II
Next book: The Goose-Step. In the early spring of 1922 I left my long-suffering wife in charge of my office with an elderly secretary and three or four assistants, while I took a tour all over the United States, going first to the Northwest, then across to Chicago, New York, and Boston, then back through the Middle West and Southwest. I had been through five years of City College and four years of postgraduate work at Columbia, and had come out unaware that the modern socialist movement existed. So now I meant to muckrake the colleges, showing where they had got their money and how they were spending it. I had jotted down the names of discontented schoolteachers and college professors who had written to me, or whose cases had become known; I visited some thirty cities, and in each of them some educator had assembled the malcontents in his or her home, and I sat and made notes while they told me their angry or hilarious stories.
There were many comical episodes on my tour. The University of Wisconsin had been liberal in the days of Robert LaFollette; but now it had a reactionary president, and I had a lively time with him. I had applied for the use of a hall, and he had already announced that he wouldn’t grant it. He referred me to the board of regents, and I had a session with them. I finally got the use of the gymnasium, and the newspaper excitement brought a couple of thousand students to ask me questions for an hour after my talk. The concluding paragraph of my Wisconsin story was as follows:
Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and played each of the pair in turn and beat them in straight sets; I was told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and didn’t know his name; he assured me with mock gravity that I had made a grave blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough to hold the crowd.
From Wisconsin I went on to Chicago, to what I called the University of Standard Oil. The students had a hymn that they sang there:
Praise God from whom oil blessings flow,
Praise Him, oil creatures here below,
Praise Him above, Ye Heavenly Host,
Praise Father, Son—but John the most.
I interviewed the president there, and he granted me the use of a small hall. When I assured him I would need a larger one, he refused to believe me; so I found myself quite literally packed in, with students climbing into the windows and sitting on the sills and standing in the corridors. Just outside the hall I had noticed a beautiful quadrangle with lovely soft grass and plenty of room. I suggested that we all move out onto the grass and that somebody find me a soapbox to stand on—the classical pulpit of radical orators. There were loud cheers, and we moved outside. Still more people came running, and I talked to the crowd for an hour or two and answered questions for an hour or two more. Everybody had a good time except the Standard Oil president.
The next day I played the tennis champion of that university, and I have to record that he beat me—but with an effort so mighty that he split his pants.