Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education - Upton Sinclair - Страница 22

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We have studied the “Laski Lampoon” to see what we can learn about Professor Laski. Let us now examine it to see what we can learn about Harvard. You remember the student who was compelled to button his collar; so you would expect to find Harvard objecting to a radical professor who did not wear the right kind of tie, and did not get his clothes from the right tailor. The “Lampoon” refers again and again to this, both in verse and drawings; it speaks of Laski’s “creed of charming untidiness”; and if you want to know about Harvard’s creed of charming tidiness, turn to the advertising portions of this paper. One cannot publish an American magazine without advertisements, and the “Laski Lampoon” is almost up to the standard of the “Saturday Evening Post”—it has fifteen pages of reading matter and thirty-nine of advertisements!

Some of this matter we may assume was contributed as a means of helping to save our alma mater from Bolshevism; for example, the page of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and the page of the United Shoe Machinery Company, and the quarter-page of the Boston “Evening Transcript,” telling us: “This paper stands unflinchingly at home and abroad for ‘straight Americanism,’ for the cultivation of ‘an American character,’ which the First American called ‘the Cement that binds the Union.’“ But the rest are the advertisements of concerns which expect to sell things; and as they spend enormous sums in this way, they make it their business to get the returns, and know how to appeal to each group. So here we learn what Harvard men like, and why they did not like Professor Laski! “Follow the Arrow and you follow the style in collars,” we are told, and on another page: “Correctness dominates the style policies of these stores.” Here are the usual handsome, haughty young men in “the Kuppenheimer clothes,” and here is the specially proper “Brogue Boot.”

Wishing to see just what Harvard men spend their money for, I take the trouble to classify this advertising. There are seven and one-half pages devoted to clothing, three and three-fourths devoted to luxurious hotels, three and one-half devoted to automobiles, and three and one-half to investments of the interlocking directorate, including an invitation to gamble in German marks. One and one-half pages are given to tobacco, one and one-fourth to candy, one and one-fourth to games and sporting goods, one to jewels, one to movies, three-fourths to music, one-fourth to the “Transcript,” one-fourth to art, and one-fourth to books. From the above we may reckon that Harvard students spend thirty times as much on clothes as they spend on books, and fourteen times as much on motor cars as on art. Such is the state of “culture” when teaching is dominated by a vested class, which fears ideas, and forbids all thinking save what is certified to be harmless.

It is a truism in the affairs of the mind, that when you bar one truth, you bar all; and when you refuse to permit students to use their minds, when you withdraw from them the vital stimulus of intellectual conflict—then they go off and get drunk. The last “senior picnic” at Harvard was “a glorified booze party,” so I was told by several who attended. There was a ball game, and certain prominent residents of the “Gold Coast” amused themselves by circulating among the crowd, making filthy remarks to girls. Some of the students became indignant, and wished to take the matter up, knowing that the remedy for such evils lies in publicity. But Mr. Frederick J. Allen, secretary to the Corporation—the same gentleman who made the tactful inquiry about the Wilfred Humphries lecture—pleaded with them to spare the good name of the university. So of course there will be another “glorified booze party” next year; and, needless to say, there will be the useful efforts to make certain that Harvard men do not think any new or vital thought about the issues which are shaping the mind of the world.

Class ignorance, class fear, and class repression are written over the modern curricula at Harvard, as at all other American universities. It proclaims that it opens its doors to all classes of the community, and sets forth statistics to prove that it is not a rich man’s affair; yet it has among its thirty overseers only three or four educators, not one woman, not one representative of agriculture, and not one of labor! The modern revolutionary movement is not explained to the students; and so they go out, ready to believe the grotesque falsehoods which are served up to them in the Boston “Evening Transcript” and the Providence “Journal”; ready to be led into any sort of lynching bee by the hundred per cent profiteers.

There was one young graduate of Harvard who managed to chop his way out of this glacier of cultured prejudice, and went over to Russia and gave his life for the revolution. His generous spirit will wipe out in Russian history the infamies committed by American capitalist government against the workers of Russia. He is in every way as beautiful and inspiring a figure as Lafayette, and he will live in the imaginations of the Russian people, precisely as Lafayette lives in ours. A hundred years from now he will be Harvard’s proudest product; but what has Harvard snobbery to say about him today? During the endowment drive for sixteen million dollars, carried on three years ago, Harvard boasted of its “hundred per cent record” for patriotism—but adding three words, for which it will blush to the end of history: “EXCEPT JOHN REED.”

No, the modern revolutionary movement is not interpreted at the university of Lee-Higginson. What is interpreted? I have a list of some of the titles of “theses in English,” accepted for the Ph.D. degree by Harvard University in the last ten years, and representing Harvard’s view of general culture. Slaves in Boston’s great department store, in which Harvard University owns twenty-five hundred shares of stock, be reconciled to your long hours and low wages and sentence to die of tuberculosis—because upon the wealth which you produce some learned person has prepared for mankind full data on “The Strong Verb in Chaucer.” Policemen who have had your strike smashed by Harvard students, rest content with your starvation wages—because one of these students has enlightened mankind on “The Syntax of the Infinitive in Shakespeare.” Girls who work in the textile mills, who walk the streets of the “she-towns” of New England and part with your virtue for the price of a sandwich, be rejoiced—because you have made it possible for humanity to be informed concerning “The Subjunctive in Layamon’s ‘Brut.’” Men who slave twelve hours a day in front of blazing white furnaces of Bethlehem, Midvale and Illinois Steel, cheer up and take a fresh grip on your shovels—you are making it possible for mankind to acquire exact knowledge concerning “The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in the Romance Languages.” Miners, who toil in the bowels of the earth in hourly danger of maiming and suffocation, be reconciled to the failure of a great university to install safety devices to protect your lives—because that money has gone to the collecting and editing of “Political Ballads Issued During the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole.” Peons, who quiver under the lash of the masters’ whip beneath tropic suns in Central America, be docile—because your labors helped to pay off the bonds of the United Fruit Company, so that a Harvard scholar might win a teaching position by compiling “Chapters in the History of Literary Patronage from Chaucer to Caxton.”