You of course are familiar with the time-honored custom of college commencements, class tents in and around which old grads let loose and get messed up generally, with booze and women. Well, in Princeton these tents are set up on vacant lots around in the town, and the townspeople feel that it is a most degrading influence upon their children, who hear the ribald songs and see sights that even grown people stay within doors to avoid if possible, during this grand and glorious reunion of the sons of Princeton. A protest as to this condition came up at a civic meeting. A committee of which I was chairman was appointed to meet Dean McClenahan of Princeton and the dean of the Graduate School. We met. The genial dean of the Graduate School after a few innocent questions said, “Why yes, Miss Vincent, you see we can’t very well have the reunion tents on the campus, because it would reflect upon the university’s good name, and would influence parents against it. But we do need to foster the reunions, because we need the support of the old graduates to keep up the college spirit.”
You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out; that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.” He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years educational director of the National Security League!
In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan, former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a trustee as well as a professor!
I talked with the wife of a Princeton instructor, who was performing some clerical duties for her husband, and thereby had opportunities to “listen in” on Princeton education. She tells me of juniors and seniors in the great fashionable university, who would ask naive and childish questions about things that were going on in the world, revealing ignorance of which grammar school children would be ashamed. These elegant young idlers had been to college for three years, some of them four years, and had not learned to read a newspaper! Yet they were all eager to go to war, for a cause of which they understood nothing, and of which their leaders understood no more—as they proved to us before they got us out of the mess.
Two years later there came as it were a colossal volcanic eruption, whereby Princeton culture, Princeton ideals and Princeton pieties were exploded over the entire globe. At present writing it appears that it will take mankind a hundred years to recover from the disasters that resulted. You, plain working men or business men who glance at this book, and think that college stupidity and corruption does not concern you, take this one fact and ponder it: millions of German and Austrian babies are hopelessly deformed by rickets, tens of millions of Russian peasants have perished of starvation, three hundred billions of human treasure and thirty million human lives were thrown away to no purpose—because, forty-five years ago, one student of Princeton College, Thomas Woodrow Wilson by name, was studying Hebrew, Greek, and imbecile theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and social engineering!
CHAPTER XXVI
THE BULL-DOG’S DEN
A short journey on Mr. Morgan’s Pennsylvania Railroad, with its Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wilson, Lafayette, Rutgers, Teachers’ College, Lehigh, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts Tech and University of Pennsylvania directors, and another short journey on Mr. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad, with its recent Harvard overseer for chairman, a Brown trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale president for director, and a member of the Yale advisory board, a Washburn trustee, a Wellesley trustee, a Pratt Institute trustee and two Harvard visitors for directors, and we find ourselves at the home of Princeton’s age-long rival, Old Eli; another carefully guarded fortress of the plutocracy, a ruling class munition factory, turning out mental bombs and poison gas for use in the class war.
There was a time when Yale was called “democratic.” This did not mean, of course, that the students had any use for the “muckers” of the town of New Haven, but merely that all the students knew one another; they were all bound for the top, and all stood together. But the secret societies came in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where the sons of millionaires draw apart and live exclusive lives. These secret societies run not merely the student life, they run the institution, through the alumni who belonged to the societies when they were undergraduates, and are now getting their sons and their friends’ sons in, and doing everything to hold up the power of “Skull and Bones.”
For this new imitation piracy the young fellows begin their training long before they see the college; there are eight or ten fashionable preparatory schools, which also have their fraternities, so that the lads are intriguing and wire-pulling and imitating one another’s imbecilities before they get out of short trousers. It is a rigid caste system, a set of artificial ideals and standards—clothes, accent, athletic prestige, money-spending, all the arcana of snobbery. The older fellows are watching, criticizing, patronizing; you “make” the proper “frat” at your “prep” school, and then go to the great university, knowing that you are watched every moment by sharply critical eyes. For a year or two you bend every thought and effort to being just exactly what the great social leaders dictate; and then comes the day of anguish, when the “tapping” is done, and you are swept on to a lifetime of triumph, or cast down into everlasting humiliation.
The standards of these fashionable societies permit you to get drunk and to acquire your due share of venereal disease, but they do not permit you to wear the wrong color tie, or to use the wrong kind of slang, or to smoke the wrong tobacco. Needless to say, they permit no smallest trace of eccentricity in ideas, and here we have a mob sentiment which supplants all academic discipline. Fifteen or twenty years ago Alexander Irvine was pastor of a church at New Haven, and thrilled some students with visions of social reform. Jack London came in 1905, and gave his famous lecture, “Revolution,” and prominent society students sat up all night to wrangle with him. But the war has swept all this away, there is no longer any trace of liberalism at Yale that I could find. Instead, there is discipline and herd sentiment. “This is the way we do it at Yale,” and woe to the youngster who tries to do it differently!