CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS
We next take the Union Pacific Railroad, with its Columbia trustee for chairman, and a Rutgers trustee and two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors, two Equitable Trust Company directors, two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and three National City Bank directors; and find ourselves in Salt Lake City, in the domain of another group of mining kings, working in alliance with one of the weirdest religious organizations that have ever sanctified America, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. This is not a book on religion, so we shall merely say that the Mormons are hard-working people, who have heaped up enormous treasures, and have turned the control of these treasures over to the heads of their church. So here is a group of pious plutocrats, who run the financial, political, religious and educational life of the State of Utah.
Also, of course, they run the state university. Mr. Richard Young, the son of Joseph Young, was until quite recently chairman of the board of regents of the University of Utah, and also trustee of the Brigham Young University. He is a prominent stand-pat politician, and made it his business to see that the professors of his university said nothing impolite about the Copper Trust, or the Smelter Trust, or the Public Utility Trust, or the Latter-Day Sanctity Trust.
Seven years ago his activities culminated in a violent row. Two professors were fired without warning, and the resentment of the faculty was so great that sixteen others resigned, and the control of the university by the church and the corporations received a thorough ventilation. It appeared that professors had been admonished and punished for various strange reasons—such as mentioning the important part played by the English church in English literature; making a private criticism of a Mormon woman at a social gathering; or making an impolite remark concerning the cuspidor shown in a painting of Brigham Young, patriarch of the Mormon religion!
The two professors who had been fired were accused of criticizing the university president; also, it was charged that one of them had remarked in a private conversation: “Isn’t it too bad that we have a man like Richard Young as chairman of the board of regents.” The witnesses who told of the criticism of the president of the university were never called, and the president was never required to name them. The regents, in an elaborate public statement on the controversy, brushed this demand aside by saying that whenever there was disagreement between the president and members of the faculty, they would settle the issue by deciding, not who was right, nor who told the truth, but who was the most useful to the university!
This affair was investigated by a committee of seven professors, representing the American Association of University Professors, who issued an eighty-two page report, covering every detail of the controversy. From this evidence it appears that the charges against the professors were false; and it appears that the president was to be numbered among those many university heads who do not always tell the truth. A student at commencement had delivered an address, advocating “a public utilities commission, and investigation into the methods of mining and industrial corporations.” The interlocking directors were furious over this, and the governor of the state set to work to find out what professors had approved it. The president of the university denied that the governor had engaged in any such activities; but the report produces a mass of evidence, making it perfectly clear that the president’s statement was untrue.
Also, it appears that the interlocking regents were not above evasion of the truth. They denied knowing that the faculty of the university had adopted a petition for redress of grievances—and this although full details about the faculty action had been published in the newspapers nine or ten days before the regents met! By keeping at it, the committee of professors extracted a few admissions from these saintly plutocrats; thus, they got Chairman Young to admit over his own signature “that the president had warned a certain prominent professor that his activity in behalf of a public utilities bill might injure the university; that he advised an instructor against participating in a political campaign, and enjoined a partisan rally on the campus.”
It must be a difficult matter, running a university in the capital of the Latter-Day Saints. You have to know that your wealthy regents are living in polygamous relationships, which differ from those maintained by wealthy regents in other parts of the country in that they are crimes under the United States law, but acts of holiness under the church law; and you have to know in just what ways to know about these semi-secret families, and in just what ways to be ignorant of them. Outside is all the world, laughing at you; and naturally you are sensitive to that laughter, and your professors are still more so. They cannot be entirely unaware of modern thought; and so you have to summon them to your office and plead with them, pointing out how certain regents object that they “have been teaching against the experiences of Joseph Smith.” You have to get them “to bring into class discussions and explanations of the term God or deity, if they can conscientiously do so.” You have to explain to them that unless they “can conscientiously do so,” the legislature will withhold appropriations, and they will not get their salaries.
And then, when the Latter-Day Grafters put pressure upon you, you have to remove a competent professor from the head of your Department of English, and put in a bishop of the Mormon church, the distinguished editor of “The Juvenile Instructor, a monthly magazine devoted to the interests of the Sunday Schools of the Mormon church”; also author of “The Restoration of the Gospel, a volume of Mormon apologetics, consisting chiefly of lessons prepared for the Young Ladies’ Improvement Association, 1910-1911, with an introduction by Joseph F. Smith, Jr., of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, 1912.” And when your professors object to things like this, your interlocking regents retire you, and put the brother of the Mormon bishop into your place!
That is what happened at the University of Utah; Mr. Richard Young, grand saint of the board of regents, put in as president of his institution Mr. J. A. Widstoe, M. A., author of “Joseph Smith, the Scientist,” in which he proves that the Mormon founder anticipated all modern science—excepting only Darwinism, which is taboo by the Church! Now Mr. Richard Young has gone to his eternal reward as grand saint, and his place is taken by Mr. Waldemar Van Cott, attorney for the Rio Grande Railroad and the Utah Fuel Company, and the most active agent in the attack on the liberal professors. President Widstoe has been promoted to “apostle” of the Church, and his place as head of the university has been taken by Dr. George Thomas, professor of economics. What kind of economics they now teach at the university is summed up for me by a lawyer of Salt Lake City, who was formerly on the faculty of the institution. He says: