You have heard of Roger W. Babson, who sends out bulletins to keep the rich informed as to the progress of social revolution. Mr. Babson deals also in plutocratic education; conducting at Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, the Babson Institute, where thirty sons of the plutocracy are trained to be magnates, at two thousand dollars per magnate per year—room and meals not included! The Babson Institute also undertakes to educate your employes, furnishing you with magic circulars to be put in their pay envelopes. I have seen some of this magic; Mr. Babson asks the wage-slaves: “What is the law of capitalism?” and answers, in capital letters: “The law of capitalism is that wealth saved in production should be honored and respected.” I wonder what Mr. Babson tells his thirty budding magnates to answer when their wage-slaves ask concerning wealth which has been stolen in corruption.
Of course there are private schools which are less expensive, and less plutocratically correct. They descend in a sliding scale, until you come to places which only a Dickens could describe. Society ladies enjoying life in Reno or Paris, captains of industry who are sent to Congress or to jail, want some place where they can stow their children out of the way. Professor William Ellery Leonard was once a master in one of these places, up in New York state, and told me vivid tales about the hordes of young savages, and how, for trying to enforce a little discipline, he incurred such furious enmity that on his last night in the school he had to barricade himself in his room and defend his life with a baseball bat!
I know a lady who, in order to get an education for her only son, accepted a position as “house-mother” in another of these private hells, and found herself housed in a room with fungus on the walls and on the floor the overflow from an adjoining urinal. Everywhere the toilets were overflowing and the floors covered with filth, the cooking atrocious, the boys ill with indigestion, colds and sore throats, no infirmary or provision for the sick, and among the hundred and fifteen boys a general prevalence of smoking and wine-drinking, and practice of self-abuse so general that many of the boys were mentally helpless—a lad would sit in class “with dropped jaw and staring eyes, or with nervous spasms which furnished entertainment for the other boys.”
I talked with a group of young masters at one of the older and more reputable of these “schools of snobbery.” To show how closely the boys were guarded from modern thought, one of these masters said that he had passed through the school as a pupil, and then gone out into the world and become a bit of a liberal; returning to the school as a master, he had met his former masters, and discovered that they too were liberals. But never a whisper of their ideas had got to him as a pupil, nor are they getting to the pupils now. All the boys’ attention is on wealth, all their standards are those of worldly possessions, and this is what their parents desire and ordain.
I have referred to Phillips Andover; this school is located five miles from Lawrence, Massachusetts, the headquarters of the Woolen Trust, run by William M. Wood, one of our most ruthless labor smashers, who ten years ago was prosecuted for a dynamite frame-up against the strikers in his mills. A group of conspirators, headed by a prominent contractor, placed dynamite in the home of a non-union worker, the intention being that the explosion should be blamed upon the strikers. The contractor who placed the dynamite blew out his brains rather than face an inquiry.
Such is the atmosphere of Lawrence. In 1919 came another great strike, and a group of young Quaker clergymen took the part of the workers. I have told about one of these, A. J. Muste, in “The Goose-step.” Among others whose consciences were stirred was Bernard M. Allen, a teacher of Latin in Phillips Andover; he went with a party of twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to attend a meeting of the strikers in Lawrence. The police commissioner had announced that no more “agitators” would be allowed to enter the city, and when these ladies and gentlemen left the railroad station and started to walk across the open square, they were charged by mounted police, and Mr. Allen was severely clubbed over the head. This was the first of a series of unprovoked assaults by the police, in one of which young Muste and another clergyman were driven into a side street and nearly clubbed to death.
As for Mr. Allen, it happened unfortunately that Phillips Andover was beginning a campaign for two million dollars’ endowment. (It had just received half a million dollars from the late Oliver Payne, who had purchased a United States senatorship for his father.) Mr. Allen’s resignation from Phillips Andover was requested and promptly accepted. If I do not tell you many such incidents concerning our schools of snobbery, you may believe that it is because young masters in these schools do not often get themselves clubbed over the head in sympathy for “dagoes” and “wops” on strike.
What these schools are really for was very interestingly shown by a study of class standing in Harvard University, published in the Harvard “Advocate” at the end of the year 1923. Here was a graduating class consisting of 379 men from private schools and 858 from public schools. The study showed that in the eight major athletic teams there were 40 men from these private schools, and only 22 from public schools. All the managers were private school men. As regards class officers, musical and glee clubs, debating teams, dramatic clubs, class day officers, etc., there were 183 private school men, as against 29 from the public schools. But after that came the record on scholarship, and the contrast was amusing: the scholarship honors had been won by 41 from private schools, and 82 from public schools! It is interesting to note that this study was made by a son of Thomas W. Lamont, and I welcome him to the ranks of the “Bolsheviks.”
In New York City I met a well-known writer, who had taught in a private school on Staten Island, and had been summoned before the principal for the crime of putting on the blackboard a stanza by Don Marquis, setting forth the idea that discontent is a good thing! I met also a woman teacher from a private school in Brooklyn; this school is located in a Y. M. C. A. building and the Y. Secretary used to come and pray with the students—he prayed that God might give them power to smash the Huns, and power to smash the Bolsheviks, and power to smash many other enemies. These expensive young gentlemen drove to the school in costly motor cars, to which God had given power to smash everything in their way.
In Boston I talked with a teacher in one of the private schools for young ladies, and she described to me the atmosphere in this place. She had got into trouble, by stating that the happiest people are those who earn their own way in life; also for stating that labor should be respected because of its importance. By remarks such as this the teacher occasioned so much resentment that she was never asked to lead in chapel. These girls would not stand the simplest kind remark about working people—not even common humanitarianism.