THE SEMI-SIMIAN MOB
Race prejudice is merely one side of the many-sided snobbery of college
life. The college is the collective prestige of a mob of socially
superior persons, and each and every one of them is interested to
protect that prestige. I asked one of the most eminent of American
scientists, a man who has lived most of his life in universities, what
is the matter with these institutions, and his answer came in an
explosion: “It is the semi-simian mob of the alumni! They have been to
college for the sake of their social position; they have gone out
utterly ignorant, and made what they call a success in the world, and
they come back once a year in a solid phalanx of philistinism, to
dominate the college and bully the trustees and the president.”
“You don’t think it’s the president’s fault, then?” I asked, and the
answer was: “It is the alumni, that semi-simian mob!”
The problem of who is to blame, the president or the alumni, is like the
ancient question: “Which comes first, the hen or the egg?” The president
makes the alumni, and the alumni make the president, and the vicious
circle continues ad infinitum. The alumnus who counts is the “successful
son,” and he values in his college those qualities which have enabled
him to succeed. The college is to him a place where he can be sure of
having his son made into the same admirable thing he knows himself to
be. The college is an insurance agency for the business and social
prosperity of his progeny. When he has got the youngsters into Groton,
and then into Harvard, and finally into the Harvard Club, they will have
made so many affiliations that nothing can hurt them; there will always
be “openings,” desirable friendships, quick promotions, favors and
honors: there will be rich girls to choose from, a welcome in homes of
luxury.
The college is to the alumnus a place in which he has invested four
years of his life, and he wants to keep up the value of that investment.
He welcomes everything which enhances that value—football victories, for
example, which fill the columns of the newspapers, and enable him to
swell out his chest and remember that he is a son of “Old Eli.” On the
other hand, if there are stories in the newspapers that his college has
become a “hot-bed” of some kind, that is a humiliation, that is a
diminution of his prestige; he calls up the president and trustees on
the telephone, and wants to know what the hell does this mean?
College is the place in which the alumnus spent the happiest years of
his life; it is the center of pleasant memories, about which to grow
sentimental. He goes back to renew old friendships, to sing old songs,
to feel tears in his eyes, delicious emotions stirring his bosom. And
just as a shrewd mother of many daughters employs their charms and
exploits the weaknesses of the male animal, so the college “alma mater”
utilizes the tender emotions of her “old boys” to separate them from
their cash. I have before me a begging circular of Yale University, got
up in the best style of the schools of advertising, attractively printed
in two colors on tinted paper. “Yale’s power lies partly in your hands,”
we are told in red ink; and then in black ink: “An Endowment to Yale:
Yourself. Interest on the Endowment: Whatever you can afford each year.”
And when the time comes for a “drive,” these herd emotions are whipped
up to frenzy. We learned these tricks in the war days, and immediately
after the war the colleges with one accord started to apply the
technique: class quotas and sectional quotas, “follow-up” letters and
daily “dope” for the press; the members of the faculty shutting their
books and turning into “gladhanders”; “prexy” making speeches to the
Rotarians and the Kiwanis and the Elks, and proving himself a “mixer.”
In 1920 I find Northwestern setting out after twenty-five millions,
Pittsburgh after sixteen, Harvard fifteen, Princeton fourteen, Cornell
ten, followed by Boston University, New York University, Oberlin, Bryn
Mawr, Massachusetts Tech—a total of more than sixty institutions,
demanding over two hundred millions of dollars. I have no objection to
colleges getting money; I am merely pointing out the price of money in a
class civilization—which is conformity to class ideas and ideals.
One of the most entertaining stories I heard on my tour of the colleges
was told by a young congressman of the modern college type, who was
graduated from one of the “little toadstools” in the Middle West. He is
a handsome fellow, and made a reputation as a quarterback, and was
selected by his alumni association to lead a campaign for funds for a
group of colleges which had combined together—Beloit, Ripon and
Lawrence, all in Wisconsin. It was his duty to travel from city to city
throughout the state; he would summon the “old boys,” and rout out the
football squads, and lecture at the Y. M. C. A.s, and call on the
clergymen of the town for the names of the likely “prospects”; he would
visit the homes of the rich, and make tennis dates with the sons, and
take the daughters driving. All his expenses were paid; he was provided
with the latest sport costumes, and automobiles without limit. He would
be invited to dinner-parties, where he would talk about the institution,
awakening tender memories in the bosom of the “old boy,” and literally
“vamping” him. He was furnished with a supply of fraternity pins, which
he allowed the girls to extract from his necktie; needless to say, he
was many times engaged. Sometimes, he told me, he even stooped to kiss
the babies. He came back in triumph, with a total of three hundred
thousand dollars to his credit. And one of his crowd made an even
greater success—he not merely got engaged, but got married to the
daughter of a multimillionaire wheat speculator; the bride gave real
estate and money to the institution, so the bridegroom’s share of the
loot was not begrudged him.
You thought perhaps I was exaggerating when I portrayed the childish
pleasure of the oil king in his Gothic buildings, with crenellated
battlements and moated draw-bridge. But that is the precise and
calculated purpose of these trappings; they are part of the vamping
equipment—they create an atmosphere and a glamour, they set the college
apart from wholesale haberdashery, or hardware, or whatever may be the
“line” of the successful son. This is the purpose of the ivy and the
college songs, the sheepskins and gold seals, the gowns and
mortar-boards and solemn processions. I have before me the picture
section of the New York “Times,” showing the installation of the new
president of Yale. It is only a photograph, but if an artist had
composed a picture of college flummery he could not have done better. In
the background are the venerable buildings, with ivy-covered walls,
memorial tablets, and huge iron gates; and here comes a procession,
headed by a solemn young official in a long black night-gown, carrying a
huge drum-major’s baton, covered with filigree like a bridal cake—a mace
of office, no doubt copied from the one used in the House of Commons.
Behind him stride the outgoing president and the incoming president—a
pair who might be labeled, like the patent medicine advertisements,
“Before and After Taking.” “Before Taking” you are a fairly capable and
intelligent looking human male, but “After Taking” you have a large
mouth, with jaw hanging down, and an expression of withered imbecility;
in both cases you wear gorgeous colored robes, and immediately behind
you, in frock-coat and silk hat, walks the grand duke of your board,
grim-faced, solemn, and paunched. Next come half a dozen army officers,
then a long double file of scholars in caps and gowns, the faculty,
carefully ordered according to the amount of their salaries. On each
side stand the rows of graduating students in their black nighties,
their heads respectfully bared, their hands folded across their tummies.
This kind of monkey-business goes on once or twice a year in every
American college and university. There is no “toadstool” so small that
it does not hasten to get up such a performance, and to contrive itself
a set of “traditions.” There is none big enough or mature enough to put
away childish things, to dispense with the tinsel and gold lace of the
scholastic life. At Harvard they have a solemn commencement day parade,
with the House of Morgan and the House of Lee-Higginson all in top hats
and swallow-tail coats—the only sign of a sense of humor being that they
forbid the taking of photographs! At Columbia, Nicholas Miraculous
appears in a rakish tam-o’-shanter, which is of almost infinite dignity,
because it signifies that he has not been content with a baker’s dozen
of honors from up-start American universities but has received the
supreme academic accolade from Oxford.
We have heard the statement that “colleges grow by degrees.” There is no
law regulating the distribution of fancy names, and they serve just as
peerages and lesser titles serve in England—to get campaign funds for
the gang in office. Through the pages of “Who’s Who in America” they are
scattered as if with a pepper-box, and a study of them is an amusing
revelation. Pick out the leading old tories in the United States, the
blind leaders of the blind who have almost tumbled our country into the
ditch; you will find everyone of them with a string of academic
dignities tacked to his name. William Howard Taft has nine, Charles E.
Hughes eleven, Woodrow Wilson ten, Leonard Wood nine, Henry Cabot Lodge
nine, William C. Sproul nine, Robert Lansing six, Elihu Root sixteen,
Herbert Hoover twenty-four. On the other hand, think of the men who have
been struggling all their lives to make this country a little bit of a
democracy: take the very truest and bravest of them—how many honorary
degrees have they? How many has Louis D. Brandeis? Not one! How many has
Robert M. LaFollette? Not one! How many have William E. Borah, Samuel
Untermyer, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Fremont Older, Frederick
C. Howe, John Haynes Holmes? Not one to divide among them!
No, the academic honors are reserved exclusively for the darlings of the
plutocracy, the henchmen and retainers of special privilege. You
remember the pious Senator Pepper, trustee of the University of U. G. I.
Six colleges have honored him—including, of course, his own. Three
honored Philander C. Knox before he died, and six honored Thomas Nelson
Page. Four have honored David Jayne Hill, Col. George Harvey, Alton B.
Parker and Frank O. Lowden; three have honored Judge Gary and A.
Mitchell Palmer, two have honored Otto Kahn, four have honored Brander
Matthews—including, of course, Columbia. We saw Columbia conferring a
degree upon Paderewski; they also conferred one upon Miller, editor of
the New York “Times,” of whom Brisbane caustically remarked that the
paper had been sold several times, and he had been sold along with it.
Senator Depew, the aged buffoon, has one, Howard Elliott has one,
Augustus Thomas has one; Owen Wister got one from the University of U.
G. I., and Booth Tarkington one from Princeton—a little wee one, he
being a mere writer of novels.
