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
Needless to say, the university authorities see to it that no modern
ideas get access to these young barbarians all at play. President
Barrows’ first act as president was to forbid Raymond Robins to speak at
the university; he knew that Robins had been in Russia, and learned some
things which President Barrows also learned, but did not tell. The kind
of speaker Barrows wants for his students he found in General Joffre,
whom he welcomed with open arms, making a grandiloquent speech about “a
soldier president welcoming a soldier hero.” The students thronged to
hear the Marshal, though they could not understand him; and they mobbed
young Herman Meyling for offering Socialist literature for sale.
“Intolerance is a virtue in war-time,” says President Barrows; and, of
course, all time is war-time to an imperialist.
The keen young commercialists of this school of hate are thoroughly
imbued with the psychology of the dominant classes; even the boys who
come from the working class are on the way to the top, and the quicker
they learn to feel like gentlemen, the better fraternity they will
“make.” “I think organized labor should be killed,” said one
undergraduate to a friend of mine. So they are eager for strike-breaking
expeditions, and their “soldier president” has kept alive this
university tradition. When the electric workers went on strike, the
mayor of Berkeley smashed the strike with university boys.
And then came the seamen’s strike, which proved a more serious matter;
it is a lark to run a dynamo or a trolley car for a few days, but to
ship on a steamer is something you can’t get out of, and some
unfortunate boys who were trapped by the knavish university machine into
shipping as seamen on the Matson Line and the Dollar Line paid for their
blunder with their lives. Others of them came home thoroughly trained
radicals—having learned more in a few months below deck on a steamship
than they would have learned in a hundred years in the lap of their alma
mater. Some of the steamships broke down at sea, and the capitalist
newspapers were filled with scare stories about sabotage; but of course
the real reason was inexperienced labor. On the steamship Ohio the chief
engineer was a Washington athlete, the second engineer was a Boston
dental student, and the third engineer an undergraduate student of the
University of California!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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