Introducing the American Spirit

by Edward Alfred Steiner

I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, alumni of the different institutions, who knew every blade of grass on each respective campus, over which they walked proudly and reverently. To find one university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surroundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, yet remained triumphantly American, was new enough and startling enough to keep my guests on the heights.

The pleasant walks, shaded by tall, graceful elms, and the presence of distinguished Americans, acted soothingly upon the Herr Director; while the gracious attention paid to the ladies convinced the Frau Directorin that she had reached the feminine paradise. She could not understand, however, why, when the ladies were permitted to go everywhere, and were even allowed to gaze at American students in athletic undress, they were barred from sharing with us the rare privilege of seeing a thousand or more of them being fed in one of those Gothic dining halls. There, surely, one might expect nothing worse than medieval piety tempering the appetite. Probably this tradition of no ladies in the galleries is the only thing beside the architecture which is left us from that hoary age.

There are certain definite points which the enthusiastic alumnus always tries to impress upon visitors, and one of them is the past, in which every college glories, and as youth seems to be unpardonable, history begins when as yet it “was not.”

In most of the places we visited, no such historic license was necessary, for many of them were respectably old, one of them being contemporaneous with the history of our country, and others belonging to that eminently respectable period, “before the Revolution.”

Some have important battles named after them, and several were “Washington’s headquarters,” a distinction freely bestowed upon many places by that ubiquitous and much beloved “Father of our Country.” At present the most important thing seems to be the buildings; dormitories, laboratories, libraries and usually most prominent of all, the gymnasium and the athletic field.

The president of one of the lesser universities, having such a million dollar plaything, became our cicerone, and while he took us hastily through everything else, lingered fondly there, showing us in detail the expensive apparatus. With classic pride he stood upon the athletic field, looking as some Cæsar must have looked when he showed visitors to Rome his arena, the “largest,” and at that time the “costliest in the world.”

It was interesting to find that the buildings which pleased the Herr Director most were neither new nor Gothic, a fact easily explained by his dislike for everything which is English. He marvelled that we had chosen to imitate English college architecture, with its heaviness and gloom, its hideous gargoyles, its useless, and here meaningless, cloisters, rather than to continue our fine inheritance, with its severely classic lines, its wide windows inviting the light, and its generous, broad doors, so much in harmony with our educational ideals.

Of course no one had an answer ready; yet personally while I do not “hasse” England nor the things which are English, I vastly prefer, let us say Nassau Hall at Princeton, to anything which that glorious campus holds, not even excepting the graduate college with its massive and impressive Cleveland Memorial Tower.

The Herr Director shook his head many a time at the external glory of our universities and even more at the comfort and luxuries of the dormitories and fraternity houses. We were the guests of one fraternity at dinner. About twenty young men were living under one roof, having chosen each other by some mysterious, selective process, and I was tempted to think that it was their negative rather than their positive qualities which drew them together. We were shown the house from cellar to garret, much to the dismay of the Herr Director who does not like climbing stairs, but to the joy of the Frau Directorin who, woman-like, not only loves to peep into closets, and see pretty rooms, but having discovered the American standard for feminine grace, wanted to lose some of her “meat” as she expressed it in her quaint English.

Each of these young men occupied a suite of three rooms. The hangings were heavy and not in the best taste, the chairs all invited to leisure, and the most conspicuous piece of furniture was a smoking set with a big brass tobacco bowl in the center; while innumerable pipes hung from a gaudily painted rack. In keeping with the furniture were the pictures which were decently vulgar, and of books there were no more than necessary.