Education: Spinster Snubber

At Mrs. Roosevelt’s White House press conference last week, newswomen baited their hooks with a spicy morsel from Berkeley, Calif. There, one Martha Ijams, a spinster alumna of the University of California, had refused to carry on as hostess of a Charter Day alumni banquet because Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was No. i Charter Day speaker.*”I do not believe,” Miss Ijams had sniffed, “that the world is so barren of persons warranting recognition that it should be necessary for the university to delve into politics to find someone worthy to receive the honor of being chosen Charter Day speaker. It seems to me entirely out of place that the first woman so recognized should be a mere politician.”

What did Mrs. Roosevelt think of that for a snub? Mrs. Roosevelt did not think it was a snub at all. “A snub,” she defined, “is the effort of a person who feels superior to make someone else feel inferior; to do so, he has to find someone who can be made to feel inferior.” From that it followed that Miss Perkins could not possibly have been snubbed.

In 34 years as a zealous alumna, clubwoman and W. C. T. Unionist, Martha Ijams had rarely been so misunderstood. When she read the White House interpretation, she tossed her blonde hair (which she wears in a modified Gibson Girl coiffure), determined to make her snubs crystal clear. Back to Washington over the press wires went her answer: “I have nothing but contempt for [Mrs. Roosevelt]. She is as presumptuous as usual in her assumption as to what I intended or did not intend relative to Miss Perkins. Why should I answer her? Nothing she ever says is worth answering. The obvious fact to sensible people is that Mrs. Roosevelt is the obvious type of cheap headline seeker.”

Not for Miss Ijams’ behavior alone will Californians remember the university’s 63rd Charter Day. Before Robert Gordon Sproul became president, the University of California never had a Charter Day speaker more liberal than Nicholas Murray Butler or David Starr Jordan. Walter Lippmann two years ago was a starter. But Pundit Lippmann had no such enemies on the West Coast as “Madam Queen” has among the San Francisco businessmen. Because she declined to use her department to weed out and deport alleged Reds, many a San Franciscan still believes that the Secretary of Labor was somehow morally responsible for last year’s General Strike.

California holds its Charter Day exercises in a handsome open Greek Theater on the first slope of the hills which rise from San Francisco Bay. Early one morning last fortnight workmen groomed the Theater for an overflow crowd. At the foot of the slope, swishing academic gowns trailed an odor of mothballs through Faculty Glade. Class banners clustered about the base of the 300-ft. white granite Campanile. Well in time for the 10 o’clock procession, Herbert Hoover, who had driven up alone from Palo Alto, arrived with his gown over his arm. To friends he confided: “I hate academic gowns.” At 10 o’clock punctual officials glanced nervously at their watches, glanced again & again before Secretary Perkins, who had overslept at the President’s House, hurried belatedly upon the scene.

A color guard of R. O. T. C. students started up the slope toward the Greek Theater. As the honor guests swung in behind, a golden concrete “C,” high above on a hillside, glistened in the sun. President Sproul led the way with Governor Frank Finley Merriam, ex-officio chairman of the Board of Regents. Be hind, with her speech in a Department of Labor “penalty” envelope, trudged Secretary Perkins, escorted by California’s best-loved professor, Vice President and Provost Monroe Emanuel Deutsch. Behind them, Citizen Hoover and General David Prescott Barrows, the university’s onetime president who led the National Guard to break up the General Strike when Miss Perkins dallied. Mr. Hoover slipped into his gown just before the procession puffed through a fringe of eucalyptus trees. Alumni fixed cushions on the Theater’s stone tiers, then hushed as the procession ended. On the stage professors shielded their eyes against a blazing sun. A Catholic priest was delivering an invocation. President Sproul was booming out his thanks to the kind souls who gave his pub lic university a half million private dollars last year. Up rose Miss Perkins to talk of Labor and Society. Above her head, from behind a U. S. flag on the Theater’s facade, peeped a large-lettered plaque: A GIFT OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST. When she was done, President Sproul slipped a silken hood over her head, pronounced her a Doctor of Laws. The crowd rose, cheered when he did the same to Herbert Hoover. Then it enveloped the stage, stranded Miss Perkins for ten minutes before President Sproul rushed her bodily to his home for luncheon.

That night there was the alumni banquet with a substitute hostess. When it was over President Sproul took pen & paper, had it out with Miss Ijams. No punch-puller, he wrote to the Daily Californian, student newspaper: “We are misrepresented by ill-advised zealots who lack balance wheels and by one or two alumni who are so unbelievably boorish as to insult publicly a guest of the university in mere pride of personal opinion.”

Snubbed back Martha Ijams: “Thousands of alumni have no respect for President Sproul for playing politics with the Perkins woman.”

Miss Ijams’ mother had the last word. She thought that her daughter and all concerned would do well to close their mouths.

*For candid camera pictures of California’s Charter Day, taken exclusively for TIME by Peter Stackpole, see p. 42.