THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LUMBER TRUST
We take the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was plundered by the
founder of Stanford, aided by the father of a Stanford trustee and the
father of a California trustee, and which now has a Rutgers College
trustee, an Equitable Trust, a Guaranty Trust, and a National City Bank
director. We travel north for a day and a little more, and find
ourselves in a country ruled with iron hand by three great lumber
companies, and the interlocking banks which finance them. The
headquarters of this oligarchy of the Northwest are at Portland and
Seattle, and we begin with the former city. You expect, perhaps, to find
a lumber country crude and wild; but you will find in Portland an old
city with a long-established aristocracy, as much concerned with its
ancestors as Philadelphia.
Fifteen years ago there was a strong movement for social justice in
Oregon, led by reformers who fondly imagined that if you gave the people
the powers of direct legislation they would have the intelligence to
protect their own interests. We see now that the hope was delusive; the
people have not the intelligence to help themselves, and the
interlocking directorate is vigorously occupied to see that they do not
get this intelligence. To this end they utilize two institutions, Reed
College in Portland, which is privately endowed, and the University of
Oregon, located in the neighboring town of Eugene. As we have seen with
Eastern universities, it makes no particle of difference whether an
institution is directly owned and controlled by the plutocracy, or
indirectly controlled through the plutocracy’s political machine.
The grand duke who attends to the education of Oregon is Mr. A. L.
Mills, president of the First National Bank of Portland, and vice
president of a trust company and an insurance company which handle the
finances of the state. Mr. Mills is an active and efficient ruler; as
his right-hand man he maintains a political boss, Gus Moser, and through
him he beat the teachers’ tenure law in Oregon, denouncing it as a move
to establish a “teachers’ soviet.” He called in the Black Hand from
California to his aid, and the pamphlets of Mr. Clum were distributed in
Oregon, and a law was put through the legislature to compel teachers to
take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, the flag, and the state.
There is as yet no law requiring any oath of loyalty to truth, to
freedom, and to justice.
In Reed College was a president, Foster, who had progressive ideas. He
hired a liberal young professor who had just been fired from the
University of Washington, Joseph K. Hart, now one of the editors of “The
Survey”; and for three years the interlocking trustees fought to get rid
of Professor Hart, and of Foster, who stood by Hart. Under such
circumstances the regular procedure is to starve out the college; but
they could not very well do it in this case, because they owned all the
real estate surrounding the college, and the college was the main source
of the real estate’s value. Nevertheless, the editor of the Portland
“Oregonian,” the old Tory newspaper which manages the thinking of the
people of Oregon, laid down the law that Reed College should get no
publicity so long as Hart and Foster stayed.
The interlocking trustee who runs Reed College is Mr. James B. Kerr, who
studied law in the office of an ancient reactionary, Senator Spooner,
and is general counsel for Mr. Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad
Company. Mr. Kerr evolved from his legal mind a scheme to have a larger
board of regents, taking in the former trustees, and making them a
minority; so President Foster retired, and Professor Hart, who was away
doing war work, was authorized to stay away![K] A professor of history
from the University of Washington was asked to become the new president,
and when he was installed, Mr. Mills, in his role as general overseer of
education, attended the ceremonies and made the principal address, in
which he laid down the law to the new incumbent: “The business men of
Oregon wish the youth of the state to become this and not that, we wish
them to be ‘shaped’ in this way and not that way.” Educators who were
present described to me the insolence, not merely of the grand duke’s
words, but of his manner. The board of regents of Reed College now
consists of Mr. Kerr; Mr. Ladd, chairman of the Ladd and Tilton Bank; an
elderly department store proprietor; a reactionary judge; and a retired
clergyman.
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Footnote K:
One professor vigorously denies that this was the purpose of the
enlarging of the board; but no one can deny that this was the effect.
When I submit this comment to this gentleman, he tells me that it is
“misleading.” At the same time he gives me an opportunity to test his
accuracy. He says: “It is my recollection that Mr. Hart was not
encouraged by the council to expect the increased salary, which he
demanded as a condition of his return.” I submitted this proposition
to Professor Hart, who replied:
“I hope Professor X’s memory is usually more reliable than this. No
question of salary was involved. Frankly, I do not _know_ what was
involved. I was on leave of absence, in the East. My leave of absence
covered the academic year 1919-20. Toward the middle of the year,
finding that I was anxious to remain in the East another year, I asked
the college authorities for an extension of my leave for another year.
You can see that that request involved no financial obligation on the
part of the college, as I was on leave without pay and merely asked
for a continuance of that status for another year. That was the whole
question. Moreover, the college authorities were never courteous
enough to tell me what had happened in the case. However, a friend in
the faculty who knew of the discussions wrote me that the council felt
that in view of the general situation it was best for me not to come
back to the college, and that therefore extending my leave would be an
empty form. Those are the facts.”
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Next for the state university. Here we have to deal with a “war case.” I
do not plan to make use of “war cases” as such, for I realize that
intolerance in war time becomes what Barrows of California said it ought
to be—a virtue. The only war cases to which I shall refer are those in
which the war was a pretext, and the real motive was to get rid of an
enemy of the plutocracy. My investigations indicate that this kind of
war case constitutes one hundred per cent of the total. There may have
been some professors in American universities and colleges who
sympathized with the German Kaiser and desired to see him win; all I can
say is that I have not come upon such a case.
