The Undergraduate Chair
Serious World Events Color Student Thinking, But Laughs Continue to Crop Up Amid the General Worry
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this issue CharlesG. Bolte '41 of Greenwich, Conn., assumesoccupancy of The Undergraduate Chair,succeeding Richard E. Glendinning Jr.'40. He was recently named a Senior Fellow for next year, and is Associate Editorof The Dartmouth. He is also a member ofthe Players, Casque and Gauntlet, andBeta Theta Pi. Bolte prepared for Dartmouth. at Greenwich High School, and isthe brother of Alan Bolte '30.
You KNOW HOW it is on the shadowy grass in front of Dartmouth Row when the glee club is singing these spring evenings? You remember the elm trees around the campus when the sun is trying to stay on them as long as it can? You understand that the Connecticut still moves along between the two best states in the Union, sometimes basking in the heat that hums with insects, sometimes crashing ice floes against the Ledyard Bridge, sometimes slipping under a wide white field of snow? You see again the •bald top of Balch, you hear the noisy ballgames on the campus, you recollect the surge of excitement in a classroom when a professor tells you something you always knew in a way you never thought of? Because if you do, we can talk together; and if you don't, you'd better hurry right back here. Trying to write about the direction Dartmouth is moving and the ways Dartmouth stands still from month to month is a big job. It is your own self reporting on how Dartmouth looks to your own self, but it has to reach Dr. Zeeb Gilman, the oldest living alumnus, and some boys you liked in the class of 1939. It also has to reach people you work with and respect in Hanover: classmates, professors, men in the administration who know things about the College. And then again Dartmouth is a complex world—an artificial world, perhaps, in which events are shaped closer to a pattern than they are in the big world, but always a world with people living in it and doing unexpected things and worrying about wars and trying to remember to laugh at pompousness.
If Dartmouth sometimes gets worrying mixed up with laughing, it's no different from the big world, either. In May when Hitler marched against the Low Countries, Hanover was disturbed as deeply as the rest of the nation, and as unable to organize a purposeful reaction. Some of the bewilderment let itself off in the form of a gag: Allen's Drug Store posted a European League box-score along with the all-important box-scores on the Dodgers and the Yankees. It credited Germany with a win over England, four runs, fifty hits, no errors. Hitler was the starting and finishing pitcher, Churchill relieved Chamberlain for the Empire All-Stars, the German-Holland game was called on account of wet grounds, and Mussolini remained a holdout. "Everything for laughs," the boys say.
They do a lot for laughs, because they agree that "if there aren't any more gags you might as well quit," but they worry about the war. They don't worry nearly as much about fraternity politics or elections to senior societies as the boys seem to at a lot of other schools; nor do they worry as much about the drape of a three-button jacket or the chances of developing a fast blocking back by next fall as you would be led to believe by the "practical men of affairs" who "never went to college and are damned proud of it." They are concerned about the war, not with the tightlipped concern of men who are afraid to die, but with the searching concern of educated men who are willing to die but who want to be sure what they are dying for.
They argue with The Dartmouth, but most of them would go with The Dartmouth when it says: "Our intent to keep out may easily be nullified, for it is coupled with inertia. This is not merely an inertia of impotence, but, as the international scene becomes more complicated, also of indecision. We begin to doubt whether democracy would not best be insured by assisting the Allies.
... .Democracy is not won by force but by men working together Nothing positive will be accomplished by this war but the promulgation of war. For the war in Europe is not democracy vs. totalitarianism. It is but a brutal and final expression of primary economic disorders which are refashioning Europe because she would not refashion herself.
"Our job is to make peace constructive, not merely the antithesis of war. Our job is to articulate our desire for peace in a mutual effort to make this country a better place to live in."
Some of them grew concerned enough to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, taking issue with his speech to the PanAmerican Scientific Congress. They wrote: "We do not believe that the present European war can be simplified into a conflict between good and evil Our duty today is to preserve and construct at home those liberties and cultural values which would undoubtedly be lost if we too went to war." The letter drew 1,000 signatures. Even making discounts for the fact that almost nobody will refuse to sign a petition, because the pressure is on to be one of the boys and Dartmouth boys like to be in the group, that still represents a considerable body of opinion.
This serious concern with the war doesn't stop the laughs, though. When Prof. Gordon Ferrie Hull wrote The Dartmouth opposing Prof. Lewis Stilwell for his hard-headed views on the importance of staying out of war and said that "we shall take action and we shall not be deterred by the loud yapping of a few screwball thumb-suckers," more people laughed than got excited.
