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After his recent visit to the United States, H. G. Wells wrote that the most vital mind he had met was James Harvey Robinson, author of "The Mind in the Making." Twenty-two or three years ago I took with Professor Robinson a course in the history of the Renaissance and Reformation. It was a great period, when the mind of the race was breaking the shackles of mediaeval tyranny in religion, politics, and thought. I read with eagerness about John Huss and Wyckliffe, Erasmus and Luther. I still hope for such heroes and for such an awakening in my own modern world; meantime, I observe that Professor Robinson, unable to stand the mediaevalism of Columbia, has handed in his resignation.

Then MacDowell, the composer. Edward MacDowell was the first authentic man of genius I met; he is the only American musician whose work has won fame abroad. He was a man as well as an artist, and his courses in general musical culture were a rare delight. After much urging, he consented to play us parts of his own works, and discuss them with us. Needless to say, this was not orthodox academic procedure, and the college authorities, who do not recognize genius less than a hundred years away, would not give proper credits for work with MacDowell. The composer's beautiful dream of a center of musical education came to nothing, and he retired, broken-hearted. As I described the tragedy at the time, he ran into Nicholas Murray Butler and was killed.

Finally, George Edward Woodberry, who was in the field of letters what MacDowell was in music, a master not merely of criticism but of creation; also a charming spirit and a friend to students. He gave a course in what he called comparative literature, and made us acquainted with Plato, Cervantes, Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, and Shelley. He was a truly liberalizing influence, and so popular among the men that the Columbia machine hated him heartily. I was taking Brander Matthews' course at the same time as Woodberry's, and would hear Matthews sneer at Woodberry's "idealism," and at his methods of teaching. A year later Woodberry was forced out, under circumstances which I shall presently narrate.

In the year 1901 I was twenty-one years of age, and was ready to quit Columbia. The great university had become to me nothing but a library full of books, and some empty class-rooms in which to sit while reading them. No longer was I lured by elaborate prospectuses, setting forth lists of "courses"; I had tried forty of them, and knew that nine-tenths of them were dull. The great institution was a hollow shell, a body without a soul, a mass of brick and stone held together by red tape.

But before I went out into the world, I made one final test of the place. I knew by this time exactly what I wanted to do in the world; I wanted to create literature. I had an overwhelming impulse, so intense that it had completely ruined me as a hack-writer; my "half-dime" novels had become impossible to me, and the question of how I was to earn my living was a serious one.

And here was a great university, devoted to the furthering of all the liberal arts. This university had trained me to love and reverence the great writers of the past; what was its attitude to the great writers of the future? The university controlled and awarded a vast number of scholarships and fellowships in all branches of learning; that is to say, it offered support to young men while they equipped themselves to understand and teach the writings of the past. But what about the writings of the future? What aid would the university give to these? I was planning to spend the summer writing a novel, and the idea occurred to me: Would Columbia University accept a novel as a thesis or dissertation, or as evidence of merit and of work accomplished, in competition for any fellowship or endowment under its control?

I made this proposition to the proper authorities at Columbia, the heads of the various departments of literature, and to the president's office as well; and I received one unanimous decision: there was no fellowship or endowment under the control of the university which could be won by any kind of creative writing, but only by "scholarship"--that is to say, by writing about the work of other people!

I was not satisfied entirely. It occurred to me--maybe there was some other university in this broad land of freedom which might have a more liberal and intelligent policy than Columbia; so I set out on a campaign to test out the question. I wrote to the authorities at Harvard, and at Yale, and at Princeton, and Cornell, and Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania, and Chicago, and Wisconsin and California, and I know not what others. I did not let up until I had made quite certain that among all the hundreds of millions of dollars of endowment at the disposal of the great American universities, there was not one dollar which could be won by a piece of creative literature, nor one university president who was interested in the possibility that there might be a man of genius actually alive in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

So I went out into the world to make my own way, and to fight for the preservation of my own talent. I had given the academic authorities nine years in which to do what they could to me, so I might fairly lay claim to be a completely educated man. I look back now, and see myself as I was, and I shudder--not merely for myself, but for all other products of the educational machine. I think of the things I didn't know, and of the pains and perils to which my ignorance exposed me! I knew nothing whatever about hygiene and health; everything of that sort I had to learn by painful error. I knew nothing about women; I had met only three or four beside my mother, and had no idea how to deal with them. I knew as much about sex as was known to the ancient religious ascetics, but nothing of modern discoveries or theories on the subject.

