlers.

Choose the big issues, and choose men and women who really have
something to bring to the student-body. You will find them nearly always
willing to come—all except the conservatives; but invite these also, and
keep after them, and advertise the fact that you have done it. You have
nothing to fear from their arguments, however masterful may be their
air; we can handle them, I promise you—I have been through the whole
question from A to Z, I have read the best that the opposition has to
produce, and they cannot refute the claims of the workers for freedom,
for social justice, and for light. If I had only one message to give to
college students, it would be this: there exists in the modern
revolutionary movement a vast treasure of idealism and inspiration,
which your elders seek by every means in their power to keep from you.
This treasure is your birthright, and to make it yours is your life’s
great success.

That they cannot answer the arguments of the social rebels, is something
which the League of the Old Men knows perfectly well, and that is why
they are afraid of us. In the literature of the Better America
Federation of California it is again and again admitted that the
immature minds of the young cannot be trusted to resist the temptations
of idealism; if they meet these beautiful-sounding ideas they adopt
them—and so they must be kept from knowing that the ideas exist! The
soundness of this fear has been proven, wherever free discussion has
been tried out. For example, in the state of Colorado, one of the great
centers of metal mining and corruption in our country, the various
colleges organized a State League for Debating, and they held a debate
on the “open shop,” and one of the teachers reported to me the results.
There were eleven members of the “team,” and they came from the homes of
the employing classes, and everyone of them believed in the “American
plan.” At the end of the debate two were in doubt and nine opposed to
the plan! Another team consisted of four women, and three of these were
converted.

There is another interesting college movement, which has taken its rise
in the West, under the leadership of B. M. Cherrington, a young Y. M. C.
A. worker of the new type, who has seen the light and is preaching the
social gospel. This organization is taking college students out into
industry in the summer-time, not merely to earn money, but to learn the
facts about labor conditions, and to understand them. The students are
required to read books on the subject, and to prepare papers on what
they have found. There was a street railway strike, in which more than
sixty persons were shot. The students attended the conferences over this
strike, and heard both sides presented. At the end of the summer’s work
they held a convention and drew up a statement, as follows:

“Having been associated, under the leadership of men of high ideals and
Christian motives, for the purpose of intensive study of the human
factor in industry, and having, as a result, come to a realization of
the present seriousness and possible disastrous results of the turmoil
and unrest which is now gripping the industrial world; and further
realizing that those who are to become the business, professional and
political leaders of tomorrow, the present college men, are, through
lack of knowledge of and interest in these conditions, not only
neglecting a vital part of their education, but are actually committing
an injustice against humanity in failing to prepare themselves to meet
the inevitable crisis, we, the members of the Denver Summer Study Group
of 1920, undertake to expand that organization under the name “The
Collegiate Industrial Research Movement.”

The same thing is being done by the Young Women’s Christian Association.
There was a movement of this kind under the direction of Miss Caroline
Goforth, and I heard an interesting story about one of the girls, who
was running an elevator, and had her foot caught and injured. She was
dressed like a “lady,” and looked like one, and the surgeon took her for
a passenger, and was courteous and helpful—until he discovered that she
was an employe, when he became abrupt and negligent. Our interlocking
newspapers profess to wonder at the existence of “parlor Bolshevists”
and “pink tea Socialists,” and may be interested to know how such
creatures are made. Here was one made in a few minutes, by sharing the
actual bitter experience of the workers!

I have narrated how the working class students at Bryn Mawr proceeded to
unionize the “help” at that college. This is another work which liberal
students may undertake with profit at many American colleges and
universities. I have already referred to the experience of a group of
students who set out ten years ago to reform conditions of labor at the
University of Wisconsin. They organized an industrial union of all
working students; the university authorities tried to break it up, and
threatened to expel a group of forty active students from their jobs—and
therefore from the university. They locked out a hundred and fifty from
the University Commons. But the students succeeded in getting publicity;
they brought in labor organizers, who surveyed the working conditions,
and showed up the graft in the running of the university dining-rooms,
the purchasing of milk and other supplies. They showed that two carloads
of potatoes had been allowed to rot, that a car of apples had been
allowed to freeze; also that the university was working girls in
violation of the state industrial law.

The interlocking regents were called in, and also the board of visitors,
and there was great excitement. One of the students reminded President
Van Hise that the Milwaukee Trades and Labor Assembly controlled a
hundred and fifty thousand votes; which apparently produced the effect
intended, for the business manager of the university retired. The
interlocking trustees showed their appreciation of his fidelity to the
principles of exploitation by immediately calling him to become
president of Tufts College! Tufts gave him an honorary degree, and Brown
and Clark followed suit, and now he is chairman of the Massachusetts
Security League!




                              CHAPTER XCII
                          THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH


I have ventured to suggest student representation on boards controlling
our colleges; and perhaps you thought I was showing too much confidence
in student wisdom. Fortunately I can show you a few places where
students are beginning to take up the problems of their own educating,
and to find fault with the courses served out to them by the
interlocking directorate. For example, Mt. Holyoke, a woman’s college
with a thousand students, located at South Hadley, Massachusetts; they
have organized the “Mt. Holyoke College Community,” governed entirely by
committees of students and faculty. I note that they are fully aware of
the various functions of government, and how to make a democracy work.
They have arranged “an executive body consisting of the acting President
of the College Community (a student) and the presidents of various
student and faculty organizations; a legislative body consisting of one
member for every fifteen students and one for every five members of the
faculty; and a judicial body consisting of five students and two members
of the faculty.” Also these students have organized a committee on the
curriculum, and three hundred and forty of them have reported “a strong
demand for the elimination of required Latin and mathematics, and for
the requirement of physiology and economics; also for modern government
and hygiene.”

More significant yet, the students of Barnard have got busy, right under
the nose of Nicholas Miraculous! They organized a committee on their own
initiative, and have constructed an “ideal” curriculum. Listen to what
these progressive young ladies purpose requiring of freshmen: a course
on the history of mankind, counting ten points, “a synthetic survey
course designed to bring out the chief aspects of man’s relation to his
environment by tracing present conditions and tendencies to historic
processes; the physical nature of the universe ... man as a product of
evolution ... the early history of man ... the concept of culture ...
the historical processes leading to present cultural conditions ...
modern problems, political, economic and social.” Next they want a
course, counting six points, in human biology and psychology, “giving an
outline of human development and distribution on earth, man in relation
to his nearest kin, a survey of human powers and functions, an
introduction to general biology, the structure of the human body,
outlines of embryology, functions of the body and their
inter-relationships”—and laboratory work on all these problems.
Also—imagine young ladies actually putting such things on paper!—they
ask for:

  “Specific human development of the sex-reproductive-child bearing
    function.

    a. “The facts of structure, functions, development and hygiene of
      the sex and reproductive apparatus of the male and female.
    b. “The outstanding facts of maternity and paternity.
    c. “Effects of sex on individual human development from
      fertilization to maturity.
    d. “The nature and power of the sex impulse.
    e. “The gradually developed sex controls imposed on the individual
      by society.
    f. “The pathological effects of perverse and unsocial uses of sex in
      society.
    g. “The facts underlying a satisfactory adjustment in marriage and
      homemaking.”

Also they want a course in “general mathematical analysis,” counting six
points; “the technique of expression,” counting two points; and
“Engliliterature,” counting six points, with the aim “to present
literature as an aspect of life; the emphasis throughout is therefore on
subject matter rather than on technical or historical problems.”

Yes; and also these young ladies of Barnard have taken up the problem of
having Nicholas Miraculous tell them whom they may listen to. It was
declared to them that the good repute of the college must be preserved,
and after an argument they submitted to that imposition; but one thing
they laid down very emphatically—they want the college authorities to
give up the idea of protecting their tender young minds! As they put it:

“Resolved, that it is the feeling of the Student Council:

“That there is nothing gained in shielding students during four years
from problems and ideas they must face during the rest of their life,
and

“That if they are considered incapable of rational judgment upon
theories presented to them, the solution lies in further training in
scientific method rather than in quarantine from ideas, and

“That a reputation for fearless open-mindedness is more to be desired
for an academic institution than material prosperity.”

