THE UNIVERSITY OF U. G. I.
Having visited the city in which they ask you what you are worth, and
the city in which they ask you what you know, we have next to visit the
city in which they ask you who your grandfather was. We shall find that
in these modern days the purpose of the inquiry is to find out if your
grandfather was rich. If your grandfather was poor, it will be necessary
for you to become richer before you get what you want in that city.
In order to reach Philadelphia from Boston we take the New York, New
Haven & Hartford Railroad, which is a Morgan road with a recent Harvard
overseer for chairman, a Brown trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale
president for director, and a member of the Yale advisory board, a
Washburn College trustee, a Wellesley trustee, a Pratt Institute
trustee, and two Harvard visitors for directors. The second part of our
journey is on the Pennsylvania Railroad, which is a Morgan road and is
interlocked with the Guaranty Trust Company, Massachusetts Tech, Johns
Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, the United
States Steel Corporation, Bryn Mawr College, Wilson College, Carnegie
Tech, the Girard Trust Company of Philadelphia and the University of
Pennsylvania. Or, if we prefer, we can take the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad, which has a Johns Hopkins trustee for president, and another
Johns Hopkins trustee for director, a Pittsburgh trustee, a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Rutgers trustee, a Teachers’ College and
a Lehigh trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First
National Bank director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors and a
trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. Or we can take the Reading
Railroad, which is Morgan and University of Pennsylvania, University of
Pittsburgh, Swarthmore and Pennsylvania State; or the Philadelphia,
Baltimore and Washington, which is University of Pennsylvania, Equitable
Life, and Johns Hopkins.
We arrive in Philadelphia, which means the City of Brotherly Love, and
observe in every down-town city block its ideals embodied in especially
large men in blue uniform, riding on especially large horses and
carrying especially large clubs, also revolvers scarcely concealed.
Philadelphia is located in the state of Pennsylvania, which means Penn’s
Woodland, and was named after a radical pacifist. All over these
woodlands now ride the state constabulary, and club the heads of persons
such as William Penn whenever they show themselves in action.
In the New York branch of our plutocratic empire of education we found
the emperor, and in the Boston branch we found his son; in Philadelphia
we find the eldest of the grand dukes. The office of J. P. Morgan &
Company in that city is known as Drexel & Company, and Philadelphia’s
great university is presided over by Mr. Edward T. Stotesbury, head of
Drexel & Company, and partner in J. P. Morgan & Company of New York. Mr.
Stotesbury is the chief investment banker of that part of the country;
he is president of three railroads and director in about twenty, also in
about twenty coal companies, and as many financial institutions, banks,
trust companies, safe deposit and insurance companies, also the Baldwin
Locomotive Works and the Cambria Steel Company. The laws of the United
States strictly forbid railroads to own coal companies, and vice versa,
but the interlocking directorate has defied this law for a generation,
and Mr. Stotesbury is one of the principal defiers.
This eldest of the grand dukes is active in their Grand Ducal party,
having taken the job of raising the money to buy the presidency of the
United States in 1904 and 1908. He is also a patron of the graces of
life; he spent fourteen thousand dollars for a trotting horse in a city
in which tens of thousands of little children go to school hungry every
day; he is so little ashamed of this performance that he caused it to be
embodied in his biography in “Who’s Who.” As second grand duke of his
university, Mr. Stotesbury has the son of old “Pete” Widener,
Philadelphia’s traction king; as assistants on the board of this
university he has a partner in his banking firm, and a choice assortment
of plutocrats, totalling as follows: five bankers, three lawyers, two
public utility officials, two corporation officials, three
manufacturers, an insurance and coal mining man, a publisher, an
architect, an engineer, two doctors, two judges, and a senator. It is
difficult to classify these trustees exactly, because the functions of
the various members overlap; most of the bankers are in the coal
business, the lawyers are directors in banks, the architect is an
exbanker, the engineer is director of a power company and a trolley
company, while the publisher is president of a steel company and a
railroad, and director of a national bank. One of the public utility
officials is the brother of Senator Penrose, one of the most
aristocratic political corruptionists America ever had; one of the
lawyers, Wickersham, was Taft’s attorney general; the senator is George
Wharton Pepper, chief lackey to the plutocracy of Pennsylvania. Another
lawyer is general counsel and active vice-president of the United Gas
Improvement Company; two of the bankers are directors in that company.
