Academic Freedom

Professor Ely and the 1894 Regents Declaration

Our story begins with the most famous case of the late 1800s in which intense public pressure was put upon university administrators and faculty because of their advocacy of social and economic change. Let us first review what social and economic changes were involved.Ely

 

According to the eminent Wisconsin historian John Buenker, Wisconsin began its difficult transformation into a modern, urban, industrial, and multiethnic society in the 1880's.1 This process was driven by three key developments: the scientific and industrial revolution in dairy farming spurred by the UW College of Agriculture that turned Wisconsin into the “Dairy State;” the development of a post-lumbering economy in the northern two-thirds of the state that included a huge papermaking industry; and an industrial expansion in the southeastern third of the state utilizing mass production, integrated corporations, national distribution systems, advertising, scientific management and other facets of modern capitalism that resulted in high national rankings by 1915.2 This transition from a pastoral economy to an industrial one brought massive urbanization and a substantial influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe which produced an “organize or perish” state of affairs that led to increasing calls for government intervention to insure “progress,” conceived of as an increase in the general welfare, the public interest. The agendas of various groups of special-interest organizations, university professors, civil servants, politicians and radicals led to the “Progressive” movement and the “Wisconsin Idea.” More specifically, that meant an “enlightened cooperation between the public sector and elements of the private sector. To accomplish that goal, the state must foster the ‘new individualism,’ generate and invest the required social capital, build the necessary infrastructure, establish and monitor operational guidelines, guarantee equitable distribution of the benefits, provide for the welfare of the ‘worthy poor,’ and protect the public interest.”3

The “progressive” call for government regulation of private industry was supported and justified to a large extent by a popular blend of Christian socialism and social science of the sort championed by Richard T. Ely and students such as Edward A. Ross, who provided much of the intellectual support for factory safety and child labor laws as well as maximum working hour and minimum wage laws. The result? A state “notorious for its domination by railroad, lumber and other business interests in the early 1890s, the Badger State was widely hailed and emulated as a progressive model and a laboratory for democracy by 1915.”4

However, many powerful leaders of private industry opposed the progressive changes, and many ordinary folks, remembering the horrors of the Civil War, feared that the labor conflicts of the late 1800s would lead to a labor war.5 In 1877, for example, more than 100 people were killed in the violence arising from a nationwide railroad worker strike. In the 1880s there were nearly 500 strikes a year and by the 1890s there were nearly 1000 strikes a year involving as many as 700,000 laborers. The Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886 resulted in the deaths of eight policeman and numerous workers.

Those who opposed government regulation of private industry blamed the labor unrest on utopian reformers and called for an end to criticisms of the status quo. For example, in June of 1894, in response to economic depression, high unemployment and the Pullman railway labor problems, Edwin Godkin and Horace White, editors of The Nation, wrote that, “As the world now stands, we hold it to be the solemn duty of all writers, preachers, and professors, who are engaged in the work of reform, to refrain from denunciations of the existing society and social arrangements….The common practice amongst Christian and other socialists and utopians of abusing…the existing conditions of society as an engine of fraud and oppression has undoubtedly done much to produce the ‘militant anarchist’ and give a sort of justification to his attacks on life and property.”6

One man in Wisconsin took Godkin and White’s editorial to heart. Oliver E. Wells, a former teacher from Appleton, was elected state superintendent of education and thus an ex officio member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents in the Democratic victories of the 1892 election. In the winter of 1892-3, Wells learned about labor unrest at the Democratic Printing Company and Tracy-Gibbs Printing Company in Madison, and that UW economics professor Richard T. Ely was involved on the side of labor. Suspicious of Ely, Wells then read Ely’s new book7 and judged it to be pernicious socialist propaganda. Convinced Ely was a radical, Wells undertook to fire the professor by complaining to President Charles Kendall Adams and the Board of Regents. When they turned a deaf ear, he took his complaints public by responding to the Nation editorial with a letter published under the title, “The College Anarchist.”

Wells:8 Your statement that theories from our colleges, libraries and lecture rooms justify anarchist attacks on life and property is supported by the teaching and practice of the University of Wisconsin. Professor Richard T. Ely, director of the School of Economics, Politics and History, supports strikes and boycotts, as evidenced by his entertaining at home and advising an out-of-state union organizer fomenting labor unrest in Madison and by his withdrawing a contract when the printer refused to unionize his workplace. His books, intentionally written for the masses and widely marketed by the University, trick the general population into accepting his revolutionary views through his pious cant and ostentatious sympathy for all who were in distress. His appeal to the religious, the moral, and the unfortunate with the promise to help all insures a large public audience. Only the careful reader will discover the utopian, impracticable and pernicious doctrines underlying his pandering to all afflicted and the justification it provides for the anarchist violence this country has already become too familiar with.

