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!