Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education - Upton Sinclair - Страница 19

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We have referred to the Harvard Liberal Club, an organization formed by some graduates who sympathized with the cause of social justice. This club brought speakers to Harvard, and got itself into the newspapers several times; for example, during the anti-red hysteria they heard an address from Federal Judge Anderson, who denounced the Palmer raids as crimes against the constitution. This caused President Lowell great annoyance, but he could not control the club, because it was a graduate organization. He demanded that it abandon the name Harvard, saying it might cause people to get a wrong idea of the university. Inquiries were made to ascertain if legal measures could be taken; and when he found that such measures wouldn’t work, he came to one of its meetings, very courteous and deeply interested, trying to steer it into ways of academic propriety. “We are all liberals at Harvard,” he said—an old, old formula! For a generation the British labor party has been hearing from the Tories: “We are all Socialists in England.”

Just how much of a liberal President Lowell is, of his own impulse and from his own conviction, was shown at the time that Louis D. Brandeis was nominated by President Wilson for the Supreme Court. Brandeis is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, and was a prosperous corporation lawyer in Boston; a man of European culture and charming manners, he was the darling of Harvard, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew. The Lees and the Higginsons took him up—until suddenly he ran into the New Haven railroad! Then the other crowd, the Kidders and the Peabodys, took him up—until he ran into the gas company! After that everybody dropped him, and if he had not been a man of wealth he would have been ruined. When he was proposed for the Supreme Court, a committee of lawyers, with Austen G. Fox, a Harvard man, at their head, took up the fight against him in the United States Senate. This fight didn’t involve Harvard, and there was no reason for President Lowell to meddle in it; but he made it his personal fight, and a fight of the most determined and bitter character.

In 1918 there was a great strike in the Lawrence textile mills, and this made a delicate situation, because Harvard holds six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of woolen mill loans and mortgages, and an equal amount of bonds and stocks. It seemed natural, therefore, to the overseers that Harvard students should go out as militiamen to crush this strike; it did not seem natural to them that members of the Liberal Club should call meetings and invite strike leaders to tell the students of the university their side of the case. But the members of this Liberal Club persisted, and when the district attorney accused the strikers of violence, they appointed a committee to interview him and get his facts. They gave a dinner, to which they invited the directors of the mills to meet the strike-leaders; they appointed a committee to consider terms of settlement, and in the end they forced a compromise.

Things like this caused most intense annoyance to the interlocking directorate. This was voiced to a Harvard man of my acquaintance, one of the organizers of the Liberal Club, by a Harvard graduate whose father has been a Harvard overseer, and is one of Massachusetts’Massachusetts’ most distinguished jurists. In the Harvard Club of Boston my friend was challenged to say what he meant by a liberal; and when his definition was not found satisfactory, the Harvard graduate exclaimed: “A liberal? I’ll tell you what a liberal is! A liberal is a —- —— —— —— —— ——!” In order to reproduce the scene you will have to fill these blanks, not with the ordinary terms of abuse used by longshoremen and lumber-jacks, but with the most obscene expletives which your imagination can invent.

Such is the present attitude of the ruling class of Harvard toward the issue of free speech. The attitude of the students was delightfully set forth by an editorial in the Harvard “Crimson,” at the time of the Liberal Club lecture of Wilfred Humphries, Y. M. C. A. worker from Russia. The “Crimson” was for Free Speech—But! What the “Crimson” wished to forbid was “propaganda”; and it made clear that by this term it meant any and all protest against things established. Said the cautious young editor: “Not prohibited by law, propaganda creeps in and is accepted by many as an almost essential part of freedom of speech!” This is as persuasive as the communications of the Harvard Union to the liberal students, barring various radicals from the platform, on the ground that the Union did not permit “partisan” speakers: the Union’s idea of non-partisan speakers being such well-poised and judicious conservatives as Admiral Sims and Detective Burns! As the old saying runs: “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy!” There is a standing rule at Harvard barring “outside” speakers who discuss “contentious contemporaneous questions of politics or economics”; and this rule was used to bar Mrs. Pankhurst!

I tell you of these petty incidents of discrimination; and yet, if we are to keep our sense of proportion, we must state that in the totality of American universities, Harvard ranks, from the point of view of academic liberalism, among the three or four best. There was no interference with its professors during the war hysteria—and I found but one other large institution, the University of Chicago, of which this statement may be made. Also, Harvard has to its credit one post-war case, in which academic freedom was gravely involved, and in which the Harvard tradition proved itself still alive. This is a curious and dramatic story, and I will tell it in detail.

