THE UNIVERSITY OF HEAVEN
We travel to Buffalo by the Pennsylvania Railroad, and from Buffalo we
continue our journey by way of the New York Central Railroad, which has
a Columbia trustee and a Cornell trustee and a Rochester trustee for
directors, a recent Yale and New York University trustee for director, a
Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president, a Guaranty Trust director
and two National City Bank directors; and so we arrive at the University
of Heaven, which has God Almighty for a director.
Thirty years ago there was nothing here; now there are a score of
elaborate buildings, and six thousand students. Never has there been
such a series of grand dukes and duchesses as at this university; Mr.
John D. Archbold, president of the Standard Oil Company, and Huyler, the
candy king, and Samuel Bowne, the cod liver oil king, and L. C. Smith,
the typewriter king, and Mrs. Russell Sage, the charity queen, and E. L.
French, head of Crucible Steel and the Halcombe Steel Company. At
present they have as their chief duke Horace S. Wilkinson, steel
magnate, one of the leading powers in the steamship lines of the Great
Lakes. As assistants there are half a dozen prominent business men of
the town, including the two leading merchants; a former brewer of New
York, who is head of a great asphalt company and a sugar company; Mrs.
Bowne, the widow of Samuel Bowne; Mr. Childs, the coal tar king; Mr.
Flaccus, the Pittsburgh glass magnate; the Honorable Louis Marshall,
millionaire lawyer of New York; the Honorable Edgar T. Brackett, leading
politician of Saratoga Springs, headquarters of New York state’s
gambling and political conventions; and the Reverend Ezra Squier Tipple,
D.D., Ph.D., president of Drew Theological Seminary, professor of
practical theology, and author of the “Drew Sermons, Series One and
Two,” and of the “Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts, Series One, Two and
Three.”
All this has grown out of the genius of one man, the Reverend James
Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., chancellor of the
University of Heaven. He made it, unassisted save by God.
What is Heaven—in the plutocratic sense? It is a place whose streets are
paved with gold and flowing with milk and honey. It is inhabited
exclusively by the elect, all others having been cast into outer
darkness. It is a place entirely under the control of the “right
people”; all unorthodox thoughts are barred, “chapel” is conducted every
morning, and if anybody does not like the way we run things, he can go
to hell.
Some time ago I made you acquainted with the ideal university president
of the metropolitan plutocracy, Nicholas Murray Butler; a man of the
world, dignified and urbane, his religion of the Episcopalian variety,
reserved and proper. Compared with him, Chancellor Day of Syracuse
University is provincial and naive, representing the adoration of wealth
in its primitive, instinctive form. His emotions flow with child-like
enthusiasm; his denomination might be described as evangelical
Mammonism. His fervor is such that he is not ashamed to bear testimony
before the world; to raise his hands in public and shout: “Money, money!
Hallelujah! Amen!” This chancellor brings to the support of his
plutocracy the direct personal revelation of the Almighty. When he makes
commencement orations, or gives interviews to the interlocking press, or
sends telegrams of congratulation to the murderers of strikers, he
brings to their support the latest decisions and interpretations of the
Throne of Grace. “God has made the rich of this world to serve Him....
He has shown them a way to have this world’s goods and to be rich
towards God.... God wants the rich man.... Christ’s doctrines have made
the world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches.” These are
from the chancellor’s book, “The Raid on Prosperity”; you can find more
of it quoted in “The Profits of Religion.”
Recently he has published another book, “My Neighbor the Workingman,”
and in this book we find God in a bloodthirsty mood. It appears that the
radicals are taking advantage of our courts, which “assume innocence
until guilt is proved.” There must be “a suspension of this order of
things,” God says; “we have found no foe more worthy of extermination.”
Strikes, God teaches us, are efforts to make labor superior to law; “the
strike is a conspiracy and nothing less.” Yet when labor proposes to use
legal methods, God does not seem to like it any better; we find Him
discussing the founding of the Labor Party in Chicago, and speaking of
the delegates as “these Simian descendants”—and just after He has made
His chief complaint against strikers, that they call non-union men bad
names! God portrays the Socialist utopia: “The soap-box orators, in the
tramp’s unclean rags, will take charge of the banks, and the bomb-makers
can be started to run the factories.” Opposed to this is God’s own
utopia, and you may take your choice: “The rich and the poor dwell
together. There is divine wisdom in the plan. They always have so lived.
They always will so live. Noble characters are in both. It must be the
divine order.”
