THE TIGER’S LAIR
For four years during my early life as a writer I lived—first in a tent,
then in a little cabin which I built, then in an old farm-house—in the
wooded hills about five miles north of Princeton. I wrote “Manassas”
there, and “The Jungle.” For “Manassas” I used the Princeton library, so
I spent a great deal of time about the place, and got to know it very
well. I dwell on those days, and visions rise of elegant country
gentlemen’s estates, deep shade-trees and smooth cool lawns with
peacocks and lyre-birds strutting about; and the campus, with elegant
young gentlemen lounging, garbed with costly simplicity and elaborately
studied carelessness. I remember the warm perfumed evenings of spring,
with the singing on the steps of “Old North”; the bonfires and parades
and rejoicings over athletic victories; the grave ceremonials of
commencement, and the speeches full of exalted sentiments. I remember a
tall black-coated figure—I never saw it without a shining silk
hat—striding about the grounds, or standing on the steps of “Prexy’s
house,” responding to a serenade, and reminding the students how they
were destined to go out and be leaders in the battle for all things
noble and true and grand.
Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and
come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future
come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The
public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw
what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and
silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not
mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there
had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this
eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a
tragedy to mankind might have been averted!
I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his
professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke,
poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of
the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met
some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had
literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria
the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man
discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name
of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was
away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even
now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the
theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in
a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had
never happened to anybody.
The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture,
the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling
about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable
English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school
and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford,
and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river,
reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two.
Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery
in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it;
no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs
run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is
presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our
empire of education.
The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor
Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest
country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank,
one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a
director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential
Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It
was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and
lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago
stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen.
The second grand duke of Princeton is Cyrus H. McCormick, head of the
International Harvester Company, also a director in the National City
Bank. The third grand duke is William Cooper Procter, the Ivory Soap
magnate, who tried to buy the presidency of the United States for
General Wood. Mr. Procter is also a director in the National City
Bank—quite a smell of Standard Oil on the Tiger’s coat, you notice! The
fourth grand duke is Robert Garrett, the biggest banker of Baltimore,
whose brownstone mansion was one of the wonders of my childhood.
All the above are life-trustees of Princeton; and to assist them they
have two more bankers, and a Philadelphia lawyer who is a director in
the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the Lehigh Railroad and the Lehigh
Coal Company; a cotton manufacturer who is a member of the Republican
Campaign Committee; a Pittsburgh merchant who is director in a national
bank; the secretary-treasurer of the United Railroads of New Jersey; the
president of the United States Trust Company; a publisher who is a
director of two banks, a lawyer who is director of two insurance
companies, and another who is chairman of a railroad, and another who is
attorney for the Prudential Life. No unsound or subversive ideas need
apply at Princeton! And the just reward of all this respectability was
reaped when H. C. Frick, the steel king, died, and left a great part of
his fortune to the university.
Woodrow Wilson made a lot of trouble for these super-plutocratic
trustees. He saw that the club system was destroying the intellectual
life of the university, and he tried to break it up and introduce a
system under which the rich students would at least know the names of
the less rich ones. He was bitterly fought at every point by the society
group, led by Andrew West, head of the Latin department, and dean of the
Graduate School, a college politician who is genial to people he can
use, but is a bitter partisan of reaction. This Dean West had a vision
of a hyper-exclusive school for graduate students, an ivory tower of
classical culture, and he got Mr. Procter, who owns a tower of ivory
soap, to offer half a million dollars for this purpose. But Woodrow
Wilson objected to the plan and delayed it, and Mr. Procter became angry
and withdrew his money—which caused a furious hullabaloo among the
Princeton plutocracy, led by Mr. Taylor Pyne, the first grand duke.
For some time the conflict raged, and it was settled in a peculiar way.
Dean West got somebody to offer three millions for the proposed school;
and that licked Woodrow, and Woodrow bowed his head in submission. It
had been possible to hesitate over half a million, but three
millions—“flesh and blood cooden bear it!” I am quoting from the
delightful scene in Thackeray’s “Yellowplush Papers,” where “Chawls,”
who is in the service of the Honorable Algernon Deuceace, is being
tempted to do some rascality for “his Exlnsy the Right Honorable Earl of
Crabs.” At first he resists the temptation; but then his Exlnsy “lugs
out a crisp, fluttering, snowy HUNDRED-PUN NOTE! ‘You shall have this;
and I will, moreover, take you into my service and give you double your
present wages.’
“Flesh and blood cooden bear it. ‘My lord,’ says I, laying my hand upon
my busm, ‘only give me security, and I’m yours forever.’
“The old noblemin grin’d, and pattid me on the shoulder. ‘Right, my
lad,’ says he, ‘right—you’re a nice promising youth. Here is the best
security.’ And he pulls out his pocketbook, returns the hundred-pun
bill, and takes out one for fifty. ‘Here is half today; tomorrow you
shall have the remainder.’” And so Dean West became the master of the
Graduate School of Princeton; according to the terms of the gift he and
another man hold the purse-strings. Up with the aristocratic tradition,
and good-bye to elegant and studied carelessness! Everybody in the
Graduate School of Princeton must wear an academic gown for dinner!
They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian
clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a
timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in
his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of
slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for
the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the
other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist
on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the
throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that
we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was
educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about
one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia,
Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen!
These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale,
Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt
and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser!