CHAPTER LXI

A LEAP INTO THE LIMELIGHT

The program of converting Clark University into an advertising department of Ginn & Company proceeded merrily so far as concerned Ginn & Company; but it caused great distress to the faculty of the university, which held a series of meetings and prepared a memorandum to the board of trustees, in which they bitterly denounced the new policy. Also there were signs of revolt among the students; even the Rotary clubs and other business organizations of Worcester began to tire of a diet of geography, fried, boiled and hashed for three meals a day. I have not been admitted to the inside of President Atwood’s psychology, but some of his professors suspect that he began to realize that something desperate must be done, and resorted to the favorite device of George M. Cohan, who, whenever one of his plays began to lag, would come dancing out on the stage with an American flag.

The students at Clark maintain a Liberal Club, and invite speakers of all points of view to discuss public questions before them. They are accustomed to question these men and tear their arguments to pieces, and if the men cannot thoroughly document their statements, they have an unhappy time. That the students really conduct an open forum is proven by the fact that they brought not merely Harry Laidler to defend Socialism, but the Reverend Murlin, president of Boston University, to speak against it. They invited Frank Tannenbaum to defend the radical movement, and they invited the Reverend Dr. Wyland of Worcester to denounce it. Dr. Wyland’s point of view on social questions is sufficiently revealed by the fact that in the Worcester “Telegram” he referred to Scott Nearing’s “licentious and seditious utterances”—and this without having attended Nearing’s lecture!

It was early in 1922 that the Liberal Club announced a coming lecture by Scott Nearing, and obtained President Atwood’s consent for it. A few days before the lecture President Atwood summoned the president of the club, and told him that there was to be a geography lecture that evening and asked that the Nearing address be shifted to a different and smaller hall. President Atwood himself, of course, went to the geography lecture; when it was over he came to the hall where Nearing had been speaking for an hour and a half to some three hundred people. I am told that on the steps of the building he met a high-up society lady of Worcester, wife of one of the interlocking directors. This lady was trembling with indignation, and told President Atwood about the horrible thing that was going on in the hall—a Bolshevist speaker was shamelessly defaming the American people.

President Atwood went in, and listened to the address for about three minutes. Scott Nearing was discussing the control of American intellectual life by the plutocracy, and, as it happened, he had just got to the subject of educational institutions, and was describing the contents of “The Higher Learning in America,” by Thorstein Veblen—who happens to be Atwood’s brother-in-law. Atwood listened, and his bosom swelled. Some poet has described Opportunity as a beautiful caparisoned white horse, which gallops by and stops for a moment in front of a man, and then gallops on. At this moment Atwood perceived that the steed had halted before him; here was the way to make the Frye-Atwood geographies known, not merely to all the schoolmarms of the United States, but to all leaders of patriotic thought all over the world! President Atwood leaped upon the horse—and rode into the limelight!

What he did was to rise up in the audience, and tell the president of the Liberal Club to stop the lecture. He had to repeat this several times before the bewildered student got his meaning; then the student went upon the platform and told Nearing to stop, and Nearing politely did so. In talking about the matter with Nearing, I told him that I thought he had made a mistake; he should have insisted upon his right to finish his lecture—and I was assured by students at Clark that if he had done this, the audience would have politely put the president of the university out of the hall. But it didn’t happen that way; Nearing stopped, and President Atwood went to the front of the platform and informed the audience that the meeting was dismissed. He said this three times, while the amazed people stared at him. He turned and instructed the janitor to “blink” the lights, so as to compel the audience to leave.

There were half a dozen of the faculty present, also the venerable scholar, ex-President G. Stanley Hall. One of the professors came forward and remarked that it seemed rather late to dismiss the meeting. President Atwood answered: “We can’t have these things going on here.”

“Why not?” asked the professor.

“This is no proper audience to hear such remarks.”

“But the audience consists of at least fifty percent college men.”

“Yes,” said President Atwood, “that’s the worst of it.” And he pounded on the wall in his excitement. “This kind of thing must be stopped! I am going to crush it with every means in my power!”

The author of the Frye-Atwood geographies was new to Clark University, and does not possess the mentality to understand the place; he was genuinely bewildered by the uproar which followed. The students called mass meetings of protest; they organized and appointed committees, and proceeded in vigorous and determined fashion to make good their right of free speech. The incident, of course, was telegraphed all over the country, and brought back upon the head of the unhappy physiographer a storm of ridicule and denunciation. He fled from it, and shut himself up in his house. The student committee could not get access to him; but finally they dug him out, and put him on the griddle.

I talked with a member of this committee, and he told me how the president had called to see him at a fraternity house, almost weeping, and saying that his life had been threatened. Next day he received a delegation from the student-body, and made them a prepared speech, in which he said: “I deeply and sincerely regret the dramatic manner in which I interrupted Dr. Nearing.” But a day or two later he appeared before a mass meeting of the whole student-body, and read them an address entitled “Extra-Curricula Activities and Academic Freedom,” in the course of which he said that Scott Nearing had “maligned the moral integrity of the American people,” and added: “I know that I should have closed that meeting. I do not regret that I have shown in a positive way that I disapprove of such influences within the halls of the university.” To a committee of the students he stated that he had evidence of “a world-wide plot to bring Bolshevism from the street corner into the colleges,” and this evidence he intended to lay before the board of trustees. He intimated that the liberal professors at Clark were privy to this conspiracy; but when the time came for him to produce the “goods,” all he had was the absurd magazine articles of Cal Coolidge!

