The Goslings: A Study of the American SchoolsSinclair, Upton
History
The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools
Sinclair, Upton
Education -- United States
The manager of the American Steel & Wire Company, another feudal
concern, whose special device is to avoid paying pensions by discharging
its old employes a year or two before they become eligible; a prominent
banker and member of this same concern; a prominent lumber dealer and
manufacturer; the head of the largest loom manufactory in the United
States, heavily interested in banks and in the two Worcester newspapers;
the head of the United States Envelope Company; a leading banker; the
president of a sprinkler company, a notorious reactionary; the treasurer
of the Norton Company; the vice-president and sales manager of a forge
company; the president of the White Motor Company; the president and
general manger of a pump machinery company; the vice-president and
superintendent of the shoe machinery trust; the vice-president of the
Westinghouse Electric Company; the manager of a tool manufacturing
concern; the vice-president of a scales company, president of two other
scales companies, chairman of a typewriter company, director of an
asbestos corporation, a cement company, two banks, a safety razor
company, an arms company, a finance and trading corporation, a guarantee
company, and a water power company; the treasurer of a construction
company; another magnate of the Norton Company; the vice-president of a
national bank; the president of a lumber company; another manufacturer;
the treasurer of another manufacturing company; and three
representatives of the open shop of Jesus Christ.
Let me give you also an illustration of what it means to run education
for such a board of magnificoes. The brother-in-law of one, an
interlocking director of manufacturing, banking, journalism and
hospitals, found himself with a son on his hands; and in the effort to
get this son through this institution he employed one of the
institution’s young instructors as a tutor. The son being unwilling to
take the trouble to visit the tutor, it was arranged that an automobile
should come each day to bring the tutor to the son. On one occasion
there turned up at the tutor’s door a large industrial truck of
unprepossessing appearance. As the tutor knew the garage of the great
magnate was stocked with motor cars of all kinds and sizes, he felt
himself injured in his dignity, and declined to climb aboard the
industrial truck. When the magnate learned of this, he was enraged, and
threatened the tutor—not merely with loss of the opportunity to tute,
but also with the loss of his position in the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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