colleges and universities, with precious few exceptions, are run by
stock-jobbers and manned by intellectual prostitutes--this doctrine
will certain give no fillip of surprise to steady readers of my
critical compositions. I have, in fact, maintained it steadily since
the earliest dawn of the present marvelous century, and to the
support of it I have brought forward an immense mass of glittering
and irrefragable facts and a powerful stream of eloquence. Nor have
I engaged in this moral enterprise _a cappella_. A great many other
practitioners have devoted themselves to it with equal assiduity,
including not a few reformed and conscience-stricken professors, and
the net result of that united effort is that the old assumption of
the pedagogue’s _bona fides_ is now in decay throughout the Republic.
In whole departments of human knowledge he has become suspect, as it
were, _ex officio_. I nominate, for example, the departments of history
and of what is commonly called English language and literature. If a
professor in the first field shows ordinary honesty, or, in the second
field, ordinary sense, it is now regarded as a sort of marvel, and with
sound reason. Barring a scant dozen extraordinary men, no American
professor of history has written anything worth reading since the year
1917; nearly all the genuine history published in the United States
since then has come from laymen, or from professors who have ceased to
profess. And so in the domain of the national letters. The professors,
with a few exceptions, mainly belated rice-converts, are unanimously
and furiously consecrated to vain attacks upon the literature that
is in being. Either, like the paleozoic Beers, of Yale, they refuse
to read it and deny that it exists, or, like the patriotic Matthews,
of Columbia, they seek to put it down by launching Ku Klux anathemas
against it. The net result is that the professorial caste, as a
whole, loses all its old dignity and influence. In universities large
and small, East, West, North and South, the very sophomores rise in
rebellion against the incompetence and imbecility of their preceptors,
and in the newspapers the professor slides down gradually to the level
of a chiropractor, a press-agent or a Congressman.
Thus there is nothing novel in the thesis of Dr. Sinclair’s book,
which deals, in brief, with the internal organization of the American
universities, and their abject subjection to the Money Power, which
is to say, to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club concepts of truth,
liberty and honor. But there is something new, and very refreshing,
in the manner of it, for the learned author, for the first time,
manages to tell a long and dramatic story without intruding his private
grievances into it. Sinclair’s worst weakness, next to his vociferous
appetite for Remedies that never cure, is his naïve and almost actorial
vanity. As everyone knows, it botched “The Brass Check.” So much of
that book was given over to a humorless account of his own combats with
yellow journals--which, in the main, did nothing worse to him than
laugh at him when he was foolish--that he left untold a great deal that
might have been said, and with perfect justice and accuracy, about the
venality and swinishness of American newspapers. In “The Profits of
Religion” he wobbled almost as badly; the subject, no doubt, was much
too vast for a single volume; the Methodists and Baptists alone, to say
nothing of Holy Church, deserved a whole shelf. But in “The Goose-Step”
he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward manner--simply,
good-humoredly and convincingly. When he comes into the narrative
himself, which is not often, he leaves off his customary martyr’s
chemise. There is no complaining, no pathos, no mouthing of platitude;
it is a plain record of plain facts, with names and dates--a plain
record of truly appalling cowardice, disingenuousness, abjectness, and
degradation. Out of it two brilliant figures emerge: first the typical
American university president, a jenkins to wealth, an ignominious
waiter in antechambers and puller of wires, a politician, a fraud and
a cad; and secondly, the typical American professor, a puerile and
pitiable slave.
Such are the common and customary bearers of the torch in the Republic.
Such is the usual machinery and inner nature of the higher learning
among us. Its aim, briefly stated, is almost indistinguishable from
the aim of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and Kiwanis. The
thing it combats most ardently is not ignorance, but free inquiry;
it is devoted to forcing the whole youth of the land into one rigid
mold. Its ideal product is a young man who is absolutely correct
in all his ideas--a perfect reader for the _Literary Digest_, the
_American Magazine_, and the editorial page of the New York _Times_.
