So much for the handling of the Stanford trust. If I had a life-time in which to study universities, I should like to see what care has been taken with the funds of the University of the United Gas Improvement Company of Philadelphia, and with those of the University of the Steel Trust, at Pittsburgh, and with those of the University of Heaven, at Syracuse, and with those of the Mining-Camp University at Denver. I should like to settle down in New York and make a thorough financial study of the University of the House of Morgan, and tell Professor Moses Primrose the names of all those trustees and professors who got advance news of the moving of the university to Morningside Heights; I should like to raise a fund and have a search made of the title records, and give him a list of the various lots and parcels of land which now belong to Barnard College, and figure up the total of the fortunes cleared by the insiders who purchased the old insane asylum which stood on that site! But maybe Professor Moses Primrose would call that “honest graft!”
CHAPTER XXXV THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LUMBER TRUST
We take the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was plundered by the founder of Stanford, aided by the father of a Stanford trustee and the father of a California trustee, and which now has a Rutgers College trustee, an Equitable Trust, a Guaranty Trust, and a National City Bank director. We travel north for a day and a little more, and find ourselves in a country ruled with iron hand by three great lumber companies, and the interlocking banks which finance them. The headquarters of this oligarchy of the Northwest are at Portland and Seattle, and we begin with the former city. You expect, perhaps, to find a lumber country crude and wild; but you will find in Portland an old city with a long-established aristocracy, as much concerned with its ancestors as Philadelphia.
Fifteen years ago there was a strong movement for social justice in Oregon, led by reformers who fondly imagined that if you gave the people the powers of direct legislation they would have the intelligence to protect their own interests. We see now that the hope was delusive; the people have not the intelligence to help themselves, and the interlocking directorate is vigorously occupied to see that they do not get this intelligence. To this end they utilize two institutions, Reed College in Portland, which is privately endowed, and the University of Oregon, located in the neighboring town of Eugene. As we have seen with Eastern universities, it makes no particle of difference whether an institution is directly owned and controlled by the plutocracy, or indirectly controlled through the plutocracy’s political machine.