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
Now behold the editor of this fine old Tory newspaper rushing to the
defense of his interlocking directorate. Mr. Laski must be driven from
Harvard, and Mr. Williams knows exactly how to do it. He interviews the
editors of the Harvard “Crimson” and “Advocate;” finally in the editors
of the “Lampoon,” he finds a group who will carry out his ideas. The
result is an issue of that paper, January 16, 1920, known to history as
the “Laski Lampoon.” If ever there was a fouler product of class venom,
it has not yet come under my eye.
I have never had the pleasure of meeting Harold J. Laski, but I form an
idea of him from a score of pictures in this publication. From a
painting on the cover I gather he is a short, thin, naked young skeleton
with a paunch; he wears large glasses, and has a fringe of whiskers, or
long hair, and a red dawn behind him, serving as a halo. From another
picture, a piece of clay modelling, I am puzzled about the whiskers, or
hairs, because I do not know whether they are little worms or pieces of
spaghetti. From other cartoons I gather that Professor Laski sometimes
wears clothes, and does not wear them entirely in the Harvard manner;
that is, his clothes do not fit him, and his hat has too broad a brim,
and is not worn entirely straight on his head. I gather that he
sometimes smokes cigarettes, a vice entirely unknown in refined
undergraduate circles.
Also Mr. Laski is described to me in a hundred or so sketches, verses
and witticisms. He is “the great indoor agitator”; he is “a member of
the firm of Lenin, Trotski and Laski.” This evil young man, you must
understand, holds the idea that the people of Russia should be permitted
to work out their own revolution in their own way, and that American
troops should not be sent in to attack them in Archangel and Siberia
without a declaration of war. This makes him a “Bolshevik”; this makes
him “Laski de Lenin,” and “Ivan Itchykoff,” and the author of “The
Constitution of the Russian Itchocracy,” and of the “Autobiographia
Laskivia.” “Love had to go. One love was bad enough, but thirty or forty
were insupportable. I had tried it and I knew.” He is invited to “sing a
song of Bolsheviks,” and he tells us that “Comrade Lenin has a hundred
and forty-eight motor cars, and Comrade Trotsky has fifty-two.” He is
“Cataline,” and again he is “Professor Moses Smartelikoff”—the “Moses”
meaning that he is a Jew, and the rest that he thinks differently from
Harvard. Such thinking must not be allowed to get a start, say our
cautious young undergraduates:
The moral, oh ye masters, is, without a doubt,
Stop infection early; kick the first one out.
And here are more verses, addressed to our unpopular professor:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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