EDUCATION F. O. B. CHICAGO
There was one American captain of industry with a monstrously developed
bump of acquisitiveness; as he described himself: “I am a great clamorer
for dividends.” It was frequently charged that in the early days his
clamoring—or at any rate that of his subordinates—did not stop at arson
and burglary; it is certain that it did not stop at railroad rebates,
“midnight tariffs,” and numerous other violations of law. By such means
he made himself master of the oil industry of the country, and was on
the way to acquiring the railways and the banks and the Child’s
restaurants. He had made one or two hundred millions of dollars, and was
busily turning it into one or two billions; but he found rising against
him a clamor of public execration, and the poor rich man, whose second
most conspicuous bump was of fear, began casting about for some way to
take the curse off himself.
About that time he met an educator—one of these typical American
combinations of financial shrewdness and moral fervor, a veritable
wizard of a money-getter, a “vamp” in trousers, a grand, impressive,
inspirational Chautauqua potentate. The old oil king was completely
captivated. We can imagine him going home to the privacy of the royal
bed-chamber, or wherever it is that oil kings and queens exchange
domestic confidences. “Say, Laura, I met a fellow today—by crackie, he’s
a wonder! He’s a professor of Semitics, or pyrotechnics, or something or
other, I forget just what—but he knows everything there is, and he’s
going to build me a university and make me the greatest philanthropist
in America!”
“Now, John,” says the oil queen, “you better be careful and hold on to
your money. The Lord is able to take care of people’s souls, and they
don’t need this newfangled modern learning.”
“That’s all right, my dear,” says the oil king, “but every business has
to advertise. I figured out that this is the cheapest yet. And, besides,
I always wished I’d had an education, so that you and I might get
invited out to dinner-parties, and not have everybody laugh at us the
way they do.”
This oil king had a pathetic trust in education, as something you could
buy ready-made for cash, the same as a political machine or a state
railroad commission. If anybody tried to put off on him an oil-field
that had got salt water in, he would know the difference; but it did not
occur to him that there might be fakes in education, or that a petroleum
philanthropist might not be able to order the whole of the human spirit,
F. O. B. Chicago, thirty days net.
I picture the educational “he-vamp,” President Harper, calling into
consultation some fellow-faker in the architectural line. Says the
architectural wizard: “I suppose this old bird will want something plain
and economical—the biggest floor-space for his money.”
“Not on your life,” says the educational wizard. “He wants something he
never saw before; he’s going in for culture. You know I specialize in
these old things—Hebrew and Greek and Assyrian and Sanskrit and
Egyptian——”
“How would it do to give him a row of pyramids?” says the architectural
wizard.
“No,” says the educational wizard, “he would think that was heathen.
He’s a religious old bird—a Baptist, like me; that’s how I got him, in
fact—met him at an ice cream festival.”
“Oh, well then, it’s plain,” says the architectural wizard. “What we
want is real old Gothic—stained-glass windows, mullioned, and
crenellated battlements, and moated draw-bridges—”
“That sounds great!” says the educational wizard. “What does it look
like?”
“I’ll have one of my office boys get you up a sketch this afternoon,”
says the architectural wizard. “It’s a good style from our point of
view, because it uses about four times as much stone per square foot of
floor-space, and stone is where we get our rake-off.”
A thousand years ago, you understand, men rode over the earth, clad in
heavy iron armor, like hard-shell crabs. Every joint had to be tightly
covered, lest a flying arrow should pierce the crack; and when they
built themselves homes they were moved by this same terror of swift
arrows, so they made the windows narrow and deep. They built the walls
of thick stone to withstand the pounding of battering-rams, and to hold
up the enormous weight of the pile. Such was the origin of “Gothic”
architecture; and I do not know any better way to expose to you the
elaborate system of buncombe which is called “higher education” than to
state that here in twentieth century America, where we know of bows and
arrows only in poetry, and have the materials and the skill to build
structures of steel and glass, big and airy and bright as day—we
deliberately go and reproduce the architectural monstrosities, the
intellectual and spiritual deformities of a thousand years ago, and
compel modern chemists and biologists and engineers to do their research
work by artificial light, for fear of arrows which ceased to fly when
the last Indian was penned up in a reservation.
Not alone at the University of Chicago do you find stone towers with
crenellated battlements—that is, notches through which arrows may be
fired, and stones and flaming Standard Oil hurled down; you find them at
college after college all over the United States. I look up some
pictures I happen to have—here they are at Princeton and at Syracuse and
at Colorado! You find Columbia University spending several millions for
a huge Roman temple of white marble, called a library—a structure which
is magnificent for picture post-card purposes, but which gives about ten
per cent of the shelf-room that should have been bought for the money,
and compels everybody in the main reading-room to use electric lights
most of the day!
I recall one of my earliest radical impulses, derived from the spectacle
I used to see when I stayed late in the afternoon in this library
building. From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with
buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures
crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up
the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths.
Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might
have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and
there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more
about money than humanity.
Of course, we know what such persons will answer; the old women were
glad to get the work. In the same way they answer that chemists and
biologists and engineers are glad to get a chance to do research work,
even at cost of their eyesight. At the University of Chicago they
discovered that men were anxious to get such work, even at the cost of
their health. In his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” Thorstein
Veblen tells of an incident which happened in a certain laboratory
“dedicated to one of the branches of biological science.” Having been
for ten years a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Veblen
felt under the necessity of withholding names; but I am not under the
same necessity, and I make so bold as to state that it occurred in the
Hull Biological Laboratory of the University of Chicago.
The building was supposed to be ventilated by a hot air system; fresh
air was taken in from the outside, and warmed over steam coils, and
distributed through the building. It began to be noted that members of
the scientific staff were mysteriously falling sick. They would be
forced to stay at home, or to take a vacation; they would get well, and
then come back and get sick again. Finally, one professor went rooting
about in the basement of the building, and made the discovery that the
university authorities, in order to save the cost of heating, had
boarded up the outside intake, so that the air which passed through the
steam-coils was being derived in part from a manhole leading to a sewer.
The great capitalist university had found it too costly to heat its
Gothic halls—playfully described by Veblen as “heavy ceiled, ill-lighted
lobbies, which might have served as a mustering place for a body of
unruly men at arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today than
so many inconvenient flag-stones to be crossed in coming and going.”