CHAPTER LXXXIV

CITIES OF REFUGE

The reader will be ready by this time with the question: are there no free colleges whatever in America, no institutions of higher learning where truth is sought and respected? There are a few, and we have now to give them credit.

We have heard Mrs. Helen Gould Shepard declaring at her dinner-table that “the Union Theological Seminary is the greatest menace to New York City today.” Translated into commonsense, this means that there are professors at this institution who have come to realize the futility of basing the moral standards of mankind upon a literal acceptance of fairy stories, the product of the child-mind of the race; also who have read the words of Jesus about the impossibility of serving both God and Mammon.

Among these revolutionary theologians is Harry F. Ward, secretary of the Social Service Federation of the Methodist church. Dr. Ward was active in protest against the crimes of Judge Gary during the recent steel strike, and as a result fell victim to the Helen Ghouls. A man called upon him, being obviously not of the idealist type, but representing himself as a lecturer on Bolshevism, wishing to verify certain facts. After a brief conversation Dr. Ward gave the man a “calling-down,” telling him that he was utterly ignorant of the subject with which he pretended to deal. Not long afterwards Dr. Ward learned of a document, issued by the National Civic Federation, but bearing no name, and accompanied by a request for its return after reading. It was being submitted to open shop employers and propagandists, and used as a means of money-getting: an alleged interview with Ward, in which he was represented as having said that Christianity would soon pass away, and Bolshevism take its place; the full absurdity of which statement you could not realize unless you had the fortune to know this passionately earnest Christian clergyman. Ward had mentioned a young Y. M. C. A. man named Hecker, as one who had first-hand knowledge of the Seattle strike, and this document named Hecker, and was used to procure his discharge. It was also used to bar Jerome Davis from Chautauqua platforms. When a committee of the Inter-church Federation called upon Judge Gary, they found the document on his desk, and he quoted from it liberally. Also it was in the hands of Chancellor Buchtel of Denver University when he barred Harry Ward from speaking. So far extends the reach of the Shepard’s Crook!

There are other places in the country in which the revolutionary leaven of Jesus is working. There is the Berkeley Divinity School at Middletown, Connecticut, a place of open-mindedness and fine idealism, presided over by Dean W. P. Ladd. Wild rumors were spread concerning Bolshevist activities, and the grand duke of the trustees, Mr. Nettleton, president of the New Haven Gas Company, took up the fight. One of the charges was that the dean belonged to the Church League for Industrial Democracy—among whose members are fifteen bishops of the Episcopal church! The investigating committee of the trustees decided that it was unwise for the dean and members of the faculty to belong to this organization. They qualified their statement, “in the present state of the public mind, and from the standpoint of the citizen of the world”; to which Dean Ladd makes the pungent comment: “One would have thought that even a citizen of the world would prefer that a member of the faculty of a Christian divinity school should regulate his conduct, not with reference to the world and the prevailing state of the public mind, but according to the principles of the religion which he professes.” Also the committee laid down the rule: “We cannot for a moment permit any action or influence of theirs (the faculty), as teachers, which would seem to develop Socialism as a political idea.” And further, the committee laid down the rule: “What the teachings of the School shall be and how they shall be taught, and under what influences the students shall live are matters for (the trustees), if not entirely, at least in co-operation with the dean and the faculty.”

Dean Ladd issued a counter statement, in which he frankly and completely differs from this policy, and declares that he will not follow it. He says:

I cannot while I remain dean of the School be a party to a policy so entirely at variance with my own judgment and conviction of what is right. The Berkeley Divinity School is, of course, desperately in need of money. And trustees and others have repeatedly said that no money will be forthcoming so long as our present policy continues. I hope this is not so. But if the School has to die in a losing fight for a policy, one feature of which is to try to make justice and love the controlling motive in all social conditions, I am quite ready to say, with Bishop Brewster, “Then let it die!” Better so to die than to live on prosperously in an attitude of subservience and compromise.

The school still lives; but you may judge the drawing-power of social idealism in America today by the fact that it has only fifteen students. It has to exist by gifts, because its trustees invested most of its funds in the shares of the New Haven Railroad!

Also at Oberlin, Ohio, is an old college under religious auspices, struggling hard to preserve the high traditions of its abolitionist founders. From its beginning in 1833 it admitted women and Negroes, and its internal affairs have always been controlled by its faculty. Appointments are made by the faculty and ratified by the trustees, and so far the trustees have behaved themselves. During the war they tried to drive out a professor on the ground that he was pro-German, but they were only able to get one faculty vote for the proposal, and so were forced to drop it. A professor at Oberlin writes me that the faculty is conservative, as in all other colleges, and they naturally try to appoint only those who conform; “but if a mistake is made there is never a thing said to coerce his freedom in the class or out.” As a consequence, this professor has ventured to advise his classes to read “The Brass Check.” When the librarian declared that the library had no funds with which to subscribe to the New York “Call,” the professor of Hebrew advised him to take the money from the “Old Testament fund,” explaining quite correctly that “the Old Testament is a book of prophecy.”

Also, in Denver is the Iliff School of Theology of the Methodist church, where several young professors are following the example of the dangerous Harry Ward. When Ward was barred from speaking by Chancellor Buchtel, they brought him across the street and triumphantly listened to his message. When I came to Denver they welcomed me in a church, and told me the story of their struggle against the infinite corruption enthroned in Denver politics, and worshipped in Denver churches.

And then, I must not overlook the Y. M. C. A. College, located at Springfield, Massachusetts, which through some freak of chance has secured a phenomenal president in L. L. Doggett, who brought his old Oberlin professor, Ballantine, to teach some truth about the Bible, and thus caused anguish to the orthodox. The war brought President Doggett to the conclusion that the world cannot be saved by prayer and Indian clubs, and he went abroad and got into touch with the London School of Economics, and other European progressives, and came back and founded an “industrial course,” in the face of bitter opposition from a solemn, prayerful and gymnastic faculty. The pious morons in the Association are fighting him tooth and nail, and have, of course, curtailed their gifts to the college. President Doggett has taken up an endowment campaign of his own, and I cheerfully give him this “boost,” though I fear it may do him more harm than good!

This part of my story would not be complete unless I paid tribute to the Church League for Industrial Democracy, and to the tireless services of Richard W. Hogue, an Episcopal clergyman who was kicked out of his church and his open forum in Baltimore, and now travels over the country, gathering groups of theological students and Y. M. C. A. workers, and preaching to them the real gospel of the crucified proletarian. He tells me that he finds increasing welcome; he tells of several little colleges throughout the Middle West, whose faculties—and in one or two cases, the presidents—believe in free discussion, and have given him a hearing.

Also, there is one free law school in America—at Harvard. We have seen Dean Pound and Professors Frankfurter, Sayre and Chafee taking a bold stand for freedom of speech. These men fearlessly teach the evolution of law, and suggest to their students the possibility of improvement in American institutions. Thus, from the last report of Dean Pound I quote a few scattered sentences, just to give you an idea of the tone:

A clear body of law has grown up already as the result of the experience of a generation in the Interstate Commerce Commission, a body of law is forming under our eyes through the administration of workmen’s compensation acts by industrial commissions, and the exigencies of general peace and good order, if nothing else, must lead before long to a new body of law governing industrial disputes.... Collective bargaining is likely to compel us to think over again the whole subject of juristic personality in Anglo-American law. Criminal law and procedure call for the best efforts of thoroughly trained common-law lawyers acquainted with the social science of today.... For much that we have had to study and to teach in the immediate past is already yielding in importance to these new elements in the legal system. Much of our nineteenth-century law will presently be as obsolete as the learning of real actions and of the feudal law of estates in land which held so large a place in the curriculum of the Law School a century ago, or the elaborate and involved procedural law which was so important fifty years later, or the pedantic law of bailments which has given way to a modern doctrine of the obligations of public service.

Needless to say, such utterances as this, from such a source, are the cause of continually increasing distress to the legal retainers of our plutocracy!

Also, there is a New England college of considerable reputation, whose president has taken a firm stand for open-mindedness, and that is Amherst. President Meikeljohn was one of the live men who got out of Brown when it began to die. He is now trying to make one small college in which young men are taught to think, instead of just to believe in dogmas. He is in the midst of a fight with reactionary trustees; in 1920 they asked for his resignation, but he consulted a lawyer and told them they had no authority in the premises. He is still in office, for how long I do not know.

Also, there is Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, in which some professors are making a brave struggle. This is an old co-educational institution established by the Quakers, a sect which had more than its share of persecution, and took pains to provide for freedom of opinion. But now the Quakers have become rich, and there is a new kind of persecution in the world, and shall they permit freedom of opinion about special privilege? That Swarthmore has not been entirely liberal, you may judge from the fact that its most conspicuous graduates are Governor Sproul of Pennsylvania, who smashed the steel strike with his Cossacks, and Attorney-General Palmer, who killed and buried the constitution of the United States. The thousands of alleged radicals and helpless foreigners who had their heads cracked by Mr. Palmer’s thugs will appreciate the gay humor of the fact that this gentleman is a devout and active Quaker!

