Most of the time it has been under cover and has consisted in efforts to bring pressure to bear on the president and board of regents. But a number of times it has come out into the open. A governor some years ago in his inaugural address announced his determination to bring about the removal of Professor ——, and a few times an effort has been made in the legislature to make elimination of his department a condition of legislative support for the university. But while a good deal of publicity was given to these more spectacular assaults on academic freedom, they had little effect except perhaps to strengthen the administrative conviction that such departments were a good deal of a nuisance. Far more effective are the ever active forces which are working silently without any publicity upon those in control—president and regents. Nor does the failure to exercise power to remove indicate necessarily lack of real influence. There are many ways of disciplining an obstreperous faculty member without actual removal. A president in his control of salaries, distribution of library and other departmental funds may withhold from an offending faculty member opportunities accorded to those who have not incurred his displeasure[displeasure]. In the course of my experience as a faculty member I have seen a good deal of the sinister side of university control.
And peace reigns in the country of the Lumber Trust. Last year the big lumber companies cut wages, and on an investment of three millions they paid dividends of seven millions. At Port Angeles they are bringing in ship-loads of Japanese labor, in defiance of the law. The lumber-jacks and the blanket-stiffs work in hourly peril of life and limb; they sleep in filthy bunks and eat rotten food, and if they attempt to organize and better their conditions, their organizations are destroyed and their meeting halls sacked by mobs of business men. If they appeal to the public authorities they are laughed at; if they appeal to the public their voices are unheard; if they exercise the elemental right of self-defense, as they did at Centralia, they are shot, or beaten to death, or castrated with pocket knives and hanged, or tried before a mob jury and sentenced to ten or twenty years in jail. These things are done, not as acts of primitive barbarism, but as a business system; they are planned by the interlocking directorate, sitting in padded arm-chairs around tables in directors’ rooms; they are carried out by efficient executives telephoning from mahogany desks. Such is the rule of the Lumber Trust; and at the University of the Lumber Trust the professors know all about it; they go to their classes and teach what their masters tell them to teach, and on behalf of justice and humanity they utter not one single peep.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE ANACONDA
We take the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr. Morgan himself for a director, also two Morgan partners, one of them a recent Harvard overseer and a Massachusetts Tech trustee, and the other a Harvard overseer and Smith College trustee; also an Amherst trustee, a Hampton trustee, a Union Theological Seminary director, a Cornell trustee, and three First National Bank directors. We travel East until we come to the mining country; first, Montana, which has been swallowed whole by an enormous corporation, appropriately called the Anaconda. The people of this state maintain a university, scattered in four widely separated places, in order to please various real estate interests.
The State Board of Education, which runs matters for the Anaconda, contains the following appointed members: the personal attorney of Senator Clark, sometimes called the richest man in the world, and certainly the worst corruptionist who ever broke into the United States Senate; another attorney for big business, a hard fighting reactionary, who “grilled” a professor of the university law school for the crime of not giving his son high marks; another corporation lawyer, and a fourth lawyer who is a mild progressive; two merchants of the aggressive Chamber of Commerce type; one rich and conservative farmer; and one very subservient school principal.
The chancellor of the university up to last year was Edward C. Elliott, and he had to handle not merely this board, but the politicians of the Anaconda who run the state legislature; he had to go to them every year to beg for appropriations, and he had the bright thought that he would try to have an annual tax provided for higher education in the state. He suggested to Louis Levine, his professor of economics, to make a study of the whole tax problem in Montana. Professor Levine set to work—beginning with the subject of mining companies and their contributions, or lack of contributions, to the state taxes! In the course of the year 1918 occurred a state tax conference, and Professor Levine addressed it, and was furiously attacked by a representative of the Anaconda Copper Company, which had packed the conference with its lawyers and lobbyists.
Toward the end of the year Professor Levine completed his report on mine taxation, in which he proved that the great corporations paid only a small percentage of the taxes they owed the state. He submitted this report to the chancellor, who read it and had a desperate case of “cold feet.” His contract was about to come up for renewal, and he decided that he had better shift the responsibility to the State Board of Education, which governs the university. Professor Levine agreed to this, but on the stipulation that if the board declined to publish the document, he should be free to publish it himself. He took the position that if he submitted to pressure in this issue, he would lose the moral right to lecture to classes of young people.
Now began a bitter struggle behind the scenes, with the governor of the state and a senator-henchman of the Anaconda striving frantically to keep the report from appearing. Finally the poor chancellor wrote to Levine, forbidding him to publish the report; Levine answered that there had been a definite understanding, made in the presence of President Sisson of Montana State University, that Levine was to be free to publish the report if he so desired. Accordingly he published it,[[L]] and the chancellor, in a rage, immediately “fired” him.
[L]. Taxation of Mines in Montana: B. W. Huebsch, New York.[York.] The book won the commendation of Professor Seligman of Columbia, America’s leading conservative authority on taxation.