THE AMERICAN DEFENSE SOCIETY

Washington Bureau, 709 Albee Bldg. R. M. Whitney, Director

Washington, D. C. February 23, 1924

President Ernest Martin Hopkins, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H,

Dear Sir: May I ask if you were correctly quoted in this morning's papers as saying that "if Lenin and Trotsky were available" you would certainly , bring them in to lecture at Dartmouth ?

Having been a newspaper correspondent all my life I know the desire for accuracy on the part of Associated Press correspondents, but I cannot believe that the president of a great American college would give Expression to such a statement. I am not an alumnus of Dart- mouth but of another college, but I feel very deeply the seriousness of such a statement credited to the head of a college like Dartmouth.

In spite of the fact that the enemies of this Government have made great capital of the fact that William Z. Foster was given hearing at Dartmouth—not officially, but by an undergraduate body—those of us who still believe that we have a form of government better in every way than that advocated by Lenine and Trotsky, had hoped that the directors of the studies of the minds of the youth of America would be careful of the material they fed the immature minds of the coming generations.

For nearly two years I have made a special .study of the communist movement in the United States. This study. has proved to me conclusively that such remarks as those credited to you could well have been inspired in Moscow and are in strict accord with the wellmatured plans of those who would overthrow this Government by violence.

Yours for National Loyalty, (Signed) R. M. WHITNEY, Director of Bureau. Following is a copy of President Hopkins' reply to Mr. Whitney.

February twenty-six 1924

Dear Mr. Whitney: I am sorry that the statement which I made before the Chicago Alumni is disturbing to you. I did not say exactly what I was quoted as saying in the Associated Press dispatch, but I have no right to quibble over the exact phrasing of it, for the correspondent's expression was accurate so far as the significance of what I said was involved.

I believe that truth has nothing to fear from error if truth be untrammeled at all times and if error be denied the sanctity conferred upon it by persecution or concealment. I stated to the Dartmouth Alumni in Chicago what I have frequently stated before,—that education is quite a different thing from training, and the method of the educational institution calls for diversity in points of view and emphasis upon stimulating the student's thought, while the training school almost inevitably emphasizes instruction and demands conformity to the thought of others.

I stated further that I knew of no reason why there should not be training schools for training the minds of men to various points of view if people could be found who were willing to offer endowment for such schools, and that it was quite compatible with the theory of democracy that we should have labor colleges and colleges for the defense of capitalism, or schools of democracy and schools for the glorification of benevolent despotism, or schools with the purpose of arguing for the validity of one contention or another in theological belief. But I argued further that there was grave danger in the fictitious value which the mind of youth ascribed to submerged or obscured theories and that there never was such great need of true educational institutions as at the present day find that my desire for Dartmouth College was that she should stand for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, without which freedom of thought is impossible, and as an embodiment of. confidence in the strength of those things which are right. We should be unafraid that harm could ever come to us mentally, spiritually or morally by the preservation of those liberties which were guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights.

I further stated that I consider it far more important to stimulate the minds of college men to thought than to prescribe what should be thought or where denial should enter in to tell them what they could not think. I quoted the statement of one of America's great surgeons in commenting upon preventive medicine, that a great mistake was made if assumption arose that health could be understood without understanding disease. I further stated my belief that no good could come, and much possible harm could come, from the misuse of propaganda designed for the establishment of a predetermined point of view. And at that point I stated that I should far prefer to have the presentation of the point of view of a governmental theory which dominated an eighth of the earth's surface through a frank partisan of that theory than through the thoroughly prejudiced presentation of opponents who utilized now in peace the methods of war and whose avowed purpose was the discrediting of the theory rather than learning the evils of government and society which made possible the imposition of such a monstrous theory upon so vast a geographical area and upon so great a number of people.

The essential point in the whole contention was, -and remains, that the American undergraduate of from eighteen to twenty-two years old is on the threshold of manhood and is as capable of stripping error from truth as he is capable of distinguishing hypocrisy from genuineness, in both of which he is superior to the average man whose interest has become highly professionalized as apart from the general interest of the college undergraduate.

Of course the fact is,—and I have heard this said within the last few days by some very practical men of large financial and industrial responsibilities,—that the corruption and acquisitive self-interest revealed in the Teapot Dome investigation made more Bolshevists in twenty-four hours than all the agents of the Soviet government could make in years. Yet here again I believe that before we get done we shall all wish that we had a people more judicially-minded and more capable of distinguishing between truth and error than we have at the present time. It is with the aspiration, at least, to do its part in creating such a spirit that I believe that the American college works at the present day. If Dartmouth College fails, in the course of striving for this end, to win the approval of the American Defense Society or to gain the endorsement of its able director, I am regretful, but nevertheless I do not see that these facts can be allowed to change the course of events.

I am Yours very truly, (Signed) ERNEST M. HOPKINS.

Perhaps, after all, it is the attitude of the undergraduate body which is most to be considered and which is most enlightening in such discussions as the one provoked by Mr. Whitney. The Dartmouth student body's reaction was expressed in The Dartmouth March 6 under the heading "Protecting the Little Lambs". The Dartmouth's editorial follows: