THE SOCIAL TRAITORS
The failure of colleges to impart culture is a standard topic of our
time, so I shall not dwell upon it. The theme of this book is something
of far greater importance—the success of colleges in imparting a spirit
of bigotry, intolerance and suspicion toward ideas. Says a teacher in a
Pennsylvania college, who asks me not to use his name: “Our students are
climbers, strangers to idealism, or at best mere dabblers at it.” Or
consider the testimony of Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who taught at
Cornell, and later at Antioch, which is trying a novel experiment in
combining education and everyday work. Van Loon declares that he found
in the students of both colleges a profound and deeply rooted hostility
toward originality, a personal resentment toward anyone who interfered
with their standardized notions. They are taught from textbooks, and
they follow the book, and refuse to think about anything that is not in
the book.
To the same effect testifies Robert Herrick, after thirty years
experience at the University of Chicago. Our colleges follow the English
monastic tradition, says Professor Herrick; they pretend to watch over
the morals of their students, but with the crowds now thronging in, the
task is impossible, and the pretense is dishonest. No large university
would today dare attempt any real control, nor would the parents support
it; because fathers who send their sons to college with large allowances
and high-powered cars know perfectly well that these young men go on
“bats,” and that they take girls out into the country in their cars.
What discipline they get, according to Herrick, they get from one
another in their fraternities and clubs. They are uncritical, naive and
barbarous, with herd feelings instead of ideas. The first requirement is
that everyone shall be alike, a part of a mob. They teach the newcomer
the rules; he must wear a freshman cap, and if he has opinions of his
own they tell him he is too “tonguey,” and proceed to knock the nonsense
out of him. The faculty know of this, and think it is fine; they mix
with the men, and join the fraternities, and help in the production of
subservience and conformity. I quoted the above remarks to a professor
in another university, and he threw up his hands. “My God!” he cried. “I
am stupefied! My students accept everything that I say as gospel. If
only I might once discover a crank in my classes!” And he quoted the
phrase of William James, once of Harvard: “Our undisciplinables are our
proudest product.”
I have before me a letter from a professor in one of the “little
toad-stools,” Parsons College, Fairfield, Iowa. The Student Council
passed a rule, which was later approved by the faculty, that all
freshmen were to wear green caps. A hundred and fifty freshmen meekly
submitted; but there was one “conscientious objector.” My informant
writes:
The upper classmen got together and announced that unless every
freshman got a cap by noon of a certain day he would be subjected to
the gauntlet of the paddling machine. I wish I could have gotten a
picture of that mob of upper classmen on the campus of a “Christian”
college, each provided with a club, as they lined up and forced Ball
through the line of clubs, each taking as hearty a swat as possible—a
fine specimen of the type of civilization we can expect from the
leaders we are training in the Christian colleges today! What a new
social order it will be! Through it all, the president has practically
approved the whole procedure, from the chapel platform. Ball still
refuses, in spite of a boycott by the student body, even his own
fellow freshmen; and I understand a paper is to be read in chapel next
week denouncing him, and calling for a boycott unless he submits. This
is supposed to be the daily Christian religious service—the hour of
devotion for the students!
Yet another professor compared his students to the crackers which are
packed in tin boxes by the wholesale bakeries; all cut from certain
patterns, and stamped with certain standard designs. We have sheltered
them from realities, and kept them ignorant of the problems they are to
confront. We have taught them a few formulas of morality, utterly
unpractical and impossible to apply—as we prove by not applying them
ourselves. From their social life the students learn what the real world
is—a place of class distinctions based upon property; they learn the
American religion—what William James calls “the worship of the
bitch-goddess Success.” They throw themselves into the social struggle
with ferocious determination to get ahead; and when they go out into the
world, they carry that spirit into the commercial struggle.
In every profession they find, of course, that the way to get ahead is
to serve the powers that rule, and to betray the general welfare. I
could take you through the professions which are taught in our
universities, one after another, and show you how the prevailing ethical
standards constitute treason to the human race. I could show you in
academic teaching how these same standards are justified, in phrases
only partly veiled. Take, Harvard, for example, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, admitted to have the highest standards of any
engineering school in America; we saw the professors in these
institutions selling themselves to predatory corporations, and laying
down high-sounding “principles,” whose sole effect and purpose is to
enable the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association to plunder the public. I
have a letter from a high official of the United States Bureau of
Education, who tells me more about these engineering traitors. He says:
I recall one man, for example, who was called in by a water company
for expert service in connection with the purity of the water, which
was being questioned by the people. He contended with me that it was
“his business” if he could find remunerative employment of that sort,
and that he was under no obligation to give the public the benefit of
his expert knowledge concerning the impurity of the water supply. But
what aroused my ire more than anything else was the fact that he
preached that kind of thing to his technical students as the standard
of “loyalty” they should pursue toward the companies where they might
be employed after graduation. This man was a real scientist. He was so
thoroughly interested in his subject that he was willing to take
considerable personal risks in conducting experiments, but he was
sadly lacking in that social and religious conception which makes us
realize our mutual obligations and duties.
