The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled
as an instructor of chemistry in the University of California.
Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery
that brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-
dozen degrees. He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology,
of Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, in
later days, only as Professor Gluck.
He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence
in the newspapers through the publication of his book, Sex and
Progress. The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and
philosophy of marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred
pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original.
It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a
stir. But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for
it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. At
once the newspapers seized these three lines, "played them up
yellow," as the slang was in those days, and set the whole world
laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of twenty-
seven. Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by reporters,
women's clubs throughout the land passed resolutions condemning him
and his immoral theories; and on the floor of the California
Assembly, while discussing the state appropriation to the
University, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was made
under threat of withholding the appropriation--of course, none of
his persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version of
only three lines of it was enough for them. Here began Emil
Gluck's hatred for newspaper men. By them his serious and
intrinsically valuable work of six years had been made a laughing-
stock and a notoriety. To his dying day, and to their everlasting
regret, he never forgave them.
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