THE BULL-DOG’S DEN
A short journey on Mr. Morgan’s Pennsylvania Railroad, with its Johns
Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wilson, Lafayette, Rutgers,
Teachers’ College, Lehigh, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts Tech and University
of Pennsylvania directors, and another short journey on Mr. Morgan’s New
Haven Railroad, with its recent Harvard overseer for chairman, a Brown
trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale president for director, and a
member of the Yale advisory board, a Washburn trustee, a Wellesley
trustee, a Pratt Institute trustee and two Harvard visitors for
directors, and we find ourselves at the home of Princeton’s age-long
rival, Old Eli; another carefully guarded fortress of the plutocracy, a
ruling class munition factory, turning out mental bombs and poison gas
for use in the class war.
There was a time when Yale was called “democratic.” This did not mean,
of course, that the students had any use for the “muckers” of the town
of New Haven, but merely that all the students knew one another; they
were all bound for the top, and all stood together. But the secret
societies came in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where
the sons of millionaires draw apart and live exclusive lives. These
secret societies run not merely the student life, they run the
institution, through the alumni who belonged to the societies when they
were undergraduates, and are now getting their sons and their friends’
sons in, and doing everything to hold up the power of “Skull and Bones.”
For this new imitation piracy the young fellows begin their training
long before they see the college; there are eight or ten fashionable
preparatory schools, which also have their fraternities, so that the
lads are intriguing and wire-pulling and imitating one another’s
imbecilities before they get out of short trousers. It is a rigid caste
system, a set of artificial ideals and standards—clothes, accent,
athletic prestige, money-spending, all the arcana of snobbery. The older
fellows are watching, criticizing, patronizing; you “make” the proper
“frat” at your “prep” school, and then go to the great university,
knowing that you are watched every moment by sharply critical eyes. For
a year or two you bend every thought and effort to being just exactly
what the great social leaders dictate; and then comes the day of
anguish, when the “tapping” is done, and you are swept on to a lifetime
of triumph, or cast down into everlasting humiliation.
The standards of these fashionable societies permit you to get drunk and
to acquire your due share of venereal disease, but they do not permit
you to wear the wrong color tie, or to use the wrong kind of slang, or
to smoke the wrong tobacco. Needless to say, they permit no smallest
trace of eccentricity in ideas, and here we have a mob sentiment which
supplants all academic discipline. Fifteen or twenty years ago Alexander
Irvine was pastor of a church at New Haven, and thrilled some students
with visions of social reform. Jack London came in 1905, and gave his
famous lecture, “Revolution,” and prominent society students sat up all
night to wrangle with him. But the war has swept all this away, there is
no longer any trace of liberalism at Yale that I could find. Instead,
there is discipline and herd sentiment. “This is the way we do it at
Yale,” and woe to the youngster who tries to do it differently!
One of its products of which Yale does not boast is Sinclair Lewis. (He
ran away, and came to Helicon Hall to learn about Socialism!) He told me
how the men in his class hated compulsory chapel, and proposed to
organize and protest; they would get up early in the morning and march
through the gateway, and defy the authorities. To a man they “cussed”
the chapel; yet, so completely did the spirit of Yale conquer them, when
they came to be seniors, and had to vote on college customs, they voted
for compulsory chapel! “After all, it’s a good thing, it helps to get
the men together and make college spirit!”
Yale was founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”—that is to say, the
slave trade; and it stands today four square on wage slavery. It has an
endowment of thirty-two million dollars; and needless to say, the
interlocking directorate is in full charge. The board includes: the
president of the New York Trust Company, who is a director in a trolley
company, a fire insurance company, and a securities company; the
president of the Merchants’ National Bank of Boston; the president of
the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of New York; the president of the
Westinghouse Company of Pittsburgh; a Chicago dry goods merchant, who is
a director of a great railroad system and a national bank; a silk
manufacturer who is a bank trustee; the publisher of a leading
newspaper, also a director of the Associated Press and two insurance
corporations; another newspaper publisher who is a director in the Erie
Railroad; the chief counsel of the Connecticut Trolley Company; and, to
make the group entirely safe and conservative, four ministers of the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite recently I saw a document which was sent
out to the Yale alumni, asking their opinions on a group of candidates
for the new elections; and at the top of the list stood the name of
America’s prize Tory, ex-President and Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court William Howard Taft.