More significant yet, I knew nothing about modern literature in any language; I had acquired a supreme and top-lofty contempt for it, and was embarrassed when I happened to read "Sentimental Tommy," and discovered that someone had written a work of genius in my own time! I knew nothing about modern history; so far as my mind was concerned, the world had come to an end with the Franco-Prussian war, and nothing had happened since. Of course, there was the daily paper, but I didn't know what this daily paper was, who made it, or what relation it had to me. I knew that politics was rotten, but I didn't know the cause of this rottenness, nor had I any idea what to do about it. I knew nothing about money, the life-blood of society, nor the part it plays in the life of modern men. I knew nothing about business, except that I despised it, and shrank in agony of spirit from contact with business people. All that I knew about labor was a few tags of prejudice which I had picked up from newspapers.

Most significant of all to me personally, I was unaware that the modern revolutionary movement existed. I was all ready for it, but I was as much alone in the world as Shelley a hundred years before me. I knew, of course, that there had been Socialism in ancient times, for I had read Plato, and been amused by his quaint suggestions for the reconstruction of the world. Also I knew that there had been dreamers and cranks in America who went off and tried to found Utopian commonwealths. It was safe for me to be told about these experiments, because they had failed. I had heard the names of Marx and Lassalle, and had a vague idea of them as dreadful men, who met in the back rooms of beer-gardens, and conspired, and made dynamite bombs, and practised free love. That they had any relationship to my life, that they had anything to teach me, that they had founded a movement which embraced all the future--of this I was as ignorant as I was of the civilization of Dahomey, or the topography of the far side of the moon.

I went out into the world, and learned about these matters, by most painful experience; and then I looked back upon my education, and understood many things which had previously been dark. One question I asked myself: was all that deficiency accidental, or was it deliberate? Was it merely the ignorance of those who taught me, or was there some reason why they did not teach me all they knew? I have come to understand that the latter is the case. Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist. To establish this thesis is the purpose of "The Goose-step."

And first a few words as to the title. We spent some thirty billions of treasure, and a hundred thousand young lives, to put down the German autocracy; being told, and devoutly believing, that we were thereby banishing from the earth a certain evil thing known as Kultur. It was not merely a physical thing, the drilling of a whole population for the aggrandizement of a military caste; it was a spiritual thing, a regimen of autocratic dogmatism. The best expression of it upon which I have come in my readings is that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Prussian philosopher and apostle of Nationalism; I quote two sentences, from a long discourse: "To compel men to a state of right, to put them under the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred duty of every man who has the knowledge and the power.... He is the master, armed with compulsion and appointed by God." I ask you to read those sentences over, to bear them in mind as you follow chapter after chapter of this book; see if I am not right in my contention that what we did, when we thought we were banishing the Goose-step from the world, was to bring it to our own land, and put ourselves under its sway--our thinking, and, more dreadful yet, the teaching of our younger generation.

The first step toward the intelligent study of American education is to consider the country in which this education grows. We are told upon good authority that men do not gather figs from thistles; we are also told that we cannot understand the cultural institutions of any country unless we know its economic and social conditions.

If you want to learn about America, the plutocratic empire, come with me and meet the emperor and his princes and lords; come to the Customs House in New York City, early in the year 1913. The memory of our busy age is short, so perhaps it will mean nothing to you if I say that the Pujo Committee of the House of Representatives is in session. They sit in a solemn row, eleven solemn legislators; and into the witness chair step one after another the masters of this plutocratic empire: J. P. Morgan senior, a bulbous-nosed and surly-tempered old man whom everyone in the room knows to be the emperor; George F. Baker, president of the First National Bank of New York, the second richest man in the world; William Rockefeller, brother of the richest man in the world; George M. Reynolds, president of the Continental National Bank of Chicago, the second largest bank in America; Henry P. Davison, Jacob Schiff--so on through a long list.

They are being questioned by a small, frail-looking Jewish lawyer named Samuel Untermyer. All his life he has been one of them, he has been in the game with them and made his millions; he knows every trick and turn of their minds, every corner where their money is hidden--and now he turns against them and exposes them to the world. They hate him, but he has them at his mercy, and step by step he shows us the machinery of our industrial and financial life, the thing which he calls the Money Trust, and which I call the plutocratic empire.

There is one phrase which makes the whole argument of the Pujo Report, and that phrase is "interlocking directorates." Interlocking directorates are the device whereby three great banks in New York, with two trust companies under their control, manage the financial affairs and direct the policies of a hundred and twelve key corporations of America. The three banks are J. P. Morgan and Company, the First National Bank, and the National City Bank; and the two trust companies are the Guaranty and the Equitable. Please fix these five concerns in your mind, for we shall come back to them in almost every chapter of this book. Their directors sit upon the boards of the corporations, sometimes several on each board, and their orders are obeyed because they control credit, which is the life-blood of our business world. Said George M. Reynolds, in his testimony, speaking of the control of American finance: "I believe it lies in the hands of a dozen men; and I plead guilty to being one, in the last analysis, of these men."

