Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/339

 of the silk stockings and the pink kimono. Nevertheless, this most popular professor of literature was driven out of the university, and set to work as a common laborer on a California chicken-ranch.

I write to ask him to verify the details of this story; I ask him to be heroic, and let me tell the story, in the interest of the public welfare. He gives the permission, adding the following comment:

In this statement, you speak of only one detail—the last one. But the real story involves what amounted to a conspiracy against me in the two years preceding my retirement from the university. This consisted in so reporting lectures and statements that a very quiet and reasonable scholar came to be regarded as a "freak professor." No one could stand up against this kind of attack and retain a position in a conventional university. I never could get to the bottom of it. It is a poor way to treat human material, but so be it.

Maybe you distrust the radicals; they are all "free lovers," you say; they deserve their marital unhappiness, they deserve exposure and humiliation. Well, then, suppose I tell you about some respectable person? Suppose I tell you about the President of the United States, secure in the sanctity of the White House? Will that convince you?

You didn't happen to know that the "Scandal Bureau" had prepared a story on Woodrow Wilson! The "interests," which wanted war with Germany and Mexico, had a scandal all ready to spring on him toward the end of the 1916 campaign. They had the dynamite planted, the wires laid; all they had to do was to press the button. At the last moment their nerve failed them, they did not press the button. I was told why by a prominent Republican leader, who was present in the councils of the party when the final decision was made. This man pounded on the table and declared: "I'd have said I'd sooner vote for the devil than for Woodrow Wilson, but if you start a dirty story on the President of the United States, I'll vote for Woodrow Wilson, and one or two million Americans will do likewise."

Their nerve failed them; but some steps they had already taken, and you may trace their footprints if you are curious. There were dark hints in many newspapers, and if you saw the Washington correspondence of London papers during the fall of 1916, you found more than hints. For example, here