Naturally, that made considerable fuss in Berkeley; for the city had a Socialist mayor and school board only a couple of years previously, and the chambers of commerce and the professional patriots were doing their best to establish the term “Bolsheviki” as including, not merely all Socialists, but everybody who believed in the initiative and referendum, or in government ownership of railroads. So the Socialists of Berkeley challenged Barrows to a debate. He accepted, and the Socialists tried first to get the university hall, and then the high school auditorium; but the president of the Berkeley board of education—a dentist, described to me by another school board member as rarely attending a session without the smell of liquor on his breath—opposed the use of the building, and advocated that all Socialists should be “driven into the bay.” Finally, however, the use of the auditorium was obtained; it would only seat twelve hundred people, whereas between eight and ten thousand came.
This was July 30, 1919, at the time when “Bolsheviki” by thousands were being clubbed over the heads and thrown into jail all over the United States. The mayor and the chief of police of Berkeley sat on the platform, and two auto loads of secret service men attended; an effort was made to start a riot and raid the Socialists, a scheme which was averted by the quickness of Mrs. Elvina Beals, who presided at the meeting. Mrs. Beals was for many years a Socialist member of the school board, and the people of Berkeley know her. In the course of the debate, Dean Barrows advocated that the American government should conquer Siberia and Russia for Kolchak, and he asked whether the Socialists of Berkeley would support a strike to prevent the shipment of ammunition to Siberia. They answered with a roar that they would; and so Dean Barrows retired, and did no more debating with these Berkeley “Bolsheviki.”
CHAPTER XXX
THE MOB OF LITTLE HATERS
President Wheeler having been intimate with the German kaiser, and ardent in his defense, the interlocking regents wanted somebody else to attend to their interests in war-time. What more natural than to turn to their Dean of Imperialism? They made him president, and he put “ginger” into the system of military training. Twelve thousand students get a free education, but must pay for it by taking two years of military training, fifty-five hours a year. A part of this training consists in learning to plunge a bayonet into an imitation human body, and you must growl savagely while you do this, and one student found it so realistic that he fainted and was dismissed from the university.
Under President Barrows’ administration the best land of the university has been taken for an artillery field, and Strawberry Canyon, the one beauty spot available for nature lovers, has been taken for a million dollar “stadium,” to be used for athletic tourneys. One professor resigned in protest against this vandalism; but President Barrows believes ardently in athletics, because it trains those strong young men who are to carry the flag from the North Pole to the South. He publicly stated that one advantage of having a big university is that you have abundant material from which to select athletic teams. In other parts of the world, when you hear of the “classics,” you think of Homer and Virgil; but in California the “classics” are the annual Stanford-California foot-ball game, and the intercollegiate track-meet, and the Pacific Coast tennis doubles.
I visited the university this spring, and was invited to a fraternity house. These well-groomed young gladiators did not know quite how to talk to a Socialist author, so between courses of the dinner they relieved their embarrassment by singing, or rather shouting in very loud tones—and I observed that their songs invariably dealt with fighting somebody. I asked a student about to graduate what he thought of his classmates, and his answer was, “They are a mob of little haters. They hate the Germans, they hate the Russians, they hate the Socialists, they hate the Japs. They are ready to hate the French or the English any time they are told to; and always they hate Stanford.”
Stanford, you understand, is a rival university, and they carry in triumph a battle-ax which they captured from this enemy many years ago; their military president and professors encourage this kind of play ferocity, as training for the setting up of slaughter-houses later on. These future world conquerors are pleased to portray themselves under the terrifying symbol of the Golden Bear. Almost every college is some kind of wild animal, you know; Princeton is a Tiger, and Yale is a Bull-dog, and they all sing songs about eating somebody up. At Harvard they tell you that the motto Veritas, means “To hell with Yale,” and at New Haven they pledge their devotion in a carefully ordered climax, “For God, for country, and for Yale.”
Needless to say, the university authorities see to it that no modern ideas get access to these young barbarians all at play. President Barrows’ first act as president was to forbid Raymond Robins to speak at the university; he knew that Robins had been in Russia, and learned some things which President Barrows also learned, but did not tell. The kind of speaker Barrows wants for his students he found in General Joffre, whom he welcomed with open arms, making a grandiloquent speech about “a soldier president welcoming a soldier hero.” The students thronged to hear the Marshal, though they could not understand him; and they mobbed young Herman Meyling for offering Socialist literature for sale. “Intolerance is a virtue in war-time,” says President Barrows; and, of course, all time is war-time to an imperialist.
The keen young commercialists of this school of hate are thoroughly imbued with the psychology of the dominant classes; even the boys who come from the working class are on the way to the top, and the quicker they learn to feel like gentlemen, the better fraternity they will “make.” “I think organized labor should be killed,” said one undergraduate to a friend of mine. So they are eager for strike-breaking expeditions, and their “soldier president” has kept alive this university tradition. When the electric workers went on strike, the mayor of Berkeley smashed the strike with university boys.
And then came the seamen’s strike, which proved a more serious matter; it is a lark to run a dynamo or a trolley car for a few days, but to ship on a steamer is something you can’t get out of, and some unfortunate boys who were trapped by the knavish university machine into shipping as seamen on the Matson Line and the Dollar Line paid for their blunder with their lives. Others of them came home thoroughly trained radicals—having learned more in a few months below deck on a steamship than they would have learned in a hundred years in the lap of their alma mater. Some of the steamships broke down at sea, and the capitalist newspapers were filled with scare stories about sabotage; but of course the real reason was inexperienced labor. On the steamship Ohio the chief engineer was a Washington athlete, the second engineer was a Boston dental student, and the third engineer an undergraduate student of the University of California!