GOD AND MAMMON
I have tried in the closing chapters of “The Profits of Religion,” and
also in “The Book of Life,” to make plain that I honor the religious
impulse in its true form. But that does not mean that I owe respect to
human systems which call themselves religious, and which make the
spiritual needs of mankind a basis of enslavement. I can tolerate the
business man who tells me that “money makes the mare go”; I can show him
how, under a cooperative system, money would make the mare go faster.
But I find it hard to tolerate those preachers of “personal
righteousness,” who keep the eyes of the working class uplifted to
heaven, while their pockets are picked on earth; our modern Pharisees,
who take the greatest of the world’s proletarian martyrs, and bind him
anew, and deliver him to be crucified upon a jewelled cross.
I make this explanation because we are now going to have a glance at
some of our “religious” colleges. Let us begin with Wooster, Ohio, an
institution run by the Presbyterian church. We have seen how at Clark
they are introducing a summer school, to make education pay; and we can
see what that will end in, because the college of Wooster has for many
years been run by its summer school: an absurdly crude, privately-owned,
money-making institution, which draws schoolmarms by offering gold
watches as prizes for those who bring in the greatest number of new
students, and by advertising in terms of dollars and cents the amount of
business done by its free teachers’ agency. In country newspapers it
advertises itself as “a School of Inspiration, Preparation and
Perspiration.” Fifteen hundred schoolmarms come each summer, and the
local papers explain that they are “free with their expense accounts.”
The regular college, having only five hundred students, is relatively
unimportant.
The active trustees, being local business men, naturally want to boost
the summer school; whereas the faculty of the college have absurd
notions of the dignity of true knowledge. Out of this grew a furious
quarrel, which lasted for several years. The partisans of the summer
school kicked out the excellent president of the college, who had spent
sixteen years building it up from nothing. They brought in to replace
him a shouting Y. M. C. A. evangelist of no college training, an utter
ignoramus, and so many kinds of a liar that it would take the rest of
this book to tell about it. The American Association of University
Professors investigated the affair, and devoted a hundred and thirty-six
pages to it, and the bulletin for May, 1917, is a study of the mental
processes of a religious hypocrite, shouting about the love of Jesus,
while stooping to every kind of vile and cowardly intrigue.
Also, while we are in Ohio, let us have a look at Muskingum College, at
New Concord. We may see this through the eyes of Professor Arthur S.
White, who was let out of the Department of Political Science and
Sociology this year. The charge against him was that he had created “a
critical attitude” among the students. The vice-president of the college
charged him “with having taught the students to think, and that they
were not thinking the right things.” At the very beginning of his work,
three years ago, he had explained to the students his dislike of “the
compartment method of education,” whereby students are crammed into a
certain tight mold. “I remarked that such methods were destructive of
personality, and must foster decay in our institutions. When I had
finished the whole class applauded. At the end of the hour, some eight
or ten waited to tell me that they were, and had been, victims of such
methods, and that they hoped my work would be different.” As a result of
this, Professor White’s classes in political science increased from
twenty-seven to a hundred and forty-two.
There was no fault to be found with his character or personal conduct,
nor is he a Socialist or propagandist of any sort. I quote again from
his statement: “My method was to present all the facts on every question
that were available; to analyze ideas, dogmas and institutions in the
light of their original professions and accomplishments. I tried to
respect the personality of my students, by insisting on their being free
to make a conscientious choice of their loyalties.” But, of course, this
did not fit into a college whose dean phrased the duty of the faculty:
“Our attitude toward the president should be that of the soldier to the
general, it should be the attitude that he can do no wrong.” Muskingum
is a Presbyterian institution, and in order to get the financial support
of the church, it advertises itself widely as a “safe” place for parents
to send their children. Everything must be “in accordance with our
tradition of ideals and customs.” So, of course, the professor who
taught his students to think had to move on.
Let us also move, to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where there is a little
religious toadstool in the heart of the oil country, and with a Standard
Oil board of trustees. On this Allegheny College we have a report of the
American Association of University Professors, in the bulletin for
December, 1917. The president (now president-emeritus) is a product of
Judge Gary’s Northwestern University, a Methodist clergyman, and trustee
of the Carnegie Foundation. An alumnus who got to know him writes me:
“Crawford is a man who has seemingly lost his moral perception, and
throughout his stay at Allegheny was notoriously untruthful and
untrustworthy.” For fourteen years he had a professor of English
literature by the name of Frank C. Lockwood, who was an ardent
Prohibitionist, and came into conflict with the two local grand dukes of
the board of trustees, political bosses and attorneys representing
applicants for liquor licenses in Meadville. Professor Lockwood had the
audacity to run for congress on the Prohibition ticket, with the backing
of the Progressives; and, worse yet, although he himself was a Methodist
minister, his wife joined the Unitarian church. The report does not make
clear what the interlocking trustees expected the Methodist professor to
do about this; they would hardly have been satisfied if he had divorced
his wife for being a Unitarian; maybe they expected him to beat her
until she reformed. Anyhow, the board adopted a resolution forbidding
its professors to take part in politics by becoming candidates for
public office; and, furthermore, it made clear its intention to drop
Professor Lockwood at the end of the next year—so he quit. A college
professor is not a citizen in Pennsylvania, any more than he is in
Illinois!
Let us have a look at the prairie country, the “free state” of Kansas.
At Washburn College, an institution of the Congregational church at
Topeka, we shall again find the worship of God and Mammon perfectly
blended. All the local plutocracy is represented on this board, and also
a collection of clergymen, headed by the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon,
famous throughout the Middle West as the author of “In His Steps.” The
president of Washburn is the Reverend Parley Paul Womer—I am aware this
sounds like a novel, but it isn’t. Washburn had been in financial need,
and President Womer was called in as a “fund-raiser”; he being the
perfect type of plutocratic piety, with knees calloused from constant
worship before the altar of the Golden Calf.
