* Well, not the only best. There are, of course, other prestigious schools not in the Ivy League, including Stanford, the University of Chicago, Williams, Amherst, Bob Jones (just kidding), MIT, NYU, UCLA, and [your favorite non-Ivy school here].
* Which he wrote for The Huffington Post.
* To the Associated Press in 2014.
* Cornell, too, won a little piece of that heart, and brought Agassiz on as a “non-resident lecturer.”
* Paulson is the Harvard alum (MBA, natch) hedge-fund guy who profited—to the tune of $15 billion—from the housing meltdown in the first decade of the 21st century.
* Before crossing the Atlantic Agassiz had never seen a black person. Seeing them freaked him out. In a letter to his mother, he complained about their lips, teeth, hair, knees, hands, and overall degeneracy. Later, he lectured a no-doubt receptive audience in Charleston, South Carolina, that “the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven months’ infant in the womb of a White.” He offered no scientific evidence to support this assertion.
* His final reward? Most likely (if one subscribes to an Agassiz-style eschatology) eternal damnation in the fire-lake of hell under the steady, searing gaze of Lucifer.
* From the perspective of regular people, that is. To creationists, he’s a fucking god.
* Who was—get ready—the Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard.
* Bishop is—and we can barely stand to type this—the mother of four (4!) children.
* Dartmouth perversely calls it an AB. So do Harvard and some of the others. We think this is just wrong.
* And not just any slave trade, but the famous “triangle” trade: grab people in Africa, sail to the Caribbean, trade some shackled people for sugar and molasses, sail to Providence and/or other ports, sell the remaining people and distill the sugar and molasses into rum, schlep the rum to Africa to trade for more slaves, etc.
* Everyone was doing it, not just the rich. It was as mainstream as your IRA.
* At times up to 90 percent of all slaves imported to North America were conveyed by ships owned and built by the citizens of this shrimpy little state. “Li’l Rhodie” consistently punched above its weight slave-trade-wise.
* By 1764, there were about thirty distilleries in microscopic Rhode Island.
* Like oversized, floating, dungeon-equipped bumper cars.
* Inaccurately ascribed by C. Wright Mills and Mario Puzo and the forgotten novelist Samuel Merwin and the forgotten French writer Pierre Mille and some Brit politician ridiculously named James Henry Yoxall and too many others to cram into a totally unnecessary footnote.
* A mental experiment, like the one with Schrödinger’s cat, although in this case we have two different people who are at once the same person rather than one cat who is in two different states (alive/dead) at once.
* Highlighted by innuendos that his opponent was a lesbian. Hi there, Karl Rove!
* And make-believe grandfather’s grandfather and make-believe grandfather’s great-uncle.
* And member of hush-hush secret society Skull and Bones.
* And member of hush-hush secret society Skull and Bones.
* Franklin Pierce, president no. 14, who supported slavery and drank himself to death.
* As a “dry drunk,” W no longer imbibed, yet appeared to be in a permanent alcoholic stupor. This, apparently, appealed to these voters.
* To trick morons into mistaking him for a Texas cowpoke.
* For instance, about the existence of WMDs. About the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. About Iraq’s purchase of fissionable “yellowcake” uranium. About a peaceful aftermath and being “greeted as liberators.” About the venture being paid for “by the oil.” We could go on.
* What Yale actually did was replace the slave with panels representing what appears to be an overcast sky—which is at Calhoun’s feet and below the cupola of the US Capitol. Once a racist stained-glass window, now a work of surrealist art!
* See Ted Kaczynski.
* Did he get this from Dr. Keith Ablow? Or vice versa? Or is it just that muddled minds think alike?
* All of which means he was a brilliant choice for Donald Trump’s cabinet.
* Consumer finance. Which Finn’s father ran before Finn did.
* At least that’s the number Finn claimed and the media repeated. Except for Vanity Fair, which pegs the gift at a measly $1.5 million.
* His 2015 salary was reportedly $3.68 million. That’s $70,769 a week, or $14,154 a day (assuming five-day workweeks), or $1,769 an hour (eight-hour workdays). That’s $29.48 a minute (sixty-minute hours), which doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Hey, one of us once spent that much on Amazon.com in less than a minute!
