I thought he was Bohemian, and recognized the name as such, in spite of
its French disguise. I told him so, and pronounced it for him in the
hard, Slavic way, all gutturals and consonants. I also told him its
meaning: "A very common hoe such as the peasants use, and it means that
your ancestors in Bohemia earned their living honestly, which I am sorry
to say cannot always be said about 'people who are somebody' in our
communities."
The Herr Director thought I was very hard upon the poor fellow, and
later I had a good talk with him. I tried to show him that his Bohemian,
peasant origin ought to be a source of pride to him. That the very fact
that he and his people had come out of the steerage, and by virtue of
our democratic institutions could rise to the point where they could
send him to college, should make him a guardian of the American Spirit
and not its foe. I do not know that he profited by what I said; for I
often find myself talking to the wind and the tide, and they are both
against me.
I have only pity for the gilded youth who go to an American college with
its vast opportunities of human contact, yet fail to see any one outside
their own social boundaries. After all, the chief glory of our
educational institutions is that their best things are still democratic.
No man is kept from the Holy of Holies, from sound learning, from the
contact with scholarly minds, from good books, and enough of rich
fellowship to make going to college worth while.
We heard one delightful story which is so typically American and so
reveals the American Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director embodied
it in his book. The president of a Quaker college told us that just as
he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way
through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a boot and
shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he was a man of means, whose standing
in his group was unquestioned, his action took from common labor its
ever renewing curse.
In many of the colleges we met groups of men so full of this spirit, so
concerned with fostering it, that all the snobberies of which we had
heard seemed even smaller than they were in their own right. We met
those who gave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy
task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost
encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars
where they lived, or in the hovels where they reared children; they
taught them English and the elements of good citizenship, and every one
of them had some particular Antonio to whom he was devoted, and whom he
was trying to lift to his level.
Although the general testimony was that the students had gained more
from the contact than the immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much
it means to these strangers to have leaning up against their own lonely
souls men of culture, and sweet, clean breath, and brotherly heart.
It is this idealism in our college youth which is so precious an asset
that to lose it would mean bankruptcy to our educational institutions.
Although the Herr Director did not tell me, I knew that this excursion
into the universities of the East had been a success; for thus far he
seemed to have enjoyed everything; at least he did not complain about
anything. He seemed in an especially happy mood when we were talking it
over in the home of one of the presidents, whose guests we had become.
"Yes, I like your colleges very much, and if I should want my boy to
have four years of more or less organized happiness, I would send him to
an American college. He would have a good time, I think his morals would
be safe," and he added with a smile, "his intellect would be safe
also."