Professor Lovejoy goes on to tell how some years later, when he was visiting Palo Alto, “one of the signers of the collective statement to the public told me that he had signed with great reluctance, and with a sense of humiliation, but, since he had a family of young children, he had not felt that he could afford to risk the loss of his position. I cannot, of course, give this man’s name.” Professor Lovejoy calls attention to the fact that practically all the men who resigned were either unmarried or were married men without children. It might seem as if Francis Bacon, a scholar himself, had foreseen the plutocratic empire of American education when he wrote, three hundred years ago: “He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”
The poor old lady died at last, but she did not leave her fortune to be adminstered by an eminent ichthyologist, badly tainted with democracy and pacifism. On the contrary, she left it to a board of fifteen trustees—the usual interlocking directorate. As first grand duke we find none other than Mr. Timothy Hopkins, son of Senator Stanford’s colleague in the “Big Four.” Mr. Hopkins is president of a milling company, and director in a trust company, an ice company, and a telephone and telegraph company. As second grand duke there is Mr. Frank B. Anderson, president of the Bank of California, the great Standard Oil institution of the state. I am told that Mr. Anderson is there to represent the Morgan interests. He is vice-president of another bank, and director in three gas and electric companies, and in numerous other great concerns, including the Spring Valley Water Company, celebrated in the San Francisco graft prosecutions.
Mr. Bourn, the president of this company, is also on the board; and Mr. Grant, described to me by a friend who knows him as “an idle millionaire, the son of an old money grubber”; but he can’t really be so idle, being vice-president of a gas company and an oil company, chairman of a power company, director of the Bank of California, another bank, a trust company, another power company, a gas and electric company, another gas company, and a steel company. Also there is Mr. Nickel, “who married forty million dollars,” and is a director of the Bank of California, president of an irrigation company, a live stock company, and of the greatest land company in California; also Mr. Newhall, the son of an old-time auctioneer, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, vice-president of a great land company. In addition to these, there are three prominent corporation lawyers, two judges, both very conservative, a banker, an insurance man, and Mr. Herbert Hoover, than whom the plutocracy has no more faithful servant in these United States. One of the corporation lawyers, T. T. C. Gregory, is that Captain Gregory who was Mr. Hoover’s representative in Hungary, and used his control of the distribution of the relief funds and supplies furnished by the American people, for the purpose of breaking the revolution of the workers of Hungary, and bringing into power the infamous Horthy, who drowned the hopes of the Hungarian workers in a sea of blood. Few blacker deeds have been committed by American class-greed; but such is the state of our public opinion, that Captain Gregory came home and boasted of it in a series of articles in “World’s Work,” and Mr. Hoover stood back of him, and the Stanford trustees elected him to their exclusive board, and made him their secretary!