The Undergraduate Chair
THERE IS one thing about the writing of the Undergraduate Chair that is inconvenient. The copy for each issue must be in on the fifteenth, so each Chair straddles two months. If, then, the reader finds things which happened in the latter part of October referred to in the December issue, he will understand.
With this preamble, we go back to the 14th of October and find that Walter Wagner '15, is proposing, and sponsoring, the project of offering instruction in the writing of moving-picture scripts. The proposal is also by way of establishing a memorial to the late Irving Thalberg. It strikes us that this latest development in a reorganized English department would seem more than radical to the old-time English teacher who considered Shakespeare and John Bunyan an education in themselves.
In the week between the Brown and Harvard games some things of interest happened in Hanover. The Dartmouth Mountaineering Club opened its season with a meeting on the 19th. Some of the members of this club have made ascents which classify them as more-than-proficient climbers. It is distressing to some of the college's landlubbers to see the club members using Bartlett Tower as a practice cliff. An important announcement during the week before the Harvard game was that made by Palaeopitus in connection with its Safe Driving campaign. This body felt that the approaching out-of-town week-ends made a discussion of their proposals particularly opportune. A resolution was made which calls for a 24-hour no-driving period following each automobile accident in which a student is killed or hospitalized. The practicality of this particular resolution seems doubtful to us, but we heartily agree with any effort to bring the necessity for safe driving to the attention of the student body. Everything possible should be done to make the student driver safety-conscious, or should we say danger-conscious.
During the winter it is not unusual to hear someone say, on witnessing a skillful descent by some member of the Dartmouth ski team, "I wish I could ski like that!" But with the announcement that the varsity team will go to Sun Valley, Idaho, over New Year's to compete in the national championships, we heard the above thought repeated with fervent embellishments. Jumping ahead chronologically for the sake of textual compactness, we mention the U. S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association convention that was held in Hanover on October 31. For the interest of skiing alumni, and this body is large enough to warrant a specifically addressed message, the New Hampshire Women's Slalom championship will be held in Hanover on February 20.
In the last Chair we said that Palaeopitus had declared the end of the freshman Delta Alpha parade. On the 25th it was announced that this ruling had been revised with the suggestion that the parade be repeated next year, with each dormitory building their presentation around some central, "local color" theme.
Then came the Harvard game. For those of you who weren't there it's putting it mildly to say that it rained. Speaking of alumni at football games, and despite the fact that this column is supposed to represent the undergraduate viewpoint, we want to say that we have heard many Dartmouth alumni voicing their disapproval of the present system of football ticket allotment and sale, or at least of the results obtained by the present system. The contention of those alumni is that undergraduates and others buy tickets in the cheering section and then sell them at premium prices to people who frequently have no connection with the College, when, on the other hand, graduates who have been out of college twenty or thirty years get poor seats even though they apply at the earliest possible date. Should the old "personal use otherwise turn them in" rule be put in force?
Lest some think that Dartmouth life and thought is focussed too narrowly we wish to say that almost every day the Vox Pop columns of The Dartmouth have carried some serious and intelligent remarks on the Sino-Japanese question. Such issues not only attract but stimulate undergraduate thought. The question of war and the activities of the Dartmouth Union in their promotion of student-faculty relations have been almost the only serious matter to appear in the pages of The Dartmouth. Much was said about the football team, justifiably so, and recently various items connected with fall house parties have filled the paper.
And this brings us to what might be termed the dessert of this month's chair,not because it is that which is looked forward to by the immature mind, nor because it is what adults have little to do with, but because it is the best part of the column. On Thursday, November nth, the Dartmouth Peace Committee sponsored two Armistice Day programs. It was at the morning meeting that Dave Bradley '38, of Madison, Wis., gave a speech which more than impressed all hearers. Bradley, one of this year's Senior Fellows, has consented to have his words printed in full in this column, and so we are taking this somewhat unusual method of bringing to the alumni a speech which the undergraduates felt approached perfection. With no other comment than that Dave has said much of what the rest of us feel, we give his speech:
"A few moments ago the children of this world were standing silently in their schoolrooms with bowed heads and wondering eyes, listening to the eleven dull strokes of the clock. They cannot hear the echoes of wild rejoicing at a peace which announced a New World nineteen years ago. But the children sense subconsciously what lies behind the ceremony of Armistice. With an intangible feeling, which is something more than uneasiness and a little less than apprehension, they discern a force which they cannot understand.
