THE LITTLE TOADSTOOLS
So far we have been dealing with the great educational centres, which
number their students in thousands and even tens of thousands; but for
every one such institution there are scores of little places scattered
over the country, with anywhere from a hundred to a thousand students
each. In general, one can say concerning these little places that they
try to be as much like the big places as possible. They get the local
financial celebrities on their boards; they get the Gothic buildings
with arrow-proof windows, and ivy of the quickest growing variety; they
dress up their faculty in fancy robes, and their graduating students in
caps and gowns; they have their fraternities and sororities, their full
equipment of athletic teams and alumni boosters. And, just as in country
villages you find more spying and more spite than in big cities, so in
little colleges you find class greed and religious bigotry incessantly
on the watch for any trace of a new idea.
To Beloit College, in Wisconsin, befell a singular fate—it got upon its
faculty a young man of talent, who wrote a live novel. “Iron City,” by
M. H. Hedges, is a picture of life in a small college, located in a
manufacturing town, and of the ferment of modern ideas trying to break
into such a place. Mr. Hedges declares that he did not indicate Beloit
especially, and has received many letters from professors in other
college towns, saying that the cap fitted them. But the gossips of
Beloit insisted upon riveting the cap upon their own heads, and there
was a dreadful scandal.
Beloit is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, its one big industry
being the Fairbanks-Morse Manufacturing Company, the largest makers of
scales in the world. Mr. Morse is the grand duke of the Beloit board,
and has as his assistants Mr. Salmon, director of the Beloit Water, Gas
& Electric Company, and Mr. Tyrrell, head of a great knitting works in
an adjoining town; also a big Chicago wheat broker; the head of
Montgomery Ward & Company; a great paper manufacturer; a leading Chicago
insurance man; a local preacher; and a “special investigator” of the
United States Department of Justice. So you see Beloit is fully equipped
to install, not merely a college of commerce and a department of
divinity, but also a school of spying.
With the publication of “Iron City” its secret service got to work
immediately; I am told by one who was on the inside that three days
after the book was out, one of the trustees called President Brannon on
the telephone from Chicago, exclaiming: “I understand you have a
novelist on your faculty. Why do you have people like that?” In less
than a month the board of trustees had formally demanded Professor
Hedges’ resignation. President Brannon is a scientist, whom we saw
kicked out of the University of Idaho by the mining kings; he had some
liberal ideas when he came to Beloit five years ago. He liked his
novelist, and tried to save him, calling him his best teacher; but the
uproar was too great—the outraged townspeople stopped speaking to
Professor Hedges and his wife on the street. Shortly after this, three
liberal professors were driven from the institution, and the president
pleaded for them also; it is said that he threatened to resign—but I
note that they are gone, while he is still in office.
President Brannon had an interesting plan to remedy the housing shortage
and improve the community spirit in this manufacturing town. He started
a “chamber of commerce,” for the purpose of constructing a million
dollars’ worth of homes on a co-operative basis, with the help of the
labor unions. The banks, the utility company heads, and the
Fairbanks-Morse people vigorously opposed the plan and tried to head it
off; after it had got started they called up the local merchants and
other members of the new “chamber of commerce” on the telephone, and
ordered them to have nothing to do with so dangerous an undertaking,
under penalty of loss of credit at the banks. So the “chamber of
commerce” no longer exists.
There is peace now in Beloit and its college. The last danger passed
when a student was expelled after publishing in the student paper a
review of “The Brass Check”! The head of the local knitting works, one
of the ultra-religious type of trustees, comes to the college and makes
orations, being introduced as “a progressive Christian employer”;
whereas it is well known among the students that the white slave
industry of the town is recruited from girls who cannot earn living
wages in the knitting works.
These manufacturing towns are scattered over the Middle West, and they
and their colleges are very much alike. Let us have a glimpse at
Marietta College, in Ohio. The recent president of this institution was
formerly editor-in-chief of the Chicago “Inter-Ocean,” and championed
the infamous Lorimer and the greedy Yerkes. A student with whom I talked
was present in a class in sociology, to which President Hinman made the
statement that preachers should not discuss social and civic problems.
