THE UNIVERSITY GANG
We cross San Francisco Bay to Berkeley, and here is a city of sixty
thousand people, cut in half by a broad avenue; on the one side live
well-to-do commuters, retired army and navy officers, capitalists, and
university students and professors; on the other side live shipyard and
railroad workers, and servants of the rich. The city, both the rich part
and the poor, is completely dominated by a medieval fortress on a hill,
which I have called the University of the Black Hand, and which is
officially known as the University of California. It has eleven thousand
students, a completely intrenched bureaucracy, and a board of regents
made up of the worst plutocratic elements in the state. Desiring to show
how much he cares for “The Goose-step,” the newly elected governor of
the Black Hand has just added to the board the greatest enemy of the
public welfare in California, Harry Chandler, publisher and owner of the
Los Angeles “Times.”
In 1911 the workers of Berkeley took thought of their own interests, and
elected a Socialist clergyman as their mayor. This, of course, was
terrible to the plutocracy, and they waged incessant war upon the
Socialists, one of their principal agencies being the political science
department of their university. You understand that the purpose of
“political science” is to maintain the capitalist state; and what better
practice for the students than to hold down the working class of their
university town?
The head of this department was David P. Barrows, whom I have called the
Dean of Imperialism: one of these military figures who make our cause
easy by caricaturing his own. I have told the story of his career in
“The Goose-step”—how he went to Siberia and directed President Wilson’s
private war on the Russian people, and then came home and clamored for
the shooting of all the Bolsheviks in America. On the strength of this
program the Black Hand made him president of the university; a position
he has just quit, because the Black Hand discovered that it needs, not
merely a man who is “strong,” but one who is not stupid.
What do you do when you are Dean of Imperialism of a state university,
and are set to hold down the local populace? You build up a political
machine, precisely like Tammany Hall or any other machine. You pick a
university representative to become mayor of the town, and you pick
another university representative to run the school board. You have your
experts draw up the city charter and all the laws and ordinances, so as
to make it possible for you to have your way and for the people not to
have their way. You summon your fraternities and put them into politics
on the side of their fathers. You vote your students en masse in the
city, in spite of the fact that they are not legally entitled to vote
there. Your fraternity political leader gets five thousand dollars from
the Key Route (street railways), and when a student exposes this fact on
a public platform, you see this student mobbed and beaten. You collect
campaign funds from the public service corporations and big business
grafters in the usual political fashion, and pay them with the promise
that when there are strikes you will use the students of the university
to break the strikes; and whenever the occasion arises you carry out
this promise. You drive from your university every professor who dares
to lift his voice against the regime of the Black Hand. You kick out
unceremoniously a student who dares to publish a paper reciting the
facts about your activities. Such is “political science” in an American
state university; such are the lessons which the students of the Black
Hand learn in Berkeley, and go back to apply in their home cities and
towns.
You might have the idea that at least a university administration would
do something in the way of improving the schools of its city; but if so,
you would be as naive as the people of Berkeley have been. The
university-controlled system of Berkeley turns out precisely the same
products as the New York system dominated by “Democratic” Tammany Hall,
and the Chicago system dominated by the Thompson “Republican” machine,
and the San Francisco system dominated by Banker Fleishhacker and
Archbishop Hanna; those products being G, F, P, and R—Graft, Favoritism,
Propaganda and Repression.
In the year 1913, when the Socialists carried their second election and
got control of the schools, the school buildings were run down and
filthy, with no paint and with vile, unsanitary toilets. Large sums of
money had been voted, and nobody could find out where they went; the
accounts were purposely confused for the concealment of graft. The
school board was made up of political “dead beats” and grafters,
representing all the business interests, including prostitution and
booze. The teachers were browbeaten, the parents were insulted and
driven from the schools when they tried to find out what was going on.
The pupils were “fired” because of their own political activities, or
the activities of their parents in opposition to the gang.
The Socialists came into power, and their first demand was for the
building up of the school system. They called a bond election, and the
interests defeated this; subsequently the bond issue was carried, and
there was a possibility of several hundred thousand dollars being spent
without consideration for the grafters. This, of course, would never do;
so the political science department of the university was called on, and
it drew up a plan, which the city council put through, to appoint a
special committee to handle this money; a “committee of citizens”—that
is to say, the business grafters of Berkeley, in sufficient number to
outvote the Socialists!
Mrs. Elvina S. Beals was a Socialist member of this school board, and
also of the next school board, on which she constituted an unhappy
minority. She has told me the story of her experiences, and put the
documents into my hands. To become a Socialist school board member is
like stepping into a lion’s den; save that there is no wall against
which you can back up—the lions are on every side of you! There is
nothing you do or attempt to do for the schools in which you do not
encounter some business interest trying to make profit out of them.
