So far our attention has been given to the public schools. There is another large field of education, at which we can only stop for a glance—the private schools. There are over two thousand private high schools and academies in the United States, with two or three hundred thousand students; and apart from parochial and a few experimental schools, these institutions are maintained by the rich for the purpose of giving their children a class education. Some of them are large and wealthy, with endowments running into the millions; when we glance at their boards of control we are reminded of the interlocking directorates of “The Goose-step.”

For example, here is Phillips Exeter, a hundred and forty-two years old; in control we find Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, partner in the firm of J. P. Morgan and Company, director of the Guaranty Trust Company, overseer of Harvard University, trustee of Smith College, and director of the Crowell Publishing Company, which gives us that lovely “American Magazine” about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” Also Colonel William Boyce Thompson, mining magnate and Republican party chief; also Mr. George A. Plimpton, trustee of Amherst College, who has just helped to kick out its liberal president, and senior partner of Ginn and Company, who run Clark University and Clark College for the benefit of the Frye-Atwood geographies.

Also there is Phillips Andover, a hundred and forty-five years old, having at the head of its board a Boston bank president, interlocked with Yale University; as board members a clergyman, interlocked by marriage with the Boston Lowells, who are even more exclusive than the Boston banks; also a New York corporation lawyer, who ran our war department under Taft. At Hotchkiss we find the president of a trust company and a dean of Yale; a partner in a stock exchange firm, who is also treasurer of Yale; and a president of a bank, vice-president of a trust company and of the American Brass Company, director of a life insurance company and a trustee of Trinity College. At Groton we find as secretary the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, interlocked with Barnard College and Nicholas Miraculous; also a member of the firm of Lee, Higginson & Company, the Boston bankers, interlocked with the University of Lee-Higginson, popularly known as Harvard; also two representatives of the Episcopal department of God, Mammon & Company.

At St. Paul’s we find the New Hampshire bishop and two other members of this same aristocratic firm, one of them interlocked with Yale; also a Baltimore copper magnate, interlocked with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and Johns Hopkins University; also a carpet manufacturer; a Republican politician of Boston; a Philadelphia lawyer, who is president of a bank and two railroads, director in four railroads, a trust company, an electrical company and an asphalt company; and finally, a real sure-enough, honest-to-goodness, cross-my-heart-and-swear-it English lord! At St. Marks we have the same bishop as at Groton, and two other representatives of the firm; also a cotton goods merchant interlocked with Boston Edison and Massachusetts Gas, the invisible government of Harvard; also a president of several manufacturing companies, who is vice-president of a railroad; one of the Choates, who directs railroads, banks and life insurance in New York; and finally “Jim” Wadsworth, senator and Republican boss of New York state, whose father I had the pleasure of putting out of politics some eighteen years ago. (See “The Brass Check,” page 45.)

The Lawrenceville School, a magnificent institution located five miles from Princeton, has on its board of trustees President John Grier Hibben of Princeton, one of our leading clerical militarists; also a New York banker who directs much foreign exploitation; also a bank president who directs insurance. At Lawrenceville they had a head master who was liberal, or at least human; he died recently, and the plutocratic alumni came, offering to raise a few millions, on condition that they should name the head master. They brought in the very successful coach of the Yale rowing crew; incidentally he was professor of Latin, but that is hardly worth mentioning in comparison. Because of his services in beating the Harvard crew, Yale gave him the degree of M.A., honoris causa—the same as they had extended to Jane Addams! This rowing gentleman proceeded to coach Lawrenceville under the new Prussian spy system, with the result of a faculty explosion too unsavory to be detailed in this book.

These schools of snobbery are scattered all over New England and the eastern states. They are training grounds for the athletic teams of the big universities, also for the university fraternities, so that social strivings and jealousies make up a good part of their student life. Admission to the more exclusive of them is an hereditary privilege; if you belong to the right families, your children and grandchildren are booked when they are born. Needless to say, the plutocratic psychology of these schools is never offended by the least breath of liberalism. In place of ideas, the boys are furnished with golf courses, motor cars, saddle-horses, boot-leggers, and all other comforts of home.

You have heard of Roger W. Babson, who sends out bulletins to keep the rich informed as to the progress of social revolution. Mr. Babson deals also in plutocratic education; conducting at Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, the Babson Institute, where thirty sons of the plutocracy are trained to be magnates, at two thousand dollars per magnate per year—room and meals not included! The Babson Institute also undertakes to educate your employes, furnishing you with magic circulars to be put in their pay envelopes. I have seen some of this magic; Mr. Babson asks the wage-slaves: “What is the law of capitalism?” and answers, in capital letters: “The law of capitalism is that wealth saved in production should be honored and respected.” I wonder what Mr. Babson tells his thirty budding magnates to answer when their wage-slaves ask concerning wealth which has been stolen in corruption.