To achieve this end Big Business has endowed it with unprecedented
liberality; there are single American universities with more invested
wealth and more income than all the universities of Germany, France
or England taken together. But in order to get that ocean of money,
and to pay for the piles of pseudo-Gothic that now arise all over the
land, scholarship in America has had to sacrifice free inquiry to
the prejudices and private interests of its masters--the search for
the truth has had to be subordinated to the safeguarding of railway
bonds and electric light stocks. As Sinclair shows, there is scarcely
a university in the United States, whether maintained out of the
public funds or privately endowed, that is not run absolutely, in all
departments, by precisely the same men who run the street railways,
the banks, the rolling-mills, the coal mines and the factories of the
country--in brief, by men who have no more respect for scholarship than
an ice-wagon driver has for beautiful letters. There is scarcely an
American university or college in which the scholars who constitute it
have any effective control over its general policies and enterprises,
or even over the conduct of their own departments. In almost every one
there is some unspeakable stockbroker, or bank director, or railway
looter who, if the spirit moved him, would be perfectly free to hound a
Huxley, a Karl Ludwig or a Jowett from the faculty, and even to prevent
him getting a seemly berth elsewhere. It is not only possible; it has
been done, and not once, but scores and hundreds of times.
Sinclair is content to set forth the basic facts; his book, as it
is, is very long; he neglects laboring all of the deductions and
implications that flow from his thesis, some of them obvious enough.
One of them is this: that the control of the universities by Mr.
Babbitt is making it increasingly difficult to induce intelligent
and self-respecting young men to embrace the birchman’s career, and
that the personnel of the teaching staffs thus tends to decline in
competence, steadily and sharply. This accounts, in large measure, for
the collapse of the old public influence of the scholar in America; he
begins to be derided simply because he is no longer the dignified man
that he once was. In certain departments, of no immediate interest to
trustees and contributors, a certain show of freedom, of course, still
prevails. What is taught in astronomy, or paleontology, or Greek cannot
menace the nail manufacturer on the board, and so he does not issue
any orders about it, nor does his agent, the university president.
But what is taught in economics, or modern history, or “education,” or
sociology, or even literature, involves a dealing with ideas that are
apt to hit him where he lives, and so he keeps a wary eye upon those
departments, and at the slightest show of heresy he takes measures to
protect himself. It is in these regions, consequently, that conformity
is most comfortable, and that professional character is most lamentably
in decay. Even here, to be sure, a few stout-hearted survivors of an
earlier day hold out, but they are surely not many, and they will have
no successors. The professor of to-morrow, in all departments that have
to do with life as men are now living it in the world, will either
be a scholastic goose-stepper or he will be out of a job. The screws
are tightening every year. In the past the Babbitts have contented
themselves with farming out the management of their intellectual
brothels to extra-plaint professors, but now they begin to turn to yet
more reliable men: army officers, lame-duck politicians, and engineers.
The time will come, no doubt, when the president of Columbia will be
just as frankly a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company as the head of the
Red Cross or the chief vestryman of Trinity Church.
How far will this debauching of education go? Will the universities
sink eventually to the level of the public-schools of such barbarous
States as Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi? Here education has been
reduced to a bald device for multiplying Shriners, Knights of Pythias
and Rotarians--in brief, ignoramuses. In the institutions of higher
learning one may reasonably look for some resistance to the process,
soon or late. I doubt, however, that it will come from the professors;
they are already too much cowed and demoralized, as Sinclair shows
abundantly. The American Association of University Professors, an
organization formed to protect pedagogues against wanton attack by the
Babbitts, numbers but 5000 members; the remaining 195,000 American
professors are either afraid to join, or already too much battered
to want to. How far their degradation has gone was made visible
during the late war, when all save an infinitesimal minority of them
yielded to the most extravagant manias of the time and thousands gave
astounding exhibitions of moronic sadism. The Neandertal qualities
thus awakened are still visible in many directions; in the Southern
States, I am informed by an exceptional professor, fully five-sixths
of his colleagues became charter members of the Ku Klux Klan. It is
hopeless to look for a _Freiheitskrieg_ among such poor serfs. But
the students remain, and in them lies some promise for the future.
The American university student, in the past, has been a victim of
the same process of leveling that destroyed his teacher. He has been
taught conformity, obedience, the social and intellectual goose-step;
the ideal held before him has been the ideal of correctness. But that
ideal, it must be plain, is not natural to youth. Youth is aspiring,
rebellious, inquisitive, iconoclastic, a bit romantic. All over the
country the fact is bursting through the chains of repression. In
scores of far-flung colleges the students have begun to challenge
their professors, often very harshly. After a while, they may begin
to challenge the masters of their professors. Not all of them will do
it, and not most of them. But it doesn’t take a majority to make a
rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
4
_The Schoolma’m’s Goal_
THE SOCIAL OBJECTIVES OF SCHOOL ENGLISH, by Charles S. Pendleton.
Nashville, Tenn.: _Published by the Author_. [The American Mercury,
March, 1925.]
Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide
and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of
pedagogy. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English
(not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the George
Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the
Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes
was, in brief, to find out what the teachers who teach English hope
to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the
improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their
art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to
increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to
inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in
the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic or military?
In order to find out, Prof. Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence,
proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could
find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from
educators of a higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of
the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional
journals ordinarily read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from
miscellaneous sources, including his own inner consciousness. In all,
he accumulated 1581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives,
and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1581 very thin
3×5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some
were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On
the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment
of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with
its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to
do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned
eighty professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the
objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this
laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.
Don’t be impatient! I won’t keep you waiting. Here is the objective
that got the most votes--the champion of the whole 1581:
The ability to spell correctly without hesitation all the ordinary
words of one’s writing vocabulary.
Here is the runner-up:
The ability to speak, in conversation, in complete sentences, not in
broken phrases.
And here is No. 7:
The ability to capitalize speedily and accurately in one’s writing.
And here is No. 9:
The ability to think quickly in an emergency.
And here are some more, all within the first hundred:
The ability to refrain from marking or marring in any way a borrowed
book.
An attitude of democracy rather than snobbishness within a
conversation.
Familiarity with the essential stories and persons of the Bible.
And some from the second hundred:
The ability to sing through--words and music--the national anthem.
The ability courteously and effectively to receive orders from a
superior.
The avoidance of vulgarity and profanity in one’s public speaking.
The ability to read silently without lip movements.
The habit of placing the page one is reading so that there will not
be shadows upon it.
The ability to refrain from conversation under conditions where it is
annoying or disagreeable to others.
The ability to converse intelligently about municipal and district
civic matters.
The ability to comprehend accurately the meaning of all common
abbreviations and signs one meets with in reading.
The ability, during one’s reading, to distinguish between an author’s
central theme and his incidental remarks.
I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among
the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them
unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as
those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards
to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates
of a home for the feeble-minded! He did, in fact, nothing of the
kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty
teachers of such professional keenness that they were assembled at the
University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had
been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them
held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in
teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska,
Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and
Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and
Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning.
They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the
Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a
solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was
to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good
capitalizers!
I present Dr. Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a
thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue
heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the
estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among
pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful
to think that the young American species are exposed day in and day
out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of
education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How
can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true
enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name
at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr.
Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the lightest
glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics
and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any
apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the
humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A. B.’s would be to take
them out in the alley and knock them in the head.
5
_The Heroic Age_
JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON, by Claude G. Bowers. Boston: _The Houghton
Mifflin Company_. JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO, by Paul Wilstach. Garden
City, L. I.: _Doubleday, Page & Company_. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN
ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1812-1826, selected by Paul Wilstach.
Indianapolis: _The Bobbs-Merrill Company_. [The American Mercury,
March, 1926.]
Jefferson, in one of his last letters to Adams, dated March 25,
1826, spoke of the time when both came into fame as the heroic age.
The phrase was certainly not mere rhetoric. The two men differed
enormously, both in their personalities and in their ideas--perhaps
quite as much as Jefferson differed from Hamilton or Adams from his
cousin Sam--but in one thing at least they were exactly alike: they
were men of complete integrity. As Frederick the Great said of the
Prussian _Junker_, one could not buy them, and they would not lie. The
fact, at times, made them bitter enemies, and the virtues of the one
were cancelled by the virtues of the other, to the damage of their
common country. But when they stood together, they were irresistible,
for complete integrity, when it does not spend itself against itself,
is always irresistible--one of the few facts, to me known, that is
creditable to the human race. The masses of men, like children, are
easily deceived, but in the long run, like children again, they show
a tendency to yield to character. Bit by bit it conquers them. They
see in it all the high values that they are incapable of reaching
themselves. They see the courage that they lack, and the honesty that
they lack, and the resolution that they lack. All these things were in
both Adams and Jefferson. They fell, in their day, into follies, but
I don’t think that anyone believes they were ever _pushed_ into them.
Adams, no doubt, could be bamboozled, but neither he nor Jefferson
could be scared.
I fear that the gallant iconoclasts who revise our history-books
sometimes forget all this. Engaged upon the destruction of legends,
all of them maudlin and many of them downright insane, they also, at
times, do damage to facts. One of these facts, it seems to me, ought
not to be forgotten, to wit, that it took a great deal of courage, in
the Summer of 1776, to sign Jefferson’s celebrated exercise in colonial
Johnsonese. There were ropes dangling in the air, and they were
uncomfortably near. There were wives and children to be considered, and
very agreeable estates. However dubious their primary motives, the men
who signed took a long chance, quietly, simply, and with their faces
to the front. How many of their successors in our own time have ever
followed their example? I find it hard to think of one. The politician
of to-day lacks their courage altogether; he lacks their incorruptible
integrity. He is a complete coward. The whip of the Anti-Saloon League
is enough to make him leap and tremble; the shadow of the rope would
paralyze him with terror. He is for sale to anyone who has anything
valuable to offer him, and the day after he has sold out to A he is
ready to sell out to A’s enemy, B. His honor is that of a street-walker.
So far we have progressed along the highroad of democracy. The
gentleman survives in our politics only as an anachronism; his day is
done. Mr. Bowers, in “Hamilton and Jefferson,” traces the beginning of
the decline; Mr. Wilstach, in the volume of Adams-Jefferson letters,
shows it in full tide. Both authors are partial to Jefferson, and
present charming portraits of him, especially Mr. Wilstach, in his
other book, “Jefferson at Monticello.” It seems to me that they often
confuse the man and his ideas, especially Mr. Bowers. Jefferson was
unquestionably one of our giants. There was more in his head than
there has been in the heads of all the Presidents in office since he
went out. He was a man of immense intellectual curiosity, profound
originality, and great daring. His integrity was of Doric massiveness.
But was he always right? I don’t think many reflective Americans
of to-day would argue that he was. Confronting enemies of great
resourcefulness and resolute determination, he was forced, bit by bit,
into giving his democratic doctrine a sweep and scope that took it
far beyond the solid facts. It became a religious dogma rather than a
political theory. Once he was gone, it fell into the hands of vastly
inferior men, and soon it had reached its _reductio ad absurdum_.
Jefferson died in 1826. By 1829, when Jackson came in, it was a
nuisance; by 1837, when he went out, it was a joke.
Jefferson’s enthusiasm blinded him to the fact that the liberty to
which he had consecrated the high days of his early manhood was a
two-headed boon. There was, first, the liberty of the people as a whole
to determine the forms of their own government, levy their own taxes,
and make their own laws--in brief, freedom from the despotism of the
King. There was, second, the liberty of the individual man to live his
own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased--in
brief, freedom from the despotism of the majority. Hamilton was as much
in favor of the first kind of liberty as Jefferson: he made, in fact,
even greater sacrifices for it. But he saw that it was worth nothing
without the second kind--that it might easily become worth less than
nothing, for the King, whatever his oppressions _en gros_, at least
gave some protection to the isolated subject. Monarchy might be the
protector of liberty as well as the foe of liberty. It had been so,
in fact, in the Prussia of Frederick. And democracy might be far more
the foe than the protector. It was obviously so in the France of the
Reign of Terror. Hamilton, a hard-headed man, given to figures rather
than to theories, saw all this; Jefferson, a doctrinaire, even in his
best moments, saw only half of it. That failure to see together was at
the bottom of their difference--and their difference came very near
wrecking the United States. Burr’s bullet probably prevented a colossal
disaster. But it also opened the way for troubles in the years to come.
We are in the midst of them yet, and we are by no means near the end of
them.
The shadow of Jeffersonism, indeed, is still over us. We are still
bound idiotically by the battle-cries of a struggle that was over more
than a century ago. We have got the half of liberty, but the other half
is yet to be wrested from the implacable fates, and there seems little
likelihood that it will be wrested soon. All the fears of Hamilton have
come to realization--and some of the fears of Jefferson to fill the
measure. Minorities among us have no rights that the majority is bound
to respect; they are dragooned and oppressed in a way that would make
an oriental despot blush. Yet behind the majority, often defectively
concealed, there is always a sinister minority, eager only for its own
advantage and willing to adopt any device, however outrageous, to get
what it wants. We have a puppet in the White House, pulled by wires,
but with dangerous weapons in its hands. Law Enforcement becomes the
new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle
B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and
bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it
respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is
to sin against the Holy Ghost.
I wonder what Jefferson would think if he could come out of his tomb
and examine the Republic that he helped to fashion. He was a man
of towering enthusiasms, but he was also sharply intelligent: he
knew an accomplished fact when he saw one. My guess is that, at the
first Jefferson Day dinner following his emergence, he would make a
startling and scandalous speech.
6
_The Woes of a 100% American_
THE NEW BARBARIANS, by Wilbur C. Abbott. Boston: _Little, Brown &
Company_. [The American Mercury, May, 1925.]