The upshot of the matter was a formal trial before the interlocking regents, with the dean of the Graduate School presiding. A great array of witnesses were summoned, and several of the victims described the scene to me. The affair was carried through with the utmost solemnity; the master of ceremonies would enter and announce: “Two witnesses wait without.” The two witnesses would be led in, and questioned as to what evil things they knew about the radical professors. One old lady, wife of a high-up faculty-member, had a dreadful charge: “Well, they sit next us in the Faculty Club, and it’s very unpleasant; Mr. Stevens laughs a great deal!” The ceremonies lasted from ten o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, and every now and then the accused professors would demand a chance to cross-question this or that witness, and they would be told: “Wait; you will have your chance.” Witness after witness testified as to their political and religious beliefs, but they themselves were given no chance to be heard, neither were they permitted to call any witnesses for their side. Late at night the proceedings were adjourned, and the chance they had been promised was never given. Even with this one-sided procedure, nothing wrong could be found with them, and the report of the regents exonerated them completely. Nevertheless, two of them were let out at the end of the year, and a third, Professor Richard C. Tolman, resigned. It is amusing to note that the charge against him had been disloyalty to his government, and as soon as he quit the university he was taken by his government into its most difficult and confidential service—the Department of Chemical Warfare! Apparently he gave satisfaction, for his government made him a major, and later on put him in charge of nitrogen fixation work. CHAPTER LV THE UNIVERSITY OF AUTOMOBILES We take the Wabash Railroad to Detroit, traveling under the protection of a Columbia University trustee; and from Detroit we take the Michigan Central Railroad, with a Columbia trustee, a Cornell trustee, a Rochester trustee and a recent Yale and New York University trustee for directors and two First National, two Guaranty Trust, and two National City Bank directors; and so we arrive at Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. In the upper peninsula of this State are enormous deposits of copper, with a great trust, Calumet and Hecla, in charge of the region. We shall feel at home here, because the enterprise is financed by Lee-Higginson, and all the old Boston families, the Shaws, Agassizs, Higginsons and Lowells, got in on the ground floor. So now when strikers have to be shot down or kidnapped, we find highly cultured graduates of Harvard in charge of the job; when they have to be lied about, the Associated Press is ready, with a Harvard graduate as general manager—see “The Brass Check,” pages 358-361.