Of course there are private schools which are less expensive, and less plutocratically correct. They descend in a sliding scale, until you come to places which only a Dickens could describe. Society ladies enjoying life in Reno or Paris, captains of industry who are sent to Congress or to jail, want some place where they can stow their children out of the way. Professor William Ellery Leonard was once a master in one of these places, up in New York state, and told me vivid tales about the hordes of young savages, and how, for trying to enforce a little discipline, he incurred such furious enmity that on his last night in the school he had to barricade himself in his room and defend his life with a baseball bat!

I know a lady who, in order to get an education for her only son, accepted a position as “house-mother” in another of these private hells, and found herself housed in a room with fungus on the walls and on the floor the overflow from an adjoining urinal. Everywhere the toilets were overflowing and the floors covered with filth, the cooking atrocious, the boys ill with indigestion, colds and sore throats, no infirmary or provision for the sick, and among the hundred and fifteen boys a general prevalence of smoking and wine-drinking, and practice of self-abuse so general that many of the boys were mentally helpless—a lad would sit in class “with dropped jaw and staring eyes, or with nervous spasms which furnished entertainment for the other boys.”

I talked with a group of young masters at one of the older and more reputable of these “schools of snobbery.” To show how closely the boys were guarded from modern thought, one of these masters said that he had passed through the school as a pupil, and then gone out into the world and become a bit of a liberal; returning to the school as a master, he had met his former masters, and discovered that they too were liberals. But never a whisper of their ideas had got to him as a pupil, nor are they getting to the pupils now. All the boys’ attention is on wealth, all their standards are those of worldly possessions, and this is what their parents desire and ordain.

I have referred to Phillips Andover; this school is located five miles from Lawrence, Massachusetts, the headquarters of the Woolen Trust, run by William M. Wood, one of our most ruthless labor smashers, who ten years ago was prosecuted for a dynamite frame-up against the strikers in his mills. A group of conspirators, headed by a prominent contractor, placed dynamite in the home of a non-union worker, the intention being that the explosion should be blamed upon the strikers. The contractor who placed the dynamite blew out his brains rather than face an inquiry.

Such is the atmosphere of Lawrence. In 1919 came another great strike, and a group of young Quaker clergymen took the part of the workers. I have told about one of these, A. J. Muste, in “The Goose-step.” Among others whose consciences were stirred was Bernard M. Allen, a teacher of Latin in Phillips Andover; he went with a party of twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to attend a meeting of the strikers in Lawrence. The police commissioner had announced that no more “agitators” would be allowed to enter the city, and when these ladies and gentlemen left the railroad station and started to walk across the open square, they were charged by mounted police, and Mr. Allen was severely clubbed over the head. This was the first of a series of unprovoked assaults by the police, in one of which young Muste and another clergyman were driven into a side street and nearly clubbed to death.

As for Mr. Allen, it happened unfortunately that Phillips Andover was beginning a campaign for two million dollars’ endowment. (It had just received half a million dollars from the late Oliver Payne, who had purchased a United States senatorship for his father.) Mr. Allen’s resignation from Phillips Andover was requested and promptly accepted. If I do not tell you many such incidents concerning our schools of snobbery, you may believe that it is because young masters in these schools do not often get themselves clubbed over the head in sympathy for “dagoes” and “wops” on strike.

What these schools are really for was very interestingly shown by a study of class standing in Harvard University, published in the Harvard “Advocate” at the end of the year 1923. Here was a graduating class consisting of 379 men from private schools and 858 from public schools. The study showed that in the eight major athletic teams there were 40 men from these private schools, and only 22 from public schools. All the managers were private school men. As regards class officers, musical and glee clubs, debating teams, dramatic clubs, class day officers, etc., there were 183 private school men, as against 29 from the public schools. But after that came the record on scholarship, and the contrast was amusing: the scholarship honors had been won by 41 from private schools, and 82 from public schools! It is interesting to note that this study was made by a son of Thomas W. Lamont, and I welcome him to the ranks of the “Bolsheviks.”

