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
I tell you of these petty incidents of discrimination; and yet, if we
are to keep our sense of proportion, we must state that in the totality
of American universities, Harvard ranks, from the point of view of
academic liberalism, among the three or four best. There was no
interference with its professors during the war hysteria—and I found but
one other large institution, the University of Chicago, of which this
statement may be made. Also, Harvard has to its credit one post-war
case, in which academic freedom was gravely involved, and in which the
Harvard tradition proved itself still alive. This is a curious and
dramatic story, and I will tell it in detail.
In the summer of 1918 the United States Army invaded Archangel in
Northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia, seizing the
territory of a friendly people and killing its inhabitants without the
declaration of war required by the constitution of the United States.
This invasion was the blackest crime in American public history, and was
denounced by many of our leading thinkers. Also it was denounced by five
obscure Russian Jews, mere children in age, living in the East-side
slums of New York City. Four boys and a girl printed a leaflet, asking
the American people not to kill their Russian compatriots, and they
distributed these leaflets in public—for which crime they were arrested,
taken to prison, and beaten and tortured so severely that one of them
died a few days later. The surviving four were placed on trial, and
after a hideous travesty of justice were given sentences of from fifteen
to twenty years in prison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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