THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STEEL TRUST
We set out for Pittsburgh; and we can take either the Baltimore and
Ohio, with a Johns Hopkins trustee for president and another Johns
Hopkins trustee for director, also a Pittsburgh trustee, a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Teacher’s College trustee, a Lehigh
trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First National Bank
director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania; or we can take the Pennsylvania Railroad,
which is interlocked with the Guaranty Trust Company, Massachusetts
Tech, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, the United States Steel
Corporation, Bryn Mawr College, Wilson College, the University of
Pennsylvania, the Girard Trust Company, and the University of
Pittsburgh. It is this Pittsburgh institution we are now going to
investigate, and we shall have no difficulty in tracing its financial
connections. As one of the professors remarked to me, “At Pittsburgh the
plumbing is all open.”
He might also have added that this plumbing has been “swiped.” In other
universities the members of the plutocracy who run things have put up at
least a part of the funds; in Pittsburgh they have made the people put
up the funds, while the interlocking directorate takes the honors and
emoluments. We saw Judge Gary being made a learned doctor of laws at
Northwestern University; and that was not so bad, because everybody
understands that this particular title is merely a compliment for
big-wigs and money-bags. But at the University of Pittsburgh they made
him a doctor of science, which is supposed to be a real degree; and if
you could plumb the depths of Judge Gary’s ignorance on every subject
except making money and killing men, you would appreciate the absurdity
of this academic performance.
The grand duke of Pittsburgh is Mr. A. W. Mellon, Secretary of the
United States Treasury, and reputed to be the third richest man in the
country; he is president of the Mellon National Bank, and vice-president
or director in a list of fifty-five great financial and industrial
organizations. As second grand duke he has his brother, Mr. R. B.
Mellon, vice-president of his bank, and vice-president or director of
fifty-six organizations—beating his brother by one! As active assistant
they have Mr. Babcock, mayor of Pittsburgh, lumber magnate and director
in a long list of corporations. There are twenty-seven other members of
this regal board, and any time a full meeting was held, they could
transact the business of most of the banks and steel companies of
Allegheny county. The typewritten list of their directorates, which lies
before me, fills ten solid pages. I know you don’t want to hear it all,
so I will just give a glimpse, here and there: a steel king, whose
father left him sixty millions; the treasurer of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, western lines; a coal operator, vice-president of a national
bank; the chairman of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; a steel
magnate; a physician who married Standard Oil; the head financier of the
Thaw family; the chairman of a foundry company; a president of seven oil
companies; another representative of the Thaw family; the owner of
several newspapers; the president of an electric company; the president
of a foundry company; the manager of several aluminum companies, Mellon
enterprises; the president of the Heinz pickle palaces; a real estate
and coal man; the president of a national bank and three coal companies;
the president of a Mellon trust company; a United States senator and
Mellon attorney; a young steel magnate; the president of the Carnegie
Steel Company; two corporation lawyers; the head of the Carnegie
Institute, a Presbyterian clergyman, and the Episcopal bishop, who has
just fled from the smoky hell of the steel-country to his eternal
reward.
We saw at the University of Pennsylvania a peculiar arrangement, whereby
a private institution, entirely controlled by private plutocrats,
receives a subsidy every year from the state, and spends this money for
anti-social purposes. At Pittsburgh we see the same arrangement; the
state contributes nearly a million dollars a year to be expended by
these steel and oil and coal and railroad and money kings. This means in
practice that every year the chancellor of the university has to make a
deal with the political bosses. Finding himself inadequate to the task,
he has turned it over to a firm of lawyers, one member of which was
speaker of the legislature, and afterwards candidate for the Republican
nomination for governor. Those who put through the appropriation get ten
per cent of it; this is known as the “cut,” and is a regular custom—even
the public hospitals in Pennsylvania have to pay such tribute. There is
a network of graft, involving every kind of organization in the state;
the saloons, the doctors, the fraternal organizations—anybody who wants
special privilege or freedom to break the laws has to put up bribes. The
lawmakers protest against this or that steal, but when the orders come,
they vote. How big is the rake-off we may judge from the fact that the
mayor of Pittsburgh put up six hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars
to secure his election to an office which pays a salary of eleven
thousand dollars a year!
The people are helpless; they have no idea what is going on, because
they have no newspapers, the so-called newspapers of Pittsburgh being
merely house organs of the steel companies. The papers have an
association regulating their output and prices, also the number of
editions. They have agreed to issue no “extras,” and have put up a bond
of ten thousand dollars, which they forfeit if they violate this
agreement. At the time of the steel strike they flooded the country with
hysterical lies about the strikers; the record stands complete in the
report of the Interchurch Federation.
Pittsburgh University is another mushroom establishment, with five
thousand students and no ideas. The steel kings condescend to run it,
but they do not patronize it; the interlocking trustees send their sons,
not to Pittsburgh, but to the big Eastern universities. “Pitt” is
bitterly jealous of “Penn,” which is old and aristocratic and athletic.
For a time Pennsylvania refused to play football with them, and they
went to the state legislature, seeking to have this made a condition of
the state appropriations for their rival!
The chancellor of the university was a preacher named McCormick, but he
failed to “get the dough,” so he quit, and they put in ex-President
Bowman of Iowa University, a product of the Columbia University
educational machine. Bowman is known as “Mellon’s man,” but he also has
failed as a “vamp.” It appears that somebody tried to work a little
scheme on Grand Duke Mellon; it was announced in the newspapers that he
had made a gift of land worth two million dollars. The papers played it
up, with pictures of the Mellon brothers and fatuous interviews with
Chancellor Bowman. But Mr. Mellon came out with the statement that all
he had promised to do was to put up a hundred thousand dollars to secure
an option on the property. They are hard-fisted fellows, these steel
men, and as the saying is, they “have to be shown.” They can see that it
is worthwhile to train experts in steel-making, so Carnegie Tech is
taken care of; but when it comes to general culture, this Latin and
Greek stuff and highbrow ologies—they let the legislature do it!
