FREE SPEECH BUT—
We have referred to the Harvard Liberal Club, an organization formed by
some graduates who sympathized with the cause of social justice. This
club brought speakers to Harvard, and got itself into the newspapers
several times; for example, during the anti-red hysteria they heard an
address from Federal Judge Anderson, who denounced the Palmer raids as
crimes against the constitution. This caused President Lowell great
annoyance, but he could not control the club, because it was a graduate
organization. He demanded that it abandon the name Harvard, saying it
might cause people to get a wrong idea of the university. Inquiries were
made to ascertain if legal measures could be taken; and when he found
that such measures wouldn’t work, he came to one of its meetings, very
courteous and deeply interested, trying to steer it into ways of
academic propriety. “We are all liberals at Harvard,” he said—an old,
old formula! For a generation the British labor party has been hearing
from the Tories: “We are all Socialists in England.”
Just how much of a liberal President Lowell is, of his own impulse and
from his own conviction, was shown at the time that Louis D. Brandeis
was nominated by President Wilson for the Supreme Court. Brandeis is a
graduate of the Harvard Law School, and was a prosperous corporation
lawyer in Boston; a man of European culture and charming manners, he was
the darling of Harvard, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew. The Lees
and the Higginsons took him up—until suddenly he ran into the New Haven
railroad! Then the other crowd, the Kidders and the Peabodys, took him
up—until he ran into the gas company! After that everybody dropped him,
and if he had not been a man of wealth he would have been ruined. When
he was proposed for the Supreme Court, a committee of lawyers, with
Austen G. Fox, a Harvard man, at their head, took up the fight against
him in the United States Senate. This fight didn’t involve Harvard, and
there was no reason for President Lowell to meddle in it; but he made it
his personal fight, and a fight of the most determined and bitter
character.
In 1918 there was a great strike in the Lawrence textile mills, and this
made a delicate situation, because Harvard holds six hundred thousand
dollars’ worth of woolen mill loans and mortgages, and an equal amount
of bonds and stocks. It seemed natural, therefore, to the overseers that
Harvard students should go out as militiamen to crush this strike; it
did not seem natural to them that members of the Liberal Club should
call meetings and invite strike leaders to tell the students of the
university their side of the case. But the members of this Liberal Club
persisted, and when the district attorney accused the strikers of
violence, they appointed a committee to interview him and get his facts.
They gave a dinner, to which they invited the directors of the mills to
meet the strike-leaders; they appointed a committee to consider terms of
settlement, and in the end they forced a compromise.
Things like this caused most intense annoyance to the interlocking
directorate. This was voiced to a Harvard man of my acquaintance, one of
the organizers of the Liberal Club, by a Harvard graduate whose father
has been a Harvard overseer, and is one of Massachusetts’ most
distinguished jurists. In the Harvard Club of Boston my friend was
challenged to say what he meant by a liberal; and when his definition
was not found satisfactory, the Harvard graduate exclaimed: “A liberal?
I’ll tell you what a liberal is! A liberal is a —- —— —— —— —— ——!” In
order to reproduce the scene you will have to fill these blanks, not
with the ordinary terms of abuse used by longshoremen and lumber-jacks,
but with the most obscene expletives which your imagination can invent.
Such is the present attitude of the ruling class of Harvard toward the
issue of free speech. The attitude of the students was delightfully set
forth by an editorial in the Harvard “Crimson,” at the time of the
Liberal Club lecture of Wilfred Humphries, Y. M. C. A. worker from
Russia. The “Crimson” was for Free Speech—But! What the “Crimson” wished
to forbid was “propaganda”; and it made clear that by this term it meant
any and all protest against things established. Said the cautious young
editor: “Not prohibited by law, propaganda creeps in and is accepted by
many as an almost essential part of freedom of speech!” This is as
persuasive as the communications of the Harvard Union to the liberal
students, barring various radicals from the platform, on the ground that
the Union did not permit “partisan” speakers: the Union’s idea of
non-partisan speakers being such well-poised and judicious conservatives
as Admiral Sims and Detective Burns! As the old saying runs: “Orthodoxy
is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy!” There is a standing rule at
Harvard barring “outside” speakers who discuss “contentious
contemporaneous questions of politics or economics”; and this rule was
used to bar Mrs. Pankhurst!
I tell you of these petty incidents of discrimination; and yet, if we
are to keep our sense of proportion, we must state that in the totality
of American universities, Harvard ranks, from the point of view of
academic liberalism, among the three or four best. There was no
interference with its professors during the war hysteria—and I found but
one other large institution, the University of Chicago, of which this
statement may be made. Also, Harvard has to its credit one post-war
case, in which academic freedom was gravely involved, and in which the
Harvard tradition proved itself still alive. This is a curious and
dramatic story, and I will tell it in detail.
