Read "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Not many in Southern Pacific University seriously believed that their "student reds" had any responsibility for or even guilty knowledge of the Wall Street bomb explosion. But they knew that these silly fools had been misled by sinister men who quite possibly did have part in the plot, or anyhow were bad enough to have it. Also they knew that the fools had got the university in for a lot of hideous publicity. So the fools were badgered and browbeaten on every hand; they were summoned to the Dean's office one by one and there racked and cross-questioned -- and not merely by President Cowper and Dean Squirge, but by various stern gentlemen representing the district attorney and the city prosecutor and the federal secret service and the patriotic newspapers and the defense societies and the information service of the once-upon-a-time ambassador of a no-longer-existing Russian government.
When Bunny Ross realized that this was happening, there was another explosion. Being a rich man's son, he was accustomed to having his rights, and more. So of the first of his questioners he demanded, "Who are you, and what brings you into this?"