No, the academic honors are reserved exclusively for the darlings of the plutocracy, the henchmen and retainers of special privilege. You remember the pious Senator Pepper, trustee of the University of U. G. I. Six colleges have honored him—including, of course, his own. Three honored Philander C. Knox before he died, and six honored Thomas Nelson Page. Four have honored David Jayne Hill, Col. George Harvey, Alton B. Parker and Frank O. Lowden; three have honored Judge Gary and A. Mitchell Palmer, two have honored Otto Kahn, four have honored Brander Matthews—including, of course, Columbia. We saw Columbia conferring a degree upon Paderewski; they also conferred one upon Miller, editor of the New York “Times,” of whom Brisbane caustically remarked that the paper had been sold several times, and he had been sold along with it. Senator Depew, the aged buffoon, has one, Howard Elliott has one, Augustus Thomas has one; Owen Wister got one from the University of U. G. I., and Booth Tarkington one from Princeton—a little wee one, he being a mere writer of novels.
It is at the commencement ceremonies that these honors are bestowed; and always the president makes a speech, telling the great one how great he is. Sometimes the great one also delivers an address, and furnishes a copy to the newspapers in advance, and so the university becomes a center of propaganda for every form of class greed and cruelty. In the spring of this year, while I was touring the colleges, Judge Gary fed his pious poison to the graduating class at the University of Heaven. At the University of the Steel Trust they gave degrees to the president of Indiana University, and to an Episcopal clergyman, and to the chairman of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Company—a gentleman we met as one of the grand dukes of Brown University. “This highest honor of the university is appropriately bestowed upon Mr. Bedford in recognition of his activities in the development of the American petroleum industry,” etc. At the Pennsylvania Military College degrees were conferred upon Secretary of War Weeks and the pious Senator Pepper. Mr. Weeks is described by the “Literary Digest” as “a banker and broker of high standing in private life,” and he takes the occasion to give a boost to the liquor lobby, and recommend to these budding soldier-boys the return of Bacchus to America.
And while I am revising my manuscript for the printer, the college hordes reassemble, and the college orators remount the rostrum, and the broadcasting stations go into action. The world is informed by the president of Dartmouth College that too many students are trying to get an education in America, there is no use wasting our time on any but superior minds. And a few days later the new head of Colgate University, Dr. George Barton Cutten, repeals the Declaration of Independence and overthrows the political theories of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. Democracy is a delusion, “founded on a mistaken theory,” and more than ever we must look to be ruled by aristocracy. “Manhood suffrage has been our greatest and most popular failure, and now we double it by granting universal suffrage.”
With exceptions so few as to be hardly worth mentioning, the rule holds good that everywhere, in every issue involving a conflict between the people and special privilege, the universities and colleges are on the side of special privilege. In the San Francisco graft prosecutions the University of California was almost unanimous in support of the grafters, so much so that when Rudolph Spreckles and Francis J. Heney entered the University Club in San Francisco, every man in the room would get up and leave. On the other side of the continent the Harvard alumni machine fought almost to a man against the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court; and for twenty-nine years this machine has voiced its political ideals in the United States Senate through Henry Cabot Lodge.
At the risk of boring you, I am going to take you to just one of the meetings of these Harvard alumni. It is a dinner, the fortieth anniversary of the class of 1881, held in the University Club of Boston, June 22, 1921. The principal speaker is a distinguished member of that class, Mr. Howard Elliott, C. E. of Harvard, and LL. D. of Middlebury College. Mr. Elliott was at this time a Harvard overseer, and chairman of Harvard’s favorite New Haven system; he is now also chairman of Mr. Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad, and a trustee of Massachusetts Tech. He is, therefore, the beau ideal of the successful son, and what he says to his classmates after forty years’ experience in the outside world represents the very soul of the alumni. Mr. Elliott is naively proud of his remarks, and has had them printed in a pamphlet, which he sends about freely. Try to enter into his primitive state of mind for a minute or two, and read half a dozen paragraphs of his oratory:
There is a spirit of unrest, of discontent, of extravagance, of idleness, of expected perfection, and impatience when we should remember that perfection and success are not immediately within one’s grasp.
There has developed out of this a noisy effort by a relatively small number of people to upset and dislocate the established order of things and to “Fly to evils that we know not of.”
What are called Radicalism, Socialism, Sovietism and Bolshevism are advocated, and too many people who should know better lend a receptive ear to those foolish, yet dangerous, doctrines, and thus encourage the ignorant, the thoughtless and the wicked.
In schools, colleges and even in our beloved Harvard, there is some of this atmosphere, and it is disturbing many of the best friends of education and progress in the country.
In giving young people their physical nourishment, we do not spread before them every kind of food and say, “Eat what you like whether it agrees with you or not.” We know that the physical machine can absorb only a certain amount and that all else is waste and trash, with the result that bodies are poisoned and weakened.