CHAPTER LXIX

THE LITTLE TOADSTOOLS

So far we have been dealing with the great educational centres, which number their students in thousands and even tens of thousands; but for every one such institution there are scores of little places scattered over the country, with anywhere from a hundred to a thousand students each. In general, one can say concerning these little places that they try to be as much like the big places as possible. They get the local financial celebrities on their boards; they get the Gothic buildings with arrow-proof windows, and ivy of the quickest growing variety; they dress up their faculty in fancy robes, and their graduating students in caps and gowns; they have their fraternities and sororities, their full equipment of athletic teams and alumni boosters. And, just as in country villages you find more spying and more spite than in big cities, so in little colleges you find class greed and religious bigotry incessantly on the watch for any trace of a new idea.

To Beloit College, in Wisconsin, befell a singular fate—it got upon its faculty a young man of talent, who wrote a live novel. “Iron City,” by M. H. Hedges, is a picture of life in a small college, located in a manufacturing town, and of the ferment of modern ideas trying to break into such a place. Mr. Hedges declares that he did not indicate Beloit especially, and has received many letters from professors in other college towns, saying that the cap fitted them. But the gossips of Beloit insisted upon riveting the cap upon their own heads, and there was a dreadful scandal.

Beloit is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, its one big industry being the Fairbanks-Morse Manufacturing Company, the largest makers of scales in the world. Mr. Morse is the grand duke of the Beloit board, and has as his assistants Mr. Salmon, director of the Beloit Water, Gas & Electric Company, and Mr. Tyrrell, head of a great knitting works in an adjoining town; also a big Chicago wheat broker; the head of Montgomery Ward & Company; a great paper manufacturer; a leading Chicago insurance man; a local preacher; and a “special investigator” of the United States Department of Justice. So you see Beloit is fully equipped to install, not merely a college of commerce and a department of divinity, but also a school of spying.

With the publication of “Iron City” its secret service got to work immediately; I am told by one who was on the inside that three days after the book was out, one of the trustees called President Brannon on the telephone from Chicago, exclaiming: “I understand you have a novelist on your faculty. Why do you have people like that?” In less than a month the board of trustees had formally demanded Professor Hedges’ resignation. President Brannon is a scientist, whom we saw kicked out of the University of Idaho by the mining kings; he had some liberal ideas when he came to Beloit five years ago. He liked his novelist, and tried to save him, calling him his best teacher; but the uproar was too great—the outraged townspeople stopped speaking to Professor Hedges and his wife on the street. Shortly after this, three liberal professors were driven from the institution, and the president pleaded for them also; it is said that he threatened to resign—but I note that they are gone, while he is still in office.

President Brannon had an interesting plan to remedy the housing shortage and improve the community spirit in this manufacturing town. He started a “chamber of commerce,” for the purpose of constructing a million dollars’ worth of homes on a co-operative basis, with the help of the labor unions. The banks, the utility company heads, and the Fairbanks-Morse people vigorously opposed the plan and tried to head it off; after it had got started they called up the local merchants and other members of the new “chamber of commerce” on the telephone, and ordered them to have nothing to do with so dangerous an undertaking, under penalty of loss of credit at the banks. So the “chamber of commerce” no longer exists.

There is peace now in Beloit and its college. The last danger passed when a student was expelled after publishing in the student paper a review of “The Brass Check”! The head of the local knitting works, one of the ultra-religious type of trustees, comes to the college and makes orations, being introduced as “a progressive Christian employer”; whereas it is well known among the students that the white slave industry of the town is recruited from girls who cannot earn living wages in the knitting works.

These manufacturing towns are scattered over the Middle West, and they and their colleges are very much alike. Let us have a glimpse at Marietta College, in Ohio. The recent president of this institution was formerly editor-in-chief of the Chicago “Inter-Ocean,” and championed the infamous Lorimer and the greedy Yerkes. A student with whom I talked was present in a class in sociology, to which President Hinman made the statement that preachers should not discuss social and civic problems. Some of the students took exception to this idea, and attempted to argue with him, whereupon he barred discussion in that class for the rest of the year. He fired a Y. M. C. A. secretary for the crime of having offered to a student a ticket to “Damaged Goods”—a play which had its opening performance in Washington, attended by President Wilson and his wife, and all the members of the cabinet and the Supreme Court.

The grand duke of this board was Mr. W. W. Mills, local traction magnate and capitalist, president of the First National Bank, interested in a cabinet company, a brick company, a bridge company, a chair company, a floral company, a paint company, and a street railway company. This versatile gentleman also controls the two newspapers of the town, and censors the proceedings of the state conferences of the Congregational church. His brother, also on the board, is director in the bank and president of the chair company. The rest of the board was made up of Mr. Mills’ nephew, Mr. Rufus Dawes, a powerful millionaire of Chicago, president of a dozen different gas and electric companies; and his brother, Mr. Charles G. Dawes, president of the Central Trust Company of Illinois, and comptroller of the currency under President McKinley; a retired merchant, director in the Mills bank; a local railway attorney, related to the Mills; the president of the Mills paint company; the postmaster of the town, protégé of the Mills; an attorney for the Mills corporations; the pastor of the Mills church; a corporation lawyer, director in the Mills bank; and a retired minister, related by marriage to the Mills. Professors Morse and Owens were let out of Marietta upon suspicion of liberalism, and in explaining the various reasons, the latter wrote: “Mr. John Mills expressed a sincere desire to wring my neck because I remarked at a dinner where he was present that the men in his mills are an unusually intelligent set.” This referred to the chair company, in which conditions were especially terrible; there were cases of married men receiving as low as seven dollars a week in wages! Says Professor Owens:

We were urged to be Americans, and yet if we raised our wee small voice in favor of a wage that would enable the workers to live up to accepted American standards, we were at once regarded as dangerous anarchists. They were utterly blind to the fact that wages should be raised not only in the interest of justice but of efficiency. Repeatedly we stated that we were entirely willing to stand by each and every statement we had made. If we had lied we were willing to suffer the penalty. But we were denied every opportunity to present our view of the situation, denied a hearing which one of our by-laws said we were entitled to.

