NOTES CHANGED ATTITUDE
I had 27 rides going west from Greenwich to San Francisco, and most of the men (women don't pick you up) didn't give a damn about the war. I had about 35 coming back from San Diego to Greenwich, and all except one of them favored conscription. They talked as if they had arrived at their favoritism after rejecting prejudices in the opposite direction. The conversations often came to a point close to the point the Texans made: them British are not everything you could ask for but they are one hell of a lot better than them Nazis.
About that one guy who didn't favor a strong defense: he was a gardener from Rye, New York, who said he was going to vote for Willkie because Roosevelt was messing around in foreign affairs and being a sucker for British propaganda. Willkie, he said, would stay out of Europe. This gardener spoke with a thick German accent.
All o£ this has everything to do with Dartmouth undergraduates and alumni. They are living in the same country with the Texan who likes to hunt redcoats, the 1 ennesseeans who hate Willkie, and the German who hates Roosevelt. Most Dartmouth men are in the political minoritybecause I am only thinking of your pocketbooks when I tell you not to bet on Willkie. But the attitude that is jelling in the way the American people talk and wonder about their jobs involves boys in school as well as graduates. Last year most undergraduates were suspicious of Britain, called this another imperialist war, and fought violently against the attempts of their teachers and parents to change their thinking. Now the feeling that we must get ready to defend our lives has crossed the country. There is still argument about the way to do it but the opposition to doing anything at all comes from a small group which makes more noise than it has members. The large, quiet, determined feeling of the great mass of Americans is going to change Dartmouth in many ways.
There are reports of resignations from college already, and you can think of boys who qure training in Canada, who are going out with the Naval Reserve, who are trying to get in Kelly and Randolph and Pensacola, who are signing up with the National Guard. There seems very little hysteria. Desire for adventure and excitement causes some enlisting, as does desire to get an officer's rank before the draft gets you. Those motives don't amount to as much as the conviction that the country needs defending. How will that hit us in Hanover this year? We will be restless. The boredom of education here, and learning how to shoot machine-guns with real bullets out there.
With the general opinion in the country shifted as it has, the early advocates of defense for America and aid for England will not have to cry wolf so shrilly nor charge their opponents with blind cynicism. All last year they moaned that their teachings had boomeranged on them. Now the more fatuous of them will boast that their preachings have borne fruit. They will be just as wrong now as they were then. Their stand was challenged last year by men who honestly were opposed to risking fascism in America by a large army and centralized control, just as they were opposed to saving the trade of an England and a France which had sunk themselves in short-sighted appeasement and pious imperialism. In spite of their worst efforts on behalf of the Allies, in spite of the most blatant things British propagandists have done, the great mass of the American people (still living in the land they made their own and still making up their own minds) have come to see a real danger in German economic and political warfare, just as they have come to a new respect for what England's fight means to America. The knowledge of that change and of what caused it will make differences in what men are respected here and on what fronts the verbal battles will take place.
"Stop believing what you see," a friend wrote me this summer. "Things are too big for just eyes." You can bet that will be true this year. It was true all along: but with eyes, with questions, with listening, maybe mostly with working in the country and coming to know a little of the size and power and richness of it, you can believe. The belief is in the land and the people of the land. A Democratic committeeman told me the other day that Democrats were really just as dumb as Republicans, and I believe him. They're just as dumb as British propagandists and people who believe everything they read in books. But the slow, unspectacular, wonderfully crackbrained thinking of 130,000,000 people is not so dumb. Their thinking and their direction (one part shoved by selfish men and money but many parts resistant to shoving) will be pretty exciting this year. Dartmouth will be exciting too—small battles stir up big noises. There'll be some changes made.
NEWEST ADDITION TO COLLEGE DORMITORIES Butterfield Hall, located next to Russell Sage Hall on Tuck Drive, was opened this fallwith accommodations for 59 men and social features suggested by students themselves.
