DARTMOUTH BACK TO THE LAND
FIVE DARTMOUTH ALUMNI and one undergraduate who spent the summer as hired hands on farms in Tunbridge, Vermont, were instrumental in organizing the farmers and townspeople of that region to sign and send to President Roosevelt a petition requesting that he consider the establishment of a model work-service camp on the site of the abandoned CCC camp at Sharon, Vermont.
The President, however, took no action on this specific proposal, for he had already considered the appointment of a committee, recently commissioned, to organize a national school-camp to train leaders for a revised form of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The now active committee, which is the result of two years' effort by Professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huesy of Dartmouth, is headed by Dean Landis of Harvard and composed of government officials, Lewis Mumford and others. They will attempt to place on national footing the local plan offered by the Tunbridge citizens and Dartmouth men, who were students of Professor Rosenstock-Huesy and who had his support throughout their work this summer.
Arthur Root, valedictorian of the class of 1940, Alfred Eiseman, Robert O'Brien, Jack Priess, Louis Schlivek, all '4O, and William Uptegrove '4a, were employed on Tunbridge farms through the help of the Master of the Tunbridge Grange. He assisted the men in the sponsorship of executive committees from eight towns of the district and the arrangements for the late September rally at which local opinion and support were sampled and the proposal presented.
The petition, with the name of Miss Dorothy Thompson, noted columnist, who was the principal speaker at the rally and who later delivered the proposal to the President, at the head of 500 or more signatures, suggested that a plan of cooperation among rural communities, college men and city youth may be worked out so that this particular farm area, and perhaps other rural communities where there is a labor shortage and necessary rehabilitation, may materially benefit. The cooperative work-service camp, under federal auspices, would undertake only those projects needed and advanced by the local communities and would include keeping back-hill roads open through the winter, painting and repairing farms to make them attractive to settlers, offsetting labor shortage during the spring and summer, and in general attempting to fulfill the vital living needs of under-manned areas.
In a circular letter sent to townspeople and interested friends, the Dartmouth men, explaining how they became concerned with the experimental camp, wrote, in part: "No one reason brought us all to Tunbridge. Some of us had studied problems of flood control and wanted to continue this study by work on some specific project. At the suggestion of Mr. Phillip Shutler, Vermont State Planning Commissioner, who visited us at Dartmouth, we planned to make a report of the effects of the proposed Tunbridge dam on the life of the town. Others of us simply desired the experience of farming, feeling that such an experience, quite for its own sake, would make for a healthy and interesting summer."
"But regardless of why we came, our plans were all alike in at least one respect. None of us looked beyond the summer, none of us expected that we would be in Tunbridge today. We are here today because, coming from four years of classroom work and out of city homes, we were unable to foresee just what life on a farm would mean to us. For the whole summer we did chores, we pitched hay, we helped at odd jobs, we had fun learning to square dance at the grange. For the first time we felt the thrill of getting close to the land of building our bodies, and of sharing the good times and the worries of the sturdy folks of the Vermont hills. And because we shared this life so fully we began to see it in a different light.
"Through our work we made friends and from our friends we came to see thai our work was much more than simply the means to a healthy summer or a chance to study flood control. Work was miicl needed. Our work was important to tie farmers with whom we lived.
"We learned that whereas there once used to be a thriving CCC camp at Sharon it had finally been closed down. The official reason was lack of work projects, when really there was work crying to be done everywhere. We learned that farmers around here had little regard for the CCC because this camp had spent its time on wasted and unnecessary projects. In addition, the townspeople and the boys in the camp had little contact; each group distrusted the other. Under such conditions the camp failed to help either its own boys or the region in which they were working."
proposal presented to President Roosevelt and largely embodying the main ideas which the new committee will put into effect on a national scale, divides itself into four parts: (1) That the government reopen the abandoned CCC camp; (2) that besides having only the poor and unemployed in the camp, there be boys from all walks of life; (3) that these boys in the camp, instead of working merely in state or national forests, be a labor force to work in the towns surrounding it; and (4) that this work be directed by the communities themselves.
