Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education - Upton Sinclair - Страница 27

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For four years during my early life as a writer I lived—first in a tent, then in a little cabin which I built, then in an old farm-house—in the wooded hills about five miles north of Princeton. I wrote “Manassas” there, and “The Jungle.” For “Manassas” I used the Princeton library, so I spent a great deal of time about the place, and got to know it very well. I dwell on those days, and visions rise of elegant country gentlemen’s estates, deep shade-trees and smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds strutting about; and the campus, with elegant young gentlemen lounging, garbed with costly simplicity and elaborately studied carelessness. I remember the warm perfumed evenings of spring, with the singing on the steps of “Old North”; the bonfires and parades and rejoicings over athletic victories; the grave ceremonials of commencement, and the speeches full of exalted sentiments. I remember a tall black-coated figure—I never saw it without a shining silk hat—striding about the grounds, or standing on the steps of “Prexy’s house,” responding to a serenade, and reminding the students how they were destined to go out and be leaders in the battle for all things noble and true and grand.

Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a tragedy to mankind might have been averted!

I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke, poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had never happened to anybody.

The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture, the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford, and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river, reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two. Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it; no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our empire of education.

The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank, one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen.

The second grand duke of Princeton is Cyrus H. McCormick, head of the International Harvester Company, also a director in the National City Bank. The third grand duke is William Cooper Procter, the Ivory Soap magnate, who tried to buy the presidency of the United States for General Wood. Mr. Procter is also a director in the National City Bank—quite a smell of Standard Oil on the Tiger’s coat, you notice! The fourth grand duke is Robert Garrett, the biggest banker of Baltimore, whose brownstone mansion was one of the wonders of my childhood.

All the above are life-trustees of Princeton; and to assist them they have two more bankers, and a Philadelphia lawyer who is a director in the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the Lehigh Railroad and the Lehigh Coal Company; a cotton manufacturer who is a member of the Republican Campaign Committee; a Pittsburgh merchant who is director in a national bank; the secretary-treasurer of the United Railroads of New Jersey; the president of the United States Trust Company; a publisher who is a director of two banks, a lawyer who is director of two insurance companies, and another who is chairman of a railroad, and another who is attorney for the Prudential Life. No unsound or subversive ideas need apply at Princeton! And the just reward of all this respectability was reaped when H. C. Frick, the steel king, died, and left a great part of his fortune to the university.

Woodrow Wilson made a lot of trouble for these super-plutocratic trustees. He saw that the club system was destroying the intellectual life of the university, and he tried to break it up and introduce a system under which the rich students would at least know the names of the less rich ones. He was bitterly fought at every point by the society group, led by Andrew West, head of the Latin department, and dean of the Graduate School, a college politician who is genial to people he can use, but is a bitter partisan of reaction. This Dean West had a vision of a hyper-exclusive school for graduate students, an ivory tower of classical culture, and he got Mr. Procter, who owns a tower of ivory soap, to offer half a million dollars for this purpose. But Woodrow Wilson objected to the plan and delayed it, and Mr. Procter became angry and withdrew his money—which caused a furious hullabaloo among the Princeton plutocracy, led by Mr. Taylor Pyne, the first grand duke.

For some time the conflict raged, and it was settled in a peculiar way. Dean West got somebody to offer three millions for the proposed school; and that licked Woodrow, and Woodrow bowed his head in submission. It had been possible to hesitate over half a million, but three millions—“flesh and blood cooden bear it!” I am quoting from the delightful scene in Thackeray’s “Yellowplush Papers,” where “Chawls,” who is in the service of the Honorable Algernon Deuceace, is being tempted to do some rascality for “his Exlnsy the Right Honorable Earl of Crabs.” At first he resists the temptation; but then his Exlnsy “lugs out a crisp, fluttering, snowy HUNDRED-PUN NOTE! ‘You shall have this; and I will, moreover, take you into my service and give you double your present wages.’

“Flesh and blood cooden bear it. ‘My lord,’ says I, laying my hand upon my busm, ‘only give me security, and I’m yours forever.’

“The old noblemin grin’d, and pattid me on the shoulder. ‘Right, my lad,’ says he, ‘right—you’re a nice promising youth. Here is the best security.’ And he pulls out his pocketbook, returns the hundred-pun bill, and takes out one for fifty. ‘Here is half today; tomorrow you shall have the remainder.’” And so Dean West became the master of the Graduate School of Princeton; according to the terms of the gift he and another man hold the purse-strings. Up with the aristocratic tradition, and good-bye to elegant and studied carelessness! Everybody in the Graduate School of Princeton must wear an academic gown for dinner!

They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia, Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen! These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale, Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser!