Letters

The Rugg Defense

To THE EDITOR: The entire class of 1908, I am sure, will join me in thanking you for the article in January issue by Harold O. Rugg.

In these jittery days it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to distinguish truth from propaganda. And that makes it something of a fieldday for the fanatics. The patrioteers and witch hunters may make life miserable for a lot of honest men before the world gets back to normalcy.

I believe everybody who was in college with Harold Rugg, and all who have since been associated with him or followed his career as an educator and writer, know that American ideals will never suffer at his hands. It is unthinkable, to us who know him.

But the great majority, even in the Dartmouth family, do not know him as we do. The attacks on his text books have been disturbing. So I feel that you have rendered a real service to Dartmouth men, as well as to an honored alumnus, in giving a considerable amount of your space in the current issue to this subject.

Milford, N. H.

"Socialist Conspirator'

To THE EDITOR: I have read with great interest the so-called "defense" of Harold O. Rugg in the Dartmouth ALUMNI MAGAZINE which my son, a Dartmouth alumnus received.

Ralph Waldo Emerson uttered a great truth when he said, in refuting certain representations, "How can I believe what you say when I know what you are?"

Rugg's whole record from the time he joined the faculty of Teachers College is one of being hand in glove with the socialist conspirators making their ghq this selfsame Teachers College. But not a word of this is mentioned in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE'S defense.

I am sure there are millions of Americans who join me in believing that Marxian socialism is the monumental fallacy of our age. Nowhere in the history of the world has it ever succeeded, and if one wants to see just what its espousal means, let him read "Democracy Rampant" by Mrs. Leila M. Blomfield, 601 West 110 th Street, New York City. This is the sad story of New Zealand and its Socialism.

In his "That Men May Understand," Prof. Rugg pussyfoots around this fundamental question of the socialistic implications of his textbooks, but it is noticeable that he repeatedly refers to necessary social changes. Why necessary? Who is Rugg or any other individual to sit up and say that they are necessary?

Our present political and economic set-up has given us by far the highest standard of living of any nation in the world, and when I see great fields of parked automobiles around our factories in this section, owned by the mechanics and other employees, and realize that there are at the present time enough automobiles rolling day by day to carry every man, woman and child in this country at one and the same time, my ire rises at socialists in high places who prate about "one-third of a nation ill clad, ill housed and ill fed."

No, any nation that falls for socialism is merely re-enacting the legend of the deadly upas tree, and it will be a sad day for the American people if they fail to grasp this solemn truth.

Two of the most lopsided things in this article—silly to those who are informed—are the marshalling of the newspaper PM, notoriously socialistic in its staff and policy, and also the Teachers Union, which is by common knowledge and consent, the farthest Left of any teachers' organization in the country.

North Cohocton, N. Y.

More About Rugg

To THE EDITOR: Have been wanting to write a note joining the chorus of praise for recent issues of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE in general—and the Rugg article specifically. I hope you have sent copies of the article to editors of daily and weekly papers in the communities where Dr. Rugg's textbooks have been banned. In times when the bugles blow and the drums beat, it's difficult to center attention on the local forces (Hart, Sokolsky at al) who are trying to put liberal education on Hitler rations. Happy New Year!

New York City.

And Still More

To THE EDITOR: You and the rest of the staff of the ALUMNIMAGAZINE deserve all kinds of praise for publishing the articles by and about Prof. Harold O. Rugg. I don't know any more valuable or courageous service the magazine has given since I've been on the mailing list.

Needham, Mass.(Reprints of Mr. Rugg's article may be secured fromthe Office of the Business Manager, 306 Parkhurst Hall,Hanover, N. H., upon request.—Ed.)

Demolition of Dartmouth

To THE EDITOR: My friend, Dr. Lewis Leary, author of the Rutgers University Press biography, That Rascal Freneau, which will appear within the next few weeks, has been kind enough to turn over to me the enclosed material [See belowEd.]. Dr. Leary found the newspaper item and poem by Philip Freneau while gathering material for the volume mentioned above. It occurred to me that Dartmouth readers might be interested and amused by a contemporary report and reaction to an almost forgotten incident.