In the summer of 1918 the United States Army invaded Archangel in Northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia, seizing the territory of a friendly people and killing its inhabitants without the declaration of war required by the constitution of the United States. This invasion was the blackest crime in American public history, and was denounced by many of our leading thinkers. Also it was denounced by five obscure Russian Jews, mere children in age, living in the East-side slums of New York City. Four boys and a girl printed a leaflet, asking the American people not to kill their Russian compatriots, and they distributed these leaflets in public—for which crime they were arrested, taken to prison, and beaten and tortured so severely that one of them died a few days later. The surviving four were placed on trial, and after a hideous travesty of justice were given sentences of from fifteen to twenty years in prison.

This is known as the “Abrams case,” and it stood as one of our greatest judicial scandals. Among others who protested was Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School. He published in the “Harvard Law Review,” April, 1920, an article entitled “A Contemporary State Trial”; and subsequently he embodied this article as a chapter in his book on “Freedom of Speech.” Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School, with Professors Frankfurter, Chafee and Sayre (President Wilson’s son-in-law), also the librarian of the Law School, signed a petition for executive clemency in this Abrams case. These actions excited great indignation among the interlocking directorates, and Mr. Austen G. Fox, a Harvard graduate and Wall Street lawyer, drew up a protest to the Harvard board of overseers, which protest was signed by twenty prominent corporation lawyers, all Harvard men, including Mr. Peter B. Olney, a prominent Tammany politician; Mr. Beekman Winthrop, ex-governor of Porto Rico, and Mr. Joseph H. Choate, Jr., recently notorious in connection with the scandals of the Alien Property Custodian. The overseers referred the matter to the “Committee to Visit the Law School,” which consists of fourteen prominent servants of the plutocracy, including a number of judges. The result was a “conference,” in reality a solemn trial, which occupied an entire day and evening, May 22, 1921, at the Harvard Club in Boston. Mr. Fox appeared, with a committee of his supporters and a mass of documents in the case; also the United States attorney and his assistant, serving as witnesses.

President Lowell’s attitude on this occasion is described to me as that of “a hen protecting her brood against an old Fox.” Professor Chafee himself tells me that President Lowell stood by him all through the “conference,” and made Mr. Fox uncomfortable by well-directed inquiries. Mr. Fox’s principal charge was that Professor Chafee had taken his quotations of testimony at the Abrams trial from the official record submitted to the Supreme Court in the defendant’s appeal, instead of going to the prosecuting attorney and getting the complete stenographic record. And lo and behold, when Mr. Fox came to confront the fourteen Harvard judges, it transpired that he himself had committed a similar blunder, only far worse! He accused the five professors at the Law School of having made false representations in their petition to President Wilson; but instead of going to the office of his friend the government prosecutor, and getting a photographic reproduction of the petition as signed by the professors, Mr. Fox presented in evidence a four-page circular, printed by the Abrams defense, containing a fac-simile of the petition, with the signatures of the five professors; the statements which Mr. Fox claimed were inaccurate were printed on the reverse side of this circular. But it was easy for the professors to show that they had nothing to do with the circular or its statements. The document had been compiled by the Abrams defense some time after the professors signed the petition. Mr. Fox, champion of strict legal accuracy, had based his charge upon a piece of propaganda literature, for which the professors had been no more responsible than he!

It is interesting to note how the interlocking newspapers of Boston handled this incident. It was, as you can understand, a most sensational piece of news; but it was an “inside” story, a family dispute of the interlocking directorate. The only newspaper which gave any account of the indictment of the professors was the Hearst paper, which is to a certain extent an outlaw institution, and publishes sensational news concerning the plutocracy, when the interests of Mr. Hearst and his group are not involved. But no other Boston newspaper published the news about this trial at the time that it took place; the first account was in the Boston “Herald,” nearly two months later, after the story was stale!

It was an amazing demonstration of the power of the Boston plutocracy; and it affords us curious evidence of the consequences of news suppression. I heard about the Chafee trial all the way from California to Massachusetts, and back again; and every time I heard it, I heard a different version—and always from some one who knew it positively, on the very best authority. These guardians of the dignity of Harvard thought that by keeping the story quiet they were helping the cause of academic freedom; but what they really did was to set loose a flood of wild rumors, for the most part discreditable to themselves. Of course, they may say that they do not care about gossip; but why is it not just as important to educate people about Harvard, as to educate them about the ancient Egyptians and Greeks?