RAKING THE DUST-HEAPS
We have studied the “Laski Lampoon” to see what we can learn about
Professor Laski. Let us now examine it to see what we can learn about
Harvard. You remember the student who was compelled to button his
collar; so you would expect to find Harvard objecting to a radical
professor who did not wear the right kind of tie, and did not get his
clothes from the right tailor. The “Lampoon” refers again and again to
this, both in verse and drawings; it speaks of Laski’s “creed of
charming untidiness”; and if you want to know about Harvard’s creed of
charming tidiness, turn to the advertising portions of this paper. One
cannot publish an American magazine without advertisements, and the
“Laski Lampoon” is almost up to the standard of the “Saturday Evening
Post”—it has fifteen pages of reading matter and thirty-nine of
advertisements!
Some of this matter we may assume was contributed as a means of helping
to save our alma mater from Bolshevism; for example, the page of the
Baldwin Locomotive Works, and the page of the United Shoe Machinery
Company, and the quarter-page of the Boston “Evening Transcript,”
telling us: “This paper stands unflinchingly at home and abroad for
‘straight Americanism,’ for the cultivation of ‘an American character,’
which the First American called ‘the Cement that binds the Union.’“ But
the rest are the advertisements of concerns which expect to sell things;
and as they spend enormous sums in this way, they make it their business
to get the returns, and know how to appeal to each group. So here we
learn what Harvard men like, and why they did not like Professor Laski!
“Follow the Arrow and you follow the style in collars,” we are told, and
on another page: “_Correctness_ dominates the style policies of these
stores.” Here are the usual handsome, haughty young men in “the
Kuppenheimer clothes,” and here is the specially proper “Brogue Boot.”
Wishing to see just what Harvard men spend their money for, I take the
trouble to classify this advertising. There are seven and one-half pages
devoted to clothing, three and three-fourths devoted to luxurious
hotels, three and one-half devoted to automobiles, and three and
one-half to investments of the interlocking directorate, including an
invitation to gamble in German marks. One and one-half pages are given
to tobacco, one and one-fourth to candy, one and one-fourth to games and
sporting goods, one to jewels, one to movies, three-fourths to music,
one-fourth to the “Transcript,” one-fourth to art, and one-fourth to
books. From the above we may reckon that Harvard students spend thirty
times as much on clothes as they spend on books, and fourteen times as
much on motor cars as on art. Such is the state of “culture” when
teaching is dominated by a vested class, which fears ideas, and forbids
all thinking save what is certified to be harmless.
It is a truism in the affairs of the mind, that when you bar one truth,
you bar all; and when you refuse to permit students to use their minds,
when you withdraw from them the vital stimulus of intellectual
conflict—then they go off and get drunk. The last “senior picnic” at
Harvard was “a glorified booze party,” so I was told by several who
attended. There was a ball game, and certain prominent residents of the
“Gold Coast” amused themselves by circulating among the crowd, making
filthy remarks to girls. Some of the students became indignant, and
wished to take the matter up, knowing that the remedy for such evils
lies in publicity. But Mr. Frederick J. Allen, secretary to the
Corporation—the same gentleman who made the tactful inquiry about the
Wilfred Humphries lecture—pleaded with them to spare the good name of
the university. So of course there will be another “glorified booze
party” next year; and, needless to say, there will be the useful efforts
to make certain that Harvard men do not think any new or vital thought
about the issues which are shaping the mind of the world.
Class ignorance, class fear, and class repression are written over the
modern curricula at Harvard, as at all other American universities. It
proclaims that it opens its doors to all classes of the community, and
sets forth statistics to prove that it is not a rich man’s affair; yet
it has among its thirty overseers only three or four educators, not one
woman, not one representative of agriculture, and not one of labor! The
modern revolutionary movement is not explained to the students; and so
they go out, ready to believe the grotesque falsehoods which are served
up to them in the Boston “Evening Transcript” and the Providence
“Journal”; ready to be led into any sort of lynching bee by the hundred
per cent profiteers.
There was one young graduate of Harvard who managed to chop his way out
of this glacier of cultured prejudice, and went over to Russia and gave
his life for the revolution. His generous spirit will wipe out in
Russian history the infamies committed by American capitalist government
against the workers of Russia. He is in every way as beautiful and
inspiring a figure as Lafayette, and he will live in the imaginations of
the Russian people, precisely as Lafayette lives in ours. A hundred
years from now he will be Harvard’s proudest product; but what has
Harvard snobbery to say about him today? During the endowment drive for
sixteen million dollars, carried on three years ago, Harvard boasted of
its “hundred per cent record” for patriotism—but adding three words, for
which it will blush to the end of history: “EXCEPT JOHN REED.”
No, the modern revolutionary movement is not interpreted at the
university of Lee-Higginson. What is interpreted? I have a list of some
of the titles of “theses in English,” accepted for the Ph.D. degree by
Harvard University in the last ten years, and representing Harvard’s
view of general culture. Slaves in Boston’s great department store, in
which Harvard University owns twenty-five hundred shares of stock, be
reconciled to your long hours and low wages and sentence to die of
tuberculosis—because upon the wealth which you produce some learned
person has prepared for mankind full data on “The Strong Verb in
Chaucer.” Policemen who have had your strike smashed by Harvard
students, rest content with your starvation wages—because one of these
students has enlightened mankind on “The Syntax of the Infinitive in
Shakespeare.” Girls who work in the textile mills, who walk the streets
of the “she-towns” of New England and part with your virtue for the
price of a sandwich, be rejoiced—because you have made it possible for
humanity to be informed concerning “The Subjunctive in Layamon’s
‘Brut.’” Men who slave twelve hours a day in front of blazing white
furnaces of Bethlehem, Midvale and Illinois Steel, cheer up and take a
fresh grip on your shovels—you are making it possible for mankind to
acquire exact knowledge concerning “The Beginnings of the Epistolary
Novel in the Romance Languages.” Miners, who toil in the bowels of the
earth in hourly danger of maiming and suffocation, be reconciled to the
failure of a great university to install safety devices to protect your
lives—because that money has gone to the collecting and editing of
“Political Ballads Issued During the Administration of Sir Robert
Walpole.” Peons, who quiver under the lash of the masters’ whip beneath
tropic suns in Central America, be docile—because your labors helped to
pay off the bonds of the United Fruit Company, so that a Harvard scholar
might win a teaching position by compiling “Chapters in the History of
Literary Patronage from Chaucer to Caxton.”