Such are the triumphs of plutocratic education; and lest you doubt this, I mention that the students proved their convictions by action. They kidnapped a Russian student, a quiet and unobtrusive fellow, a Socialist, not a Communist; they carried him in an automobile some fifteen miles outside the city, beat him until he was helpless, and left him to get back as best he could. This was punishment for expressing the opinion that the Russian people should be permitted to work out their own destiny in their own way. For things such as this the state of Pennsylvania contributes a subsidy of a million and a half dollars a year!
The interlocking trustees are so sure of their power that they ventured recently to give to all the world a demonstration of it. The old provost retired, and they cast about for a new one, and offered to the American academic world the gravest insult it has yet sustained. You might spend much time searching through the names of prominent people in America, before you found one less fitted to be head of a great university than Leonard Wood; a second-rate regimental surgeon at the Presidio in San Francisco, who had the fortune to become the favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, and was by him rushed to a high command in the army, against the unanimous protest of army men. In 1920 he was picked out by a group of millionaire adventurers as their candidate for president; these men were shown by the New York “World” to have spent millions to buy him the nomination. They failed; and perhaps to soothe the general’s wounded feelings the trustees of U. G. I. selected him for the highest honor in their gift. Also, Harvard has just made him an overseer—the interlocking process in a new form!
At the University of Pennsylvania the General receives twenty-five thousand dollars per year. He has not yet condescended to honor the university with his presence, but his duties are performed by an assistant provost, at six or eight thousand. As faculty men explained to me, the one thing which makes it possible to tolerate the indignities of management by business men, is the fact that the president is always a professional educator, a man who has been one of them and understands their problems. But here is a man who has never been an educator, and is not even a graduate of a university; a military autocrat, utterly out of sympathy with true ideals of education. So the professor is pushed one step lower in the social scale, his status of inferiority is fixed; and at the University of U. G. I. everybody sits still and holds his breath, waiting for the Grand Duke of Drexel-Morgan to die, and leave his millions to his dead university!
P. S. As this goes to press, General Wood resigns.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE TIGER’S LAIR
For four years during my early life as a writer I lived—first in a tent, then in a little cabin which I built, then in an old farm-house—in the wooded hills about five miles north of Princeton. I wrote “Manassas” there, and “The Jungle.” For “Manassas” I used the Princeton library, so I spent a great deal of time about the place, and got to know it very well. I dwell on those days, and visions rise of elegant country gentlemen’s estates, deep shade-trees and smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds strutting about; and the campus, with elegant young gentlemen lounging, garbed with costly simplicity and elaborately studied carelessness. I remember the warm perfumed evenings of spring, with the singing on the steps of “Old North”; the bonfires and parades and rejoicings over athletic victories; the grave ceremonials of commencement, and the speeches full of exalted sentiments. I remember a tall black-coated figure—I never saw it without a shining silk hat—striding about the grounds, or standing on the steps of “Prexy’s house,” responding to a serenade, and reminding the students how they were destined to go out and be leaders in the battle for all things noble and true and grand.
Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a tragedy to mankind might have been averted!
I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke, poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had never happened to anybody.
The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture, the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford, and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river, reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two. Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it; no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our empire of education.
The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank, one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen.