Nothing specific was sent to me. But, by what chain of circumstances need not be told, I saw with my own eyes a letter from Pierce Butler addressed to President Burton asking for my decapitation. The neatest thing you ever saw—not a direct order, and not even a request for my dismissal, but a carefully worded statement to the effect that it seemed to him (Butler) regrettable that the name of the university had been linked up in the press with the name of myself. That was all. But Burton sent it down the line of officials as a positive decree and my fate at Minnesota was settled. Usually, as you perhaps are aware, the thing is done by word of mouth only. Butler, of course, never imagined that this letter would reach my eyes.
Mr. Butler remains grand bully of the university; but here also we are at the “big scene” in the melodrama—the villain has the heroine helpless, but in the distance we hear the galloping hoofs of the rescuer’s horses! The farmers of Minnesota with their Non-partisan League, and the workers of the cities with their unions, have got together into the Farmer-Labor party, and they have just elected their own United States senator. Before long they may also elect a governor of their state, and the University of the Ore Trust may become the University of the people of Minnesota.
P.S.—As this book is going to the printer President Harding, wishing to show the public exactly how contemptuous of public opinion it is possible for a public official to be, sends in the nomination of Grand Bully Butler for justice of the United States Supreme Court!
CHAPTER XLVI
INTRODUCING A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
From the University of Minnesota we take the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, which has a Princeton trustee and a recent New York University and Yale trustee for directors, and two National City Bank directors. Overnight we come to Madison, Wisconsin, where for the first time we find an institution of higher education which has partly emerged from under the shadow of the White Terror. The reason for this is one man—Senator LaFollette, who for forty years has been fighting the battle of the people in his state. LaFollette has not always had his way; he has been in again and out again half a dozen times; but the thought of him is never out of the minds of the reactionaries, and many things they have wished to do in their university they have not dared to do. So at Wisconsin are two professors who are “rank” Socialists, and perhaps a dozen others more or less on the way to “rankness.” Just now the state administration is LaFollette’s, but the administration of the university is reactionary, a relic of the war hysteria.
The grand duke of the plutocratic element of the board is Mr. A. J. Horlick, whose contribution to American scholarship is a brand of malted milk, with a picture of a cow from which the commodity is understood to be derived. Quite recently the president of the University of Wisconsin announced that no one would be permitted to address the university who had not supported the government during the war. Mr. Horlick has proven his right to be numbered among the hundred percent patriots, the firm of which he is head having been indicted by the United States government and fined fifty thousand dollars for the hoarding of flour. (Query: Is malted milk made out of flour?)
The most active reactionary upon the board is Mr. Harry J. Butler, a railroad attorney of Madison; he is ably seconded by Dr. Seaman, a physician, anti-LaFollette candidate for governor last year; also by a wholesale grocer, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, two other attorneys, and a manufacturer’s wife. For many years the university had a liberal president; since his death they have had an elderly zoologist of reactionary temper, who deftly dodges trouble by “passing the buck” to his board. The liberals, inside the university and out, are biding their time; they strengthened their hold on the state at the recent election, and now hope to get one or two more members of the board, so that when a new president is chosen he may be of their kind.
Last winter it was rumored that I was coming East, and the students of the Social Science Club asked if I would deliver an address at the university. Before I had time to answer, I learned from newspaper clippings that the president of the university had announced that I was not a proper person to be heard by the students, and would not be granted the use of a hall. I have to spend some time every day declining invitations to deliver lectures, and the elderly Wisconsin zoologist might have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had waited before he spoke. Of course, when he told me I couldn’t come, I felt compelled to go.
President Birge had stated in the Madison “Capital-Times” that “Upton Sinclair’s attack on journalism could only be fairly expounded if a representative of the Associated Press or other organized journalistic body were present at the same time to answer.” Apparently it was the president’s idea that I never talked on any subject but the newspapers, which of course was underestimating the range of my discontent. However, I wired the “Capital-Times,” asking them to convey to their president the information, “I have been trying in every possible way to inveigle the Associated Press into answering ‘The Brass Check’ in any manner they might choose. I have publicly challenged them and their leading representatives a dozen different times. If President Birge will persuade the Associated Press to send a representative to debate with me, he will confer upon me the greatest favor I could name.”
President Birge made no answer to this, and on Friday, April 28th, when I arrived in Madison, I learned that the students of the Social Science Club had arranged that the meeting should be held on the following Monday in the high school auditorium. I thought it would be interesting to collect a university president for this book, so the first thing I did was to go and pay a call on Dr. Birge.