The Goose-step: A Study of American Education

by Upton Sinclair

Let us continue East on the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr. Morgan and two of his partners for directors, a recent Harvard overseer and Massachusetts Tech trustee for chairman, a Harvard overseer and Smith College trustee, a Cornell trustee, an Amherst trustee, a Hampton trustee and a Union Theological Seminary trustee for directors, also three First National Bank directors; and we come to the “Twin Cities,” from which the Northwestern grain country is run. Here we are in one of the strongholds of the Steel Trust, also of the Lumber Trust and the grain speculators. Minnesota contains a great part of the iron ore of the United States, and the Steel Trust owns it all, and in alliance with the millers and the lumbermen, it runs the government of the state, and of course the state university. The university had a most wonderful endowment of government land, covered with the finest white and Norway pine. The Lumber Trust wanted this timber, and they got practically all of it. Likewise the Steel Trust wanted the ore that was under the land, and they got it; and sometimes it happened that the officials who sold this land at bargain prices were also trustees of the university.

For a generation the grand duke who ran the University of Minnesota was John S. Pillsbury, co-author with his two brothers of a famous work entitled “Pillsbury’s Best,” widely known all over the United States. I had better abandon this feeble jest and be explicit, stating that Governor Pillsbury belonged to a family of flour manufacturers, the founders of the Milling Trust. Governor Pillsbury himself went in more especially for lumber; he got fraudulent possession of more public lands than any other person in the state, and gave some of the profits to the university, and so is called the “father of the university.” Now he is dead, and the grand duke of his institution is his son-in-law, Fred B. Snyder, president of a mining company and director of the biggest bank and trust company in Minneapolis. As his right-hand man he has Pierce Butler, railroad attorney, a hard-fisted and aggressive agent of the plutocracy, counsel for the Great Northern Railroad. As his assistants he has the vice-president of a national bank in Duluth, who is director of another national bank and a large owner of land and mines; the biggest dry-goods wholesaler in Minneapolis, director in the city traction lines; a water-power financier; the wife and daughter-in-law of two mining and lumber magnates; a physician, son-in-law of “Jesse James” Hill, the railroad king; and another very wealthy physician, on whose yacht on the Mississippi River the regents sometimes hold their meetings.

I remember Lincoln Steffens, telling twenty years ago of the Shame of the Cities, describing how the politicians in Pittsburgh would travel to Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and other cities, to find out the latest wrinkles in graft, with a view to applying them at home. It occurs to me that the interlocking regents of Minnesota must have sent a commission to study methods at the University of Pennsylvania; for when I asked Minnesota professors to tell me what happened to them, I heard the same story that I had heard in the Wharton School of Finance, told in the very same phrases.

If you displease your superiors of the Milling Trust, you may get no changes in your courses, but may have to teach large classes of freshmen, over and over again the same weary routine, until your heart breaks. You ask for more advanced classes, and you do not get them; you do not get promotions or increases in salary, and when you inquire the reason, your superiors are politely vague. If you still do not take the hint and abandon your independent manners and beliefs, the head of your department sends for you and tells you that he is very sorry, but there are a lot of cranks running the state just now. “Here I have a letter from the dean, who has it from the president, who has it from a regent.” If your superior happens to like you, he offers you one more opportunity to recant, or he offers “to land you at Wisconsin”; he will give you “a bully recommendation,” it will be “a fine opportunity for you.” If, on the other hand, he does not happen to like you, then you pick up your evening paper, and read a scare headline on the front page, to the effect that you have been dismissed from the university for conduct unbecoming the academic profession.

There were some students who thought it would be interesting to have an “open discussion club.” They were handicapped by many regulations; and, quite casually, the dean of student affairs would stroll in on their meetings, to keep watch over them. One of the students went to a member of the faculty, and asked him if he would come and explain to the students the doctrines of Karl Marx; the professor smiled, and answered that he wanted to stay at the university. I am happy to be able to say that the students were not so timid as the professor, and they now meet quite openly, calling themselves the “Seekers.”

They have had several grave mishaps at this University of the Ore Trust. First, a man came and registered in the classes, and was discovered to be a Communist! The man had been brought to the United States when he was three years old, and so he was an alien, and was slated for deportation. But the government was in an embarrassing position; the man did not know what country to claim, and the government couldn’t find out, and didn’t know where to send him! Needless to say, however, the university got rid of him in a hurry.

They had for three years a Harvard Ph.D., educated in England; after the fashion of Englishmen, he was a member of the Fabian Society, and thought he had a perfect right to his political views, just the same as if he had been at Oxford. He began working for the Committee of Forty-eight, making speeches at other places, and so he got into the newspapers. The head of his department sent for him: “We have to keep out of the newspapers; look at me, I have been here twelve years, and I have never got into them!” But this instructor would not change his evil practices, so he too had to be got rid of.

Meet Professor John Henry Gray, one of the most distinguished economists in the United States. Professor Gray was for fifteen years at Northwestern University, and for fifteen at the University of Minnesota. He is not a Socialist, but an extremely mild liberal, a quiet man and a patient worker, who gets the facts on his subject and sets them forth regardless of consequences. He has been selected to represent the United States government on many economic commissions abroad—at the International Cooperative Congress at Manchester, 1902; at the International Congress on Insurance for Laboring Men, at Düsseldorf, and the International Congress of Commerce and Industry, at Ostend. He was appointed on a commission of the National Civic Federation in 1905, to study municipal ownership abroad; again, in 1911-1914, to investigate the regulation of public service corporations. He is associate editor of two economic journals—I might go on to give a long list of his honors and positions. But Professor Gray had the bad taste to become converted to the doctrines of municipal ownership, and the still worse taste, while working for the government in Washington during the war, to interfere with some of the interlocking directors from his home state, engaged in their usual practice of robbing the government. So Professor Gray’s life at the university became a torment.

They removed him from the leadership of his department, saying that he had no executive ability and couldn’t keep order. They would move him from one room to another, and subject him to every humiliation. He was sixty-three years of age, and would soon be entitled to a pension, so he held on; but he never got a “raise,” and he was told that he never would get it, nor would any man he recommended ever get it. They brought in a subordinate from the census bureau in Washington, and paid this man $1,500 a year more than Professor Gray was getting. They “reorganized” his department, deposing him from the headship, and combining it with a “School of Business,” and so finally succeeded in making him resign.

Or consider the strange experience of a young instructor of chemistry named Bernard Dietrichson. He had a dispute with his dean, and two members of the law faculty were appointed by the regents to make an inquiry. This committee reported that the department had been seriously mismanaged by the dean, and that Mr. Dietrichson “had done nothing to merit discipline or dismissal.” This report was received by a committee of the regents, with Pierce Butler, chief bully of the board of regents, in charge. It issued a decision, stating that it had examined the findings of the investigating committee of lawyers, and that on the basis of these findings it held that there had been no mismanagement by the dean, and that Mr. Dietrichson ought to be dismissed! The regents’ committee then suppressed the text of the findings of the investigating committee; but unfortunately for Mr. Butler, the document containing the suppressed facts came into the hands of Dietrichson, and he published it. Thereupon, the dean of the chemistry department was dismissed, and the department reorganized—a complete confession that Dietrichson was right. Nevertheless, he is still out of the university!