Naturally, that made considerable fuss in Berkeley; for the city had a Socialist mayor and school board only a couple of years previously, and the chambers of commerce and the professional patriots were doing their best to establish the term “Bolsheviki” as including, not merely all Socialists, but everybody who believed in the initiative and referendum, or in government ownership of railroads. So the Socialists of Berkeley challenged Barrows to a debate. He accepted, and the Socialists tried first to get the university hall, and then the high school auditorium; but the president of the Berkeley board of education—a dentist, described to me by another school board member as rarely attending a session without the smell of liquor on his breath—opposed the use of the building, and advocated that all Socialists should be “driven into the bay.” Finally, however, the use of the auditorium was obtained; it would only seat twelve hundred people, whereas between eight and ten thousand came.
This was July 30, 1919, at the time when “Bolsheviki” by thousands were being clubbed over the heads and thrown into jail all over the United States. The mayor and the chief of police of Berkeley sat on the platform, and two auto loads of secret service men attended; an effort was made to start a riot and raid the Socialists, a scheme which was averted by the quickness of Mrs. Elvina Beals, who presided at the meeting. Mrs. Beals was for many years a Socialist member of the school board, and the people of Berkeley know her. In the course of the debate, Dean Barrows advocated that the American government should conquer Siberia and Russia for Kolchak, and he asked whether the Socialists of Berkeley would support a strike to prevent the shipment of ammunition to Siberia. They answered with a roar that they would; and so Dean Barrows retired, and did no more debating with these Berkeley “Bolsheviki.”
President Wheeler having been intimate with the German kaiser, and ardent in his defense, the interlocking regents wanted somebody else to attend to their interests in war-time. What more natural than to turn to their Dean of Imperialism? They made him president, and he put “ginger” into the system of military training. Twelve thousand students get a free education, but must pay for it by taking two years of military training, fifty-five hours a year. A part of this training consists in learning to plunge a bayonet into an imitation human body, and you must growl savagely while you do this, and one student found it so realistic that he fainted and was dismissed from the university.