After several years of strife, Nearing promised to be “good” for a year, and he was “good” for two years; that is, he made no outside speeches; but it didn’t help him, because what he said in his class-rooms was reported by the students, and reached the ears of the interlocking trustees. The standard time for promotion in the Wharton School is five years, but Nearing waited eight years, and along with his promotion he got a notice from the provost that the period of his appointment was for one year at a time! Randall Morgan, vice-president of the U. G. I., and trustee of the University of U. G. I., remarked to a friend of mine: “He may stay until he’s bald-headed, but he’ll never get promoted.” Another trustee said to Nearing: “We’ll give you young fellows rope and you’ll hang yourselves. There’ll be no dismissals.” This was E. B. Morris, president of the Girard Trust Company, a Morgan concern, with Mr. Stotesbury, the grand duke, for a director; also chairman of the Cambria Steel Company, of which Mr. Stotesbury is a director; also director of the Pennsylvania Steel Company.
The provost thought he knew how to handle this matter. He said to one of his henchmen: “Load him with administrative work, so that he can’t lecture. ‘Squeeze’ him.“ This is a term which they understand at plutocratic universities; to “squeeze” you is to make changes in your curriculum, so as to make your courses less important; to take them out of the required list, or to give required French at the same hour, so that nobody will be free to come to your courses; or to put them at inconvenient hours, say at three o’clock in the afternoon, when nobody likes to come. If you are a professor, they will “squeeze” your young men; you will be unable to get promotions and proper salaries for your subordinates, or equipment or proper supplies for your department.
You may find the adventures of Scott Nearing set forth in a book called “The Nearing Case,” by Lightner Witmer, a professor at the university. It is interesting to note that Professor Witmer paid for the publication of this book by being “squeezed” himself, and by having his young men “squeezed.” Scott Nearing, ring-leader of the agitation, they kept on a salary of fifteen hundred dollars—and at the same time they delicately called his attention to an opening which presented itself at another university, where he might get three thousand dollars! “What a shame about that nice young Nearing fellow!” said Professor Lingelbach of the department of history. “He might have been getting seven or eight thousand dollars now, if he had held his tongue!” But on another occasion this venerable professor argued in a faculty discussion that there was no suppression of free speech at the University of Pennsylvania. Somebody put to him the question, suppose he wanted to join in municipal research work, to take up gas or street railways. Yes, everybody present admitted, that might make a difference!
CHAPTER XXII
PROFESSOR BILLY SUNDAY
No study of the University of Pennsylvania would be complete which failed to mention that it was founded by Benjamin Franklin, and gave an honorary degree to Thomas Paine. Franklin’s doctrines, political and religious, could not be taught in any university in America today, while as for Paine, he could not keep out of jail in any state of the Union. Theodore Roosevelt described Paine as “a filthy little atheist,” which makes one think of Agassiz’s student, who defined a lobster as “a red fish that swims backwards.” There were only three things wrong with the definition, said Agassiz; a lobster is not red, it is not a fish, and it does not swim backwards. Thomas Paine was not filthy, he was not little, and he wrote: “I believe in one God and no more.” Paine first proposed the Declaration of Independence, he saved the American Revolution by his eloquence, and he will come into his own when Americans are free men. Meantime, the great university which honored him would not dare to mention his name, and his place in the academic sunshine is taken by the Rev. William A. Sunday, D.D.
For the benefit of posterity, I explain that Sunday was an incredibly vulgar and blatant religious revivalist, who abused the labor movement and extolled the rich, and was used by the interlocking directorate to keep the eyes of the masses fixed on heaven. They carried him from one city to another all over the United States, and in Philadelphia they financed for him a four weeks’ campaign. Sunday had already received the degree of doctor of divinity from one American college; he was now welcomed with open arms by the University of Pennsylvania, which had barred Samuel Gompers from speaking, and more recently has barred James Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor.
About the reception of the Rev. Billy, you may read in his biography, a chapter headed “A Wonderful Day in a Great University.” “The greatest day of his crowded life,” the biographer comments, and quotes a few samples of the eloquence whereby the great evangelist promoted the cause of culture and scholarship. “Oh, Jesus, isn’t this a fine bunch?” he began his closing prayer. “Hot Cakes Off the Griddle” was the title of his address, and he portrayed the wife of Pilate—“one of those miserable, pliable, plastic, two-faced, two-by-four, lick-spittle, toot-my-own-horn sort of women”; and then Pilate himself—“one of those rathole, pin-headed, pliable, stand-pat, free-lunch, pie-counter politicians.” Speaking in the largest auditorium of the university, before the assembled students and instructors, Billy Sunday declared that “Jesus Christ is either the son of God or the natural offspring of a Jewish harlot.”
You will appreciate this even more when you learn that one of the underground charges laid against Scott Nearing was that he, when asked privately by a student for his opinion of the Episcopal Academy, had said that he would rather send a son of his to hell than to the academy. This shocked a trustee, Mr. Bell, Republican machine politician and ex-attorney general, who had never heard such language used in political life. But Mr. Bell did not object to the Rev. Sunday stating that ex-President Eliot of Harvard University was a man “so low-down he would need an aeroplane to get into hell.” Poor President Eliot, it should be explained, is a Unitarian—that is the reason he gets cussed![[G]]
[G]. Ordinarily a man’s domestic misfortunes are not proper basis for attack upon his ideas; but when a man sets himself up as a teacher of the young, when he claims that he has the one true and valid moral system, and pours out virulent abuse upon all who differ with his ideas—then it seems reasonable to call attention to the fact that the son of the evangelist, William A. Sunday, Jr., has been arrested in the city of Los Angeles twice within the past fortnight. The first time he was fined two hundred dollars for reckless driving of an automobile; the second time his home was raided, and he and seven of his guests were arrested upon complaint of the neighborhood that they have been conducting drunken debauches for many weeks.