CHAPTER XXV

PEACOCKS AND SLUMS

Evans Clark, now of the Labor Bureau in New York, was for three years a “preceptor” at Princeton, and tried to interest the young men in what was going on in the outside world; among other things he assigned them Walter Lippmann’s “Preface to Politics” as a book to read. I remember that I made a diligent “go” at this book, to find out what Lippmann meant and what he wanted; but I never could, and I doubt if any Princeton under-graduate could do more. However, Professor William Starr Myers of the department of history, a popular orator at ladies’ clubs, thought it was a terrible book, and pleaded with Clark that he was “taking an unfair advantage of immature minds!” A professor at another university, who knows Professor Myers well, tells me that “he is, next to Cal Coolidge and Ole Hanson, the most consummate ass on radicalism in the country. He is the lion of the afternoon pink teas.”

As always, where you have smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds on them, you also have vile and filthy slums, in which babies die of typhoid and dysentery, and little children grow up crooked and poisoned for life. In this elegant aristocratic university town are some of the worst slums in the world; the Rev. Edward A. Steiner, author of “The Trail of the Immigrant,” was brought to Princeton to preach, and he inspected them, and writes me: “The housing conditions at Princeton were about as I have found in the most congested district of New York. Under the shadow of three million dollar dormitories were tenements of the worst type. They were occupied by colored and white help.”[H]

There was a young social worker, Nell Vincent by name, who was called to act as secretary to the charity organization society of the town. Some common laborers, working on the college buildings, went on strike and began picketing. It was a spontaneous strike, by Italians and other foreigners, and Miss Vincent, who knew their wives and children, tried to organize them, and spoke to them at a meeting, urging them to refrain from violence and abide by the law. The news of this came to the charity organization trustees, and there was a terrible fuss; some of the prominent members of the faculty summoned Miss Vincent to appear before the board, and challenged her for stirring up trouble in the town. One charge they brought against her was that she had never been to church; another was that while living on a “good” street, she had invited the poor to visit her, and the wives and families of Italian laborers trailing up to her door had “lowered the social tone of the street.” She had brought into Princeton a critical sentiment, which was most distressing to the authorities of a fashionable university. One professor’s wife reported that the attitude of the Italians had entirely changed; she no longer had any pleasure in distributing charity to them, they did not love her any more. President Hibben finally succeeded in patching up the trouble; but he told Miss Vincent, referring to some of the university trustees who are members of the charity board, “You have no idea how I had to argue with them!” In a letter to me Miss Vincent uses the phrase, “the exquisite lie that is Princeton.”

In connection with this strike Evans Clark tells an anecdote which throws a bright light on Princeton education. He was invited by a student to lunch on Prospect avenue, where all the rich clubs are. The strikers had quit work on a club building, and were picketing this building, riding up and down on bicycles. “What are those men doing?” asked the student, and Clark explained—they were pickets. “What are pickets?” was the next question. They went inside, continuing their conversation at the club dining-table; here were a score of college men, and all asked questions, and hardly one knew what the word “picket” means, and hardly one knew there was a strike of the laborers working on Princeton’s exclusive new club!

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Footnote H:

“Some Unsolved Social Problems of a University Town,” by Arthur Evans Wood, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan; a thesis of the University of Pennsylvania, published by C. W. Graham, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1920. This document gives a detailed study of Princeton slums. On page 32 it appears that the infant mortality rate of Princeton in 1916 was 150 per thousand, as against 96 per thousand in New York City.

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Six or seven years ago we had a chance to make war on Mexico; and the former president of Princeton took us part way in, while the then president of Princeton tried furiously to get us all the way in. It happened that Norman Angell, the English writer and pacifist, was invited to Princeton to lecture, and made some casual reference to the militarist propaganda against Mexico—and so got himself into a bewildering experience. Picture him, a foreigner from a land of politeness, an invited guest at a university supposed to represent culture and urbanity; and the president of this university, a clergyman of Jesus Christ, springs up in the audience and challenges him. “Do you believe in murder? Do you believe in allowing American citizens to be murdered in Mexico?”

The lecturer tries politely to answer, but is not allowed to finish. “Answer me, yes or no!” cries the president of Princeton. “Do you believe in murder?” And when the Englishman still fails to answer yes or no, the shepherd of Jesus shakes his finger at him, trembling with rage and screaming again and again, “Answer me, yes or no! Do you believe in murder?” Both Evans Clark and his wife were witnesses of this extraordinary scene, and described it to me in detail, not resenting my incredulity, but patiently assuring me that they were not exaggerating, it happened just so. And a letter from Mr. Angell substantiates it.

In the year 1916 arrangements had been made to have President David Starr Jordan of Stanford speak in a hall on the campus; but President Hibben, a life-long friend of Jordan’s, refused him the use of the building, and he had to speak in the Presbyterian church. Two or three students had organized an anti-war society, and they invited Professor Henry Mussey of Columbia, but could not get either a college hall or a church of Jesus Christ; they rented an obscure room in the labor quarters of the town, and here the lecture took place. It had not gone very far before Frank Jewett Mather, professor of art—sixty years of age, and old enough to know better, you would think—stuck in his head, and then slammed the door with a loud noise. Apparently he went off for reinforcements, for ten minutes later he flung the door open, and entered with a professor of French and another professor. These three stamped over the hall, up one aisle and down another, shouting comments on the lecturer’s remarks, and not stopping at personal insults. In order to appreciate the scene you would have to know Henry Mussey—so gentle and charming, rosy-faced, smiling like a cherub just arrived from heaven. And here was Evans Clark, a young preceptor, presiding, and he had to get up several times and ask three full professors of his university to behave themselves like gentlemen! Finally, they marched out, shouting “Vive la France!” “Was this before we went into the war?” I asked, and the answer was: “It was after Princeton went into the war, but before the rest of the United States did.”

Also Mr. Clark’s wife told me some of her adventures. She is Frieda Kirchwey, daughter of a former dean of the Columbia University Law School; she is one of the editors of the “Nation,” and as lovely a person as you will find. But you know how it is with these proper society people, their imaginations always run to foulness concerning people who differ with them; they cannot see how anybody who refuses to believe in class privilege and wage slavery can lead a decent life. Before the Clarks had been at Princeton a few months, a head of one of the departments asked if it was true, as reported, that their marriage was a trial one! Then, in a railroad train, sitting behind two socially exclusive professors’ wives, Frieda Kirchwey became acquainted with Princeton ideas about herself. At this time she had a job in New York and commuted every day; the trip takes an hour and a half each way, and you must admit that a woman who stands that all the year round must love her husband a good deal. But here sat the two ladies, gossiping about pacifism, and the moral obloquy attendant thereon. “My dear,” said one, “they say he’s married, but nobody ever sees her; she doesn’t live with him—except maybe on vacations, of course. Nobody knows where he picked her up.”

To balance this, you should have a glimpse of the morals of Princeton’s chosen ones. Let me remind you that President Hibben is a clergyman, and that Dean West of the Graduate School, who makes the students wear academic gowns at dinner, is a clergyman’s son. Now read the following paragraph from a letter of Miss Vincent:

You of course are familiar with the time-honored custom of college commencements, class tents in and around which old grads let loose and get messed up generally, with booze and women. Well, in Princeton these tents are set up on vacant lots around in the town, and the townspeople feel that it is a most degrading influence upon their children, who hear the ribald songs and see sights that even grown people stay within doors to avoid if possible, during this grand and glorious reunion of the sons of Princeton. A protest as to this condition came up at a civic meeting. A committee of which I was chairman was appointed to meet Dean McClenahan of Princeton and the dean of the Graduate School. We met. The genial dean of the Graduate School after a few innocent questions said, “Why yes, Miss Vincent, you see we can’t very well have the reunion tents on the campus, because it would reflect upon the university’s good name, and would influence parents against it. But we do need to foster the reunions, because we need the support of the old graduates to keep up the college spirit.”

You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out; that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.” He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years educational director of the National Security League!

In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan, former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a trustee as well as a professor!

I talked with the wife of a Princeton instructor, who was performing some clerical duties for her husband, and thereby had opportunities to “listen in” on Princeton education. She tells me of juniors and seniors in the great fashionable university, who would ask naive and childish questions about things that were going on in the world, revealing ignorance of which grammar school children would be ashamed. These elegant young idlers had been to college for three years, some of them four years, and had not learned to read a newspaper! Yet they were all eager to go to war, for a cause of which they understood nothing, and of which their leaders understood no more—as they proved to us before they got us out of the mess.

Two years later there came as it were a colossal volcanic eruption, whereby Princeton culture, Princeton ideals and Princeton pieties were exploded over the entire globe. At present writing it appears that it will take mankind a hundred years to recover from the disasters that resulted. You, plain working men or business men who glance at this book, and think that college stupidity and corruption does not concern you, take this one fact and ponder it: millions of German and Austrian babies are hopelessly deformed by rickets, tens of millions of Russian peasants have perished of starvation, three hundred billions of human treasure and thirty million human lives were thrown away to no purpose—because, forty-five years ago, one student of Princeton College, Thomas Woodrow Wilson by name, was studying Hebrew, Greek, and imbecile theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and social engineering!

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