Now behold the editor of this fine old Tory newspaper rushing to the defense of his interlocking directorate. Mr. Laski must be driven from Harvard, and Mr. Williams knows exactly how to do it. He interviews the editors of the Harvard “Crimson” and “Advocate;” finally in the editors of the “Lampoon,” he finds a group who will carry out his ideas. The result is an issue of that paper, January 16, 1920, known to history as the “Laski Lampoon.” If ever there was a fouler product of class venom, it has not yet come under my eye.
I have never had the pleasure of meeting Harold J. Laski, but I form an idea of him from a score of pictures in this publication. From a painting on the cover I gather he is a short, thin, naked young skeleton with a paunch; he wears large glasses, and has a fringe of whiskers, or long hair, and a red dawn behind him, serving as a halo. From another picture, a piece of clay modelling, I am puzzled about the whiskers, or hairs, because I do not know whether they are little worms or pieces of spaghetti. From other cartoons I gather that Professor Laski sometimes wears clothes, and does not wear them entirely in the Harvard manner; that is, his clothes do not fit him, and his hat has too broad a brim, and is not worn entirely straight on his head. I gather that he sometimes smokes cigarettes, a vice entirely unknown in refined undergraduate circles.
Also Mr. Laski is described to me in a hundred or so sketches, verses and witticisms. He is “the great indoor agitator”; he is “a member of the firm of Lenin, Trotski and Laski.” This evil young man, you must understand, holds the idea that the people of Russia should be permitted to work out their own revolution in their own way, and that American troops should not be sent in to attack them in Archangel and Siberia without a declaration of war. This makes him a “Bolshevik”; this makes him “Laski de Lenin,” and “Ivan Itchykoff,” and the author of “The Constitution of the Russian Itchocracy,” and of the “Autobiographia Laskivia.” “Love had to go. One love was bad enough, but thirty or forty were insupportable. I had tried it and I knew.” He is invited to “sing a song of Bolsheviks,” and he tells us that “Comrade Lenin has a hundred and forty-eight motor cars, and Comrade Trotsky has fifty-two.” He is “Cataline,” and again he is “Professor Moses Smartelikoff”—the “Moses” meaning that he is a Jew, and the rest that he thinks differently from Harvard. Such thinking must not be allowed to get a start, say our cautious young undergraduates:
The moral, oh ye masters, is, without a doubt,
Stop infection early; kick the first one out.
And here are more verses, addressed to our unpopular professor:
As you sit there, growing prouder,
With your skillful tongue awag,
As your piping voice grows louder,
Preaching Socialistic gag—