The Goose-Step

by Upton Sinclair

Chapter VII - The Interlocking President

We have investigated the governing board of the University of the House of Morgan. We have next to investigate the president they have selected to carry out their will. Naturally, they would seek the most plutocratic college president in the most plutocratic country of the world. They sought him and they found him; his name is Nicholas Murray Butler, abbreviated by his subordinates to “Nicholas Miraculous.” I am going to sketch his career and describe his character; and as what I say will be bitter, I repeat that I bear him no personal ill-will. If I pillory him, it is as a type, the representative, champion and creator of what I regard as false and 30cruel ideals. His influence must be destroyed, if America is to live as anything worthwhile, kindly or beautiful. For this reason I have made a detailed study of him, and present here a full length portrait. If some of it seems too personal, bear in mind the explanation; you will understand every aspect of our higher education more clearly, if you know, thoroughly and intimately, one specimen of the ideal interlocking university president.

Nicholas Murray Butler was born in Paterson, N. J., and his father was a mechanic. This is nothing to his discredit, quite the contrary; the only thing to his discredit is the fact that he is ashamed of it, and tries to suppress it. When he was candidate for vice-president in 1912 it was given out that he was descended from the old Murray family of New York, which gave the name to aristocratic Murray Hill; and this I am assured is not the fact. He has been all his life what is called a “climber.” Ordinarily I hate puns on people’s names, but the name of Butler seems to have been a special act of Providence. His toadying to the rich and powerful is so conspicuous that it defeats its own ends, and brings him the contempt of men whose intimacy he wishes to gain. George L. Rives, former corporation counsel of New York City, and chairman of the board of Columbia University for many years, said of him: “Butler is a great man, but the damnedest fool I know; he values himself for his worst qualities.”

Here is a man with a first-class brain, a driving, executive worker, capable in anything he puts his mind to, but utterly overpowered by the presence of great wealth. He serves the rich, and they despise him. The rich themselves, you understand, are not in awe of wealth; at least, if they are, they hide the fact. They are sometimes willing to meet plain, ordinary human beings as equals, and when they see a man boot-licking them because of their wealth they sneer at him behind his back, and sometimes to his face. At the Union Club they joke about Butler, with his crude talk about “the right people.” They observe that he will never go anywhere to a dinner party unless there are to be prominent people present, unless he has some prestige to gain from it. He has been married twice, and both times he has married money; his present wife is a Catholic, and she and her sister are tireless 31society ladies, “doing St. James’ and that kind of thin.”

Butler became a teacher, then school superintendent, then instructor in Columbia College, then professor of philosophy in the university, then dean, and now president. This would seem to most men a splendid career—especially considering the perquisites which have gone with it. The interlocking trustees built for their favorite a splendid mansion, costing over three hundred thousand dollars—paying for it out of the trust funds of the university. This mansion is free from taxation, upon the theory that it is used for educational purposes; but Professor Cattell publishes the statement that Butler uses it “for social climbing and political intrigues.” No one has ever been able to find out what portion of the trust funds of the university is paid to its president as salary. In addition, it is generally rumored at Columbia that Butler has accepted gifts from his trustees and other wealthy admirers.

But all this has not been sufficient for our ambitious educator. He has craved political honors; seeking them tirelessly, begging for them with abject insistence. He has been candidate for vice-president with Taft, and has been several times candidate for the Presidential nomination. All these things he has taken with the most desperate seriousness, utterly unable to understand why the politicians tell him he cannot be elected. He would go down to Washington to plead, and Jim Wadsworth, young aristocrat who runs the up-state political machine of New York, would “kick him about.” He would travel over the country addressing banquets of the “best people,” telling them how the country should be saved, and how he was the man to save it; at the same time he would go down to the common people, and pose as one of them. If you want to succeed in America, you must be what is called a “joiner”; so Butler joined the Elks, and a man who was present at this adventure told me about it. The Elks gathered, a vast herd; they had come to hear a great educator, and it was to be a highbrow affair for once in their lives, and they were solemn about it, expecting to be uplifted from their primitive Elkhood. Instead of which, the great educator flopped to their level, or below it. He tried to “jolly” them, telling them that he was “a regular fellow,” “one of the boys,” and that it was “all 32right for a man to have a good time now and then.” Of course, the Elks were disgusted.

