INTRODUCING A BOARD OF REGENTS
On Tuesday morning the regents of the University of Wisconsin held a
session; and I assumed that, having made the acquaintance of a
university president, you might also be interested in interviewing a
board of regents. I looked up the statutes of the state of Wisconsin,
and ascertained that under the law all meetings of the board are public.
So I went to the administration building at ten o’clock on Tuesday
morning, the hour set for the meeting—and to my great surprise
discovered the ladies and gentlemen of the august board meeting behind
locked doors!
It appears that whenever they have a ticklish question to discuss, they
evade the law by calling it a meeting of a “committee.” I am in position
to testify that the meeting of the “committee” was a meeting of exactly
the same individuals as later constituted a meeting of the “board”; also
I am in position to testify that they discussed exactly the same
subject, because the anteroom in which I was invited to sit and wait was
so near to the meeting-room, that I could hear the voices when they were
raised, and I knew that they were discussing the subject of my proposed
speech. I handed to the secretary of the board a formal request for a
hearing, and then waited. At a quarter past ten, the secretary of the
board came to the anteroom, which was occupied by myself and half a
dozen newspaper reporters, and requested that we should go downstairs
and wait, as it was not proper for us to be “listening in on the
proceedings of the board.” Naturally I was not gratified by this remark,
as I had been sitting quietly in the chair which had been indicated to
me as the proper chair for me to occupy, and I had not been told that it
was my duty to stuff cotton into my ears.
However, I went downstairs, and waited another half hour, and then I
wrote another note, stating briefly that I protested against the board
settling a question in secret meeting, when the law required that their
proceedings should be public. After that I waited another hour, and then
the secretary informed me that the meeting of the board of regents was
now about to begin, and that the “public” was welcome to enter. I
entered the room where the ladies and gentlemen of the board had been
violating the law of their state for an hour and three-quarters, and I
was informed that the board would be pleased to give me ten minutes in
which to present my case.
I have made it my practice to use most careful courtesy in dealing with
my enemies, so as to put them in the wrong. I dutifully rehearsed to the
regents my qualifications as a university orator, after which the board
proceeded to question me, the two active questioners being Mr. Butler,
the railroad attorney, and Dr. Seaman, the reactionary candidate for
governor. The latter wanted to know if I had been correctly quoted in
the newspaper interview, in which I had charged that President Birge
“had been influenced by money” in his decision against me.
Pardon me if I go into details on this point. We have seen several
university professors being cross-questioned by boards of regents, and
it will be worth while for us to have exact knowledge of how these
inquisitions are conducted. You would have thought that Dr. Seaman,
being a man prominent in public life, would have taken the trouble to
provide himself with a copy of the interview about which he intended to
cross-question me; but he had not done so, and I, as it happens, do not
go about with copies of my newspaper interviews in my pocket. I was
embarrassed by Dr. Seaman’s question, and could only explain that I had
no recollection of having made any such statement about President Birge,
and that certainly I could have no such idea about him. Newspaper
reports were frequently inaccurate. What I had intended to say and
should have said was that in his decision concerning me President Birge
had “acted in the interest of special privilege.” Later, when I went out
from the board, and got a copy of the interview, I discovered that this
is exactly what I was reported to have said, and that Dr. Seaman had
been misquoting me in a public session of the board, with half a dozen
newspaper reporters diligently taking notes!
President Birge arose and asked on what ground I could have made such a
statement about him. My answer was that he had shown his attitude of
sympathy with special privilege by many things he had said in our long
interview; also he had shown a very strong prejudice against the enemies
of special privilege.
“How, for example?” he asked.
I answered: “If I were a person disposed to take personal offense, I
would have considered myself outraged by the remark you made to me, that
without having read any of my books you had come to the conclusion that
I was a person ‘accustomed to pep up and exaggerate his statements in
order to create a sensation and to increase the sale of his books.’” (I
loathe the expression “pep up,” and beg the reader to understand that I
am quoting a university president.)
At this President Birge became much excited, saying that this had been a
confidential conversation; he had given me his personal opinion of my
reputation at my request, and I now proceeded to tell it in the presence
of newspaper reporters—and he was a man old enough to be my father!
I answered that I did not see that age had anything to do with the
matter, nor could I understand how our interview could be regarded as
“confidential”; I had come to him, a public official, acting in a public
matter. There could have been nothing “personal” between us, for I did
not know President Birge, I had never even heard his name until I read
his interview in a Madison newspaper, stating that I was an unfit person
to address the university students.
Said President Birge: “I did not say you were unfit.”
Said I: “I don’t know what your word was, but your action was certainly
to that effect.”
Then Attorney Butler spoke up, and wanted to know if I had threatened
that if I were not permitted the use of a university building I would
attack President Birge and the university in some other hall. To this I
said that my action followed automatically from the situation. I had
come to Madison for the purpose of delivering to the students an address
entitled: “The College Student and the Modern Crisis.” If the university
would permit me to deliver this address, I should deliver it. If they
wouldn’t permit me to deliver this address, I should naturally have to
discuss the question of why they took such action. Mr. Butler’s answer
was that nobody should come to the university, with his consent, and try
to bulldoze the board of regents by any kind of threat.
The board offered me an additional five minutes, if I wished it, but I
answered that the greatest virtue in an orator was to know when he had
said his say. I thanked them and retired; and that afternoon they held
another session, and Mr. Butler and Dr. Seaman, ably seconded by the
bathtub manufacturer and the wholesale grocer, voted that I should be
refused the use of the gymnasium. The seven other members of the board
voted that President Birge should be requested to grant me the use of
the gymnasium. President Birge himself did not vote, and I am sorry to
state that the malted milk regent was absent and did not get recorded.
Needless to say, all this publicity—it filled many columns of Madison’s
two newspapers for five days—resulted in the gymnasium’s being packed on
Wednesday evening. Some two thousand students heard my scheduled
address, and asked me questions for an hour afterwards, and the walls of
the building did not collapse, nor have any of the students since thrown
any bombs.
Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and
played each of its members in turn, and beat them in straight sets; and
I am told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational
incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on
the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and don’t know his
name; but he assured me, with deep conviction, that I had made a grave
blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the
speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough
to hold the crowd!