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.
CHAPTER XXXVII THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE ANACONDA
We take the Northern Pacific Railroad, which has Mr. Morgan himself for a director, also two Morgan partners, one of them a recent Harvard overseer and a Massachusetts Tech trustee, and the other a Harvard overseer and Smith College trustee; also an Amherst trustee, a Hampton trustee, a Union Theological Seminary director, a Cornell trustee, and three First National Bank directors. We travel East until we come to the mining country; first, Montana, which has been swallowed whole by an enormous corporation, appropriately called the Anaconda. The people of this state maintain a university, scattered in four widely separated places, in order to please various real estate interests.
The State Board of Education, which runs matters for the Anaconda, contains the following appointed members: the personal attorney of Senator Clark, sometimes called the richest man in the world, and certainly the worst corruptionist who ever broke into the United States Senate; another attorney for big business, a hard fighting reactionary, who “grilled” a professor of the university law school for the crime of not giving his son high marks; another corporation lawyer, and a fourth lawyer who is a mild progressive; two merchants of the aggressive Chamber of Commerce type; one rich and conservative farmer; and one very subservient school principal.