Also the Harvard students are waking up, under the influence of the
Liberal Club. They have been discussing the subject of education,
calling in various professors and deans to address them, and last spring
the members of the corporation and the board of overseers were the
guests of the club, to consider inaugurating the English tutorial system
at Harvard. Also Harvard has a cooperative society, with three students
upon its board of directors, and the Barnard students are planning a
cooperative book-store, to be run entirely by themselves.

Such things as this have a way of spreading; they are spreading rapidly
in Germany, where there is a movement of insurgent youth, taking steps
to form a “World League of Youth,” to make over the thinking and the
social life of mankind. You will no doubt admit that the youth of
Germany have justification for being discontented with the management of
their Fatherland. Let me quote from their manifesto:

“Comrades! We are united in the hatred of the institutions of our social
life and of our time. We ask ourselves: Whose fault are these
institutions, this civilization? On whose conscience rest these
political systems, these schools, these churches, these politics, these
newspapers and so much else? The ‘adult’ people....”

Again, here is a statement from one of the leaders of this new and
vitally important movement:

“The unifying characteristic, indeed the only sense of the youth
movement is this: we no longer want to obey laws, coercions, customs
that come to us from the outside and that have aims without a living,
inner meaning to ourselves. We want to form our lives in accordance with
laws that are within us, laws toward which alone we feel a
responsibility.”

Our own country has been more fortunate than Germany; we have still a
great measure of prosperity, we are not yet in the pit of hell with
Central Europe. But we are sliding, and sliding fast, and those who run
our country do not know how to stop the process. I have shown you the
League of the Old Men, suppressing thought and wrecking the world; and
now here is the answer—the League of Youth! The Old Men were raised in
the old order, their thinking is bound by its limitations. But we, the
youth of the world, live in a new age, and have new problems to deal
with. We cannot well do worse than our elders have done; we may very
easily do better. Since we have longer to live in this world than our
elders, we have surely the right to save it if we can!


                             CHAPTER XCIII
                             THE OPEN FORUM


I am writing in a time of reaction, but already the streaks of dawn are
beginning to show. We are soon to witness the social revolution in
Western Europe, and it will not be possible to keep these ideas from
stirring the minds of young America. Our politics will change, and with
that change will come freedom in our state universities, and the
privately endowed institutions will be forced to come along. Just what
will happen in the great centers of snobbery, such as Columbia and
Princeton and Pennsylvania, I do not attempt to predict; perhaps their
faculties will wake up and take control of their own destinies, or
perhaps we shall see in our political life some violent revolutionary
change, which will sweep the plutocratic endowments out of existence all
at once. I am not advocating such a procedure, but I see our ruling
classes doing everything in their power to force it, and if their
efforts should succeed, we may see very quick reforms in American higher
education.

What is it that I want? What should I do if I had my own unhampered way?
Should I kick out all the reactionary professors, and turn Columbia and
Princeton and Pennsylvania into Socialist propaganda clubs? If I could
have my way, I should not commit a single violation of the principles of
academic freedom for which I have pleaded in this book. The trustees and
the presidents should of course be laid on the shelf, for these are
administrative officials, and properly removable when a change of policy
is desired. This would apply equally to the deans as administrators; but
so far as the teachers are concerned, I would do them the honor to set
them free, and plead with them to open their eyes to the new dawn of
social justice. Just as there are thousands of members of the clergy who
would jump up with a shout if they knew they could cease preaching fairy
tales without losing their jobs, so there are thousands of college
professors who would consider the truth if it were presented to them,
and would teach it if they were encouraged.

As for the aged-minded ones—what I should do with them is to compete
them out of business. I really believe in truth, and in the power of
truth to confute error; I take my stand on the sentence of Wendell
Phillips: “If anything cannot stand the truth, let it crack.” What I ask
is free discussion; what I want in the colleges is that both faculty and
students should have opportunity to hear all sides of all questions, and
especially those questions which lie at the heart of the great class
struggle of our time. What I should do to the college would be to
introduce a few live young professors who know modern ideas, and would
lecture on modern books and modern political movements, explaining the
revolutionary spirit which is vitalizing history, philosophy, religion
and art. You would see in a year or two how the students thronged to
these live men, and how the old men would have to wake up and fight for
their prestige.

This is the plan of the open forum, and I urge groups of young
professors and students everywhere to take their stand on that. We
desperately need men to lift their voices in this cause just now, for in
the last eight bitter years the American people have shown that they
have no idea what free speech means—no trace of such an idea! We sent
one or two thousand men to jail for the crime of expressing unpopular
opinion; as I write, four years after the armistice, we are still
holding seventy-six such men in torment, and the great mass of authority
which controls our politics, our press and our pulpits shows that it has
no conception whatever of the right of a man to advocate an unpopular
belief, or of the danger to society involved in the crushing of minority
opinion.

It is not too much to say that in America today it is a general and
firmly held conviction that to believe and teach certain ideas is a
crime. And from where shall we expect opposition to this survival of
savagery among us, if not from our universities, which are supposed to
be dedicated to the search for truth? It is the shame of our time that
our colleges and universities have been silent while freedom of opinion
has been strangled in America. Right here is the crucial issue, here is
where the call for academic heroes and martyrs goes out. The few of us
who believe in the truth have an organization, which will back you and
furnish you with ammunition in this fight; if you do not know its
literature, write to the American Civil Liberties Union, New York City.

I have heard the arguments of the reactionaries, their cries of horror
at the idea that the sensitive minds of the young should be exposed to
the corruption of vicious and incendiary ideas. To this the answer is
plain: if any parent wants to keep his child from thinking, there is no
law to deny him this power, but he should keep that child at home, and
not send it to an institution which exists for the purpose of training
young men and women to use the faculties of the mind. Colleges and
universities are places, or should be places, for those who wish to
think; and for any institution making such a pretense there can be but
one rule of procedure, which is that all ideas are given a hearing and
tried out in the furnace of controversy.

I am aware, of course, that there are lunatics in the world, and an
infinite variety of cranks and bores—my mail is burdened with their
writings, and they keep my door bell buzzing. I do not mean to say that
college platforms should be turned over to such people; what I do say
is, that whenever any considerable group of thinking people claim to
have important new ideas to teach the world, they should be given a
hearing in colleges, and if their ideas are unsound, let it be the
business of the college to produce some one on the same platform to
expose that unsoundness. The one thing that should never be heard inside
college walls, or in connection with college policy, is that ideas
should be suppressed because they are “dangerous”—because, in other
words, they might win converts if they were given a hearing!

I met on my journey a horrified university trustee, who exclaimed:
“What! You would permit anarchists and I. W. W.’s to speak at our
institution?”

My answer was a counter-question: “Do you think that anarchism is right,
or that it is wrong?”

The answer was: “Wrong!”

“Then,” I said, “why are you afraid to hear it?”

“I am not afraid for myself, but when you are dealing with young
minds”—and there you are; we must protect the minds of the young! It is
hard for the old to realize that the young may have older minds, having
grown up in a world with better means of thinking and of spreading
ideas.

We deported Emma Goldman, and thought we had thereby prevented the
spread of anarchism; which shows that whatever else our colleges and
universities have done, they have not taught us the psychology of
martyrdom. I agree with the university trustee in thinking that
anarchism is wrong—at least for a hundred years or so; but my way of
handling Emma Goldman would have been to run her on a lecture tour in
every American college and university, in a debate with some thoroughly
trained expert in the history of social evolution. I would have let all
the students hear her, and keep her until midnight answering questions;
so, if there was truth in her views it would have spread, and if there
was error the students would have been inoculated against it for life.

Some years ago I wrote that I should like to send every clergyman in the
United States to jail for a week; this not out of any ill will for the
church, but as a step toward prison reform. In the same way I should
like to see our college students go to jail; or barring that, I should
like to have the prisoners come to the colleges, to tell the students
how men become criminals, and what society could do about it. Some of
the most interesting men I ever met were criminals, and others were
tramps, and others were social revolutionists. I should like to see all
college students go to work in factories, and I should like to see the
leaders of labor, both conservatives and radicals, brought to the
colleges to tell the students about industrial problems. Let the
employers come also—both sides would be more careful of their facts if
they knew they had to present them before a jury of wide-awake students
and highly trained faculty members. What a service the college might
perform, in toning down the bitterness of the class struggle, if the
faculty made it their business to invite both sides in every labor
dispute to come and justify themselves; if the faculty would keep at it,
and accept no refusal, but “smoke out” the arrogant ones, who take,
either publicly or privately, the old-style attitude of “the public be
damned!”