Taft is a Yale man, and is proud to boast himself a pupil of the late
William Graham Sumner, professor of political economy, and a prime
minister in the empire of plutocratic education. I doubt if there has
ever been a more capitalistic economist than Sumner, a man who took a
ghoulish delight in the glorifying of commercialism. He is the author of
a book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”; reading this book you
discover that what the rich owe is to enjoy their riches, while what the
poor owe is to keep out of the way. Never that I know of has stark
brutal selfishness been so deified, and covered by the mantle of
science. “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to
take care of his or her own self.” Such was the first commandment
according to Sumner; and the second was like unto it: “Mind your own
business.”
Of course, to such a man there was no person so irritating as a
“reformer” of any sort, and he never wearied of pouring out ridicule
upon the man who imagined he could do anything to make society better.
“Society does not need any care or supervision,” decreed the all-wise
professor, and that settled it; the hard young Roman rulers thronged to
his classes, and absorbed his gospel of the wolf-pack, and went out with
their minds encased in a triple-plated Harveyized steel armor of
prejudice, ready to commit any crimes that might be necessary to the
preserving of their privileges. Today the pupils of Professor Sumner are
walking upon the faces of labor and stamping out the hopes of mankind in
hundreds of the leading industries of the country, and in the highest
posts of the government, from the United States Supreme Court down. Such
a man is worth many billions of dollars to the plutocrats; they pay him
a few thousand a year, and tickle his vanity with solemnly conferred
degrees and an academic robe to wear, and at the end of his thirty years
of service the editors of the “Yale Review” celebrate him in a series of
articles as “Pioneer—Teacher—Inspirer—Idealist—Man—and Veteran.”
Professor Sumner’s place is now ably taken by one of his pupils,
Professor Albert G. Keller, author of “Societal Evolution,” which a
well-known American sociologist describes to me as “a lengthy example of
secondary rationalization to prove the immorality of social reform.” In
case you do not understand these scientific technicalities, let me
explain that Professor Keller is employed by the New England plutocracy
to act as intellectual night-watchman for their property; and that
having got his orders what to teach, he then invents an elaborate set of
reasons to convince himself and the world that this is the right thing
to teach, and that in so teaching he is protecting society.
Meantime, what of the men at Yale who happen to have some vision of
social service and human sympathy? I managed to find one who had been
there, and for a while thought he was going to make a success in the
great university. He invented during the war a device to destroy
submarines, and the United States government took it up. Word came to
the interlocking trustees, and the secretary of the corporation, Mr.
Anson Phelps Stokes, sent for the professor in haste. There was a story
in this—some advertising for Old Eli! Simon Lake, a Yale man, had
invented the submarine, and now another Yale man was to wipe it out!
“For God, for country, and for Yale!” Mr. Stokes with eager fingers
began turning the pages of an encyclopedia, to find out the date of
Simon Lake’s invention, and the date of his sojourn in the university!
But this bit of favor was quickly lost, when the professor took up the
troubles of his colleagues, who found it impossible to exist upon their
salaries, with the cost of living going up day by day. My friend had
spent ten years preparing himself for university teaching; he had spent
eight years teaching at Clark, at Harvard and at Yale, and now he was
getting fourteen hundred dollars! He insisted that he and his colleagues
should get more; and the secretary was irritated by this agitation. Mr.
Stokes comes from a wealthy family himself, but believes that other
people should wait for their rewards in heaven. He wrote my friend that
college professors should not interfere with matters which are not their
own business; also that he had never advised Yale instructors to get
married!
What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns
Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation
wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the
plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University,
a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the
open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining
that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. So you see, we are
literally realizing the sarcastic observation of Professor Spingarn,
that there are three sexes in America—men, women and professors. There
is only one step more to be taken, and I expect some morning to pick up
my paper and read that the president of some great university has
announced that, inasmuch as college professors who cannot afford to
marry sometimes set bad moral examples for the students, it is now
ordained that none but eunuchs need apply for jobs. If this arrangement
has proved useful to the ruling classes of Turkey, and for the choir
boys of the Vatican, why should it not be given a trial in our
plutocratic empire?