DOES SNOBBERY PAY?

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 206, 31 August 1929, Page 9 (Supplement)

DOES SNOBBERY PAY?

AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW.

BOSTON , PROFESSOR "HEDGES"

"THE SADDEST OF LIFE'S

FAILURES."

"Be a snob," Professor E. Rogers counselled the graduating class of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and thereby started more wagging of tongues and shaking of heads than are usually occasioned by sober addresses to earnest young graduates. "Bβ a snob," advised Professor Rogers, who teaches English and history; "marry the boss' daughter iisjtead of 'hie stenographer, dress, speak and act like a gentleman, and you'll be surprised at the amount of murder you can get away with." Editors paused in their contemplation of the settlement of the reparations problem, farm relief, Congressional reapportionnient, or what not, to shake a reproving finger at the unusual professor, or to commend him rather 'hesitantly ovtr hisbold departure from the accepted rules. Even that genial philosopher and columnist, Heywood Broun, mildly chides Professor Rogers, and reminds us that neither Herbert Hoover nor Thomas A. Edison was a stickler for fashion. "Neither one of these- gentlemen," says Mr. Broun in his column in the New York "Telegram," "ever edged hie way into fame behind the cutting prow of a well-pressed suit. It. was recorded of President Hoover during the campaign that 'he ordered his suits in bulk without a single try on, and Mr. Edison's clothes are apparently through the courtesy of the Pills'bury Flour Company. Aβ far as financial success goes," says Mr. Broun remins<yntly, "there is not. a nickel'e difference between being immaculate and shabby. I've tried it." "Be Superior." But to return to. Professor Rogers' address. As he Is quoted in sundry dispatches, he pointed to Harvard University as an institution which for 300 years had never stopped "putting up a front" and "what goes for an institution," he said, "goes for an individual as well." Advising 'his young hearers, then, to be "superior," Professor Rogers went on, we read: —• "Never buy a suit of clothes unless you can buy one with an extra pair of trousers. Have one suit of clothes pressed every week. And the first chance you have, when you have accumulated enough money, buy a second suit of clothes. Never buy a pair of shoes unless you buy shoe trees for them. Have your shoes shined every day, and shave. Never wear the same collar at night that you have been wearing in the daytime at your work. "Found a family that will be successful. Seek the leadership of the ruling class. The ambitious, aspiring men are always marrying a little higher in the social scale. Do that yourselves. It is just as easy to marry the boss' daughter as the stenographer." Later, we read in the Boston "Post, Professor Rogers explained that the snob he had in mind was "that kind of person who is liable- to get called snobbish or "high hat,' because he holds himself up to a standard of manners of speech and of behaviour and cultivation which is rapidly going out of fashion. And if that is to be a snob, then I'm all for^it."

Manners Count, Not Manner. "It is true that a large number of men do shave daily," replies the Harvard "Crimson," "but it is hardly to this that they owe the remarkable front which has apparently enabled them to get away with murder for the. past 300 years." Seriously, continues the Harvard mouthpiece, "it may be well to point out that the reason Harvard 'never apologises, never argues, never listens to criticism,' is that she has never been fooled by the sort of distinction that appearance, manners or artifical social orders create." Snobs, comments the Philadelphia "Inquirer," "are to be counted among the saddest of life's failures, condemned to the resentment and ridicule of that part of humanity that seeks for higher and better things in life, and doomed no less to the society of their peers. . . . One can think of no place where enobbery would be more tragic in its consequences than in the fields of applied science, which are especially the goal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In those fields a man is measured only by his deeds, and a cranky Steinmetz or a dishevelled Edison would turn the balance against ten times ten thousand frock-coated cadgers manoeuvring to feast upon the leavings of a rich man's table rather than to win the esteem of their fellow-men through real service to society." "You cannot succeed by merely being a snob," asserts Dean Christian Gauss, of Princeton University, as he is quoted in a dispatch to the New York "Times." Aβ he sees it, "success comee usually to simple and single-purposed men. Snobbery is only a manner, and manner does not count. Manners do."