In the summer of 1918 the United States Army invaded Archangel in
Northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia, seizing the
territory of a friendly people and killing its inhabitants without the
declaration of war required by the constitution of the United States.
This invasion was the blackest crime in American public history, and was
denounced by many of our leading thinkers. Also it was denounced by five
obscure Russian Jews, mere children in age, living in the East-side
slums of New York City. Four boys and a girl printed a leaflet, asking
the American people not to kill their Russian compatriots, and they
distributed these leaflets in public—for which crime they were arrested,
taken to prison, and beaten and tortured so severely that one of them
died a few days later. The surviving four were placed on trial, and
after a hideous travesty of justice were given sentences of from fifteen
to twenty years in prison.
This is known as the “Abrams case,” and it stood as one of our greatest
judicial scandals. Among others who protested was Professor Zechariah
Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School. He published in the “Harvard Law
Review,” April, 1920, an article entitled “A Contemporary State Trial”;
and subsequently he embodied this article as a chapter in his book on
“Freedom of Speech.” Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School, with
Professors Frankfurter, Chafee and Sayre (President Wilson’s
son-in-law), also the librarian of the Law School, signed a petition for
executive clemency in this Abrams case. These actions excited great
indignation among the interlocking directorates, and Mr. Austen G. Fox,
a Harvard graduate and Wall Street lawyer, drew up a protest to the
Harvard board of overseers, which protest was signed by twenty prominent
corporation lawyers, all Harvard men, including Mr. Peter B. Olney, a
prominent Tammany politician; Mr. Beekman Winthrop, ex-governor of Porto
Rico, and Mr. Joseph H. Choate, Jr., recently notorious in connection
with the scandals of the Alien Property Custodian. The overseers
referred the matter to the “Committee to Visit the Law School,” which
consists of fourteen prominent servants of the plutocracy, including a
number of judges. The result was a “conference,” in reality a solemn
trial, which occupied an entire day and evening, May 22, 1921, at the
Harvard Club in Boston. Mr. Fox appeared, with a committee of his
supporters and a mass of documents in the case; also the United States
attorney and his assistant, serving as witnesses.
President Lowell’s attitude on this occasion is described to me as that
of “a hen protecting her brood against an old Fox.” Professor Chafee
himself tells me that President Lowell stood by him all through the
“conference,” and made Mr. Fox uncomfortable by well-directed inquiries.
Mr. Fox’s principal charge was that Professor Chafee had taken his
quotations of testimony at the Abrams trial from the official record
submitted to the Supreme Court in the defendant’s appeal, instead of
going to the prosecuting attorney and getting the complete stenographic
record. And lo and behold, when Mr. Fox came to confront the fourteen
Harvard judges, it transpired that he himself had committed a similar
blunder, only far worse! He accused the five professors at the Law
School of having made false representations in their petition to
President Wilson; but instead of going to the office of his friend the
government prosecutor, and getting a photographic reproduction of the
petition as signed by the professors, Mr. Fox presented in evidence a
four-page circular, printed by the Abrams defense, containing a
fac-simile of the petition, with the signatures of the five professors;
the statements which Mr. Fox claimed were inaccurate were printed on the
reverse side of this circular. But it was easy for the professors to
show that they had nothing to do with the circular or its statements.
The document had been compiled by the Abrams defense some time after the
professors signed the petition. Mr. Fox, champion of strict legal
accuracy, had based his charge upon a piece of propaganda literature,
for which the professors had been no more responsible than he!
It is interesting to note how the interlocking newspapers of Boston
handled this incident. It was, as you can understand, a most sensational
piece of news; but it was an “inside” story, a family dispute of the
interlocking directorate. The only newspaper which gave any account of
the indictment of the professors was the Hearst paper, which is to a
certain extent an outlaw institution, and publishes sensational news
concerning the plutocracy, when the interests of Mr. Hearst and his
group are not involved. But no other Boston newspaper published the news
about this trial at the time that it took place; the first account was
in the Boston “Herald,” nearly two months later, after the story was
stale!
It was an amazing demonstration of the power of the Boston plutocracy;
and it affords us curious evidence of the consequences of news
suppression. I heard about the Chafee trial all the way from California
to Massachusetts, and back again; and every time I heard it, I heard a
different version—and always from some one who knew it positively, on
the very best authority. These guardians of the dignity of Harvard
thought that by keeping the story quiet they were helping the cause of
academic freedom; but what they really did was to set loose a flood of
wild rumors, for the most part discreditable to themselves. Of course,
they may say that they do not care about gossip; but why is it not just
as important to educate people about Harvard, as to educate them about
the ancient Egyptians and Greeks?