The professors tell a story about Mayor Babcock, lumber magnate and
interlocking trustee. Chancellor McCormick wanted to advance a young man
in the chemistry department over the head of his senior, who was a Jew.
He explained in a meeting of the trustees that it would look all right,
because the Jew was not a Ph. D. Mr. Babcock, deputy grand duke of the
board, had fallen asleep, and now he opened his eyes suddenly. “Ph. D?
What the hell’s that?”
Needless to say, they don’t waste much time fooling about academic
freedom at the University of Pittsburgh. The nearest approach to a
radical that ever got into the place is a professor at the law school,
one of the twelve lawyers who signed the protest against
Attorney-General Palmer’s raids on the constitution of the United
States. There was a terrible uproar in Pittsburgh over this. The
professor received a letter of protest from the chancellor, and was
called in for a long argument. The new chancellor came in at this time,
and at the first meeting of the board he started his money “spiel.”
“Gentlemen,” said he, “the first duty before the university is to raise
six and a half million dollars.” But Mr. Babcock thought that the board
had another duty, which was to listen to him curse the radical
professor. The secret service department of the Steel Trust was put to
work, and there was a report on this professor, and he lost his chance
to become head of his department. “We must lie low now,” said the
chancellor. “We have a big program ahead.”
Needless to say, they are very devout at this University of the Steel
Trust. One of their grand dukes was the elder Mr. Heinz, distinguished
author of “Fifty-seven Varieties,” and proud owner of sixty-eight pickle
factories and forty-five branch houses. Mr. Heinz was an eminent
Presbyterian, and head of the World’s Sunday School Association, and
left a quarter of a million dollars to Pittsburgh University for a
building to teach Sunday School work. Naturally, therefore, it seemed a
dreadful thing to the interlocking trustees that the church should turn
traitor to their interests. Trustee Follansbee furiously attacked the
Interchurch World Movement report on the steel strike; at a meeting in
New York he said that it had set back the cause of Christianity fifty
years. And when the United States Senate sent out a committee to
investigate the strike—then suddenly the fighting steel kings discovered
what a handy thing it is to own an educational machine! Mayor Babcock
gave the senators a grand dinner-party, to which he invited his
chancellor and some of his trustees and deans, and these eminent and
disinterested gentlemen loaded the senators up with information
concerning the Bolshevik uprising in Western Pennsylvania.
Needless to say, there are no liberal movements of the students at this
university, and no “outside speakers” bringing them improper ideas. A
recent graduate writes to me:
One cannot describe the stupidity and ignorance of the students. Most
of them could never see beyond themselves; most of them attended
school to avoid working, for the sake of the diploma which at least
would give them more pay, if not secure them a better job, and some
even because they could not think of a better, easier, and happier way
to spend four years. The professors and instructors were even worse,
there being hardly one who could inspire a student.
Also needless to say, there is no organization of the professors; the
university has the “open shop” as well as “open plumbing.” At the time
of the Scott Nearing affair at Pennsylvania, there was a strong movement
for faculty representation, and several of the men who stood for this
movement were charged with insubordination and fired; others, who stood
by the authorities in order to curry favor, got promotions. A University
Council was established, but it proved a tender plant, and did not
survive in the smoke-laden atmosphere of the steel country. Chancellor
Bowman has now laid down the law, that all appointments are subject to
annual renewal; teachers are no different from other employes, and he
intends to run the university like a business concern. This is the sort
of talk that brings satisfaction to steel kings!
I was told about a professor who was brought before the chancellor, upon
the charge of having destroyed the religious faith of one of his
students. The boy’s father had complained, and it developed that the
professor, in a private talk with the boy, had been asked and had
answered questions about the divinity of Jesus. There was a solemn
council of the chancellor, the dean, and all the professors in this
department, and the chancellor drew up a statement for the professors to
sign, to the effect that they would do everything in their power to
avoid tampering with the religious faith of the students. They refused;
the utmost they were willing to sign was an agreement that they would
not go out of their way to tamper with the religious faith of their
students.
These men, of course, are teaching the scientific method, which is
incompatible with revelation; they know it, and the chancellor knows it;
all he asks is to avoid trouble with parents and interlocking trustees
who are making money out of the system of private monopoly, and wish to
keep the thoughts of their wage-slaves upon their future heaven and off
their present hell. A friend of mine tells me that, at the time of the
Braddock shootings the Pittsburgh professors “talked like
Bolsheviks”—but only among themselves! When it comes to public talking,
that is attended to by people like Mayor Garland, a former trustee, who
at a big meeting of faculty, students and alumni declared that “in a
community like Pittsburgh, which depends upon a high tariff for its
prosperity, it would be very wrong for any professor to advocate free
trade.” A friend of mine asks: “Was he joking?” I answer that one might
as well expect to hear a convocation of Catholic prelates joking about
the Immaculate Conception.
And while we are in this neighborhood we ought to make note of the
curious experience of Prof. G. F. Gundelfinger, author of “Ten Years at
Yale,” who was assistant professor of mathematics at the Carnegie
Institute of Technology, and wrote a personal letter to the president
protesting against an indecent orgy of the students, publicly conducted
and led by the president. The letter was sent to the president’s home,
and was opened by his wife; Professor Gundelfinger was fired a few days
later. He made a public fight, and the trustees dismissed the
president—but they did not take Professor Gundelfinger back!