THE UNIVERSITY OF AUTOMOBILES
We take the Wabash Railroad to Detroit, traveling under the protection
of a Columbia University trustee; and from Detroit we take the Michigan
Central Railroad, with a Columbia trustee, a Cornell trustee, a
Rochester trustee and a recent Yale and New York University trustee for
directors and two First National, two Guaranty Trust, and two National
City Bank directors; and so we arrive at Ann Arbor, home of the
University of Michigan. In the upper peninsula of this State are
enormous deposits of copper, with a great trust, Calumet and Hecla, in
charge of the region. We shall feel at home here, because the enterprise
is financed by Lee-Higginson, and all the old Boston families, the
Shaws, Agassizs, Higginsons and Lowells, got in on the ground floor. So
now when strikers have to be shot down or kidnapped, we find highly
cultured graduates of Harvard in charge of the job; when they have to be
lied about, the Associated Press is ready, with a Harvard graduate as
general manager—see “The Brass Check,” pages 358-361.
In the lower peninsula are great manufacturing cities, including
Detroit, headquarters of the automobile industry. The grand duke of the
state university is Frank B. Leland, president of the United Savings
Bank and brother of a great motor magnate. As his right-hand agent and
local manager at Ann Arbor he has Mr. Junius P. Beal, former owner of
the Ann Arbor “Times,” prominent Republican politician, director of a
bank and an insurance company, and owner of most of the saloon property
in Detroit; also Judge Murfin, a leading stand-pat politician; a doctor,
who is also an active politician; the manager of the Grand Rapids street
railways, who is interested in banks; and a Bay City manufacturer, who
is president of a national bank.
No account of education in Michigan would be complete which did not
mention Senator Newberry, the especial darling of the plutocracy of the
state. Newberry is the son-in-law of A. V. Barnes, president of the
American Book Company, which is the school-book trust, the most
important single agency in the corrupting of American education. We
shall come to know this American Book Company intimately when we deal
with our public schools. Suffice it for the moment to say that when
ex-Secretary of the Navy Newberry bought his way into the United States
Senate, he used money which had been pilfered from the school children
of the United States. Mr. Fred Cody, henchman of Newberry, and convicted
with him, is an American Book Company agent, while his brother, Frank
Cody, is superintendent of schools in Detroit. You see what a tight
little system they have in Michigan!
As president of the university they had until two years ago a native
son, who began teaching there fifty years ago. He is described to me by
one who had much dealings with him as a typical “go-getter,” with the
mentality of a hardware sales agent; very expert at getting money from
the rich, but in the realm of the intellect “a bouncing old fool.” A
year or two ago they got in Marion LeRoy Burton, the great
inspirationalist whom we met at the University of Minnesota. We saw him
introduced there with brass bands and fireworks, and I have a friend who
saw the same thing happen at Ann Arbor; these inspirationalists, it
seems, live always in the glare of fireworks and the blare of brass
bands—or else the sound of their own eloquence, which is the same thing.
The University of Michigan is another of these huge educational
department stores, a by-product of the sudden prosperity of the
automobile business. Its spirit was interestingly revealed by the
Detroit “News” of two years ago, at which time the enrollment amounted
to twelve thousand. Said the “News:”
Whether it is wise or best for the individual and society is difficult
to decide; but it is true and very natural indeed that for nearly all
of these young persons an education is not greatly worth while if at
the end of the college course or soon thereafter it can not be
translated into good pay and the material comforts of life. The old
ideal of education as an end in itself, as the deepening and
broadening of one’s view of life, as the acquiring of a certain amount
and kind of culture, has gone from among us.
At this university they have, of course, all the usual paraphernalia of
fraternities and sororities and “student activities”; also they have an
oversupply of what passes for religion in a commercial age. There are
five or six hundred instructors, employed to prepare boys and girls for
money-making, and a few fond idealists, who struggle to introduce a
little understanding of the intellectual life. At this, as at other
universities, you hear wailing about the impossibility of getting
college students to study; so you would have thought that when a man
came along who proved himself a wizard at that art, the harassed
authorities would have grappled him to their hearts. I put it to you,
overworked and troubled college professor, in whatever part of America
you may be: suppose some one put to you the task of getting seventy-five
college boys to come to you, begging you to teach them in off hours, and
outside the regular classes, and without any credits; offering to rent
rooms for the purpose, clean them up themselves, buy lumber and saw it
and build benches with their own hands—would you say you know how to do
that? Suppose you were asked if you could spend hundreds of hours in
intimate association with such students, and never once hear a dirty
story, never once hear talk about football or society politics, never
see a man light a cigarette—would you say that any man alive could do
such a thing? Suppose it were up to you to get yourself invited to the
toughest fraternity-house on the campus, to read the Bible to the men
between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, and have everybody in the
fraternity-house attend, and even bring in crowds from the other
fraternity-houses—would you think that could be done in any American
university? And if a man were doing all these things, would you say that
he ought to be made dean of men, and then, as quickly as possible,
president of the university—or would you say that he ought to be fired
from the university in disgrace? Of course it would depend; before
giving your answer, you have to know whether the man is a Socialist!