Another of the bankers is a sugar smuggler, and one of the manufacturers
helped in the effort to buy a presidential nomination for General Wood.
One could not get a more plutocratic board than this; and the
significant thing about it is that they are nearly all of them active,
hard-fighting plutocrats; no retired bandits fattening on their
accumulated loot, but hard campaigners, living in the saddle, riding day
by day to combat. They are the banking men, the coal men, the gas men,
the railroad men, who are robbing the public and crushing labor hour by
hour, and the control they exercise over their educational system is of
the instant, vigilant, smashing kind which you would expect from
military men on hard service.
It is a little difficult to find a satisfactory name for a university in
which so many plutocratic interests are so completely represented. I
might call it the University of Morgan-Drexel, or I might call it the
University of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and be entirely just and exact.
After studying its management and history, I realize that its most
active single interest is the United Gas Improvement Company of
Philadelphia, known as U. G. I. You must not think of this as a local
gas company; it is a great chain of corporations, ruling over three
hundred cities and towns, and with a total investment of five hundred
millions of dollars. Of the seven directors of this concern, Mr.
Stotesbury and two others are on the board of the university, and a
fourth left only last year; also an attorney for the U. G. I. is on the
board. Mr. Randall Morgan, vice president of the U. G. I., is chairman
of the finance committee of the university, the all-powerful position.
Some eighteen years ago Lincoln Steffens described the City of Brotherly
Love in an article entitled “Philadelphia Corrupt and Contented.” He
told how the political ring voted dead dogs and Negro babies at
elections, and how they played poker in hotel rooms for the franchises
and public privileges of the city. Philadelphia was corrupt in those
days, but it was not really contented; for the people had assembled with
ropes in their hands, to mob their city councilmen who were giving away
a franchise to the U. G. I. But since those days the war has come, and
taught our rulers how to handle social discontent. There was a general
strike in the City of Brotherly Love, and it was smashed; the little
Socialist bookstore was raided, the books burned and everybody who sold
them jailed, and now Philadelphia is truly contented, and where the
interlocking directorate used to plunder in tens of millions it now
plunders in hundreds.[E]
[Footnote E: In April, 1922, all the officers and directors of the
United Gas Improvement Company, and its subsidiaries, were indicted by
the Federal grand jury in New York for criminal activities. This grand
jury took testimony for over four weeks, hearing city officials from all
over the Eastern and Central states. The charges listed in the
indictment were that the U. G. I. “(1) instituted and caused to be
instituted unwarranted, vexatious and tortuous litigation against
competitors for the purpose of injuring and intimidating them and
preventing them from continuing to engage in the industry; (2)
instigating the false arrest of competitors and falsely charged said
competitors with counterfeiting trade-marks; (3) acquired control of
competing companies wherever possible and operated said companies as
ostensible but not real competitors of the United Gas Improvement
Company; (4) secretly and fraudulently acquired stock control of
competing companies and eliminated competition on the part of said
companies; (5) entered or caused to be entered collusive bids for
contracts for furnishing and maintaining incandescent gas street lamps
by two or more companies belonging to the United Gas Improvement
Company, each company falsely representing itself to be independent and
not connected with any other company bidding for the same contract; (6)
concealed and denied ownership of various subsidiary companies, and
operated said companies ostensibly as competitors but in fact as
unlawful instruments in accomplishing the objects of the combination and
monopoly; (7) circulated or caused to be circulated false and misleading
reports concerning competitors for the purpose of preventing
competition; (8) molested, injured, and interfered with competitors for
the purpose of intimidating and discouraging them and preventing them
from continuing as competitors in the industry; (9) entered into
contracts with competitors whereby said competitors agreed to refrain
from competition.” The prosecutions were called off by Attorney-General
Daugherty, the particular government official whom President Harding has
appointed for the protecting of big business criminals in the United
States.]
From the beginning the U. G. I. has been vigilant in holding down the
professors in its university. As early as 1886 Professor Edmund J. James
prepared a paper in which he showed the excessive cost of gas furnished
by private companies; for this he was severely mishandled. Later on,
when a syndicate was formed to steal the waterworks from the city of
Philadelphia, they offered Professor James twenty thousand dollars to
keep still on the subject of municipal waterworks; and when he declined
this most generous proposition, they let him go to the University of
Chicago.
Next, in 1898, Professor Leo S. Rowe, now director of the Pan-American
Union, published a paper on Philadelphia’s experiences with its gas
supply. Mr. Clark, one of the vice-presidents of the U. G. I., took
great offense at these statements and made desperate efforts to compel
Mr. Rowe to change them. Professor E. W. Bemis of the University of
Chicago has stated over his own signature as follows: “Failing in this
endeavor, he, Clark, became much excited, and declared to me that if
Professor Rowe did not change or withdraw the account, he would lose all
social and scientific standing in Philadelphia and at the University of
Pennsylvania. Mr. Clark added that he was positive of this, because he
was in close touch with both the city and the university.” Bear in mind,
if you can, the name of this injudicious Professor Bemis, because we
shall hear about him and his adventures at the University of Chicago.
A friend of mine in Philadelphia, who was in touch with this
controversy, told me the curious experience of a young instructor, who
is now connected with the State Department at Washington. This
instructor dug out information concerning certain defects in the charter
of the U. G. I.; and when the directors of the company learned what he
had got, they treated him to “the finest dinner on earth.” “One thing we
want to suggest that you change,” etc. “Well,” said the young
instructor, “I got this out of an ordinance.” He went to his dean with
the facts, and the dean found he was right and told him to stick by it.
This dean was Lewis, another man who got into trouble in the university,
and had a ten years’ campaign to hold his job, because he persisted in
taking part in the activities of the Progressive party. The young
instructor turned his material over to Professor Rowe, and Rowe made use
of it, and as a result his salary was held down for years; none of his
young instructors could get promoted, and he was handicapped at every
turn. Finally, when he was doing war work for the government, and
Secretary McAdoo asked for further leave of absence, an ugly answer was
returned by the university, and Professor Rowe was forced to withdraw.
Next came the adventure of Professor Clyde King, who in 1912 made the
discovery that the U. G. I. was robbing the government of the city of
half a million dollars a year, by delivering gas of less than twenty-two
candlepower, the quality specified in its lease. They worked this little
scheme through the chief of the Bureau of Gas, and the exposure made a
terrific scandal in Philadelphia. This chief had ten thousand dollars a
year for his department, and he himself drew fifty-five hundred of this,
and had five assistants, and only one doing any work. Professor King
took records as to the gas tests, and proved that the U. G. I. had
notice in advance, by a secret telephone code, and they pumped in benzol
vapor to improve the quality of the gas.[F] The president of the gas
company, of course, denied that he knew anything about it. The
vice-president and active head of the gas company, a trustee of the
university, made desperate efforts to suppress this scandal, but he
failed; and as a result of the exposure, the chief of the gas bureau was
fired—and three months afterwards was given an honorary degree by
Muhlenberg College, at Allentown, Pa.
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Footnote F:
See files of Public Service Commission, City of Philadelphia.
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You may have been puzzled as you read this book to understand why the
plutocracy should be so anxious to own universities and colleges; but
now you can understand. If you own a university or college, neither you
nor your friends can ever be sent to jail, and no matter what crimes you
may commit, you can always be made respectable again. This was proven in
the case of the gas chief, for shortly afterwards the U. G. I. came back
into control of the city, and the gas chief was reappointed to his
office! It is interesting to note that the grand duke of Muhlenberg
College who arranged this honor for the gas chief is Colonel Trexler,
president of a lumber company, a cement company, a trolley company and a
telephone company, and author of the wittiest remark now current in the
educational world: “I believe that colleges should grow by degrees!”