THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE ANACONDA
We take the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr. Morgan himself for
a director, also two Morgan partners, one of them a recent Harvard
overseer and a Massachusetts Tech trustee, and the other a Harvard
overseer and Smith College trustee; also an Amherst trustee, a Hampton
trustee, a Union Theological Seminary director, a Cornell trustee, and
three First National Bank directors. We travel East until we come to the
mining country; first, Montana, which has been swallowed whole by an
enormous corporation, appropriately called the Anaconda. The people of
this state maintain a university, scattered in four widely separated
places, in order to please various real estate interests.
The State Board of Education, which runs matters for the Anaconda,
contains the following appointed members: the personal attorney of
Senator Clark, sometimes called the richest man in the world, and
certainly the worst corruptionist who ever broke into the United States
Senate; another attorney for big business, a hard fighting reactionary,
who “grilled” a professor of the university law school for the crime of
not giving his son high marks; another corporation lawyer, and a fourth
lawyer who is a mild progressive; two merchants of the aggressive
Chamber of Commerce type; one rich and conservative farmer; and one very
subservient school principal.
The chancellor of the university up to last year was Edward C. Elliott,
and he had to handle not merely this board, but the politicians of the
Anaconda who run the state legislature; he had to go to them every year
to beg for appropriations, and he had the bright thought that he would
try to have an annual tax provided for higher education in the state. He
suggested to Louis Levine, his professor of economics, to make a study
of the whole tax problem in Montana. Professor Levine set to
work—beginning with the subject of mining companies and their
contributions, or lack of contributions, to the state taxes! In the
course of the year 1918 occurred a state tax conference, and Professor
Levine addressed it, and was furiously attacked by a representative of
the Anaconda Copper Company, which had packed the conference with its
lawyers and lobbyists.
Toward the end of the year Professor Levine completed his report on mine
taxation, in which he proved that the great corporations paid only a
small percentage of the taxes they owed the state. He submitted this
report to the chancellor, who read it and had a desperate case of “cold
feet.” His contract was about to come up for renewal, and he decided
that he had better shift the responsibility to the State Board of
Education, which governs the university. Professor Levine agreed to
this, but on the stipulation that if the board declined to publish the
document, he should be free to publish it himself. He took the position
that if he submitted to pressure in this issue, he would lose the moral
right to lecture to classes of young people.
Now began a bitter struggle behind the scenes, with the governor of the
state and a senator-henchman of the Anaconda striving frantically to
keep the report from appearing. Finally the poor chancellor wrote to
Levine, forbidding him to publish the report; Levine answered that there
had been a definite understanding, made in the presence of President
Sisson of Montana State University, that Levine was to be free to
publish the report if he so desired. Accordingly he published it,[L] and
the chancellor, in a rage, immediately “fired” him.
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Footnote L:
Taxation of Mines in Montana: B. W. Huebsch, New York. The book won
the commendation of Professor Seligman of Columbia, America’s leading
conservative authority on taxation.
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This was about as clear a case of the violation of academic freedom as
had ever occurred in America. The matter created a great scandal, and
this scandal caused pain to the faculty of the university. A committee
of professors took the matter up, and reported, somewhat plaintively:
“It must have been foreseen that the enforcement of this order would
lead to all of the undesirable publicity which has attended this whole
affair, and which has brought down upon the University of Montana the
condemnation of some of the most widely read newspapers and periodicals
of the country, and which has made the university stand in the minds of
people throughout the United States as a horrible example of
narrow-mindedness, bigotry and intolerance.... Not only have the members
of the faculty of the State University been made to feel that they have
lost all independence of thought and action, which are (sic) absolutely
essential to the maintenance of a university’s morale, but the day is
far distant when the University of Montana will be able to attract to
its faculties broad-minded and eminent scholars of independence and
initiative.”
Also the American Association of University Professors took up the
matter and sent out a representative to mediate. The State Board of
Education could not face the public clamor; doubtless, also, they
reasoned that the report was out, and their mining companies had
sustained all the harm possible. They tactfully voted that both sides
were right; the chancellor had acted properly in firing Professor
Levine, but Levine should now be reinstated, and paid for the time he
had been fired! The state legislature appointed a committee to
investigate the university, and especially the teaching of “Socialism”
in its economics department. This committee met privately in the empty
bar-room of Helena’s biggest hotel, and learned from Professor Levine
that co-operative marketing by farmers is not the entire program of the
Third International. After giving this information, Professor Levine
resigned.
