Word: snobs
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...acknowledge your courteous letter in which you ask me to express an opinion as the causes of what you evidently think is a rather general belief that a Harvard education tends to make a man a snob. The quickest and best way to answer your question is to say simply that I neither think it does nor do I think that there is any such general belief. I know nothing of the alleged "hostility" to Harvard either in the west or elsewhere to which the editorial from the CRIMSON, which you so kindly enclose, refers, and I am disinclined...
There are snobs at Harvard and snobs at Yale, Oberlin and Lealand Stanford. There are prigs everywhere. The young gentleman in my story--"That sort of Woman"--which you have apparently done me the compliment to read--"Payson Clifford, Jr."--was a Harvard prig, but in the end, all his underlying good qualities, you will have observed, came to the top and he proved to be a regular fellow after all. He is not generic but he is--isn't he?--not exactly uncommon. Let us be honest. "Harvard Indifference" is at once the virtue upon which we pride ourselves...
There are snobs at Harvard and snobs at Yale, Oberlin and Lealand Stanford. There are prigs everywhere. The young gentleman in my story--"That sort of Woman"--which you have apparently done me the compliment to read--"Payson Clifford, Jr."--was a Harvard prig, but in the end, all his underlying good qualities, you will have observed, came to the top and he proved to be a regular fellow after all. He is not generic but he is--isn't he?--not exactly uncommon. Let us be honest. "Harvard Indifference" is at once the virtue upon which we pride ourselves...
...catering to the best; and it is attempting concretely to set its standards by the ablest men, rather than by the mediocre. It is true that American schools are inclusive: Harvard is frankly exclusive and selective, though not always happily so. Perhaps that is why we sometimes get the "snob" instead of the man we want; the true aristocrat. It is a word we shudder at these days; and yet, did not the Cambridge group of poets and thinkers form a genuinely creative aristocracy, functioning at a time when the rest of America was quite barren of thought...
According to this categorization we are all snobs. There are, it is true, but few of the first type; the second type, however, is legion. Snobbery, after all, is mere inherency. Prejudice, the universal sin, is a species of snobbery. Excessive pride in a hobby--and who does not take pride in one--is another snobbery. Harvard is criticised by outsiders (who often know nothing about it) for being snobbish, and within its exclusive gates men call other men snobs. Irascible X accuses immaculate Y of being a snob and then snubs provincial Z who comes from another and smaller...