That is my program for colleges—to discuss the vital ideas, the subjects
that men are arguing and fighting over, the problems that must be solved
if our society is not to be rent by civil war. Everybody is interested
in these questions, old and young, rich and poor, high and low, and if
you deal with them you solve several vexing problems at once. You solve
the problem of getting students to study, and also the problem of
student morals; you turn your college from a country club to which
elegant young gentlemen come to wear good clothes and play games, and
more or less in secret to drink and carouse—you turn it from that into a
place where ideas are taken seriously, and the young learn the use of
the most wonderful tool that the human race has so far developed, that
of experimental science.

When you understand this weapon and its powers, you are no longer afraid
of the specters and the goblins, the dragons and devils and other
monsters which haunted the imagination of our racial childhood. You
know; you know precisely, and you know certainly, and so you are free
from fear; you go out into life as a young warrior with an enchanted
sword, all powerful against all enemies. To forge that sword and train
you in the care of it and the use of it—that is the true task of our
institutions of higher education. To that end the call goes out to all
men and women, who have learned to believe in reason, and wish to have
it vindicated and used in the world. Our educational system today is in
the hands of its last organized enemy, which is class greed and
selfishness based upon economic privilege. To slay that monster is to
set free all the future. If this book helps to make clear the issue, and
to bring fresh recruits to the army of emancipation, its purpose will be
served and its author will be content.

It was my original intention to write a book dealing with our whole
educational system; but as you have seen, the mass of material dealing
with colleges alone proved sufficient to make a full-sized book. It is
my purpose to follow this with a second volume, dealing with the public
schools, and entitled “The Goslings.”




                                 INDEX

Roman numerals refer to chapters, Arabic numerals to pages. Names of
colleges and universities are in italics.

 Abelard, 454

 Abortions, 381

 “Abrams case,” 75

 “Acres of Diamonds,” 332

 Advertising, 315

 _Allegheny_, 347

 Allen, F. J., 89

 Alumni, LXXIII

 Amal. Clothing Workers, 452

 “A Man’s World,” 295

 _American_, 349

 Amer. Ass’n of University Profs., 181, 186, 192, 195, 346–7, 354, 375,
    409, 455

 Amer. Book Co., 289

 Amer. Civil Lib. Union, 475

 Amer. Fed. of Teachers, 459

 _Amherst_, 432

 Ammons, 193

 Anaconda, 179

 Anderson, F. B., 158, 166

 Anderson, Judge, 72

 Angell, J. R., 115, 389

 Angell, N., 117

 Ann Arbor, 264

 _Antioch_, 377

 Archbold, 277, 286

 Ardzrooni, 56

 Armour, 258

 Associated Press, 34, 223, 225, 263, 325

 Athletics, LXXIV

 Atwood, W. W., LX-LXI

 “Auctioneer,” 40

 Aughinbaugh, LXIV

 Automobiles, LV

 Ayres, 183

 Babcock, Mayor, 272–4

 Bacon, J., 208

 Baker, G. F., 19, 306

 Baker, N. D., 304

 Baker, S., 26

 Ballantine, 431

 Bangs, 206

 Bangs, F. S., 48

 Banton, 360

 _Barnard_, 56, 168, 360, 470–1

 Barnes, A. V., 264

 Barnes, B., 35, 46

 Barrows, XXVII-XXXI, 161

 Barnum, 332

 Bartlett, 161

 Baruch, 344

 _Baylor_, 352

 Beal, 264–9

 Beals, 140

 Beard, 47–9, 56, 120, 393, 434, 453

 “Beast,” 189

 Beck, J. M., 416

 Bedford, 368

 Bell, 103

 Bell, B. I., LXXXIII

 _Beloit_, 339–65

 Bemis, 95, 244–5

 Bentley, F. W., 215, 450

 Berkeley, 135, 140

 _Berkeley Divinity_, 429

 _Bethany_, 354

 Better Amer. Fed., 129, 130, 143, 468

 Beyer, 443

 Birge, XLVI

 Birth Control, 146

 Bismarck, 52

 B. “Tribune,” 208

 Black Hand, 131, 149, 150, 169

 Blanshard, P., 451

 Blethen, 174–7

 Bohn, W. E., 267

 Bolley, 200–4

 Bolshevism, 60, 86, 138, 160, 182

 “Book of Life,” 311, 345

 “Bootstrap-lifters,” 353

 Borglum, 58

 Borah, 138, 367

 _Boston_, 320

 B. “Eve. Transcript,” 85

 B. “Herald,” 283

 _Boston Labor_, 449

 Bowman, 273, 275

 Bowne, 277

 Boyesen, 53, 61

 Brackett, 277

 Brandeis, L. D., 20, 62, 73, 85, 367

 Brannon, 182, 340

 “Brass Check,” LXVI, 47, 64, 85, 223-4-31-63, 300–15-40, 430

 Brewster, 192

 Brisbane, 367

 Brock, 417

 Brooks, R. C., 433

 _Brookwood_, 450

 _Brown_, LXIII

 Brown, Chancellor, LXIV, 359

 Bryan, E. A., 183

 Bryan, W. J., 352

 Bryant, L., 59

 Buchtel, 190, 389, 429, 430

 Bulkley, 266

 Bullock, A. G., 289, 295

 Burch, 27

 Burns, 74

 Burton, M. L., 217, 218, 221, 264, 270, 389

 Busey, 261–2

 Butler, H. J., 223, 228–9

 Butler, N. M., VII-XIII, 12, 115, 134, 163, 278, 366, 409, 412, 414,
    456, 458

 Butler, P., XLIX

 Bynner, 143, 145, 148, 151

 Cabot, 69, 359

 _California_, XXVII-XXXI, 320–368, 372, 396, 455

 “Capital-Times,” 223

 “Cardinal,” 237

 Carlton, 26, 196

 Carnegie, 45, 46, 54

 C. Foundation, 408

 “C. Pensions,” 409

 _Carnegie Tech._, 276

 Carpenter, G. R., 9

 Carstensen, 426

 Carver, 411

 Catholic, 7, 177, 349

 Catell, S. S., 362

 Cattell, J. McK., 31, 40, 54, 55, 56, 248, 401, 408, 411, 460, 461

 _Center_, 374

 Central Pacific, 153

 Chafee, 75, 76

 Chaflin, 320

 Chancellor, W. E., 401

 Chandler, 129

 Chanslor, 150, 151

 “Chanticleer,” 247

 Chaplin, R., 464

 Chapman, J. J., 301

 “Charter Day,” 132

 Chase, John, 194

 Chaucer, 8

 Chemistry, 7

 Cherrington, 468

 _Chicago_, L-LII, 321, 375, 377, 380, 397, 455

 Chi. “Inter-Ocean,” 341

 Chi. “Tribune,” 415

 Chinese, 149, 159

 Choate, 75

 Church League for Industrial Democ., 429, 431, 444

 Citizen’s Alliance, 215

 _City College, N. Y._, II, 329

 _Cincinnati_, 331

 _Clark_, LIX-LXI, 422

 Clark, E., 28, 115, 117, 465

 Clark, Senator, 179

 Classics, 141

 Clum, 131, 169, 412

 Cody, 264

 Coe, 27

 Coffman, 218

 Cohan, 296

 Colby, J., 450

 Cole, L. W., 194

 _Colgate_, 368

 _Colorado College_, 194

 _Col. School of Mines_, 196

 _Col. Univ._, 192

 _Columbia_, III, IV, VI-XIII, 320, 359, 366, 443, 458

 Comings, 232

 Commons, 279

 “Comrade Yetta,” 295

 _Conn. C. for Women_, 165

 Conway, 100

 Conwell, 332, 389

 Cooke, M. L., 77, 79, 267

 Cooley, 267

 Coolidge, 84, 194

 Cooper, T., 203, 204

 _Cornell_, LXIII, 377

 Coudert, 26, 48, 127

 Cramblet, 354

 Crane, M., 83, 84

 Crawford, 347, 389

 “Crimes of Times,” 327

 “Criminal Syndicalism,” 131

 “Crimson,” 74

 Crocker, 127, 129, 136, 153

 Crothers, 163, 166

 Croyle, 355

 Cutten, 368

 “Damaged Goods,” 341

 Dana, H. W. L., 56, 446–9

 “Daily Californian,” 151

 Darrow, 367

 _Dartmouth_, 368

 Darwinism, 352

 Davis, J., 429

 Dawes, 341

 Day Brothers, 182

 Day, J. R., LVII-III, 389, 459

 Debs, 145, 284, 417

 Deering, 256

 Degrees, 366, 388–9

 Delano, 63

 _Delaware_, 344

 Democracy, 460

 _Denison_, 361

 _Denver_, XXXIX, 417

 Denver, 444

 D. “Post,” 189, 417, 446

 _DePauw_, 422

 Depew, 367

 Detroit “Free Press,” 270

 Detroit “News,” 265

 Dewey, F. H., 289, 291

 Dewey, 51, 78, 459

 de Young, 130

 Dill, 380

 Dietrichson, 213

 Dirba, 215

 Dix, 27

 Dobson, A., 8

 Dodge, M. H., 25, 45, 392

 Doggett, 431

 Doheny, 333

 Doherty, H. L., 268

 Dollar Line, 143

 Dow, 352

 Drexel, 92

 “Dugout”, 130

 Duke, 350

 du Pont, 64, 344

 Earl, 128, 129, 148

 Easley, LXXXII-LXXXIII

 Eastman, 64, 165

 Eaton, A., 171–173

 Eaton, G. D., 270

 Edison Electric, 71, 77

 “Editor & Publisher”, 225

 Edwards, A., 295

 Egbert, 60, 442, 445, 453

 Einstein, 394

 Eldridge, 343

 Eliot, C. W., 68, 103, 389

 Elks, 31

 Elliott, E. C., 179

 Elliott, H., 62, 64, 367, 369

 Emerson, 68

 _Emory & Henry_, 355

 Engineers, 267, 379

 English, 4, 9

 Erskine, 13

 Evans, W. G., 189–90

 Evanston Conference, 258

 Evolution, 352

 Farmer-Labor Party, 222

 Farrand, 193

 Faunce, 389

 Fed. Res. Board, 410

 Fed. Press, 232

 Few, 389

 Fichte, 18

 Fisher, A., 181

 Fisher, W. C., 311–2

 Flaccus, 277

 Fleishhacker, 127, 128, 129

 _Florida State_, 422

 Foerster, 174

 “Foes of Democracy”, 183

 Follansbee, 275

 “Foolscap”, 218

 Foster, W. T., 169

 Foster, W. Z., 434

 Fox, A. G., 73, 75, 76

 Frankfurter, 75, 78

 Franklin, B., 102

 Fraser, L., 45-7-9

 Frasier, L., 206

 Fraternities, 122, 393

 French, 10

 French, Dean, 282

 French, E. L., 277, 280

 Freud, 288

 Frick, 113

 Frye-Atwood, 292–7

 “Fundamentalists”, 236, 351–3

 Gardner, G., 198

 Garfield, 344, 389

 Garland (Mayor), 276

 Garrett, 113

 Garrison, W. L., 67

 Gary, LIII, 191, 271, 285, 332, 367, 368, 418, 420

 Gen. Educ. Board, 198, 409

 Geo. Wash. Society, 444

 German, 6, 11, 18, 160

 Getts, 435

 “Gibson Standard”, 356

 Gillette, 207

 Gilman, D. C., 302–3

 Gilman, E., 305

 Ginn & Co., 283, 292–5

 Girdansky, 360

 Gleason, 465

 Goforth, 469

 Goldman, 476

 Gompers, 103, 453

 Goodnight, 389

 Goodnow, 52, 303, 389

 Goose-step, 18

 Gorki, 150

 Gosling, I, 478

 Gothic, 241, 365

 Grand Duchess, LIV

 Grand Forks “Herald”, 208

 Graves, 139

 Gray, J. H., 212, 255

 Greater Iowa Ass’n, 131

 Greek, 6

 Greer, 27

 Gregory, T. T. C., 158

 Grundy, 100, 106

 Guggenheim, 189–191

 Gundelfinger, 276

 Guthrie, 53

 Haessler, 435

 Haldeman, 129, 130

 Hall, G. S., LIX-LXI

 _Hamline_, 443

 Hankins, 397

 Hanna, 204

 Harding, 222

 Harper, 241–7

 Hart, 170, 176–7

 _Harvard_, XIV-XIX, 28, 39, 263, 320, 359, 366, 369, 371, 374, 455

 _Harvard Law_, 73, 431

 Harvard Liberal Club, 70, 72, 73, 466

 Harvey, Geo., 367

 Harvey, H. A., 283

 Hayes, E., 436

 Hearst, 76, 134

 Heaven, LVII-III

 Hecker, 428

 Hedges, 339

 Heinz, 272–4

 Helen Ghouls, LXXXII-III, 453

 Helicon Hall, 122

 Heney, 162, 369

 “Herald”, 77

 Herrick, R., 248, 262, 377

 Hibben, 114, 116, 117, 119, 374

 Higginson, 62

 Hill, D. J., 233–4, 367, 414

 Hill, J. J., 203, 206

 Hill, L., 208

 Hinman, 341

 History, 5

 Hixson, 389

 Hogue, 304, 433, 444

 Holmes, 330, 367

 Holman, E. H. H., 443

 “Holy Trinity”, 154

 Holder, 402

 Hoover, 158–9, 367

 Hopkins, 153, 158, 160, 162

 Horlick, 222

 Houston, D. F., 410–1

 Howard, 156

 Howbert, 195

 Howe, F. C., 207, 367

 Howerth, 147, 148

 Hoxie, 78

 Hughes, 108, 309, 367

 Humphries, 70, 74

 _Hunter_, 329, 360

 Huntington, 153

 Huyler, 277

 Hyde, 161, 324

 Hydro-electric, 161

 Hyslop, 13

 _Idaho_, XXXVII

 _Iliff_, 430

 “Illini”, 260

 _Illinois_, LIV, 320, 390, 455

 I. V. A., 207

 “Industrial Republic”, 37

 I. W. W., 57, 476

 Interchurch Fed., 258, 273

 Interchurch World Movement, 191, 275

 Intercoll. Socialist Soc., 355

 Interlocking Directorates, V

 Internat. Harvester Co., 319

 Internat. Ladies’ Garment Workers, 452

 Inventors, 379

 _Iowa_, 336

 “Iron City”, 339

 Irvine, 122

 Jabbergrab, LXIV-VI

 Jackson, D. C., 80

 James, E. J., 95

 James, Wm., 378

 Jastrow, 409

 Jaurès, 358

 Jesus, 27, 256, 276, 282

 Jews, LXXII, 4, 52, 75, 83, 329

 Joffre, 142

 _Johns Hopkins_, LXII, 53, 397, 444

 Johnson, H., 160

 Jones, J. L., 105

 Jordan, 117, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163, 373, 389

 Journalism, LXVI

 Jowett, 436

 “Judge”, 324

 Judson, 250, 389

 Jung, 288

 “Jungle”, 224

 Kahlenberg, 232

 Kahn, 64, 367

 Kaiser, 33, 37, 38, 39, 46

 Kane, 175–6, 207

 _Kansas State_, 396

 Kant, 12

 Keller, 124

 Kelley, F., 465

 Kennedy, J. C., 246

 Kennedy, J. S., 27

 Kent, Dean, 282

 Kerfoot, 443

 Kerlin, 362

 Kerr, 170

 Key Route, 135

 Keyser, 303

 Kiang, 148, 149, 150

 Kidder-Peabody, 84

 King, 96

 Kingsley, 314

 Kinley, 261, 321

 Kirby, F. M., 438

 Kirchwey, F., 118

 _Knox_, 259

 Knox, P. C., 367

 Kolchak, 138

 Kornhauser, 361

 Ku Klux Klan, 336, 381, 423

 “Labor Age”, 453

 Labor Party, 279

 Ladd, A. J., 207

 Ladd, E. F., 199–204

 Ladd, G. T., 401

 Ladd, W. P., 429

 _Lafayette_, 438

 LaFollette, 32, 33, 222, 232, 367

 Laidler, 296, 355, 465

 Lake, 125

 “Lampoon”, 85

 Land Grant Colleges, 199

 Lansing, 367

 Laski, XVIII-XIX, 299, 391

 Lassalle, 17, 358

 Latin, 6

 Latter Day Saints, XXXVIII, 145, 150

 _Lawrence_, 365

 Lawrence, 73, 150

 Lawrence strike, 451

 Lawyers, 380

 League for Ind. Democ., 465

 “League of Old Men”, 331, 467, 473

 League of Youth, 473

 Leavenworth, 435

 Lee, E., 64

 Lee, I., 323

 Lee, J. M., LXVI

 Lee-Higginson, XIV-XIX, 263, 366

 Leland, F. B., 263

 Leland, H., 266

 Lenin, 86

 “Leslie’s”, 324

 Levine, XXXVII, 303

 Lewis, F., 343

 Lewis, S., 122, 217

 Lewis, Wm. D., 96

 Lewinsohn, 206

 Lewisohn, 337, 361, 397

 Libby, O. G., 208

 Liberal, 74

 Liebknecht, 358

 Lindsay, S. McC., 59

 Lindsey, 189, 380

 Lingelbach, 102

 Linville, 26

 Lippmann, 115

 “Literary Digest”, 35

 Literature, 7

 Lockwood, 347

 Lockwood Comm., 59

 Lodge, 63, 367, 369

 Loeb, 396

 London, J., 122, 331, 465

 Los Angeles “Express”, 128

 L. A. “Times”, 129

 Lovejoy, 156, 157

 Lovett, R. M., 246, 465

 Lovett, R. S., 26

 Lowden, 367

 Lowell, A. L., XV-XIX, 115, 359, 389

 Lumber Trust, 177

 “Luskers”, 414

 MacCracken, 424, 438, 440

 MacDonald, 310

 MacDowell, 14

 Maclaurin, 398

 Maddox, 342

 “Man and Superman”, 433

 Manning, W. T., 26

 Mansbridge, 453

 Marburg, 304

 _Marietta_, 341

 “Maroon”, 253

 Marshall, L., 277

 Marx, G., 436

 Marx, K., 17, 211, 358

 _Maryville_, 422

 _Mass. Tech._, 64, 71, 374

 Mather, 118

 Matson Line, 143

 Matthews, B., 11, 163–166, 261–281, 290, 367

 Maurer, 103, 453

 Mayo, 214

 McAdoo, 96

 McClellan, 120

 McClelland, Rev., 259

 McClenahan, 119

 McConnell, 258

 McCormick, 113

 McCormick, Rev., 273

 McElroy, 119, 120

 McVey, 206

 Meadville (Pa.), 347

 Meeker, 258

 Meikeljohn, 432

 Mellon, LVI

 Mencken, 303–4

 “Metropolis”, 327

 Mexico, 117

 Meyling, 142

 _Michigan_, LV, 455

 “Michigan Daily”, 270

 Middletown, 311

 “Mile High Club”, 218

 Miller, Chas., 367

 Mills, A. L., 169–170

 Mills, D. O., 35

 Mills, W. W., 341

 _Minnesota_, XLIV-V, 320

 _Mississippi_, 352

 “Missoulian”, 181

 Mitchell, Pres., 389

 _Modern School_, 414

 Moffat, W. D., 328

 Monaco, 394

 Money Trust, 19, 199

 Montague, 52

 _Montana_, XXXVII, 459

 Montgomery, 389

 Morgan, J. P., V, VI, 45, 62, 179, 366, 456

 Morgan, R., 101

 Mormons, 185

 Morris, E. B., 101

 Morrow, 139

 Morse, 342

 Moser, 169

 _Mt. Holyoke_, 470

 Muensterberg, 39

 _Muhlenberg_, 97

 Mulvane, 349

 _Munich_, 174

 Munroe, 402

 Murfin, 264

 Murlin, 296

 Murray, Bishop, 304

 “Mushrooms”, LXVIII

 _Muskingum_, 346

 Mussey, 56, 117

 Muste, 450

 Myers, 115

 “My Neighbor the Workingman”, 278

 “Nation”, 280, 301

 Nat’l Ass’n for Constitutional Govt., 233

 Nat’l Ass’n Mfrs., 412

 Nat’l Civic Fed., LXXXII, 255

 Nat’l Educ. Ass’n, 59

 Nat’l Security League, 413

 Nat’l Student Forum, 465

 Nearing, XXI-II, LXI, 28

 _Nebraska_, 320, 334

 Negroes, 353, 359, 401

 Nestos, 208

 Nettleton, 429

 Newark (Del.), 344

 Newberry, 264

 Newhall, 158, 167

 New Haven, 73, 85

 “New Northwest”, 181

 “New Republic”, 280, 301, 418

 _New School for Social Research_, 434, 453

 “New Student”, 465

 Newton, 398

 N. Y. “Call”, 430

 N. Y. “Eve. Post”, 63, 64, 225

 N. Y. “Eve. Sun”, 326

 N. Y. “Globe”, LXVI

 N. Y. “Times”, 38, 44, 60, 163, 327, 442, 453

 _N. Y. Univ._, LXIV-VI, 359

 N. Y. “World”, 426, 445

 Nickel, 158, 167

 Nonpartisan League, 199, 202, 221

 _North Carolina_, 433

 North Dakota, 60

 _N. Dakota Agric._, XLI-II, 203

 _N. Dakota Univ._, XLIII, 459

 Northrop, 216

 _Northwestern_, LIII, 125, 144, 321

 _Oberlin_, 430

 “Octopus”, 238

 O’Hare, 232

 _Ohio State_, 337

 _Oklahoma_, 336, 362

 Older, 130, 367

 Olney, 75

 Open Forum, XCIII

 _Oregon_, XXXV, 199

 “Oregonian”, 170

 Ore Trust, XLIV-V

 Otto, 236

 “Our World”, 295

 Overstreet, 459

 Owens, 342

 Pacific Improvement Co., 165

 Paderewski, 58, 367

 Page, T. N., 367

 Paine, 102

 Pallen, 418

 Palmer, 72, 274, 367, 413, 432, 440

 Palo Alto, 161, 462

 Parker, A. B., 367, 418, 425

 Parks, C. C., 194

 Parlor Bolshevists, 469

 _Parsons_, 378

 Parsons, W. B., 25

 _Pasadena High_, 449

 Pattee, 280

 Patten, 254, 255

 Patton, H. B., 196

 Peck, Dean, 287

 Peck, H. T., 12, 42

 _Pennsylvania_, XX-XXIII, 374, 434

 Penn. Mil., 368

 Penrose, 93

 People’s Council, 173

 Pepper, G. W., 93, 104, 105, 367, 368

 Philadelphia, 92

 Phila. “No. Amer.”, 104

 Phillips, W., 67, 474

 Phipps, 191

 Physicians, 381

 Pierson, 100

 Pilate, 103

 Pillsbury, J. S., 210

 _Pittsburgh_, LVI

 “Plebs”, 453

 Plumb, 330, 370

 “Poison Ivy”, 323

 Porter, W. W., 281

 Portland, 452

 Potter, 27

 Powder Trust, 64

 Pound, 75, 431

 President, LXXVI

 Prexy, LXXVI

 _Princeton_, XXIV-VI, 358, 374

 Pritchett, 409

 Procter, 36, 113

 Professors’ Union, LXXXIX

 “Profits of Religion”, 345