In the University of Montana law school was a young professor by the
name of Arthur Fisher, son of the ex-Secretary of the Interior. He was a
splendid teacher, popular with the students and with the faculty; but he
associated himself with the Farmer-Labor movement, an effort of the
people of the Northwestern states to take the control of their affairs
away from the corporations. A former president of the university, who
had been kicked out by the Anaconda, had started a liberal newspaper,
the “New Northwest,” and Professor Fisher became interested in this and
thereby stirred the fury of the “Missoulian,” a newspaper of the
Anaconda, which discovered that Fisher was a Bolshevist, and that he was
“financing the paper with the street-car graft of his father”—Fisher’s
father being a man who had spent a large part of his life opposing the
street-car graft in Chicago. In the spring of 1921 the “Missoulian” dug
up the fact that Fisher had made a speech in Chicago during the war,
urging that the United States should force the allies to define their
war aims. That, of course, was “pro-German,” and the American
Legion—swallowed by the Anaconda—took up the issue, and demanded
Fisher’s scalp.
A faculty committee of the university spent a good part of the summer on
this problem, and vindicated the young professor on every point; but the
chancellor—who still had to get his appropriations every year from an
Anaconda legislature—mutilated the report of his faculty committee
before he submitted it to the state board of education; and he and his
board and the attorney general of the state of Anaconda worked out a
most ingenious solution—they gave the radical young professor a
compulsory leave of absence at full pay; they forbid him to teach law at
the university, but they pay him the state’s money while he edits the
“New Northwest!” And the interlocking directorate were so much pleased
with this ingenuity of Chancellor Elliott that they called him to become
president of Purdue University at a higher salary!
We move down to Moscow, Idaho, where we find another university of the
Copper Trust. Five years ago this university had a president named
Brannon, described to me by a friend as “a liberal conservative, an
educator and a scientist.” The politicians who run the state are the Day
brothers, mining kings; they starved the university, and their henchmen,
who controlled the school funds, refused to pay the university’s bills.
They tried to reduce the president’s salary, though he had a contract;
he resigned, but there was such an uproar in the state that they had to
recede. Senator Day’s whole family, including the ladies, now took up
the intrigue against President Brannon; they caused an investigation of
the bursar, and when the accounts were reported all right, they sent
back their investigators with instructions to find something wrong. A
prominent newspaper publisher served notice that he must have the
university printing or he would make trouble; and it is reported on good
authority that on this occasion President Brannon said a “cuss” word.
Anyhow, he was forced to resign, though no charges had been brought
against him. Dean Ayres, and another dean who had supported him, went at
the same time. We shall meet President Brannon again before long at
Beloit, and it will appear that he has learned his lesson; for this
time, when the interlocking directorate gives him orders, he obeys!
The educational affairs of Idaho, both school and university, are in the
hands of Dr. E. A. Bryan, chief administrative officer of the State
Board of Education. I have before me a very sumptuous pamphlet, printed
by this board a few months ago at the expense of the people of Idaho. It
contains an address by Dr. Bryan, entitled “The Foes of Democracy,” and
has as a frontispiece the portrait of an exceedingly handsome but
stern-looking hundred per cent American. Dr. Bryan has discovered four
dangerous foes of democracy: first, the “reds”; second, the “radicals”;
third, the “profiteers”; and fourth, the “robber barons.” Just what is
the difference between a “red” and a “radical” I do not know, and Dr.
Bryan does not enable me to find out. Apparently a “radical” is a person
who advises labor unions to use strikes to “injure the public.” It is
manifest that there can be no strike which does not injure the public;
Dr. Bryan is a bit muddled, but it is clear what he means, that as
strikes grow more big, they also grow more inconvenient. I find him
equally muddled on the subject of the “profiteer”; because, while he
tells us not to make “an excess profit,” he does not tell us what “an
excess profit” is, nor how there can be such a thing in a competitive
world. Apparently it is the same thing as in the case of strikes:
profiteering has got too big! But that big strikes might be a
consequence of big profiteering has apparently not penetrated Dr.
Bryan’s handsome head.
Also I seek in vain to find out the difference between the “profiteers”
and the “robber barons.” All I can gather is that there are bad men in
the world, and they abuse their power. It is Dr. Bryan’s idea that they
will read his pamphlet, and reform, and then all will be well. May I
suggest that he send copies of his pamphlet to the Day brothers, and
also to the Day wives, who run the mining and the education of Idaho?
The significant thing about the pamphlet, aside from its feebleness of
thought, is the amount of space which it gives to the various kinds of
evil persons. The “reds” get eleven pages, the “radicals” get four and a
half, the “profiteers” get one and a quarter, and the “robber barons”
get two and a half. I took the trouble to figure this out, and it
appears that the head of Idaho’s educational machine considers that
eighty per cent of the perils to present-day American life comes from
the poor, and less than twenty per cent from the rich. So I am not
surprised to receive a letter from a university professor, telling me
that “in Idaho, when a successor to President Lindley of the state
university at Moscow was being sought, the state commissioner of
education, Dr. Bryan, requested a Stanford professor to come and meet
the regents. He did this and was _not_ appointed, because of certain
views in reference to the present economic order. Dr. Bryan told me this
himself.” I suggest that Dr. Bryan should issue a new edition of his
pamphlet, listing a fifth variety of “foes of democracy,” in the shape
of university authorities who train the youth of the country to be
henchmen and lackeys of the profiteers and the robber barons.