THE DEAN OF IMPERIALISM
We return to David P. Barrows to follow his career as he rises to the
heights of academic prominence and power. For seven years he stumped the
state of California, proclaiming the destiny of the Stars and Stripes to
float from the North Pole to the South. The world was to be divided up,
it was our business to get our share; we should win because we were
better organized, more efficient; the world would not tolerate small
nations; strong men must rule. And presently came a chance for strong
men to rule in Mexico; but the strong men had at their head a weakling
by the name of Woodrow Wilson, who refused to act. You might think there
would be some impropriety, some violation of military precedence, in a
university dean’s attacking a former university president, who had
become President of the United States; but when Woodrow Wilson took Vera
Cruz, and then refused to take the rest of Mexico, Dean Barrows rushed
to the front, denouncing him before chambers of commerce, and being
reported in the interlocking newspapers.
We shall note in the course of this book many cases of college
professors forbidden to take part in “outside activities,” and
especially to get themselves into the newspapers. The professor’s place
is the classroom, we are told; and to this there is only one
exception—when the professor is advocating more loot for the exploiters
who pay him his salary. Shortly after this Vera Cruz affair the San
Francisco “Star” published some revelations concerning our imperialist
dean, stating that at the very time he was campaigning for intervention,
he was vice-president of the Vera Cruz Land & Cattle Company. A friend
who knows Dean Barrows well, defended him to me by the statement that
his holdings in this company were not valuable. When I asked how
valuable they might have become if the United States had conquered
Mexico, my friend changed the subject.
The next part of the world to be divided up was Siberia, and our
imperialist dean was made a colonel, and put in charge of the Army
Intelligence Service. So far as I know, he has not told the full story
of his adventures in Siberia, but we may glean hints in the press of
China and Japan, which charged that Colonel Barrows was an accomplice of
Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, in a plot to separate Mongolia from the
Chinese Empire and place it under the rule of Semenoff and the American
concession-hunters. The situation in Siberia at this time was a
complicated one. Kolchak was the official representative of the allies,
fighting the Bolsheviki with American money and supplies. Semenoff
revolted against Kolchak, and set himself up as an independent bandit,
controlling a part of Mongolia. He was intimate with Colonel Barrows at
this time, and a leading Chinese journalist wrote an article in
“Millard’s Review,” in which he referred to Barrows as “an unscrupulous
and unprincipled American adventurer.” It was rumored at this time, and
has since been thoroughly proven, that Semenoff entered the pay of the
Japanese, and was used by them in their Siberian intrigues; Colonel
Barrows himself admitted this in an interview published in the San
Francisco “Chronicle,” April 15, 1922.
Semenoff was in America at this time, backed by the Japanese intriguers,
but supposed to represent the anti-Bolshevik cause. Naturally he was
welcomed by his friend, Colonel Barrows, and ardently defended in the
interlocking newspapers. Certain “Bolshevik” agitators pointed out that
Semenoff had fired upon and murdered a number of American soldiers; and
just what does our academic colonel think about the murdering of
American soldiers by a Cossack bandit in Japanese pay? Our colonel
declares that he investigated the matter, and that it was merely owing
to “a misunderstanding”; General Semenoff wanted to move a train across
a sector at Chita, where the Americans refused to let him go, and so he
shot and killed a few American soldiers. That is all! The colonel
describes Semenoff as “a man of iron, both in courage and military
leadership. He was brave.... Semenoff did not thing (evidently a
misprint in the newspaper) of which I disapproved. He accepted the help
of the Japanese ... but even in this he was helpless; when the allies
refused their aid, he was compelled to accept Japanese assistance....
Whatever he did, it was with the sole aim of beating the Bolsheviki,
whom he hated.”
This was at the time that Senator Borah was exposing Semenoff’s
infamies. Borah read extracts from a speech by an American Railway
Commission officer, who stated that Semenoff “carried with him on his
so-called ‘summer car’ a harem of thirty of the most beautiful women I
ever saw.” Mr. Borah offered to show a picture of the car, and we wonder
if this was one of the things which Colonel Barrows saw, when he saw
“not thing” of which he disapproved! Colonel Morrow, in command of the
American troops at Chita, stated that Semenoff’s own Cossacks had
estimated that Semenoff had slaughtered one hundred thousand
non-combatants in Siberia. Colonel Morrow testified to “the extreme
cruelty and wholesale murders” of Semenoff; this on April 12, three days
before the Barrows interview. Also General Graves, commander of the
American Siberian expedition, used the phrase “wholesale murderer,” and
described “grim murder trains, which took men out to be shot along the
side track and buried in common graves; American soldiers ruthlessly
murdered; an American lieutenant held virtual prisoner forty hours,”
etc. All this was fully reported in the press, and was in President
Barrows’ newspapers several days before he made his statement that
Semenoff had done “not thing” of which he, Barrows, disapproved. To
quote from the San Francisco “Examiner,” April 13, 1922:
It is part of the testimony that prisoners captured by Semenoff’s army
in their raids upon villages were taken by trainloads to places which
Colonel Morrow designated as “Semenoff’s slaughter houses” and there
shot down by the wholesale.
All this Colonel Barrows had every opportunity to see, and in it he saw
“not thing” that he disapproved; so you see that our “dean of political
science” is no fragile mollycoddle, no bespectacled professor living a
closet life, but a real, red-blooded, two-fisted man of action. Coming
back to California, fresh from “Semenoff’s slaughter houses,” Colonel
Barrows proceeded to advocate the setting up similar establishments on
the campus of his university. Speaking before a convention of the State
High School Association, he advocated that the Bolsheviki should be
stood against the wall and shot. “There is only one way to deal with
Bolshevism—fight it. Force is the only way. The time has come to treat
them with militarism; I believe in killing the Bolsheviki.” Then Captain
Schuyler, one of the intelligence officers whom Barrows brought back
with him, spoke his sentiments: “If a man stood before me and declared
himself a Bolshevist, I would shoot him on the spot, like a mad dog.”
Naturally, that made considerable fuss in Berkeley; for the city had a
Socialist mayor and school board only a couple of years previously, and
the chambers of commerce and the professional patriots were doing their
best to establish the term “Bolsheviki” as including, not merely all
Socialists, but everybody who believed in the initiative and referendum,
or in government ownership of railroads. So the Socialists of Berkeley
challenged Barrows to a debate. He accepted, and the Socialists tried
first to get the university hall, and then the high school auditorium;
but the president of the Berkeley board of education—a dentist,
described to me by another school board member as rarely attending a
session without the smell of liquor on his breath—opposed the use of the
building, and advocated that all Socialists should be “driven into the
bay.” Finally, however, the use of the auditorium was obtained; it would
only seat twelve hundred people, whereas between eight and ten thousand
came.
This was July 30, 1919, at the time when “Bolsheviki” by thousands were
being clubbed over the heads and thrown into jail all over the United
States. The mayor and the chief of police of Berkeley sat on the
platform, and two auto loads of secret service men attended; an effort
was made to start a riot and raid the Socialists, a scheme which was
averted by the quickness of Mrs. Elvina Beals, who presided at the
meeting. Mrs. Beals was for many years a Socialist member of the school
board, and the people of Berkeley know her. In the course of the debate,
Dean Barrows advocated that the American government should conquer
Siberia and Russia for Kolchak, and he asked whether the Socialists of
Berkeley would support a strike to prevent the shipment of ammunition to
Siberia. They answered with a roar that they would; and so Dean Barrows
retired, and did no more debating with these Berkeley “Bolsheviki.”