Or take the work of inventors; they have a man at one of our greatest
universities who is a famous inventor, and he makes great scientific
discoveries, and then he goes to the big corporations and sells
them—what? The right to use his invention and spread it throughout the
world for the benefit of mankind? No; he sells them the right to
suppress the invention, and deprive mankind of the use of it for a
generation or two! You see, a new invention may mean the scrapping of a
great deal of existing machinery; if it falls into the hands of some
independent concern, it may cost the big monopolists enormous losses. So
they pay for the right to suppress it, and a great inventor is turned by
the social system into a kind of scientific blackmailer.
Or take the lawyers; surely I do not need to prove to you how the
lawyers are betraying mankind. A professor at the University of Chicago
told me of attending a class reunion, where a group of high-up
corporation lawyers got drunk and began gossiping about the tricks they
had played in their profession, and, as the professor said, it made him
physically ill. I also have heard these high-up lawyers talking; the
late James B. Dill, who was paid a million dollars to organize the Steel
Trust, spent many an evening in his home telling me the game as he had
seen it, and it began with bribery of judges, juries and legislators,
and ended with wire-tapping and burglary. The late Francis Lynde
Stetson, one of the highest paid corporation lawyers in New York, went
down to Trenton on the train with Judge Dill to beat some railroad rate
law, and he opened his suit-case playfully, showing that he had fifty
thousand dollars in new bank-notes. “That’s a fine kind of work for a
pillar of the church like you,” said Dill, and the other answered, with
a grin: “How do I know but that I may have to pay for my lunch?”
Or if you cannot believe Judge Dill, believe Judge Lindsey, who told me
about a young man who came to Denver from the Harvard Law School, full
of the fine phrases of altruism with which his teachers had filled him,
and when he learned what he had to do to practice corporation law in
Denver, he broke down in Lindsey’s office, and buried his head in his
arms and cried like a baby. Afterwards, so Lindsey writes me, “he
capitulated and joined the gang.”
Or maybe it is medicine the young man has studied. He has heard about
the nobleness of the healing art, but he has to keep an automobile, and
his wife wants to get into society, and competition is keen. There is
one way a physician can make a thousand dollars by a few minutes’ work,
and any physician who is in touch with the leisure class has women on
their knees to him every week, begging him to take their money. Dr.
William J. Robinson estimates that there are a million abortions
performed in the United States every year, so you see that our medical
schools have not steeled all their graduates against this temptation.
Now we have another one added—every physician in the United States is
made by law a dispenser of joviality, the seneschal of the castle, the
keeper of the keys to the wine-cellar!
Or maybe the graduate becomes a newspaper reporter. One of the oldest
Wall Street reporters in New York talked to me last spring, telling me a
little of the way things are going there. The newspaper reporters also
are keepers of the keys of the wine-cellar; they have police passes, and
some of them are running a bootlegging industry between New York and
Canada! Others have gone into high finance on a large scale—because, of
course, a financial reporter comes on information which is worth
thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. “Nowadays,” said my friend,
“when a Wall Street reporter gets a tip and rushes to the telephone, you
don’t hear him call his city editor; you hear him call his broker.” I
was told of one newspaper man who had the fortune to be called in when
Mr. Charles Sabin of the Guaranty Trust Company gave out some news of
the German overtures for peace, and this enterprising young man cleared
fifty thousand dollars from the information.
Or perhaps the young man becomes a college professor; if so, he hides
his convictions and makes himself a tight little snob and reactionary,
to win the favor of the college machine. He hides the truth from his
students, or he “shades” it, which is the same thing, and takes his
pitiful little bribe in the dignity of a full professorship. He turns
out class after class of young men, as ignorant of life and as helpless
against temptation as he himself was once. So reaction rules in our
country, and men who plead for social justice are slandered and
maligned, and turned into criminals in the public eye; all the agencies
of law and justice become mobs, and the Ku Klux Klan meets every night
in lonely places, and lights its fiery cross and prepares for the
wholesale slaughter of the future of mankind.
Just now the rich are having it all their own way; they can do the
killing and the bludgeoning and the jailing—and it never occurs to them
to think what an example they are setting to the workers, and what it
will mean when the tables are turned, and the disinherited of the earth
have their way for a while! It ought to be the chief function of
educators to point out things like this to the public; but that would be
“meddling in politics,” and we have seen that politics in colleges is a
privilege reserved to presidents and trustees. There are going to be
ferocious attacks made upon this book, and this seems as convenient a
place as any in which to explain what they mean. Faculty members will
rush forward to defend their institutions; in some cases, no doubt,
there will be resolutions of protest, with many signatures. They will
have some ammunition; for, of course no one can write a book of this
size, full of such masses of facts, and not make a few slips of detail.
These will be taken up and magnified into gigantic blunders, and
denunciation of them spread broadcast in the capitalist press. When you
read these things, bear one circumstance in mind: that any young
professor who wants to become a dean in a hurry, who has a vision of
himself selected as president in the course of a few years, will know
that he can find no more certain way to win favor with his overlords
than to find something wrong with this book, and then tell about it
gallantly!