How this organization puts pressure on university professors is a matter about which you do not have to take my word; you may have the word of Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. In the San Francisco “Call” for January 20, 1922, I find an article occupying the top of seven columns, “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men of San Francisco.” This is a report of a luncheon at the St. Francis Hotel, in which Mr. Haldeman explained his work to the president and vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a group of such leading interlocking directors. Said Mr. Haldeman: “Through the children of the best business families throughout the land, who are attending universities, we are having students of radical tendencies watched. We are receiving reports of what is going on, both as to students and teachers that uphold radical doctrines and views.”
So here is the spy system in our universities; college boys and girls set to tale-bearing on their fellows and on their teachers! On such ignorant and garbled reports professors in the University of California are black-listed for promotion; or they are quietly let out without explanation—or with just a lie or two. When they apply for jobs in other places, letters are written to keep them from getting those jobs. School teachers are black-listed over the entire state; students in the university who graduate with honors are unable to get teaching positions, because the employment system maintained by the university is under the control of this kid-gloved Black Hand.
The active manager of this organization until a few months ago was Mr. Woodworth Clum, a lawyer, author of a pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” the substance of which is that America is calling her school children to mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. Mr. Clum was formerly secretary of the Greater Iowa Association, at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year; also secretary to the Iowa Commission to the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He left the state after a three years’ controversy over the fact that this Commission had failed to file a proper statement of its expenditure of public funds with the state accountant, twenty thousand dollars being missing; also after a typewriter belonging to the Commission had been traced to the office of the Greater Iowa Association; also after Mr. Clum had walked across the street and brutally struck in the face a Civil War veteran, wearing a Grand Army button, because this old man was deaf and did not hear a band playing the Star-Spangled Banner some distance away, and therefore had failed to remove his hat.