The Goose-step: A Study of American Education

by Upton Sinclair

The leader of this new fanaticism is no less a personage than the Honorable William Jennings Bryan, the Peerless Commoner, who, having made several hundred thousand dollars out of lecturing, is not so keen for the breaking of the money power, but gives his time to the preserving of the ignorance of his forefathers. Mr. Bryan has used his enormous prestige with the legislatures of the Southern states; he came within one vote of putting through the Kentucky legislature a bill providing that no public appropriations should be used for salaries of employes who teach Evolution or Darwinism. Incredible as it may seem, he succeeded in putting through such a measure in the states of South Carolina and Oklahoma, and he expects to make a tour of the legislatures this winter and try with others.

These reactionaries are busy in all the Southern colleges, plying their brooms against the tide of modern thought. They succeeded in driving Professor Wheeler from the University of Mississippi, and Professor Rice from the Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas. Also they are strong among the Baptists, and at Waco, Texas, they have got possession of a large school called Baylor University. This place had a professor of sociology, G. S. Dow, who devoutly believed in his Baptist faith, and earnestly protested that he did not teach that “man came from another species”; but he published a text-book, “Introduction to the Principles of Sociology,” in which he used some phrases of modern science, and the howling dervishes of Texas took it up. In Fort Worth is a Baptist preacher, who publishes a paper called the “Searchlight,” and has grown rich out of waging war upon modern thought; in what delicate language his controversies are carried on you may judge from one sentence, referring to the expulsion of Professor Rice: “While the Methodists have put their orang-outang out, we are keeping ours in!”

I really felt sorry for Professor Dow, as I read over a mass of clippings concerning his trouble; he is such a humble and patient Christian gentleman! But, you see, in his book he actually made reference to “primitive man,” and we all know there was no such beast; says the “Searchlight”: “Those of us who read our Bibles have always thought that he was made in the image of God.” So Professor Dow was forced to resign, and he stayed resigned, in spite of indignant protests of his students.

The Baptists of Texas appointed a committee, which went about in these educational institutions, submitting to every instructor a questionnaire, and forcing the resignation of several who were too honest in their confessions. They held a “pastors’ and laymen’s conference,” in which they laid down “uncompromising opposition to the teachings of Darwinian evolution, and the substitution of social service for regeneration.” Reading their literature is to a modern man like having a nightmare; it takes you back three hundred years in human history, when they burned witches at the stake, and tore men to pieces on the rack. In Texas now they burn only Negroes; but the wretched, half-starved, rack-rented tenant-farmers and their wives are victims of the most degrading sort of terrors. In one issue of the “Searchlight” I find a portrait of a maniac with a big black moustache, cavorting with clenched fists on a platform, and advertised as “the man who preaches sin black, hell hot, life short, death certain, eternity long, and calls sinners to a blood-bought redemption.”

In “The Profits of Religion” I have pictured the “Bootstrap-lifters,” with their eyes uplifted to heaven while the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association are robbing them on earth. Just so it is with the “Fundamentalists”; while they were getting the professor of evolution fired from the Southern Methodist University, the public utility interests of Texas, camouflaged as the “Texas Public Service Information Bureau,” have been poisoning the minds of the students. They have contrived a course of lectures, to be given by expert public utility pickpockets—the general manager of the telephone company, the president of the power and light company, the general manager of the traction company—so on through a long list.

Also these Fundamentalists are active in Tennessee, where they brought destruction to an old friend of mine, a thoroughly trained scientist and most humane and charming gentleman, who was director of hygiene and physician at the state university. They were cordial to him in the first weeks, until he began attending the Unitarian church; then a pillar of the rich Baptist church in Knoxville refused to donate to the “Y” work at the university “so long as they had Unitarians on the faculty.” In the hope of forcing my friend to withdraw, the president and dean proceeded to make him unpopular by requiring all freshmen to take a course of two hours a week in “personal hygiene” with him—and receiving no credit for the course! Still, the professor made a success of it, and more students came to him for treatment than he could handle; so last spring he was unceremoniously dropped.

At Bethany, West Virginia, is a college of the religious body who call themselves the “Disciples of Christ,” or “Christians”—to distinguish themselves from Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other kinds of heathen. This institution is described as “a literary, moral and religious school,” and it now has some five hundred students, and thirty or forty members of the faculty. They got a young professor by the name of Croyle, in the “Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament,” and they kept him less than a year, and then summarily fired him without notice. The professor put the case in the hands of the American Association of University Professors, which wrote to the president of the college and proposed an investigation. The president’s name is Cramblet—again I have to explain that I do not make these things up. President Cramblet replied to the effect that he and his college did not want any interference from professors’ associations. “For the present we are quite sure that we can make our own rules and conduct our own affairs better than some people who are not able to take care of their own business.”

It is interesting to follow this story and watch the slow process of the opening up of this religious hard shell. It took the Association about a year and a half to do the job; they kept boring away—a little publicity here and a threat of publicity there—until finally President Cramblet popped open and wrote a long letter, explaining the crimes of Professor Croyle, and agreeing to meet a committee of the Association and prove his charges. It appeared that Professor Croyle had come from the Union Theological Seminary, with his mind full of what in the West Virginia mountains is known as “destructive criticism.” In one of his classes he had explained that maybe the story of God’s plan to drown everybody in the world except Noah and his family was not to be taken quite literally; that night President Cramblet was called to the girls’ dormitory, “because a number of them were weeping and well-nigh hysterical over this experience!”

It is interesting to note that the Professors’ Association does not attempt to insist that church colleges shall maintain any standards of freedom of teaching or of thinking. All it lays down is that “church colleges should fully and unequivocally inform the public and their professors of all restrictions that their tenets impose upon academic freedom.” And it notes that this “Christian” college has now taken out of its catalogue the statement that “Bethany seeks the latest and best results of modern scholarship,” and that “the latest results of archeology are used in an attempt to understand the vitality of the Prophetic Activity!”

I close this chapter with the singular adventure of my friend, Harry Laidler, who went a few years ago to lecture at Emory and Henry College, one of the oldest institutions in Virginia. Laidler was secretary of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and the students had asked to hear him, and the president had consented. It chanced, however, that an itinerant preacher was present that morning, and he strongly disapproved of a Socialist lecture, and took occasion to save the students from the consequences of their wayward curiosity. He took the platform, and lifted his hands in invocation to the Almighty, imploring Him to protect these young minds from the heresies and false doctrines to which they were about to be exposed!