And just as this University of the Black Hand seeks to run the city, so also it seeks to run the state. Just now there is a bitter struggle under way, over a bill to enable cities and towns to combine and develop water power for their own use. The special interests of California are fighting this measure tooth and nail; and prominent among them are the ten university regents who are interested in power companies. Do these gentlemen fail to make use of their university in the struggle? If you expect such a thing, you do not know our empire of raisins and prunes!
The farmers of this empire are organized into farm bureaus at state expense. These bureaus are supposed to be run by the farmers themselves, but the university appoints “experts,” and the state pays them to act as advisers and guiding lights to the farm bureaus. During this campaign it was observed that resolutions against the hydro-electric power bill kept coming in from the farm bureaus; which seemed unaccountable, because in the state legislature the farmers’ bloc was unanimous for the bill. The mystery was traced down, and in every case it was discovered that the treacherous resolution had come from the “experts”—university men, appointed by university regents in the interest of their privately owned power plants! And at the same time in San Francisco, Mr. Crocker, grand duke of the regents, is starting a campaign to get Rudolph Spreckles, a liberal capitalist, out of control of the First National Bank, because Mr. Spreckles has committed the crime of supporting this power bill!
CHAPTER XXIX
THE DEAN OF IMPERIALISM
We return to David P. Barrows to follow his career as he rises to the heights of academic prominence and power. For seven years he stumped the state of California, proclaiming the destiny of the Stars and Stripes to float from the North Pole to the South. The world was to be divided up, it was our business to get our share; we should win because we were better organized, more efficient; the world would not tolerate small nations; strong men must rule. And presently came a chance for strong men to rule in Mexico; but the strong men had at their head a weakling by the name of Woodrow Wilson, who refused to act. You might think there would be some impropriety, some violation of military precedence, in a university dean’s attacking a former university president, who had become President of the United States; but when Woodrow Wilson took Vera Cruz, and then refused to take the rest of Mexico, Dean Barrows rushed to the front, denouncing him before chambers of commerce, and being reported in the interlocking newspapers.
We shall note in the course of this book many cases of college professors forbidden to take part in “outside activities,” and especially to get themselves into the newspapers. The professor’s place is the classroom, we are told; and to this there is only one exception—when the professor is advocating more loot for the exploiters who pay him his salary. Shortly after this Vera Cruz affair the San Francisco “Star” published some revelations concerning our imperialist dean, stating that at the very time he was campaigning for intervention, he was vice-president of the Vera Cruz Land & Cattle Company. A friend who knows Dean Barrows well, defended him to me by the statement that his holdings in this company were not valuable. When I asked how valuable they might have become if the United States had conquered Mexico, my friend changed the subject.
The next part of the world to be divided up was Siberia, and our imperialist dean was made a colonel, and put in charge of the Army Intelligence Service. So far as I know, he has not told the full story of his adventures in Siberia, but we may glean hints in the press of China and Japan, which charged that Colonel Barrows was an accomplice of Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, in a plot to separate Mongolia from the Chinese Empire and place it under the rule of Semenoff and the American concession-hunters. The situation in Siberia at this time was a complicated one. Kolchak was the official representative of the allies, fighting the Bolsheviki with American money and supplies. Semenoff revolted against Kolchak, and set himself up as an independent bandit, controlling a part of Mongolia. He was intimate with Colonel Barrows at this time, and a leading Chinese journalist wrote an article in “Millard’s Review,” in which he referred to Barrows as “an unscrupulous and unprincipled American adventurer.” It was rumored at this time, and has since been thoroughly proven, that Semenoff entered the pay of the Japanese, and was used by them in their Siberian intrigues; Colonel Barrows himself admitted this in an interview published in the San Francisco “Chronicle,” April 15, 1922.
Semenoff was in America at this time, backed by the Japanese intriguers, but supposed to represent the anti-Bolshevik cause. Naturally he was welcomed by his friend, Colonel Barrows, and ardently defended in the interlocking newspapers. Certain “Bolshevik” agitators pointed out that Semenoff had fired upon and murdered a number of American soldiers; and just what does our academic colonel think about the murdering of American soldiers by a Cossack bandit in Japanese pay? Our colonel declares that he investigated the matter, and that it was merely owing to “a misunderstanding”; General Semenoff wanted to move a train across a sector at Chita, where the Americans refused to let him go, and so he shot and killed a few American soldiers. That is all! The colonel describes Semenoff as “a man of iron, both in courage and military leadership. He was brave.... Semenoff did not thing (evidently a misprint in the newspaper) of which I disapproved. He accepted the help of the Japanese ... but even in this he was helpless; when the allies refused their aid, he was compelled to accept Japanese assistance.... Whatever he did, it was with the sole aim of beating the Bolsheviki, whom he hated.”
This was at the time that Senator Borah was exposing Semenoff’s infamies. Borah read extracts from a speech by an American Railway Commission officer, who stated that Semenoff “carried with him on his so-called ‘summer car’ a harem of thirty of the most beautiful women I ever saw.” Mr. Borah offered to show a picture of the car, and we wonder if this was one of the things which Colonel Barrows saw, when he saw “not thing” of which he disapproved! Colonel Morrow, in command of the American troops at Chita, stated that Semenoff’s own Cossacks had estimated that Semenoff had slaughtered one hundred thousand non-combatants in Siberia. Colonel Morrow testified to “the extreme cruelty and wholesale murders” of Semenoff; this on April 12, three days before the Barrows interview. Also General Graves, commander of the American Siberian expedition, used the phrase “wholesale murderer,” and described “grim murder trains, which took men out to be shot along the side track and buried in common graves; American soldiers ruthlessly murdered; an American lieutenant held virtual prisoner forty hours,” etc. All this was fully reported in the press, and was in President Barrows’ newspapers several days before he made his statement that Semenoff had done “not thing” of which he, Barrows, disapproved. To quote from the San Francisco “Examiner,” April 13, 1922:
It is part of the testimony that prisoners captured by Semenoff’s army in their raids upon villages were taken by trainloads to places which Colonel Morrow designated as “Semenoff’s slaughter houses” and there shot down by the wholesale.
All this Colonel Barrows had every opportunity to see, and in it he saw “not thing” that he disapproved; so you see that our “dean of political science” is no fragile mollycoddle, no bespectacled professor living a closet life, but a real, red-blooded, two-fisted man of action. Coming back to California, fresh from “Semenoff’s slaughter houses,” Colonel Barrows proceeded to advocate the setting up similar establishments on the campus of his university. Speaking before a convention of the State High School Association, he advocated that the Bolsheviki should be stood against the wall and shot. “There is only one way to deal with Bolshevism—fight it. Force is the only way. The time has come to treat them with militarism; I believe in killing the Bolsheviki.” Then Captain Schuyler, one of the intelligence officers whom Barrows brought back with him, spoke his sentiments: “If a man stood before me and declared himself a Bolshevist, I would shoot him on the spot, like a mad dog.”