The Goose-step: A Study of American EducationSinclair, Upton
History
The Goose-step: A Study of American Education
Sinclair, Upton
Education -- United States; Universities and colleges -- United States
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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