Some of the students took exception to this idea, and attempted to argue
with him, whereupon he barred discussion in that class for the rest of
the year. He fired a Y. M. C. A. secretary for the crime of having
offered to a student a ticket to “Damaged Goods”—a play which had its
opening performance in Washington, attended by President Wilson and his
wife, and all the members of the cabinet and the Supreme Court.
The grand duke of this board was Mr. W. W. Mills, local traction magnate
and capitalist, president of the First National Bank, interested in a
cabinet company, a brick company, a bridge company, a chair company, a
floral company, a paint company, and a street railway company. This
versatile gentleman also controls the two newspapers of the town, and
censors the proceedings of the state conferences of the Congregational
church. His brother, also on the board, is director in the bank and
president of the chair company. The rest of the board was made up of Mr.
Mills’ nephew, Mr. Rufus Dawes, a powerful millionaire of Chicago,
president of a dozen different gas and electric companies; and his
brother, Mr. Charles G. Dawes, president of the Central Trust Company of
Illinois, and comptroller of the currency under President McKinley; a
retired merchant, director in the Mills bank; a local railway attorney,
related to the Mills; the president of the Mills paint company; the
postmaster of the town, protégé of the Mills; an attorney for the Mills
corporations; the pastor of the Mills church; a corporation lawyer,
director in the Mills bank; and a retired minister, related by marriage
to the Mills. Professors Morse and Owens were let out of Marietta upon
suspicion of liberalism, and in explaining the various reasons, the
latter wrote: “Mr. John Mills expressed a sincere desire to wring my
neck because I remarked at a dinner where he was present that the men in
his mills are an unusually intelligent set.” This referred to the chair
company, in which conditions were especially terrible; there were cases
of married men receiving as low as seven dollars a week in wages! Says
Professor Owens:
We were urged to be Americans, and yet if we raised our wee small
voice in favor of a wage that would enable the workers to live up to
accepted American standards, we were at once regarded as dangerous
anarchists. They were utterly blind to the fact that wages should be
raised not only in the interest of justice but of efficiency.
Repeatedly we stated that we were entirely willing to stand by each
and every statement we had made. If we had lied we were willing to
suffer the penalty. But we were denied every opportunity to present
our view of the situation, denied a hearing which one of our by-laws
said we were entitled to.
You remember Professor Bolley of the North Dakota Agricultural College,
and his brave statement that a college professor is a citizen. For
example, may a college professor become president of his local school
board? Surely, yes!—you will say. But wait a moment; let me complete the
sentence, “May a college professor become president of his local school
board under a labor administration?” Well, now—of course—that depends!
At Rockford, Illinois, a manufacturing and commercial center, is a very
exclusive college for young ladies, with a wonderful board of trustees,
including a great agricultural implement manufacturer, another large
manufacturer, and the widow of a third; the attorney for the town’s
principal industrial enterprise, also a large stockholder in the
concern; the town’s principal merchant, its principal lumber and fuel
dealer, and the editor of its interlocking newspaper; a bank president,
a steel manufacturer, a judge, and an ex-governor of the state of
Illinois, a notorious corporation tool. May a professor in such a
college accept any sort of office under a labor administration? Let us
see!
President Maddox of Rockford College went in for liberalism and the
enlightening of the masses. He had got a very conscientious young
teacher by the name of Seba Eldridge, and gave him a couple of
impressive titles—“Head of the Social Science Department and Professor
of Economics and Sociology.” Professor Eldridge went out and did “social
work,” and presently the labor men of Rockford elected themselves a
mayor, and this mayor appointed a school board. It would seem to have
been of a representative character—a Catholic business woman of
independent mind, a Socialist ex-teacher who was a good Methodist, a
Swedish workingman, self-taught but of particular intelligence, a
building contractor of large practical experience, and finally, as
president of the board, Professor Seba Eldridge of Rockford College.
