CHAPTER LXXXV

THE CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG

Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to him? How competent is he to judge about “masters of fiction” who are “truly spiritual”? How much sincerity is there in such literary criticism, emanating from the elm shadows of New Haven, Connecticut?

Picture a great ruling-class university, founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”; that is to say, the African slave-trade, covered by a mantle of religiosity. The students at this university are young aristocrats, heirs-apparent of ruling-class families, who attend “prep” schools so exclusive, and with so long a waiting list that you have to make your application when you are born. In these schools they “make” certain exclusive fraternities, and when they come to Yale they “make” certain secret societies, whose spirit is symbolized by the “Skull and Bones.” Their other ideal in life is to win athletic contests, whose temper they embody in the “Bull-dog.”

The trustees of this pious university you will find listed according to their economic functions in “The Goose-Step.” Their favorite alumnus, the high god of the present Yale religion is a three-hundred-pound plutocrat by the name of William Howard Taft, who was made president of the United States some years ago for the purpose of allowing the land thieves to get away with the natural resources of Alaska. Having fulfilled that function for his class, and having, when he came up for re-election, succeeded in carrying the states of Vermont and Utah, he was made chief justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as a bulwark of the liberties of the American people: the liberty of the individual hunky and wop to negotiate independently with the Steel Trust; the liberty of railroad directors to compel their wage-slaves to toil when the wage-slaves want to rest; the liberty of little children of Georgia crackers and North Carolina clay-eaters to work all night in cotton mills. Having solemnly delivered such pronouncements in defense of liberty, this all-highest alumnus brings his three hundred pounds to the commencement ceremonies, and walks in solemn procession clad in scarlet and purple robes.

That is Yale, and the spirit of Yale; the academic apologist of the most efficient system of plunder yet seen upon the face of the earth. Capitalistic exploitation is Yale’s religion; and you will note that in all essentials it is identical with the religion of Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas. When the tsar’s armies marched out to protect the lumber concessions of the grand dukes on the Yalu River, the priests and archbishops in the Kremlin officially blessed the ikons. And just so do chaplains of New Haven bless the flags when the American marines set out to shoot up natives in the West Indies and Central America, for failing to pay their interest upon the bonds of J. P. Morgan and his Yale trustees.

This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.

Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes them--precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion--just as Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the “Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers through a hundred thousand years.

Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to the Bull-dog.”

Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t get it away from them.”

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