If you tried to obtain a fair price for a building site, you made mortal
enemies of some fellow board member, whose relatives were expecting to
retire with a life competence from this particular deal. If you insisted
upon enforcing the law requiring bids for school furnishings, you made
enemies of those board members who had “friends” among the wholesalers.
If you tried to have the board furnish stationery to the high school
students at cost, the merchants of your city came in a body to make a
protest to the board—you were ruining their business. The secretary of
the Chamber of Commerce made an eloquent speech, asking who it was that
paid the taxes to support the schools, if not the business men. If you
tried to establish school cafeterias, so that poor children could get
wholesome food at cost, you were ruining the restaurant keepers and the
bakers. All these people would combine and form a little local Black
Hand; they would start a scandal bureau and fill the kept press with
misrepresentations; they would start a “recall” campaign against you,
and pour out floods of slander upon you, and make you spend a small
fortune to defend yourself.
And here is the most significant fact: at the very front of this
campaign of rascality and falsehood would be the university machine!
Here was a school board giving away old houses to real estate men
without bids; here was a coal man on the board giving furniture
contracts to a friend; and in every such issue the university vote would
be on the side of the grafters! The Socialists brought up the question
of fire insurance graft. It seemed that whenever the local insurance men
got hard up and needed cash, they went and insured a school; they had
even insured one building which didn’t exist!
They had been charging as high as four dollars per hundred; but now the
Socialists demanded bids, and forced the local agents down to a
dollar-sixty per hundred, and in one case as low as sixty cents per
hundred. The representative of a Pennsylvania company made this bid, and
the law required that the city should take the lowest bid. Mrs. Beals
urged that the law be obeyed; against her on the board was an official
of the Federal Coal Company, whose president and secretary were at that
time in San Quentin penitentiary, charged with defrauding the government
by short-weight—and getting fifteen hundred dollars a month salary from
the company while in jail! Also a prominent politician, who frequently
came to board meetings with so much liquor in him that you could smell
it across the table. Also a local political woman and finally the
university professor. Here was a plain issue of whether or not the
school board should obey the law; and the university professor of the
Black Hand voted to disobey the law. After a whole day’s fight, Mrs.
Beals forced a reconsideration on this matter; the professor stuck by
the gang, but the woman and the coal dealer changed, and so the city of
Berkeley was saved five thousand dollars.
Then came an old settler trying to sell some property to the board for
many times its value. There was mysterious pulling of wires, and it was
evident that the board was again going to disobey the law. So the
Socialists raked up a forgotten statute, to the effect that the board
could not buy land without the consent of the people. Under another
forgotten statute they called a town meeting, which was most
embarrassing to the grafters. The board dropped this proposition; also
they dropped Mrs. Beals from the sites committee of the board, and put
her on the supplies committee instead. Thus she saw another side of the
system; one of the agents who sold school supplies told her he was glad
there was now one school supplies committee in the state of California
which did not have its hands held out!
The board, following the lead of President Barrows at the university,
had made a ruling that the superintendent might dismiss teachers on
recommendation from the principal, and without the right to see the
board. But Mrs. Beals made it her business to see every teacher who was
let out, and also to see those who were newly engaged. Iron fire-escapes
were desperately needed, and with the help of the fire-chief Mrs. Beals
got them. Also she got kindergartens in every primary school. Giving her
entire time for the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a month, she
had saved the city of Berkeley a hundred thousand dollars. But now came
war and glory; the board members were called upon to sign a resolution
to the effect that they would perform any service that Woodrow Wilson
might request; and when Mrs. Beals very wisely hesitated at this, the
Associated Press flashed her over the United States as disloyal. So the
gang came in waving the stars and stripes, and everything is now back
where it was. You will find this happening in city after city—America
has been made safe for capitalism.
Berkeley now has as superintendent an amiable but feeble
lecturer-pedagogue, who told the California Teachers’ Association that
“the teachers and the public should get together in prayer-meeting”; he
went on to explain what he meant by the public, naming the Chamber of
Commerce, the Rotarians, the Kiwanis—and not a single labor body! The
overhead expenses of the schools have increased five times—but they have
put out all the Montessori work, because they cannot afford it! In
charge of the spending of the money is a board made up as follows: a
coal and wood dealer; a dry goods merchant of the Rotary Club and
Chamber of Commerce type; the wife of an attorney; a political woman
affiliated with the oil interests and the Barrows machine; and a
professor of the agricultural department of the university. How
aggressively the Black Hand is at work you may judge from the fact that
the children of Berkeley were required to answer a questionnaire,
disguised as a “social survey.” Among fifty questions were such as
these: “How does your father spend his spare time? What does he do
Sundays? What books does your mother read?” The child was assured that
all this would be “confidential”; but he was not permitted to take the
questions home to his parents!