This part of my story would not be complete unless I paid tribute to the Church League for Industrial Democracy, and to the tireless services of Richard W. Hogue, an Episcopal clergyman who was kicked out of his church and his open forum in Baltimore, and now travels over the country, gathering groups of theological students and Y. M. C. A. workers, and preaching to them the real gospel of the crucified proletarian. He tells me that he finds increasing welcome; he tells of several little colleges throughout the Middle West, whose faculties—and in one or two cases, the presidents—believe in free discussion, and have given him a hearing.
Also, there is one free law school in America—at Harvard. We have seen Dean Pound and Professors Frankfurter, Sayre and Chafee taking a bold stand for freedom of speech. These men fearlessly teach the evolution of law, and suggest to their students the possibility of improvement in American institutions. Thus, from the last report of Dean Pound I quote a few scattered sentences, just to give you an idea of the tone:
A clear body of law has grown up already as the result of the experience of a generation in the Interstate Commerce Commission, a body of law is forming under our eyes through the administration of workmen’s compensation acts by industrial commissions, and the exigencies of general peace and good order, if nothing else, must lead before long to a new body of law governing industrial disputes.... Collective bargaining is likely to compel us to think over again the whole subject of juristic personality in Anglo-American law. Criminal law and procedure call for the best efforts of thoroughly trained common-law lawyers acquainted with the social science of today.... For much that we have had to study and to teach in the immediate past is already yielding in importance to these new elements in the legal system. Much of our nineteenth-century law will presently be as obsolete as the learning of real actions and of the feudal law of estates in land which held so large a place in the curriculum of the Law School a century ago, or the elaborate and involved procedural law which was so important fifty years later, or the pedantic law of bailments which has given way to a modern doctrine of the obligations of public service.
Needless to say, such utterances as this, from such a source, are the cause of continually increasing distress to the legal retainers of our plutocracy!
Also, there is a New England college of considerable reputation, whose president has taken a firm stand for open-mindedness, and that is Amherst. President Meikeljohn was one of the live men who got out of Brown when it began to die. He is now trying to make one small college in which young men are taught to think, instead of just to believe in dogmas. He is in the midst of a fight with reactionary trustees; in 1920 they asked for his resignation, but he consulted a lawyer and told them they had no authority in the premises. He is still in office, for how long I do not know.
Also, there is Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, in which some professors are making a brave struggle. This is an old co-educational institution established by the Quakers, a sect which had more than its share of persecution, and took pains to provide for freedom of opinion. But now the Quakers have become rich, and there is a new kind of persecution in the world, and shall they permit freedom of opinion about special privilege? That Swarthmore has not been entirely liberal, you may judge from the fact that its most conspicuous graduates are Governor Sproul of Pennsylvania, who smashed the steel strike with his Cossacks, and Attorney-General Palmer, who killed and buried the constitution of the United States. The thousands of alleged radicals and helpless foreigners who had their heads cracked by Mr. Palmer’s thugs will appreciate the gay humor of the fact that this gentleman is a devout and active Quaker!
Governor Sproul gave to Swarthmore an astronomical observatory; the stars are a long way off, and the governor is not afraid of anything that might be discovered there. But Professor Robert C. Brooks of Swarthmore put his sociological telescope upon Delaware County, in which the college is located, and drew a diagram of the “jury wheel system,” whereby the big political crooks managed to keep themselves out of jail. Certain men of wealth came to the president of Swarthmore, saying: “Here we have given five millions, and we can’t do it with a man like Brooks running round and stirring up trouble”; so the president had a “frank talk” with Professor Brooks.
Nevertheless, some professors are holding on both to their convictions and their jobs, and so the place is regarded as a “hot-bed.” There is a professor of philosophy, who is using modern literature as a door to Plato, and tells the students to read “Man and Superman” and “The Spoon River Anthology.” He got from this experiment a lively response; some of the boys and girls were shocked, but they asked questions, and presently began to think for themselves, and discovered that thinking is a thrilling experience. I am told that the librarian of the college stays shocked. Never before had he heard of students in college being taught from a book like “The Spoon River Anthology.”
There is also one state institution which deserves mention—the University of North Carolina, sometimes called the “Wisconsin of the South.” Richard Hogue tells me that he was permitted to explain the meaning of industrial democracy to the students of this institution. I wrote one of the professors and received from him a letter, assuring me that here was a place, having some twenty-five hundred students, which was both free and democratic. I thought I would test the matter a little, so I asked him whether a professor who was an avowed Socialist would be tolerated, and whether the modern Socialist movement was adequately explained to the students. My correspondent replied that he himself was a “Christian Socialist,” but that he did not mean “as Bouck White sees it, or even as Ward sees it.” He adds: “My experience is that the destructive radical is a chap with a screw loose somewhere—with a twist in his intelligence or with an excess of inflammable emotion. Oftimes he has intellect and courage, but is emotionally unbalanced, like Scott Nearing, for instance. Or he is intelligent and deliberately destructive like Foster.” In comment on the above I will merely state my own opinion; first, that Scott Nearing is the ablest economist in the United States today; and second, that William Z. Foster is a very constructive force in the American labor movement.
I have letters from several other professors, who are sure that their institutions are free, and I tested them also with these questions. You will be amused to know that one of them was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania! He stated that professors known to be Socialists would be permitted to teach “as scientific scholars. I suppose if they devoted their time to propaganda they would properly be eliminated.” Of course no mention is made of the many professors at the University of Pennsylvania who devote their time to capitalist propaganda—such as for example, Meade, Conway, Hess, Johnson and Huebner.