What is Heaven—in the plutocratic sense? It is a place whose streets are paved with gold and flowing with milk and honey. It is inhabited exclusively by the elect, all others having been cast into outer darkness. It is a place entirely under the control of the “right people”; all unorthodox thoughts are barred, “chapel” is conducted every morning, and if anybody does not like the way we run things, he can go to hell.
Some time ago I made you acquainted with the ideal university president of the metropolitan plutocracy, Nicholas Murray Butler; a man of the world, dignified and urbane, his religion of the Episcopalian variety, reserved and proper. Compared with him, Chancellor Day of Syracuse University is provincial and naive, representing the adoration of wealth in its primitive, instinctive form. His emotions flow with child-like enthusiasm; his denomination might be described as evangelical Mammonism. His fervor is such that he is not ashamed to bear testimony before the world; to raise his hands in public and shout: “Money, money! Hallelujah! Amen!” This chancellor brings to the support of his plutocracy the direct personal revelation of the Almighty. When he makes commencement orations, or gives interviews to the interlocking press, or sends telegrams of congratulation to the murderers of strikers, he brings to their support the latest decisions and interpretations of the Throne of Grace. “God has made the rich of this world to serve Him.... He has shown them a way to have this world’s goods and to be rich towards God.... God wants the rich man.... Christ’s doctrines have made the world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches.” These are from the chancellor’s book, “The Raid on Prosperity”; you can find more of it quoted in “The Profits of Religion.”
Recently he has published another book, “My Neighbor the Workingman,” and in this book we find God in a bloodthirsty mood. It appears that the radicals are taking advantage of our courts, which “assume innocence until guilt is proved.” There must be “a suspension of this order of things,” God says; “we have found no foe more worthy of extermination.” Strikes, God teaches us, are efforts to make labor superior to law; “the strike is a conspiracy and nothing less.” Yet when labor proposes to use legal methods, God does not seem to like it any better; we find Him discussing the founding of the Labor Party in Chicago, and speaking of the delegates as “these Simian descendants”—and just after He has made His chief complaint against strikers, that they call non-union men bad names! God portrays the Socialist utopia: “The soap-box orators, in the tramp’s unclean rags, will take charge of the banks, and the bomb-makers can be started to run the factories.” Opposed to this is God’s own utopia, and you may take your choice: “The rich and the poor dwell together. There is divine wisdom in the plan. They always have so lived. They always will so live. Noble characters are in both. It must be the divine order.”
This chancellor of the University of Heaven was providentially equipped for his rôle. He stands about six and a half feet high, and broad in proportion, with the face of a Jupiter commanding the lightnings. He has a magnificent rolling voice, so that Jehovah’s commands are heard as usual amid the thunders of Sinai. He is a masterful personality; he knows instantly what God wants, and he goes after the bacon and gets it for God, and every plutocrat, meeting him, recognizes him as the ideal person to take charge of the thinking of posterity.
No nonsense is tolerated at Syracuse; they know what truth is, and how it should be taught, and you teach it that way or you get out, the quicker the better. Early in the chancellor’s administration he discovered that John R. Commons was tolerant toward free silver, and he fired him, giving as his reason that the professor was tolerant towards Sunday baseball! Every year he discovers that several others are tolerant towards something ungodly, and he fires them. There is no “tenure” or faculty control, or stuff of that sort; it is the chancellor who pays the salaries, and the chancellor who decides what the various men are worth—and he generally decides they are not worth much. He said at a faculty meeting, “You fellows needn’t think you mean anything to me; I could replace you all in an hour and a half.”
This is his regular manner toward his faculty; he subjects them to the most incredible indignities. For example, he gave the degree of doctor of science to one of his grand dukes, Mr. E. L. French, president of Crucible Steel. At a faculty meeting at which this project was brought up, one of the professors ventured to suggest that it might be better to make it an LL.D., which is generally understood as having an honorary significance, instead of an Sc.D., which is understood to indicate actual achievement in the scientific field. Chancellor Day pointed at the objector a finger which trembled with rage, and shouted: “Sit down and shut up!” This was Professor E. N. Pattee, and I find him still listed in the Syracuse catalogue as “director of the chemical laboratory,” so I presume that he sat down and shut up as directed.
Several people described to me the eloquence of the chancellor’s sermons, with the tremolo stop which reduces his auditors to tears. I asked one of them, “Does he believe in his religion?” The answer was: “No more than I do. He has no particle of Christianity or of faith; he uses it merely as a shield.” To his faculty its purpose appears to be to beat down their salaries. If you go into his office to ask for a raise, he will glare at you and pound on the desk, shouting: “What’s this I hear about you, John Smith? Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus? Have you been saying that you distrust the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch?” Or maybe he will say: “I want you to understand, young man, I have been hearing reports about you. You were seen walking on the street with Professor So-and-So’s wife!” Or maybe he will say: “I have taken the trouble to inquire, and I find that you subscribe to the ‘Nation’ and the ‘New Republic.’”
Heaven, from the point of view of college professors, is an intellectual sweatshop. I was told of a professor of geology, who was there for twenty years, and finally got up the nerve to ask for a raise, and he got fifty dollars a year. Another professor asked for a raise, but the chancellor discovered that this man had written a book, and he said: “A man who has written a book ought not to expect promotion; it shows that he had spare time on his hands.” All contracts with the university are verbal, and you take the chancellor’s word for your fate. It may seem a dreadful thing to say about heaven, but the fact remains that a number of the chancellor’s faculty, both past and present, unite in placing him among those college heads who do not always tell the truth.
A few years ago he got rid of his treasurer, Mr. W. W. Porter, who had served the university for nineteen years. The chancellor published a series of accusations against Mr. Porter, and the latter replied in a printed statement of twelve thousand words, which I have before me. It is a dignified and frank and convincing document. Mr. Porter bears testimony to that same “wrath and vindictive spirit and methods” upon which all authorities agree. He goes on to give the documents and figures of a series of petty grafts perpetrated by the chancellor: For example he states that laborers worked on the chancellor’s farm, and were paid out of the university treasury amounts aggregating $710.82; also, that the chancellor sold this farm to the university “at cost,” and when the treasurer asked for proper vouchers, “he immediately flew into a passion, stating that his word was sufficient”; also, that a member of the chancellor’s family purchased a building, and leased it to the university, to be used as a book-store, at an excessive rental; also, that the chancellor sold his old automobile to the university at an excessive price; “the chancellor sold horses, wagons, harness, etc., at various times to the university, making out bills in favor of himself and receipting the same, acting as both seller and purchaser.” We might go on to summarize twelve closely printed sheets of this kind of thing; but space is limited, so we content ourselves by stating that we know where this document is, and we will submit it to Professor Brander Matthews on demand!