This chancellor of the University of Heaven was providentially equipped
for his rôle. He stands about six and a half feet high, and broad in
proportion, with the face of a Jupiter commanding the lightnings. He has
a magnificent rolling voice, so that Jehovah’s commands are heard as
usual amid the thunders of Sinai. He is a masterful personality; he
knows instantly what God wants, and he goes after the bacon and gets it
for God, and every plutocrat, meeting him, recognizes him as the ideal
person to take charge of the thinking of posterity.
No nonsense is tolerated at Syracuse; they know what truth is, and how
it should be taught, and you teach it that way or you get out, the
quicker the better. Early in the chancellor’s administration he
discovered that John R. Commons was tolerant toward free silver, and he
fired him, giving as his reason that the professor was tolerant towards
Sunday baseball! Every year he discovers that several others are
tolerant towards something ungodly, and he fires them. There is no
“tenure” or faculty control, or stuff of that sort; it is the chancellor
who pays the salaries, and the chancellor who decides what the various
men are worth—and he generally decides they are not worth much. He said
at a faculty meeting, “You fellows needn’t think you mean anything to
me; I could replace you all in an hour and a half.”
This is his regular manner toward his faculty; he subjects them to the
most incredible indignities. For example, he gave the degree of doctor
of science to one of his grand dukes, Mr. E. L. French, president of
Crucible Steel. At a faculty meeting at which this project was brought
up, one of the professors ventured to suggest that it might be better to
make it an LL.D., which is generally understood as having an honorary
significance, instead of an Sc.D., which is understood to indicate
actual achievement in the scientific field. Chancellor Day pointed at
the objector a finger which trembled with rage, and shouted: “Sit down
and shut up!” This was Professor E. N. Pattee, and I find him still
listed in the Syracuse catalogue as “director of the chemical
laboratory,” so I presume that he sat down and shut up as directed.
Several people described to me the eloquence of the chancellor’s
sermons, with the tremolo stop which reduces his auditors to tears. I
asked one of them, “Does he believe in his religion?” The answer was:
“No more than I do. He has no particle of Christianity or of faith; he
uses it merely as a shield.” To his faculty its purpose appears to be to
beat down their salaries. If you go into his office to ask for a raise,
he will glare at you and pound on the desk, shouting: “What’s this I
hear about you, John Smith? Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus?
Have you been saying that you distrust the verbal inspiration of the
Pentateuch?” Or maybe he will say: “I want you to understand, young man,
I have been hearing reports about you. You were seen walking on the
street with Professor So-and-So’s wife!” Or maybe he will say: “I have
taken the trouble to inquire, and I find that you subscribe to the
‘Nation’ and the ‘New Republic.’”
Heaven, from the point of view of college professors, is an intellectual
sweatshop. I was told of a professor of geology, who was there for
twenty years, and finally got up the nerve to ask for a raise, and he
got fifty dollars a year. Another professor asked for a raise, but the
chancellor discovered that this man had written a book, and he said: “A
man who has written a book ought not to expect promotion; it shows that
he had spare time on his hands.” All contracts with the university are
verbal, and you take the chancellor’s word for your fate. It may seem a
dreadful thing to say about heaven, but the fact remains that a number
of the chancellor’s faculty, both past and present, unite in placing him
among those college heads who do not always tell the truth.
A few years ago he got rid of his treasurer, Mr. W. W. Porter, who had
served the university for nineteen years. The chancellor published a
series of accusations against Mr. Porter, and the latter replied in a
printed statement of twelve thousand words, which I have before me. It
is a dignified and frank and convincing document. Mr. Porter bears
testimony to that same “wrath and vindictive spirit and methods” upon
which all authorities agree. He goes on to give the documents and
figures of a series of petty grafts perpetrated by the chancellor: For
example he states that laborers worked on the chancellor’s farm, and
were paid out of the university treasury amounts aggregating $710.82;
also, that the chancellor sold this farm to the university “at cost,”
and when the treasurer asked for proper vouchers, “he immediately flew
into a passion, stating that his word was sufficient”; also, that a
member of the chancellor’s family purchased a building, and leased it to
the university, to be used as a book-store, at an excessive rental;
also, that the chancellor sold his old automobile to the university at
an excessive price; “the chancellor sold horses, wagons, harness, etc.,
at various times to the university, making out bills in favor of himself
and receipting the same, acting as both seller and purchaser.” We might
go on to summarize twelve closely printed sheets of this kind of thing;
but space is limited, so we content ourselves by stating that we know
where this document is, and we will submit it to Professor Brander
Matthews on demand!