|
|
In April 1922 The Laughing Horse appeared on the scene in
Berkeley, “wherein the first laughs are awarded the University of
California.”. The Apologia gives the views of the editors.
Herewith is presented “The Laughing Horse,” a magazine of
polemics, phillippics [sic], satire, burlesque and all around
destructive criticism, edited, written and financed by four more or less
like-minded young persons, who find education as it is perpetrated in
America, and especially at California, a somewhat gaudy farce with
lachrymose overtones, but withal a spectacle par excellence.
Claiming that the magazine is a healthful reaction to the ‘vacillating
conservative spirit’ prevalent at the time, the editors seek a robust
skepticism to counteract what they perceived as the stultifying
education received in universities of the day, obviously including the
University of California, in which standardization seemed to be the
order of the day.
The editors were identified as Jane Cavendish, Noel Jason, Bill Murphy,
and L13, pseudonyms all, adopted in order to afford full freedom to
criticize:
We are not reformers; we are not architects. We are the wrecking
gang, hurlers of brickbats, shooters of barbs, tossers of custard pies.
We are not bitter; we are not ill-natured; we are not soreheads. We are
simply tired of the incessant bleating of professorial poloniuses and
their spineless imitators, the blather of campus politicians, the
palpable tosh of Cal. and Pelly and Occident editorials, the silly
chatter of our half-baked Hobsons, Bryans and Orison Swett
Mardens.
In reality the editors were Willard (“Spud”) Johnson, Roy Chanslor and
James Van Rensselaer, Jr., which they revealed in issue number 4, and it
was this issue that caused them some difficulty, especially for Chanslor
the only one of the three still actually enrolled at Berkeley by that
time. The issue included a contribution by D. H. Lawrence, solicited by
Johnson who by this time was living in Taos, New Mexico, and excerpts of
Upton Sinclair’s new book, The Goose Step: A Study of American
Education (Pasadena, 1923).
The latter was a scathing attack on American higher education, and
The Laughing Horse reprinted five chapters from the book in which
Sinclair addressed the problems he perceived at the University of
California. The titles themselves of the five chapters suggest the
nature of the criticism: “The University of the Black Hand,” “The
Fortress of Medievalism”, “The Dean of Imperialism”, “The Mob of Little
Haters”, and “The Drill Sergeant on the Campus.”
Sinclair’s criticism was aimed at the Board of Regents and at
Presidents Benjamin Ide Wheeler and David Prescott Barrows. The regents
are portrayed as powerful—both politically and economically—heads of
corporations who use the university to further their own aims. They are
accused of supporting the Better America Federation, which worked to
suppress any form of liberal thought. Harry Haldeman, president of the
federation, refers to what Sinclair called a “spy-system” in the
university:
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.
After dismissing Wheeler as an elitist, with regard only for the rich
and powerful and none for his prominent faculty, especially those in the
sciences, Sinclair levels most of his attack on Barrows in his “Dean of
Imperialism” and “Drill Sergeant on Campus” chapters. Referring to
Barrows’s experiences with the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia,
Sinclair characterizes him as “a real, red-blooded, two-fisted man of
action,” advocating that “Bolsheviki should be stood against the wall
and shot.”
Sinclair takes great exception to what he perceives as a militarization
of the university:
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
consist 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.
Sinclair perhaps unfairly singles out Barrows for this policy of
military training which was a long-standing one, but he also includes in
the same vein the athletic side of the university, commenting than under
Barrows the “one beauty spot available for nature lovers” was taken for
a stadium and that one advantage of a big university is the large number
of students available for selection for athletic teams:
In other parts of the world, when you hear of the “classics,”
you think of Homer and Virgil; but in California the “classics” are the
annual Stanford-California foot-ball game, and the intercollegiate
track-meet, and the Pacific Coast tennis doubles.