In one of President Butler’s published speeches I find him sneering at the progressives as “declaimers and sandlot orators and perpetual candidates for office.” What this refers to is men like Roosevelt and LaFollette, who go out to the people and seek election. It does not apply to those who go in secret to the homes and offices of political corruptionists and wire-pullers, there to plead, almost on their knees, for nominations and favors. A prominent Republican politician of New York said to me: “He begged in my office for two hours. He told me he had the support of this man and that, and then I inquired and found it was not so.”

It is embarrassing to find so many people asserting that the president of Columbia University does not always tell the truth. It will be still more embarrassing to have to state that most of the presidents of colleges and universities in the United States do not always tell the truth. A curious fact which I observed in my travels over the country—there was hardly a single college head about whom I was not told: “He is a liar.” I believe there are no effects without causes, and I have tried to analyze the factors in the life of college heads which compel them to lie. I shall present these to you in due course; for the present suffice it to say that a man who has held the highest offices in New York state told me how Butler had assured him that Pierpont Morgan had promised to “back Butler to the limit for President,” and later this politician ascertained that no such promise had been given. Butler stated that he had the unqualified endorsement of another man; the politician questioned him closely—the matter had been settled only yesterday afternoon, so Butler declared. As soon as Butler left, this politician called up the man on the telephone, and ascertained that the man had not seen Butler for a month, and had made no promise.

Also, my informant had attended a caucus of the Republican party at the Republican Club in New York City, when President Butler was intriguing for the nomination for President. Butler came out from that caucus and was surrounded by a group of reporters, who asked him: “Was Theodore Roosevelt’s name proposed?” Roosevelt, you understand, was Butler’s most dreaded rival, and to 33keep him from getting the nomination was the first aim of every reactionary leader in the country. Said President Butler to the assembled reporters: “Gentlemen, you can take this one thing from me—Theodore Roosevelt’s name was positively not mentioned in this caucus.” But, so my informant declared, Roosevelt’s name had been mentioned only a few minutes before in the caucus, and President Butler had opposed it! It is worth noting that Butler denounced Roosevelt and abused him with almost insane violence; but when Roosevelt died he made lovely speeches about him, and hailed himself as the true heir of the Roosevelt tradition. He sought the support of one of Roosevelt’s close relatives on this basis, and the report was spread among newspaper men that he had got it.

Nicholas Murray Butler considers himself the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy; he takes that rôle quite frankly, and enacts it with grave solemnity, lending the support of his academic authority to the plutocracy’s instinctive greed. There has never been a more complete Tory in our public life; to him there is no “people,” there is only “the mob,” and he never wearies of thundering against it. “In working out this program we must take care to protect ourselves against the mob.” Socialism “would constitute a mob.” “Doubtless the mob will prefer cheering to its own whoopings,” etc.—all this fifteen years ago, in one speech at the University of California. President Wheeler of that university remarked to a friend of mine that this speech might have been made by Kaiser Wilhelm; and Wheeler ought to have known, for he had been the Kaiser’s intimate.

And the fifteen years that have passed have made no change in our miraculous Nicholas. As I write, Senator LaFollette addresses the convention of the American Federation of Labor, and says: “A century and a half ago our forefathers shed their blood in order that they might establish on this continent a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, in which the will of the people, expressed through their duly elected representatives, should be sovereign.”

And instantly our interlocking president rushes to the rescue. Before the convention of the New Jersey Bar Association he exclaims: “Our forefathers did nothing of the sort. They took good care to do something quite different.” And the Associated Press takes that and sends it all over the United States, and ninety-nine out of a hundred good Americans read it, and say, reverently: “A great university president says so; it must be true.”