He is; and so he was driven from the University of Automobiles. His
story was told to me by some of his former students, who ask me not to
use his name; he has another job, and might very easily lose that. So
let us call him Smithfield. He began teaching at Ann Arbor fifteen years
ago, starting in on rhetoric. Naturally, the way to make rhetoric
interesting is to see how it is used by live writers; so Smithfield and
his classes would read H. G. Wells, and the plays and prefaces of
Bernard Shaw, and the essays of John Stuart Mill. He would set his
classes interesting stunts to do; a passage from Wells to write over in
the style of Milton, or one of Shakespeare in the manner of Carlyle. His
classes grew, and when he turned them over to others they fell off. The
head of the department brought him three boys, sons of the interlocking
directorate, who could not pass; Smithfield taught them, and they
passed. “It’s a marvel,” said the professor; “I don’t see how you do
it.”
But parents began to complain. Their children were coming home with
different ideas; they were learning real things about modern life,
instead of the pretenses the parents were used to! A nephew of Mr. Henry
Leland, of Lincoln Motors, brought to Mr. Bulkley, the banker, at that
time a regent, the dreadful story that Smithfield was a Socialist; so
the president of the university summoned him in haste: “My dear
Smithfield,” said he, “can’t you see that if you were to divide
everything up, it would not be many years before the more able people
had got possession of everything again?” Such was the mentality of the
aged native product; and he was backed by Mr. Beal, the resident regent,
owner of banks and saloon real estate. The boys had to come to this
latter to ask for the use of a hall for a lecture by some unorthodox
person, and they would regularly be asked this question about dividing
up!
Matters got so serious, with complaints of rich parents, that there was
a formal investigation by a committee. Thirty students were corralled
and questioned by five members of the faculty. “Have you ever read a
Socialist book? Have you ever been to a Socialist lecture? Where did you
get these ideas? Were you taught Socialism by Professor Smithfield?” One
and all, the boys testified that Smithfield had never taught them
Socialism; he had taught them to think. He had been tireless in
impressing upon them that they should learn to hold their minds in
suspense, and to judge for themselves; they should test new ideas, and
accept what they found convincing to their reason. As a result of this
investigation, one of the deans informed Smithfield that he had been
suspended by the regents, but this statement turned out not to be
true—not yet!
These professors were charming fellows in their social life; but when
they were offended in their class prejudices, they became vindictive.
They were incensed against Professor William E. Bohn, who was a
candidate on the Socialist ticket, and made a speech at Kalamazoo, which
was taken up by the capitalist press. Professor Bohn’s manuscript showed
that he did not say what the papers accused him of saying, and many
members of the audience substantiated his statement, nevertheless he was
fired. About this same time they barred Jane Addams from speaking in a
college building; she was arguing for woman suffrage, and that was a
contentious political question, unfit for student ears!
For thirteen years Smithfield was in perpetual hot water, being “called
up” and cautioned and pleaded with by the authorities. “What is the
matter?” he asked of his dean. “Can’t I teach?” The answer was, “You
teach too God-damned well.” This was Mortimer E. Cooley, a high-up
authority in the engineering world, one of those valuation wizards about
whom we learned in our study of Harvard. Dean Cooley has been interested
all his life in privately owned public utilities, and he stated his
point of view to one of his professors: “An engineer owes his first duty
to the man who employs him.” In the pamphlet, “Snapping Cords,” by
Morris L. Cooke, of Philadelphia, it is narrated how Professor Cooley
serves his masters; he went to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and
told these students that “in 1911 the average rate of return on all the
capital (of all utility corporations) was but 2.3 per cent.” Mr. Cooke
cites a circular of Henry L. Doherty & Company, New York investment
bankers, giving a table of net earnings of such corporations for the ten
years from 1902, to 1912, and they amount to: gas and electric, 8.45;
industrials, 7.79; railroads, 4.25 per cent. Mr. Cooke adds the
important note that the securities of such utility corporations are from
fifty to one hundred per cent in excess of invested capital!
Dean Cooley was troubled, because he could not get his engineering
students to take any interest in ideas. They ought to have a little more
culture than the average business men, he thought; so he tried to get
them to read Shakespeare and Milton, but in vain; he tried to get them
to read Darwin and Huxley, but in vain. Chemistry and physics they got
in the laboratory, but they had no biology and wanted none. Smithfield
tried them on the social sciences, introducing them to Bertrand Russell
and Bernard Shaw; and these hustling young engineers suddenly discovered
that literature had something to do with life. In six semesters this
teacher had eight sections, over two hundred students. But every bit of
this was abolished by the university authorities, under pressure of the
plutocracy of automobiles, railroads and banks.
It was then that Smithfield’s students took matters into their own
hands. They asked if he would meet with them for talks, and they started
an open forum, renting some rooms above a drug store, and doing all the
work themselves. They cut out smoking and drinking, and took to debating
social problems. As one of them phrased it to me, “We let loose a spirit
of real knowledge, and if we could have gone on, we should have changed
the social order in ten years.” But, of course, that is exactly what the
plutocracy of Michigan did not intend to have happen; they are going to
keep the present social order—which means that we are going to have
civil war in America, with the horrors we have seen in Russia and
Ireland.
Some boys came to Smithfield, saying they would like to meet on Sunday
mornings and study religion. Smithfield thought he would like to know
something about religion himself; so they got together and began to read
the Bible. Of course they read it with their eyes open; they studied the
class struggle in ancient Judea, the Hebrews enslaved by the plutocracy
of Rome, the Hebrew proletariat enslaved by their own exploiters, with
the help of priests and preachers of institutionalized religion. You can
see the same thing in Ann Arbor and Detroit, so Professor Smithfield’s
boys discovered the Bible to be “live stuff.”
Presently came the Y. M. C. A. hand-shakers, seeking to introduce Bible
study into the fraternity-houses. They would select some fraternity man
to read the Bible between five and six o’clock in the afternoon; and
then it was the Alpha Deltas, who boast themselves the toughest bunch in
town, came to Smithfield and asked him to read to them. All the other
classes petered out, and came to nothing; and naturally the “Y” people
were sore, because a radical was able to hold his classes while they
could not.
Professor Smithfield’s attitude toward the war was about the same as my
own; that is, he swallowed the allies’ propaganda sufficiently to think
there might be a greater hope for democracy if the allies were to win.
He made speeches, and sold Liberty Bonds, and his enemies could not get
him on this issue. So the scandal bureau was put to work. Professor
Smithfield’s wife was a teacher of swimming in the public schools of
Detroit, and presently it began to be rumored that she had had a
red-headed baby. One of the students told me the origin of this
red-headed baby story, but I forget it; maybe the wife had been seen to
pat a red-headed baby on the street, or maybe she had taken care of a
red-headed baby for some friend—any little thing like that will do for
the scandal bureau. It happens that the wife is likewise a Socialist,
and in 1919 she answered some questions which students asked her about
the Newberry case. As we have seen, the superintendent of schools in
Detroit is a brother to Newberry’s leading henchman, so Mrs. Smithfield
lost her position as a teacher of swimming.
Shortly afterwards her husband lost his position as a teacher of modern
ideas. They did not notify Smithfield himself, but the newspapers got
hold of it, and the reporters interviewed his dean, and also Regent
Beal, and both declared the report was untrue, it was a mistake. The
dean told Smithfield it was a mistake; but shortly afterwards Smithfield
discovered that it was the truth. And if you want to know why college
teaching is dull, and why college students drink and smoke and gamble
and go to “petting-parties,” you have the whole answer in this
experience of one live and interesting teacher.
They have a newspaper at the university, the “Michigan Daily,” and on
Sunday they publish an eight-page literary supplement of very excellent
quality. In October, 1922, a senior student, G. D. Eaton, published in
this supplement a review of John Kenneth Turner’s book, “Shall It Be
Again?” an exposure of the dishonesties of the late war, based upon
documents, and therefore not to be answered. The student who reviewed it
had been an ardent patriot, and had endeavored to enlist; being rejected
as under weight, he managed to get in by a trick, and performed his
military duties competently. He was invalided, and is at the university
as a ward of the Federal Board of Vocational Rehabilitation. Immediately
on the appearance of his review, President Burton summoned the faculty
members of the Board of Control of Student Publications, and directed
this board to dismiss Eaton at once, the declared reason being one
sentence in the review: “Most history professors are senile, simple and
misguided asses.” A faculty member visited the offices of all three
student publications, and not merely forbade that Eaton should
contribute to any of these papers, but forbade that the papers should
mention his dismissal in any way. The Dean of Students endeavored to
have the government withdraw support from Eaton, so that he would have
to quit the university. Extraordinary efforts were made to keep the case
from getting into the newspapers; but a month later the Detroit “Free
Press” got hold of the story, and gave young Eaton a little course in
practical journalism. They got an interview with him, and from this
interview they cut everything that might be favorable to his case; as
the rest was not unfavorable enough, they embellished it with fourteen
distinct falsehoods, which Mr. Eaton lists in a letter to me. Also I
ought to mention that this returned soldier was mobbed and badly beaten
by the students for an article in the “Smart Set,” discussing the
university. His successor as editor has been forbidden to publish an
article proving that freedom of opinion among the students is not
desired or permitted.