Keller's Last Class

A barrel-chested, wing-collared young Yale instructor glared sternly at his pupils and in a voice that rang like an anvil began to lecture to his first class. He was William Graham Sumner. "He broke upon us," said a pupil, "like a cold spring in the desert." For 37 years Yale students were stimulated by that cold spring. When Sumner retired in 1909, an equally remarkable teacher took his chair. Last week Sumner's barrel-chested, stern-eyed successor, Professor Albert Galloway Keller, faced his last class.

U.S. education has known no other such team as tough-minded old Professor Sumner, father of modern U.S. social science, who coined the phrase "the Forgotten Man,"* and Disciple Keller, who in 50 years at Yale (42 as teacher) made the Sumner tradition great. With Keller it was a case of love at first sight; from the day he entered Sumner's class he began to prepare to follow in the great man's steps, meekly bore Sumner's pronouncements on his habits, studies, marriage (Sumner was against it). Keller became as great a sociologist and anthropologist as Sumner, learned ten of Sumner's 13 languages (bogging down only on Hebrew, Russian, Polish).

Sumner himself chose Keller as his successor. He also left his pupil 52 big drawers jammed with 156,000 pages of notes. Keller spent 17 years organizing them and in 1927 produced an immense work in four volumes, Science of Society, which he credited mainly to Sumner. Once, when Connecticut's ex-Governor Wilbur L. Cross intimated at a public meeting that there was more Keller than Sumner in the book, Keller leaped to his feet to denounce the idea. But last week the William Graham Sumner Club (old Sumner and Keller pupils) decided that bluff Bert Keller's hero worship had gone too far. Celebrating his retirement with a dinner in New Haven (to which he refused to wear dinner clothes), they dragged him out of his master's shadow, pronounced him as great a man as Sumner himself.

With fellow Professors Billy Phelps and Johnny Berdan (also retired), who are his whist cronies, Keller has long been one of Yale's greatest teachers. In his famed anthropology and S.O.S. (Science of Society) courses, he has taught some 16,000 Yale men. Honest as an old shoe, gruff Dr. Keller shocked his classes with his hard-bitten views on politics, religion, charity, sentimental humanitarianism.

Like Sumner, Keller applied Darwinian theories on evolution and natural selection to man-made institutions, constantly inveighed against pampering weaklings either among men or their institutions. Scorning the word "sociology" as smacking of uplift, Keller and Sumner called their subject societology. Greatest Keller precept, which no Keller student ever forgot, was a ruthless respect for facts and contempt for "thobbery" (i.e., wishful thinking).

Brooking no newfangled teaching notions, Professor Keller for 42 years invariably opened every class with a ten-minute written quiz, even after other Yale teachers had dropped the practice. Generations of his students have had to memorize head measurements, maxillary angles, etc. Possessor of a phenomenal memory, he greeted old grads by recalling their seat numbers and their grades in his courses. He paid no attention to the college rule allowing students on the "dean's list" unlimited cuts; rule or no rule, absentees from his classes got zero. He was not at all disturbed by being deaf. Said he: "You don't hear so damned much twaddle."

As his final class filed inlast week, Professor Keller gruffly put his last quiz. Question: "It has been stated that the Crow Indians have no religion; what is the evidence?" Quiz and lecture over, the professor bristled and harrumphed: "You have been a good class to conclude with and so we will conclude our relations at this point." (A storm of applause.) Professor Keller peered around the room, cleared his throat: ". . . Some of you and some of your fathers have done some awfully asinine things. . . ." (Deafening applause.) Muttering a farewell, "Non dum emeritus, sed emeriturus, saluto," Professor Keller picked up his books and scooted from the room.

*Sumner divided society into four groups: A and B-- "self-righteous uplifters"; C--hard-working, self-reliant, uncomplaining taxpayers; D--riffraff. "A and B," observed Keller, "put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D." In Sumner's and Keller's view, the Forgotten Man was not D but C.

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