 Providence “Journal”, 415

 Pulitzer, 323

 Pujo Committee, 19

 Purdue, 182

 Pyne, 112

 Quakers, 432

 Rabbits, LXXXV

 _Radcliffe_, 28

 _Rand School_, 414, 443

 Rathom, 415

 “Rationalizations”, 438

 “Reds”, 419

 _Reed_, XXXV, 199

 Reed, A. A., 194

 Reed, J., 90

 Renommir, 52

 Reporters, 381

 Research, 144

 Reynolds, G. M., 19, 20

 Rice, Prof., 352

 Rich, I., 320

 Richmond “News-Leader”, 444

 _Ripon_, 365

 Rives, 30

 Robins, R., 142, 252

 Robinson, J. H., 14, 56, 434

 Robinson, Wm. J., 381

 _Rochester_, 165

 _Rochester Labor_, 451

 Rockefeller, 194, 198, 323, 409, 446

 R. Foundation, 217

 Rockefeller, W., 19, 26

 _Rockford_, 342

 R. “Morning Star”, 343

 Rodolf, 435

 Rogers, A. R., 203–6

 Rolland, 132

 Roosevelt, 32, 35, 78, 102, 110

 Root, 35, 46, 367, 409

 Ross, E. A., 155, 402, 456

 Rothschild, 465

 Rowe, 95, 96

 Rugg, 290, 291

 Russell, B., 174, 399

 Sabin, 381

 Sack, A. J., 294

 Sage, Mrs., 277

 Saposs, 450

 Sartori, 128

 Satterlee, 26

 Sayre, 75

 Schlesinger, 453

 Schmieder, 435

 Schmitz, 162

 Schneiderman, 447

 “School & Society”, 390, 461

 Schurman, 307, 389

 Schwab, 307

 Scientists, 133

 Scott, J., 449

 Scudder, 436

 Seaman, Dr., 223, 228

 Seaman, Major, 307

 “Searchlight”, 352

 Seattle, 174

 S. “Post-Intelligencer”, 176

 S. “Times”, 174

 “Seekers”, 211

 Seligman, 44, 56

 Semenoff, 109, 138, 139, 150

 “Sentimental Tommy”, 17

 “Sentinels of Republic”, 414

 Shanklin, 312, 389

 Shaw, B., 266

 Sheldon, 348

 Shelley, 8, 10, 112

 Shepard, 419

 Shepard’s Crook, LXXXIII

 Shepherd (Miss), 262

 Sherman, S. P., 321

 Shiels, 59

 Sims, 74

 Sinclair, 249–254, 300

 Sisson, 180

 “Skull and Bones”, 122

 Smith, Captain, 196

 Smith, E., XXI, 97, 389

 Smith, Jos., 187

 Smith, H., 283

 Smith, L. C., 277

 Smithfield, LV

 “Snapping Cords”, 79, 267

 Snobbery, 363

 Snyder, F. B., 210, 218

 Socialism, 17, 37, 52, 135, 140

 Sou. Methodist, 352

 Soviet Government, 59

 _S. California_, 320, 333

 Speyer, 154

 Spillman, 198, 410

 Spingarn, 41–43, 125

 “Spoon River Anthology”, 433

 Spreckles, 136, 162, 369

 Sproul, 367, 432

 Stairs, 459

 _Stanford_, XXXII-IV, 372, 373

 Stanford, L., 152, 162

 Stanford, Mrs., XXXII-III, 160

 Standard Oil, L-LII, 24, 42

 State Street, 63, 72, 77

 Steel Trust, LVI

 Steffens, 94, 210, 367

 Steiner, 115

 Steinmetz, 465

 Stetson, 380

 Stewart, P. B., 195

 Stockyards, 246

 Stokes, A. P., 125

 Stone, M. E., 225

 Stotesbury, 92, 93

 Strayer, 60

 _St. Stephen’s_, LXXXIII

 Submarines, 125

 Summer Schools, 292

 Sumner, C., 67

 Sumner, W. G., 123, 124

 Sunday, Wm. A., XXII

 “Survey”, 418

 Swain, 79

 _Swarthmore_, 432

 Sykes, F., 165

 _Syracuse_, LVII-III

 Taft, 123, 367

 Tagore, 252

 Tannenbaum, 296

 Tarkington, 367

 Taylor, Mayor, 165

 Teachers’ Union, 26, 27, 459

 _Temple_, 332

 Tennis, 230, 253

 Tennessee, 354

 Tennyson, 112

 “Ten Years at Yale”, 276

 Texas, 70, 252–3

 Thackeray, 114

 Thaw, 272

 Third International, 447

 Thomas, Augustus, 367

 Thomas, G., 187

 Thomas, M. C., 417, 446

 Thomas, N., 465

 Thompson, Pres., 337, 389

 Thurber, C. H., 289, 292, 293

 Tipple, E. S., 277

 Titus, 399

 “Toadstools”, LXIX

 Tolman, 262, 263

 Topeka “Daily Capital”, 349

 Traditions, 366

 Trent, W. P., 10

 Trexler, 97

 Triggs, 245

 _Trinity_, 350

 Trinity Church, 56

 Trotsky, 86

 _Tufts_, 470

 Turner, J. K., 270

 “Twin Cities”, 202

 Underwood, 58

 Unearned Increment, 232

 _Union Theo. Sem._, 355, 420

 Unitarian, 70, 348, 354

 U. G. I., XX-XXIII

 U. S. Comm. Industrial Relations, 193

 “University Control”, 55, 401, 461

 Untermyer, S., 19, 59, 367

 “Up Stream”, 361

 Urbana, 258

 _Utah_, XXXVIII

 Van Cott, 187

 Vanderlip, 64, 128, 129

 Van Dyke, 111

 Van Hise, 147, 236, 469

 Van Loon, 308, 377

 _Vassar_, 417

 Veblen, 163, 164, 243, 297, 308, 375, 434

 Vera Cruz, 137

 Villard, 147

 Vincent, M., 116, 119

 Vincent, Pres., 217

 _Virginia Mil. Inst._, 362

 Vladivostok, 75

 Wadsworth, E., 62

 Wadsworth, J., 31, 46

 Wanamaker, 332

 Ward, H. F., 191, 255, 428, 430, 433, 459

 Ward, L., 147

 Warfield, D., 40

 _Washburn_, 348, 444

 _Washington_, XXXVI, 331

 _Wash. & Jeff._, 375

 Webb, General, 329

 Webster, A. G., 283

 Weeks, 368

 _Wellesley_, 436

 Wells, H. E., 375

 Wells, H. G., 14, 266

 _Wesleyan_, LXIII, 290

 Wesleyan Foundation, 236

 West, A., 113, 114, 119

 Westinghouse, 307

 _Wharton School_, 99

 Wheat, 201

 Wheeler, B. I., 33, 46, 115, 134, 141, 148, 388

 Wheeler, E. P., 426

 Wheeler, Prof., 352

 White, A. S., 346

 White, B., 330, 433

 Wickersham, 93

 Widener, 93

 Widstoe, 187

 Wilbur, 115, 159, 161

 Wildes, H. E., 65, 66

 Wilhelm, 115

 Wilkinson, H. S., 277

 Willard, 303

 _Williams_, 344

 Williams, A. R., 418

 Williams, J. T., 85

 Willis, 208

 Wilshire, 325

 Wilson, S., 135

 Wilson, W., 137, 367, 385, 413

 Winchester, Geo., 376

 Winthrop, 75

 _Wire City_, 434

 _Wisconsin_, XXVI-IX, 393, 469

 Wishart, 389

 Wister, 367

 Witmer, 101

 Wolf, A. G., 197

 Womer, 348

 Wood, A. E., 116

 Wood, L., 36, 93, 110, 367

 Wood, W. W., 451

 Woodberry, 15, 42

 _Wooster_, 346

 Worcester, 290

 W. “Telegram”, 296

 “Workers”, 441

 Workers’ Education, LXXXVI

 Workers’ Ed. Bureau, 453

 “World’s Work”, 416

 Worrell, 197

 Worst, 199, 204

 Wyckliffite, 8

 Wyland, 296-9

 _Yale_, XXVI, 364, 365, 455

 “Yale Review”, 124

 Yard, R. S., 328

 “Yellowplush Papers”, 114

 Young, J., 185

 Young, N. C., 206

 Young, R., 185-7

 “Young Democracy”, 107

 Y. M. C. A., 70, 191, 269, 422, 468

 _Y. M. C. A. College_, 431

 Y. W. C. A., 469

 Zeuch, 307

 “Zion’s Herald”, 285

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                        =Proposition to Reprint=

                   The Early Books of Upton Sinclair

All the books written by me from 1901 to 1911 are now out of print and
unobtainable. These include:

“=Manassas=,” which Jack London called “The best Civil War book I have
read.”

“=Samuel the Seeker=,” which Frederik van Eeden, the Dutch poet and
novelist, considered my best novel.

“=The Metropolis=,” a novel portraying “Four Hundred” of New York, which
caused a sensation in its day.

“=The Moneychangers=,” a novel dealing with the causes of the panic of
1907.

“=The Journal of Arthur Stirling=,” which is my favorite among my early
books.

“=Jimmie Higgins=,” a novel of the war, published in 1918, and already
out of print.

It is my wish to reprint these six books in a uniform edition, both
cloth-bound and paper-bound. The price will be 60 cents a copy paper and
$1.20 a copy cloth. In order to obtain the necessary capital for this
publication I wish to hear from those who will agree to take the six
volumes, in sets put up in a box. The price will be $2.50 per set
paper-bound and $5.00 per set cloth-bound. You need not send the money;
all I want is to know how many of my readers will take these books when
they are published. If a sufficient number of guarantees are received
the books will be issued in the summer of 1923. The very low price in
sets is intended only for advance orders, and will not be repeated.

                                       UPTON SINCLAIR,
                                               Pasadena, California.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                     =Who Owns the Press, and Why?=

When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And
whose propaganda?

Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it
honest material?

No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the
first time the questions are answered in a book.

                           =THE BRASS CHECK=

                     A Study of American Journalism
                           By UPTON SINCLAIR

Read the record of this book to August, 1920: Published in February,
1920; first edition, 23,000 paper-bound copies, sold in two weeks.
Second edition, 21,000 paper-bound, sold before it could be put to
press. Third edition, 15,000, and fourth edition, 12,000, sold. Fifth
edition, 15,000, in press. Paper for sixth edition, 110,000, just
shipped from the mill. The third and fourth editions are printed on
“number one news”; the sixth will be printed on a carload of lightweight
brown wrapping paper—all we could get in a hurry.

The first cloth edition, 16,500 copies, all sold; a carload of paper for
the second edition, 40,000 copies, has just reached our printer—and so
we dare to advertise!

Ninety thousand copies of a book sold in six months—and published by the
author, with no advertising, and only a few scattered reviews! What this
means is that the American people want to know the truth about their
newspapers. They have found the truth in “The Brass Check” and they are
calling for it by telegraph. Put these books on your counter, and you
will see, as one doctor wrote us—“they melt away like the snow.”

From the pastor of the Community Church, New York:

  “I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your new book,
  ‘The Brass Check.’ Although it arrived only a few days ago, I have
  already read it through, every word, and have loaned it to one of my
  colleagues for reading. The book is tremendous. I have never read a
  more strongly consistent argument or one so formidably buttressed by
  facts. You have proved your case to the handle. I again take
  satisfaction in saluting you not only as a great novelist, but as the
  ablest pamphleteer in America today. I am already passing around the
  word in my church and taking orders for the book.”—John Haynes Holmes.

  =440 pages. Single copy, paper, 6Oc postpaid; three copies, $1.50; ten
 copies, $4.50. Single copy, cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies, $3.00;
                            ten copies, $9.00=

                 Address: UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, Cal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         They Call Me Carpenter

                           By UPTON SINCLAIR

Would you like to meet Jesus? Would you care to walk down Broadway with
him in the year 1922? What would he order for dinner in a lobster
palace? What would he do in a beauty parlor? What would he make of a
permanent wave? What would he say to Mary Magna, million dollar queen of
the movies? And how would he greet the pillars of St. Bartholomew’s
Church? How would he behave at strike headquarters? What would he say at
a mass meeting of the “reds”? And what would the American Legion do to
him?

  _From the “Survey”_:

  “Upton Sinclair has a reputation for rushing in where angels fear to
  tread. He has done it again and, artist that he is, has mastered the
  most difficult theme with ease and sureness. That the figure of Jesus
  is woven into a novel which is glorious fun, in itself will shock many
  people. But the graphic arts have long been given the liberty of
  treating His life in a contemporary setting—why not the novelist?

  “Heywood Broun and other critics notwithstanding, it must be stated
  that Sinclair has treated the figure of Christ with a reverence far
  more sincere than that of writings in which His presence is shrouded
  in pseudo-mystic inanity. By an artistry borrowed from the technique
  of modern expressionist fiction, he has combined downright realism
  with an extravagant imaginativeness in which the appearance of Christ
  is no more improper than it is in the actual dreams of hundreds of
  thousands of devout Christians.

  “Like all of Sinclair’s writings, this book is, of course, a Socialist
  tract; but here—in a spirit which entirely destroys Mr. Broun’s charge
  that he has made Christ the spokesman of one class—he is unmerciful in
  his exposure of the sins of the poor as well as of the rich, and
  directs at the comrades in radical movements a sermon which every
  churchman will gladly endorse.

  “It is not necessary to recommend a book that will find its way into
  thousands of homes. Incidentally one wonders how a story so
  colloquially American—Mr. Broun considers this bad taste—can possibly
  be translated into the Hungarian, the Chinese and the dozen or so
  other languages in which Sinclair’s books are devoured by the common
  people of the world.”

                     Price, $1.75 cloth, postpaid.

                               Order from
                            UPTON SINCLAIR,
                          Pasadena, California

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 _A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the literary reviews of
                               America._

                        THE PROFITS OF RELIGION

                           BY UPTON SINCLAIR

A study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a Shield to
Privilege; the first examination in any language of institutionalized
religion from the economic point of view. “Has the labour as well as the
merit of breaking virgin soil,” writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had
practically no advertising and only two or three reviews in radical
publications; yet forty thousand copies have been sold in the first
year.

  _From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes_: “I must confess that it has fairly
  made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or
  unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts.
  I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant
  experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have
  told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for
  my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental,
  whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing.... Let me
  repeat again that I feel that you have done us all a service in the
  writing of this book. Our churches today, like those of ancient
  Palestine, are the abode of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual
  and helpful a thing now as it was in Jesus’ day for that fact to be
  revealed.”

  _From Luther Burbank_: “No one has ever told ‘the truth, the whole
  truth, and nothing but the truth’ more faithfully than Upton Sinclair
  in ‘The Profits of Religion.’”

  _From Louis Untermeyer_: “Let me add my quavering alto to the chorus
  of applause of ‘The Profits of Religion.’ It is something more than a
  book—it is a Work!”

  315 pages. Single copy, 60c postpaid; three copies, $1.50; ten copies,
  $4.50; By freight or express, collect, twenty-five copies at 40c per
  copy; 100 copies at 38c; 500 copies at 36c; 1,000 copies at 35c.
  Single copy, cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies, $3.00; ten copies,
  $9.00. By freight or express, collect, twenty-five copies at 80c per
  copy; 100 copies at 76c; 500 copies at 72c; 1,000 copies at 70c.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                    =A New Novel by Upton Sinclair=

                                  100%

                         THE STORY OF A PATRIOT

Would you like to go behind the scenes and see the “invisible
government” of your country saving you from the Bolsheviks and the Reds?
Would you like to meet the secret agents and provocateurs of “Big
Business,” to know what they look like, how they talk and what they are
doing to make the world safe for democracy? Several of these gentlemen
have been haunting the home of Upton Sinclair during the past three
years and he has had the idea of turning the tables and investigating
the investigators. He has put one of them, Peter Gudge by name, into a
book, together with Peter’s ladyloves, and his wife, and his boss and a
whole group of his fellow-agents and their employers.

The hero of this book is a red-blooded, 100% American, a “he-man” and no
mollycoddle. He begins with the Mooney case, and goes through half a
dozen big cases of which you have heard. His story is a fact-story of
America from 1916 to 1920, and will make a bigger sensation than “The
Jungle.” Albert Rhys Williams, author of “Lenin” and “In the Claws of
the German Eagle,” read the MS. and wrote:

  “This is the first novel of yours that I have read through with real
  interest. It is your most timely work, and is bound to make a
  sensation. I venture that you will have even more trouble than you had
  with ‘The Brass Check’—in getting the books printed fast enough.”