The poem first appeared in the New York Daily Advertiser for March 22, 1790. It was reprinted in the present form in the Charleston, South Carolina, City Gazette for July 9, 1790; again as "On the Demolition of Log-College," in Freneau's Poems (1795), pp. 374" 75; and as "On the Demolition of an Old College," in Freneau's Poems (1809), 11, 235" 37. Dr. Leary also informs me that it appears in Volume 111, p. 33, of The Poems of PhilipFreneau, edited (1902-1907) by Fred Lewis Pattee, Class of 1888.

I suppose that all the standard histories of Dartmouth have taken some notice of the incident of the tearing down of College Hall by the students on the evening of December 31, 1789. It happens that I have at hand here only The Story of Dartmouth, by Wilder Dwight Quint, in which, on pages 75 and 76, Mr. Quint gives a rarified account containing no hint of the supposed drunkenness of the student perpetrators nor of the supposed attempts of President John Wheelock to turn the students from their purpose. Mr. Quint, indeed, suggests that the president and faculty were not too displeased by the actions of the students.

The veracity of Freneau's own information may, perhaps, be reasonably called into question when one notices in the fourth stanza of his poem that he says the College Hall had stood "at least one hundred years" before its demolition. However this may be, the poem makes a good story.

Furthermore, I am personally reminded of the demolition of a certain barn down by the river on the Lyme Road on the occasion of the 1927 Senior Picnic, an event which, as a junior, I had no business witnessing, but which I saw nevertheless, and at close hand. Not all the elements of this comparatively modern assault on property are strictly analogous with those of 1789, but those members of the Class of 1927 who took part at the barn may find certain similarities.

The University of Miami,Coral Gables, Florida.

Supremacy of Spirit

To THE EDITOR: Early in the fateful year we have entered I should like to send a greeting to friends among the alumni who are hesitating to join in a defense effort that necessarily includes some opponents and partial opponents of genuine democracy. All Americans are menaced by disaster worse than flood or fire: a power that would manipulate men everywhere as puppet pieces in a fantastic mechanism. And the first requirement of men with generous desires being the supremacy of the human over all machines, we must accept the mechanism of defense, with all its ironies and dangers, to establish that supremacy. At the same time we must see to it that the mechanism functions continually subordinate to the human spirit.

All the time you can be on guard, in squad, platoon and company, if you are drafted; wherever your work may take you, administrative position, newspaper beat or desk, factory or school: you can keep a place for humor and imagination, perpetuating still some tolerance erance for individual variation, preserving each man's right of making some decisions for himself, and standing up for Tom, Dick and Harry, all the more because in needful ways all must unite.

The tension will be great; under tension triumphs of imaginative resolution are achieved. It will be the feat of the sensitive and thoughtful if after the crisis America has more men than ever before who meet each other fully, and on the level, and every person counts his full one and no more.

All of this is not taking the sting out of war, removing all dubiety from battle. It is simply saying that if you mean it when you declare you want your life to have some point, then the fight to keep machinery responsible to the human spirit is worth all hazards. And instead of wishing you escape from the draft, I wish that you may have now, in defense against dictatorships, and all your life a part in fighting for man's dangerous chance to grow, a part in fighting for the continuous making of a way for men to get along together, while each one spiritually holds his own. The fight is always for the chance to make a better fight.

Hanover, N. H.

Gay Deceiver

To THE EDITOR: It is all very well tor Frank Sullivan to warn our alumni associations of the innocent impostures of Corey Ford, but perhaps that gay deceiver should take care that his lightly assumed loyalties do not cost him rather dearly before the season is over, particularly if he is taken in by your own glowing assurances of free feeding for an entire winter.

When we organized The Jackobites at our First and Last Annual Dinner in 1935, Ford was invited to come as a guest of honor. On his arrival, he was greeted at the door by a ticket collector. And when, at the end of the meal, the headwaiter presented the check, which somewhat exceeded the fuzzy calculations of the chairman, the voting stock voted to assess the preferred, and Corey was accorded still another honor.

But then, of course, Jacko humor has been famous for generations.

Jersey City, N. J.