As manager of their program of “education” they selected one Thomas Cooper, at a larger salary than any “educator” in North Dakota had ever been paid before. Forty-five thousand dollars a year was pledged, and Mr. Cooper set to work to “educate” the farmers as to the wickedness of Ladd, Bolley, and others. After three years the balance-sheet of the organization showed liabilities of forty thousand dollars, and assets of one brilliant idea. The bankers of the organization went to that other group of bankers who comprised the trustees of the North Dakota Agricultural College, and proposed that the college should take over Mr. Cooper and his salary and his deficit, and should give him entire control of the experiment station and extension division, and joint authority over the instruction division, with eighteen North Dakota bankers as an advisory board! This little job was put through in 1913, and the exact facts were hidden from the people of North Dakota, and two years later the Nonpartisan League newspapers had to steal the documents in the case in order to make them known!

Now behold Mr. Cooper and his eighteen bankers in control of a state experiment station! The first thing they do is to lock Professor Bolley out of his laboratories, and the poor janitor is somewhat bewildered, not knowing whom to let in! They even take away from his department the research money which he had got from the linseed crushers! They forbid Ladd and Bolley to go to the state capital while the state legislature is in session. They issue a written order forbidding them to publish press bulletins or newspaper articles until these have received the O. K. of Mr. Cooper; and when Professor Bolley submits bulletins they chop them to pieces and publish them in such garbled form that they make nonsense. For four years they publish nothing at all of Bolley’s work.

The brunt of the struggle fell on President Worst, not because he had done anything himself, but because he stood by his professors. In the fall of 1914 Worst was in Washington, attending a convention of the agricultural colleges, and the board passed a secret resolution promoting him to be president-emeritus—an honorary degree hitherto unknown in North Dakota agricultural culture. They had conceived the clever idea of putting Ladd in his place, because this would pacify the people, and they believed that Ladd would prove a poor executive, and would be unable to hold on. They came to Ladd and begged him to accept, and assured him that Worst had consented—which was not true.

When the governor of the state learned what they had done, he fell into a panic, and ordered them to rescind the action, and for a year thereafter they backed and filled and argued, trying to persuade Worst to resign and Ladd to take his place. In the following year Governor Hanna, himself a prominent banker and director in many corporations, appointed a new board of regents, with a banker as president, and another banker and his lawyer making the majority. To this new board President Worst protested against the disorganization in the institution, and proposed some division of authority. The interlocking newspapers lied about what he had said, and the board again got up the nerve to kick him upstairs. The students met, and in mass conventions denounced and protested, and the board spent three days badgering them trying to find out who had written an editorial of protest.

Finally, Worst went out and Ladd came in—on condition that he was to have complete authority, and that Professor Bolley was to remain. Senator Ladd tells me that as soon as he had been elected, and in the very room where these conditions had been agreed to, one member of the board asked him to get rid of Bolley, and called him a “damned fool” when he refused. After that there was never a single meeting of the board that they did not pick a row with him over this issue. Soon they began asking him to resign; at first they asked him to write his resignation, and later they wrote it for him—all they asked him to do was to sign it!

Also there were filed some forty odd charges of unprofessional conduct against Professor Bolley, whom they had now discovered to be “crazy.” They gave this “crazy” man a busy time for several years. Two members of the board came to Fargo, to demand that Bolley should be fired; then an investigating committee of the faculty was appointed, which completely exonerated him. But the board insisted that this was a partisan committee; they appointed a committee of their own members, and this committee called on the chairman of the faculty committee, and abused him for not making a proper investigation; then they went to Bolley, and took up one question after another, and Bolley refuted each. After three hours one member of the board said: “Well, I think it’s time to quit.” The second said: “If you are satisfied, I am.” The board received this report of complete exoneration from its committee, and decided they would have to discontinue the procedure—but they refused to exonerate Bolley! The controversy was carried to the national government, and the Department of Agriculture appointed a committee, which also investigated, and could find nothing wrong with the “crazy” professor.

This whole story of Bolley makes you think of the melodramas we used to see on the Bowery, where the heroine is tied to a railroad track, or tied on a log which is going into a saw-mill, and the rescuers come galloping up on horseback at the instant when the villain seems triumphant. In the fall of 1916 the Non-partisan League swept the State of North Dakota, and on January 1, 1917, Lynn Frasier came galloping into the governorship of North Dakota, and the farmers of the state got the results of Professor Bolley’s experiments once more. Thunders of applause from the gallery!

CHAPTER XLIII
THE UNIVERSITY OF WHEAT

The state of North Dakota is small in population, likewise in its influence in the academic world; but its story is important, because its people have blazed a path upon which the rest of us are destined to travel for the next decade. What has happened in North Dakota education will happen in hundreds of our institutions, and therefore it is desirable that academic liberals should know the story.

The University of North Dakota is located at Grand Forks. The president from 1909 to 1913 was Frank L. McVey, who was chairman of a tax commission in Minnesota, and got in the way of “Jesse James” Hill, and was shunted off to North Dakota to get rid of him. That he was not a dangerous radical may be judged from the fact that in 1912 he objected to three of his professors taking part in the Progressive movement. In 1914 Professor Lewinsohn of the law school resigned his position with a dignified statement, and the president replied by a letter, in which he set up the contention that college professors are in the same position as judges.