THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLACK HAND
We have completed a survey of our five largest Eastern universities,
Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale; we shall now cross
the continent, to the Western domains of our interlocking directorate.
We may begin our journey on the New York Central, which is a
Vanderbilt-Morgan road, and has a Columbia and a Cornell and a Rochester
University trustee for directors, a recent Yale and New York University
trustee for director, a Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president,
and a Cornell trustee for vice-president, also a Guaranty Trust and two
National City Bank directors; and continue it on the Michigan Central
under the same auspices; then on the Illinois Central, which has a
Columbia trustee and an Armour Institute trustee and a recent University
of Chicago trustee, and a Knox and a Rockford College trustee for
directors, and one First National, one Guaranty Trust, and two National
City Bank directors; then on the Missouri Pacific, with a Brown
University and a Vassar College and a Middlebury College trustee for
directors, and a New York University council member for director and a
Massachusetts Tech trustee for vice-president, and one Equitable Trust
and two Guaranty Trust directors; finishing on the Union Pacific, which
has a Columbia trustee for chairman, also a Rutgers College trustee and
two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors,
also two Equitable Trust, two Guaranty Trust, and three National City
Bank directors. We may announce our coming by the Western Union, which
has a Columbia trustee for president, and on its directorate two
Columbia trustees, a Princeton trustee, a Massachusetts Tech and Hebrew
Tech trustee, and a recent Harvard overseer. Arriving in San Francisco
we shall be welcomed by the interlocking directorate in charge of
railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electricity, land, water, gas—and
education.
Across the bay from San Francisco, high up above the city of Berkeley,
stands the University of California, a medieval fortress from which the
intellectual life of the state is dominated; and here also we find one
of the grand dukes of the plutocracy in charge—Mr. William H. Crocker,
whose father looted the Southern Pacific railroads, covering all
California. Mr. Crocker is a “social leader,” and active head of the
Republican political machine, which runs the government and is run by
the finance of the state. We shall feel at home with Mr. Crocker, when
we discover that he is a director of the Equitable Trust Company of New
York, one of the five great banking institutions of the Money Trust, and
that he sits on this board with Mr. Coudert, attorney for the plutocracy
and trustee of Columbia University; also when we learn that he was a
director of the Parkside Land Company, all of whose officers were
indicted in the San Francisco graft scandal.
Associated with Mr. Crocker in the running of the University of
California is Mortimer Fleishhacker, the biggest banker in San
Francisco, president of the Anglo-California Trust Company, and first
vice-president of the Anglo and London National Bank. I can give you a
glimpse of this gentleman’s activities, for the other day I met a young
newspaper man who had shipped on one of the fishing vessels which
constitute the “hell fleet of the Pacific.” Mr. Fleishhacker is
vice-president of the Union Fish Company, which is paying men $5 a ton
for catching and salting cod, which are sold in San Francisco for $160 a
ton, the incidental costs being practically nothing. Mr. Fleishhacker is
also vice-president of the Alaska Canning Company, whose workers are
hired by a Chinese contractor for $34 a month and board—which consists
of two meals a day of scurvy diet, and only one cup of water a day. In
the canning factories they work from 3 a. m. to 9 p. m., and they sleep
in ramshackle bunkhouses, with no heat, no light and tide water wetting
the floor. Eight of them died of small-pox while my friend was there.
As aid on his university board Mr. Fleishhacker has his attorney, Mr.
Guy C. Earl, vice-president of two power companies and two electric
companies, and a very crude and subservient newspaper, the Los Angeles
“Express”; also Mr. Dickson, proprietor of this same “Express.” Also we
find the president of San Francisco’s gas company, Mr. Britten, an
active enemy of every public ownership movement; Mr. Moffitt,
vice-president of the First National Bank, an honest believer in
capitalism at its worst, and a furious reactionary; also Mr. Bowles,
president of the First National Bank of Oakland, and director in a
railway, a water company, and a timber company; also Mr. Cochran,
vice-president of the Southern California Edison Company, president of a
life insurance company, a director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank, and a
director in half a dozen large financial institutions; also Mr. Foster,
another director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank. Mr. Foster lives in Marin
county, just north of the university, and is known as the Duke of Marin;
so you see these medieval titles are not entirely the product of my
muck-raking imagination.
In addition to these seven, there are two wealthy corporation attorneys,
one of them counsel for the Catholic Church, and for the grafters who
were put on trial in 1910; a Catholic priest who is a close adviser of
the archbishop who runs the San Francisco school system; and the wife of
Sartori, one of the largest bankers in Los Angeles, who, as I happen to
know, helped to finance the concession-hunting expedition of Vanderlip
in Kamtchatka. These are the appointed regents; and in addition there
are some who hold ex-officio—the Governor of the state, the Lieutenant
Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, etc. These do not matter, being
merely machine politicians, selected by Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker
and two or three others in private conference, nominated by these
gentlemen’s newspapers, and elected by these gentlemen’s checks.
Besides the state government and the university, and their own banks and
railroads, Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker control for the interlocking
directorate a vast network of gas and electric companies, street
railways, land companies, and power companies. The recent development of
water power has made this the dominant industry of the state, and the
means whereby the other industries are subordinated. Mr. Fleishhacker is
president of the Great Western Power Company, and of the California
Electric Generating Company, and a director in the Northwestern Electric
Company; while his attorney, Mr. Earl, also a trustee of the university,
is vice-president of two of these concerns. Eight other regents are
active directors of such power companies; and we shall see shortly how
they use their university as a propaganda department against power
development by the state. Mr. Foster, the Duke of Marin, is president of
the ferry company, and a director of the United Railroads of San
Francisco, which has been a leading agency in corrupting the city for
the past twenty years. Mr. Crocker is a director in the committee which
is now trying to reorganize these United Railroads, after the looters
have got through with them. We shall see how these gentlemen use their
university as a strike-breaking agency for the benefit of their street
railways, their ferries and their gas and electric companies.
One might think that the plutocracy of California ought to be content to
leave its educational business in the hands of such a board;
nevertheless, they have felt it necessary to organize an independent
vigilance committee, to supplement Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker. The
prime mover in this action was Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the
Pacific Pipe & Supply Company of Los Angeles, a gentleman whose
qualifications to direct the higher education of California were
acquired while driving a stage. Mr. Haldeman founded what he called the
Commercial Federation of California; later, learning from the war the
advantages of camouflage, he changed the name to the Better America
Federation. He went out among the interlocking directorate and raised
the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the
purpose of keeping California capitalist. The Better America Federation
is a kind of “black hand” society of the rich, a terrorist organization
which does not stop short of crime, as I know from personal experience.
It works in league with several depraved newspapers—the Los Angeles
“Times,” owned by Harry Chandler, speculator in Mexican revolutions, and
co-partner with Mrs. Sartori’s husband in the Vanderlip Kamtchtkan
adventure; the Los Angeles “Express,” with two university regents in
charge; the San Francisco “Chronicle,” owned by Mike de Young, whom
Ambrose Bierce pictured hanging on all the gibbets of the world; the San
Francisco “Bulletin,” whose bottomless venality has been revealed in
Fremont Older’s book. I have told in “The Brass Check,” Chapter LXVI,
the story of how “The Dugout,” a returned soldier’s paper in Los
Angeles, was smashed because its publisher would not have it used as a
strike-breaking agency. The secret service branch of the Better America
Federation committed a dozen separate crimes in the doing of this job,
and much of this was proved at the publisher’s trial.
The Better America Federation investigates every person who runs for
office in California, and black-lists him unless he is one hundred per
cent capitalist. It browbeats public officials and slanders them in its
newspapers; it causes the raiding of labor offices, and the jailing
without trial of labor organizers; and among its other activities it
runs the educational system of California, including the state
university. The spirit in which it works is revealed in a bill which it
came near to pushing through the last California legislature, providing
for cancelling the license of any school teacher who, discussing the
constitution of the United States with a pupil “shall express to such
pupil any opinion or argument in favor of making any change in any
provision.”
How this organization puts pressure on university professors is a matter
about which you do not have to take my word; you may have the word of
Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. In the
San Francisco “Call” for January 20, 1922, I find an article occupying
the top of seven columns, “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men
of San Francisco.” This is a report of a luncheon at the St. Francis
Hotel, in which Mr. Haldeman explained his work to the president and
vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a group of such
leading interlocking directors. Said Mr. Haldeman: “Through the children
of the best business families throughout the land, who are attending
universities, we are having students of radical tendencies watched. We
are receiving reports of what is going on, both as to students and
teachers that uphold radical doctrines and views.”
So here is the spy system in our universities; college boys and girls
set to tale-bearing on their fellows and on their teachers! On such
ignorant and garbled reports professors in the University of California
are black-listed for promotion; or they are quietly let out without
explanation—or with just a lie or two. When they apply for jobs in other
places, letters are written to keep them from getting those jobs. School
teachers are black-listed over the entire state; students in the
university who graduate with honors are unable to get teaching
positions, because the employment system maintained by the university is
under the control of this kid-gloved Black Hand.
The active manager of this organization until a few months ago was Mr.
Woodworth Clum, a lawyer, author of a pamphlet, “America Is Calling,”
the substance of which is that America is calling her school children to
mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. Mr.
Clum was formerly secretary of the Greater Iowa Association, at a salary
of ten thousand dollars a year; also secretary to the Iowa Commission to
the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He left the state after a three years’
controversy over the fact that this Commission had failed to file a
proper statement of its expenditure of public funds with the state
accountant, twenty thousand dollars being missing; also after a
typewriter belonging to the Commission had been traced to the office of
the Greater Iowa Association; also after Mr. Clum had walked across the
street and brutally struck in the face a Civil War veteran, wearing a
Grand Army button, because this old man was deaf and did not hear a band
playing the Star-Spangled Banner some distance away, and therefore had
failed to remove his hat.
Now, here is Mr. Clum’s new organization, the kid-gloved Black Hand of
California, working in close alliance with the “open-shoppers” and labor
union smashers of the state, and holding over school teachers and
college professors the lash, not merely of black-list, slander and
starvation, but of sentence to fourteen years in prison. For you must
understand that we have a “criminal syndicalism” law in California, and
this is applied to you, not merely if you belong to a radical labor
union, but if you take any action on behalf of the victims of the Black
Hand. This organization has a private army of sluggers, called the
“citizens’ police,” which maintains a standing offer of fifty dollars
for every arrest of a “radical,” and three hundred dollars for every
conviction. As I write this book, one J. P. McDonald is arrested at Long
Beach, California, for asking signatures to a petition to President
Harding for the release of political prisoners—this petition being one
which was signed by three hundred thousand American citizens and
presented to the President by a delegation of some thirty leaders of
liberal thought. Holding over this workingman’s head the threat of
prosecution for “criminal syndicalism,” the police persuaded him to
plead guilty to vagrancy—though he had money in his pocket and a job.
They promised him he would get thirty days, and the judge gave him six
months, and grinned at him. Such is California, described by Romain
Rolland as “Land of Orange Groves and Jails”; and such is the atmosphere
of espionage and terrorism in which is conducted the University of the
Black Hand.