THE UNIVERSITY OF THE HOUSE OF MORGAN
The headquarters of the American plutocracy is, of course, New York
City. Here are the three central banks, and here the hundred and twelve
corporations have their offices, and the interlocking directors roll
about in their padded limousines and collect their gold eagles and
half-eagles with the minimum of trouble and delay. According to the Pujo
Committee, the banks and trust companies of New York, all interlocked
with the House of Morgan, had over five billion dollars’ worth of
resources, which was nearly one-fourth of the bank resources of the
country. This did not include the House of Morgan itself, which was, and
is, a private institution. These figures, of course, seem puny since the
world war; in that war the House of Morgan alone is reputed to have made
a billion dollars from its war purchases for the British government, and
if the Pujo Committee were to inquire at the present time it would find
the banking resources of New York City somewhere between fifteen and
twenty-five billions of dollars.
It is inevitable that this headquarters of our plutocratic empire should
be also the headquarters of our plutocratic education. The interlocking
directors could not discommode themselves by taking long journeys;
therefore they selected themselves a spacious site on Morningside
Heights, and there stands the palatial University of the House of
Morgan, which sets the standard for the higher education of America.
Other universities, we shall find, vary from the ideal; there are some
which have old traditions, there are others which permit modern
eccentricities; but in Columbia you have plutocracy, perfect, complete
and final, and as I shall presently show, the rest of America’s
educational system comes more and more to be modeled upon it. Columbia’s
educational experts take charge of the school and college systems of the
country, and the production of plutocratic ideas becomes an industry as
thoroughly established, as completely systematized and standardized as
the production of automobiles or sausages.
Needless to say, the University of the House of Morgan is completely
provided with funds; its resources are estimated at over seventy-five
million dollars and its annual income is over seven million. A
considerable part of its endowment is invested in stocks and bonds,
under the supervision of the interlocking directors. I have a
typewritten list of these holdings, which occupies more than twenty
pages, and includes practically all the important railroads and
industrial corporations in the United States. Whoever you are, and
wherever you live in America, you cannot spend a day, you can hardly
spend an hour of your life, without paying tribute to Columbia
University. In order to collect the material for this book I took a
journey of seven thousand miles, and traveled on fourteen railroads. I
observe that every one of these railroads is included in the lists, so
on every mile of my journey I was helping to build up the Columbia
machine. I helped to build it up when I lit the gas in my lodging-house
room in New York; for Columbia University owns $58,000 worth of New York
Gas and Electric Light, Heat and Power Company’s 4 per cent bonds; I
helped to build it up when I telephoned my friends to make engagements,
for Columbia University owns $50,000 worth of the New York Telephone
Company’s 4½ per cent bonds; I helped to build it up when I took a
spoonful of sugar with my breakfast, for Columbia University owns some
shares in the American Sugar Refining Company, and also in the Cuba Cane
Sugar Corporation.
The great university stops at nothing, however small: “five and ten cent
stores,” and the Park and Tilford Grocery Company, and the Liggett and
Myers Tobacco Company. I have on my desk a letter from a woman, telling
me how the Standard Oil Company has been dispossessing homesteaders from
the oil lands of California; Columbia University is profiting by these
robberies, because it owns $25,000 worth of the gold debenture bonds of
the Standard Oil Company of California. Recently I met a pitiful human
wreck who had given all but his life to the Bethlehem Steel Company;
Columbia University took a part of this man’s health and happiness.
Crossing the desert on my way home, in the baking heat of summer I saw
far out in the barren mountains a huge copper smelter, vomiting clouds
of yellow smoke into the air. We in the Pullman sat in our
shirt-sleeves, with electric fans playing and white-clad waiters
bringing us cool drinks, but even so, we suffered from the heat; yet,
out there in those lonely wastes men toil in front of furnace fires, and
when they drop they are turned to mummies in the baking sand and their
names are not recorded. Not a thought of them came into the minds of the
passengers in the transcontinental train; and, needless to say, no
thought of them troubles the minds of the thirty thousand seekers of the
higher learning who flock to Columbia University every year. With serene
consciences these young people cultivate the graces of life, upon the
income of $49,000 worth of stock in the American Smelters Securities
Company.
