From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

I was talking some time afterwards to an English friend, the friend to whom I have already referred, who knows America very well and who offered to take care of me while I was there. I told him the story of the voter and the Tammany gangsters.

"These things," he said, "happen over here. They are constantly happening. One gets into the way of not being shocked by them. But there always is that university student somewhere round, when they do happen."

It is an amazingly high tribute to the American universities. If my friend is right, if blatant force and abominable injustice do indeed find themselves faced, always and as a matter of course, by a university student, then the universities are doing a very splendid work. And I am inclined to think that my friend is right. There is another story of the same kind, one of many which might be told. This one came to me, not in a newspaper but from the lips of a man who told me that he was a witness of what happened.

There was—I forget where—a kind of settlement, half camp, half town, built in a lonely place for the workmen of a company which was conducting some mining or engineering enterprise. The town, if I am to call it a town, was owned and ruled by the company. The workmen were of various nationalities, and, taken as a whole, a rough lot. It was, no doubt, difficult to keep them contented, difficult enough to keep them at all in such a place. It would probably be unjust to say that the company encouraged immorality; but the existence of disorderly houses in the place was winked at. The men wanted them. The officials of the company, we may suppose, found their line of least resistance in ignoring an evil which they may have felt they could not cure. After a while, during one summer vacation, there came to the place a university student. He was not a miner or an engineer and had no particular business with the company. He was, apparently, on a kind of mission; but whether he was preaching Christianity or social reform of a general kind I was not told. He was the inevitable university student of my friend's remark.

He found himself face to face with an evil thing which he at all events would not ignore. He made his protest. Now no man of the world, certainly no business man, objects to a proper protest, temperately made, provided the protester does not go too far. The man of the world is tolerant. He is a consistent believer in the policy of living and letting live. He recognizes that people with principles must be allowed to state them. It is in order to be stated that principles exist. But he holds that in common fairness he ought to be allowed to ignore these statements of principle. That was just what this university student could not understand. He went on protesting more and more forcibly until he made the officials uncomfortable and the men exceedingly angry. It was the men, either with, or, as I hope, without the knowledge of their superiors, who first threatened, then beat that university student, beat him on the head with a sandbag and finally drove him from the place with a warning that he had better not return again.

He did return, bringing with him certain officers of the law. He was a man of some strength of character and the recollection of the beating did not cause him to hesitate. Unfortunately the officers of the law could not do much. The disorderly houses were all quite orderly when they appeared. They were small shops selling apples, matches and other innocent things. There was no evidence to be got that anything worse had ever gone on in them than the sale of apples and matches. The previous inhabitants of these houses were picnicking in the woods for a few days. All that the officers of the law were able to do was to conduct the university student safely out of the place. That was difficult enough.

I am not sure that this story is true, for I did not read it in a newspaper; but it is very like several others which I heard. They may all be false or very greatly exaggerated, but they show, at least, the existence of a popular myth in which the university student figures, always with the same kind of character. Behind every myth there is some reality. Even solar myths, the vaguest myths there are, lead back ultimately to the sun, which is indubitably there. It seems to me that whether he actually does these fine things or not the American university student has succeeded in impressing the public with the idea that he is the kind of man who might do them. That in itself is no small achievement.

I wanted very much, because of the myth and for other reasons, to see something of American university life. I did see something, a little of it, both at Yale and Princeton.

I have heard it said that the Englishman is more attached to his school than to his university, that in after life he will think of himself as belonging to Eton, to Harrow, to Winchester, rather than to Oxford or to Cambridge. The school, for some reason, rather than the university, is regarded as "the mother" from whom the life of the man's soul flowed, to whom his affection turns. An Oxford man or a Cambridge man is indeed all his life long proud, as he very well may be, of his connection with his university, but his school is the subject of his deepest feeling. Round it rather than the university gathers that emotion which for want of better words may be described as educational patriotism. An Irishman, on the other hand, if he is a graduate of Dublin University, thinks more of "Trinity" than he does of his school. He may have been at one of the most famous English public schools, but his university, to a considerable extent, obliterates the memories of it. He thinks of himself through life as a T. C. D. man.

America is like Ireland in this respect. I find, looking back on my memories of the American men whom I met most frequently, that I know about several of them whether they are Yale men, Princeton men or Harvard men. I do not know about any single one of them what school they belonged to. I never asked any questions on the subject. Such information as I got came to me accidentally. It came to me without my knowing that I was getting it. Only afterwards did I realize that I knew A. to be a Yale man, B. to be a Harvard man and so forth. In England the information which comes unsought about a man concerns his school rather than his university. It is the name of his school which drops from his lips when he begins talking about old days. There are oftener books about his school than about his university on his shelves, photographs of his school on the walls of his study.