CHAPTER XLI

A LAND GRANT COLLEGE

We travel Northeast, and leave the mining country. On the lonely plains of the state of North Dakota we find men toiling for long hours, and raising a hundred million bushels of wheat every year. They mill very little wheat, but ship it away to the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul; and then import their own flour: which means that from the time the wheat leaves his land the farmer is paying tribute to a chain of exploiters—elevator men, railroads, speculators, millers, and the bankers who furnish the capital for these operations. The same situation prevails throughout the prairie states, and so here you have a well-matured class struggle between the dwellers in the country and the dwellers in the towns. Ever since the Civil War the farmers have been struggling to free themselves from the “money devil.” Wave after wave of revolt has risen, and sunk again, but always the masters of credit have managed to hold on. They have done this by owning or subsidizing the newspapers, the agricultural weeklies and the general magazines, and also by controlling the schools and colleges in which the farmers’ children are educated.

Writing in 1916, Gilson Gardner stated that the United States Bureau of Education had approximately two hundred employes, and out of this number one hundred and thirty appeared on the official rolls as drawing a salary of one dollar per year. “The source from which these men are paid is unknown. It is known in general, however, that some of them get their salaries from the Rockefeller General Education Board and some from the Sage Foundation or other endowments of private capital. The reports made by these employes go out as government experiment publications with the full prestige of official endorsement upon them.”

One of the government employes who is not a corporation hireling is Professor W. J. Spillman, chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and editor of a farm paper. Professor Spillman states that a wealthy friend came to him, with a statement that the Rockefeller General Education Board was seeking to control the educational institutions of the country, to see that the men employed in them were “right.” They had been successful with the smaller institutions, but some of the larger ones had held out, and Rockefeller was now adding a hundred million dollars to the foundation, “for the express purpose of forcing his money into these big institutions. He is looking for a man who can put this across. I think you are just the man for the place. There is a fat salary in it for the man who can do the thing,” and so on. Professor Spillman expressed some doubt of the Rockefellers being able to accomplish their purpose, and the friend explained that the removal of the unsatisfactory educators would be brought about as the result of “local dissatisfaction.”

You will call this a “cock and bull story”; but just notice—in the years 1915 and 1916 there were nine liberal presidents of Western colleges turned out of their jobs, and at least twenty professors, mostly of economics and sociology! Do you really think that the masters of the Money Trust, having bought up the last newspaper and the last popular magazine, would overlook your schools and colleges? If so, you are exactly the kind of foolish person they count upon you to be!

Most influential among the farmers are the so-called “land grant colleges,” which, way back in the days of President Lincoln, received from Congress large grants of government land for their support. Much of this land was stolen outright by the grafters. I am told that in Maine large tracts of the most valuable timber land were sold for a mere song, and without advertisement; exactly the same thing was done in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon—these land steals form the basis of the power of those old aristocratic families whom we found running Reed College and the University of Oregon. From what I know of my United States, I feel quite sure that an investigation in any state between Maine and Oregon would reveal the same kind of thing.

Anyhow, here are these land grant colleges, some of them big and prosperous, educating the farmers’ boys, and as yet not aspiring to the snobbery of the big universities. The interlocking directorate wishes to get hold of these institutions, and to see that dangerous thoughts are kept out. I purpose to show you what they did in one state; I bespeak your careful attention, because the story of one is the story of all, and in reading about North Dakota you will also be reading about Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado and Oregon.

John H. Worst, at that time lieutenant-governor of North Dakota, became president of the Agricultural College in 1895. It was a small institution at that time; by seventeen years of hard work he built it up until he had over twelve hundred students. Also he conducted, in connection with the college, a government experiment station, in which he had some devoted scientists. One of these, Professor E. F. Ladd, now United States Senator put in office by the Non-Partisan League, was a chemist, who became state pure food commissioner, and carried on a vigorous campaign against light weights and short measures, and the adulterating and misbranding of food. He went to the shelves of the grocery stores, and showed that the stomachs of the people of North Dakota were made a dumping-ground for timothy seed, gelatine and coal tar dyes. He exposed the use of dangerous poisons in patent medicines, and denounced the practice of bleaching flour—nor was he content to prove these things in his laboratory, he went out and taught the people of the state, and helped to put through laws against these practices. As a result, he incurred the mortal enmity of whiskey rectifiers, baking-powder manufacturers, paint manufacturers, the Beef Trust and the Milling Trust. I talked with Senator Ladd in Washington in June, 1922, and he told me that the last libel suit filed against him—for one hundred thousand dollars—had been dismissed on the fourteenth of the previous April; prior to that time, for twenty-two years he had never been free from libel suits and injunctions. At one time there had been six hanging over his head, and never one had been filed by a citizen of North Dakota, nor had he ever lost one.

