CHAPTER LXXII
THE ACADEMIC POGROM
It is natural that in a time of reaction such as the present, every form of organized cruelty and hatred should lift its ugly head; and so we have in our colleges not merely campaigns of religious bigotry, but also of race prejudice.
We know the ideal American college student. He comes from our best families, his figure is tall and straight, and his features regular and blank, according to the Gibson standard. He is perfectly groomed, in the Arrow collar and the Kuppenheimer clothes and the Brogue boot. He has always had plenty of servants to wait on him, so he does not know how to work. He is thoroughly skilled, however, in every form of play, and has been raised in a system of conventions which constitute “good manners.” He comes to college to spend the four pleasantest years of his life in the company of his social equals. His father and big brothers before him have belonged to the right clubs, and are prominent in the alumni association. He goes in for athletics, and for the glee club, and gets a fraternity pin and a big Y, or whatever letter it may be, on his sweater; he becomes a leader of his class and a social favorite, and takes the college girls to dances in his big car, and now and then he takes one of the town girls out into the country on summer evenings, or to a road-house in winter. He is an expert in smoking tobacco, and connects up with the best university boot-legger—but all quietly, of course, and nothing to excess, except on football nights and special occasions.
There is only one thing wrong with this four years of paradise, and that is a lot of fool pedants and bookworms, who think they have something to do with running the college, and worry a fellow to death stuffing his head with old Anglo-Saxon roots and mathematical formulas, names and dates of dead kings and battles, and peculiarities of French and Greek irregular verbs. The young gentleman in college regards these pedants as his natural enemies, and the outwitting of them as one of his entertainments. If you have plenty of money you can hire sharp fellows to study examination papers and work out the science of “getting by,” and two weeks before examinations you shut yourself up in your room, with a wet towel about your head and a pot of strong coffee on your desk, and you cram your mind with the necessary mass of facts, and so you pass. You understand the unwritten law of colleges—just as the old French marquis understood the heavenly system, when he said that God would think twice before he damned a gentleman like him. Make yourself a power in athletics and in social life, and pay a certain minimum debt to the thing called “learning,” and you may be sure that no member of the faculty will have the insolence to “flunk” you. Such is American college life today, and when we read in college journals and in the capitalist press about the preservation of Anglo-Saxon traditions in our institutions of higher education, that is what we are talking about.
But now along come a lot of fellows—and worse, a few girls as well—whose features lack the regular vapidity of the Gibson type, but on the contrary, have been distorted by suffering and struggle. These people have for the last two thousand years been an oppressed race, and they display the painful qualities which oppression causes in human beings. Sometimes they cringe, and again, when they get power they may become insolent. For two thousand years they have survived in the world by two qualities, racial and religious solidarity, and commercial shrewdness. We in America are full of the raptures of dollar-getting; but here is a people who can make two dollars while we are making one, and can save ten dollars while we are squandering a hundred. Being people who have had to make their own way in the world, they are apt to be pushing and thick-skinned; they sometimes come where they are not wanted, and do not always take a hint to leave.
They try to break into “society”; that is, having acquired wealth, they assume they are entitled to the perquisites of wealth. But we bar them from our dinner-parties and our clubs, and sometimes from our hotels. Naturally their sons and daughters turn their eyes upon our colleges; and here is an atrocious situation. These institutions have established no social tests, but have left their doors open for anyone who can pass an examination. And these people take advantage of us—they actually expect to break in among our sons and daughters, just by learning more than our sons and daughters know! That is easy for them, you understand; not being admitted to fraternities and glee clubs, they have nothing better to do than to sit in their rooms and read and study. And what chance do our “Gibson types” stand against such a proposition? They stand no chance whatever; and so the Jews carry off the honors and the prizes—actually, if things were allowed to go on, they would become members of the faculty, and we should be sending our future Anglo-Saxon conquerors to be taught by Jewish scientists and men of letters!
Such is the problem faced by our interlocking trustees and their faculties; it is an embarrassing problem, because, in the first place, the Jews are enormously wealthy, and they stand together, and have not merely financial but political power. Also, they take pride in their culture; they point out that they gave the world its first great literature, and have given to Anglo-Saxon countries practically everything in the way of religion which these countries consider divine. They have contributed their due share of scientists and writers and statesmen of modern times; also they have given to the world the religion of the future, through the labor of Marx and Lassalle, Jaurès and Liebknecht.
In the light of these varied facts, we cannot come out boldly and say that we refuse to admit Jews to our universities; we find it easier to employ those peculiar talents for prevarication which our college heads have developed. We invent what are called “psychological tests”; we fill our examination papers with “catch” questions—little details of language idiom and social observance and historical tradition, with which the Jews are less apt to be familiar. Or we conduct oral examinations, concerning which there are no records, and therefore no proofs of prejudice. By these means, in a couple of years we cut down the percentage of Jews at Columbia from forty percent to twenty-two percent, and at New York University we cut it down from fifty percent to fifteen.
Our really aristocratic university, Princeton, has never “made any bones” about it. Very few Jews and no Negroes have been able to pass the “examinations” for admission to Princeton. At Harvard it has always been possible to get in by passing a much stricter examination; but even by this method the percentage of Jews keeps creeping up, and when I was in Harvard last spring they were talking about introducing the “psychological tests,” as at Columbia. One student reported a conversation with Richard Cabot, professor of “social ethics,” who said that he did not object to the exclusion of Jews, but thought it should be done frankly. His idea prevailed among the overseers, and shortly afterwards a statement was issued which gives an amusing illustration of what Harvard regards as frankness. The statement set forth that there were more applicants for admission than Harvard was able to accommodate, and the governing body must take some action in the matter. Then: “It is natural that with a widespread discussion of this sort going on there should be talk about the proportion of Jews at the college.” In the course of the “discussion” that followed, we find President Lowell deploring the growth of anti-Semitic feeling, and suggesting a marvelous plan to eliminate it from American colleges—let the Jews keep away!
And then the Negro question. They have a Memorial Hall at Harvard, and make much of their heroes who died to abolish Negro slavery. I have a cousin who went to Harvard twenty years ago, and though he is a Southern man, he was able to live comfortably in a dormitory in which there was a Negro student. But a year or two ago a student engaged a room in a freshman dormitory, and went to occupy it, and when they made the discovery that he was a Negro, they told him that a mistake had been made, they had no room vacant in that dormitory, or in any other dormitory. Not until they had been exposed several times in such evasions, did they come forward and announce that in future no Negroes would be admitted to freshman dormitories at Harvard.