Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

The other system of caste, to which we give sharp attention when it goes badly wrong, is of course the club hierarchy. Wherever there are clubs their social capital will necessarily fluctuate with the quality of the members they take in. The reformers who deplore the institution of “rushing” have of course exaggerated its evils, but the evils are there. In young colleges, and wherever clubs are insecure, the candidates are liable to be spoiled for any club purposes before their destination is settled; wherever the candidates must do the courting, either brazenly or subtly, they tend to debauch the club. The dilemma holds, in one form or another, all the way from the opposed “literary” societies of the back-woods college to the most powerful chapters of the national fraternities; and it is particularly acute where the clubhouse is also the student’s residence. Any remedy thus far advanced by the reformers is worse than the disease.

In many of the older colleges the equilibrium has been stabilized by a device similar to the gentlemen’s agreement in industry. The important clubs have gradually adjusted themselves into a series through which the clubman passes, or into which he penetrates as far as his personality and money will carry him. So the initial competition for untried material is done away with or greatly simplified; one or two large freshman or sophomore clubs take in all the likely candidates; the junior clubs do most of their choosing from among this number; and the senior clubs in turn draw on the junior. Meanwhile the member turnover is perhaps trebled, and initiations and other gay functions multiply.

It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren shift onward and upward year by year. Many have to content themselves with clubs already won, and those who pass on are a narrowing band, whose depleted ranks are by no means restored in the eleventh hour recruiting of “elections at large,” deathbed gestures of democracy after a career of ballotting to exclude candidates who had not taken all the earlier degrees. Thus increasing distinction is purchased through the tried and true method of decreasing numbers. To be sure, the same end could be served if all would remain in one club and periodically drop groups of the least likely members. Initiations might be reversed, and punches be given to celebrate the lightening of the ship: it would be no more fantastic than a good part of the existing ceremonial. But—it would be undemocratic! And, too, the celebrations might be fatally hilarious. The present pre-initiation discipline is one that tests for regularity and bestows the accolade on the inconspicuous, so that the initiates turn out pretty much of a piece and the entertainment they provide is safely conventional. But reverse the process, assemble in one squad all the hands suspected of being exceptional—all the queer fish and odd sticks—and there’s no predicting what capers they might cut as they walked the plank.

The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability, its standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistication where life might be a riot of adventures and experiments and self-discoveries—in one word, its respectability. Not that it does not provide much good fellowship and a great deal of fun (including the varieties that have distressed its moral critics). But that everything it provides is so definitely provided for, so institutionalized, and so protected from the enrichment different types and conditions of men could bring to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than the one intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery.

Normally the club system is by no means so snobbish as it is thought to be; it dislikes, and is apt to punish with the black ball, the currying of social favour and the parade of special privilege. For youth is youth, and in the last analysis the enemy of caste. It is the glory of college life that the most unexpected friendships will overleap the fences run by class and club regimentation. It is its pity that the fences, which yield so easily to irregular friendships once they have discovered themselves, should nevertheless be stout enough to herd their victims past so many unrecognized opportunities for spontaneous association. The graduate who looks back fondly on his halcyon days is very likely passing over the Senior Picnic and his row of shingles to recall haze-hung October afternoons of tobacco and lazy reminiscence on the window-seat of somebody who got nowhere in class or club, or is wistful for the midnight arguments he had with that grind who lived in his entry freshman year—nights alive with darting speculation and warm with generous combat. Of these clandestine sweets he will say nothing; he is a regular fellow; but he affords one of the proofs that the well-worn social channels are not deep enough to carry off all the wine of free fellowship. And that even the moderate caste of college, securely established as it seems, must defend itself from youth (even from its own youth!) is demonstrated by two phenomena not to be explained satisfactorily on any other hypothesis. What is all the solemn mummery, the preposterous ritual, the pompous processions to and from temples of nightmare architecture, the whole sacrosanct edifice of the secret fraternities, if it be not an embroidery wherewith to disguise from present and future devotees the naked matter-of-factness of the cult? And, on the other hand, what are the too early maturity, the atmosphere of politely blasé languor, the ubiquitous paraphernalia for comfort and casual hospitality that characterize the non-secret and citified clubs of the “indifferent” college but so many disarming confessions of the predictability of everything—the predictability, and the necessity for quiet acceptance? Under all the encouraging variations and exceptions runs the regimental command of our unanimity: if you are to belong, you must conform; you must accept the limits of the conventional world for the bounds of your reality; and then, according to the caprice of your genius loci, you will play the game as if everything, even the minutiæ of the ritual your club has inherited from freer spirits, were of tremendous moment, or you will play it no less thoroughly but with the air of one who knows that nothing is of any moment at all. The clubs, that have so often been criticized for their un-American treason to democracy, are only too loyally American.

