PEACOCKS AND SLUMS
Evans Clark, now of the Labor Bureau in New York, was for three years a
“preceptor” at Princeton, and tried to interest the young men in what
was going on in the outside world; among other things he assigned them
Walter Lippmann’s “Preface to Politics” as a book to read. I remember
that I made a diligent “go” at this book, to find out what Lippmann
meant and what he wanted; but I never could, and I doubt if any
Princeton under-graduate could do more. However, Professor William Starr
Myers of the department of history, a popular orator at ladies’ clubs,
thought it was a terrible book, and pleaded with Clark that he was
“taking an unfair advantage of immature minds!” A professor at another
university, who knows Professor Myers well, tells me that “he is, next
to Cal Coolidge and Ole Hanson, the most consummate ass on radicalism in
the country. He is the lion of the afternoon pink teas.”
As always, where you have smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds
on them, you also have vile and filthy slums, in which babies die of
typhoid and dysentery, and little children grow up crooked and poisoned
for life. In this elegant aristocratic university town are some of the
worst slums in the world; the Rev. Edward A. Steiner, author of “The
Trail of the Immigrant,” was brought to Princeton to preach, and he
inspected them, and writes me: “The housing conditions at Princeton were
about as I have found in the most congested district of New York. Under
the shadow of three million dollar dormitories were tenements of the
worst type. They were occupied by colored and white help.”[H]
There was a young social worker, Nell Vincent by name, who was called to
act as secretary to the charity organization society of the town. Some
common laborers, working on the college buildings, went on strike and
began picketing. It was a spontaneous strike, by Italians and other
foreigners, and Miss Vincent, who knew their wives and children, tried
to organize them, and spoke to them at a meeting, urging them to refrain
from violence and abide by the law. The news of this came to the charity
organization trustees, and there was a terrible fuss; some of the
prominent members of the faculty summoned Miss Vincent to appear before
the board, and challenged her for stirring up trouble in the town. One
charge they brought against her was that she had never been to church;
another was that while living on a “good” street, she had invited the
poor to visit her, and the wives and families of Italian laborers
trailing up to her door had “lowered the social tone of the street.” She
had brought into Princeton a critical sentiment, which was most
distressing to the authorities of a fashionable university. One
professor’s wife reported that the attitude of the Italians had entirely
changed; she no longer had any pleasure in distributing charity to them,
they did not love her any more. President Hibben finally succeeded in
patching up the trouble; but he told Miss Vincent, referring to some of
the university trustees who are members of the charity board, “You have
no idea how I had to argue with them!” In a letter to me Miss Vincent
uses the phrase, “the exquisite lie that is Princeton.”
In connection with this strike Evans Clark tells an anecdote which
throws a bright light on Princeton education. He was invited by a
student to lunch on Prospect avenue, where all the rich clubs are. The
strikers had quit work on a club building, and were picketing this
building, riding up and down on bicycles. “What are those men doing?”
asked the student, and Clark explained—they were pickets. “What are
pickets?” was the next question. They went inside, continuing their
conversation at the club dining-table; here were a score of college men,
and all asked questions, and hardly one knew what the word “picket”
means, and hardly one knew there was a strike of the laborers working on
Princeton’s exclusive new club!
-----
Footnote H:
“Some Unsolved Social Problems of a University Town,” by Arthur Evans
Wood, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan;
a thesis of the University of Pennsylvania, published by C. W. Graham,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1920. This document gives a detailed study of
Princeton slums. On page 32 it appears that the infant mortality rate
of Princeton in 1916 was 150 per thousand, as against 96 per thousand
in New York City.
-----
Six or seven years ago we had a chance to make war on Mexico; and the
former president of Princeton took us part way in, while the then
president of Princeton tried furiously to get us all the way in. It
happened that Norman Angell, the English writer and pacifist, was
invited to Princeton to lecture, and made some casual reference to the
militarist propaganda against Mexico—and so got himself into a
bewildering experience. Picture him, a foreigner from a land of
politeness, an invited guest at a university supposed to represent
culture and urbanity; and the president of this university, a clergyman
of Jesus Christ, springs up in the audience and challenges him. “Do you
believe in murder? Do you believe in allowing American citizens to be
murdered in Mexico?”
The lecturer tries politely to answer, but is not allowed to finish.
“Answer me, yes or no!” cries the president of Princeton. “Do you
believe in murder?” And when the Englishman still fails to answer yes or
no, the shepherd of Jesus shakes his finger at him, trembling with rage
and screaming again and again, “Answer me, yes or no! Do you believe in
murder?” Both Evans Clark and his wife were witnesses of this
extraordinary scene, and described it to me in detail, not resenting my
incredulity, but patiently assuring me that they were not exaggerating,
it happened just so. And a letter from Mr. Angell substantiates it.