* His pitch probably didn’t include the line “Why, you couldn’t have done better with Bernie Madoff himself!” Meanwhile, you ask, “Is 15 percent good?” Dude. (May we call you dude?) The average investor return for 2014 was a little over 4 percent.
* That’s only 2.83 days of earnings at his aforementioned job.
* A mere twenty miles away from the Bronxville residence. Why? Why?
* The bail terms were later changed to $1 million cash, plus a $5 million bond secured by three people, plus the Bronxville house, minus the Manhattan co-op. You can’t put up a Manhattan co-op as bond. We could have told them that—not from personal experience, mind you. From the miracle of knowledge.
* Trouncing the infamous Benedict Arnold by five years.
* As an undergrad. There was no graduate medical school until 1782, and Church was dead by then, so it was out of the question.
* Alongside his classmate the signature artist John Hancock.
* He was first acclaimed as a poet for two 1760 works celebrating the coronation of King George III, who, in the 1770s, was the top bad guy of the American Revolution. If Church’s peers had been paying attention, they might have been able to prevent his treacherous doings later.
* Gold coins, not feathered creatures of the class Aves, order Galliformes, family Numididae. A guinea, if we remember our Sherlock Holmes aright, was worth a pound and a shilling.
* We’re pretending we lifted this sentence from the pages of the Colonial Enquirer.
* Clearly, this was not a da Vinci–level code job.
* Because “United Statesians” is uberclunky.
* Because it’s beneath us. And you. And we’ll deal with some of them in our entry on Kenneth Starr.
* In which Clinton and many other Ivy-educated liberal politicians are accused of willfully abandoning the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party in favor of rich, “well-graduated” technocrats just like themselves.
* There were enough of them to require an epithet. They were termed “bimbo eruptions” by Clinton advisor Betsy Wright.
* True, that’s easy for us to say. We probably couldn’t keep it zipped for eight days, with all that available action. But that’s why we’re not president.
* Name a twenty-four-year-old who wouldn’t mention to someone that she was diddling the president of the United States of America. We’ll wait. See? You can’t do it.
* See our entry on Al Gore, for instance.
* Ukraine and Lithuania are what we call these places today. We’d tell you what they were called back then but we know you couldn’t care less. Why don’t you just think of them as “Russia” and let us continue with the story? Thank you.
* Today’s Mississippi State University. Why Mississippi? We have no idea. It makes as little sense to us as it does to you.
* A Bronx accent, and whatever accent Lona had, are nothing like a New Zealand accent. Did Moscow train them to speak like New Zealanders to trick the accent-astute Brits? Some reports say they posed as Canadians, which would have been easier for them to mimic, eh?
* Nifty spy lingo from John le Carré. Isn’t it great? Who cares if it’s authentic.
* Who was brought on as assistant counsel and hated Cohn for the rest of his life.
* Dubbed the Lavender Scare. You could look it up.
* Guess when this was overturned. No, you’re wrong. It was overturned in 1995, when President Bill Clinton replaced it with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that cleared the way for gay men and women to enter the military.
* Fellow commie hunter David Schine. Long story.
* McCarthy, meantime, focused on drinking himself to death.
* Although he always promptly paid the homosexual prostitutes he hired.
* Which for some reason reminds us that Cohn joined the batshit right-wing John Birch Society in the 1960s.
* Power-crazed Lord of the Rings villain portrayed by Christopher Lee. You knew that, of course.
* Punishable by up to two years in prison, presumably without access to obscene devices.
* “Oh, yeah?” we want to retort. “Then just whose genitals can one stimulate for such purposes?”
* As Cruz surely knows, the flat tax he (and a string of crackpots before him, such as STEVE FORBES) touts is a) wonderful for the top one percenters, not so much for the rest of us, and b) likely to reduce the government’s revenues by as much as $1 trillion a year (which is probably why he likes it so much).
* Liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate gyrus—an area of the brain responsible for absorbing new information and integrating it with decision making—than do conservatives. Conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, a brain structure that is all about fear. Oh, you knew that? It’s still worth mentioning.