Governor Sproul gave to Swarthmore an astronomical observatory; the stars are a long way off, and the governor is not afraid of anything that might be discovered there. But Professor Robert C. Brooks of Swarthmore put his sociological telescope upon Delaware County, in which the college is located, and drew a diagram of the “jury wheel system,” whereby the big political crooks managed to keep themselves out of jail. Certain men of wealth came to the president of Swarthmore, saying: “Here we have given five millions, and we can’t do it with a man like Brooks running round and stirring up trouble”; so the president had a “frank talk” with Professor Brooks.

Nevertheless, some professors are holding on both to their convictions and their jobs, and so the place is regarded as a “hot-bed.” There is a professor of philosophy, who is using modern literature as a door to Plato, and tells the students to read “Man and Superman” and “The Spoon River Anthology.” He got from this experiment a lively response; some of the boys and girls were shocked, but they asked questions, and presently began to think for themselves, and discovered that thinking is a thrilling experience. I am told that the librarian of the college stays shocked. Never before had he heard of students in college being taught from a book like “The Spoon River Anthology.”

There is also one state institution which deserves mention—the University of North Carolina, sometimes called the “Wisconsin of the South.” Richard Hogue tells me that he was permitted to explain the meaning of industrial democracy to the students of this institution. I wrote one of the professors and received from him a letter, assuring me that here was a place, having some twenty-five hundred students, which was both free and democratic. I thought I would test the matter a little, so I asked him whether a professor who was an avowed Socialist would be tolerated, and whether the modern Socialist movement was adequately explained to the students. My correspondent replied that he himself was a “Christian Socialist,” but that he did not mean “as Bouck White sees it, or even as Ward sees it.” He adds: “My experience is that the destructive radical is a chap with a screw loose somewhere—with a twist in his intelligence or with an excess of inflammable emotion. Oftimes he has intellect and courage, but is emotionally unbalanced, like Scott Nearing, for instance. Or he is intelligent and deliberately destructive like Foster.” In comment on the above I will merely state my own opinion; first, that Scott Nearing is the ablest economist in the United States today; and second, that William Z. Foster is a very constructive force in the American labor movement.

I have letters from several other professors, who are sure that their institutions are free, and I tested them also with these questions. You will be amused to know that one of them was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania! He stated that professors known to be Socialists would be permitted to teach “as scientific scholars. I suppose if they devoted their time to propaganda they would properly be eliminated.” Of course no mention is made of the many professors at the University of Pennsylvania who devote their time to capitalist propaganda—such as for example, Meade, Conway, Hess, Johnson and Huebner.

Some of the professors who seceded from Columbia University, including James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Thorstein Veblen, organized a free institution known as the New School for Social Research; it was to cater to students who really wished to study, and to dispense with all the flummeries, including examinations and degrees. The enterprise has not proved a financial success, for a peculiar reason. The capitalist system does not permit people to study for the luxury of possessing knowledge; the purpose of study is to earn a living, and to that end you have to have a certificate that you have studied. In other words, you must go to an institution which fits as a cog in the educational machine. The New School for Social Research has on its teaching staff half a dozen of the best minds in America, and its purpose is really to teach people to think; therefore I give it a free “boost,” and advise you that its address is 465 West 23rd Street, New York.

There was another free college in America; it didn’t last long, but I mention it because it was a gallant effort, and offers a model for the future. It was known as Wire City College, and had a beautiful location in a big house high up on the banks of the Missouri River at Leavenworth, Kansas. Its professors, and likewise its students, were military prisoners of the United States government, and they proceeded to organize themselves, forming a really free college, governed by its students and faculty. All the teachers were elected by the students, and ran the class until they were deposed; all the papers were voluntary, there were no examinations, and—most vital this difference from other colleges—all the students studied.

There was a secret library of three hundred radical books, in addition to the prison library of seven thousand respectable books. The library reading room was the lavatory. There were lectures every evening from seven to eight; on Monday English was taught by H. Austin Simons, a former reporter for the Hearst newspapers; on Tuesday logic was taught by Carl Haessler, now managing editor of the Federated Press; on Wednesday economics was taught by Carlton Rodolf, secretary of the Marx Institute of New York. (His students decided that he was too technical, so they fired him.) There was also Clark Getts, later connected with the Federated Press. On Thursday biology was taught by George Schmieder, former high school teacher and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania; on Friday philosophy was taught by Haessler; and on Saturday there were discussions.

The college published a paper, the “Wire City Weekly,” also a bulletin, clandestinely made on prison typewriters; the time-schedules were printed by a conscientious objector in the prison printery. The institution was conducted for several months, until finally the authorities found out about it, and almost the entire faculty was kidnapped and carried off to Alcatraz Island, and almost the entire student body to Fort Douglas, Utah. So far as I know, this is the only college in America which has thus been dealt with; but no doubt the interlocking directorate has made note of the plan, and if free colleges should continue to spring up, we shall get used to the wholesale disappearance of college faculties and students.

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