Professor Eldridge had served on a local school board of New York City,
and is author of two books, including a useful work on social
legislation; the very man for the place, you would have thought. So
thought the president of the college and the chairman of his board of
trustees; and Professor Eldridge accepted the post.
But the business men of Rockford had still to be heard from! They had
control of the board of aldermen, and they meant to smash this labor
administration, so their aldermen rejected the board of education
proposed by the mayor. Their newspapers fell to denouncing Professor
Eldridge, and the big bankers made it plain that the city of Rockford
could sell no school bonds until the board had a “business man” for its
head. The interlocking trustees came round and interviewed the
president, whereupon that gentleman suddenly changed his position, and
withdrew his approval of Professor Eldridge’s acceptance of the school
board presidency. As the school board position paid no salary, and as
the young professor had a family dependent upon him, he decided to let
the mayor name a school board president who would be confirmed by the
city council! He resigned from the college also and accepted a position
elsewhere.
Mr. Fay Lewis, who lives in Rockford, has been kind enough to supply me
with a file of newspaper clippings on this incident, which occurred in
1921. Among these clippings I find a curious illustration of the method
by which the “Morning Star” of Rockford serves its interlocking
directorate. There was a discussion before the Rotary Club between the
labor mayor of the town and a former president of the school board,
representing the business men. The newspaper reports this discussion in
full; that is to say, it quotes twenty-nine inches of what the
representative of the plutocracy had to say, and two inches of what the
labor mayor had to say in reply!
Also, I ought to give you a little glimpse into Williams College, at
Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was originally established as an
institution for poor boys. It has become the most exclusive country club
in the United States, with the possible exception of Princeton. Like
Brown University, it is a place of dry rot; the faculty is devoted to
social life and respectability, and has been rewarded by Mr. “Barney”
Baruch, who has established a summer school of politics for the purpose
of promoting the “Bankers’ International.” The president of the
University is Harry A. Garfield, son of a former president of the United
States; and as I read the proofs of this book he rushes into the
newspapers to set forth his ideas on the subject of a living wage.
Unskilled workers, it appears, should not receive a living wage for
their families, but only for themselves. Should the worker marry, the
wife should help him to earn the household income until he educates
himself out of the unskilled status—presumably by going to college and
having President Garfield show him how!
Before we conclude this chapter, you might be interested to learn what
the invention of gunpowder has done to higher education; something which
is on demonstration in the state of Delaware. This home of the powder
oligarchy ranked almost at the bottom of the list of states in matters
of education, until Mr. Coleman du Pont, the powder king, took the
matter off the hands of the people, and put up the money for a new
educational system. That was kind of Mr. du Pont, of course, and the
people of Delaware appreciate it; but it means that we have the feudal
system permanently established and officially recognized in an American
state. The powder oligarchy has a university, located at Newark, and
here was a typhoid scandal, exactly as at the University of Oregon, with
the local magnates controlling the situation, and a young instructor
persisting in telling the facts. It was Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the
People,” precisely re-enacted. On the day that one student was buried,
this young instructor published a letter, in which he accused of murder
the people who had refused to put in a sewage system. He was threatened
with tarring and feathering, and the president of the college was very
sorry he could not offer this young instructor a raise. But he always
did what the treasurer of the college wanted—and the treasurer was the
man who had blocked the efforts of the board of health to avoid a
typhoid epidemic! A gentleman who was for many years a member of the
faculty of this university writes me, in very temperate language, as
follows:
“I think the university needs an awakening to the fact that political
and social conditions in the state and nation are proper and necessary
subjects of the freest possible discussion. I also believe that, in
spite of Pierre du Pont’s altruistic attitude, the du Pont wealth stands
at the gates of opportunity in Delaware, and that some who enter
renounce, consciously or unconsciously, their personal freedom of
opinion and action. As to the du Pont control of politics, it should be
fully and forever repudiated by the people of Delaware as an insolent
attempt to enslave the state to a single great interest.”