* His childhood nickname, which he threw overboard when he tired of being teased about it. We think it’s rather nice. “You been stimulating yourself, Felito?”
* You’re reading that correctly.
* More on this in a moment.
* Cough!… cough!… northernandwesterneurope!… cough!… cough!…
* Held in London and presided over, we’re sorry to have to inform you, by Charles Darwin’s son Leonard. That’s Major Leonard Darwin to you.
* Know what I mean, wink wink, say no more, nudge nudge, know what I mean?
* Holy fuck.
* I.e., get busy, people. Assuming you are from northern or western Europe.
* Holy fuck.
* Ibid. Because seriously. Nothing good can come from the phrase “to adulterate our national germ plasm.”
* Op. cit.
* Sorry, we’re fresh out of footnotes. Although we’d love to have heard how the receptionist answered the phone in that office.
* There were also allegations that as a judge he traded sexual favors from male defendants in exchange for lighter sentences.
* We know—not nearly a strong enough word. How about wrongdoing? Criminality? Lawbreaking? Dickishness?
* Again, this was in 2005. The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University released a study calculating that the war cost US taxpayers $2.2 trillion and killed 4,488 members of the US armed services and at least 123,000 to 134,000 Iraqi civilians—this apart from the wounded, injured, traumatized, orphaned, and suicidal casualties on both sides.
* We wanted to use M for Murderer, but our lawyer suggested CP for Classification Pending, because “Gilbert has not yet been tried and formally convicted of murder.”
* Who went to Groton and Yale after his stint at Buckley, in case you’re interested.
* A novel twist on old-boy networking.
* A Princeton grad with a Harvard MBA. He had worked on Wall Street for decades. For real. Pa Gilbert, at least, wasn’t just making it up.
* Apparently Gilbert Senior intended to continue paying Junior’s $2,400 monthly rent. Now Junior pays no rent! And gets his meals for free!
* Although you could make a pretty good case for Jonah Lehrer.
* Actually, he failed out twice, but “Yale double-failout” is not English. Although it does sound like a trick football play.
* Or however you choose to describe the process.
* On which sat two justices appointed by the father of the winning candidate.
* Remember the “butterfly ballot” issue, in which thousands of Gore voters mistakenly voted for right-winger Pat Buchanan? We don’t either.
* A squad that included Denny Hastert, sexual abuser of students; adulterer Henry Hyde; and multiadulterers Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston.
* She of the sanctimonious campaign for nasty-language warning labels on records.
* Which enshrined it as one of the all-time top-ten books for morons. The Norwegian psychopath who murdered sixty-nine kids in 2011 mentioned Grant’s book in his own depraved manifesto. For zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, Great Race was “the most influential tract of American scientific racism.”
* Odd combo, you think? Read on, O Noble Reader!
* Thank God that no longer obtains in our modern, sensible society.
* This is not a word he would have used. What are you, meshuggah?
* In quotation marks because there’s no such thing, scientifically speaking.
* One can imagine Grant-inspired posters in hospitals reading “Don’t Be Sentimental. Destroy Defective Infants.”
* See Abbott Lawrence Lowell for more in this cartoonishly narrow vein.
* IYKWHMAWTTYD (If You Know What He Meant And We Think That You Do).
* It probably didn’t hurt that he spoke all those languages and was applying from exotic Lebanon.
* How far we’ve come from those ancient days!
* We paraphrase.
* As opposed to Mount Holyoke College, which was named after the mountain that was named after his grandfather.
* All of whom had last names.
* Who is a woman and not a man.
* Some of whose ancestors were African. They did not leave Africa of their own volition.
* His great-grandfather was one of the original settlers of Providence in the 1630s. You can’t get more established than that… unless, you know, your people had been living there for a thousand years before the Europeans came along.
* He was the most generous of the college’s founding donors.
* A precursor of the infamous Tea Act of 1773, which spawned the Boston Tea Party, which led inexorably to the American Revolution, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the ignoramuses who, after the election of the first black president of the US in 2008, went all batshit and started calling themselves Tea Partiers.
* This was far from rare in ye olde Rhode Island. The REVEREND JAMES MANNING, the first president of the college later known as Brown, for instance, was accompanied by his own slave when he arrived.
* Except slaves, we need hardly point out.
* This is not a typo.
* Think of them as news-filled websites, but made of paper. Hence the term.
* “You antiwar people are so beautiful, and these colors, I can feel the universe breathing, wow, look at my hand, it’s pulsing, it’s part of the breathing universe…”
* Composed of exiled Cubans Hunt knew from his Bay of Pigs fuckup.
* See William F. Buckley.
* It wouldn’t look good. “How much money you make? Okay, that’s good enough, your kid’s in. Next.”
* We’ve been waiting for a chance to use that word.
* Which, at Berkeley, was not that big a deal.
* WICKLIFFE DRAPER.
* It also gave at least a couple of million to other researchers cited in Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which cites Jensen twenty-three times.
* Dialogue simulated.
* That’s an italicized lowercase g, which stands for—hold your breath—“genetic”! Or “genetic component”! Or something equally gobsmacking.
* The sneeringest type of person there is.
* We, we should note, also refer to ourselves as “we,” but we really are we.
* A literary device known as “understatement.”
* See Robert Cantor.
* He died in September 2016.
* And its less iconic 1967 predecessor that Gainsbourg recorded with then lover Brigitte Bardot, who asked him to suppress it so as not to infuriate her then husband, Gunter Sachs. Birkin sang and orgasmed an octave higher than Bardot.
* Victorious for men, Mysterieuse for women.
* She evidently has a James Francoesque lust for education.
* Delightfully named Zeromax.
* Another entity with a delightful name.
* A known drug-and gunrunner, but hey, nobody’s perfect.
* In an unprecedented move, two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest.
* Or here’s another way to think about it: Lower income and capital gains taxes and make goods and services more available—increase output on the “supply side”—and consumers will be affected the way the cheating-lover subject of a voodoo ceremony will experience pain when his doll effigy is stabbed by the houngans and mambos (male and female priests). It’s spooky action at a distance, capitalism-style. They’ll experience sudden, inexplicable urges. They’ll buy! Buy! Buy! The economy will expand, and the government—even at the lower tax rates—will see increased revenue. Does it work? No. It’s magical thinking, silly. Like voodoo.
* You can’t make this shit up.
* Who(m) did he want to sterilize? The “feeble-minded” and insane; alcoholics and criminals; epileptics; the blind; the deaf; the deformed; the poor; and, probably, you.
* You can’t make this shit up.
* You can’t… oh, never mind.
* Where, less than a year later, he was murdered by his cellmate, who was an even nastier predator than Geoghan.
* As we type, the Church is still negotiating a settlement with the victims and their families. It is currently hovering at around $65 million.
* Do you see what we did there? We claimed, or at least implied, we were feeding you an original line (“coined”), then slipped you someone else’s line (and a really stupid one, originally uttered by stumblebrained monster George W. Bush), thus not only illustrating but demonstrating the type of wrongdoing committed by the present profilee.
* The sick part is that Kerry actually fought in the war while Bush was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, doing who knows what.
* We’d like to see some seventeen-year-old smarty-pants teenager try to teach there today.
* Point to ponder: If he was such a learned preacherman, why did someone else have to point out that slavery was A-OK with the Bible? Had he never read the whole thing before?
* And eponym of Dartmouth’s business school.
* Although he surely thought he was right and they were wrong. After all: the Bible.
* See George W. Bush, lest you think the Ivies eradicated this in the early 1900s.
* The schools on the receiving end were universally thankful to Harvard for tipping them off about the transfer applicants’ depravity.
* Which was especially odd since black and white students had been living peacefully together in Harvard dorms for years before Lowell instituted his new “democratic” policy.
* You have to admire the gall of this sort of racist jiujitsu. It’s like saying, “Of course the races are equal. So we must keep them separate, so that blacks aren’t oppressed by people who think they’re not equal, having had no experience with them because we’ve been keeping them separate.”
* I.e., “Too many Jews leads to more anti-Semitism. Plus, it alienates anti-Semites, so they don’t come to Harvard, resulting in less anti-Semitism, which is also, for some reason, bad.”
