And what is a college president for? A college president is paid by the interlocking directorate to take their “consulting engineers” and “valuation experts” and cover them with a mantle of respectability, enabling them to do their dirty work in the name of education and public service. And if any freak individual comes along, trying to break in and spoil the game, the function of a college president is to furnish what the college football player knows as “interference“—tripping the fellow up, slugging him, maiming him. In football there are strict rules against fouls; but in this game of plutocratic education “everything goes.”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE LASKI LAMPOON
A more recent test of Harvard University was made by Harold J. Laski, a brilliant young writer whom President Lowell in an unguarded moment admitted to teach political science. Laski holds unorthodox ideas concerning the modern capitalist state; he thinks it may not be the divinely appointed instrument which it considers itself. Laski raised this question in his Harvard classes, which caused tremendous excitement in State Street. The Harvard “drive” for sixteen millions was on, and a number of people wrote that they would give no money to Harvard while Laski was on its teaching staff. On the other hand, a Chicago lawyer wrote that his son had never taken any interest in his studies previously, but that since he had come under Laski’s influence he had become a serious student; this lawyer sent fifty thousand dollars to make up the losses. The controversy got into the Boston newspapers, and President Lowell stood by Laski; no Harvard professor should be driven out because of his opinions. “Thank God we are not as Columbia!”
I asked a Cambridge friend about President Lowell’s heroism, and he took a cynical view of it. Lowell is the author of a book interpreting the British constitution, and has a reputation in England based on this book; he has received an Oxford degree, and hopes some day to be ambassador. In England people really believe in free speech, and practice their beliefs; and Laski, it happens, is a Manchester Jew, his family associated with the present ruling group in England. Also, Laski himself wields a capable pen, and is not the sort of man one chooses for an enemy. If Laski were to go home and state that he had been expelled from President Lowell’s university because of disbelief in the modern state, what would become of Lowell’s English reputation? Said my friend: “If Laski had been a German Jew, or a Russian Jew”—and he smiled.
As to the overseers and their handling of the case, Professor Laski writes me that they were very nice to him. “I was simply invited to a dinner at which we exchanged opinions in a friendly fashion. My only doubt there was a doubt whether the committee realized how very conservative my opinions really were in this changing social world. Like most business men, they had little or no knowledge of the results of modern social science.”
The climax came with the Boston police strike in the fall of 1919. This was a very curious illustration of the part which the Harvard plutocracy plays in the public life of Boston, so pardon me if I tell the story in some detail. You know how the cost of living doubled all over the country, while the wages of public servants increased very little. The policemen of Boston were not able to live on their wages; they begged for an increase, and the police commissioner promised them the increase if they would wait until after the war. They waited; and then the police commissioner tried to keep his promise, and the mayor and the Democratic administration worked out a settlement. But the Harvard plutocracy, which runs the government of the state, decided not to permit that settlement, but to force a strike of the policemen, so that they could smash the policemen’s union. The late Murray Crane, senator and millionaire, holder of a Harvard LL. D., planned the job in the Union Club of Boston, together with Kidder, Peabody & Co., the bankers. Governor Coolidge, the tool of Crane, upset the arrangements made by the mayor of Boston, and the mayor was so furious that he “pasted the governor one in the eye”—the inside reason why Coolidge disappeared so mysteriously during the strike. But the newspapers of the interlocking directorate celebrated him as the hero of the affair, and he became vice-president of the United States on a wave of glory!
The strike came, and according to the standard American technique of strike-breaking, hoodlums were turned loose at the right moment, to throw stones and terrify the public. The whole affair was obviously stage-managed; nothing was stolen, and no real harm was done. Insiders assured me that all the time the “riots” were going on, there was a safe reserve of police locked up in the police-station, waiting in case things should go too far. The Boston policemen were represented as traitors to society, and a wave of fury swept the country—including Harvard, which holds hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Boston city bonds, also securities of Boston public service corporations. These properties must be protected; so a “Harvard Emergency Committee” was formed, headed by the professor who had first reported to the overseers Professor Laski’s too great zeal in outside activities. Needless to say, no one complained about the “outside activities” of this anti-strike professor; on the contrary, President Lowell issued a resounding call to Harvard men to help smash the policemen’s strike.
Incidentally, Harvard men smashed Harold J. Laski, who had the temerity to interject himself into this class war. Laski went to Boston and made a speech to the strikers’ wives, expressing sympathy with their cause; whereat all Boston raged. “I would like to ask you something, Mr. Laski,” said President Lowell, at a dinner party. “Why did you make that speech?” “Why, Mr. Lowell,” said Laski, smiling, “I made it because there is a general impression throughout the labor world that Harvard is a capitalistic institution, and I wanted to show that it is not true.” Laski was only twenty-six years old at the time, and it took some nerve, you must admit. How to get this young incendiary out of Harvard was the next job of the interlocking directorate.
Meet Mr. James Thomas Williams, Jr., of Boston. Mr. Williams was graduated from Columbia University in the same year that I quit it; he then joined the Associated Press, and now serves the interlocking directorate as editor of the Boston “Evening Transcript,” the paper which is read by every Tory in New England. You may learn more about this paper by consulting pages 284, 306, 307 and 379 of “The Brass Check.” Also, perhaps I should tell you a little incident which happened after “The Brass Check” came out. Desiring to test the capitalist newspapers, I made up a dignified advertisement of the book—nothing abusive or sensational, merely opinions from leading journals of Europe. I sent this advertisement, with a perfectly good check, to the Boston “Evening Transcript,” and the check was returned to me, with the statement that the “Transcript” thought it best not to publish the advertisement, because of the possibility of being sued for libel.
I was puzzled at first, wondering what paper might sue the Boston “Evening Transcript” for publishing an advertisement of “The Brass Check.” Then I remembered that in the book I had accused a Boston newspaper of having shared in the slush funds of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad; also of having suppressed reports of Justice Brandeis’ exposures of the Boston Gas Company, at the same time publishing page advertisements from this gas company; also of having published advertisements of “Harvard Beer, 1,000 Pure,” at the same time suppressing news of the fact that the federal government was prosecuting the manufacturers of Harvard Beer for violation of the pure food laws. So I understood that the Boston “Evening Transcript” was afraid of being sued by the Boston “Evening Transcript.”