CHAPTER XXXV
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LUMBER TRUST
We take the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was plundered by the founder of Stanford, aided by the father of a Stanford trustee and the father of a California trustee, and which now has a Rutgers College trustee, an Equitable Trust, a Guaranty Trust, and a National City Bank director. We travel north for a day and a little more, and find ourselves in a country ruled with iron hand by three great lumber companies, and the interlocking banks which finance them. The headquarters of this oligarchy of the Northwest are at Portland and Seattle, and we begin with the former city. You expect, perhaps, to find a lumber country crude and wild; but you will find in Portland an old city with a long-established aristocracy, as much concerned with its ancestors as Philadelphia.
Fifteen years ago there was a strong movement for social justice in Oregon, led by reformers who fondly imagined that if you gave the people the powers of direct legislation they would have the intelligence to protect their own interests. We see now that the hope was delusive; the people have not the intelligence to help themselves, and the interlocking directorate is vigorously occupied to see that they do not get this intelligence. To this end they utilize two institutions, Reed College in Portland, which is privately endowed, and the University of Oregon, located in the neighboring town of Eugene. As we have seen with Eastern universities, it makes no particle of difference whether an institution is directly owned and controlled by the plutocracy, or indirectly controlled through the plutocracy’s political machine.
The grand duke who attends to the education of Oregon is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National Bank of Portland, and vice president of a trust company and an insurance company which handle the finances of the state. Mr. Mills is an active and efficient ruler; as his right-hand man he maintains a political boss, Gus Moser, and through him he beat the teachers’ tenure law in Oregon, denouncing it as a move to establish a “teachers’ soviet.” He called in the Black Hand from California to his aid, and the pamphlets of Mr. Clum were distributed in Oregon, and a law was put through the legislature to compel teachers to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, the flag, and the state. There is as yet no law requiring any oath of loyalty to truth, to freedom, and to justice.
In Reed College was a president, Foster, who had progressive ideas. He hired a liberal young professor who had just been fired from the University of Washington, Joseph K. Hart, now one of the editors of “The Survey”; and for three years the interlocking trustees fought to get rid of Professor Hart, and of Foster, who stood by Hart. Under such circumstances the regular procedure is to starve out the college; but they could not very well do it in this case, because they owned all the real estate surrounding the college, and the college was the main source of the real estate’s value. Nevertheless, the editor of the Portland “Oregonian,” the old Tory newspaper which manages the thinking of the people of Oregon, laid down the law that Reed College should get no publicity so long as Hart and Foster stayed.
The interlocking trustee who runs Reed College is Mr. James B. Kerr, who studied law in the office of an ancient reactionary, Senator Spooner, and is general counsel for Mr. Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Mr. Kerr evolved from his legal mind a scheme to have a larger board of regents, taking in the former trustees, and making them a minority; so President Foster retired, and Professor Hart, who was away doing war work, was authorized to stay away![[K]] A professor of history from the University of Washington was asked to become the new president, and when he was installed, Mr. Mills, in his role as general overseer of education, attended the ceremonies and made the principal address, in which he laid down the law to the new incumbent: “The business men of Oregon wish the youth of the state to become this and not that, we wish them to be ‘shaped’ in this way and not that way.” Educators who were present described to me the insolence, not merely of the grand duke’s words, but of his manner. The board of regents of Reed College now consists of Mr. Kerr; Mr. Ladd, chairman of the Ladd and Tilton Bank; an elderly department store proprietor; a reactionary judge; and a retired clergyman.
[K]. One professor vigorously denies that this was the purpose of the enlarging of the board; but no one can deny that this was the effect. When I submit this comment to this gentleman, he tells me that it is “misleading.” At the same time he gives me an opportunity to test his accuracy. He says: “It is my recollection that Mr. Hart was not encouraged by the council to expect the increased salary, which he demanded as a condition of his return.” I submitted this proposition to Professor Hart, who replied:
“I hope Professor X’s memory is usually more reliable than this. No question of salary was involved. Frankly, I do not know what was involved. I was on leave of absence, in the East. My leave of absence covered the academic year 1919-20. Toward the middle of the year, finding that I was anxious to remain in the East another year, I asked the college authorities for an extension of my leave for another year. You can see that that request involved no financial obligation on the part of the college, as I was on leave without pay and merely asked for a continuance of that status for another year. That was the whole question. Moreover, the college authorities were never courteous enough to tell me what had happened in the case. However, a friend in the faculty who knew of the discussions wrote me that the council felt that in view of the general situation it was best for me not to come back to the college, and that therefore extending my leave would be an empty form. Those are the facts.”