* Does a 2014 arrest for breaking into an ex-girlfriend’s apartment and scribbling penises on murals that he himself had painted, then sending obscene messages from her e-mail account to execs at her company, merit the insult? We think so. And we haven’t even mentioned his previous DWI. Or the time he smacked a girlfriend, tore the phone off the wall so she couldn’t call 911, and smashed her with it.
* They knew each other from what fine journalists call “the prestigious Ross School in East Hampton,” where the children of both men were enrolled. Yes, Ludwick had two kids with his estranged wife.
* The first question the police asked was whether there had been anyone in the car with him. Ludwick’s no-doubt-slurred answer: “Don’t worry about him.”
* Example: he wanted know how big a boat he’d need to cross to Venezuela.
* Don’t ask. They were Puritans. We wonder whether he had a sister named Cottonelle.
* The word shanda is Yiddish for a disgracefully shameful thing. It’s root, root, root for the home team; if they don’t win, it’s a shame. If they lose to the by-far-worst team in the league, it’s a shanda.
* Cotton Mather didn’t actually say or write this. This is us, “doing” him. Not bad, huh?
* Us again.
* Pardon us. We should have said “lowly, non–Ivy League Queens College.”
* To us, that’s called “schizophrenogenic parenting.” The message—“You did a bad thing! And you should have known how to get away with it!”—is, shall we say, mixed.
* And on a screenplay Erik and a friend cowrote that had a plot almost identical to the one Erik and Lyle hatched for real. It would have been a nice piece of evidence, practically a preconfession, had it been allowed at trial. Which, tragically, it wasn’t.
* It was a thought that did not “take.”
* Those seeking pubic-wig jokes in this entry will be severely disappointed.
* Which supposedly pays for the expertise of those running the fund. In this case, that expertise consisted of knowing the location of Bernie Madoff’s money drop.
* Perhaps not so oddly (in this particular small world), at a certain point Bernie Madoff became treasurer of Yeshiva University. Could he have chosen to steer money directly to his fund without allowing Merkin to dip his wick? Perhaps, but we imagine he was too kind, too generous, for that.
* According to NYU’s attorneys, Merkin had ignored warnings from his associate Victor Teicher that Madoff was a scammer. For the record, Teicher was in federal prison for insider trading while he worked with Merkin.
* The total hit to synagogue congregants was around $2 billion, leading to the tabloid coinage “Temple of Doom.”
* Whose net gain on their investments, therefore, worked out to minus 83 percent.
* Thereby exposing himself as either a terrible money man (since he didn’t clock that Madoff’s absurdly consistent high returns were impossible); or a liar; or delusional.
* We hear your stern-but-fair objection: it’s not exactly an Ivy. But it is one of the Seven Sisters, it is and always has been extremely cozy with Columbia, it is across the street from Columbia, many Columbia classes are open to Barnard students and vice versa, at graduation Barnard grads receive diplomas that say “Columbia University” on them, and in any case she also has a master’s in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, so please shut up already.
* Same “mission” as with Bush. Same “accomplished,” too.
* We’re ignoring the eighty-five days she spent in jail protecting a source—Scooter Libby again—in the Valerie Plame affair. So sue us.
* She once explained that her job “isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers… what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” In other words, to be a stenographer for powerful prevaricators. Which is pretty much what her critics say about her.
* Founded by WICKLIFFE DRAPER and at one point run by Harry H. Laughlin.
* The Pioneer Fund was also rather fond of Arthur Jensen.
* If you started at the end and are reading backward, or are reading the entries in random order, or have an attention-deficit issue and find yourself reading a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, a footnote from someplace else, then it doesn’t matter what we say here since none of it is making sense to you anyway.
* Also with a law degree from Harvard, plus a Harvard MA in economics.
* At the bottom of the first page there is a note stating that the website is not operated by any of the people who pissed away the money, but by a claims administration firm whose job it is to help the unfortunates who fell for Noel’s sales pitch get their money back.
* Details? See the Brown Family.
* In 1782, there were 300,000 to 500,000 slaves on the island.
* For the record, their father, like many Boston go-getters, had also been involved in the triangle slave trade.
* In today’s dollars: $67 trillion, we guesstimate.
* It’s always at least ten years away.
* Except, perhaps, a passive one.
* Which is more than anyone born in Sri Lanka had ever been worth.
* How original.
* Based on nothing but the stories of professors Raphael Robb and Lawrence Scott Ward, a stranger to our planet might conclude that all Ivy League economics professors are rich and evil.
* Other than that before Cornell, he’d graduated from the too-on-the-nose-named Killingly High School in Killingly, Connecticut.
* Heraldry talk! Let’s say.
* Perhaps not as elite as Scalia’s law school, but elite nonetheless. Only high-achieving students, regardless of color, were admitted.
* Perhaps we oversimplify. In fact he was voting against a case challenging a law that made antigay discrimination illegal. Got it?
* A backwater religious redoubt—his kind of place, despite his Ivy League pedigree.
* Such as the recently renamed, Koch-funded Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. George Mason almost went with “Antonin Scalia School of Law” but decided that the acronym, “ASSoL,” resonated uncomfortably with its eponym.
* If you’re thinking of applying to Harvard Business School, take a tip from Jeff Skilling. When asked during his admissions interview if he was smart, he replied, and we quote: “I’m fucking smart.” Brilliant!
* Trust us. We read the transcript.
* We’re hoping you’re not going to make us explain what they did to create that illusion. Okay, here’s one thing: they created “special purposes entities,” companies Enron owned and used as fake trading partners to create fake profits. Can we move on now?
* Yes, “men,” since sex scandals in Congress almost always involve male congresspersons. Which is not to say that we’re not open to hearing about illicit behavior among congresswomen, because we totally are. And, of course, the other parties in those scandals can be women, men, boys, girls, and whatever else is left.
* More than 8,000 pages of them. Between the abusing and the note taking, it’s not clear how Packwood had time for anything else.
* He died in prison. Just kidding. He became a rich, successful lobbyist.
* The firing of White House Travel Office personnel! Abuse or misuse or whatever of FBI files! Rose Law Firm high-jinx! Madison Guarantee monkeyshines!
* Available from Amazon.com for $0.01 (plus $3.99 shipping) as of this writing.
* For perjuring himself about blow jobs and obstructing justice concerning blow jobs.
* The phrase Hillary Clinton first used in 1998 to characterize, accurately, the forces hounding her and her husband.
* Yes, his father.
* Who maybe, as Trump claimed, really was an alternate on the 1972 Czechoslovakian Winter Olympics ski team, but, in fact, really really wasn’t.
* Inspired by his mentor, Roy Cohn.
* And “the women.” And “the Mexicans.”
* And eminently giftable.
* Overheard by a fly on the wall of the Monsters of the Ivy League office suite: EW: Do we really want to say that Trump supporters are “pro–racial subjugation”? SR: We’re illustrating a point with an anachronism. We don’t have slavery—racial subjugation—per se in the twenty-first century. But we do have racists, and which presidential candidate did those racists overwhelmingly support in 2016? So, yes, we can and should say that. EW: I don’t know… oh, all right.
* It was called “filibustering,” unrelated to the current practice in which, for instance, Senator Ted Cruz stands at a lectern and spouts nonstop nonsense for more than twenty hours, causing his fellow senators to hate him even more than they had before. But we digress.
* The term “Boston Brahmin” was coined in 1861 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. We apologize if you feel betrayed or upset by our mildly anachronistic usage.
* Published in 1821. Here’s the title in full: Description of the Island of St. Michael, Comprising an Account of Its Geological Structure; with Remarks on the Other Azores or Western Islands. Actually, there’s another line or two of title but our typographer quit.
* He walked the streets of Boston every day collecting rent from his tenement dwellers.
* I.e., Robert Gould Shaw. This was a truly stupid move: Webster certainly knew that Parkman and Shaw would occasionally converse. Why? Because Shaw was Parkman’s brother-in-law and business partner.
* Charles Dickens heard about it in London. When he visited Boston in 1867 he discussed the case with Longfellow and visited the scene of the crime. His unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood has parallels to the Webster-Parkman story.
