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

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In 1916 the New York Evening Post, at that time in rebellion against the House of Morgan, published an interesting study of the financial connections of the governing board of Harvard. There are six members of the Harvard corporation, known as the “fellows,” and these are appointed for life. In addition, there are thirty “overseers,” elected by the whole body of graduates. The New York “Evening Post” examined these latter, and found eleven capitalists and seven lawyers, a generous majority for the plutocracy. Nor was there much danger to the plutocracy from some of the others; those classified as “public men” including Senator Lodge and F. A. Delano, ex-president of several railroads.

A year later the “Evening Post” made a further examination, considering not merely the fellows and the overseers, but the nine directors of the Harvard Alumni Association, the nine members of the Association’s nominating committee, twenty candidates for overseers who had just been called, and six who had just been called as candidates for directors of the Association. That made a body of eighty Harvard graduates, forty of them Boston men, and twenty-nine of these forty being financial men, or attorneys for the State Street houses. All but six were connected with the three interlocked financial institutions; twenty were connected with Lee, Higginson & Company or its institutions—nine with the Old Colony Trust Company, the great Lee-Higginson bank, five with Lee, Higginson & Company itself, four directors in another Lee-Higginson bank, six directors in a Lee-Higginson savings bank, six in another Lee-Higginson savings bank, four in a Lee-Higginson insurance company, and six attorneys for these. “State Street,” you see, is like Virginia; the old families have been intermarrying for so long that everybody is related to everybody else.