Also, the National Association of Manufacturers has been active. It was this organization which was exposed, in the famous “Mulhall” letters, as expending many millions in the bribing of Congress in the interest of big business. This organization has sent out agents to make propaganda in favor of commercial training in all colleges, and also to turn our public school system into an institution for the perpetuating of a class civilization. They call their scheme “vocational training,” and they wish to educate the children of the poor as workers, and to exclude them from general culture.
Also there is the National Security League, a high-up hundred per cent organization, whose active educational head received a three years’ leave of absence from Princeton University[University], to carry on propaganda on behalf of capitalist nationalism. In the beginning it was Hun-hunting, but later it turned into a Bolshevik-hunt, with Woodrow Wilson waging a private war in Siberia and Archangel, and Attorney-General Palmer’s thugs clubbing the heads of men and women who dared to disbelieve in the divine right of the plutocracy. Just now this organization is carrying on a campaign in defense of the Supreme Court’s right to annul acts of Congress, and defeat the will of the people in the interests of property. It has what is called a program for “economic education”; it proposes to have “the Constitution” taught in the public schools—meaning thereby the inviolability of special privilege. It sends out “dope” to the press of the country—and in this material I note an amusing concession to the well-known habit of newspapers to falsify. The “date line” of this press matter begins with the word “New York,” and then a blank is left, so that newspapers may pretend to have received a long telegram from the metropolis!
There are such organizations as this in every section of our country. They call themselves merchants’ and manufacturers’ associations, chambers of commerce, citizens’ alliances, national protective associations, home defense leagues. They do not deal especially with education, but when their attention is called to unorthodox teachings, or to “outside activities” of college professors, they intervene with authority. From the “National American Council” I have obtained a list of seventy-nine such organizations, all pledged to keep the American people in “blinkers.” Recently a number of them—the National Association for Constitutional Government, the Public Interest League, the League for Preservation of American Independence, the Constitutional Liberty League, the Anti-Centralization Club—have formed themselves into one super-organization known as the “Sentinels of the Republic.” They intend to enlist a million patriots, their motto being “Every citizen a sentinel, every home a sentry-box.” The object of this sentineling is to smash the Socialists, and among the organizers are of course David Jayne Hill and Nicholas Murray Butler.
Also, this chapter would not be complete without mention of that immortal committee of the New York state legislature, which has given to the English language a new word. The “Luskers” hauled radicals of all sorts before it, raiding their homes and offices, smashing their furniture and stealing their papers. It went particularly after the school-teachers, and we shall meet it again when we come to the schools. One of its chosen victims was the Rand School of Social Science, which is really a college, but modestly refrains from calling itself such. It is an institution in which students are frankly and shamelessly taught to think for themselves, and the politicians of the state and city of New York understand that their existence is jeopardized by such a place. The first steps taken against the Rand School were to raid the place and throw the typewriters and the teachers down the stairs. As that did not cause the pupils to stop thinking for themselves, the Lusk committee recommended, and the New York state legislature passed a bill, requiring that all institutions which carry on teaching in New York state shall have a license from the regents of the state education board; the intention, of course, being that a license shall be issued to all institutions in the state except the Rand School of Social Science and the “Modern School,” organized by the followers of Ferrer.
The Rand School has refused to apply for a license under this law, and the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, has just ruled against the school, holding the act constitutional. The next step is to carry the case to the Court of Appeals, and after that to the United States Supreme Court. It is manifest that if this Lusk law is upheld, there will be no use talking any more about academic freedom, so far as concerns the state of New York. Common sense would suggest that the provision in the United States Constitution, forbidding the passing of laws interfering with freedom of speech and of the press, should cover this case; but when you investigate the subject you find that common sense and the plain words of the Constitution are not what count in capitalist law. There is a provision in our Constitution forbidding interference with “the right of the people to bear arms in time of peace”; but that right has not prevented the courts of New York state from upholding a law forbidding a citizen to keep a revolver in his home! It is pleasant to be able to record that Governor Miller, who signed these Lusk laws, was defeated for re-election in November, 1922, by a plurality of four hundred and ten thousand votes, the largest plurality ever cast in the history of an American state.
There are many other organizations watching our colleges. The interlocking newspapers are vigilant, and do not always confine their activities to their own locality. The Chicago “Tribune” has exposed and caused the expulsion of more than one college professor. We have seen in this book such activities on the part of the “Oregonian” of Portland and the “Missoulian” of Montana, the Seattle “Times” and the Boston “Evening Transcript,” the Grand Forks, North Dakota, “Herald,” the Rockford, Illinois, “Star,” the Fort Worth, Texas, “Searchlight.”
In Rhode Island is the Providence “Journal,” whose publisher we have met as one of the three leading trustees of Brown University. The editor of this paper is a super-patriot, Mr. John Revelstoke Rathom, who is tireless in war upon “radicalism” in the colleges, not merely of his own state, but throughout New England. I find Mr. Rathom lecturing before the Liberal Club of Clark University—the same organization which was so bitterly denounced by the Worcester “Telegram” as Bolshevist! Mr. Rathom put no restraint upon his contempt for the parlor Socialists; he denounced them as “unsexed brains,” and declared that he “would not pay them twenty-five dollars a week” on his newspaper—this being the final test of excellence in human brains. “Still,” says Mr. Rathom, “they are permitted to teach our young students all this filth, this infidelity to country, this bestial doctrine.” He declared that in many places “our public schools have become hot-beds of anarchy, instead of shrines of liberty.”
Mr. Rathom’s title to hundred percent Americanism is secured by his Australian birth and English education. In the days before America entered the war, this multiple patriot took up the task of bringing us in, and published in his paper an elaborate series of exposés of German intrigue in our country. It read like Sherlock Holmes, and was taken up by the interlocking press, and created an enormous sensation. Then Mr. Rathom started a series of articles in the “World’s Work”—tales about German spies and bomb plots, and how Mr. Rathom with his host of secret agents had penetrated even into the German embassy at Washington! But something happened, nobody knew what. Mr. Rathom’s narrative came to a sudden stop, and the “World’s Work” said no more about it. It was not until several years later that the truth was revealed; the United States Secret Service authorities had objected to being represented as a collection of “boobs,” and had forced Mr. Rathom to a showdown. Not merely had they made him stop the publication of his articles; they had made him sign an elaborate document, in which he admitted that a good part of his material was the product of his own imagination, and the rest had been furnished him by the Bohemian National Alliance, and the Croatian and Serbian national societies, and other anti-German and anti-Austrian groups in America! I quote you just one sentence of this document, in order that you may observe the nature of a worm when it wriggles:
I feel that the general public opinion, which has rather unfortunately credited us with the actual bringing to justice of German spies and malefactors, has been misdirected to the extent that our only possible claim to valuable constructive work in the past three and one-half years ought in fairness to be restricted to the educational value of our combined efforts, and the newspaper enterprise which produced a great number of stories printed in our newspapers.
And then follow twenty-eight long paragraphs, in which Mr. Rathom admits in detail the falsehoods in the “stories” he published, and winds up by agreeing to make no more public addresses during the war! Also, one ought not deny the honor of mention to Mr. James M. Beck, corporation lawyer and amateur patriot. Mr. Beck holds three honorary degrees from American universities, and is described to me by a university professor as “the most notorious high-brow ass in the country.” He travels about making commencement orations in our colleges, and clamoring for the casting out of professors who fail in loyalty to the plutocracy. If you want to know just how foolish one of these hundred percenters can make himself in public, read the controversy of Mr. Beck with Professor Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School concerning the Mooney case, published in the “New Republic” for January 18, 1922.