The curious thing about all these experiences is how little the professor himself realized the significance of them. He wrote me: “My record does not seem to occasion special suspicion!” Again he said: “There is no organized system of control by privilege over American education!” As it happens, I was behind the scenes in New York, and heard some mention of this same professor’s name. Some day we shall have a government in this country which will indict the heads of the National Civic Federation for criminal conspiracy, and then we may take a turn at looking into their papers, and this professor may learn why it was that the heads of so many colleges suddenly discovered that it would be as much as their jobs were worth to recommend him for promotion!
P. S.—It is interesting to note that only three months later this young professor had grown wiser. He wrote to me again, as follows:
I have been thinking that I might have to revise my letter to you in one point. I said I had never encountered anything like a black-list. Now I am not so sure. I had to hunt another job this year (just why I am not perfectly sure), but failed in my efforts to land anything suitable. A certain proportion of the institutions to which I applied answered in such a way as aroused no suspicion of anything ulterior. A good many did not answer at all, or else merely returned my material. I have a notion that some of them have me spotted. In one case where I was asked to apply in person, the case was closed in a dubious way, etc.
We have one supremely successful organization for standardizing the thoughts and morals of America, the Ku Klux Klan. The reason for its success is that its members dress themselves in night-gowns and white hoods, and its leaders call themselves Grand Goblins and Imperial Kleagles. These symbols and names of terror have proven so effective, that I wonder the idea is not taken up by the secret agents and scandal-hounds of the National Civic Federation’s “Committee for Study of Revolutionary Movements.” I offer the suggestion for what it is worth; let them name themselves the Helen Ghouls, and let Mr. Condé B. Pallen be known as the Shepard’s Watch-dog, and Mr. Ralph M. Easley as the Shepard’s Crook! I must not suggest this latter name without definite reason, so I set aside the next chapter to show you by what devious devices Mr. Easley does his work of destroying the reputation of educators who fail to recognize his plutocratic authority.
CHAPTER LXXXIII
THE SHEPARD’S CROOK
There is at Annandale, New York, an Episcopal church institution called St. Stephen’s College, having as its president the Reverend Bernard Iddings Bell, who was dean of the cathedral at Fond-du-lac, Wisconsin, for five years, and chaplain of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station during the war. President Bell is a former Socialist, who resigned from the Church Socialist Fellowship at the outbreak of the war, but has not abandoned his belief that the way to confute error is to understand it and tell the truth about it, instead of to lie about it and repress it by force.
Immediately after the war the National Civic Federation invited Bishop Burch of the Episcopal diocese of New York to send delegates to a conference on labor conditions, and President Bell was asked to become one of the delegates; he declined, and wrote Bishop Burch advising him not to send any delegates, “since to do so[so] would be to tie up the church officially with an organization which is suspect among most social workers of responsibility and reliability.” As a result of this advice, Bishop Burch sent no delegates.
Shortly afterwards word of this came to Mr. Ralph M. Easley, and he was furiously incensed against President Bell. He met President MacCracken of Vassar College at a dinner-party, and “in a most violent and unrestrained manner” announced that he was going to “get this man Bell”; St. Stephen’s College was “full of Bolshevism,” etc. From various other people word came to President Bell that Mr. Easley was attacking St. Stephen’s, “in the same violent and unrestrained manner, selecting especially those persons who were liable to make financial contributions to the college.” President Bell thereupon wrote Mr. Easley a very courteous letter, explaining that he was under an entire misapprehension concerning St. Stephen’s, and inviting him to come there and make an investigation of the place, and incidentally to explain the Civic Federation’s work to the students. Mr. Easley replied that he could not come at once, but would take up the matter later. He never did take it up, nor did he ever accept the invitation several times repeated by President Bell during the controversy which followed.
What Mr. Easley did was to publish in the “National Civic Federation Review” for January, 1920, what President Bell described as “a vituperative article, based on false information and illegitimate deductions.” These words were used by President Bell in a letter to Judge Alton B. Parker, president of the Civic Federation. Said President Bell: “I do not believe that the Civic Federation stands by this kind of thing, and I think it is high time that someone takes your publication in hand and teaches it the principles of honest journalism.” President Bell went on to express his confidence in Judge Parker’s belief in honesty and fair play; but apparently his confidence was misplaced, for Judge Parker never answered this letter, nor any other letter on the subject of the misdeeds of Mr. Easley. What Judge Parker did was to show President Bell’s letter, “with violent indignation,” to the general counsel of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in the Metropolitan Club of New York, known as the “Millionaires.” He was surprised to learn that this gentleman was a trustee of St. Stephen’s, and that he stood by President Bell. The trustee undertook to obtain from President Bell a detailed statement of the falsehoods in Mr. Easley’s article. So President Bell wrote to his trustee, pointing out a series of ten false statements and inferences in Mr. Easley’s attack upon the college. I don’t suppose the reader will wish to go into these details; suffice it to say that the clergyman proved his case thoroughly, and that his bill of complaint traveled by way of the trustee and Judge Parker to Mr. Easley, who wrote to President Bell, stating that he was turning the whole correspondence over “to a committee composed of members of the Protestant Episcopal Church who are interesting themselves in the subject of the extent to which the revolutionary forces have permeated that church.”
This committee consisted of an obscure lawyer by the name of Townsend, an Episcopal clergyman by the name of Carstensen, and Mr. Everett P. Wheeler, a New York lawyer, whose excuse is that he is eighty-two years of age. Dr. Carstensen was courteous enough to advise President Bell that he was serving on this committee, and asked that an anti-Bolshevist army officer should be permitted to address the students of St. Stephen’s College—which request President Bell cheerfully granted.