CHAPTER XLVI

INTRODUCING A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT

From the University of Minnesota we take the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, which has a Princeton trustee and a recent New York University and Yale trustee for directors, and two National City Bank directors. Overnight we come to Madison, Wisconsin, where for the first time we find an institution of higher education which has partly emerged from under the shadow of the White Terror. The reason for this is one man—Senator LaFollette, who for forty years has been fighting the battle of the people in his state. LaFollette has not always had his way; he has been in again and out again half a dozen times; but the thought of him is never out of the minds of the reactionaries, and many things they have wished to do in their university they have not dared to do. So at Wisconsin are two professors who are “rank” Socialists, and perhaps a dozen others more or less on the way to “rankness.” Just now the state administration is LaFollette’s, but the administration of the university is reactionary, a relic of the war hysteria.

The grand duke of the plutocratic element of the board is Mr. A. J. Horlick, whose contribution to American scholarship is a brand of malted milk, with a picture of a cow from which the commodity is understood to be derived. Quite recently the president of the University of Wisconsin announced that no one would be permitted to address the university who had not supported the government during the war. Mr. Horlick has proven his right to be numbered among the hundred percent patriots, the firm of which he is head having been indicted by the United States government and fined fifty thousand dollars for the hoarding of flour. (Query: Is malted milk made out of flour?)

The most active reactionary upon the board is Mr. Harry J. Butler, a railroad attorney of Madison; he is ably seconded by Dr. Seaman, a physician, anti-LaFollette candidate for governor last year; also by a wholesale grocer, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, two other attorneys, and a manufacturer’s wife. For many years the university had a liberal president; since his death they have had an elderly zoologist of reactionary temper, who deftly dodges trouble by “passing the buck” to his board. The liberals, inside the university and out, are biding their time; they strengthened their hold on the state at the recent election, and now hope to get one or two more members of the board, so that when a new president is chosen he may be of their kind.

Last winter it was rumored that I was coming East, and the students of the Social Science Club asked if I would deliver an address at the university. Before I had time to answer, I learned from newspaper clippings that the president of the university had announced that I was not a proper person to be heard by the students, and would not be granted the use of a hall. I have to spend some time every day declining invitations to deliver lectures, and the elderly Wisconsin zoologist might have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had waited before he spoke. Of course, when he told me I couldn’t come, I felt compelled to go.

President Birge had stated in the Madison “Capital-Times” that “Upton Sinclair’s attack on journalism could only be fairly expounded if a representative of the Associated Press or other organized journalistic body were present at the same time to answer.” Apparently it was the president’s idea that I never talked on any subject but the newspapers, which of course was underestimating the range of my discontent. However, I wired the “Capital-Times,” asking them to convey to their president the information, “I have been trying in every possible way to inveigle the Associated Press into answering ‘The Brass Check’ in any manner they might choose. I have publicly challenged them and their leading representatives a dozen different times. If President Birge will persuade the Associated Press to send a representative to debate with me, he will confer upon me the greatest favor I could name.”

President Birge made no answer to this, and on Friday, April 28th, when I arrived in Madison, I learned that the students of the Social Science Club had arranged that the meeting should be held on the following Monday in the high school auditorium. I thought it would be interesting to collect a university president for this book, so the first thing I did was to go and pay a call on Dr. Birge.

I am told that in his own line he is a distinguished scientist, and his friends at the university explained that he is accustomed to being treated with extreme deference. I am sorry to say that I missed this point. I considered that I had been attacked in the newspapers entirely without provocation, and I was not willing to be content with polite evasions. In trying to get at the facts, I felt that I was acting in a public cause, and I was not thinking about the personality of a university president, any more than I was thinking about my own.

He is a rather small man, with small dark eyes, and he sat at his big desk, watching me uncomfortably. I asked him what reasons he had for pronouncing the ban upon me, and he could only say it was my reputation. I asked him where he had got his impression of my reputation, and of course he had to admit that he had got it from the capitalist newspapers. I asked if he had read any book of mine, and at first he said he had not, then he thought he had read “The Jungle,” but had forgotten it.

“Oh, no, President Birge,” I answered. “Nobody that has read ‘The Jungle’ has ever forgotten it.” And I could see that this was not the answer he had expected.

I asked him on what he based his impression that I had exaggerated in “The Brass Check.” He admitted that he had not read the book; whereat I remarked: “You have spoiled my score!” I explained that I had traveled from Pasadena to Madison, and stopped at nine cities on the way, and in each place I had talked to from ten to twenty educators—school teachers and college professors—and so far every person had read “The Brass Check.” “I thought I was going to get to New York with a hundred percent record!” President Birge murmured sympathetically.

“You will realize,” I added, “that it strikes me as significant that the one person who thinks the book isn’t true is the person who hasn’t read it.”

I went on to tell about the many and various efforts I had made to lure the Associated Press into the arena. Before publishing the book I had submitted to Mr. Melville E. Stone, then general manager of the Associated Press, four questions for him to answer. He had previously written that he would be glad to answer any questions, but he fell silent when he read the questions I sent. I had written to Mr. Stone’s assistant, now general manager, calling his attention to the book, and asking for an answer on various points. At the annual convention of the Associated Press, held in New York in April, 1921, after “The Brass Check” had been out more than a year, it was officially announced in the “Editor and Publisher,” and also in the New York “Evening Post,” that the Associated Press had a committee investigating “The Brass Check,” and was shortly to issue a complete report upon the book. A couple of months later, when this report failed to appear, I wrote the Associated Press asking what had become of it, and when they failed to reply, I published my letter and sent a copy of it to the managing editor of every Associated Press newspaper in the United States—but without getting a reply from a single one!

Only a couple of weeks before I met President Birge, another annual convention of the Associated Press took place in New York, and I repeated my challenge to this gathering, and sent a copy to every managing editor, and also every publisher, of the thirteen hundred Associated Press newspapers in the United States. No attention was paid to these communications, and not one single Associated Press newspaper was willing to demand that the Associated Press should produce the report on “The Brass Check,” which it had officially announced it was preparing.

I showed President Birge also how the students of his own Social Science Club had tried in vain to get the Associated Press to answer me. Their first request, that the Associated Press should send a representative to meet me on a university platform, had met with no reply; a second and very sharp letter had brought the response that no responsible newspaper man would be willing to meet me on a platform. Any newspaper man will realize the absurdity of this statement. The A. P. could find a man in any city—if they could furnish him with the facts!

Then I set forth to President Birge my qualifications as an orator in university halls; as it happened, I came within his specifications, in that I had supported the government during the war. I came of a long line of American ancestors; my grandfather and my great-grandfather had been captains in the United States Navy, and my great-great-grandfather had commanded the frigate “Constitution.” I had had nine years of college and university life, and was a married man of good moral character. Also, I mentioned that it was not my intention to discuss the newspapers, but to lecture on “The College Student and the Modern Crisis.” All these facts the elderly zoologist politely received, and told me that if I would embody them in a letter to him he would oblige me by a reply not later than noon of the next day.

I wrote the letter, and received the reply, which was that President Birge would not change his decision, but that if the board of regents saw fit to grant my request, they would be at liberty to do so. Thereupon I gave to the press my letter to President Birge and his reply, and also an interview in which I stated that the president had afforded me an exceedingly good example of my thesis “that educational institutions are controlled by special privilege,” and that I would give up my intention of lecturing on “The College Student and the Modern Crisis” in Madison, and instead would discuss the subject of free speech in universities. The effect of which announcement was that the superintendent of the high school took fright, and withdrew permission for me to speak in his auditorium!

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