The D. H. Lawrence contribution to issue number 4 of The Laughing
Horse was a harsh review of Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare, in
the form of a letter address to “Chere Jeunesse,” Hecht, journalist and
writer, published his work in 1922, which prompted the federal
government to charge Hecht with obscenity. Hecht was later known for his
play The Front Page (1928), a classic which depicted the raucous
world of Chicago journalism,, but his earlier work was an iconoclastic
and literary assault against conventional American morality. In his
condemning review of the Hecht work, Lawrence did not hesitate to use a
full vocabulary of words which might be deemed of questionable taste.
Indeed, the editors substituted long dashes for these words: “We were
advised at the last moment to leave out words in this letter which might
be considered objectionable. We hope that this censorship will in no way
destroy the sense of the text.”
One might think that the university administration would be more
disturbed by the Upton Sinclair attack, but in fact it was the Lawrence
article that administrators seized upon in its attack on the magazine,
charging that it had printed obscene matter in its fourth issue. The
Undergraduate Student Affairs Committee found Chanslor guilty of the
charge and recommended expulsion from the university, which
recommendation was carried out by President Barrows in December, 1922.
Chanslor immediately wrote a defense to Barrows which first denies the
charge, based upon the critical acceptance of Lawrence’s work, and then
proceeds to claim that this was only a pretext for the real objection to
the contents of this issue of The Laughing Horse.
The truth seems to be that I have been expelled on the veriest
pretext, that the Lawrence letter has been siezed [sic] upon as a
convenient excuse for expelling me from the University, that my real
crime is that I have dared to print in the “Laughing Horse”, articles
which ridiculed and criticized policies of the University and of
yourself which could not bear criticism. In brief, that I am being
expelled from the largest university in the world for daring to express
my own honest opinions and for providing an organ so that others might
express their honest opinions.
The University of California apparently has no place for men who wish to
speak out, to broadcast their ideas. There is no place there for men who
insist upon their right to express themselves freely and without
restraint. If there is a member of the faculty or student body … who has
any ideas that are different from the accepted ideas, he has kept them
to himself. Opinion and inquiry must be correct, must be respectable,
must be approved. “Radicals,” that is those who seek to pierce through
the layers of hokum and bunk and downright lies to something resembling
the truth, are not wanted. May I ask then, what a university if for? Is
it a colossal sausage-mill, grinding out stupid, conventional,
tenth-rate imitations of the typical one-hundred-percent “go-getter”?
What encouragement, may I ask, does the University of California give to
creative artists, to fearless questioners, to challengers? The answer
is, NONE!
B. M. Woods, then dean of summer sessions in Los Angeles, wrote to
Barrows that he had seen a copy of The Laughing Horse and that he
appreciates the “moderation” that Barrows showed towards those involved
in the publication. Commenting on Sinclair’s “perversion of truth,” he
continues:
Particularly illmannered [sic] on the part of the author of the
article and on the part of the editor of the magazine is the publication
of material which in my opinion can result almost exclusively in harm to
the University and to the ideals which it represents.
Chanslor’s letter, in addition to pointing out that the ‘ridiculous’
charge of obscenity was dismissed by a police court in less than a
minute, states that The Laughing Horse “has tried, in its small
way, to let in a breath of air, a shaft of light to this campus.”
Issue number 5 reprinted a lengthy letter from Upton Sinclair to
President Barrows, dated December 14, 1922, in which he chastises
Barrows for his treatment of Chanslor and reiterates his objections to
Barrows’s administration and policies.
I do not ask the students of the University of California to
“defend’ my “article.” I only ask them to read it, and consider it, and
investigate its statements—which means that they should demand of the
president of the University of California that he either disprove the
charges, or else stand convicted before the people of this state as a
henchman of organized greed, instead of a servant of truth and social
justice.
The Laughing Horse continued to be published in Berkeley for two
more numbers, although not claiming any relationship to the university.
With issue number 8, it moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Willard
Johnson had already established himself and had forged a connection with
Witter Bynner. Further issues of the publication changed the scope of
the publication entirely, relying on contributions from the Santa Fe and
Taos literati, especially from Witter Bynner, Mabel Dodge Luhan and D.
H. Lawrence. The Laughing Horse continued its influential
literary output until 1930, with one further issue in 1938, when Johnson
turned to other interests.
Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of the University of
California, Issue 5 (2002)
|
|
