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

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And instantly our interlocking president rushes to the rescue. Before the convention of the New Jersey Bar Association he exclaims: “Our forefathers did nothing of the sort. They took good care to do something quite different.” And the Associated Press takes that and sends it all over the United States, and ninety-nine out of a hundred good Americans read it, and say, reverently: “A great university president says so; it must be true.”

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What is the function of an American university president? Apparently it is to travel about the country, and summon the captains and the kings of finance, and dine in their splendid banquet halls, and lay down to them the law and the gospel of predation. I consult the name of Nicholas Murray Butler in the New York Public Library, and I find a long list of pamphlets, each one immortalizing a plutocratic feast; the Annual Luncheon of the Associated Press, 1916; the Annual Dinner of the Commercial Club of Kansas City, 1908, the Annual Dinner of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, 1917, the Annual Dinner of the Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Springfield, Mass., 1917, the Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, 1911, the Annual Dinner of the American Bankers’ Association—and so on. In addressing these mighty men of money there is no cruelty which our interlocking president will not endorse and defend, no vileness of slander he will not perpetrate against those who struggle for justice in our commercial hell. “Political patent medicine men,” he calls us; and he tells the masters of the clubs and bayonets, the gas-bombs and machine-guns that we seek our ends “by some means—violent if possible, peaceable if necessary”; he tells about Socialists “whose conception of government is a sort of glorified lynching.”