You see, the poor fellow is utterly ignorant of the problems with which he is trying to deal; a child in his mentality, he was talking to students who had been trained in the social sciences, and were accustomed to do their own thinking, and to produce evidence for their statements. These students persisted in pinning him down as to what he meant by freedom of speech and of teaching, and they succeeded in extracting from him one extraordinary piece of obscurantist dogma. He said to them: “If, in teaching geology I had in my class Lutherans who believed in an actual six day creation of the earth, I could only state that scientists were aware that the earth is very old and it is our theory, nothing but theory, that it evolved through countless eons; but as to its actual creation, whether or not it took six days we do not know. I could say nothing which seemed to contradict the beliefs which they had gained in the home.”

Another student who had a session with him made very careful notes, and has placed these at my disposal. Said President Atwood: “When I came to this college and found that you had no chapel, I was shocked to the depths of my soul. My father was a minister, and I regard religion as the fundamental basis of all education.” The student replied by informing his president that the study of religion formed an essential part of all the sociology courses at Clark. Said the student: “Do you suppose that many members of the student-body agreed with what Nearing said?” “No,” replied President Atwood, “maybe not, but they would have if they had a chance to hear him.” The student laughed at this, and told him that if he had let the meeting alone and sat quietly, he would have heard Scott Nearing questioned and made to back his assertions, if he could. The president was told about the misadventure of the Reverend Wyland, who had come to talk against Bolshevism, without knowing a single thing about the subject; he had been questioned and backed into a corner, and when he got off the platform he was “as limp as a rag.” But somehow that did not satisfy President Atwood!

How simple-minded he is you may perceive from the fact that he allowed a professor of his geography department, coming forward in his defense, to point out that Harvard, by holding on to Laski, had lost more than a million dollars! He went before the Rotary Club at Worcester, which received him with tumultuous cheering; he was their kind of man! Also the Reverend Wyland defended him—with the result that the student glee-club canceled a concert at Wyland’s church. The clergyman gave out to the press a statement that the reason for the canceling was that not enough tickets had been sold! President Atwood called off the weekly assembly, because he dared not face the students; they might refuse to sing, he said. They used to cheer him on the campus, but now they passed him in silence; when he addressed them at the mass meeting, there were present not merely the state police, but a number of private detectives. The newspapers had scare headlines: “POLICE PROTECT COLLEGE PRESIDENT FROM STUDENTS.”

An interesting aspect of this affair is the behavior of the kept press of Worcester. One of the students said to me: “I read ‘The Brass Check,’ and I couldn’t believe it, but now I know it is true, because I saw the Worcester newspapers do practically everything that you told about.” Throughout the whole affair the students were orderly and dignified; yet their local newspapers sent over the country wild tales about riots and threats. The Worcester “Telegram,” in its first account of the incident, ran the headline: “SPEAKER FLAYS SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, GOVERNMENT”—whereas Scott Nearing had not once mentioned the government. Next day the “Telegram” quoted the president of the Liberal Club as saying: “If we could raise enough money we would engage Upton Sinclair.” This anecdote is told in the “Clark College Monthly,” a student paper, which declares: “This statement is without the slightest foundation in fact. Asked by a reporter if the Liberal Club planned to have any more radical speakers, as for example, Upton Sinclair, Fraser had replied: ‘Why, he is in California’; and thus grows the mighty oak!”

One day more, and the “Telegram” buried the students’ official statement in an obscure page, and ran the headline: “STUDENTS TALK STRIKE, PREXY SAYS, ‘LET THEM TRY IT’!” The Springfield “Union” declared that the “notorious Scott Nearing was delivering an anarchistic lecture.” Throughout the whole affair both these papers referred to the student-body by such phrases as “irresponsible college boys,” “make-believe radicals,” “children who should be spanked,” and “sincere young people of an impressionable age”; entirely concealing the fact that the average age of Clark students, including the freshman class, is twenty-one years, while the average of the Liberal Club members at the time of the Nearing lecture was twenty-five and six-tenths years.

To conclude the story: the protests of the students availed them nothing. The author of the Frye-Atwood geographies announced his intention to oversee their activities and their thoughts; and he has done so. He did not announce his intention to get rid of the professors who had publicly opposed him, but he proceeded to make it so uncomfortable for them that they would hasten to remove themselves. The great tragedy of American academic life is the lack of solidarity of the faculty. Even the more courageous and public-spirited men among the Clark faculty did not seem to feel that they owed a duty to the institution and its traditions; instead of proceeding to organize the faculty, and to stand as a unit against the degradation of Clark, what has happened is that six of the best men have resigned in as many months; they have found congenial places in other institutions, and their colleagues are left to their fate. As John Jay Chapman puts it:

“The average professor in an American college will look on at an act of injustice done to a brother professor by their college president with the same unconcern as the rabbit who is not attacked watches the ferret pursue his brother up and down through the warren to a predestinate and horrible death. We know, of course, that it would cost the non-attacked rabbit his place to express sympathy for the martyr; and the non-attacked is poor, and has offspring, and hopes of advancement.”

The students, of course, are helpless; no student-body can ever control an institution, except for a brief period, by some violent outburst. The best trained and most intelligent men go out every year, and a new crop of youngsters come in, who know nothing of the traditions of the institution; nor can they find out what is going on in the outside world, since the librarian of the university keeps the “Nation” and the “New Republic” hidden away in the basement, among the obscene literature which can only be got by special signed request! So all that the interlocking directorate has to do is to sit tight and hold on to the purse-strings. In two or three years the last trace of the Clark tradition will be forgotten, and the university which stood at the head of America’s scientific life will be one more of the regulation standard educational department-stores—but distinguished by the fact that every summer it conducts geographical tea-parties, at which the distinguished author of the Frye-Atwood geographies tells the assembled fifth-grade schoolmarms that “the great object of you teachers is to prepare the minds of youth to stand firm against the great wave of radicalism which is sweeping American institutions off the face of the earth.”

##