The war didn't stop the other laughs, the easy laughs which prove that Dartmouth is enjoying the springtime and is in a party-mood—the laughs when a great crowd gathered outside the Nugget for the final Sunday afternoon movie in the Audio-Visual series to see Hedy Lamarr in "Ecstasy" ("educational, symbolical, no sex") and gave the Nazi salute and a resounding "Heil!" when Haven Falconer spoke from a second-story window; the laughs at The Dartmouth's "automobile issue" which declared that "Buick features a double-locking hood which holds the car together at high speed"; the laughs at a pigeon which flew aimlessly around in Webster Hall while the Smith Dramatic Association presented "Call It a Day."
May means Green Key, too, which is always good for laughs. Some of them were pretty bitter when the rain fell all day Saturday, and some of them were pretty strained when the crowd got too thick around the Glenn Miller and Red Norvo bandstands at the Prom, but it was a successful week-end or an unsuccessful one from the individual standpoint of how much fun you had doing what you were doing, as week-ends always are. The Dartmouth welcomed the 750 visitors by reversing its usual "War on Women" policy and waging a "War on People": "For all their changing, women never change; they are consistent only in their fickleness. Does it make any difference?.... Did you ever gossip about another fe110w,.... or set your week-end pace for something trivial because you thought it was expected of you? Ever? If you want women to join the human race, why don't you join yourself?" There was a good performance of "Golden Boy" by the Players, the athletic contests were mostly rained out, and by Monday morning everyone was quoting the lone voice from a fraternity-house bar which keynoted the week-end at 5 o'clock Sunday morning: "Then I found myself in the second cycle of erosion."
The campus has been excited about the chances for the Dodgers to win the pennant. A new toy in Fletcher's has been very popular: a machine-gun which brings down enemy planes in flames (all done with motion-pictures). Everyone laughed about a giant Green Key Giveaway, a promotion scheme which resulted in raffling a summer formal to a freshman who already had one and fixin's for a picnic to a junior who wasn't having a date. Clarence Budington Kelland came to Hanover for a week to confer with would-be writers for the slick-paper magazines, and nearly everyone heeded the precautionary advice of a professor who said, "Don't bully him too much," though not everyone could keep from feeling that, despite Mr. Kelland's pleasant personality and his tremendous money-making ability, his writing was not the kind to generate reactions to the world as it is. Twentyfive students went to Philadelphia for the third annual Cornell-Dartmouth-Pennsylvania conference on "Making Democracy Work," talked with some intelligent guest consultants (including Norman Thomas, Harry Elmer Barnes, Alexander Meiklejohn and President Stringfellow Barr of St. John's College), and returned aware of the inefficiencies of democracy but still convinced of its ability to move toward a solution of some of the problems of living together by achieving a common language and a common understanding.
People went to the Nugget to see "Pinocchio" and "Of Mice and Men." They played interfraternity baseball on the campus and went to the Junior Prom at Wellesley. They went to classes; some of them they slept through and some they sat up straight in and said, "Boy! That's a big thing!" They talked about Jack Townsend's no-hit, no-run game for the Theta Delts, about the way the Handel Society sounded in its annual concert under Professor Longhurst, about Professor Schlossmacher's delicate new mouse-gray coat. The seniors walked slower and slower, and said, "Just carve there below the circle on the cane, will you?" A native-born Hollander in the class of 1943 said, "I have six cousins in the army, and I don't suppose I'll ever see them again, but I think they'd rather fight than submit. They're fighters—the Dutch."
This May in Hanover was a lot like other Mays. The war was talked about and worried about, but all the major and minor problems of keeping awake in the world went on as usual. "Cataclysms and incidentals," The Dartmouth called it-keeping awake, laughing, worrying, and looking for an education that is more than a pile of classroom notes and forgotten blue books.
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND, NOTED AMERICAN AUTHOR WHO VISITED DARTMOUTH FOR A WEEK IN MAY TO DISCUSS PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF WRITING WITH UNDERGRADUATES, IS SHOWN (LEFT) WITH PRESIDENT HOPKINS AT THE HARVARD TRACK MEET. AT THE RIGHT, MR. KELLAND IS SHOWN IN HIS SANBORN HOUSE OFFICE DISCUSSING WRITING WITH JOHN D. BREWER JR. '42 OF NEW ROCHELLE, N. Y.
