The second grand duke of Princeton is Cyrus H. McCormick, head of the International Harvester Company, also a director in the National City Bank. The third grand duke is William Cooper Procter, the Ivory Soap magnate, who tried to buy the presidency of the United States for General Wood. Mr. Procter is also a director in the National City Bank—quite a smell of Standard Oil on the Tiger’s coat, you notice! The fourth grand duke is Robert Garrett, the biggest banker of Baltimore, whose brownstone mansion was one of the wonders of my childhood.
All the above are life-trustees of Princeton; and to assist them they have two more bankers, and a Philadelphia lawyer who is a director in the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the Lehigh Railroad and the Lehigh Coal Company; a cotton manufacturer who is a member of the Republican Campaign Committee; a Pittsburgh merchant who is director in a national bank; the secretary-treasurer of the United Railroads of New Jersey; the president of the United States Trust Company; a publisher who is a director of two banks, a lawyer who is director of two insurance companies, and another who is chairman of a railroad, and another who is attorney for the Prudential Life. No unsound or subversive ideas need apply at Princeton! And the just reward of all this respectability was reaped when H. C. Frick, the steel king, died, and left a great part of his fortune to the university.
Woodrow Wilson made a lot of trouble for these super-plutocratic trustees. He saw that the club system was destroying the intellectual life of the university, and he tried to break it up and introduce a system under which the rich students would at least know the names of the less rich ones. He was bitterly fought at every point by the society group, led by Andrew West, head of the Latin department, and dean of the Graduate School, a college politician who is genial to people he can use, but is a bitter partisan of reaction. This Dean West had a vision of a hyper-exclusive school for graduate students, an ivory tower of classical culture, and he got Mr. Procter, who owns a tower of ivory soap, to offer half a million dollars for this purpose. But Woodrow Wilson objected to the plan and delayed it, and Mr. Procter became angry and withdrew his money—which caused a furious hullabaloo among the Princeton plutocracy, led by Mr. Taylor Pyne, the first grand duke.
For some time the conflict raged, and it was settled in a peculiar way. Dean West got somebody to offer three millions for the proposed school; and that licked Woodrow, and Woodrow bowed his head in submission. It had been possible to hesitate over half a million, but three millions—“flesh and blood cooden bear it!” I am quoting from the delightful scene in Thackeray’s “Yellowplush Papers,” where “Chawls,” who is in the service of the Honorable Algernon Deuceace, is being tempted to do some rascality for “his Exlnsy the Right Honorable Earl of Crabs.” At first he resists the temptation; but then his Exlnsy “lugs out a crisp, fluttering, snowy HUNDRED-PUN NOTE! ‘You shall have this; and I will, moreover, take you into my service and give you double your present wages.’
“Flesh and blood cooden bear it. ‘My lord,’ says I, laying my hand upon my busm, ‘only give me security, and I’m yours forever.’
“The old noblemin grin’d, and pattid me on the shoulder. ‘Right, my lad,’ says he, ‘right—you’re a nice promising youth. Here is the best security.’ And he pulls out his pocketbook, returns the hundred-pun bill, and takes out one for fifty. ‘Here is half today; tomorrow you shall have the remainder.’” And so Dean West became the master of the Graduate School of Princeton; according to the terms of the gift he and another man hold the purse-strings. Up with the aristocratic tradition, and good-bye to elegant and studied carelessness! Everybody in the Graduate School of Princeton must wear an academic gown for dinner!
They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia, Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen! These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale, Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser!
CHAPTER XXV
PEACOCKS AND SLUMS
Evans Clark, now of the Labor Bureau in New York, was for three years a “preceptor” at Princeton, and tried to interest the young men in what was going on in the outside world; among other things he assigned them Walter Lippmann’s “Preface to Politics” as a book to read. I remember that I made a diligent “go” at this book, to find out what Lippmann meant and what he wanted; but I never could, and I doubt if any Princeton under-graduate could do more. However, Professor William Starr Myers of the department of history, a popular orator at ladies’ clubs, thought it was a terrible book, and pleaded with Clark that he was “taking an unfair advantage of immature minds!” A professor at another university, who knows Professor Myers well, tells me that “he is, next to Cal Coolidge and Ole Hanson, the most consummate ass on radicalism in the country. He is the lion of the afternoon pink teas.”
As always, where you have smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds on them, you also have vile and filthy slums, in which babies die of typhoid and dysentery, and little children grow up crooked and poisoned for life. In this elegant aristocratic university town are some of the worst slums in the world; the Rev. Edward A. Steiner, author of “The Trail of the Immigrant,” was brought to Princeton to preach, and he inspected them, and writes me: “The housing conditions at Princeton were about as I have found in the most congested district of New York. Under the shadow of three million dollar dormitories were tenements of the worst type. They were occupied by colored and white help.”[[H]]