In Denver the president of the newly organized labor college applied for the use of some of the high school buildings, in the evening. The request was turned down, on the ground that the college was too radical; if the authorities allowed working-class people to meet in the schools, they must also allow the capitalists to meet. In Denver, you see, they have never opened the schools for free discussion, or for teaching the people anything except what the politicians approve. In this case the school authorities said that they would allow the use of the rooms, provided they were allowed to appoint the instructors!
Johns Hopkins University moved out to its magnificent new site at Homewood, which it had obtained by the selling of its soul. The old buildings were left in Baltimore, and the Reverend Richard Hogue, secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, applied for the use of one of the buildings. They had actually begun meeting, under the direction of one of the professors, but the university put them out by order of the trustees. The “hundred percenters” who superintend education in Baltimore call themselves the George Washington Society, and they bitterly attacked one Johns Hopkins professor for taking part in a labor college, and demanded that he be forced out of Johns Hopkins.
You may be interested to know how it comes about that a young professor in one of our most prosperous and important universities happened to be espousing the cause of self-education by the workers. This young professor at the outbreak of the war was a reporter for the Richmond “News-Leader,” and a strike was threatened in the Richmond plant of the American Locomotive Company. The basis of the strike was the refusal of the company officials to comply with the regulations of the War Labor Board; and the young reporter wrote the facts, and his newspaper published them, to the great indignation of the interlocking directorate. In the midst of the controversy a stranger turned up—we will call him Brown—producing credentials from the New York “World.” He pretended to be sympathetic to the union men, and diligently sought information concerning them. The “News-Leader” became suspicious, and telegraphed to the New York “World,” and the answer came, “Brown is all right.”
So Brown continued his operations for a few days longer. He suggested to the young reporter a wonderful plan to get the facts about what the company was doing; he and the reporter were to bribe the book-keeper, and break into the company offices at night! Such temptations arise now and then in the lives of newspapermen, and if it is information against labor unions you are seeking, you may employ such methods. But this reporter knew that you cannot commit burglaries against big business, and his paper investigated further, and discovered that Brown was a secret agent of the American Locomotive Company, operating under the protection of the New York “World”! The young professor suggested that this story would fit in “The Brass Check”; but it seems to me that it does very well in this place—showing how a college professor who leaves the shelter of the cloister is forced to revise his formulas concerning large scale capitalist industry!
CHAPTER LXXXVII
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
We have noted Professor Egbert of the University of J. P. Morgan & Company, advising the workers to avail themselves of the existing college system—in other words, to let the capitalists do their educating for them. “Won’t you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly.” Just what labor education turns into when it is superintended by the existing educational authorities was amusingly demonstrated at Bryn Mawr, a very aristocratic college for women located near Philadelphia, and having the president of an insurance company for its treasurer, and for its grand duke the president of a steel company and a trust company, vice-president of a national bank and director of a sugar company.
We have seen President Thomas of Bryn Mawr branded in the Denver “Post” as a dangerous radical, and we now discover the basis of the charge; she started a movement to educate working girls! The idea was that the brightest and most promising members of labor unions should come to Bryn Mawr in the summer and be taught by professors from various colleges. This, of course, was a step in the right direction, and I have no desire to belittle it; though I should have liked to see the further provision that at the same time the young ladies of Bryn Mawr should take the places of the working girls in the factories.
I have no doubt whatever that this experiment was well meant; but in its working out it revealed the impossibility of honesty under our present class system. In raising money it was set forth that the purpose of the plan was to bring the working girls into touch with the cultured classes and break down the spirit of class consciousness. Then, after the money was got, it was necessary to get the girls; and so the unions were told that the purpose of the plan was to make the girls into more efficient and capable leaders of unions.
Bryn Mawr has received a heavy endowment from John D. Rockefeller; a hall is named for him, and also a gateway. The organizers of the summer school were getting up a prospectus telling of the plan, and they put on the cover a photograph, with the name “Rockefeller Gateway.” But at the last moment it occurred to someone that this might not look well to the unions, so the label “Rockefeller” was left off, and the photograph went out with the caption, “A Gateway.”
I met three different professors who were invited to come to Bryn Mawr and teach at this summer session; one of them, Professor H. W. L. Dana, whom we saw turned out of Columbia University as a scapegoat for the pacifism of Nicholas Miraculous. Professor Dana had an interview with President Thomas, in which the terms of the engagement were laid down to him. There were to be no social relationships with the working girls, no tennis dates, no activities outside the classes. His subject was to be literature, and he was to avoid dangerous writers, such as Morris, Whitman and Ruskin; he was to teach literature as art, and not as part of the labor movement.