The third emphasis would be corollary to these two—the political management of athletic and class and club affairs. The politics are those of personal popularity, the management is that of administration rather than legislation, the spirit is the American flair for petty regulation. Where issues are in question the tone is almost certain to be propagandist, conservatives and radicals dividing a field littered with hard names. College life has accumulated an abundance of machinery for the expression of the managing instinct, and most of it works. Nowadays the lines of representation finally knot in a Student Council, which is at once the Cabinet, the Senate, and the Supreme Court of the undergraduate commonwealth. The routine of its work is heavily sumptuary, and such matters as the sizes and colours and seasons for hatband insignia, the length of time students may take off to attend a distant game, the marshalling of parades, are decided with taste and tact. Then, abruptly, it is a tribunal for major cases, just if severe: a class at Yale fails to observe the honour rule, and upon the Council’s recommendation twenty-one students are expelled or suspended; it was the Student Council at Valparaiso that secured the president’s withdrawal; and at Cornell it was the Student Council that came to the rescue of tradition when a freshman refused to wear the freshman cap. Invariably, one concludes, its edicts and verdicts will support righteousness, as its constituents understand righteousness.

The constituents themselves are ordinarily on the side of light, as they see the light. Not so long ago the faculty of a small New England college decided to dispense with compulsory chapel: the students voted it back. Moral crusades spring up like mushrooms and command the allegiance of all but the recalcitrant “rough-necks,” whom student opinion is sometimes tempted to feel are beating their way through an education for which they make no equivalent return in public spirit. A typical campaign of the sort was recently put in motion by the student daily at Brown: the editors discovered that “the modern age of girls and young men is intensely immoral”; they penned sensational editorials that evoked column-long echoes in the metropolitan press; they raised a crusade against such abominations as petting parties, the toddle (“Rome,” they wrote, “toddled before it fell”), and “parties continued until after breakfast time”; almost immediately they won a victory—the Mothers’ Club of Providence resolved that dances for children must end by eleven o’clock....

And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp line must be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the A.B. degree as the end of schooling and the beginning of business, and study that is a part of professional training, that looks forward to some professional degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. Both come under the head of preparation for life; but in the former case the degree itself is the preparation, whereas in the latter case it is recognized that one must master and retain at least a working modicum of the subject-matter of the professional courses and of the liberal courses preliminary to them.

The arts man, then, recognizes only the same necessity he has faced all the way up the school ladder—to pass. If he have entrance conditions, they are mortgages that must be paid off, perhaps in the Summer School; he must keep off probation to protect his athletic or political or other activity status; beyond this, he must garner enough courses and half-courses, semester hours or points, to purchase the indispensable sheepskin. Further effort is supererogatory so far as concerns study per se: prizes and distinctions fall in the category of “student activities,” hobbies, and belong of right to the “sharks”; scholarships, which in America are for the poor only, have to do with still another matter—earning one’s way through—and are mostly reserved for the “paid marks men,” professional studiers, grinds.

Upon his programme of courses the student will often expend as much mental energy as would carry him through an ordinary examination: he will pore over the catalogue, be zealous to avoid nine o’clocks and afternoon hours liable to conflict with games, make an elaborate survey of the comparative competence of instructors, both as graders and as entertainers and even (quaintly enough) as experts in their fields, and enquire diligently after snap courses. Enrolled in a course, he will speedily estimate the minimum effort that will produce a safe pass, unless the subject happens to be one that commends itself to his interest independently of academic necessity. In that case he will exceed not only the moderate stint calculated to earn a C, but sometimes even the instructor’s extravagant requirements. There is, in fact, scarcely a student but has at least one pet course in which he will “eat up” all the required reading and more, take gratuitous notes, ask endless questions, and perhaps make private sallies into research. The fact that he holds most of this labour to be self-indulgence will not temper his indignation if he fails to “pull” an A or B, though it is a question whether, when the grade has sealed the course, he will be much the wiser for it than for the others.