His record also is set down in a report of the Association. We find him
requiring one of his professors to promote a certain student, because
his father was “a prominent and well-to-do man,” and “had intimated that
if Washburn would graduate his son he might do something handsome for
the college in a financial way.” We find him continually humiliating
members of the faculty, by warning them not to do this and not to do
that “which might conceivably be displeasing to any persons from whom we
might hope for aid.” We find him refusing all reforms in the way of
faculty control, because “Washburn depends for its financial support on
business men, men of large financial interests who would be quick to
resent any appearance of Bolshevism in the administration of the
college.” We find him summarily discharging professors who opposed his
combination of boot-licking and bullying, and then lying about these
professors, and then asking that the committee of the Association should
consider these lies to be “confidential”!
Finally, matters came to a head; more than half the faculty either
resigned or were discharged, and the students rose up and began
bombarding the pious president’s house with rotten eggs. But did that
make any difference to President Womer? It did not! The smell of rotten
eggs evaporates quickly, but money endures, and he is the boy who gets
the money. His interlocking trustees stood by him, and one month after
the publication of the damning report of the Association, I find in the
Topeka “Daily Capital” a front-page story about the culmination of
President Womer’s marvelous drive to raise the endowment of Washburn to
eight hundred thousand dollars. He has raised three hundred and
seventy-five thousand outside of Topeka, and three hundred thousand
inside. Fifty thousand of this comes from Mr. Joab Mulvane, the grand
duke of the city, and according to the newspaper, “the walls of the
Chamber of Commerce shivered in the greatest uproar of applause they
ever enclosed.... President Womer received at last night’s meeting a
demonstration of cordial good-will and appreciation such as few public
men hope for in a lifetime.” “One of the greatest days in the history of
Topeka,” was Mr. Mulvane’s own characterization of the event. There are
two columns of this kind of rapture, with the names of all the donors
and the “volunteer workers,” and descriptions of parades, fireworks,
dancing, brass-bands, and the singing of “Washburn pep songs.”
Also the Catholics have their educational machine, and raise money from
wealthy Catholics for the protection both of Catholicism and of wealth.
In the city of Washington they have a great central institution. An
official of the United States Department of Education writes me:
I made a study of the American University in Washington not long ago.
There are a number of wealthy men on the board. They are obviously
placed there for the usual purpose. Most of them never went to college
themselves, and they know nothing about higher education in general or
in particular. Now I saw no occasion to doubt their desire to do the
best they know how for the institution. But some things they know
about, from their associations, and others they do not. They simply
cannot appreciate, for example, the fine zeal the founders had for the
establishment of a great graduate university. They can see a
considerable demand for education in law and business, and so they
very naturally let the institution turn in this direction.
Consequently a low grade law school and a lower grade business course
are being established. The trustees can see some use in these courses
and some demand. The need for a great graduate school, so patent to
educators, the trustees are blissfully ignorant of, and I doubt very
much whether on account of their limited educational experience they
will ever be able to appreciate the need for such a graduate
institution in Washington.
We move South to Durham, North Carolina, home of Trinity College, a
considerable religious institution, founded by Washington Duke, the
tobacco king. A friend of mine who knew the old gentleman tells me how
he furnished his mansion, ordering the books for his library by the size
and color of binding; and now his statue decorates a college grounds.
The present head of the family is James B., locally known as “Buck”
Duke, and it would be a poor pun to describe him as the Grand Duke of
Trinity College. He and his brother, Mr. B. N. Duke, his wife, his son
and his daughter, have all purchased the good will of North Carolina
Methodism by making public gifts to Trinity, amounting to four million
dollars; all three of the male Dukes are therefore on its board of
trustees. James B. has just given a million to the endowment, fifty
thousand towards a new school for religious training, and other sums for
gymnasium and law building. So I note in the Greensboro “Daily News” an
editorial headed: “The Duke Also Has Virtues.”
Forty years ago “Buck” Duke could not borrow ten thousand dollars in
North Carolina; today he boasts that he is worth four hundred million,
beside what his father and brother have accumulated. Assuming that his
services in providing the world with tobacco were worth a hundred
dollars a week, it would have taken a hundred and fifty-four thousand
years to earn his own share of this money. “Buck” is distinguished among
interlocking trustees in that he has had a decision of the United States
Supreme Court on his money-making methods; the exact words are that he
“persistently and continuously and consciously violated the law.” The
Supreme Court has not yet passed on the fact that a man who is worth
four hundred million dollars pays only eight hundred and twenty-eight
dollars taxes in the state where he lives in a magnificent palace!
The Methodist church is, as we know, violently opposed to the use of
tobacco, but it applies the ancient saying of one of the Roman emperors,
Pecunia non olet—money has no smell. Mr. Duke completed his purchase of
the church by a so-called donation for the support of its superannuated
ministers, and so his right to run both church and university is
undisputed. He brought in a South Carolina minister of pliant
principles, and made him president of the university, and this president
never lost an occasion to chant the praises of his grand Duke. The grand
Duke had this chief chanter made a director of his Southern railroad,
and wanted to have him made also a bishop of the church, but for three
successive years he failed; then he hired some regular lobbyists and
sent them to the Methodist General Conference—and that was the way to do
it. “Pecunia non olet”; and also, “pecunia parlat”; and also, “pecunia
ambulare equinam fecit!”—if you will let me fix up the Latin.