In the year 1916 arrangements had been made to have President David
Starr Jordan of Stanford speak in a hall on the campus; but President
Hibben, a life-long friend of Jordan’s, refused him the use of the
building, and he had to speak in the Presbyterian church. Two or three
students had organized an anti-war society, and they invited Professor
Henry Mussey of Columbia, but could not get either a college hall or a
church of Jesus Christ; they rented an obscure room in the labor
quarters of the town, and here the lecture took place. It had not gone
very far before Frank Jewett Mather, professor of art—sixty years of
age, and old enough to know better, you would think—stuck in his head,
and then slammed the door with a loud noise. Apparently he went off for
reinforcements, for ten minutes later he flung the door open, and
entered with a professor of French and another professor. These three
stamped over the hall, up one aisle and down another, shouting comments
on the lecturer’s remarks, and not stopping at personal insults. In
order to appreciate the scene you would have to know Henry Mussey—so
gentle and charming, rosy-faced, smiling like a cherub just arrived from
heaven. And here was Evans Clark, a young preceptor, presiding, and he
had to get up several times and ask three full professors of his
university to behave themselves like gentlemen! Finally, they marched
out, shouting “Vive la France!” “Was this before we went into the war?”
I asked, and the answer was: “It was after Princeton went into the war,
but before the rest of the United States did.”
Also Mr. Clark’s wife told me some of her adventures. She is Frieda
Kirchwey, daughter of a former dean of the Columbia University Law
School; she is one of the editors of the “Nation,” and as lovely a
person as you will find. But you know how it is with these proper
society people, their imaginations always run to foulness concerning
people who differ with them; they cannot see how anybody who refuses to
believe in class privilege and wage slavery can lead a decent life.
Before the Clarks had been at Princeton a few months, a head of one of
the departments asked if it was true, as reported, that their marriage
was a trial one! Then, in a railroad train, sitting behind two socially
exclusive professors’ wives, Frieda Kirchwey became acquainted with
Princeton ideas about herself. At this time she had a job in New York
and commuted every day; the trip takes an hour and a half each way, and
you must admit that a woman who stands that all the year round must love
her husband a good deal. But here sat the two ladies, gossiping about
pacifism, and the moral obloquy attendant thereon. “My dear,” said one,
“they say he’s married, but nobody ever sees her; she doesn’t live with
him—except maybe on vacations, of course. Nobody knows where he picked
her up.”
To balance this, you should have a glimpse of the morals of Princeton’s
chosen ones. Let me remind you that President Hibben is a clergyman, and
that Dean West of the Graduate School, who makes the students wear
academic gowns at dinner, is a clergyman’s son. Now read the following
paragraph from a letter of Miss Vincent:
You of course are familiar with the time-honored custom of college
commencements, class tents in and around which old grads let loose and
get messed up generally, with booze and women. Well, in Princeton
these tents are set up on vacant lots around in the town, and the
townspeople feel that it is a most degrading influence upon their
children, who hear the ribald songs and see sights that even grown
people stay within doors to avoid if possible, during this grand and
glorious reunion of the sons of Princeton. A protest as to this
condition came up at a civic meeting. A committee of which I was
chairman was appointed to meet Dean McClenahan of Princeton and the
dean of the Graduate School. We met. The genial dean of the Graduate
School after a few innocent questions said, “Why yes, Miss Vincent,
you see we can’t very well have the reunion tents on the campus,
because it would reflect upon the university’s good name, and would
influence parents against it. But we do need to foster the reunions,
because we need the support of the old graduates to keep up the
college spirit.”
You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest
of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out;
that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no
taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter
from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits
that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of
view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He
still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best
work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.”
He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and
circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I
should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of
more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He
stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In
order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that
Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at
Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years
educational director of the National Security League!
In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect
illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill
tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and
dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political
science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the
facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton
professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to
speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the
fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan,
former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our
history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for
the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the
metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of
brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put
up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much
appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a
trustee as well as a professor!
I talked with the wife of a Princeton instructor, who was performing
some clerical duties for her husband, and thereby had opportunities to
“listen in” on Princeton education. She tells me of juniors and seniors
in the great fashionable university, who would ask naive and childish
questions about things that were going on in the world, revealing
ignorance of which grammar school children would be ashamed. These
elegant young idlers had been to college for three years, some of them
four years, and had not learned to read a newspaper! Yet they were all
eager to go to war, for a cause of which they understood nothing, and of
which their leaders understood no more—as they proved to us before they
got us out of the mess.
Two years later there came as it were a colossal volcanic eruption,
whereby Princeton culture, Princeton ideals and Princeton pieties were
exploded over the entire globe. At present writing it appears that it
will take mankind a hundred years to recover from the disasters that
resulted. You, plain working men or business men who glance at this
book, and think that college stupidity and corruption does not concern
you, take this one fact and ponder it: millions of German and Austrian
babies are hopelessly deformed by rickets, tens of millions of Russian
peasants have perished of starvation, three hundred billions of human
treasure and thirty million human lives were thrown away to no
purpose—because, forty-five years ago, one student of Princeton College,
Thomas Woodrow Wilson by name, was studying Hebrew, Greek, and imbecile
theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and
social engineering!