Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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This eldest of the grand dukes is active in their Grand Ducal party, having taken the job of raising the money to buy the presidency of the United States in 1904 and 1908. He is also a patron of the graces of life; he spent fourteen thousand dollars for a trotting horse in a city in which tens of thousands of little children go to school hungry every day; he is so little ashamed of this performance that he caused it to be embodied in his biography in “Who’s Who.” As second grand duke of his university, Mr. Stotesbury has the son of old “Pete” Widener, Philadelphia’s traction king; as assistants on the board of this university he has a partner in his banking firm, and a choice assortment of plutocrats, totalling as follows: five bankers, three lawyers, two public utility officials, two corporation officials, three manufacturers, an insurance and coal mining man, a publisher, an architect, an engineer, two doctors, two judges, and a senator. It is difficult to classify these trustees exactly, because the functions of the various members overlap; most of the bankers are in the coal business, the lawyers are directors in banks, the architect is an exbanker, the engineer is director of a power company and a trolley company, while the publisher is president of a steel company and a railroad, and director of a national bank. One of the public utility officials is the brother of Senator Penrose, one of the most aristocratic political corruptionists America ever had; one of the lawyers, Wickersham, was Taft’s attorney general; the senator is George Wharton Pepper, chief lackey to the plutocracy of Pennsylvania. Another lawyer is general counsel and active vice-president of the United Gas Improvement Company; two of the bankers are directors in that company. Another of the bankers is a sugar smuggler, and one of the manufacturers helped in the effort to buy a presidential nomination for General Wood.