Education: Chicago & Communism

Charles Rudolph Walgreen runs the largest chain of drug stores in the U. S. and prizes the few hours a day he can spare with his family. Each morning in the ivory-colored dining room of his Chicago apartment, overlooking Lake Michigan and the South Shore Country Club, short, bald Drugman Walgreen and his wife take breakfast together. Before Daughter Ruth and Son Charles Jr. were married, they, too, turned up for breakfast. The Walgreens are given to talking much over their eggs. But since Mrs. Walgreen’s niece Lucille Norton graduated from a Seattle high school and went East to stay with the Walgreens while she attended the University of Chicago, the conversation has been less & less to the Walgreens’ taste.

Each morning Uncle Charles would ask how Lucille, a healthy, buxom girl of 18, was getting on at college. After breakfast Lucille would pick up her books, ride with him as far as the campus on the Midway where the World’s Fair of 1893 was held. In the evening she would be back and next morning Uncle Charles would ask about her work again. Soon Lucille did not need to be asked. She talked at length of the things she learned. To Charles Rudolph Walgreen those things sounded dangerously like Communism.

Last fortnight, after Lucille had gone to bed, Mrs. Walgreen showed her husband a mimeographed quiz for an English course which Lucille had brought home. Lucille was to take one of a list of quotations, discuss it as “a starting point from which to frame a new social policy for the problems which we now confront.” Mr. Walgreen’s eyes ran down the list, stopped in horror and amazement at a quotation from Russia’s Primer by M. Ilin:

We have a plan. In America they work without a plan. In America they destroy crops. We increase production. In America they reduce production and increase unemployment.

We make what is essential. . . .

What, Mr. Walgreen wondered, did they teach in government courses? That night he slept little and next morning he delivered an ultimatum: Lucille must leave the University. Short while later, when he dropped his niece at the campus, she had instructions to go at once to Cobb Hall, tell the Dean all about it.

University of Chicago’s short, round Dean Aaron J. Brumbaugh worried privately for a week before he took two conservative-looking professors to call at Mr. Walgreen’s office. Mr. Walgreen seated them among pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, a lion, and a motto by Editor George Horace Lorimer (Saturday Evening Post), talked darkly of Reds and Sedition. As soon as they had gone he called his secretary, dictated a letter to the University’s able young President Robert Maynard Hutchins: “With regret, I am having my niece. Miss Lucille Norton, discontinue her studies at the University of Chicago. I am unwilling to have her absorb the Communistic influences to which she is so insidiously exposed.”

Drugman Walgreen took pains to send a copy to each of the University’s 30 trustees. Soon it got into the hands of newshawks. Chicago’s Press gave it great headlines. President Hutchins made more news by asking Mr. Walgreen for evidence. Mr. Walgreen made still more news by demanding a public meeting of the trustees to hear the evidence. Angrily President Hutchins refused to give him a field day.

Wrote President Hutchins: “The Uni-versity of Chicago for 43 years has had a clear record of public service and educational leadership. In view of that record it sees no necessity of holding a public hearing when vague and unsupported charges are made against it.”

Swiftly Chicago’s faculty rallied to the defense. Cried famed Orientalist James Henry Breasted: “Mr. Walgreen can hardly be unaware of the publicity value of his premature and regrettable use of the daily Press. Nor is it likely that his own publicity agents are unacquainted with the value of this inexpensive form of advertising. … At the hands of our Huey Longs and Father Coughlins our inherited institutions are indeed in danger. It may be a fair question to ask whether the author of such a destructive public attack . . . has disclosed such a complete lack of any sense of social responsibility that by his own act he has classified himself among the dangerous men of our time.” Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Arthur Holly Compton thought that “in a university, if radical viewpoints were not discussed, it would mean that such a university was intellectually stagnant.”

Least concerned was Niece Lucille Norton. Found by newshawks last week in an armchair with a book entitled The Meaning of Marx at hand, she scoffed at the idea of any Communist trying to “convert” her, admitted that Chicago is “one of the best places to learn about Communism if you want to.”

That radicalism is a real issue at the University, few Chicagoans deny. But real evidence of radicalism is scant. The Tribune, hunting campus Reds last winter, found only two pinko organizations (National Student League and League for Industrial Democracy), one that was hardly pinko (League Against War and Fascism). Their total membership, out of a student body of 6,000, was between 75 and 100.