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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.

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

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[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,[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[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.[money.]

[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[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.

[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’[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!