One of its products of which Yale does not boast is Sinclair Lewis. (He ran away, and came to Helicon Hall to learn about Socialism!) He told me how the men in his class hated compulsory chapel, and proposed to organize and protest; they would get up early in the morning and march through the gateway, and defy the authorities. To a man they “cussed” the chapel; yet, so completely did the spirit of Yale conquer them, when they came to be seniors, and had to vote on college customs, they voted for compulsory chapel! “After all, it’s a good thing, it helps to get the men together and make college spirit!”
Yale was founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”—that is to say, the slave trade; and it stands today four square on wage slavery. It has an endowment of thirty-two million dollars; and needless to say, the interlocking directorate is in full charge. The board includes: the president of the New York Trust Company, who is a director in a trolley company, a fire insurance company, and a securities company; the president of the Merchants’ National Bank of Boston; the president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of New York; the president of the Westinghouse Company of Pittsburgh; a Chicago dry goods merchant, who is a director of a great railroad system and a national bank; a silk manufacturer who is a bank trustee; the publisher of a leading newspaper, also a director of the Associated Press and two insurance corporations; another newspaper publisher who is a director in the Erie Railroad; the chief counsel of the Connecticut Trolley Company; and, to make the group entirely safe and conservative, four ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite recently I saw a document which was sent out to the Yale alumni, asking their opinions on a group of candidates for the new elections; and at the top of the list stood the name of America’s prize Tory, ex-President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft.
Taft is a Yale man, and is proud to boast himself a pupil of the late William Graham Sumner, professor of political economy, and a prime minister in the empire of plutocratic education. I doubt if there has ever been a more capitalistic economist than Sumner, a man who took a ghoulish delight in the glorifying of commercialism. He is the author of a book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”; reading this book you discover that what the rich owe is to enjoy their riches, while what the poor owe is to keep out of the way. Never that I know of has stark brutal selfishness been so deified, and covered by the mantle of science. “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to take care of his or her own self.” Such was the first commandment according to Sumner; and the second was like unto it: “Mind your own business.”