Chapter VI: Appendix: A

About the year 1920 to 1921 the “Blue Menace” began to use its three arms of power: the secret service, a hired police, and signed and unsigned propaganda against what the “Blue Menace” called the “Red Menace.”

While Calvin Coolidge was vice president of the United States the public had under Mr. Coolidge’s signature in the _Delineator_ for June, 1921, the first of a series of three articles on “Enemies of the Republic” with a sub-caption of “Are the Reds stalking our college women?” This happened to be the third year of Debs’ term of ten years in Atlanta Penitentiary.

It would seem that Mr. Coolidge signed these articles on the Red Menace but did not write them. Vassar, Barnard, Wellesley, Radcliffe, and other women’s colleges were “hotbeds of Bolshevism,” etc. But “Smith Seems Sane,” and Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr escaped slashing by signature altogether. A “Miss Smith” of the Vassar faculty--too apparently the entire Smith family could not claim sanity!--had offended Coolidge democracy by being favorably impressed with the liberalism of the Soviet ambassador in Washington. Naughty Miss Smith! “Democracy” as defined by Mr. Coolidge is an over-lord who can do no wrong. And on the terms of such a definition, in the third of these articles he proposed this “Coolidgism”: “When a college professor is disloyal to the government he is no longer a college professor.” Query: What is he? This question the Poor Professor himself sometimes alters nowadays to read: Where am I?

Studious, scholarly Dr. Harry Laidler of the League for Industrial Democracy had, according to the Vice President, been raising the sort of sulphurous dust in the women’s colleges to which perfect ladies do not refer. A certain Vida Dalton (Dutton?) Scudder, professor of English literature at Wellesley, had offended by suggesting in the _Socialist Review_ in an article with the title “Socialism and Character” (a vicious title because such a conjunction is impossible of course!) that Christianity was being exploited for purposes not exactly Christlike. It would seem that this is a thought that has occurred to others, too. Freda Kirchwey had erred by showing a “Williams boy” that Barnard women could define socialism. In addition to all this--_ab urbe condita_ horror of horrors!--“a Mary Calkins, professor of philosophy” (she is said to have voted for Debs for President at the recent election) was guilty of “the creed of Internationalism.” Run in on the same page (67) of that issue where the vice president stopped was a short story, and a loitering eye stopped beside this phrase: “‘Oh, little Eve,’ a sob caught in her own throat, ‘love never dies.’” Usually the month they are born that kind of love and story do die. But the kind of love at the heart of Internationalism seems to have spread from its groups of brave pioneers, among whom was “a Mary Calkins,” and become a world-wide movement.

In the next article for July the “Coolidgisms” continued. The first article had been illustrated by a grandmotherly looking wolf, spectacles on nose--the better to see you, my dears!--and some plump little lambs among which all college women will recognize themselves instantly. But this second article has the picture of a thoughtful young man resting elbow on desk, and resting coiled upon his shoulder is a hooded cobra. Behind the cobra is a phantom-like figure--evidently in the minds of Mr. Coolidge and the illustrator intended to be a menacing figure. It is, rather, for the phantom looks as if under one interpretation of democracy he had had to stand too long on an American bread-line.

In this issue Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary and the Rand School came in for special attention, one of the “Coolidgisms” being that “the good is never self-existent.” An aspect of this “Coolidgism” which has, perhaps, not occurred to Mr. Coolidge, is that idealists--all too many for a “free” democracy--are having to prove their devotion to the ideal all too often in prison. Some of the themes of the same issue are “Red Pedagogy,” our public schools, and “Trotsky _vs._ Washington.” And the article closes under the caption: “In Truth our Freedom Lies.” This moral fiat will bear looking at twice, and may cause amusement or discomfort to those who penetrate its sinister inversions.

The third article in the August issue, also we understand “collected” for Mr. Coolidge and then signed by him, has a heavy muscular young woman seated on the prostrate back of a Russian bear whose tongue is lolling out helplessly as she jabs a two-edged sword down through the back of Brother Bear. Study of the young woman’s features, her figure and her draperies, suggests that she has just stepped down from the Statue of Liberty in order to take this firm seat. Whether the bear is _de facto_ or not the Soviet government, there are some weak “radicals” who may find both the young woman and the sword of “righteous authority” a bit brutal, or at least lacking in Franciscan symbols of Christianity.

“Righteous authority” is the pivot thought on which this third and last article in the _Delineator_ by Calvin Coolidge is swung. During many years now Mr. Coolidge has wielded supreme authority in the United States, among other acts carrying on an unauthorized war against Nicaragua, and lending his silence, if not his articles, to an unauthorized man-hunt not only for Sandino outside the confines of the United States, but also for brave liberals in the schools, the colleges, the churches, and the labor organizations, who dare to interpret the truth in the developing formulæ, political as well as educational and religious, of a developing humanity.