CHAPTER XXVII

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLACK HAND

We have completed a survey of our five largest Eastern universities, Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale; we shall now cross the continent, to the Western domains of our interlocking directorate. We may begin our journey on the New York Central, which is a Vanderbilt-Morgan road, and has a Columbia and a Cornell and a Rochester University trustee for directors, a recent Yale and New York University trustee for director, a Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president, and a Cornell trustee for vice-president, also a Guaranty Trust and two National City Bank directors; and continue it on the Michigan Central under the same auspices; then on the Illinois Central, which has a Columbia trustee and an Armour Institute trustee and a recent University of Chicago trustee, and a Knox and a Rockford College trustee for directors, and one First National, one Guaranty Trust, and two National City Bank directors; then on the Missouri Pacific, with a Brown University and a Vassar College and a Middlebury College trustee for directors, and a New York University council member for director and a Massachusetts Tech trustee for vice-president, and one Equitable Trust and two Guaranty Trust directors; finishing on the Union Pacific, which has a Columbia trustee for chairman, also a Rutgers College trustee and two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors, also two Equitable Trust, two Guaranty Trust, and three National City Bank directors. We may announce our coming by the Western Union, which has a Columbia trustee for president, and on its directorate two Columbia trustees, a Princeton trustee, a Massachusetts Tech and Hebrew Tech trustee, and a recent Harvard overseer. Arriving in San Francisco we shall be welcomed by the interlocking directorate in charge of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electricity, land, water, gas—and education.

Across the bay from San Francisco, high up above the city of Berkeley, stands the University of California, a medieval fortress from which the intellectual life of the state is dominated; and here also we find one of the grand dukes of the plutocracy in charge—Mr. William H. Crocker, whose father looted the Southern Pacific railroads, covering all California. Mr. Crocker is a “social leader,” and active head of the Republican political machine, which runs the government and is run by the finance of the state. We shall feel at home with Mr. Crocker, when we discover that he is a director of the Equitable Trust Company of New York, one of the five great banking institutions of the Money Trust, and that he sits on this board with Mr. Coudert, attorney for the plutocracy and trustee of Columbia University; also when we learn that he was a director of the Parkside Land Company, all of whose officers were indicted in the San Francisco graft scandal.

Associated with Mr. Crocker in the running of the University of California is Mortimer Fleishhacker, the biggest banker in San Francisco, president of the Anglo-California Trust Company, and first vice-president of the Anglo and London National Bank. I can give you a glimpse of this gentleman’s activities, for the other day I met a young newspaper man who had shipped on one of the fishing vessels which constitute the “hell fleet of the Pacific.” Mr. Fleishhacker is vice-president of the Union Fish Company, which is paying men $5 a ton for catching and salting cod, which are sold in San Francisco for $160 a ton, the incidental costs being practically nothing. Mr. Fleishhacker is also vice-president of the Alaska Canning Company, whose workers are hired by a Chinese contractor for $34 a month and board—which consists of two meals a day of scurvy diet, and only one cup of water a day. In the canning factories they work from 3 a. m. to 9 p. m., and they sleep in ramshackle bunkhouses, with no heat, no light and tide water wetting the floor. Eight of them died of small-pox while my friend was there.

As aid on his university board Mr. Fleishhacker has his attorney, Mr. Guy C. Earl, vice-president of two power companies and two electric companies, and a very crude and subservient newspaper, the Los Angeles “Express”; also Mr. Dickson, proprietor of this same “Express.” Also we find the president of San Francisco’s gas company, Mr. Britten, an

## active enemy of every public ownership movement; Mr. Moffitt,

vice-president of the First National Bank, an honest believer in capitalism at its worst, and a furious reactionary; also Mr. Bowles, president of the First National Bank of Oakland, and director in a railway, a water company, and a timber company; also Mr. Cochran, vice-president of the Southern California Edison Company, president of a life insurance company, a director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank, and a director in half a dozen large financial institutions; also Mr. Foster, another director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank. Mr. Foster lives in Marin county, just north of the university, and is known as the Duke of Marin; so you see these medieval titles are not entirely the product of my muck-raking imagination.

In addition to these seven, there are two wealthy corporation attorneys, one of them counsel for the Catholic Church, and for the grafters who were put on trial in 1910; a Catholic priest who is a close adviser of the archbishop who runs the San Francisco school system; and the wife of Sartori, one of the largest bankers in Los Angeles, who, as I happen to know, helped to finance the concession-hunting expedition of Vanderlip in Kamtchatka. These are the appointed regents; and in addition there are some who hold ex-officio—the Governor of the state, the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, etc. These do not matter, being merely machine politicians, selected by Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker and two or three others in private conference, nominated by these gentlemen’s newspapers, and elected by these gentlemen’s checks.

Besides the state government and the university, and their own banks and railroads, Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker control for the interlocking directorate a vast network of gas and electric companies, street railways, land companies, and power companies. The recent development of water power has made this the dominant industry of the state, and the means whereby the other industries are subordinated. Mr. Fleishhacker is president of the Great Western Power Company, and of the California Electric Generating Company, and a director in the Northwestern Electric Company; while his attorney, Mr. Earl, also a trustee of the university, is vice-president of two of these concerns. Eight other regents are

## active directors of such power companies; and we shall see shortly how

they use their university as a propaganda department against power development by the state. Mr. Foster, the Duke of Marin, is president of the ferry company, and a director of the United Railroads of San Francisco, which has been a leading agency in corrupting the city for the past twenty years. Mr. Crocker is a director in the committee which is now trying to reorganize these United Railroads, after the looters have got through with them. We shall see how these gentlemen use their university as a strike-breaking agency for the benefit of their street railways, their ferries and their gas and electric companies.

One might think that the plutocracy of California ought to be content to leave its educational business in the hands of such a board; nevertheless, they have felt it necessary to organize an independent vigilance committee, to supplement Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker. The prime mover in this action was Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Pacific Pipe & Supply Company of Los Angeles, a gentleman whose qualifications to direct the higher education of California were acquired while driving a stage. Mr. Haldeman founded what he called the Commercial Federation of California; later, learning from the war the advantages of camouflage, he changed the name to the Better America Federation. He went out among the interlocking directorate and raised the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the purpose of keeping California capitalist. The Better America Federation is a kind of “black hand” society of the rich, a terrorist organization which does not stop short of crime, as I know from personal experience. It works in league with several depraved newspapers—the Los Angeles “Times,” owned by Harry Chandler, speculator in Mexican revolutions, and co-partner with Mrs. Sartori’s husband in the Vanderlip Kamtchtkan adventure; the Los Angeles “Express,” with two university regents in charge; the San Francisco “Chronicle,” owned by Mike de Young, whom Ambrose Bierce pictured hanging on all the gibbets of the world; the San Francisco “Bulletin,” whose bottomless venality has been revealed in Fremont Older’s book. I have told in “The Brass Check,”