Oil! by Upton Sinclair

At Southern Pacific University the class lines were tacitly but effectively drawn, and in the ordinary course of events a man of Bunny's wealth, good looks and good manners, would have associated only with the members of fraternities and sororities. If some Negro boy were to develop eloquence as a debater, or if someone taking a course in millinery or plumbing were to display fleetness as a hurdler, the hurdler might hurdle and the debater might debate, but they would not be invited to tea-parties or dances, nor be elected to prominence in the student organizations; such honors were reserved for tall Anglo-Saxons having regular features, and hair plastered straight back from their foreheads, and trousers pressed to a knife edge and never worn two days in succession.

But here was Bunny Ross, persisting in fooling with "dangerous thoughts," that made his friends angry. Of course, as anyone would have foreseen, there were "barbs" and "goats," anxious to break in where they were not wanted, and perfectly willing to pretend to think that our country ought not to intervene in Russia, if by so professing they could get to know one of the socially elite. So Bunny found himself on talking terms with various queer fish. For example, there was Peter Nagle, whose father was president of a "rationalist society," and who seemed to have one dominating desire in life -- to blurt out in class that what was the matter with the world was superstition, and that mankind could never progress until they stopped believing in God. In a university all of whose faculty were required to be devout Methodists, you can imagine how popular this made him. Peter looked just as you would expect such a boor to look, with a large square head and a wide mouth full of teeth, and a shock of yellow hair which he allowed to straggle round his ears and drop white specks onto his coat collar -- his coat did not match his trousers, and he brought his lunch to the university tied with a strap!