It is at the commencement ceremonies that these honors are bestowed; and
always the president makes a speech, telling the great one how great he
is. Sometimes the great one also delivers an address, and furnishes a
copy to the newspapers in advance, and so the university becomes a
center of propaganda for every form of class greed and cruelty. In the
spring of this year, while I was touring the colleges, Judge Gary fed
his pious poison to the graduating class at the University of Heaven. At
the University of the Steel Trust they gave degrees to the president of
Indiana University, and to an Episcopal clergyman, and to the chairman
of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Company—a gentleman we met
as one of the grand dukes of Brown University. “This highest honor of
the university is appropriately bestowed upon Mr. Bedford in recognition
of his activities in the development of the American petroleum
industry,” etc. At the Pennsylvania Military College degrees were
conferred upon Secretary of War Weeks and the pious Senator Pepper. Mr.
Weeks is described by the “Literary Digest” as “a banker and broker of
high standing in private life,” and he takes the occasion to give a
boost to the liquor lobby, and recommend to these budding soldier-boys
the return of Bacchus to America.
And while I am revising my manuscript for the printer, the college
hordes reassemble, and the college orators remount the rostrum, and the
broadcasting stations go into action. The world is informed by the
president of Dartmouth College that too many students are trying to get
an education in America, there is no use wasting our time on any but
superior minds. And a few days later the new head of Colgate University,
Dr. George Barton Cutten, repeals the Declaration of Independence and
overthrows the political theories of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.
Democracy is a delusion, “founded on a mistaken theory,” and more than
ever we must look to be ruled by aristocracy. “Manhood suffrage has been
our greatest and most popular failure, and now we double it by granting
universal suffrage.”
With exceptions so few as to be hardly worth mentioning, the rule holds
good that everywhere, in every issue involving a conflict between the
people and special privilege, the universities and colleges are on the
side of special privilege. In the San Francisco graft prosecutions the
University of California was almost unanimous in support of the
grafters, so much so that when Rudolph Spreckles and Francis J. Heney
entered the University Club in San Francisco, every man in the room
would get up and leave. On the other side of the continent the Harvard
alumni machine fought almost to a man against the appointment of
Brandeis to the Supreme Court; and for twenty-nine years this machine
has voiced its political ideals in the United States Senate through
Henry Cabot Lodge.
At the risk of boring you, I am going to take you to just one of the
meetings of these Harvard alumni. It is a dinner, the fortieth
anniversary of the class of 1881, held in the University Club of Boston,
June 22, 1921. The principal speaker is a distinguished member of that
class, Mr. Howard Elliott, C. E. of Harvard, and LL. D. of Middlebury
College. Mr. Elliott was at this time a Harvard overseer, and chairman
of Harvard’s favorite New Haven system; he is now also chairman of Mr.
Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad, and a trustee of Massachusetts Tech.
He is, therefore, the beau ideal of the successful son, and what he says
to his classmates after forty years’ experience in the outside world
represents the very soul of the alumni. Mr. Elliott is naively proud of
his remarks, and has had them printed in a pamphlet, which he sends
about freely. Try to enter into his primitive state of mind for a minute
or two, and read half a dozen paragraphs of his oratory:
There is a spirit of unrest, of discontent, of extravagance, of
idleness, of expected perfection, and impatience when we should
remember that perfection and success are not immediately within one’s
grasp.
There has developed out of this a noisy effort by a relatively small
number of people to upset and dislocate the established order of
things and to “Fly to evils that we know not of.”
What are called Radicalism, Socialism, Sovietism and Bolshevism are
advocated, and too many people who should know better lend a receptive
ear to those foolish, yet dangerous, doctrines, and thus encourage the
ignorant, the thoughtless and the wicked.
In schools, colleges and even in our beloved Harvard, there is some of
this atmosphere, and it is disturbing many of the best friends of
education and progress in the country.
In giving young people their physical nourishment, we do not spread
before them every kind of food and say, “Eat what you like whether it
agrees with you or not.” We know that the physical machine can absorb
only a certain amount and that all else is waste and trash, with the
result that bodies are poisoned and weakened.
In giving mental nourishment, why lay before young and impressionable
men and women un-American doctrines and ideas that take mental time
and energy from the study and consideration of the great fundamentals
and eternal truths, fill the mind with unprofitable mental trash
which, with some, result only in sowing the seeds of discontent and
unrest? And which can result only in absolute life failure, spiritual
and material.
The first thing we note from the above is, what an extremely low
standard of English composition prevailed at Harvard from 1877 to 1881.
The second is, upon what feeble intellectual equipment it is possible
for a man to have charge of two great American railroads. The third is,
why Mr. Howard Elliott declined an invitation to discuss the railroad
problems of the country on the same platform with Glenn E. Plumb. The
fourth is, why an advocate of special privilege tries so desperately to
avoid giving the young people of the country an opportunity to compare
his mental equipment with that of the radicals.