Such was the situation in 1913; and now, America has fought and won a war, and become the financial master of the world. The wealth of America was estimated in 1912 at a hundred and twenty-seven billions; in 1920 it was estimated at five hundred billions, greater than the combined wealth of the British Empire, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, and Japan. At the same time that wealth has increased, so has the concentration of its control. If the Pujo Committee were to conduct another inquiry in the year 1922, it would find exactly the same interlocking directorates, only more of them; and it would find that the financial empire controlled by three great banks and two trust companies has grown from twenty-two billions to not less than seventy-five, and probably close to a hundred billions of dollars.

Just how do these interlocking directorates work? A picture of their method was drawn in Harper's Weekly by Louis D. Brandeis, at that time an anti-corporation lawyer of Boston, and now a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Said Mr. Brandeis:

Mr. J. P. Morgan , a director of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, causes that company to sell to J. P. Morgan and Company an issue of bonds. J. P. Morgan and Company borrow the money with which to pay for those bonds from the Guaranty Trust Company, of which Mr. Morgan is a director. J. P. Morgan and Company sell the bonds to the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, of which Mr. Morgan is a director. The New Haven spends the proceeds of the bonds in purchasing steel from the United States Steel Corporation, of which Mr. Morgan is a director. The United States Steel Corporation spends the proceeds of the rails in purchasing electrical supplies from the General Electric Company, of which Mr. Morgan is a director. The General Electric Company sells the supplies to the Western Union Telegraph Company, a subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and in both Mr. Morgan is director. The Telegraph Company has a special wire contract with the Reading, in which Mr. Morgan is a director--

So on to the Pullman Company and the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Mr. Brandeis points out how "all these concerns patronize one another; they all market their securities through J. P. Morgan and Company, they deposit their funds with J. P. Morgan and Company, and J. P. Morgan and Company use the funds of each in further transactions."

But Mr. Brandeis stops his story too soon; he ought to show us some of the wider ramifications of these directorates. He ought to picture Mr. Morgan falling ill, and being treated in St. Luke's Hospital, in which Mr. Morgan is a trustee, and by a physician who is also a trustee, and who was educated in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, of which Mr. Morgan is a trustee. He ought to picture Mr. Morgan dying, and being buried from Trinity Church, in which several of his partners are vestrymen, and having his funeral oration preached by a bishop who is a stockholder in his bank, and reported in newspapers whose bonds repose in his vaults. Mr. Brandeis might say about all these persons and institutions just what he says about the Steel Corporation and the General Electric Company and the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Baldwin Locomotive Works--they all patronize one another and they all deposit their funds with J. P. Morgan and Company.

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service. Therefore the interlocking directorate has need of an educational system, and has provided it complete. There is a great university, of which Mr. Morgan was all his active life a trustee, also his son-in-law and one or two of his attorneys and several of his bankers. The president of this university is a director in one of Mr. Morgan's life insurance companies, and is interlocked with Mr. Morgan's bishop, and Mr. Morgan's physician, and Mr. Morgan's newspaper. If the president of the university writes a book, telling the American people to be good and humble servants of the plutocracy, this book may be published by a concern in which Mr. Morgan is a director, and the paper may be bought from the International Paper Company, in which Mr. Morgan has a director through the Guaranty Trust Company. If you visit the town where the paper is made, you will find that the president of the school board is a director in the local bank, which deposits its funds with the Guaranty Trust Company at a low rate of interest, to be reloaned by Mr. Morgan at a high rate of interest. The superintendent of the schools will be a graduate of Mr. Morgan's university, and will have been recommended to the school board president by Mr. Morgan's dean of education. Both the board and president and the school superintendent will insure their lives in the company of which Mr. Morgan's university president is a director; and the school books selected in that town will be published by a concern in which Mr. Morgan is a director, and they will be written by Mr. Morgan's university's dean of education, and they will be praised in the journal of education founded by Mr. Morgan's university president; also they will be praised by Mr. Morgan's newspaper and magazine editors. The superintendent of schools will give promotion to teachers who take the university's summer courses, and will cause the high school pupils to aspire to that university. Once a year he will attend the convention of the National Educational Association, and will elect as president a man who is a graduate of Mr. Morgan's university, and also a member of Mr. Morgan's church, and a reader of Mr. Morgan's newspaper, and of Mr. Morgan's university's president's educational journal, and a patron of Mr. Morgan's university presidents' life insurance company, and a depositor in a bank which pays him no interest, but sends his money to the Guaranty Trust Company for Mr. Morgan to loan at a high rate of interest. And when the Republican party, of which Mr. Morgan is a director, nominates the president of Mr. Morgan's university for vice-president of the United States, Mr. Morgan's bishop will bless the proceedings, and Mr. Morgan's newspapers will report them, and Mr. Morgan's school superintendent will invite the children to a picnic to hear Mr. Morgan's candidates' campaign speeches on a phonograph, and to drink lemonade paid for by Mr. Morgan's campaign committee, out of the funds of the life insurance company of which Mr. Morgan's university president is director.

Such is the system of the interlocking directorates; such is, in skeleton form, that department of the plutocratic empire which calls itself American Education. And if you don't believe me, just come along and let me show you--not merely the skeleton of this beast, but the nerves and the brains, the blood and the meat, the hair and the hide, the teeth and the claws of it.

The headquarters of the American plutocracy is, of course, New York City. Here are the three central banks, and here the hundred and twelve corporations have their offices, and the interlocking directors roll about in their padded limousines and collect their gold eagles and half-eagles with the minimum of trouble and delay. According to the Pujo Committee, the banks and trust companies of New York, all interlocked with the House of Morgan, had over five billion dollars' worth of resources, which was nearly one-fourth of the bank resources of the country. This did not include the House of Morgan itself, which was, and is, a private institution. These figures, of course, seem puny since the world war; in that war the House of Morgan alone is reputed to have made a billion dollars from its war purchases for the British government, and if the Pujo Committee were to inquire at the present time it would find the banking resources of New York City somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five billions of dollars.

It is inevitable that this headquarters of our plutocratic empire should be also the headquarters of our plutocratic education. The interlocking directors could not discommode themselves by taking long journeys; therefore they selected themselves a spacious site on Morningside Heights, and there stands the palatial University of the House of Morgan, which sets the standard for the higher education of America. Other universities, we shall find, vary from the ideal; there are some which have old traditions, there are others which permit modern eccentricities; but in Columbia you have plutocracy, perfect, complete and final, and as I shall presently show, the rest of America's educational system comes more and more to be modeled upon it. Columbia's educational experts take charge of the school and college systems of the country, and the production of plutocratic ideas becomes an industry as thoroughly established, as completely systematized and standardized as the production of automobiles or sausages.

Needless to say, the University of the House of Morgan is completely provided with funds; its resources are estimated at over seventy-five million dollars and its annual income is over seven million. A considerable part of its endowment is invested in stocks and bonds, under the supervision of the interlocking directors. I have a typewritten list of these holdings, which occupies more than twenty pages, and includes practically all the important railroads and industrial corporations in the United States. Whoever you are, and wherever you live in America, you cannot spend a day, you can hardly spend an hour of your life, without paying tribute to Columbia University. In order to collect the material for this book I took a journey of seven thousand miles, and traveled on fourteen railroads. I observe that every one of these railroads is included in the lists, so on every mile of my journey I was helping to build up the Columbia machine. I helped to build it up when I lit the gas in my lodging-house room in New York; for Columbia University owns ,000 worth of New York Gas and Electric Light, Heat and Power Company's 4 per cent bonds; I helped to build it up when I telephoned my friends to make engagements, for Columbia University owns ,000 worth of the New York Telephone Company's 4 1/2 per cent bonds; I helped to build it up when I took a spoonful of sugar with my breakfast, for Columbia University owns some shares in the American Sugar Refining Company, and also in the Cuba Cane Sugar Corporation.

The great university stops at nothing, however small: "five and ten cent stores," and the Park and Tilford Grocery Company, and the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company. I have on my desk a letter from a woman, telling me how the Standard Oil Company has been dispossessing homesteaders from the oil lands of California; Columbia University is profiting by these robberies, because it owns ,000 worth of the gold debenture bonds of the Standard Oil Company of California. Recently I met a pitiful human wreck who had given all but his life to the Bethlehem Steel Company; Columbia University took a part of this man's health and happiness. Crossing the desert on my way home, in the baking heat of summer I saw far out in the barren mountains a huge copper smelter, vomiting clouds of yellow smoke into the air. We in the Pullman sat in our shirt-sleeves, with electric fans playing and white-clad waiters bringing us cool drinks, but even so, we suffered from the heat; yet, out there in those lonely wastes men toil in front of furnace fires, and when they drop they are turned to mummies in the baking sand and their names are not recorded. Not a thought of them came into the minds of the passengers in the transcontinental train; and, needless to say, no thought of them troubles the minds of the thirty thousand seekers of the higher learning who flock to Columbia University every year. With serene consciences these young people cultivate the graces of life, upon the income of ,000 worth of stock in the American Smelters Securities Company.

This University of the House of Morgan is run by a board of trustees. Under the law these trustees are the absolute sovereign, the administrators of the property, responsible to no one. They cannot be removed, no matter what they do, and they are self-perpetuating, they appoint their own successors. Their charter, be it noted, is a contract with the state, and can never be altered or revised. Such was the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dartmouth case, way back in 1819.