You remember Professor Bolley of the North Dakota Agricultural College, and his brave statement that a college professor is a citizen. For example, may a college professor become president of his local school board? Surely, yes!—you will say. But wait a moment; let me complete the sentence, “May a college professor become president of his local school board under a labor administration?” Well, now—of course—that depends!

At Rockford, Illinois, a manufacturing and commercial center, is a very exclusive college for young ladies, with a wonderful board of trustees, including a great agricultural implement manufacturer, another large manufacturer, and the widow of a third; the attorney for the town’s principal industrial enterprise, also a large stockholder in the concern; the town’s principal merchant, its principal lumber and fuel dealer, and the editor of its interlocking newspaper; a bank president, a steel manufacturer, a judge, and an ex-governor of the state of Illinois, a notorious corporation tool. May a professor in such a college accept any sort of office under a labor administration? Let us see!

President Maddox of Rockford College went in for liberalism and the enlightening of the masses. He had got a very conscientious young teacher by the name of Seba Eldridge, and gave him a couple of impressive titles—“Head of the Social Science Department and Professor of Economics and Sociology.” Professor Eldridge went out and did “social work,” and presently the labor men of Rockford elected themselves a mayor, and this mayor appointed a school board. It would seem to have been of a representative character—a Catholic business woman of independent mind, a Socialist ex-teacher who was a good Methodist, a Swedish workingman, self-taught but of particular intelligence, a building contractor of large practical experience, and finally, as president of the board, Professor Seba Eldridge of Rockford College. Professor Eldridge had served on a local school board of New York City, and is author of two books, including a useful work on social legislation; the very man for the place, you would have thought. So thought the president of the college and the chairman of his board of trustees; and Professor Eldridge accepted the post.

But the business men of Rockford had still to be heard from! They had control of the board of aldermen, and they meant to smash this labor administration, so their aldermen rejected the board of education proposed by the mayor. Their newspapers fell to denouncing Professor Eldridge, and the big bankers made it plain that the city of Rockford could sell no school bonds until the board had a “business man” for its head. The interlocking trustees came round and interviewed the president, whereupon that gentleman suddenly changed his position, and withdrew his approval of Professor Eldridge’s acceptance of the school board presidency. As the school board position paid no salary, and as the young professor had a family dependent upon him, he decided to let the mayor name a school board president who would be confirmed by the city council! He resigned from the college also and accepted a position elsewhere.

Mr. Fay Lewis, who lives in Rockford, has been kind enough to supply me with a file of newspaper clippings on this incident, which occurred in 1921. Among these clippings I find a curious illustration of the method by which the “Morning Star” of Rockford serves its interlocking directorate. There was a discussion before the Rotary Club between the labor mayor of the town and a former president of the school board, representing the business men. The newspaper reports this discussion in full; that is to say, it quotes twenty-nine inches of what the representative of the plutocracy had to say, and two inches of what the labor mayor had to say in reply!

Also, I ought to give you a little glimpse into Williams College, at Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was originally established as an institution for poor boys. It has become the most exclusive country club in the United States, with the possible exception of Princeton. Like Brown University, it is a place of dry rot; the faculty is devoted to social life and respectability, and has been rewarded by Mr. “Barney” Baruch, who has established a summer school of politics for the purpose of promoting the “Bankers’ International.” The president of the University is Harry A. Garfield, son of a former president of the United States; and as I read the proofs of this book he rushes into the newspapers to set forth his ideas on the subject of a living wage. Unskilled workers, it appears, should not receive a living wage for their families, but only for themselves. Should the worker marry, the wife should help him to earn the household income until he educates himself out of the unskilled status—presumably by going to college and having President Garfield show him how!

Before we conclude this chapter, you might be interested to learn what the invention of gunpowder has done to higher education; something which is on demonstration in the state of Delaware. This home of the powder oligarchy ranked almost at the bottom of the list of states in matters of education, until Mr. Coleman du Pont, the powder king, took the matter off the hands of the people, and put up the money for a new educational system. That was kind of Mr. du Pont, of course, and the people of Delaware appreciate it; but it means that we have the feudal system permanently established and officially recognized in an American state. The powder oligarchy has a university, located at Newark, and here was a typhoid scandal, exactly as at the University of Oregon, with the local magnates controlling the situation, and a young instructor persisting in telling the facts. It was Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the People,” precisely re-enacted. On the day that one student was buried, this young instructor published a letter, in which he accused of murder the people who had refused to put in a sewage system. He was threatened with tarring and feathering, and the president of the college was very sorry he could not offer this young instructor a raise. But he always did what the treasurer of the college wanted—and the treasurer was the man who had blocked the efforts of the board of health to avoid a typhoid epidemic! A gentleman who was for many years a member of the faculty of this university writes me, in very temperate language, as follows:

“I think the university needs an awakening to the fact that political and social conditions in the state and nation are proper and necessary subjects of the freest possible discussion. I also believe that, in spite of Pierre du Pont’s altruistic attitude, the du Pont wealth stands at the gates of opportunity in Delaware, and that some who enter renounce, consciously or unconsciously, their personal freedom of opinion and action. As to the du Pont control of politics, it should be fully and forever repudiated by the people of Delaware as an insolent attempt to enslave the state to a single great interest.”

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