The Goose-step: A Study of American Education

by Upton Sinclair

We take the Wabash Railroad to Detroit, traveling under the protection of a Columbia University trustee; and from Detroit we take the Michigan Central Railroad, with a Columbia trustee, a Cornell trustee, a Rochester trustee and a recent Yale and New York University trustee for directors and two First National, two Guaranty Trust, and two National City Bank directors; and so we arrive at Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. In the upper peninsula of this State are enormous deposits of copper, with a great trust, Calumet and Hecla, in charge of the region. We shall feel at home here, because the enterprise is financed by Lee-Higginson, and all the old Boston families, the Shaws, Agassizs, Higginsons and Lowells, got in on the ground floor. So now when strikers have to be shot down or kidnapped, we find highly cultured graduates of Harvard in charge of the job; when they have to be lied about, the Associated Press is ready, with a Harvard graduate as general manager—see “The Brass Check,” pages 358-361.

In the lower peninsula are great manufacturing cities, including Detroit, headquarters of the automobile industry. The grand duke of the state university is Frank B. Leland, president of the United Savings Bank and brother of a great motor magnate. As his right-hand agent and local manager at Ann Arbor he has Mr. Junius P. Beal, former owner of the Ann Arbor “Times,” prominent Republican politician, director of a bank and an insurance company, and owner of most of the saloon property in Detroit; also Judge Murfin, a leading stand-pat politician; a doctor, who is also an active politician; the manager of the Grand Rapids street railways, who is interested in banks; and a Bay City manufacturer, who is president of a national bank.

No account of education in Michigan would be complete which did not mention Senator Newberry, the especial darling of the plutocracy of the state. Newberry is the son-in-law of A. V. Barnes, president of the American Book Company, which is the school-book trust, the most important single agency in the corrupting of American education. We shall come to know this American Book Company intimately when we deal with our public schools. Suffice it for the moment to say that when ex-Secretary of the Navy Newberry bought his way into the United States Senate, he used money which had been pilfered from the school children of the United States. Mr. Fred Cody, henchman of Newberry, and convicted with him, is an American Book Company agent, while his brother, Frank Cody, is superintendent of schools in Detroit. You see what a tight little system they have in Michigan!

As president of the university they had until two years ago a native son, who began teaching there fifty years ago. He is described to me by one who had much dealings with him as a typical “go-getter,” with the mentality of a hardware sales agent; very expert at getting money from the rich, but in the realm of the intellect “a bouncing old fool.” A year or two ago they got in Marion LeRoy Burton, the great inspirationalist whom we met at the University of Minnesota. We saw him introduced there with brass bands and fireworks, and I have a friend who saw the same thing happen at Ann Arbor; these inspirationalists, it seems, live always in the glare of fireworks and the blare of brass bands—or else the sound of their own eloquence, which is the same thing.

The University of Michigan is another of these huge educational department stores, a by-product of the sudden prosperity of the automobile business. Its spirit was interestingly revealed by the Detroit “News” of two years ago, at which time the enrollment amounted to twelve thousand. Said the “News:”

Whether it is wise or best for the individual and society is difficult to decide; but it is true and very natural indeed that for nearly all of these young persons an education is not greatly worth while if at the end of the college course or soon thereafter it can not be translated into good pay and the material comforts of life. The old ideal of education as an end in itself, as the deepening and broadening of one’s view of life, as the acquiring of a certain amount and kind of culture, has gone from among us.

At this university they have, of course, all the usual paraphernalia of fraternities and sororities and “student activities”; also they have an oversupply of what passes for religion in a commercial age. There are five or six hundred instructors, employed to prepare boys and girls for money-making, and a few fond idealists, who struggle to introduce a little understanding of the intellectual life. At this, as at other universities, you hear wailing about the impossibility of getting college students to study; so you would have thought that when a man came along who proved himself a wizard at that art, the harassed authorities would have grappled him to their hearts. I put it to you, overworked and troubled college professor, in whatever part of America you may be: suppose some one put to you the task of getting seventy-five college boys to come to you, begging you to teach them in off hours, and outside the regular classes, and without any credits; offering to rent rooms for the purpose, clean them up themselves, buy lumber and saw it and build benches with their own hands—would you say you know how to do that? Suppose you were asked if you could spend hundreds of hours in intimate association with such students, and never once hear a dirty story, never once hear talk about football or society politics, never see a man light a cigarette—would you say that any man alive could do such a thing? Suppose it were up to you to get yourself invited to the toughest fraternity-house on the campus, to read the Bible to the men between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, and have everybody in the fraternity-house attend, and even bring in crowds from the other fraternity-houses—would you think that could be done in any American university? And if a man were doing all these things, would you say that he ought to be made dean of men, and then, as quickly as possible, president of the university—or would you say that he ought to be fired from the university in disgrace? Of course it would depend; before giving your answer, you have to know whether the man is a Socialist!

He is; and so he was driven from the University of Automobiles. His story was told to me by some of his former students, who ask me not to use his name; he has another job, and might very easily lose that. So let us call him Smithfield. He began teaching at Ann Arbor fifteen years ago, starting in on rhetoric. Naturally, the way to make rhetoric interesting is to see how it is used by live writers; so Smithfield and his classes would read H. G. Wells, and the plays and prefaces of Bernard Shaw, and the essays of John Stuart Mill. He would set his classes interesting stunts to do; a passage from Wells to write over in the style of Milton, or one of Shakespeare in the manner of Carlyle. His classes grew, and when he turned them over to others they fell off. The head of the department brought him three boys, sons of the interlocking directorate, who could not pass; Smithfield taught them, and they passed. “It’s a marvel,” said the professor; “I don’t see how you do it.”

But parents began to complain. Their children were coming home with different ideas; they were learning real things about modern life, instead of the pretenses the parents were used to! A nephew of Mr. Henry Leland, of Lincoln Motors, brought to Mr. Bulkley, the banker, at that time a regent, the dreadful story that Smithfield was a Socialist; so the president of the university summoned him in haste: “My dear Smithfield,” said he, “can’t you see that if you were to divide everything up, it would not be many years before the more able people had got possession of everything again?” Such was the mentality of the aged native product; and he was backed by Mr. Beal, the resident regent, owner of banks and saloon real estate. The boys had to come to this latter to ask for the use of a hall for a lecture by some unorthodox person, and they would regularly be asked this question about dividing up!

Matters got so serious, with complaints of rich parents, that there was a formal investigation by a committee. Thirty students were corralled and questioned by five members of the faculty. “Have you ever read a Socialist book? Have you ever been to a Socialist lecture? Where did you get these ideas? Were you taught Socialism by Professor Smithfield?” One and all, the boys testified that Smithfield had never taught them Socialism; he had taught them to think. He had been tireless in impressing upon them that they should learn to hold their minds in suspense, and to judge for themselves; they should test new ideas, and accept what they found convincing to their reason. As a result of this investigation, one of the deans informed Smithfield that he had been suspended by the regents, but this statement turned out not to be true—not yet!