One of its products of which Yale does not boast is Sinclair Lewis. (He ran away, and came to Helicon Hall to learn about Socialism!) He told me how the men in his class hated compulsory chapel, and proposed to organize and protest; they would get up early in the morning and march through the gateway, and defy the authorities. To a man they “cussed” the chapel; yet, so completely did the spirit of Yale conquer them, when they came to be seniors, and had to vote on college customs, they voted for compulsory chapel! “After all, it’s a good thing, it helps to get the men together and make college spirit!”
Yale was founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”—that is to say, the slave trade; and it stands today four square on wage slavery. It has an endowment of thirty-two million dollars; and needless to say, the interlocking directorate is in full charge. The board includes: the president of the New York Trust Company, who is a director in a trolley company, a fire insurance company, and a securities company; the president of the Merchants’ National Bank of Boston; the president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of New York; the president of the Westinghouse Company of Pittsburgh; a Chicago dry goods merchant, who is a director of a great railroad system and a national bank; a silk manufacturer who is a bank trustee; the publisher of a leading newspaper, also a director of the Associated Press and two insurance corporations; another newspaper publisher who is a director in the Erie Railroad; the chief counsel of the Connecticut Trolley Company; and, to make the group entirely safe and conservative, four ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite recently I saw a document which was sent out to the Yale alumni, asking their opinions on a group of candidates for the new elections; and at the top of the list stood the name of America’s prize Tory, ex-President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft.
Taft is a Yale man, and is proud to boast himself a pupil of the late William Graham Sumner, professor of political economy, and a prime minister in the empire of plutocratic education. I doubt if there has ever been a more capitalistic economist than Sumner, a man who took a ghoulish delight in the glorifying of commercialism. He is the author of a book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”; reading this book you discover that what the rich owe is to enjoy their riches, while what the poor owe is to keep out of the way. Never that I know of has stark brutal selfishness been so deified, and covered by the mantle of science. “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to take care of his or her own self.” Such was the first commandment according to Sumner; and the second was like unto it: “Mind your own business.”
Of course, to such a man there was no person so irritating as a “reformer” of any sort, and he never wearied of pouring out ridicule upon the man who imagined he could do anything to make society better. “Society does not need any care or supervision,” decreed the all-wise professor, and that settled it; the hard young Roman rulers thronged to his classes, and absorbed his gospel of the wolf-pack, and went out with their minds encased in a triple-plated Harveyized steel armor of prejudice, ready to commit any crimes that might be necessary to the preserving of their privileges. Today the pupils of Professor Sumner are walking upon the faces of labor and stamping out the hopes of mankind in hundreds of the leading industries of the country, and in the highest posts of the government, from the United States Supreme Court down. Such a man is worth many billions of dollars to the plutocrats; they pay him a few thousand a year, and tickle his vanity with solemnly conferred degrees and an academic robe to wear, and at the end of his thirty years of service the editors of the “Yale Review” celebrate him in a series of articles as “Pioneer—Teacher—Inspirer—Idealist—Man—and Veteran.”
Professor Sumner’s place is now ably taken by one of his pupils, Professor Albert G. Keller, author of “Societal Evolution,” which a well-known American sociologist describes to me as “a lengthy example of secondary rationalization to prove the immorality of social reform.” In case you do not understand these scientific technicalities, let me explain that Professor Keller is employed by the New England plutocracy to act as intellectual night-watchman for their property; and that having got his orders what to teach, he then invents an elaborate set of reasons to convince himself and the world that this is the right thing to teach, and that in so teaching he is protecting society.
Meantime, what of the men at Yale who happen to have some vision of social service and human sympathy? I managed to find one who had been there, and for a while thought he was going to make a success in the great university. He invented during the war a device to destroy submarines, and the United States government took it up. Word came to the interlocking trustees, and the secretary of the corporation, Mr. Anson Phelps Stokes, sent for the professor in haste. There was a story in this—some advertising for Old Eli! Simon Lake, a Yale man, had invented the submarine, and now another Yale man was to wipe it out! “For God, for country, and for Yale!” Mr. Stokes with eager fingers began turning the pages of an encyclopedia, to find out the date of Simon Lake’s invention, and the date of his sojourn in the university!
But this bit of favor was quickly lost, when the professor took up the troubles of his colleagues, who found it impossible to exist upon their salaries, with the cost of living going up day by day. My friend had spent ten years preparing himself for university teaching; he had spent eight years teaching at Clark, at Harvard and at Yale, and now he was getting fourteen hundred dollars! He insisted that he and his colleagues should get more; and the secretary was irritated by this agitation. Mr. Stokes comes from a wealthy family himself, but believes that other people should wait for their rewards in heaven. He wrote my friend that college professors should not interfere with matters which are not their own business; also that he had never advised Yale instructors to get married!
What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University, a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. So you see, we are literally realizing the sarcastic observation of Professor Spingarn, that there are three sexes in America—men, women and professors. There is only one step more to be taken, and I expect some morning to pick up my paper and read that the president of some great university has announced that, inasmuch as college professors who cannot afford to marry sometimes set bad moral examples for the students, it is now ordained that none but eunuchs need apply for jobs. If this arrangement has proved useful to the ruling classes of Turkey, and for the choir boys of the Vatican, why should it not be given a trial in our plutocratic empire?
CHAPTER XXVII
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLACK HAND
We have completed a survey of our five largest Eastern universities, Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale; we shall now cross the continent, to the Western domains of our interlocking directorate. We may begin our journey on the New York Central, which is a Vanderbilt-Morgan road, and has a Columbia and a Cornell and a Rochester University trustee for directors, a recent Yale and New York University trustee for director, a Lake Erie College trustee for vice-president, and a Cornell trustee for vice-president, also a Guaranty Trust and two National City Bank directors; and continue it on the Michigan Central under the same auspices; then on the Illinois Central, which has a Columbia trustee and an Armour Institute trustee and a recent University of Chicago trustee, and a Knox and a Rockford College trustee for directors, and one First National, one Guaranty Trust, and two National City Bank directors; then on the Missouri Pacific, with a Brown University and a Vassar College and a Middlebury College trustee for directors, and a New York University council member for director and a Massachusetts Tech trustee for vice-president, and one Equitable Trust and two Guaranty Trust directors; finishing on the Union Pacific, which has a Columbia trustee for chairman, also a Rutgers College trustee and two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors, also two Equitable Trust, two Guaranty Trust, and three National City Bank directors. We may announce our coming by the Western Union, which has a Columbia trustee for president, and on its directorate two Columbia trustees, a Princeton trustee, a Massachusetts Tech and Hebrew Tech trustee, and a recent Harvard overseer. Arriving in San Francisco we shall be welcomed by the interlocking directorate in charge of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electricity, land, water, gas—and education.