Who are the members of this board? The first thing to be noted about them is that there is only one educator, and that is the president of the university, an ex-officio member. Not one of them is a scholar, nor familiar with the life of the intellect. There is one engineer, one physician, and one bishop; there are ten corporation lawyers, and eight classified as bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants and manufacturers. Without exception they are the interlocking directors of the Pujo charts. The chairman of the board is William Barclay Parsons, engineer of the subway, and director in numerous corporations. The youngest member of the board is Marcellus Hartley Dodge, who was elected when he was 26 years old, and was a director of the Equitable Life while still an undergraduate at Columbia; he is a son-in-law of William Rockefeller, and is chairman of the Remington Arms Company and Union Metallic Cartridge Company. He is said to have cleaned up twenty-four million in one deal in Midvale Steel, and in October, 1916, he is credited with making two million by cornering the market in munitions machinery. Frederick R. Coudert is one of the most prominent attorneys of the plutocracy, a director in the National Surety and Equitable Trust. Herbert L. Satterlee is a Morgan attorney and a Morgan son-in-law. Robert S. Lovett is chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and director of a dozen other roads. Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, guides the affairs of a great university in spite of the fact that he is not a college man. Reverend William T. Manning is an ex-officio member, one might say, being the bishop of the church of J. P. Morgan and Company. You must understand that Columbia is descended from Kings College, an Episcopal institution, and the bishop, and three vestrymen of Old Trinity are on its board. Pierpont Morgan, the elder, was on all his life, and Stephen Baker, president of the Bank of Manhattan and the Bank of the Metropolis, is still on. A study of those who have held office on the board of Columbia, from 1900 to 1922, shows fifty-nine persons classified as follows: bankers, railroad owners, real estate owners, merchants and manufacturers, 20; lawyers, 21; ministers, 8; physicians, 6; educators, 1; engineers, 3. The six physicians were on because of their connection with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a branch of Columbia.

How rich in their own right are the particular Money Trust lords who run this great University it is not possible to determine, because these gentlemen, for the most part, keep their affairs secret. But in the list of those who have died during twenty-two years we have means for an estimate, for the property of many of these was listed in the probate courts of New York and appraised by the transfer tax appraisers. A study of these records has been made by Henry R. Linville, president of the Teachers' Union, and he has courteously placed the manuscript at my disposal. There are twenty-one trustees who have died and been appraised, and the list of their stocks and bonds fills a total of twenty-three typewritten pages, and shows that the total wealth on which they paid an inheritance tax amounted to one hundred and seventy-three million dollars, an average of over eight million each. I note among the list five members of the clergy of Jesus Christ, and I am sure that if He had visited their parishes He would have been delighted at their state of affluence--He could hardly have told it from His heavenly courts with their streets of gold. The poorest of these clergy was Bishop Burch, who left ,840; second came the Reverend Coe, who left ,683; next came the Reverend Greer, who left 2,619; next came the Reverend Dix, rector of Trinity, who left 9,637; and finally, Bishop Potter, my own bishop, whose train I carried when I was a little boy, in the solemn ceremonials of the church. I was dully awe-stricken, but not so much as I would have been if I had realized that I was carrying the train of 0,568. Such sums loom big in the imagination of a little boy; but they don't amount to so much on the board of a university where you associate with the elder Morgan, who left seventy-eight millions, and with John S. Kennedy, banker of the Gould interests, who left sixty-five millions.

You might possibly think that our interlocking directors would be so busy with the task of managing our industries and our government that they would not have time to superintend our education; but that would be underestimating their diligence and foresight. They do the job and they do it personally, not trusting it to subordinates. In the office of the Teachers' Union of New York I inspected a chart, dealing with the interlocking directorates of Columbia University; and except by the label, you could not tell it from the charts in the three volumes of the Pujo Reports. It is the same thing, and the men shown are the same men. They serve J. P Morgan and Company as directors in the coal trust, the steel trust, the railroad trust; they serve also on the boards of schools, colleges, and universities through the United States. You could not tell a chart of the Columbia trustees from a chart of the New York Central Railroad, or the Remington Arms Company. You could not tell a chart of Harvard University from a chart of Lee, Higginson and Company, the banking house of Boston. You could not tell a chart of the University of Pennsylvania from a chart of the United Gas Improvement Company. You could not tell a chart of the University of Pittsburgh from a chart of the United States Steel Corporation. You could not tell a chart of the University of California from one of the Hydro-Electric Power Trust, one of Denver University from the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, one of the University of Montana from the Anaconda Copper Company, one of the University of Minnesota from the Ore Trust. These corporations are one, their interests are one, and their purposes are one.

Evans Clark, a preceptor in Princeton University--until he made this survey--collected the facts as to the financial interests of governing boards of the largest American universities--seven of which were privately controlled and twenty-two state controlled. He found that the plutocratic class, or those intimately connected therewith--bankers, manufacturers, merchants, public utility officers, financiers, great publishers and lawyers--composed 56 per cent of the membership of the privately controlled boards, and 68 per cent of the publicly controlled boards. Says Mr. Clark: "Of the other two great economic groups in society there is little or no representation. The farmers total between 6 per cent in private and 4 per cent in public boards, while no representative of labor has a place on any board, public or private. And finally, no college professor is a trustee of the college in which he serves, while only fourteen out of 649 are professors in other institutions. Of these, six are Harvard professors on the Radcliffe board . We have allowed the education of our youth to fall into the absolute control of a group of men who represent not only a minority of the total population but have, at the same time, enormous economic and business stakes in what kind of an education it shall be."

And this condition prevails right through the list of our colleges, regardless of size, or where they are located or how financed. This was shown by Scott Nearing in an exhaustive study, reported in "School and Society" for September 8, 1917. He wrote to the governing bodies of all colleges and universities in the United States having more than five hundred students. There are 189 such institutions, and 143 of these supplied the lists of trustees with their occupations. The total number of trustees was 2,470. There were 208 merchants, 196 manufacturers, 112 capitalists, 6 contractors, 32 real estate men, 26 insurance men, 115 corporation officials, 202 bankers, 15 brokers, and 18 publishers, making for the plutocratic group a total of 930. There were 111 doctors, 514 lawyers, 125 educators, 353 ministers, 8 authors, 43 editors, 70 scientists, 13 social workers and 32 judges, making a total for the professional group of 1,269. For the miscellaneous group there were 94 retired business men, 3 salesmen, 123 farmers, 46 home-keepers, 3 mechanics, and 2 librarians, making a total of 271. For the purpose of this inquiry the lawyers belong, not with the professional class, but with the commercial and financial class, whose retainers they are. That makes a total of 1,444 of that class, or 58 per cent. In the state universities the commercial class had a total of 477 out of 776, or 61 per cent. And this, you will note, without counting the retired business men, who are certainly no less plutocratic in their mentality than the active ones; without counting the many doctors, ministers, editors, and educators who are just as plutocratic as the bankers. How plutocratic an educator can be when he is well paid for it is the next proposition we have to prove to you.

We have investigated the governing board of the University of the House of Morgan. We have next to investigate the president they have selected to carry out their will. Naturally, they would seek the most plutocratic college president in the most plutocratic country of the world. They sought him and they found him; his name is Nicholas Murray Butler, abbreviated by his subordinates to "Nicholas Miraculous." I am going to sketch his career and describe his character; and as what I say will be bitter, I repeat that I bear him no personal ill-will. If I pillory him, it is as a type, the representative, champion and creator of what I regard as false and cruel ideals. His influence must be destroyed, if America is to live as anything worthwhile, kindly or beautiful. For this reason I have made a detailed study of him, and present here a full length portrait. If some of it seems too personal, bear in mind the explanation; you will understand every aspect of our higher education more clearly, if you know, thoroughly and intimately, one specimen of the ideal interlocking university president.

Nicholas Murray Butler was born in Paterson, N. J., and his father was a mechanic. This is nothing to his discredit, quite the contrary; the only thing to his discredit is the fact that he is ashamed of it, and tries to suppress it. When he was candidate for vice-president in 1912 it was given out that he was descended from the old Murray family of New York, which gave the name to aristocratic Murray Hill; and this I am assured is not the fact. He has been all his life what is called a "climber." Ordinarily I hate puns on people's names, but the name of Butler seems to have been a special act of Providence. His toadying to the rich and powerful is so conspicuous that it defeats its own ends, and brings him the contempt of men whose intimacy he wishes to gain. George L. Rives, former corporation counsel of New York City, and chairman of the board of Columbia University for many years, said of him: "Butler is a great man, but the damnedest fool I know; he values himself for his worst qualities."

Here is a man with a first-class brain, a driving, executive worker, capable in anything he puts his mind to, but utterly overpowered by the presence of great wealth. He serves the rich, and they despise him. The rich themselves, you understand, are not in awe of wealth; at least, if they are, they hide the fact. They are sometimes willing to meet plain, ordinary human beings as equals, and when they see a man boot-licking them because of their wealth they sneer at him behind his back, and sometimes to his face. At the Union Club they joke about Butler, with his crude talk about "the right people." They observe that he will never go anywhere to a dinner party unless there are to be prominent people present, unless he has some prestige to gain from it. He has been married twice, and both times he has married money; his present wife is a Catholic, and she and her sister are tireless society ladies, "doing St. James' and that kind of thin."

Butler became a teacher, then school superintendent, then instructor in Columbia College, then professor of philosophy in the university, then dean, and now president. This would seem to most men a splendid career--especially considering the perquisites which have gone with it. The interlocking trustees built for their favorite a splendid mansion, costing over three hundred thousand dollars--paying for it out of the trust funds of the university. This mansion is free from taxation, upon the theory that it is used for educational purposes; but Professor Cattell publishes the statement that Butler uses it "for social climbing and political intrigues." No one has ever been able to find out what portion of the trust funds of the university is paid to its president as salary. In addition, it is generally rumored at Columbia that Butler has accepted gifts from his trustees and other wealthy admirers.

But all this has not been sufficient for our ambitious educator. He has craved political honors; seeking them tirelessly, begging for them with abject insistence. He has been candidate for vice-president with Taft, and has been several times candidate for the Presidential nomination. All these things he has taken with the most desperate seriousness, utterly unable to understand why the politicians tell him he cannot be elected. He would go down to Washington to plead, and Jim Wadsworth, young aristocrat who runs the up-state political machine of New York, would "kick him about." He would travel over the country addressing banquets of the "best people," telling them how the country should be saved, and how he was the man to save it; at the same time he would go down to the common people, and pose as one of them. If you want to succeed in America, you must be what is called a "joiner"; so Butler joined the Elks, and a man who was present at this adventure told me about it. The Elks gathered, a vast herd; they had come to hear a great educator, and it was to be a highbrow affair for once in their lives, and they were solemn about it, expecting to be uplifted from their primitive Elkhood. Instead of which, the great educator flopped to their level, or below it. He tried to "jolly" them, telling them that he was "a regular fellow," "one of the boys," and that it was "all right for a man to have a good time now and then." Of course, the Elks were disgusted.

In one of President Butler's published speeches I find him sneering at the progressives as "declaimers and sandlot orators and perpetual candidates for office." What this refers to is men like Roosevelt and LaFollette, who go out to the people and seek election. It does not apply to those who go in secret to the homes and offices of political corruptionists and wire-pullers, there to plead, almost on their knees, for nominations and favors. A prominent Republican politician of New York said to me: "He begged in my office for two hours. He told me he had the support of this man and that, and then I inquired and found it was not so."

It is embarrassing to find so many people asserting that the president of Columbia University does not always tell the truth. It will be still more embarrassing to have to state that most of the presidents of colleges and universities in the United States do not always tell the truth. A curious fact which I observed in my travels over the country--there was hardly a single college head about whom I was not told: "He is a liar." I believe there are no effects without causes, and I have tried to analyze the factors in the life of college heads which compel them to lie. I shall present these to you in due course; for the present suffice it to say that a man who has held the highest offices in New York state told me how Butler had assured him that Pierpont Morgan had promised to "back Butler to the limit for President," and later this politician ascertained that no such promise had been given. Butler stated that he had the unqualified endorsement of another man; the politician questioned him closely--the matter had been settled only yesterday afternoon, so Butler declared. As soon as Butler left, this politician called up the man on the telephone, and ascertained that the man had not seen Butler for a month, and had made no promise.

Also, my informant had attended a caucus of the Republican party at the Republican Club in New York City, when President Butler was intriguing for the nomination for President. Butler came out from that caucus and was surrounded by a group of reporters, who asked him: "Was Theodore Roosevelt's name proposed?" Roosevelt, you understand, was Butler's most dreaded rival, and to keep him from getting the nomination was the first aim of every reactionary leader in the country. Said President Butler to the assembled reporters: "Gentlemen, you can take this one thing from me--Theodore Roosevelt's name was positively not mentioned in this caucus." But, so my informant declared, Roosevelt's name had been mentioned only a few minutes before in the caucus, and President Butler had opposed it! It is worth noting that Butler denounced Roosevelt and abused him with almost insane violence; but when Roosevelt died he made lovely speeches about him, and hailed himself as the true heir of the Roosevelt tradition. He sought the support of one of Roosevelt's close relatives on this basis, and the report was spread among newspaper men that he had got it.

Nicholas Murray Butler considers himself the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy; he takes that r?le quite frankly, and enacts it with grave solemnity, lending the support of his academic authority to the plutocracy's instinctive greed. There has never been a more complete Tory in our public life; to him there is no "people," there is only "the mob," and he never wearies of thundering against it. "In working out this program we must take care to protect ourselves against the mob." Socialism "would constitute a mob." "Doubtless the mob will prefer cheering to its own whoopings," etc.--all this fifteen years ago, in one speech at the University of California. President Wheeler of that university remarked to a friend of mine that this speech might have been made by Kaiser Wilhelm; and Wheeler ought to have known, for he had been the Kaiser's intimate.

And the fifteen years that have passed have made no change in our miraculous Nicholas. As I write, Senator LaFollette addresses the convention of the American Federation of Labor, and says: "A century and a half ago our forefathers shed their blood in order that they might establish on this continent a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, in which the will of the people, expressed through their duly elected representatives, should be sovereign."

And instantly our interlocking president rushes to the rescue. Before the convention of the New Jersey Bar Association he exclaims: "Our forefathers did nothing of the sort. They took good care to do something quite different." And the Associated Press takes that and sends it all over the United States, and ninety-nine out of a hundred good Americans read it, and say, reverently: "A great university president says so; it must be true."

