CHAPTER XXVI

THE BULL-DOG’S DEN

A short journey on Mr. Morgan’s Pennsylvania Railroad, with its Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wilson, Lafayette, Rutgers, Teachers’ College, Lehigh, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts Tech and University of Pennsylvania directors, and another short journey on Mr. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad, with its recent Harvard overseer for chairman, a Brown trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale president for director, and a member of the Yale advisory board, a Washburn trustee, a Wellesley trustee, a Pratt Institute trustee and two Harvard visitors for directors, and we find ourselves at the home of Princeton’s age-long rival, Old Eli; another carefully guarded fortress of the plutocracy, a ruling class munition factory, turning out mental bombs and poison gas for use in the class war.

There was a time when Yale was called “democratic.” This did not mean, of course, that the students had any use for the “muckers” of the town of New Haven, but merely that all the students knew one another; they were all bound for the top, and all stood together. But the secret societies came in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where the sons of millionaires draw apart and live exclusive lives. These secret societies run not merely the student life, they run the institution, through the alumni who belonged to the societies when they were undergraduates, and are now getting their sons and their friends’ sons in, and doing everything to hold up the power of “Skull and Bones.”

For this new imitation piracy the young fellows begin their training long before they see the college; there are eight or ten fashionable preparatory schools, which also have their fraternities, so that the lads are intriguing and wire-pulling and imitating one another’s imbecilities before they get out of short trousers. It is a rigid caste system, a set of artificial ideals and standards—clothes, accent, athletic prestige, money-spending, all the arcana of snobbery. The older fellows are watching, criticizing, patronizing; you “make” the proper “frat” at your “prep” school, and then go to the great university, knowing that you are watched every moment by sharply critical eyes. For a year or two you bend every thought and effort to being just exactly what the great social leaders dictate; and then comes the day of anguish, when the “tapping” is done, and you are swept on to a lifetime of triumph, or cast down into everlasting humiliation.

The standards of these fashionable societies permit you to get drunk and to acquire your due share of venereal disease, but they do not permit you to wear the wrong color tie, or to use the wrong kind of slang, or to smoke the wrong tobacco. Needless to say, they permit no smallest trace of eccentricity in ideas, and here we have a mob sentiment which supplants all academic discipline. Fifteen or twenty years ago Alexander Irvine was pastor of a church at New Haven, and thrilled some students with visions of social reform. Jack London came in 1905, and gave his famous lecture, “Revolution,” and prominent society students sat up all night to wrangle with him. But the war has swept all this away, there is no longer any trace of liberalism at Yale that I could find. Instead, there is discipline and herd sentiment. “This is the way we do it at Yale,” and woe to the youngster who tries to do it differently!

One of its products of which Yale does not boast is Sinclair Lewis. (He ran away, and came to Helicon Hall to learn about Socialism!) He told me how the men in his class hated compulsory chapel, and proposed to organize and protest; they would get up early in the morning and march through the gateway, and defy the authorities. To a man they “cussed” the chapel; yet, so completely did the spirit of Yale conquer them, when they came to be seniors, and had to vote on college customs, they voted for compulsory chapel! “After all, it’s a good thing, it helps to get the men together and make college spirit!”

Yale was founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”—that is to say, the slave trade; and it stands today four square on wage slavery. It has an endowment of thirty-two million dollars; and needless to say, the interlocking directorate is in full charge. The board includes: the president of the New York Trust Company, who is a director in a trolley company, a fire insurance company, and a securities company; the president of the Merchants’ National Bank of Boston; the president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of New York; the president of the Westinghouse Company of Pittsburgh; a Chicago dry goods merchant, who is a director of a great railroad system and a national bank; a silk manufacturer who is a bank trustee; the publisher of a leading newspaper, also a director of the Associated Press and two insurance corporations; another newspaper publisher who is a director in the Erie Railroad; the chief counsel of the Connecticut Trolley Company; and, to make the group entirely safe and conservative, four ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite recently I saw a document which was sent out to the Yale alumni, asking their opinions on a group of candidates for the new elections; and at the top of the list stood the name of America’s prize Tory, ex-President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft.

Taft is a Yale man, and is proud to boast himself a pupil of the late William Graham Sumner, professor of political economy, and a prime minister in the empire of plutocratic education. I doubt if there has ever been a more capitalistic economist than Sumner, a man who took a ghoulish delight in the glorifying of commercialism. He is the author of a book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”; reading this book you discover that what the rich owe is to enjoy their riches, while what the poor owe is to keep out of the way. Never that I know of has stark brutal selfishness been so deified, and covered by the mantle of science. “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to take care of his or her own self.” Such was the first commandment according to Sumner; and the second was like unto it: “Mind your own business.”

Of course, to such a man there was no person so irritating as a “reformer” of any sort, and he never wearied of pouring out ridicule upon the man who imagined he could do anything to make society better. “Society does not need any care or supervision,” decreed the all-wise professor, and that settled it; the hard young Roman rulers thronged to his classes, and absorbed his gospel of the wolf-pack, and went out with their minds encased in a triple-plated Harveyized steel armor of prejudice, ready to commit any crimes that might be necessary to the preserving of their privileges. Today the pupils of Professor Sumner are walking upon the faces of labor and stamping out the hopes of mankind in hundreds of the leading industries of the country, and in the highest posts of the government, from the United States Supreme Court down. Such a man is worth many billions of dollars to the plutocrats; they pay him a few thousand a year, and tickle his vanity with solemnly conferred degrees and an academic robe to wear, and at the end of his thirty years of service the editors of the “Yale Review” celebrate him in a series of articles as “Pioneer—Teacher—Inspirer—Idealist—Man—and Veteran.”

Professor Sumner’s place is now ably taken by one of his pupils, Professor Albert G. Keller, author of “Societal Evolution,” which a well-known American sociologist describes to me as “a lengthy example of secondary rationalization to prove the immorality of social reform.” In case you do not understand these scientific technicalities, let me explain that Professor Keller is employed by the New England plutocracy to act as intellectual night-watchman for their property; and that having got his orders what to teach, he then invents an elaborate set of reasons to convince himself and the world that this is the right thing to teach, and that in so teaching he is protecting society.

Meantime, what of the men at Yale who happen to have some vision of social service and human sympathy? I managed to find one who had been there, and for a while thought he was going to make a success in the great university. He invented during the war a device to destroy submarines, and the United States government took it up. Word came to the interlocking trustees, and the secretary of the corporation, Mr. Anson Phelps Stokes, sent for the professor in haste. There was a story in this—some advertising for Old Eli! Simon Lake, a Yale man, had invented the submarine, and now another Yale man was to wipe it out! “For God, for country, and for Yale!” Mr. Stokes with eager fingers began turning the pages of an encyclopedia, to find out the date of Simon Lake’s invention, and the date of his sojourn in the university!

But this bit of favor was quickly lost, when the professor took up the troubles of his colleagues, who found it impossible to exist upon their salaries, with the cost of living going up day by day. My friend had spent ten years preparing himself for university teaching; he had spent eight years teaching at Clark, at Harvard and at Yale, and now he was getting fourteen hundred dollars! He insisted that he and his colleagues should get more; and the secretary was irritated by this agitation. Mr. Stokes comes from a wealthy family himself, but believes that other people should wait for their rewards in heaven. He wrote my friend that college professors should not interfere with matters which are not their own business; also that he had never advised Yale instructors to get married!

What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University, a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. So you see, we are literally realizing the sarcastic observation of Professor Spingarn, that there are three sexes in America—men, women and professors. There is only one step more to be taken, and I expect some morning to pick up my paper and read that the president of some great university has announced that, inasmuch as college professors who cannot afford to marry sometimes set bad moral examples for the students, it is now ordained that none but eunuchs need apply for jobs. If this arrangement has proved useful to the ruling classes of Turkey, and for the choir boys of the Vatican, why should it not be given a trial in our plutocratic empire?

##