• U.S.

Education: In Seattle

8 minute read
TIME

An Indian never forgets. The flame-coated mounted police of the Northwest always “get their man.” These are axioms of the great open spaces.

When tamer sections of the country heard last week that, in the rugged state of Washington, where snow-toothed mountains leap skyward and rivers with names like Snake and Yakima coil through forests never scarred by the ringing ax, the Governor had, after ten years of grim waiting, “got” the President of the State University for an old grudge, there was less alarm for the welfare of public education than thrill at the substantiation of legend.

It had been a long, smoldering wait for Governor Roland H. Hartley, but when he struck, he struck suddenly. Dr. Henry Suzzallo, the University President, had crossed his trail years ago, during the War, when he, Hartley, then a private citizen deep in timber operations, was having trouble with labor. The academician, as a member of the Labor Industries Board, had the audacity to suggest that timber operators put their crews on an eight-hour schedule, as in many another industry. In 1924, after Mr. Hartley’s election and during his campaign for a superboard to manage all state education (instead of various boards of regents) Dr. Suzzallo again appeared in the political forest and blocked the trail. The legislature passed, over the Hartley veto, an educational outlay far greater than the Hartley political economy deemed necessary.

Six months ago, Governor Hartley turned his attention to the Board of seven Regents which governs the University of Washington. Giving no reasons, he removed five of these functionaries, presumably with the “advice and consent” of the state senate as required by law, and made new, judicious appointments. Last month, Governor Hartley must have been glad of this step for after he had stumped the state with another appropriation-slashing program, the people of Washington rebuffed him in the primary, elected a legislature more un-Hartleyfied than ever. This time Dr. Suzzallo was loudly accused of exercising his right as a citizen to oppose Mr. Hartley in the public lists, Mr. Hartley at the same time denying that his “wangling” of the Regents was aimed at Dr. Suzzallo. Nevertheless, one evening last week, after visiting the Hartley suite in a Seattle hotel, the Hartleyfied regents went into executive session and came out to announce a “leave of absence” for Dr. Suzzallo and to talk of his successor, “a good man acceptable to everyone, under cover in the East.”

No reason was given for the abrupt dismissal. Dr. Suzzallo had been charged with nothing, been asked for no defense. But as a crowd of students surged up the street under red flares, surprise and anger were not among the emotions that filled Dr. Suzzallo’s voice in a front-porch speech. The students were for “striking” but Dr. Suzzallo begged them not to do that. The Regents’ action was, of course, a gross indignity to the presidential office and to the University as a whole, but after all its roots were in a personal antagonism; deeper than that, in an antagonism of type, culture, race. Realizing this, Dr. Suzzallo urged the students to attend their classes as usual and maintain without him the University that he had been privileged to help build up since 1915. And back the students went. The Governor. There was, of course, a plausible enough argument on Governor Hartley’s side of the conflict. He represented Dr. Suzzallo as too extravagant, too ambitious in his plans for the University of a state which, like all states, has much other educational machinery to support. The University, founded by Congress in 1854 as the Territorial University, before Washington was a state, enjoys the income from rich timberlands, tracts of which the State has added to the original Federal grant. Governor Hartley represented himself as trying to conserve these resources.

Roland H. Hartley, son of a preacher in New Brunswick, Canada, is as self-made and self-reliant as any man could be. His parents settled in Minnesota when he was a stripling of 14, and he added to the meagre instruction of the New Brunswick public schools everything that he could get from the Minneapolis Academy. He made the best of it because it was all the formal education he was to receive. No college for him, but work, hard work. He met a girl named Nina Clough whose father was rising in state politics. In 1888 he married her. In 1895, David M. Clough was elected Minnesota’s Governor and Roland Hartley served his father-in-law faithfully as private secretary. In 1903, with substantial funds in hand, he moved out to Everett, Wash., and got into the lumber game. Successful, he remembered his father-in-law’s fame and had himself elected Mayor of Everett, in 1910. Fourteen years from small-town mayor to Governor is not a bad political pace, even in progressive Washington. At last Roland H. Hartley was in a position to express himself as became a son of the forest primeval, an Eagle and a Mason, an Elk and a Woodman. Simple, hardheaded industry, devil-take-the-weakling, was his philosophy. When The Child Welfare Committee of America held a meeting (TIME, May 18, 1925) down in effete Manhattan and asked all the Governors to send representatives, newly-elected Roland H. Hartley replied, manfully and rather rudely: “. . . an overabundance of altruistic twaddle … a lot of this uplift gush!”

The President. Quite as self-reliant, but less rugged about it, is Dr. Henry Suzzallo, whose Italian mother bore him at San Jose, Calif., in 1875, shortly after emigrating with her husband from their home near Trieste, which was ruled by Austria’s conquering hands. He went up to Stanford for his A. B. degree, then east to Columbia for his M. A. and Ph. D. He found his line in educational sociology and followed it on the faculties of Stanford, the University of California, Yale, and Columbia, where he became head of the philosophy department in Teachers’ College. It was there that the Washington regents found him in 1915 and he returned to the coast of his birth gladly. The University of Pittsburgh tried to lure him east again in 1919, offering to double his salary. He refused. The Carnegie Foundation, the National Research Council, the English Speaking Union, the Hall of Fame, the National Dante Committee, the American Legion, the Boy Scouts, the International Institute of the University of Heidelberg, and a dozen or so literary, sociological and scientific societies, soon made inroads on his time, recognizing him for a man of creditable character and intelligence; hearing of him from his many friends as one in whom force combined with charm, integrity with flexibility of manner. His prime attention, however, he devoted to the institution that was now in his charge.

He was at one with its pioneering spirit; he had been born to appreciate the two deep lakes between which the campus lay, and the virgin timber standing near its buildings. He watched its tuition-free student body expand above 8,000. He sent its oarsmen 3,000 miles east to a rowing contest; its baseballers 4,100 miles west to trounce the Japanese; its footballers down to Pasadena, Calif., to play the “Tournament of Roses” (New Year) match with Alabama (TIME, Jan. 11).

Last week, rudely “fired” by his Nordic enemy, Dr. Suzzallo did not announce how he would spend his indefinite “leave of absence.” For rugged Governor Hartley, however, the incident appeared as but a preliminary to another fight. Friends of fairness and of state education free from political interference; were talking of a gubernatorial impeachment. Alumni who viewed with alarm the judgment of the Hartleyfied regents, talked of advancing Dean Henry Landes of the College of Science, whose wife, Bertha K. Landes, ably serves Seattle as its Mayor (first woman mayor of a large U. S. city [TIME, March 22]).

Growing Panes

In Birmingham, Eng., educators studied “the little window where the sun peeped in at morn”; weighed, measured, counted the red corpuscles of school children who spent a school year behind windows fitted with ordinary glass, compared them with data on children studying behind glass made specially to permit the transference of ultraviolet rays in sunlight . The ultraviolet children surpassed their common-glass fellows by three pounds, half an inch, many a corpuscle (8%). Last week the Birmingham educators decreed ultraviolet glass windows for all schools. (Many a U. S. school has studied ultraviolet effects on health. No large U. S. city has yet installed special panes on all its schools.)

Harvard Jews

On shady Prescott Street, Cambridge, Mass., alongside the Harvard Union, back of the Yard and within hearing distance of President Lowell’s red brick home, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in American opened a cafeteria and dormitory, exclusively for Jewish students, last week. The building, once a private residence, will be operated under the jurisdiction of, among others, Dr. Nathan Isaacs, Harvard Professor of Business Law.Only Kosher foods will be served.*

*The rational, hygienic Mosaic dietary laws are catalogued in Deuteronomy 14, which specifies that the flesh of only cloven-footed beats that chew their cud may be eaten—cattle, deer, etc. Cloven-footed hares and swine do not chew their cuds and are interdicted.

Only fish with both fins and scales are allowed; no catfish, sharks, eels.

Kinds of birds permissible for food are not listed. But it is forbidden to eat eagles, owls, etc.

And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they shall not be eaten.— Deut. 14:19.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com