Returning to China on a visit, Professor Kiang had an uncomfortable experience. On the steamer an American borrowed a hundred dollars from him, promising to return it at the journey’s end. Later, in China, when Professor Kiang needed his money, the man turned on him with angry threats, saying that he was known to be living with a woman not his wife, and that the man would report him to the university and cause him to lose his job.
Now, the situation regarding Professor Kiang’s wife was that for eight years his first wife had been hopelessly insane. In many parts of America you can divorce a wife who is insane, but in China you do not do this, because to divorce a woman is to inflict both upon her and her relatives a most dreadful disgrace. Insanity not being the woman’s fault, nor the fault of her relatives, it is unthinkable in China to seek a divorce for such a reason. What you do is to avail yourself of the privilege of having a second wife. As a rule the Westernized Chinese have but one wife, but in a case such as this they would have two, and the second wife would be treated with especial consideration because of the particular circumstances. When Professor Kiang married again, the relatives of his first wife attended the ceremony, and this same attitude to the matter was manifested by everyone. Witter Bynner went to China with Kiang, to collaborate with him in translating Chinese poetry into English, and Bynner writes:
I can testify that the second wife has been signally honored; she was the first woman, for instance, to address a body similar to our chambers of commerce in the capital of Kiang’s native province, and she broke another precedent by addressing, together with her husband, the officers of Wu Pei-fu’s army. Wu Pei-fu is now, as you know, the Dictator of Pekin and more or less of China. It will interest you to know that he and his leading generals, being Christians, were concerned to know whether there might be any conflict between Socialism and Christianity, and found them upon investigation to be expressions of the same thing. If there were any objections to Kiang’s second wife, Wu Pei-fu, as a Christian, might have been expected to feel it. Perhaps his being a Socialist, however, incapacitates him for true morality!
It had been understood that Professor Kiang was to return to the University of California; but now the Black Hand got busy. Not merely was there a flaw in Kiang’s marriage certificate; also, he was a leading Chinese Socialist, one of the founders of that movement in his own country. So he received from President Barrows a cruel and insolent letter, informing him that he was not to return. It was practically the same thing as the Gorki story, and both Gorki and Kiang were enemies of the interlocking directorate. But Semenoff was their friend, so you do not find Colonel Barrows, in espousing his Cossack hero, mentioning the fact that Semenoff was traveling in America with a lady not his wife; still less do you find him mentioning those thirty most beautiful women in Semenoff’s “summer car!”
Becoming aware of the Black Hand and its power in the institution, independent-minded men seek other occupations; the sycophants and the sluggards remain, and as a result, the quality of the teaching goes down. Every year the boys and girls pour in from the cities and ranches of California, and they are commanded to study dull subjects under dull instructors, and they prefer football and flirtation. In Berkeley there are twelve thousand, and in the Southern branch in Los Angeles four or five thousand more. Immorality is more common than scholarship; the conditions have become a scandal throughout the state, and our imperialist president finds himself with a peck of trouble on his hands, a board of quarreling regents who cannot agree what is to be done. There is a flaw, apparently, in Colonel Barrows’ doctrine of the strong man; the strong man does not always rule—especially when he is a stupid man! So our “soldier president” has just asked to be excused from his job, and allowed to become once more a humble Professor of Political Ignorance.
P. S.—After this book has been put into type an interesting development occurs at Berkeley. The editors of an independent student publication, the “Laughing Horse,” asked my permission to quote extracts from these chapters, and they printed six or eight pages in their issue of November, 1922. The publication created great excitement at the university, and a senior student by the name of Butler went to a magistrate and swore out a warrant for the arrest of Roy Chanslor, the “Laughing Horse” editor, upon the charge of publishing obscene matter. The pretext was another article in the magazine, a letter from D. H. Lawrence, the English novelist, reviewing and strongly condemning as immoral a novel by Ben Hecht. But the real reason was obviously the passages from “The Goose-step.” The “Daily Californian,” the student paper, gave the thing away, denouncing “the printing of disgusting articles by Upton Sinclair and other perverted ‘knockers.’ To jolt the university they hurled and blatted the most unprecedented compilations of lies that has (sic) yet found expression in these parts. At first the students rose in righteous wrath to ‘tar and feather’ the perpetrators of such foul, insane blusterings.”
I am informed that the action against Chanslor was instigated by a high official of the university. The student, Butler, is a son of the president of the California State Bar Association; on the eve of the trial his father came to Berkeley and declared with indignation that his son was being made a tool of, and worse, was being made a fool of. The magistrate threw out the complaint, as it failed to contain the necessary legal technicalities. Chanslor was summoned before the Undergraduate Student Affairs Committee; he stood upon his rights, and a day or two later was summoned before President Barrows and expelled from the university. I quote an account of the matter, sent to me by one of the editors of the “Laughing Horse”:
Barrows said he was doing so by a recommendation from the Student Affairs Committee, and gave as his reason not only the D. H. Lawrence letter but the poem by Witter Bynner, “Little Fly.” He did not mention the excerpts from “The Goose-step.” How Barrows can have the face to expel any student from the university for obscenity is quite beyond me! I, myself, saw Barrows sit through a “Smoker Rally” (the men’s rally before the Big Game with Stanford), at which the football coaches and prominent alumni told the most vulgar and filthy stories that anyone ever heard. The speaker of the evening, an alumnus from Pasadena, told one story that I remember that one would hear only in the coarsest society. Moreover, the campus comic monthly, “The Pelican,” prints thinly disguised obscenities of all sorts that is countenanced without a murmur. Yet Barrows solemnly upbraided Chanslor for printing this frank, straightforward and really highly moral letter. Apparently everyone has been cautioned not to let any indignation over your exposé creep into the case again.
I also quote one paragraph from a letter addressed to President Barrows, written by Roy Chanslor after his expulsion. I think it says about all there is to say on the subject:
You have apparently confused the sincere and fine and beautiful expression of a great artist and a brilliant and original thinker with the crude vulgarities and obvious obscenities regularly on tap at smoker rallies, and with the corrupt literature which I have heard is sold to those who desire it by bell-boys and train-boys. At the smoker rally held late in November, the night before the annual California-Stanford football game, it did not strike my attention that you did anything to stop the bawdy stories and the frankly vulgar exhibition of dancing which a student in black-face gave with a dummy stuffed to represent a woman, but it did strike my attention that you sat through the spectacle in a seat in the front row, tacitly, by your silence, countenancing the whole affair. This spectacle, which was frankly vulgar and obscene, apparently did not arouse in you any of the moral indignation which the letter of Mr. Lawrence did, a letter which I repeat is not obscene or corrupt or degenerate, but fine and sincere and beautiful.