Let us have a look at the prairie country, the “free state” of Kansas. At Washburn College, an institution of the Congregational church at Topeka, we shall again find the worship of God and Mammon perfectly blended. All the local plutocracy is represented on this board, and also a collection of clergymen, headed by the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon, famous throughout the Middle West as the author of “In His Steps.” The president of Washburn is the Reverend Parley Paul Womer—I am aware this sounds like a novel, but it isn’t. Washburn had been in financial need, and President Womer was called in as a “fund-raiser”; he being the perfect type of plutocratic piety, with knees calloused from constant worship before the altar of the Golden Calf.
His record also is set down in a report of the Association. We find him requiring one of his professors to promote a certain student, because his father was “a prominent and well-to-do man,” and “had intimated that if Washburn would graduate his son he might do something handsome for the college in a financial way.” We find him continually humiliating members of the faculty, by warning them not to do this and not to do that “which might conceivably be displeasing to any persons from whom we might hope for aid.” We find him refusing all reforms in the way of faculty control, because “Washburn depends for its financial support on business men, men of large financial interests who would be quick to resent any appearance of Bolshevism in the administration of the college.” We find him summarily discharging professors who opposed his combination of boot-licking and bullying, and then lying about these professors, and then asking that the committee of the Association should consider these lies to be “confidential”!
Finally, matters came to a head; more than half the faculty either resigned or were discharged, and the students rose up and began bombarding the pious president’s house with rotten eggs. But did that make any difference to President Womer? It did not! The smell of rotten eggs evaporates quickly, but money endures, and he is the boy who gets the money. His interlocking trustees stood by him, and one month after the publication of the damning report of the Association, I find in the Topeka “Daily Capital” a front-page story about the culmination of President Womer’s marvelous drive to raise the endowment of Washburn to eight hundred thousand dollars. He has raised three hundred and seventy-five thousand outside of Topeka, and three hundred thousand inside. Fifty thousand of this comes from Mr. Joab Mulvane, the grand duke of the city, and according to the newspaper, “the walls of the Chamber of Commerce shivered in the greatest uproar of applause they ever enclosed.... President Womer received at last night’s meeting a demonstration of cordial good-will and appreciation such as few public men hope for in a lifetime.” “One of the greatest days in the history of Topeka,” was Mr. Mulvane’s own characterization of the event. There are two columns of this kind of rapture, with the names of all the donors and the “volunteer workers,” and descriptions of parades, fireworks, dancing, brass-bands, and the singing of “Washburn pep songs.”
Also the Catholics have their educational machine, and raise money from wealthy Catholics for the protection both of Catholicism and of wealth. In the city of Washington they have a great central institution. An official of the United States Department of Education writes me:
I made a study of the American University in Washington not long ago. There are a number of wealthy men on the board. They are obviously placed there for the usual purpose. Most of them never went to college themselves, and they know nothing about higher education in general or in particular. Now I saw no occasion to doubt their desire to do the best they know how for the institution. But some things they know about, from their associations, and others they do not. They simply cannot appreciate, for example, the fine zeal the founders had for the establishment of a great graduate university. They can see a considerable demand for education in law and business, and so they very naturally let the institution turn in this direction. Consequently a low grade law school and a lower grade business course are being established. The trustees can see some use in these courses and some demand. The need for a great graduate school, so patent to educators, the trustees are blissfully ignorant of, and I doubt very much whether on account of their limited educational experience they will ever be able to appreciate the need for such a graduate institution in Washington.
We move South to Durham, North Carolina, home of Trinity College, a considerable religious institution, founded by Washington Duke, the tobacco king. A friend of mine who knew the old gentleman tells me how he furnished his mansion, ordering the books for his library by the size and color of binding; and now his statue decorates a college grounds. The present head of the family is James B., locally known as “Buck” Duke, and it would be a poor pun to describe him as the Grand Duke of Trinity College. He and his brother, Mr. B. N. Duke, his wife, his son and his daughter, have all purchased the good will of North Carolina Methodism by making public gifts to Trinity, amounting to four million dollars; all three of the male Dukes are therefore on its board of trustees. James B. has just given a million to the endowment, fifty thousand towards a new school for religious training, and other sums for gymnasium and law building. So I note in the Greensboro “Daily News” an editorial headed: “The Duke Also Has Virtues.”
Forty years ago “Buck” Duke could not borrow ten thousand dollars in North Carolina; today he boasts that he is worth four hundred million, beside what his father and brother have accumulated. Assuming that his services in providing the world with tobacco were worth a hundred dollars a week, it would have taken a hundred and fifty-four thousand years to earn his own share of this money. “Buck” is distinguished among interlocking trustees in that he has had a decision of the United States Supreme Court on his money-making methods; the exact words are that he “persistently and continuously and consciously violated the law.” The Supreme Court has not yet passed on the fact that a man who is worth four hundred million dollars pays only eight hundred and twenty-eight dollars taxes in the state where he lives in a magnificent palace!
The Methodist church is, as we know, violently opposed to the use of tobacco, but it applies the ancient saying of one of the Roman emperors, Pecunia non olet—money has no smell. Mr. Duke completed his purchase of the church by a so-called donation for the support of its superannuated ministers, and so his right to run both church and university is undisputed. He brought in a South Carolina minister of pliant principles, and made him president of the university, and this president never lost an occasion to chant the praises of his grand Duke. The grand Duke had this chief chanter made a director of his Southern railroad, and wanted to have him made also a bishop of the church, but for three successive years he failed; then he hired some regular lobbyists and sent them to the Methodist General Conference—and that was the way to do it. “Pecunia non olet”; and also, “pecunia parlat”; and also, “pecunia ambulare equinam fecit!”—if you will let me fix up the Latin.
CHAPTER LXXI
THE ORANG-OUTANG HUNTERS
There is a part of the United States which suffered for a century or two under the blight of Negro slavery; in consequence, from Virginia to Texas, the population still lives in the ideas of a hundred years ago. Here are communities which are not content to use religious dogmas as a shield for special privilege; they really believe the dogmas, and are willing to fight about them and to torture one another, as in the old days. In these states there has sprung up what is called the “Fundamentalist” movement, made up of seventeenth century Cromwellians in modern machine-made clothing; the only difference being that whereas the old Pilgrims wished to “come out from among them,” the idea of these modern fanatics is to drive out the other fellow. They are carrying on an enormous campaign in the evangelical churches, seeking to keep out of the pulpits people who do not believe in the literal inspiration of Scripture—in Noah’s ark, and Jonah and the whale, and Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho; also in the virgin birth, and the six-day creation of man. They are especially indignant against “evolution,” which means to them one thing, that man is descended from the monkey—something it does not mean to any scientist.