CHAPTER L
EDUCATION F. O. B. CHICAGO
There was one American captain of industry with a monstrously developed bump of acquisitiveness; as he described himself: “I am a great clamorer for dividends.” It was frequently charged that in the early days his clamoring—or at any rate that of his subordinates—did not stop at arson and burglary; it is certain that it did not stop at railroad rebates, “midnight tariffs,” and numerous other violations of law. By such means he made himself master of the oil industry of the country, and was on the way to acquiring the railways and the banks and the Child’s restaurants. He had made one or two hundred millions of dollars, and was busily turning it into one or two billions; but he found rising against him a clamor of public execration, and the poor rich man, whose second most conspicuous bump was of fear, began casting about for some way to take the curse off himself.
About that time he met an educator—one of these typical American combinations of financial shrewdness and moral fervor, a veritable wizard of a money-getter, a “vamp” in trousers, a grand, impressive, inspirational Chautauqua potentate. The old oil king was completely captivated. We can imagine him going home to the privacy of the royal bed-chamber, or wherever it is that oil kings and queens exchange domestic confidences. “Say, Laura, I met a fellow today—by crackie, he’s a wonder! He’s a professor of Semitics, or pyrotechnics, or something or other, I forget just what—but he knows everything there is, and he’s going to build me a university and make me the greatest philanthropist in America!”
“Now, John,” says the oil queen, “you better be careful and hold on to your money. The Lord is able to take care of people’s souls, and they don’t need this newfangled modern learning.”
“That’s all right, my dear,” says the oil king, “but every business has to advertise. I figured out that this is the cheapest yet. And, besides, I always wished I’d had an education, so that you and I might get invited out to dinner-parties, and not have everybody laugh at us the way they do.”
This oil king had a pathetic trust in education, as something you could buy ready-made for cash, the same as a political machine or a state railroad commission. If anybody tried to put off on him an oil-field that had got salt water in, he would know the difference; but it did not occur to him that there might be fakes in education, or that a petroleum philanthropist might not be able to order the whole of the human spirit, F. O. B. Chicago, thirty days net.
I picture the educational “he-vamp,” President Harper, calling into consultation some fellow-faker in the architectural line. Says the architectural wizard: “I suppose this old bird will want something plain and economical—the biggest floor-space for his money.”
“Not on your life,” says the educational wizard. “He wants something he never saw before; he’s going in for culture. You know I specialize in these old things—Hebrew and Greek and Assyrian and Sanskrit and Egyptian——”
“How would it do to give him a row of pyramids?” says the architectural wizard.
“No,” says the educational wizard, “he would think that was heathen. He’s a religious old bird—a Baptist, like me; that’s how I got him, in fact—met him at an ice cream festival.”
“Oh, well then, it’s plain,” says the architectural wizard. “What we want is real old Gothic—stained-glass windows, mullioned, and crenellated battlements, and moated draw-bridges—”
“That sounds great!” says the educational wizard. “What does it look like?”
“I’ll have one of my office boys get you up a sketch this afternoon,” says the architectural wizard. “It’s a good style from our point of view, because it uses about four times as much stone per square foot of floor-space, and stone is where we get our rake-off.”
A thousand years ago, you understand, men rode over the earth, clad in heavy iron armor, like hard-shell crabs. Every joint had to be tightly covered, lest a flying arrow should pierce the crack; and when they built themselves homes they were moved by this same terror of swift arrows, so they made the windows narrow and deep. They built the walls of thick stone to withstand the pounding of battering-rams, and to hold up the enormous weight of the pile. Such was the origin of “Gothic” architecture; and I do not know any better way to expose to you the elaborate system of buncombe which is called “higher education” than to state that here in twentieth century America, where we know of bows and arrows only in poetry, and have the materials and the skill to build structures of steel and glass, big and airy and bright as day—we deliberately go and reproduce the architectural monstrosities, the intellectual and spiritual deformities of a thousand years ago, and compel modern chemists and biologists and engineers to do their research work by artificial light, for fear of arrows which ceased to fly when the last Indian was penned up in a reservation.
Not alone at the University of Chicago do you find stone towers with crenellated battlements—that is, notches through which arrows may be fired, and stones and flaming Standard Oil hurled down; you find them at college after college all over the United States. I look up some pictures I happen to have—here they are at Princeton and at Syracuse and at Colorado! You find Columbia University spending several millions for a huge Roman temple of white marble, called a library—a structure which is magnificent for picture post-card purposes, but which gives about ten per cent of the shelf-room that should have been bought for the money, and compels everybody in the main reading-room to use electric lights most of the day!
I recall one of my earliest radical impulses, derived from the spectacle I used to see when I stayed late in the afternoon in this library building. From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths. Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more about money than humanity.
Of course, we know what such persons will answer; the old women were glad to get the work. In the same way they answer that chemists and biologists and engineers are glad to get a chance to do research work, even at cost of their eyesight. At the University of Chicago they discovered that men were anxious to get such work, even at the cost of their health. In his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” Thorstein Veblen tells of an incident which happened in a certain laboratory “dedicated to one of the branches of biological science.” Having been for ten years a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Veblen felt under the necessity of withholding names; but I am not under the same necessity, and I make so bold as to state that it occurred in the Hull Biological Laboratory of the University of Chicago.
The building was supposed to be ventilated by a hot air system; fresh air was taken in from the outside, and warmed over steam coils, and distributed through the building. It began to be noted that members of the scientific staff were mysteriously falling sick. They would be forced to stay at home, or to take a vacation; they would get well, and then come back and get sick again. Finally, one professor went rooting about in the basement of the building, and made the discovery that the university authorities, in order to save the cost of heating, had boarded up the outside intake, so that the air which passed through the steam-coils was being derived in part from a manhole leading to a sewer. The great capitalist university had found it too costly to heat its Gothic halls—playfully described by Veblen as “heavy ceiled, ill-lighted lobbies, which might have served as a mustering place for a body of unruly men at arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today than so many inconvenient flag-stones to be crossed in coming and going.”
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