Consider the experience of Professor Joel E. Spingarn, a distinguished poet and scholar, who took Professor Woodberry’s place in the department of comparative literature, and filled it for many years acceptably. A member of the department of Latin, Professor Harry Thurston Peck, was sued by a woman for breach of promise, and his letters were given to the newspapers. Professor Peck declared that the woman was a blackmailer, and most of the faculty at Columbia thought that he should not be judged guilty until the charge was proven; but Butler got rid of Peck, incidentally publishing statements about him which caused Peck to sue him for libel. Professor Spingarn was outraged at Butler’s proceedings, and introduced in the faculty of philosophy a resolution testifying to the academic services of Professor Peck, who had been twenty-two years with Columbia. This, of course, was a declaration of war upon the administration, and Butler made to Spingarn the threat: “If you don’t drop this matter you will get into trouble.” Within ten days thereafter he notified Spingarn that a committee of the trustees had voted to abolish his chair. Professor Spingarn published a pamphlet, in which he gave the history of the case, and the entire correspondence with Butler. I quote from his comments:
It would be disheartening to a proud son of Columbia to linger over all the details of official trickery and deception, of threat and insult, of manners even worse than morals; but it would be unjust to those who love Columbia’s honor to hide from them the fact that, in the course of this single incident, the president of their alma mater told at least five deliberate falsehoods, broke at least three deliberate promises, and denied his own statements whenever it served his purpose to do so. It is without rancor, and with deep regret, that Professor Spingarn feels obliged to state these facts, and to express his mature conviction that the word or promise of President Butler is absolutely worthless unless it is recorded in writing and that even a written document offers no certain safeguard against evasion or distortion. It is to this executive, with this code of honor, that Columbia entrusts all avenues of communication between the subservient faculties and the governing trustees.
This is not a history or an estimate of President Butler’s administration of Columbia; it is merely the record of a single abuse. But the record would be incomplete if it were not clearly made known that the facts, so far from being exceptional, are typical of his executive career. It is not merely that Columbia’s greatest teachers, poets, musicians, have been lost to the university from the very outset as a result of his methods and his policies. The real scandal is worse than this. It is that in the conduct of its affairs a great university, so far from being above the commercialism of its industrial environment, actually employs methods that would be spurned in the humblest of business undertakings. Even the decencies of ordinary business are not always observed; and the poor scholar, unfamiliar with methods such as these, falls an easy prey. No device, however unworthy, is regarded as forbidden by custom or by honor. A professor may be asked to send in a purely formal resignation as a compliment to the prospective new head of his department, and then be dumbfounded to have his letter acted upon by the president immediately upon its receipt, and before the new head is actually appointed. A professor may be induced to come to Columbia by the assurance of the president that the usual contract, “for three years or during the pleasure of the trustees,” involves an actual obligation for three years on the part of the university, while another professor holding the same contract with the university may find his chair abolished, on the recommendation of the president, at the end of two years. These are actual cases.
Shortly after this Spingarn incident President Butler completed the tenth year of his administration at Columbia, and a banquet was held at the Hotel Astor, attended by some two hundred members of the faculty. “It was an evening of much felicitation,” the New York “Times” reported (May 16, 1911), but there were “almost imperceptible references” to the recent conflicts. The “Times” report goes on to quote some jovial remarks by Professor Seligman, head of the department of political science. I quote:
Prof. Seligman regaled the diners with some anecdotes of the days when Dr. Butler was an undergraduate. He told of a student to whom was spared the embarrassment of reciting by pulling the gong and getting the class dismissed. He said he did not know who that student was, but admitted that he had his suspicions, as he did in the case of the same student getting to the head of his class by making a ten out of his zero on the professor’s record.
The above anecdote proves once more the ancient truth, that the child is father to the man; it would seem that by careful watching of one’s classmates one can pick out those students who are destined to grow up into college presidents who do not always tells the truth.
CHAPTER X
THE LIGHTNING-CHANGE ARTIST
President Butler’s career at Columbia has been like that of a drunken motorist in a crowded street; he has left behind him a trail of corpses. In the course of twenty years of office he has managed to expel or force to withdraw some two score men, including most of the best in the place. The cases of MacDowell and Woodberry occurred in 1902, the cases of Peck and Spingarn in 1910 and 1911. Beginning in 1917 there was a sudden series of casualties; but before these can be clearly explained, it is necessary that the reader should be made acquainted with another aspect of the career of Nicholas Miraculous—as pacifist and prophet of the Capitalist International.
Butler’s friend, Carnegie, put up ten million dollars to establish a foundation in the cause of universal peace; and Butler became a trustee. The pointed question has been asked whether the Carnegie Peace Foundation pays for the elaborate banquets which President Butler serves to peace delegates in his home. Needless to say, when you have half a million dollars a year to administer, you can hire a great many secretaries, and print a great deal of literature, and give a great many champagne banquets, and make a great splurge in the world. Butler engaged a young man, Leon Fraser, to organize a peace movement in the colleges, and had him made an instructor in the department of political science at Columbia. We shall see in a minute what happened to this young man.
In the summer of 1914 Butler went to Europe to continue his peace work—but not with entire success. He came home in September, very much horrified at what had happened in Europe, and to the students at the opening of the university he made a speech in which you find him at his best, with his clear, keen mind and driving energy. He denounced the war-makers in language which left nothing to be desired. One thing this war had done, he said; it had “put a final end to the contention, always stupid and often insincere, that huge armaments are an insurance against war and an aid in maintaining peace. This argument was invented by the war-makers who had munitions of war to sell.... Since war is an affair of governments and of armies, one result of the present war should be to make the manufacture and sale of munitions of war a government monopoly hereafter.... How anyone not fit subject for a madhouse, can find in the awful events now happening in Europe a reason for increasing the military and naval establishments and expenditures of the United States is to me wholly inconceivable. Militarism—there is the enemy!”