We move a couple of hundred miles farther north to Seattle. It may be difficult to believe that there was ever a time when students in an American university took an active interest in the people’s rights, and declined to receive favors from wholesale corrupters of public life; but such was actually the case ten years ago, at the height of the Progressive movement in the state of Washington.

The grand duke who ran the higher education of that state was Colonel Blethen, publisher of the Seattle “Times,” an exceptional old scoundrel who had manipulated street railways in Minnesota, and then brought his fortune to Seattle and bought a newspaper, which he used for the rawest kind of blackmailing, by a “strong arm” advertising department. Colonel Blethen had been made a member of the board of regents of the university; and in the effort to rehabilitate himself and his family name, he spent twelve thousand dollars for a set of chimes, which he presented to the university with the stipulation that they were to be known by his name.

The students of the university did not feel grateful; fifty-one of them composed and signed a letter of protest which was inserted in the student daily, and put on the presses, when the printer “tipped off” Colonel Blethen’s university president, and the presses were stopped. The students took the letter to the city and there printed it and distributed it. The editor of the college paper refused to publish again until he could publish the letter. When ordered by the authorities to issue the paper, he did so with a blank space where the letter had been!

Colonel Blethen’s president was a gentleman named Kane—bear his name in mind, if you can, as we shall have some adventures with him at the University of North Dakota. President Kane accepted the chimes, and a solemn ceremony of dedication was performed—with the students distributing handbills of protest on the outskirts of the crowd! If you consider the coincidence of Times, chimes and crimes, you will understand that the young men were literally driven to writing verses. The ones they made strike me as exceptionally good, so I quote two stanzas.

The protest had been orderly and dignified—the only violence being committed by one of the regents, who had dragged a student about, trying to tear his papers away from him and denouncing him for what he was doing. The student body was thoroughly roused, and more than seven hundred signed a letter endorsing the protest. Blethen had come on to the campus to make a speech, and the students had heckled him and as one of them told me “had him on the run.” The university authorities now barred all save invited speakers, and the president ordained that the teaching of progressive ideas at the university must cease, and there was to be no student criticism of president or regents, or their acts. The whole controversy was reviewed by the regents, who endorsed what the president had done.

We have spoken of Professor Hart, and how he was dropped from Reed. At this time Hart was at the University of Washington, and an incident will illustrate the feeling of all parties. Hart sat at luncheon in the Faculty Club, when President Kane entered and told of the action of the regents. Said Hart, “They think they can get away with it?” To which the president answered: “Aren’t they the authorities?” Said Hart: “Do you realize that there are a thousand students in this university who have votes, and may hold the balance of power at the next election?”

Evidently the regents thought the same thing; it was the year of the Roosevelt revolt, and the Progressives were certain of carrying the state. A few days before the election, the Seattle “Post-Intelligencer,” owned by the transportation lines and the Seattle National Bank, dug up a story to the effect that the Progressive candidate had divorced his wife. They mailed out ten thousand post cards to the women of the state: “Do you want a divorced man for governor?” As a result, the Democrats carried the election by eight hundred votes. They threw out two regents who had supported the students, and later on, as a result of the controversy, the governor turned out the entire board and put in four standpat business men, with a Catholic M. D. at the head. This gentleman made a desperate effort to have a Catholic chosen as president of the university, but finally compromised upon a High Church Episcopalian of Catholic extraction, a product of Nicholas Murray Butler’s finishing machine.

Professor Hart was at this time one of the most popular members of the faculty with the students, a lecturer widely known throughout the state; he was now told that his inability to get along with his colleagues in his department was a reason for his dismissal. They gave him a year’s leave of absence, though he did not want it; then they set out to find a substitute, and he applied for the job of substitute! Finally, they let out all three professors in the department, including Hart; a little later they took back one of them, the dean! A great many people thought this was a trick, and Hart’s students protested bitterly, but in vain. They paid Hart an unusual tribute of appreciation, organizing a publishing company to finance his book on social service.

Old Colonel Blethen of the “Times” is dead, and the University of the Chimes now has as its first grand duke a gentleman who is president of a bank, a commercial company, an investment company, an irrigating company, and a mortgage and a loan company; he is assisted by a politician and lobbyist, chairman of the appropriations committee of the state legislature. In twenty-five years, I am informed, there has never been a farmer or a labor representative on the board! The university remains a place of low standards, no academic achievements, and perpetual cheap advertising by the administration. Three different men have written me to tell how they have been strangled—but always warning me not to use their names—not even to tell the details of their experiences! One writes about another professor, not in any sense a radical, but who tells the truth about public questions, and as a result has been an object of attack for twenty-five years:

And peace reigns in the country of the Lumber Trust. Last year the big lumber companies cut wages, and on an investment of three millions they paid dividends of seven millions. At Port Angeles they are bringing in ship-loads of Japanese labor, in defiance of the law. The lumber-jacks and the blanket-stiffs work in hourly peril of life and limb; they sleep in filthy bunks and eat rotten food, and if they attempt to organize and better their conditions, their organizations are destroyed and their meeting halls sacked by mobs of business men. If they appeal to the public authorities they are laughed at; if they appeal to the public their voices are unheard; if they exercise the elemental right of self-defense, as they did at Centralia, they are shot, or beaten to death, or castrated with pocket knives and hanged, or tried before a mob jury and sentenced to ten or twenty years in jail. These things are done, not as acts of primitive barbarism, but as a business system; they are planned by the interlocking directorate, sitting in padded arm-chairs around tables in directors’ rooms; they are carried out by efficient executives telephoning from mahogany desks. Such is the rule of the Lumber Trust; and at the University of the Lumber Trust the professors know all about it; they go to their classes and teach what their masters tell them to teach, and on behalf of justice and humanity they utter not one single peep.