Next, meet Professor H. C. Bolley, who is my dream of a scientist; a long, lean, keen old gentleman, a demon for the hunting out of knowledge, and an untamed champion of the people’s cause. I met him in Fargo, and asked him if he would tell me his story, and there came a few more wrinkles on his thin face. “I have been in this for twenty-two years,” he said, “and maybe it will be my fate to be kicked out for talking to Upton Sinclair!” Then the old professor thrust out an eager finger: “This is the question I am asking: Is a college professor a citizen? Or does he part with his rights, and become some kind of subject when he takes a college job? I made up my mind that I was going to stay a citizen, and exercise every one of the rights of a citizen, including the right to go out and talk to my fellow-citizens, to educate them, and organize them to protect their rights against all-comers. That is all there is to my story.”

Professor Bolley is one of the leading plant pathologists of the United States; it was he who first discovered the causes of most of the diseases which plague the farms of North Dakota—of “rust” and “smut” and “root rots” in wheat and other cereals, of potato “scab” and flax “wilt”—and he worked out remedies for these troubles, and taught them to the people. He proved that “flax wilt” is due to “sick” soil—and that seemed a terrible thing to the land interests and the railroads, who were making money out of getting new farmers into North Dakota. These speculators were not interested in having Professor Bolley cure the “sick” soil; it paid them better if the farmers went into bankruptcy every few years. The discoveries of Professor Bolley were worth hundreds of millions to the farmers of the Northwest. He made discoveries about flaxseed, and the linseed crushers and paint makers tried to buy his services—they were used to buying professors. Bolley had them put the money into the institution, with the provision that it was to be employed for his researches. We shall presently see how his enemies tried to take it away from him.

Also, this professor-citizen took up the question of the grading of wheat, the sorest point with the Northwestern farmers. They are absolutely at the mercy of the elevator men and the millers, and the whole thing is one colossal swindle. Professor Bolley knows wheat as well as any other man in the world, and he showed the tricks to the farmers. In the first place, the wheat all gets mixed up in the elevators, and there is no way to tell Smith’s from Jones’s. Nevertheless, the farce of “grading” goes on, and its effect is to beat down the price to the farmer. The millers say they must have Number One Red Spring—but there is not enough of this produced in America to feed one big city! What determines the mixture is the percentage of protein, starch, and gluten, and they test the flour as it comes through the mill, and when this or that ingredient is needed, they let in wheat of a certain kind, regardless of its “grade.” That which they grade as “D,” and buy as “feed” wheat, just because it is shrunken, may be the richest of all in proteins, and be used in their best brands of flour.

It is a fact that a great part of the flour is made from “rejected” wheat; and the sole point of the rejecting is to lower the price. I asked, “What is the price of rejected wheat?” and the answer was, “It is a bottomless pit—you can buy it for anything.” They reject wheat if there is water in it—but they have to put water in it themselves in order to mill it! They reject it for smut—but they use it just the same, because the brush that takes off the bran also takes off the smut! They even use the mouldy wheat, because they bleach it. Many times Professor Bolley found them rejecting wheat for smut, and he would go to that neighborhood and learn there was little or no smut to be found there, and the elevator men made no effort to keep the wheat with smut separate from the rest. The elevator and grading workers would tell him that they had received word—there was too much wheat on the market, and they were to buy only “rejected” wheat—as an act of charity to those poor farmers who had got smut into their wheat; but the effect of this action was to force more farmers into ruin.

Professor Bolley was invited to accompany fifty scientists, including some from Europe, to inspect the flour mills in the “Twin Cities.” Here came the prize “boosters” of the millers, setting forth the wonders of the place and the extreme precautions they took to use only the very finest wheat—they were making their best flour. Professor Bolley dipped his hand into one hopper and then into another, and carried home samples of this wheat. Fifty per cent of it consisted of amber durum, which they rejected, seven per cent of another rejected kind, and the balance of a very inferior grade of winter wheat; no hard spring wheat in the sample! And yet the millers would invite Professor Bolley to the Chamber of Commerce, to tell them how they could teach the farmers to raise better wheat! Professor Bolley went to Russia and spent a year collecting hardy wheats; the Siberian wheat which he brought home thrived, but the millers said it was worthless—and they bought it cheap. Then the farmers stopped growing it; whereupon the millers suddenly decided that this Siberian wheat was good; the climate had changed it, they said!

Meantime, Professor Ladd had set up a model bakery and a flour mill at the experiment station, and on the basis of his demonstrations, President Worst was showing the farmers of North Dakota how they could save the sum of fifty-five million dollars a year, by setting up elevators and mills, and exporting flour instead of wheat. In this demonstration lay the beginnings of the Nonpartisan League movement, and the masters of the Money Trust perceived that they must crush these rebel educators. How they tried to do it is the story we have next to hear.

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