![]() At the same time, as one commentator noted, echoing Santayana’s observation on Yale students’ conformity, “It is the effect of organized democracy that it sets sharp, and often quite arbitrary, limits upon individual taste and action.” The eminent literary critic and Princetonian Edmund Wilson noted that fear of this social censorship in New Haven caused “the most vigorous and alert intelligences. ![]() Democracy existed in the sense that success in extracurricular activities could offset parental fame or wealth in establishing student prestige. Of course, this was democracy within institutions that did not reflect all the ethnoreligious, racial, gender, or class heterogeneity of American society, but the self-characterization was strongly believed and nationally debated for all that. At Harvard, journalist Edwin Slosson observed, “the word ‘democracy’ seems to mean ‘promiscuity’ or else some spiritual condition altogether unaffected by external circumstances.” To the ditty respecting Harvard’s famous snobbery- “And this is good old Boston/The home of the bean and the cod,/Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,/And the Cabots talk only to God”-Yale had a riposte: It was because of the sameness of their students that spokesmen for Yale and Princeton liked to claim the existence of a near-perfect “democracy” within their student bodies. They are like passengers in a ship or fellow countrymen abroad their sense of common interests and common emotions overwhelms all latent antipathies.” 4 The relations of one Yale student to another are comparatively simple and direct. The college hero is there more unreservedly admired, and although it is not true that the most coveted societies are open to everyone who gains distinction in scholarship or athletics, other considerations have relatively much less weight than among us. The new influences soon control him entirely and imprint upon his mind and manner the unmistakable mark of his college. His family and early friends are far away. The traditions of the place become sacred to him and he vies with his fellow students in proving that he understands them. They come, as is well known, from many parts of the country, and this diversity of origin and associations would seem at first sight to be an obstacle to unity. “The first ingredient of the Yale Spirit is of course the raw material of the students. Harvard professor George Santayana, reflecting on a year spent in New Haven, wrote of the New Haven college’s “isolation from the outer world and internal homogeneity” for a Cambridge audience in the Harvard Monthly. 3 In ethnicity and religion, too, Yale College was homogeneous, and the outside world hardly impinged. The collegians were now mostly young men, not boys: the average age of graduates of the class of 1886 was 22 years, seven months. ![]() Not surprisingly, as it aged the college had become more dynastic regarding alumni legacies in admissions: in the class of 1831, 11 percent had Yale graduates for fathers, while by 1891 the figure was 16 percent, a number that was to hold roughly constant for another four decades, through 1921. Among its peers, meaning then Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell, “Yale incontestably had the smallest home-state base, but also the smallest state as home.” 2 ![]() Yale was still admitting more freshmen than Harvard-344 to 324, this year-while becoming less regional and more truly national (and even international: almost 3 percent came from abroad or the U.S. Fifty-seven years later, New England including Connecticut accounted for less than half of those collegians, the Middle Atlantic almost a third, the Great Lakes a sixth, and the Southern states a bit less than 3 percent. Then, two-thirds of the student body hailed from New England, with a fifth from the Middle Atlantic states, and a tenth from the South. John Seymour Wood (Bones 1874), Yale Yarns (1895) 1īy the 1889–90 school year, Yale College boasted a student body of 1,079 students, a number which trebled the head count in 1832–33, the year before the senior society system began with the founding of Skull and Bones. He succeeds, in spite of his income, and his friends like him because he acts and carries himself like a man. The rich man’s son still has to fight his own battles, and frequently to overcome a certain democratic prejudice against him. The college still preserves the character of twenty years ago in its regard for a purely democratic standard of manliness and worth. ![]()
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