This University of the House of Morgan is run by a board of trustees.
Under the law these trustees are the absolute sovereign, the
administrators of the property, responsible to no one. They cannot be
removed, no matter what they do, and they are self-perpetuating, they
appoint their own successors. Their charter, be it noted, is a contract
with the state, and can never be altered or revised. Such was the
decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dartmouth case, way
back in 1819.
Who are the members of this board? The first thing to be noted about
them is that there is only one educator, and that is the president of
the university, an ex-officio member. Not one of them is a scholar, nor
familiar with the life of the intellect. There is one engineer, one
physician, and one bishop; there are ten corporation lawyers, and eight
classified as bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants
and manufacturers. Without exception they are the interlocking directors
of the Pujo charts. The chairman of the board is William Barclay
Parsons, engineer of the subway, and director in numerous corporations.
The youngest member of the board is Marcellus Hartley Dodge, who was
elected when he was 26 years old, and was a director of the Equitable
Life while still an undergraduate at Columbia; he is a son-in-law of
William Rockefeller, and is chairman of the Remington Arms Company and
Union Metallic Cartridge Company. He is said to have cleaned up
twenty-four million in one deal in Midvale Steel, and in October, 1916,
he is credited with making two million by cornering the market in
munitions machinery. Frederick R. Coudert is one of the most prominent
attorneys of the plutocracy, a director in the National Surety and
Equitable Trust. Herbert L. Satterlee is a Morgan attorney and a Morgan
son-in-law. Robert S. Lovett is chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad,
and director of a dozen other roads. Newcomb Carlton, president of the
Western Union Telegraph Company, guides the affairs of a great
university in spite of the fact that he is not a college man. Reverend
William T. Manning is an ex-officio member, one might say, being the
bishop of the church of J. P. Morgan and Company. You must understand
that Columbia is descended from Kings College, an Episcopal institution,
and the bishop, and three vestrymen of Old Trinity are on its board.
Pierpont Morgan, the elder, was on all his life, and Stephen Baker,
president of the Bank of Manhattan and the Bank of the Metropolis, is
still on. A study of those who have held office on the board of
Columbia, from 1900 to 1922, shows fifty-nine persons classified as
follows: bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants and
manufacturers, 20; lawyers, 21; ministers, 8; physicians, 6; educators,
1; engineers, 3. The six physicians were on because of their connection
with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a branch of Columbia.
How rich in their own right are the particular Money Trust lords who run
this great University it is not possible to determine, because these
gentlemen, for the most part, keep their affairs secret. But in the list
of those who have died during twenty-two years we have means for an
estimate, for the property of many of these was listed in the probate
courts of New York and appraised by the transfer tax appraisers. A study
of these records has been made by Henry R. Linville, president of the
Teachers’ Union, and he has courteously placed the manuscript at my
disposal. There are twenty-one trustees who have died and been
appraised, and the list of their stocks and bonds fills a total of
twenty-three typewritten pages, and shows that the total wealth on which
they paid an inheritance tax amounted to one hundred and seventy-three
million dollars, an average of over eight million each. I note among the
list five members of the clergy of Jesus Christ, and I am sure that if
He had visited their parishes He would have been delighted at their
state of affluence—He could hardly have told it from His heavenly courts
with their streets of gold. The poorest of these clergy was Bishop
Burch, who left $37,840; second came the Reverend Coe, who left $80,683;
next came the Reverend Greer, who left $172,619; next came the Reverend
Dix, rector of Trinity, who left $269,637; and finally, Bishop Potter,
my own bishop, whose train I carried when I was a little boy, in the
solemn ceremonials of the church. I was dully awe-stricken, but not so
much as I would have been if I had realized that I was carrying the
train of $380,568. Such sums loom big in the imagination of a little
boy; but they don’t amount to so much on the board of a university where
you associate with the elder Morgan, who left seventy-eight millions,
and with John S. Kennedy, banker of the Gould interests, who left
sixty-five millions.
