Next for the state university. Here we have to deal with a “war case.” I do not plan to make use of “war cases” as such, for I realize that intolerance in war time becomes what Barrows of California said it ought to be—a virtue. The only war cases to which I shall refer are those in which the war was a pretext, and the real motive was to get rid of an enemy of the plutocracy. My investigations indicate that this kind of war case constitutes one hundred per cent of the total. There may have been some professors in American universities and colleges who sympathized with the German Kaiser and desired to see him win; all I can say is that I have not come upon such a case.
At the University of Oregon was Mr. Allen Eaton, one of the most public-spirited young teachers it has been my fortune to hear about. There was an epidemic of typhoid in the town of Eugene, and eighty of the students were ill, and more than two hundred of the townspeople—twenty-two of them died within a fortnight. Mr. Eaton ascertained from the physicians of the town that the city water was contaminated, and so he published an article advising everyone to boil the water before drinking it. The water supply was controlled by a private water company, in which the banks were interested, also prominent members of the Eugene Commercial Club. Mr. Eaton’s banker and others of these citizens undertook to “persuade” him to keep quiet about the epidemic; “so much talk is giving the town a black eye.” They made threats which forced the young professor either to “knuckle down” or to fight in the open. He chose the latter course, and he forced municipal ownership of the waterworks; a modern filtration system was installed, and in ten years there has not been a single case of typhoid traceable to the city water. We shall find in the course of this book many boards of trustees laying down the law that university professors are not allowed to take part in politics, but I think you must admit that in this case it might fairly be claimed that Mr. Eaton was forced into politics to protect his own self-respect.
He was six times elected to the Oregon state legislature, his chief local opponent being a hard-boiled politician in the hire of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Eaton made in the legislature an immaculate record; he exposed and abolished a wasteful type of road which the contractors were building in the state; he planned the Oregon building at the San Francisco Exposition, the most beautiful building on the grounds; he labored to introduce art into county fairs—and if you know what an American county fair is you can understand what a job the young instructor had! All this time his pay stayed low and promotion was lacking; nevertheless, he gave lectures for the people at the university and all over the state, and taught them what true art means—the people’s own creation of beauty in their daily lives.
People who have lived all their lives in Oregon assure me that there has never been a man, either in the university or in the state legislature, who has done as much for education as Allen Eaton did. He undertook a campaign to increase the appropriation for the university; the governor of the state opposed him—this gentleman, being wealthy, sent his children to a fashionable university in the East. Eaton put through a bill to raise the appropriation from $47,500 to $125,000, and when the governor vetoed the proposition, he directed a state-wide referendum campaign and carried the measure. He worked equally hard for the public schools; but at the same time he committed the crime of forcing the taxation of water-power sites, and advocating the direct election of United States senators. Still worse, he committed the crime of carrying to the Supreme Court of the state a case which kept the Southern Pacific Railroad from stealing sixty-six million dollars worth of timber-lands from the people of Oregon. Mr. Eaton is not a lawyer, but he got lawyers to help him, and he won the case; so the special interests of Oregon were out to “get” him at any price.
When the war came it happened that Allen Eaton was in Chicago, and he attended the convention of the People’s Council. He took no part in the affair, not being himself a pacifist; but he wrote an honest account of the proceedings for the Portland “Journal,” and so the large scale grafters got their chance. The Commercial Club of Eugene adopted a set of resolutions, bringing seven separate charges of disloyalty; the Spanish War Veterans endorsed the charges, and the regents of the university were summoned in solemn conclave, and Mr. Eaton appeared for trial, with the Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Commercial Club of Eugene as the prosecutors. Every one of the charges was disproven in every detail. The president of the university stood by Mr. Eaton, and the faculty of the university adopted a resolution in his support. The regents themselves admitted his innocence, for they stated that they “did not intend to accuse him of intending disloyalty to his government.” Nevertheless, they accepted his resignation, giving him less than ten days’ notice in which to shape his life plans—the Chamber of Commerce was in that much of a hurry!
Mr. Eaton ran for the legislature again, and among the super-patriots who set out to compass his defeat was a leading banker, who shortly afterwards was arrested for setting fire to a building in which he had stored a quantity of potatoes, held as an unsuccessful war-speculation; also a hundred percent sheriff, whose boast was that he had broken up a public meeting in defense of Mr. Eaton. At the very time he did this he had in his pockets forty-five hundred dollars which he had stolen from the county; a little later this was discovered and he was forced to leave overnight!
It might be worth while to mention that at the very time that Allen Eaton was fired from the University of Oregon, Professor Foerster of the University of Munich, an ardent pacifist, was denouncing the German government and being widely quoted by the allies; he was ostracized by the entire faculty of his university—nevertheless, the Kaiser’s government let him continue to teach, because in Germany they really understand what academic freedom is, and stand by the principle. In all Great Britain there was only one case during the war of interference with academic freedom, and that was the case of Bertrand Russell, who was prosecuted and sent to prison for his pacifist activities. But in America, which understands no kind of freedom except the freedom of mobs to suppress anybody they do not like, I know of just two great universities in which some man or group of men were not hounded from their positions, for pointing out this or that unwelcome truth to the public.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CHIMES
We move a couple of hundred miles farther north to Seattle. It may be difficult to believe that there was ever a time when students in an American university took an active interest in the people’s rights, and declined to receive favors from wholesale corrupters of public life; but such was actually the case ten years ago, at the height of the Progressive movement in the state of Washington.
The grand duke who ran the higher education of that state was Colonel Blethen, publisher of the Seattle “Times,” an exceptional old scoundrel who had manipulated street railways in Minnesota, and then brought his fortune to Seattle and bought a newspaper, which he used for the rawest kind of blackmailing, by a “strong arm” advertising department. Colonel Blethen had been made a member of the board of regents of the university; and in the effort to rehabilitate himself and his family name, he spent twelve thousand dollars for a set of chimes, which he presented to the university with the stipulation that they were to be known by his name.