In New York City I met a well-known writer, who had taught in a private school on Staten Island, and had been summoned before the principal for the crime of putting on the blackboard a stanza by Don Marquis, setting forth the idea that discontent is a good thing! I met also a woman teacher from a private school in Brooklyn; this school is located in a Y. M. C. A. building and the Y. Secretary used to come and pray with the students—he prayed that God might give them power to smash the Huns, and power to smash the Bolsheviks, and power to smash many other enemies. These expensive young gentlemen drove to the school in costly motor cars, to which God had given power to smash everything in their way.

In Boston I talked with a teacher in one of the private schools for young ladies, and she described to me the atmosphere in this place. She had got into trouble, by stating that the happiest people are those who earn their own way in life; also for stating that labor should be respected because of its importance. By remarks such as this the teacher occasioned so much resentment that she was never asked to lead in chapel. These girls would not stand the simplest kind remark about working people—not even common humanitarianism.

I talked with another who taught in a girls’ school, where the pupils were advised to avoid hard thinking, because it would spoil their complexions and bring wrinkles and other signs of care. I could make a novel out of the story which this teacher told me about the treatment of a girl whose father had failed in business, and who was trying to pay her way through the school by selling an encyclopedia. The teachers at this place were underpaid and pitiful decayed gentlewomen, who lived starved lives and read sentimental romances; but they did not feel sentimental about a girl who was trying to redeem her family fortunes.

Concerning a school of “secretarial science” in Boston I was told a story which at least has the grace of being funny. Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., a Boston banker, was invited to address the young ladies of this school, and the principal’s speech of introduction ran as follows: “The gentleman whom we have the privilege of hearing is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison” (dead silence); “he is the nephew of Lucretia Mott” (dead silence); “he is the lightest quarter-back that ever played on the Harvard eleven” (tumultuous applause).

I am especially informed concerning young ladies’ finishing schools, because of the fact that my wife was sent up from Mississippi to attend one. This school stood on the fashionable part of Fifth Avenue, and in the catalogue you were informed that it adjoined the homes of the Goulds and Vanderbilts, and the pupils had opportunities to meet the multi-millionaires of New York. The pupils used to watch these multi-millionaires and their multi-wives from the windows—hiding behind the curtains, of course, so that they might not be seen. One of these fortunate wives came frequently to call upon the young ladies, bringing her multi-dogs. Helen Gould came once, and it was the same as a court ceremony, the thrills of it lasted for weeks.

The husband of this establishment was an old gentleman with humiliating plebeian tastes; he used to go out every afternoon and disappear around the corner, and come back with a small paper bag, which was a source of fascinated speculation to the young ladies—until finally one of them succeeded in brushing it out of his hand as she passed him on the stairs, and it was discovered to contain a ten-cent apple pie purchased on Third Avenue! My wife thinks I ought not to tell this story, because it is unkind to the old gentleman, who has since died. I hasten to explain that I myself now and then bring home an apple-pie in a paper bag; the point of the story is not that the old gentleman liked pie, but that the young ladies considered his liking it a scandal of first-class proportions. It was only permitted to like expensive things!

My wife came from the far South, and had the prestige which attaches to that region in the world of elegance. It has been written up in romances, you understand; so the mining princesses from Idaho and the cattle kings’ daughters from Wyoming were eager to model themselves upon the gestures and mannerisms of a real daughter of the Confederacy. The teachers at this school were forbidden to correct her Southern dialect; therefore the standard of good English for the “Four Hundred” was set by a Negro field-hand, black as a scuttle of coal, who had been picked out as a house servant before the war, and had become “mammy” to a dozen white babies. When this aged negress was cross she would say: “I never said any such of a thing”; and when she was pleased she would say: “The prettiest thing I nearly ever saw.” When the Goulds and Vanderbilts heard that, they called it “charm”!

What these young ladies were taught in their “finishing school” is “accomplishments”; everything from the standpoint of the drawing-room, and just enough to get by on. When my wife was completely “finished,” she could play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin; she could sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances; she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three operas, and read three books. What was more important, she had had tea in all the luxurious palm-rooms and Louis Quinze rooms of the great New York hotels; she had acquired connections with the most expensive fashion shops, and had had obsequious foreign gentlemen study her colors, and tell her what was her proper style; she had seen the inside of a number of Fifth Avenue homes, and learned the names of “period” furniture; she had been to West Point to attend the annual football match with Annapolis, and to New Haven to attend the annual rowing match with Harvard. Now she lets me poke fun at such culture, but she still has affection for her old teachers, and insists that I specify—they were giving the young ladies exactly what the parents of these young ladies demanded, and the only thing they were willing to pay for.