What is the function of an American university president? Apparently it is to travel about the country, and summon the captains and the kings of finance, and dine in their splendid banquet halls, and lay down to them the law and the gospel of predation. I consult the name of Nicholas Murray Butler in the New York Public Library, and I find a long list of pamphlets, each one immortalizing a plutocratic feast; the Annual Luncheon of the Associated Press, 1916; the Annual Dinner of the Commercial Club of Kansas City, 1908, the Annual Dinner of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, 1917, the Annual Dinner of the Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Springfield, Mass., 1917, the Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, 1911, the Annual Dinner of the American Bankers' Association--and so on. In addressing these mighty men of money there is no cruelty which our interlocking president will not endorse and defend, no vileness of slander he will not perpetrate against those who struggle for justice in our commercial hell. "Political patent medicine men," he calls us; and he tells the masters of the clubs and bayonets, the gas-bombs and machine-guns that we seek our ends "by some means--violent if possible, peaceable if necessary"; he tells about Socialists "whose conception of government is a sort of glorified lynching."

And all this, you understand, not referring to the Bolsheviks; this in the days of the "Bull Moose"! In his speech before the Republican State Convention in 1912 President Butler portrayed the struggle with the Progressives as one "to decide whether our government is to be Republican or Cossack"! He discussed proposals to amend the constitution, saying it was like "proposing amendments to the multiplication table"! In the year 1911 we find him before the 143d Annual Banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, stating that "our business men are attacked," and that this constitutes "civil war." Our political conventions are being besieged "by every crude, senseless, half-baked scheme in the country"--a terrifying situation, and what is to be done about it? The orator is ready with the answer: "Why should not the associated business men of the United States unite to demand that the next political campaign be conducted with a view to their oversight and protection?"

The associated business men of the United States thought this was fine advice, so through the agency of their Grand Old Party they nominated Nicholas Murray Butler for the office of vice-president of the United States. In that campaign Butler called one of his opponents, Theodore Roosevelt, a demagog, and the other, Woodrow Wilson, a charlatan; and he triumphantly polled the electoral votes of the states of Utah and Vermont, a total of eight out of a possible four hundred and ninety-one.

But did that end the political ambitions of our interlocking president? It did not. He gave an honorary degree to the senator who had helped him carry the state of Utah, and continued diligently to cultivate the rich and powerful. In 1916 we find him in the field again, and this time his ambitions have swelled, he wishes to be President of the United States. In 1920 he wishes it still more ardently; his campaign managers solemnly assure the world that he will take nothing less. The "Literary Digest" conducted a straw vote in the spring of 1920 to find out what the American people wanted; 211,000 of them wanted General Wood, 164,000 wanted Senator Johnson, 20,000 of them wanted poor old Taft, and how many of them do you think wanted Nicholas Miraculous? 2,369! But did that trouble our interlocking president? It did not; because, you see, he knows that the politicians nominate what the interlocking directorate bids them nominate, and the people choose the least bad of the two interlocking candidates--if they can find out which that is.

So President Butler's campaign continued, and with the help of D. O. Mills, the banker, and Elihu Root, the fox, and Bill Barnes, the infamous, he corralled the sixty-eight delegates of the New York state machine, and a few days before they departed for the Chicago convention we find President Butler giving them a dinner and making them a speech at the Republican Club. They went to Chicago, and in the hotel rooms where the wires were pulled President Butler argued and pleaded and fought, but in vain. One of the most prominent Republicans in the United States described these scenes to me, and told of the pitiful, impotent fury of Butler when finally Harding was nominated. He stormed about the room, denouncing this man and that man. "Look what I did for him, this, that and the other thing--and what he has done for me!" And when the delegation returned from Chicago, Butler received the newspaper reporters and poured out his balked egotism in a statement which startled the country. He denounced the campaign backers of General Wood, "a motley group of stock-gamblers, oil and mining promoters, munition makers, and other like persons." These men, he said, had "with reckless audacity started out to buy the Presidency." He went on to picture the New York delegation, the heroic sixty-eight who had stood by President Butler and saved the nation's honor.

Then, of course, there was the devil let loose! General Wood came out in the next day's paper, denouncing Butler's statement as "a vicious and malicious falsehood." It was necessary, said General Wood, "to brand a faker and denounce a lie." And also there was Procter, Ivory Soap magnate, and General Wood's principal backer, denouncing "this self-seeking and cowardly attack." President Butler was interviewed by the New York "Times," and was dignified. "I am sorry that General Wood lost his temper. It does not sound well." He went on to point out that the New York "World" had exposed the corruptionists who were putting up the money for General Wood; and this made lively material for the Democratic campaign--you can imagine!

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