We set out for Pittsburgh; and we can take either the Baltimore and Ohio, with a Johns Hopkins trustee for president and another Johns Hopkins trustee for director, also a Pittsburgh trustee, a Princeton trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Teacher’s College trustee, a Lehigh trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First National Bank director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania; or we can take the Pennsylvania Railroad, which is interlocked with the Guaranty Trust Company, Massachusetts Tech, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, the United States Steel Corporation, Bryn Mawr College, Wilson College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Girard Trust Company, and the University of Pittsburgh. It is this Pittsburgh institution we are now going to investigate, and we shall have no difficulty in tracing its financial connections. As one of the professors remarked to me, “At Pittsburgh the plumbing is all open.”
He might also have added that this plumbing has been “swiped.” In other universities the members of the plutocracy who run things have put up at least a part of the funds; in Pittsburgh they have made the people put up the funds, while the interlocking directorate takes the honors and emoluments. We saw Judge Gary being made a learned doctor of laws at Northwestern University; and that was not so bad, because everybody understands that this particular title is merely a compliment for big-wigs and money-bags. But at the University of Pittsburgh they made him a doctor of science, which is supposed to be a real degree; and if you could plumb the depths of Judge Gary’s ignorance on every subject except making money and killing men, you would appreciate the absurdity of this academic performance.
The grand duke of Pittsburgh is Mr. A. W. Mellon, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and reputed to be the third richest man in the country; he is president of the Mellon National Bank, and vice-president or director in a list of fifty-five great financial and industrial organizations. As second grand duke he has his brother, Mr. R. B. Mellon, vice-president of his bank, and vice-president or director of fifty-six organizations—beating his brother by one! As active assistant they have Mr. Babcock, mayor of Pittsburgh, lumber magnate and director in a long list of corporations. There are twenty-seven other members of this regal board, and any time a full meeting was held, they could transact the business of most of the banks and steel companies of Allegheny county. The typewritten list of their directorates, which lies before me, fills ten solid pages. I know you don’t want to hear it all, so I will just give a glimpse, here and there: a steel king, whose father left him sixty millions; the treasurer of the Pennsylvania Railroad, western lines; a coal operator, vice-president of a national bank; the chairman of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; a steel magnate; a physician who married Standard Oil; the head financier of the Thaw family; the chairman of a foundry company; a president of seven oil companies; another representative of the Thaw family; the owner of several newspapers; the president of an electric company; the president of a foundry company; the manager of several aluminum companies, Mellon enterprises; the president of the Heinz pickle palaces; a real estate and coal man; the president of a national bank and three coal companies; the president of a Mellon trust company; a United States senator and Mellon attorney; a young steel magnate; the president of the Carnegie Steel Company; two corporation lawyers; the head of the Carnegie Institute, a Presbyterian clergyman, and the Episcopal bishop, who has just fled from the smoky hell of the steel-country to his eternal reward.
We saw at the University of Pennsylvania a peculiar arrangement, whereby a private institution, entirely controlled by private plutocrats, receives a subsidy every year from the state, and spends this money for anti-social purposes. At Pittsburgh we see the same arrangement; the state contributes nearly a million dollars a year to be expended by these steel and oil and coal and railroad and money kings. This means in practice that every year the chancellor of the university has to make a deal with the political bosses. Finding himself inadequate to the task, he has turned it over to a firm of lawyers, one member of which was speaker of the legislature, and afterwards candidate for the Republican nomination for governor. Those who put through the appropriation get ten per cent of it; this is known as the “cut,” and is a regular custom—even the public hospitals in Pennsylvania have to pay such tribute. There is a network of graft, involving every kind of organization in the state; the saloons, the doctors, the fraternal organizations—anybody who wants special privilege or freedom to break the laws has to put up bribes. The lawmakers protest against this or that steal, but when the orders come, they vote. How big is the rake-off we may judge from the fact that the mayor of Pittsburgh put up six hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars to secure his election to an office which pays a salary of eleven thousand dollars a year!
The people are helpless; they have no idea what is going on, because they have no newspapers, the so-called newspapers of Pittsburgh being merely house organs of the steel companies. The papers have an association regulating their output and prices, also the number of editions. They have agreed to issue no “extras,” and have put up a bond of ten thousand dollars, which they forfeit if they violate this agreement. At the time of the steel strike they flooded the country with hysterical lies about the strikers; the record stands complete in the report of the Interchurch Federation.
Pittsburgh University is another mushroom establishment, with five thousand students and no ideas. The steel kings condescend to run it, but they do not patronize it; the interlocking trustees send their sons, not to Pittsburgh, but to the big Eastern universities. “Pitt” is bitterly jealous of “Penn,” which is old and aristocratic and athletic. For a time Pennsylvania refused to play football with them, and they went to the state legislature, seeking to have this made a condition of the state appropriations for their rival!
The chancellor of the university was a preacher named McCormick, but he failed to “get the dough,” so he quit, and they put in ex-President Bowman of Iowa University, a product of the Columbia University educational machine. Bowman is known as “Mellon’s man,” but he also has failed as a “vamp.” It appears that somebody tried to work a little scheme on Grand Duke Mellon; it was announced in the newspapers that he had made a gift of land worth two million dollars. The papers played it up, with pictures of the Mellon brothers and fatuous interviews with Chancellor Bowman. But Mr. Mellon came out with the statement that all he had promised to do was to put up a hundred thousand dollars to secure an option on the property. They are hard-fisted fellows, these steel men, and as the saying is, they “have to be shown.” They can see that it is worthwhile to train experts in steel-making, so Carnegie Tech is taken care of; but when it comes to general culture, this Latin and Greek stuff and highbrow ologies—they let the legislature do it!
The professors tell a story about Mayor Babcock, lumber magnate and interlocking trustee. Chancellor McCormick wanted to advance a young man in the chemistry department over the head of his senior, who was a Jew. He explained in a meeting of the trustees that it would look all right, because the Jew was not a Ph. D. Mr. Babcock, deputy grand duke of the board, had fallen asleep, and now he opened his eyes suddenly. “Ph. D? What the hell’s that?”
Needless to say, they don’t waste much time fooling about academic freedom at the University of Pittsburgh. The nearest approach to a radical that ever got into the place is a professor at the law school, one of the twelve lawyers who signed the protest against Attorney-General Palmer’s raids on the constitution of the United States. There was a terrible uproar in Pittsburgh over this. The professor received a letter of protest from the chancellor, and was called in for a long argument. The new chancellor came in at this time, and at the first meeting of the board he started his money “spiel.” “Gentlemen,” said he, “the first duty before the university is to raise six and a half million dollars.” But Mr. Babcock thought that the board had another duty, which was to listen to him curse the radical professor. The secret service department of the Steel Trust was put to work, and there was a report on this professor, and he lost his chance to become head of his department. “We must lie low now,” said the chancellor. “We have a big program ahead.”
Needless to say, they are very devout at this University of the Steel Trust. One of their grand dukes was the elder Mr. Heinz, distinguished author of “Fifty-seven Varieties,” and proud owner of sixty-eight pickle factories and forty-five branch houses. Mr. Heinz was an eminent Presbyterian, and head of the World’s Sunday School Association, and left a quarter of a million dollars to Pittsburgh University for a building to teach Sunday School work. Naturally, therefore, it seemed a dreadful thing to the interlocking trustees that the church should turn traitor to their interests. Trustee Follansbee furiously attacked the Interchurch World Movement report on the steel strike; at a meeting in New York he said that it had set back the cause of Christianity fifty years. And when the United States Senate sent out a committee to investigate the strike—then suddenly the fighting steel kings discovered what a handy thing it is to own an educational machine! Mayor Babcock gave the senators a grand dinner-party, to which he invited his chancellor and some of his trustees and deans, and these eminent and disinterested gentlemen loaded the senators up with information concerning the Bolshevik uprising in Western Pennsylvania.