At the University of Oregon was Mr. Allen Eaton, one of the most
public-spirited young teachers it has been my fortune to hear about.
There was an epidemic of typhoid in the town of Eugene, and eighty of
the students were ill, and more than two hundred of the
townspeople—twenty-two of them died within a fortnight. Mr. Eaton
ascertained from the physicians of the town that the city water was
contaminated, and so he published an article advising everyone to boil
the water before drinking it. The water supply was controlled by a
private water company, in which the banks were interested, also
prominent members of the Eugene Commercial Club. Mr. Eaton’s banker and
others of these citizens undertook to “persuade” him to keep quiet about
the epidemic; “so much talk is giving the town a black eye.” They made
threats which forced the young professor either to “knuckle down” or to
fight in the open. He chose the latter course, and he forced municipal
ownership of the waterworks; a modern filtration system was installed,
and in ten years there has not been a single case of typhoid traceable
to the city water. We shall find in the course of this book many boards
of trustees laying down the law that university professors are not
allowed to take part in politics, but I think you must admit that in
this case it might fairly be claimed that Mr. Eaton was forced into
politics to protect his own self-respect.
He was six times elected to the Oregon state legislature, his chief
local opponent being a hard-boiled politician in the hire of the
Southern Pacific Railroad. Eaton made in the legislature an immaculate
record; he exposed and abolished a wasteful type of road which the
contractors were building in the state; he planned the Oregon building
at the San Francisco Exposition, the most beautiful building on the
grounds; he labored to introduce art into county fairs—and if you know
what an American county fair is you can understand what a job the young
instructor had! All this time his pay stayed low and promotion was
lacking; nevertheless, he gave lectures for the people at the university
and all over the state, and taught them what true art means—the people’s
own creation of beauty in their daily lives.
People who have lived all their lives in Oregon assure me that there has
never been a man, either in the university or in the state legislature,
who has done as much for education as Allen Eaton did. He undertook a
campaign to increase the appropriation for the university; the governor
of the state opposed him—this gentleman, being wealthy, sent his
children to a fashionable university in the East. Eaton put through a
bill to raise the appropriation from $47,500 to $125,000, and when the
governor vetoed the proposition, he directed a state-wide referendum
campaign and carried the measure. He worked equally hard for the public
schools; but at the same time he committed the crime of forcing the
taxation of water-power sites, and advocating the direct election of
United States senators. Still worse, he committed the crime of carrying
to the Supreme Court of the state a case which kept the Southern Pacific
Railroad from stealing sixty-six million dollars worth of timber-lands
from the people of Oregon. Mr. Eaton is not a lawyer, but he got lawyers
to help him, and he won the case; so the special interests of Oregon
were out to “get” him at any price.
When the war came it happened that Allen Eaton was in Chicago, and he
attended the convention of the People’s Council. He took no part in the
affair, not being himself a pacifist; but he wrote an honest account of
the proceedings for the Portland “Journal,” and so the large scale
grafters got their chance. The Commercial Club of Eugene adopted a set
of resolutions, bringing seven separate charges of disloyalty; the
Spanish War Veterans endorsed the charges, and the regents of the
university were summoned in solemn conclave, and Mr. Eaton appeared for
trial, with the Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Commercial Club of
Eugene as the prosecutors. Every one of the charges was disproven in
every detail. The president of the university stood by Mr. Eaton, and
the faculty of the university adopted a resolution in his support. The
regents themselves admitted his innocence, for they stated that they
“did not intend to accuse him of intending disloyalty to his
government.” Nevertheless, they accepted his resignation, giving him
less than ten days’ notice in which to shape his life plans—the Chamber
of Commerce was in that much of a hurry!
Mr. Eaton ran for the legislature again, and among the super-patriots
who set out to compass his defeat was a leading banker, who shortly
afterwards was arrested for setting fire to a building in which he had
stored a quantity of potatoes, held as an unsuccessful war-speculation;
also a hundred percent sheriff, whose boast was that he had broken up a
public meeting in defense of Mr. Eaton. At the very time he did this he
had in his pockets forty-five hundred dollars which he had stolen from
the county; a little later this was discovered and he was forced to
leave overnight!
It might be worth while to mention that at the very time that Allen
Eaton was fired from the University of Oregon, Professor Foerster of the
University of Munich, an ardent pacifist, was denouncing the German
government and being widely quoted by the allies; he was ostracized by
the entire faculty of his university—nevertheless, the Kaiser’s
government let him continue to teach, because in Germany they really
understand what academic freedom is, and stand by the principle. In all
Great Britain there was only one case during the war of interference
with academic freedom, and that was the case of Bertrand Russell, who
was prosecuted and sent to prison for his pacifist activities. But in
America, which understands no kind of freedom except the freedom of mobs
to suppress anybody they do not like, I know of just two great
universities in which some man or group of men were not hounded from
their positions, for pointing out this or that unwelcome truth to the
public.