An After-Dinner Address
By G. Stanley Hall
President of Clark University
G. STANLEY HALL (born in Ashfield, Mass., in 1846), President of Clark University, is a leading authority on education and psychology, and author of a number of important books, notably "Adolescence" (2 vols. 1904). The present address, delivered at a recent dinner of the Clark Menorah Society, has been revised by Dr. Hall for publication in The Menorah Journal.
I FEEL an unwonted embarrassment in speaking to you to-night, first because the light After-Dinner View of Life, which is my theme on your program, is far from being serious enough, and I must totally abandon my plan and speak entirely extemporaneously, although upon a subject in which I have an old and strong interest.
Again, I am always embarrassed in talking to members of your race because I feel a little as Napoleon did when he told his soldiers in Egypt that forty generations looked down on them from the top of the Pyramids. You know your ancestry in general back for thousands of years, and I am rarely fortunate in being able to go back as much as nine or ten generations to the Puritans of the "Mayflower," but there I stop and everything before that is a blank. David Starr Jordan tells us in his book that there is perhaps no man alive who has not kings or queens in his ancestry, but adds that we all have had murderers among our predecessors, too.
There Is Much In Common Between Yankee and Jew
THERE is much in common between the Yankees, whom I represent, and the Jews, and this alone ought to give us a friendly feeling toward one another. We are both misunderstood and caricatured. The Yankee stands for a peculiar sort of closeness in money matters and a shrewdness which has even given its slang name to a neighboring New England State, the "Nutmeg State." Perhaps we have both done too much in the past to deserve this reputation for super-cleverness. One of you has referred to the fact that there are Jews who do not like to acknowledge their race. In that respect we are alike, for there are many Yankees who are ashamed of being known as such. Long years ago, when I was a student in Germany, I was introduced one evening to a young German countess. She said in her broken English, "I am so glad to meet an American. I have heard you have many funny people there, the Dago, the Paddy, the Nigger, and many more; but I have heard that the lowest people there are what they call the 'damn Yankees.' How I would like to see one of them!" This, bear in mind, was soon after our Civil War, and she received her impression of us doubtless from Confederates. I did not have the courage to acknowledge my nationality to her, but diverted the topic to some of the other people she had mentioned.