'What has Armistice come to mean to us? Only a few short years ago we, who are now undergraduates of Dartmouth, were those children; and, like them, we have never known any other tradition than this annual recollection of that crucial moment of 1918. But during the process of our growing into men, the Armistice has revealed a new and terrible import. Our childish premonitions with which we then identified ourselves with the World War have been transformed by the years into concrete reactions and convictions. The earth, our home, seen from the outside, presents a fierce and bewildering aspectand, known from within, it is found to be one of pathos, where young and vigorous aspirations dwell side by side with aged and out-worn hopes. One cannot look beyond the peaceful borders of our country without sensing the awful presence of the Past. Neither can we ever hope to build indifference so thick and prejudice so high as to withhold from our ears the turmoil of the outside world. And if we refuse to hear the tumult and the shouting, what of the soft, tearful voices—can we ever shut them out?
"In the name of all Mankind we—individually—shall have to face the present and the future with the resolutions of yesterday. And if we forsake our heritage as one of tragic immutability—where evil inbreeds with evil, where the blunders of one generation are visited upon the next—this, we must remember, is the environment which we give to our children as their home.
"We sue for peace, for a constructive peace uninfected by ancient hates. But where is such peace to be found? In the arrogant self-sufficiency of the nation and the limp asceticism of the individual? Never, in our complicated western civilization. Peace no less than war is a dynamic thing. It needs, even more, both the vigour of youth and the judgment of age to give it strength and purpose.
"But in our haste to woo peace and banish all that represents war, we are apt to misrepresent the men who fought in the last conflict. We say that they were victims of vicious interests, lured into the vortex of destruction by blatant fraud and artful subterfuge. We say that the best of American youth was sacrificed to Molloch, thus leaving the country to the family of the Jukes. But we forget that they could not forsee the things which, owing to our costly gift of hindsight, now seem obvious to us. And if that war has come to mean no more than the 'reeking tube and iron shard' mixed with vain ideals and mothers' tears, then Armistice can also mean no more than bruised fields spangled for eternity with lifeless crosses where one time the fragrant wheat gleamed before the scythe.
"And so for many of us Armistice Day has become a symbol of war rather than of peace. There is a reason for this convenient generality; we who are undergraduates today have never felt the placid atmosphere of Dartmouth College stirred by anything more momentous than football games, impending hour examinations, house parties, and periodic assaults upon the Nugget. We are not able to project our thoughts and our emotions back into the psychology of 1916 and '17. We cannot quite hear the contagious beat of marching feet; nor see the daily papers printed wet with blood; nor feel the air itself transformed by the ruthless undercurrents of war.
"And, lacking this sympathy, we easily forget that the sustaining motive of Americans, both in the war and in the Armistice was that same peace which you and I hold so dear. But they could see no hope for peace when brutality was allowed to terrorize the earth.
"If we have now progressed so far that we can deny the validity of their struggle, the tragedy is not so much theirs, that they died in a futile cause, but ours, that we have lived to prove their faith a terrible delusion.
"The World War did not end war, nor did it make the world safe for Democracy. But in declaring this, with the same breath, we must turn to ourselves and ask: What, then, is worth believing in and even fighting for, if it is not the two convictions which inspired our fathers and mothers in 1917—Peace and that high ideal of individual freedom and equality which we call Democracy.
"This is the question which some day we may have to answer definitely, as they did, and if we do, perhaps only then shall we truly understand their answer."
A BAND'S-EYE VIEW OF THE YALE BOWL