Godkin and White responded to the Wells letter with another editorial, this time singling out Professor Ely for rebuke, and published it not only in the Nation but also their newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and many newspapers around the country reprinted the article.

Godkin and White:9 Mr. Wells is quite right. In 1886, we printed a book review outlining Ely’s bias and bitterness against wealthy people, which mirror the ravings of an Anarchist or the dreams of a Socialist and is seriously out of place in a university chair. In 1888, we criticized Ely for advancing worthless and revolutionary ideas advocating state and municipal socialism. Of course, Mr. Ely is too clever to straight out and announce his socialism and anarchism, but he blames industrial poverty on the wealthy rather than on the extravagance, improvidence and dissipation of workingmen themselves. Rather than criticize George Pullman for providing company-owned housing to his railway workers as a subterfuge further putting labor under the control of capital, he should recognize it to be the good and noble work it is, a benefit beyond the ability of most workingmen to provide for their families. The world does not need to be made over again. Laissez-faire capitalism is doing great.

Professor Ely had come to Wisconsin in 1892 as one of the nation’s most distinguished, and controversial, political economists. In 1879 he took his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, a leading center of the German historical school of economics; beginning in 1881, he taught at Johns Hopkins, the foremost American graduate school of the time; in 1885 he co-founded the American Economics Association. He was the son of a devout minister, and his economic teachings focused on a kind of civic humanism promoting the well being of all citizens and publicly took the side of the working class in the biggest issue of the day, class warfare. For example, in 1886 he wrote a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun supporting a rally held by Baltimore streetcar workers advocating a twelve-hour day.

Ely:10 I do not hesitate to condemn in the most severe terms the treatment streetcar workers have received from their employers. In future years it will inevitably be a blot on our much-vaunted nineteenth-century civilization, that in all large American cities men worked from fourteen to nineteen hours a day in sight of the public, and that the moral sense of the community was not sufficiently elevated to revolt against this barbarity.

Professor Ely also was the first academic economist to address a national labor union, the American Federation of Labor, at their 1887 meeting in Baltimore. He wrote his books for the working class and employers, not his fellow economists. He championed city-run electric companies, gasworks, waterworks, and street railways; federally-run telegraph and telephone companies, railroads, canals, forest and mineral lands; the inheritance tax, greater protections for female and child labor, civil service reforms, better legal outcomes for labor unions, slum clearances and the creation of urban parks, savings banks, restriction of immigration, and tax relief for lower classes.11

One must keep in mind this was a “radical” agenda in the late 1800s, the heyday of laissez-faire (unregulated) capitalism. Ely’s intellectual arguments and public support for such reforms made him the target of many wealthy and powerful critics at a time when there did not exist any legal precedents or organizations protecting academic freedom and it put him at odds not only with the defenders of laissez-faire capitalism, but also with many academics who hoped to develop an uncontroversial (and thus financially well supported) professional culture. Thus, the Wells letter and editorial rebuke of the Nation raised a controversy that the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents could not ignore. William Bartlett, the regent’s president, proposed at the July 31, 1894 meeting of the board that since a Regent had made the charges against Ely, the board should appoint a committee to study the matter. Despite some objections, the board adopted the proposal, and Bartlett appointed three men to conduct the investigation: Herbert Chynoweth, a Madison Attorney, John Johnston, a Milwaukee banker, and Harvey Dale, an Oshkosh physician.

Ely was on favorable terms with Johnston, having exchanged friendly letters about the need for freedom on the college campus,12 but the announcement of the investigation stimulated Ely’s supporters to mount a publicity campaign on his behalf to win over the other two regents and the general public.13 Jerome Raymond, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an acquaintance of Harvey Dale, wrote to him in Ely’s favor, and persuaded another closer friend of Dale to do the same. He also agitated for favorable press in the Chicago area, since many small-town Wisconsin papers reprinted the big-city articles without editing or comment. Philip Ayres, a former student of Ely’s, got Cincinnati newspapers to publish articles supporting Ely. In Baltimore, another former Ely student, Edward Ingle worked his connections as a freelance writer to get favorable press for Ely. The Chicago Evening Post published an editorial supporting Ely. In Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal editor Amos P. Wilder worked for favorable press coverage in the local area. David Kinley, a University of Illinois economist and former Ely student, offered Wells a chance to withdraw the charges, and when Wells did not, set about to refute each of the particular charges he had leveled.

Ely himself said nothing public, having gone east on holiday to help his wife recover from illness and the death of their nine-month-old child. However, six days before the regents would meet to discuss his case, Ely (a Chautauqua lecturer) wrote a prepared statement for the Reverend John Vincent, chancellor of the Chautauqua system, to read at the upstate New York gathering.

Ely:14 I categorically deny Oliver Wells’ charges in each and every particular. The man who makes these charges against me is well known to his neighbors as a politician of the meaner sort, who, too small to appreciate the most important trust ever committed to him, betrayed it in his insensate love of notoriety. I am neither a socialist nor an anarchist, and although I favor labor unions, I have a limited faith in them. I expect President Adams of the University of Wisconsin to fully support me when the time comes for him to speak on the issue.

The committee requested Mr. Wells appear at their August 20 meeting with his evidence against Ely and they instructed Ely to bring whatever lecture notes from his Wisconsin classes he could produce. The committee announced it would only address Ely’s activities in the strike and his teachings; it would not investigate his personal beliefs or publications. Two hundred observers, nearly all Ely supporters, attended the hearing. Ely came with his attorney Burr W. Jones, a Madison attorney, Democratic politician, and teacher in the university’s law school. Wells, however, did not appear, but sent a messenger to explain that he was out of town on business and did not need to be present until Ely’s books were considered, since they were the basis of his accusations. After conferring with Ely and Jones, the regents postponed the meeting until the next night.

Again Wells was asked to attend, and the regents explained that they had excluded Ely’s books since their charge was to investigate Wells’ complaint about Ely’s “teachings in the University.” However, they assured Wells they would listen to all of his comments if he attended. Thus, Wells did come to the next meeting along with his attorney (Colonel George W. Bird) although much of the meeting was spent arguing over what exactly the charges were, what books might be evidence, and whether formal charges were required. Eventually they agreed to take the Nation editorial as a statement of the charges, and lawyer Jones responded with Ely’s refutation of each.

As to the printer’s strike, Wells’ key witness, Mr. Tracy of Tracy-Gibbs failed to back up the specific charges, proving only that Ely thought unions at times had to resort to unlawful boycotts to be successful and that this was one of the bad things about them. Thomas Reynolds, who was supposed to provide the link to Mr. Klunk, the out-of-state union organizer, also failed to back up the accusations. The committee then adjourned until two nights later, when Wells was supposed to produce the goods from Ely’s writings.

However, the very next day, David Kinley produced a letter from Klunk stating that he had not been to Ely’s home, nor had he consulted with Ely about the strike, though he had perhaps interviewed him once. Further, Wells did not attend the next meeting, again sending a letter in his place insisting Ely had encouraged the strike, tried to coerce Tracy, and favored socialism. The committee accepted the letter as evidence along with the letters of several prominent academics supporting Ely, including President Adams of the University of Wisconsin, President E. Benjamin Andrews of Brown University, U.S. Labor Commissioner Carroll Wright, and Albert Shaw, editor of Review of Reviews. Several professors from around the country testified that Ely’s work caused no harm and had beneficial results, and submitted numerous favorable reviews of his books as further evidence. Given the failure of Wells to back up his accusations and the outpouring of support for Ely, the committee ended the hearing and investigation.

Interestingly, Ely himself seemed of two minds about freedom of speech and academic freedom. He did not appeal to either in his defense, opting instead for the safer strategy of denying the charges, and even publicly admitted that if he were guilty of the charges he would be unworthy of the honor of being a professor in a great university.15 In private, Ely saw academic freedom was involved, for example, commenting that “if I am slaughtered, others in different Universities will perish, and what will become of freedom of speech, I do not know;”16 and encouraging Amos Wilder at the Wisconsin State Journal to appeal to academic freedom, for if the university “should yield to popular clamor and discharge me for my views, it would be an injury to the University from which is would not soon recover….Freedom is the glory of a State University and intolerance is its shame.”17 Yet years later, during World War I, Ely advocated the dismissal of any professor who opposed, criticized or in any other way undermined the American war effort.18

David Kinley took the appeal to academic freedom public, predicting a “vindication of the principle of free speech and the harmlessness of truth” and that “even if it were true that Dr. Ely’s views were far in advance of those commonly accepted, it would be a serious matter to curtail freedom of opinion.”19 But many people were not willing to go so far. The editor of the Evangelist wrote that Ely had gone too far if “the State authorities are openly defied, as well as theoretically,” and if his views were “radically erroneous or inconsistent with loyal citizenship,” he was an unsafe teacher of youth.20 President George Gates of Iowa College, wrote an editorial for the Kingdom defending Ely’s “liberty to prophesy,” although a man does not have a right to “say and teach anything he pleases.”21 The editor of the Springfield ( Mass.) Republican expressed worries about allowing the government to brand any doctrine a heresy, but yet conceded that a professor might be dismissed for economic heresy. Two Wisconsin papers, the Milwaukee Wisconsin and Milwaukee Journal thought Dr. Ely should be fired on the grounds that the state cannot “maintain a propaganda directed against the political and social principles embodied in the constitution” and “[o] ur free institutions are too valuable to be imperiled by such teachings as are attributed to Dr. Ely.”22

However, stimulated by a letter from UW law professor John Olin23 and the outspoken public support for censorship, the committee decided in its final report to make a bold, strong statement in favor of academic freedom:

As Regents of a university with over a hundred instructors supported by nearly two millions of people who hold a vast diversity of views regarding the great questions which at present agitate the human mind, we could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher even if some of his opinions should, in some quarters, be regarded as visionary. Such a course would be equivalent to saying no professor should teach anything which is not accepted by everyone as true. This would cut our curriculum down to very small proportions. We cannot for a moment believe that knowledge has reached its final goal, or that the present condition of society is perfect. We must therefore welcome from our teachers such discussions as shall suggest the means and prepare the way by which knowledge may be extended, present evils be removed and others prevented. We feel that we would be unworthy of the position we hold if we did not believe in progress in all departments of knowledge. In all lines of academic investigation it is of utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead. Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage the continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.24

The Ely case ends with a victory for academic freedom. Professor Ely was completely exonerated, and continued his highly successful career at UW until he retired in 1925 after 33 years of service. Many years later, Ely proudly wrote about the 1894 regents report as “that famous pronunciamento of academic freedom which has been a beacon of light in higher education in this country, not only for Wisconsin, but for all similar institutions, from that day to this. Their declaration on behalf of academic freedom…has become to be regarded as part of the Wisconsin Magna Charta….”25 The would-be-censor Oliver Wells, on the other hand, was booed and hissed at his party’s state convention in 1894 and dumped as a the Democratic candidate for superintendent of state schools. He also received a formal rebuke from the Board of Regents, and was forsaken by Godkin and White of the Nation who professed to be pleased to see Ely cleared of the allegations.

Yet the fight for freedom is never finished, and many other academics teaching around the nation soon faced similar ordeals.26 And the declaration by the UW Board of Regents in 1894 did not prevent later attempts to censor campus speech, sometimes successfully, as our next case shows.

Notes

1 John D. Buenker, “Sifting and Winnowing: The Historical Context,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1998), pp. 19-35.

2 In 1915 Wisconsin ranked ninth nationally in value added by manufacturing and tenth in product value.

3 Buenker (1998), p. 23.

4 Buenker (1998), p. 34.

5 See Benjamin G. Rader, “’That Little Pill’: Richard T. Ely and the Emerging Parameters of Professional Propriety,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 105.

6 “The Moral of Carnot’s Assasination,” Nation 58 (June 1894), p. 480.

7 Name book. List other Ely books of the era

8 Quotes and paraphrases from Wells, “Letter to the Editor,” Nation 59 (July 1894), p. 27.

9 “An Ethical Professor Rebuked,” Nation 59 (July 19, 1894), pp. 41-2. They also publicized their criticisms of Ely in their newspaper, “Our Socialists of the Chair,” New York Evening Post, June 11, 1894.

10 See Benjamin G. Rader, “’That Little Pill’: Richard T. Ely and the Emerging Parameters of Professional Propriety,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 106.

11 Theron F. Schlabach, “An Aristocrat on Trial: The Case of Richard T. Ely,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 43.

12 Johnston assured Ely that “A teacher who can only teach what is accepted by everybody, will be confined to a very narrow line of tuition” and that he hoped the University “will always hold fast to the apostolic injunction to ‘prove all things and hold fast to that which is good.” For his part, Ely assured Johnston he was a firm believer in independent thought and did not teach dogmatically, and many of his students, while liberal and progressive, were “at the same time conservative men in the truest sense of the word.” Schlabach, p. 44-45.

13 Schlabach, p. 45.

14 “Prof. Richard T. Ely Makes a Personal Statement,” Chautauqua Assembly Herald, August 15, 1894.

15 Schlabach, p. 50.

16 Ely letter to Shaw, August 8, 1894.

17 Ely letter to Wilder, July 22, 1894.

18 A. W. Coats, “Economists, the Economics Profession, and Academic Freedom in the United States,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 134.

19 Turner quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal August 24, 1894 and August 3, 1894.

20 Evangelist, August 16, 1894.

21 Kingdom, August 24, 1894.

22 Quoted in Wisconsin State Journal, August 3, 1894 and August 10, 1894.

23 Olin had an even more trying tussle with the Board of Regents, having been fired in 1887 for advocating prohibition and providing legal counsel to people with claims against the University, but rehired in 1893. Olin wrote Regent George Noyes of Milwaukee asserting that they needed to declare the freedom of professors to speak out on the “living questions” in order to repair the damaged reputation of the university. See Schlabach, pp. 51-2.

24 Reprinted in Theodore Herfurth, “Sifting and Winnowing: A Chapter in the History of Academic freedom at the University of Wisconsin,” in W. Lee Hansen (ed.), Academic Freedom on Trial (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 66-7.

25 Richard T. Ely, Ground Under Our Feet (New York, 1938), p. 232.

26 See, e.g., Coats, pp. 124-149.