Across the bay from San Francisco, high up above the city of Berkeley, stands the University of California, a medieval fortress from which the intellectual life of the state is dominated; and here also we find one of the grand dukes of the plutocracy in charge—Mr. William H. Crocker, whose father looted the Southern Pacific railroads, covering all California. Mr. Crocker is a “social leader,” and active head of the Republican political machine, which runs the government and is run by the finance of the state. We shall feel at home with Mr. Crocker, when we discover that he is a director of the Equitable Trust Company of New York, one of the five great banking institutions of the Money Trust, and that he sits on this board with Mr. Coudert, attorney for the plutocracy and trustee of Columbia University; also when we learn that he was a director of the Parkside Land Company, all of whose officers were indicted in the San Francisco graft scandal.
Associated with Mr. Crocker in the running of the University of California is Mortimer Fleishhacker, the biggest banker in San Francisco, president of the Anglo-California Trust Company, and first vice-president of the Anglo and London National Bank. I can give you a glimpse of this gentleman’s activities, for the other day I met a young newspaper man who had shipped on one of the fishing vessels which constitute the “hell fleet of the Pacific.” Mr. Fleishhacker is vice-president of the Union Fish Company, which is paying men $5 a ton for catching and salting cod, which are sold in San Francisco for $160 a ton, the incidental costs being practically nothing. Mr. Fleishhacker is also vice-president of the Alaska Canning Company, whose workers are hired by a Chinese contractor for $34 a month and board—which consists of two meals a day of scurvy diet, and only one cup of water a day. In the canning factories they work from 3 a. m. to 9 p. m., and they sleep in ramshackle bunkhouses, with no heat, no light and tide water wetting the floor. Eight of them died of small-pox while my friend was there.
As aid on his university board Mr. Fleishhacker has his attorney, Mr. Guy C. Earl, vice-president of two power companies and two electric companies, and a very crude and subservient newspaper, the Los Angeles “Express”; also Mr. Dickson, proprietor of this same “Express.” Also we find the president of San Francisco’s gas company, Mr. Britten, an active enemy of every public ownership movement; Mr. Moffitt, vice-president of the First National Bank, an honest believer in capitalism at its worst, and a furious reactionary; also Mr. Bowles, president of the First National Bank of Oakland, and director in a railway, a water company, and a timber company; also Mr. Cochran, vice-president of the Southern California Edison Company, president of a life insurance company, a director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank, and a director in half a dozen large financial institutions; also Mr. Foster, another director in Mr. Fleishhacker’s bank. Mr. Foster lives in Marin county, just north of the university, and is known as the Duke of Marin; so you see these medieval titles are not entirely the product of my muck-raking imagination.
In addition to these seven, there are two wealthy corporation attorneys, one of them counsel for the Catholic Church, and for the grafters who were put on trial in 1910; a Catholic priest who is a close adviser of the archbishop who runs the San Francisco school system; and the wife of Sartori, one of the largest bankers in Los Angeles, who, as I happen to know, helped to finance the concession-hunting expedition of Vanderlip in Kamtchatka. These are the appointed regents; and in addition there are some who hold ex-officio—the Governor of the state, the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, etc. These do not matter, being merely machine politicians, selected by Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker and two or three others in private conference, nominated by these gentlemen’s newspapers, and elected by these gentlemen’s checks.
Besides the state government and the university, and their own banks and railroads, Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker control for the interlocking directorate a vast network of gas and electric companies, street railways, land companies, and power companies. The recent development of water power has made this the dominant industry of the state, and the means whereby the other industries are subordinated. Mr. Fleishhacker is president of the Great Western Power Company, and of the California Electric Generating Company, and a director in the Northwestern Electric Company; while his attorney, Mr. Earl, also a trustee of the university, is vice-president of two of these concerns. Eight other regents are active directors of such power companies; and we shall see shortly how they use their university as a propaganda department against power development by the state. Mr. Foster, the Duke of Marin, is president of the ferry company, and a director of the United Railroads of San Francisco, which has been a leading agency in corrupting the city for the past twenty years. Mr. Crocker is a director in the committee which is now trying to reorganize these United Railroads, after the looters have got through with them. We shall see how these gentlemen use their university as a strike-breaking agency for the benefit of their street railways, their ferries and their gas and electric companies.
One might think that the plutocracy of California ought to be content to leave its educational business in the hands of such a board; nevertheless, they have felt it necessary to organize an independent vigilance committee, to supplement Mr. Crocker and Mr. Fleishhacker. The prime mover in this action was Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Pacific Pipe & Supply Company of Los Angeles, a gentleman whose qualifications to direct the higher education of California were acquired while driving a stage. Mr. Haldeman founded what he called the Commercial Federation of California; later, learning from the war the advantages of camouflage, he changed the name to the Better America Federation. He went out among the interlocking directorate and raised the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the purpose of keeping California capitalist. The Better America Federation is a kind of “black hand” society of the rich, a terrorist organization which does not stop short of crime, as I know from personal experience. It works in league with several depraved newspapers—the Los Angeles “Times,” owned by Harry Chandler, speculator in Mexican revolutions, and co-partner with Mrs. Sartori’s husband in the Vanderlip Kamtchtkan adventure; the Los Angeles “Express,” with two university regents in charge; the San Francisco “Chronicle,” owned by Mike de Young, whom Ambrose Bierce pictured hanging on all the gibbets of the world; the San Francisco “Bulletin,” whose bottomless venality has been revealed in Fremont Older’s book. I have told in “The Brass Check,” Chapter LXVI, the story of how “The Dugout,” a returned soldier’s paper in Los Angeles, was smashed because its publisher would not have it used as a strike-breaking agency. The secret service branch of the Better America Federation committed a dozen separate crimes in the doing of this job, and much of this was proved at the publisher’s trial.
The Better America Federation investigates every person who runs for office in California, and black-lists him unless he is one hundred per cent capitalist. It browbeats public officials and slanders them in its newspapers; it causes the raiding of labor offices, and the jailing without trial of labor organizers; and among its other activities it runs the educational system of California, including the state university. The spirit in which it works is revealed in a bill which it came near to pushing through the last California legislature, providing for cancelling the license of any school teacher who, discussing the constitution of the United States with a pupil “shall express to such pupil any opinion or argument in favor of making any change in any provision.”
How this organization puts pressure on university professors is a matter about which you do not have to take my word; you may have the word of Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. In the San Francisco “Call” for January 20, 1922, I find an article occupying the top of seven columns, “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men of San Francisco.” This is a report of a luncheon at the St. Francis Hotel, in which Mr. Haldeman explained his work to the president and vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a group of such leading interlocking directors. Said Mr. Haldeman: “Through the children of the best business families throughout the land, who are attending universities, we are having students of radical tendencies watched. We are receiving reports of what is going on, both as to students and teachers that uphold radical doctrines and views.”
So here is the spy system in our universities; college boys and girls set to tale-bearing on their fellows and on their teachers! On such ignorant and garbled reports professors in the University of California are black-listed for promotion; or they are quietly let out without explanation—or with just a lie or two. When they apply for jobs in other places, letters are written to keep them from getting those jobs. School teachers are black-listed over the entire state; students in the university who graduate with honors are unable to get teaching positions, because the employment system maintained by the university is under the control of this kid-gloved Black Hand.
The active manager of this organization until a few months ago was Mr. Woodworth Clum, a lawyer, author of a pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” the substance of which is that America is calling her school children to mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. Mr. Clum was formerly secretary of the Greater Iowa Association, at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year; also secretary to the Iowa Commission to the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He left the state after a three years’ controversy over the fact that this Commission had failed to file a proper statement of its expenditure of public funds with the state accountant, twenty thousand dollars being missing; also after a typewriter belonging to the Commission had been traced to the office of the Greater Iowa Association; also after Mr. Clum had walked across the street and brutally struck in the face a Civil War veteran, wearing a Grand Army button, because this old man was deaf and did not hear a band playing the Star-Spangled Banner some distance away, and therefore had failed to remove his hat.