CHAPTER LXIII

INTELLECTUAL DRY-ROT

There are a few other universities, which in past times have established reputations in America; for example, Cornell University, located at Ithaca, New York, on the Lackawanna Railroad, with a Cornell trustee, a Columbia trustee, and a Princeton trustee; also on the Lehigh Railroad, with a trustee and recent president of Lehigh College, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee of Lafayette College for directors. Cornell today has some six thousand students, and as choice an outfit of trustees as a plutocratic imagination could invent. The grand duke is Mr. George F. Baker, reputed to be, next to Rockefeller, the richest man in America. I might take a page of this book to list all the various institutions of which Mr. Baker is an interlocking director. He is president of the First National Bank of New York, one of the three great institutions of the Money Trust, and also a trustee of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, a great treasure-chest. He is director in a dozen railroads, and his son is director in many more.

Next to Mr. Baker stands Mr. Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, and H. H. Westinghouse, chairman of the Westinghouse Company. It will suffice to indicate a few of the others—the head of the biggest bank in Ithaca; the head of a great machinery company, president of a national bank; a corporation lawyer and bank director; a metal manufacturer, director of many railroads; an ex-governor and prominent Republican politician; the chairman of the Bankers’ Trust Company of Buffalo, president of a steamship company, a lumber company and a railroad company; the vice-president and counsel of the New York Central Railroad; a prominent corporation lawyer; a judge, ex-mayor of Ithaca, and director of a national bank; the president of a national bank and director of half a dozen others; the president of the Ithaca Trust Company, director of many other banks; an official of Mr. Schwab’s shipbuilding corporation; the chief justice, and another justice, of the New York Court of Appeals; and, finally, that Major Seaman whose heroic defense of the Chicago packers you may read about in