* Not to be confused with the Franciscan friar William of Ockham, of razor fame, who died some 400 years earlier.
* The venture didn’t go too well. Students tended to die of homesickness.
* That’s the word they used back then, okay? Just chill.
* For further research: 1) Why did he own such a big pot? 2) What did he do with it after using it for this ghastly purpose? 3) Did he refer to this object as a “human” skeleton or as a “Negro” skeleton? If the former, mightn’t that raise some sticky questions about the morality of slavery? And if the latter, what did he use for the former?
* While Harvard and Yale had been admitting blacks for decades, not one (0—a shutout!) was admitted to Princeton during Wilson’s reign.
* One example: it had been a Republican tradition to appoint black postmasters, especially in the South. This was a fine and respected job, especially compared to “slave.” Wilson appointed whites to these—and all other—federal positions.
* A reference to the famous and, in its own way, brilliant YouTube video of 2007’s Miss Teen USA from South Carolina, which prominently features the phrase “and such as.” South Carolina is a former Confederate state not too far from Wilson’s native Virginia, which is all the justification we need for this non sequitur.
* Christopher L. Eisgruber, a JEW! Suck on that, Woodrow.
* It’s not easy to change the name of a venerable, highly respected mandarin institution. There’s just too much “brand equity” at stake. If it were to come out tomorrow that John Harvard had been a serial molester of young lady pilgrims and a slaughterer of baby harp seals, you can bet that the eponymous university would shrug it right off. But if, before his downfall, Bernie Madoff had handed $50 million to his alma mater, Hofstra, to establish the Bernard L. Madoff Institute of Financial Ethics, it’s a dead certainty that the day after his arrest a crew of workers would have been rushed to the campus to chisel the sign off the building—either that, or to carve a hasty “Not” before the name.
* Five of the first ten survived to adulthood, which wasn’t too bad for back then.
* Possible eighteenth-century vaudeville sketch: MR. COSTELLO: Nice to meet you. I’m a Harvard graduate. And you? MR. ABBOTT: I’m a Dummer man. MR. COSTELLO: Well, obviously. But from what school? MR. ABBOTT: The Dummer College! MR. COSTELLO (slaps own face five times): I did hear you the first time! But which one, pray? What institution of higher learning did you attend? (Etc.)
* It’s a real-life version of the old joke: Hymie has a barrel of herring. He sells it to Moishe. Moishe sells it to Isaac. Isaac sells it to Murray. Murray looks at it one day, decides he’s a little hungry, opens it, and eats some of the herring. It’s horrible! Spoiled rotten! Outraged, he calls up Isaac and says, “That herring you sold me, ptui! It stinks!” Isaac says, “Schmuck! It’s not for eating. It’s for selling.” Thus with Mr. Yale’s slaves. They weren’t for having, or owning, or enslaving. They were for selling.
* Should you decide you like this book so much that you want to write your own version of it, but without spending a lot of time on research, our hard-won advice is that you should—contrary to our foolish approach—call it Monsters of Harvard and forget about Dartmouth and Cornell and the rest of them. Your book will practically write itself!
* One-upping Harvard’s “Truth,” because what good is truth if you don’t have enough light to see it?
* Penn alumni face an ego deflating drip-drip-drip torture until the day they die. It goes something like this—at least once a month: OTHER PARTY: So where did you go to college? UPENN ALUM: Penn. OTHER PARTY: Hey, go Nittany Lions! Penn State, rah rah rah! Too bad about that sex-abuse scandal. But really good school. (Etc.)
* Actually, 1749, but in 1899 the trustees “adjusted” it to 1740 for various technical reasons. The real reason: to scoop nearby rival Princeton.
* Not great. But it’s better than Columbia’s.
* Princeton calls itself the fourth-oldest university in the nation (after Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale), ignoring Penn’s 1740 claim.
* She who?
* No shit, Jack.
* Hope? Not Trust? What’s that all about?
* Oh, my. Well, maybe all the other Latin words were taken.
* Yeah, no. That’s a sentence, something Ezra Cornell said, something wishful and hopeful and nice, but it’s no motto. Please try again.