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.”
CHAPTER LXX
GOD AND MAMMON
I have tried in the closing chapters of “The Profits of Religion,” and also in “The Book of Life,” to make plain that I honor the religious impulse in its true form. But that does not mean that I owe respect to human systems which call themselves religious, and which make the spiritual needs of mankind a basis of enslavement. I can tolerate the business man who tells me that “money makes the mare go”; I can show him how, under a cooperative system, money would make the mare go faster. But I find it hard to tolerate those preachers of “personal righteousness,” who keep the eyes of the working class uplifted to heaven, while their pockets are picked on earth; our modern Pharisees, who take the greatest of the world’s proletarian martyrs, and bind him anew, and deliver him to be crucified upon a jewelled cross.
I make this explanation because we are now going to have a glance at some of our “religious” colleges. Let us begin with Wooster, Ohio, an institution run by the Presbyterian church. We have seen how at Clark they are introducing a summer school, to make education pay; and we can see what that will end in, because the college of Wooster has for many years been run by its summer school: an absurdly crude, privately-owned, money-making institution, which draws schoolmarms by offering gold watches as prizes for those who bring in the greatest number of new students, and by advertising in terms of dollars and cents the amount of business done by its free teachers’ agency. In country newspapers it advertises itself as “a School of Inspiration, Preparation and Perspiration.” Fifteen hundred schoolmarms come each summer, and the local papers explain that they are “free with their expense accounts.” The regular college, having only five hundred students, is relatively unimportant.
The active trustees, being local business men, naturally want to boost the summer school; whereas the faculty of the college have absurd notions of the dignity of true knowledge. Out of this grew a furious quarrel, which lasted for several years. The partisans of the summer school kicked out the excellent president of the college, who had spent sixteen years building it up from nothing. They brought in to replace him a shouting Y. M. C. A. evangelist of no college training, an utter ignoramus, and so many kinds of a liar that it would take the rest of this book to tell about it. The American Association of University Professors investigated the affair, and devoted a hundred and thirty-six pages to it, and the bulletin for May, 1917, is a study of the mental processes of a religious hypocrite, shouting about the love of Jesus, while stooping to every kind of vile and cowardly intrigue.
Also, while we are in Ohio, let us have a look at Muskingum College, at New Concord. We may see this through the eyes of Professor Arthur S. White, who was let out of the Department of Political Science and Sociology this year. The charge against him was that he had created “a critical attitude” among the students. The vice-president of the college charged him “with having taught the students to think, and that they were not thinking the right things.” At the very beginning of his work, three years ago, he had explained to the students his dislike of “the compartment method of education,” whereby students are crammed into a certain tight mold. “I remarked that such methods were destructive of personality, and must foster decay in our institutions. When I had finished the whole class applauded. At the end of the hour, some eight or ten waited to tell me that they were, and had been, victims of such methods, and that they hoped my work would be different.” As a result of this, Professor White’s classes in political science increased from twenty-seven to a hundred and forty-two.
There was no fault to be found with his character or personal conduct, nor is he a Socialist or propagandist of any sort. I quote again from his statement: “My method was to present all the facts on every question that were available; to analyze ideas, dogmas and institutions in the light of their original professions and accomplishments. I tried to respect the personality of my students, by insisting on their being free to make a conscientious choice of their loyalties.” But, of course, this did not fit into a college whose dean phrased the duty of the faculty: “Our attitude toward the president should be that of the soldier to the general, it should be the attitude that he can do no wrong.” Muskingum is a Presbyterian institution, and in order to get the financial support of the church, it advertises itself widely as a “safe” place for parents to send their children. Everything must be “in accordance with our tradition of ideals and customs.” So, of course, the professor who taught his students to think had to move on.
Let us also move, to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where there is a little religious toadstool in the heart of the oil country, and with a Standard Oil board of trustees. On this Allegheny College we have a report of the American Association of University Professors, in the bulletin for December, 1917. The president (now president-emeritus) is a product of Judge Gary’s Northwestern University, a Methodist clergyman, and trustee of the Carnegie Foundation. An alumnus who got to know him writes me: “Crawford is a man who has seemingly lost his moral perception, and throughout his stay at Allegheny was notoriously untruthful and untrustworthy.” For fourteen years he had a professor of English literature by the name of Frank C. Lockwood, who was an ardent Prohibitionist, and came into conflict with the two local grand dukes of the board of trustees, political bosses and attorneys representing applicants for liquor licenses in Meadville. Professor Lockwood had the audacity to run for congress on the Prohibition ticket, with the backing of the Progressives; and, worse yet, although he himself was a Methodist minister, his wife joined the Unitarian church. The report does not make clear what the interlocking trustees expected the Methodist professor to do about this; they would hardly have been satisfied if he had divorced his wife for being a Unitarian; maybe they expected him to beat her until she reformed. Anyhow, the board adopted a resolution forbidding its professors to take part in politics by becoming candidates for public office; and, furthermore, it made clear its intention to drop Professor Lockwood at the end of the next year—so he quit. A college professor is not a citizen in Pennsylvania, any more than he is in Illinois!