  Single copy, 60c postpaid; three copies, $1.50; ten copies, $4.50. By
  freight or express, collect, twenty-five copies at 40c per copy; 100
  copies at 38c; 500 copies at 36c; 1,000 copies at 35c. Single copy,
  cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies, $3.00; ten copies, $9.00. By
  freight or express, collect, twenty-five copies at 80c per copy; 100
  copies at 76c; 500 copies at 72c; 1,000 copies at 70c.

              =UPTON SINCLAIR   —   Pasadena, California=

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                             JIMMIE HIGGINS

“Jimmie Higgins” is the fellow who does the hard work in the job of
waking up the workers. Jimmie hates war—all war—and fights against it
with heart and soul. But war comes, and Jimmie is drawn into it, whether
he will or no. He has many adventures—strikes, jails, munitions
explosions, draft-boards, army-camps, submarines and battles. “Jimmie
Higgins Goes to War” at last, and when he does he holds back the German
army and wins the battle of “Chatty Terry.” But then they send him into
Russia to fight the Bolsheviki, and there “Jimmie Higgins Votes for
Democracy.”

A picture of the American working-class movement during four years of
world-war; all wings of the movement, all the various tendencies and
clashing impulses are portrayed. Cloth, $1.20 postpaid.

  _From “The Candidate”_: I have just finished reading the first
  installment of “Jimmie Higgins” and I am delighted with it. It is the
  beginning of a great story, a story that will be translated into many
  languages and be read by eager and interested millions all over the
  world. I feel that your art will lend itself readily to “Jimmie
  Higgins,” and that you will be at your best in placing this dear
  little comrade where he belongs in the Socialist movement. The opening
  story of your chapter proves that you know him intimately. So do I and
  I love him with all my heart, even as you do. He has done more for me
  than I shall ever be able to do for him. Almost anyone can be “The
  Candidate,” and almost anyone will do for a speaker, but it takes the
  rarest of qualities to produce a “Jimmie Higgins.” You are painting a
  superb portrait of our “Jimmie” and I congratulate you.

                                                     EUGENE V. DEBS.

  _From Mrs. Jack London_: Jimmie Higgins is immense. He is real, and so
  are the other characters. I’m sure you rather fancy Comrade Dr.
  Service! The beginning of the narrative is delicious with an
  irresistible loving humor; and as a change comes over it and the Big
  Medicine begins to work, one realizes by the light of 1918, what you
  have undertaken to accomplish. The sure touch of your genius is here,
  Upton Sinclair, and I wish Jack London might read and enjoy.

                                                    CHARMIAN LONDON.

  _From a Socialist Artist_: Jimmie Higgins’ start is a master portrayal
  of that character. I have been out so long on these lecture tours that
  I can appreciate the picture. I am waiting to see how the story
  develops. It starts better than “King Coal.”

                                                        RYAN WALKER.

                     Price, cloth, $1.20 postpaid.

                  UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, California

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Concerning

                              =The Jungle=

Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been
such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has
come to Upton Sinclair.—_New York Evening World._

                                  ---

It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin” did for black slavery. But the work is done far better and more
accurately in “The Jungle” than in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”—_Arthur Brisbane
in the New York Evening Journal._

                                  ---

I never expected to read a serial. I am reading “_The Jungle_,” and I
should be afraid to trust myself to tell how it affects me. It is a
great work. I have a feeling that you yourself will be dazed some day by
the excitement about it. It is impossible that such a power should not
be felt. It is so simple, so true, so tragic and so human. It is so
eloquent, and yet so exact. I must restrain myself or you may
misunderstand.—_David Graham Phillips._

                                  ---

In this fearful story the horrors of industrial slavery are as vividly
drawn as if by lightning. It marks an epoch in revolutionary
literature.—_Eugene V. Debs._

                                  ---

          Mr. Heinemann isn’t a man to bungle;
          He’s published a book which is called “The Jungle.”
          It’s written by Upton Sinclair, who
          Appears to have heard a thing or two
          About Chicago and what men do
          Who live in that city—a loathsome crew.
          It’s there that the stockyards reek with blood,
          And the poor man dies, as he lives, in mud;
          The Trusts are wealthy beyond compare,
          And the bosses are all triumphant there,
          And everything rushes without a skid
          To be plunged in a hell which has lost its lid.
          For a country where things like that are done
          There’s just one remedy, only one,
          A latter-day Upton Sinclairism
          Which the rest of us know as Socialism.
          Here’s luck to the book! It will make you cower,
          For it’s written with wonderful, thrilling power.
          It grips your throat with a grip Titanic,
          And scatters shams with a force volcanic.
          Go buy the book, for I judge you need it,
          And when you have bought it, read it, read it.
                              —_Punch_ (_London_).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            _OTHER BOOKS BY
                            UPTON SINCLAIR_.

=KING COAL=: a Novel of the Colorado coal country. Cloth, $1.20
postpaid.

“Clear, convincing, complete.”—Lincoln Steffens.

“I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart of
every American.”—Adolph Germer.

=THE CRY FOR JUSTICE=: an Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest,
with an Introduction by Jack London, who calls it “this humanist
Holy-book.” Thirty-two illustrations, 891 pages. Price $1.50 cloth;
$1.00 paper.

“It should rank with the very noblest works of all time. You could
scarcely have improved on its contents—it is remarkable in variety and
scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it has the
spirit of a challenge and a battle cry.”—Louis Untermeyer.

“You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a book
that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You have made
one that every student of the world’s thought—economic, philosophic,
artistic—has to have.”—Reginald Wright Kauffman.

=SYLVIA=: a Novel of the Far South. Price $1.20 postpaid.

=SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE=: a sequel. Price $1.20 postpaid.

=DAMAGED GOODS=: a Novel made from the play by Brieux. Cloth, $1.20;
paper, 60 cents postpaid.

=PLAYS OF PROTEST=: four dramas. Price $1.20 postpaid.

                      _The above prices postpaid._

                 =UPTON SINCLAIR—Pasadena, California=

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           Transcriber’s Note

The index entry for ‘Open Forum’ incorrectly referenced an invalid Roman
numeral ‘LCIII’ rather than ‘XCIII’. This has been corrected.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
The following issues should be noted, along with the resolutions.

  3.19     a jolly Irish gentle[tle]man                   Removed.

  27.15    when I was a little boy[./,]                   Replaced.

  48.32    the trustees included Tammany [T/H]all         Replaced.

  56.16    of the university’s money[,/.]                 Replaced.

  57.26    to bring suit aga[ni/in]st the university      Transposed.

  73.43    one of Massachusett[’s/s’] most distinguished  Transposed.
           jurists.

  100.8    but this recomm[ne/en]dation was held up       Transposed.

  133.24   the wives of his wea[l]thiest regents          Inserted.

  157.2    they app[e]ared                                Inserted.

  178.17   who have not incurred his disple[sa/as]ure     Transposed.

  180.41   B. W. Huebsch, New York[,/.]                   Replaced.

  303.22   John[s] Hopkins what they like                 Added.

  306.19   said this John[s] Hopkins man                  Added.

  363.32   will always be “openings[,]” desirable         Inserted.
           friendships

  392.31   was an undergradu[a]te                         Inserted.

  394.27   and their a[l]pha-apple-pies                   Inserted.

  398.18   Said N[ei/ie]tzsche                            Transposed.

  399.25   by a peculiar circumstance[s]                  Removed.

  413.12   from Princeton Univer[s]ity                    Inserted.

  420.11   so I take i[s/t] as fair to assume             Replaced.

  421.20   for five paragraphs i[s/t] proceeds            Replaced.

  424.21   since to do so[ so] would                      Removed.

  461.42   to make their will effective[.]                Added.

  472.40   these politics, these newspaper[s]             Added.

  486.29   Schneiderman[n], 447                           Removed.

  ad.1     dealing wit[t]h the causes                     Removed.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 65492 ***