You might possibly think that our interlocking directors would be so
busy with the task of managing our industries and our government that
they would not have time to superintend our education; but that would be
underestimating their diligence and foresight. They do the job and they
do it personally, not trusting it to subordinates. In the office of the
Teachers’ Union of New York I inspected a chart, dealing with the
interlocking directorates of Columbia University; and except by the
label, you could not tell it from the charts in the three volumes of the
Pujo Reports. It is the same thing, and the men shown are the same men.
They serve J. P Morgan and Company as directors in the coal trust, the
steel trust, the railroad trust; they serve also on the boards of
schools, colleges, and universities through the United States. You could
not tell a chart of the Columbia trustees from a chart of the New York
Central Railroad, or the Remington Arms Company. You could not tell a
chart of Harvard University from a chart of Lee, Higginson and Company,
the banking house of Boston. You could not tell a chart of the
University of Pennsylvania from a chart of the United Gas Improvement
Company. You could not tell a chart of the University of Pittsburgh from
a chart of the United States Steel Corporation. You could not tell a
chart of the University of California from one of the Hydro-Electric
Power Trust, one of Denver University from the Colorado Fuel and Iron
Company, one of the University of Montana from the Anaconda Copper
Company, one of the University of Minnesota from the Ore Trust. These
corporations are one, their interests are one, and their purposes are
one.
Evans Clark, a preceptor in Princeton University—until he made this
survey—collected the facts as to the financial interests of governing
boards of the largest American universities—seven of which were
privately controlled and twenty-two state controlled. He found that the
plutocratic class, or those intimately connected therewith—bankers,
manufacturers, merchants, public utility officers, financiers, great
publishers and lawyers—composed 56 per cent of the membership of the
privately controlled boards, and 68 per cent of the publicly controlled
boards. Says Mr. Clark: “Of the other two great economic groups in
society there is little or no representation. The farmers total between
6 per cent in private and 4 per cent in public boards, while no
representative of labor has a place on any board, public or private. And
finally, no college professor is a trustee of the college in which he
serves, while only fourteen out of 649 are professors in other
institutions. Of these, six are Harvard professors on the Radcliffe
board (the women’s college connected with Harvard). We have allowed the
education of our youth to fall into the absolute control of a group of
men who represent not only a minority of the total population but have,
at the same time, enormous economic and business stakes in what kind of
an education it shall be.”
And this condition prevails right through the list of our colleges,
regardless of size, or where they are located or how financed. This was
shown by Scott Nearing in an exhaustive study, reported in “School and
Society” for September 8, 1917. He wrote to the governing bodies of all
colleges and universities in the United States having more than five
hundred students. There are 189 such institutions, and 143 of these
supplied the lists of trustees with their occupations. The total number
of trustees was 2,470. There were 208 merchants, 196 manufacturers, 112
capitalists, 6 contractors, 32 real estate men, 26 insurance men, 115
corporation officials, 202 bankers, 15 brokers, and 18 publishers,
making for the plutocratic group a total of 930. There were 111 doctors,
514 lawyers, 125 educators, 353 ministers, 8 authors, 43 editors, 70
scientists, 13 social workers and 32 judges, making a total for the
professional group of 1,269. For the miscellaneous group there were 94
retired business men, 3 salesmen, 123 farmers, 46 home-keepers, 3
mechanics, and 2 librarians, making a total of 271. For the purpose of
this inquiry the lawyers belong, not with the professional class, but
with the commercial and financial class, whose retainers they are. That
makes a total of 1,444 of that class, or 58 per cent. In the state
universities the commercial class had a total of 477 out of 776, or 61
per cent. And this, you will note, without counting the retired business
men, who are certainly no less plutocratic in their mentality than the
active ones; without counting the many doctors, ministers, editors, and
educators who are just as plutocratic as the bankers. How plutocratic an
educator can be when he is well paid for it is the next proposition we
have to prove to you.