I answered that I did not see that age had anything to do with the matter, nor could I understand how our interview could be regarded as “confidential”; I had come to him, a public official, acting in a public matter. There could have been nothing “personal” between us, for I did not know President Birge, I had never even heard his name until I read his interview in a Madison newspaper, stating that I was an unfit person to address the university students.
Said President Birge: “I did not say you were unfit.”
Said I: “I don’t know what your word was, but your action was certainly to that effect.”
Then Attorney Butler spoke up, and wanted to know if I had threatened that if I were not permitted the use of a university building I would attack President Birge and the university in some other hall. To this I said that my action followed automatically from the situation. I had come to Madison for the purpose of delivering to the students an address entitled: “The College Student and the Modern Crisis.” If the university would permit me to deliver this address, I should deliver it. If they wouldn’t permit me to deliver this address, I should naturally have to discuss the question of why they took such action. Mr. Butler’s answer was that nobody should come to the university, with his consent, and try to bulldoze the board of regents by any kind of threat.
The board offered me an additional five minutes, if I wished it, but I answered that the greatest virtue in an orator was to know when he had said his say. I thanked them and retired; and that afternoon they held another session, and Mr. Butler and Dr. Seaman, ably seconded by the bathtub manufacturer and the wholesale grocer, voted that I should be refused the use of the gymnasium. The seven other members of the board voted that President Birge should be requested to grant me the use of the gymnasium. President Birge himself did not vote, and I am sorry to state that the malted milk regent was absent and did not get recorded. Needless to say, all this publicity—it filled many columns of Madison’s two newspapers for five days—resulted in the gymnasium’s being packed on Wednesday evening. Some two thousand students heard my scheduled address, and asked me questions for an hour afterwards, and the walls of the building did not collapse, nor have any of the students since thrown any bombs.
Next afternoon I met the champion tennis team of the university, and played each of its members in turn, and beat them in straight sets; and I am told that the student body regarded this as a far more sensational incident than my Socialist speech. An elderly professor came up to me on the campus next day—I had never seen him before, and don’t know his name; but he assured me, with deep conviction, that I had made a grave blunder—I should have played the tennis matches first, and made the speech second, and no building on the campus would have been big enough to hold the crowd!
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE PRICE OF LIBERTY
The University of Wisconsin has the reputation of being the most liberal institution of higher education in the United States, and on the whole I think the reputation is deserved. I have shown what a struggle it took to introduce one little impulse of new thinking into the place; and you must realize that every mite of freedom has been won by the same struggle, and the maintaining of it depends upon somebody’s willingness to be disagreeable. I talked with one professor, who is known throughout the United States as a writer and lecturer, not a Socialist, but a tireless advocate of social justice. This man has won, and he holds grimly the right to have his own say and his own way. He assigns to his graduate students “The Brass Check” as required reading, and as their thesis they make a study of some capitalist newspaper in its handling of half a dozen crucial public issues, such as the steel strike and Mexican intervention.
The rub comes when the professor goes outside and lectures to city clubs and chambers of commerce, and gets into the newspapers in favor of the recognition of Soviet Russia. Then all the reactionaries in the state clamor for his scalp. He said to me: “They say a fox learns to enjoy being chased, and in the same way I have had to learn to enjoy outmatching my enemies. I feel that I am being stalked by a band of thugs; I have to set out deliberately and consciously to build up my prestige throughout the state, to keep myself in the public mind, so that my enemies won’t dare go beyond abusing me. Manifestly, that means that academic freedom is only for the man who has a tough skin and can be happy in a fight. The young man, also the weak man, is helpless; if he tries to tell the truth about anything, he’ll have to go out and write life insurance for a living.”
Such is the judgment, after nearly two decades’ experience, of one of America’s freest college professors, in America’s freest university. That many men should fail in such a test is inevitable. There is another professor in the university, an elderly man, who began his career as a Socialist of the academic type; he is the author of standard books on Socialism, and all through the years when he made his reputation he recognized the unearned increment of land as a grave form of social injustice. He has now changed his views, and has become the tamest of conservatives, a pitiable figure. It happened recently that a friend of mine was in his office, and discovered an economic basis for this transformation. Some one wanted to buy some lots from the old professor; and the price was two thousand dollars each, he said. He listened to some protest of the would-be purchaser; then he said: “I know; the price was eighteen hundred a couple of weeks ago, but it has now gone up.”