DEAR PRESIDENT HOPKINS

Alumnus Ten Years Out Poses Some Large Questions

Fortune has been good to me .... yet Iam chagrined, and puzzled How, andto what extent, can an educated youngman of good will on the threshold of hismost productive, his most vigorous, yearscontribute to the establishment of—whatshall we call it—Truth, Peace, Progress,Virtue, Wisdom—or just Contentment onthis earth?

THIS IS THE CENTRAL question posed in a letter from Carl B. Hess '34 to President Hopkins. The letter and the reply, called to the editor's attention by a friend who had found the exchange deeply interesting, deal with questions of such broad application and are so excellently written on both sides as to constitute an obligation, in the editor's opinion, to make them available to Dartmouth men in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. President Hopkins and Mr. Hess have listened to the editor's entreaty and have kindly granted permission to publish them.

I

DEAR PRESIDENT HOPKINS: This is to be a letter which I think many young men would like to write—or, in any event, they would like to have answers to the questions I shall ask you.

Ten years ago I received my A.B. from Dartmouth. In June, 1934, I should have expected that by the Spring of 1944 I would be grey and slightly infirm. Somewhat to my surprise, I find that I am neither. Having had a fortunate career in college, moreover, I fully anticipated that by the time I was 31 I would be sitting on important councils handily disposing of the world's problems. Again, somewhat to my surprise, I find that this is not the case.

Do not misunderstand. I have no complaint. Fortune has been good to me, and I am most grateful for it. Yet, I confess that I am chagrined and puzzled. This letter will tell you why.

During these war years, it has been difficult for me to decide whether I should stay on the job or enter some branch of active service. Manufacturing aircraft components has been absorbing and essential work, but I have continuously wondered whether I had any right to remain at home out of uniform, while most of my friends were scattered. around the world, many of them fighting.

The concern I now express, although similarly related to things I didn't do, is deeper-rooted. For example, I am humiliated that I could have gone through college with such naivete, and I am particularly abashed because I was supposedly a student leader with an obligation to mould student opinion. I think that my friends and I failed in that responsibility. We had all the machinery running, but not nearly enough grist for the mill.

Upon graduating, most, if not all, of us departed blissfully ignorant of the world and our covenants with it. As Class Day Orator, I had a final opportunity to exercise my function as a leader. So I pled that we should not become joiners; that we should not become musical comedy VicePresidents; that we shouldn't be perennially sophomoric. Sound enough pleas, but chiefly peripheral. Of course, I don't know that even genuine clairvoyance would have merited or received any more or less attention. I only know that I think I failed to do a satisfactory job.

My years since graduation have certainly not been without activity. Yet (particularly those prior to the war) now in retrospect seem shockingly ineffectual andwhat is more important—aimless, unguided, even stagnant. Once, before Munich, but after the Spanish Civil War, I told Professor Eddy about my uneasiness and discontent. Listening sympathetically, he cautioned me not to burn my bridges behind me. No good general ever did, he said. That, I rationalized, must be pretty good advice, and, besides, maybe there wouldn't be a war and all the strife and baseness and self-seeking would simply be blown away. It was just that flabby.

The dodge was clinched when I read Emerson's essay on "Character." I found the part that I wanted. "In times," said Emerson, "when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished All our days are so unprofitable while they pass that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got any of that which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue." And again, "Tis the trick of Nature to thus degrade today; a good deal of buzz and somewhere a result slipped magically in."

So the years buzzed by. Now I am 31. I know that the best of my life lies immediately ahead of me. And I know that if I am to plan any constructive course of action, I must do so soon. But to what ends shall I devote myself? What is properly the ambition of an educated man some ten years out of college? Is it enough to desire only Peace and the Good Earth? Can I expect that the next twenty-five \ears, spent waiting for results to slip magically in, will ultimately give me the satisfaction that comes from a full life well led? Should I espouse a cause to have a cause? What purpose shall I declare so that by my example and by my efforts my son can stand freely in an understanding world? Is it enough for me to lead a retiring but exemplary existence, or must I express my faith in the good life and exert my energies before and in behalf of the public to achieve it? What must be added to tolerance to constitute an "exemplary existence"?

What leadership should I follow? Politically, I admire the motivating humanitarianism of Rooseveltian Democracy, but to me, the current embodiment of that idealism is, in many respects, a played-out donkey. Much more profoundly do I dislike the smug reactionaryism of far too many men who are Republican because taxes were lower and tariffs were higher, and there were no unions in the good old days. I dislike them to the point of despising them. Nor, frankly, have I to date found much encouragement in the new cover-up smeared over the old Republican bumblepuppy.

PRACTICAL LEADERSHIP SOUGHT

Thus posing the dilemma, I ask where can one expect to find the continuing leadership essential to Democracy? We all realize that one cannot long talk in the abstract about "Leadership" and "Democracy." We have to talk about men: masses of men and individual leaders of men. We can talk abstractly about the need for compassion and faith and high courage, but we must soon talk specifically about the means of attaining those ends, and of the men who will lead us to them. We can repeat after Leland Stowe (in They ShallNot Sleep) that out of somewhere must come a universal realization that the world's masses will not, in this century, permit themselves to be sold down the river with impunity as they did in the past. But after we pay this lip-service—then what?

Practically speaking, our soldiers and sailors are the men of the hour. To what extent will we be able to look to them? Will they have learned worldliness with all its broad implications? Or will they come back more determined than ever that the United States is a world unto itself; that change is taboo, and compromise treason?

If the Services do not produce constructive leadership, they will at least provide huge blocs of men responsive to it. Historically, at war's end, military and naval men assume a sort of self-endowed national trusteeship which automatically implies national interests. Properly channeled, this could exert a powerful force for the common good. Left to the usually misguided self-interest of professional "patriots," it can become the greatest organized menace in history.

I fully realize that all of this talk about "new" leadership is highly combustible. It is precisely the sort of palaver upon which embryonic despotism feeds. But note that mine is not a plea for changes in form of law or government. I seek only a leadership divorced from the enervating drag of partisanship, intolerance, selfishness, andGood Lord, yes—gullibility too!

If it could be reduced to so simple a matter as selection of a President, the prospect would be more encouraging. But it is more difficult of solution than that. Clearly, one man in the Presidency can be of inestimable value by his guidance, his stimulus, his example. That, unfortunately, will not suffice. There must arise,in great numbers, enough men of goodwill to give the lie to bigotry, so that thosewho would, sponsor lunatic panaceas willnot find comfort here; to inspire self-con-fidence without arrogance, so that we maydeal fairly and honestly with those whowould so deal with us; to instill an appreciation of the soundness and fineness ofnature without resorting to pagan frenzy;to nurture a respect for Man as a wholesome product of that Nature; and to establish, by example, the delineation between individual opinion as an expresssion of Freedom and individual opinion asan expression of Persecution; to excite arespect as well as an appetite for the intelligent progress of education and researchthat we may all lead lives in appreciationof all these things.

These are fine words. They are words written by one endowed with an immaculate idealism, but with no apparent capacity for giving reality to that idealism. They are the words of a young man who sees an alarming growth of things which promise to negate his ideals: too much apathy, too much stupidity, greed, fanaticism, and suspicion. Yes, they are greatsounding words and they make greatsounding phrases. But behind their soothing roll is the sharp awareness that somehow they must be converted from mellifluous intellectual slogans into the primary dicta of action.

To my better-insulated friends, this is the night-cry of an alarmist. Things, they say, are not so bad as they seem; in the great levelling-off process we somehow muddle through; on the whole justice triumphs and virtue will out; pain is soon forgotten and the world goes on its way. These are bromides, and any man who refuses to rationalize solely that he may breathe more easily after a full meal, knows it.

ACCUSED OF MAKING FACES

Others tell me "a pretty plea but academic." I am only deluding myself, according to them, if I think that there is to be found sufficient persuasive leadership to effect any substantial betterment. I am talking instead, they continue, about a pathetically small group of would-be reformers who will never do anything more than make faces at the world. I refuse to believe it.

I will concede that in my earnestness I may have over-simplified the case. For example, implying nations, I have talked of those who would deal fairly with us. I am not sure I could name them. What happens if there are none? Then, too, I concede the difficulty of recognizing all the "good" men I have talked about. This, particularly since the standard seems to be my own self-applied goodness—and I have always been skeptical of self-established virtues.

But all of this clouds the issue. Here, succinctly, is the problem: How, and towhat extent, can an educated young manof good will, on the threshold of his mostproductive, his 'most vigorous, years contribute to the establishment of—what shallwe call it—Truth, Peace, Progress, Virtue,Wisdom—or just Contentment on thisearthf

That there are some specific ways I do not doubt. But first must come the fundamentals. Because these must be built of a maturity which I do not and can not yet possess, I am writing you. This is based not only on my respect for your judgment, but on a growing realization that my awareness of these matters, and my capacity to think about them, can be traced directly to the Liberal Arts education I received at Dartmouth, which education was based on tenets laid down by you so long ago. I hope, in conclusion, that you will not consider this the plea of just another frustrated mortal, trying to establish some special identity for himself. And I hope, further, that you will grant the propriety of probing the future as I have despite the fact that the war is not yet won.

Undoubtedly it is an imposition to ask you to read through all this, and perhaps an even greater imposition to ask for a reply. But since that, of course, is the reason for my writing this letter, I could not, without hypocrisy, apologize—except to say that I hope this has not bored you too much.

With sincerity, I am Yours very truly,

II

DEAR CARL: No apology is necessary for your full letter of inquiry and I am much interested in it. My only regret is that the necessity of leaving town for alumni meetings and other engagements, official and personal, would delay my reply a month if I were to wait and perhaps in turn would thrust a whole volume of manuscript into your hands. My only alternative, therefore, is to write hurriedly, as I am herewith doing.

As a matter of fact, the mental concern you express and the questions you submit have so much in common with inquiries, verbal and written, which I am getting from many another man that it is perfectly clear that these are effects which go back to common causes. Moreover, these causes are not something which bear on younger men alone or upon any single group, for among all there is the same uneasiness and the same concern as to whether one's status is as definitely contributing to the public good as it ought to do. The last time I was in New York I spent an evening with a group of younger friends who had graduated from other colleges and they were in the same state of mind in which you find yourself. Traveling about and meeting with academic associates in my own age group, I hear constantly the lament that we are past the age where we can contribute anything actively and obviously to the war effort directly. Consequently the mental perturbation you are in is nothing to be concerned about excepting as we are concerned about world conditions which make introverts of all of us at a time when extroversion and objectivity are indispensable for any eventual solution of our difficulties. Conditions as you and I find them in ourselves are no exclusive attributes of any one anywhere, men or women, old or young.

So much for the general situation in which no one of us can avoid being puzzled at the complicated and constantly changing patterns of life and its problems. Neither can any of us keep from being chagrined and humiliated that we haven't been personally more effective that these patterns should not have become what they are. Certainly no one can sit here in Hanover and receive the almost daily casualty lists of our boys who are in the service, and I doubt if any alumnus can read the ALUMNI MAGAZINE without feeling that whatever we may have done, great or small, directly or indirectly, we haven't done enough.

QUOTES GRAHAM WALLAS

Now in this hasty itemization of some of my own impressions, leaving the question of military service and coming to some of the other questions you have in mind, I am reminded of what Graham Wallas, the great English sociologist, said to me years ago when he was staying at the house and while he was working on his book The Artof Thought. I asked him what on the basis of his observation would be his comments on the young college men he had met in America. He answered at once that it would be their nervous impatience to take over the affairs of the world from men of more experience. He then added that he didn't understand what it was in the American temperament or in the American climate that created all of this nervous energy that made the young American college graduate so much "a young man in a hurry."

One sometimes seeks the answers to questions in his own experience. I am not sure that I am not less competent than many another man to give advice at this point, for I am so constituted mentally that I have always lived pretty much in the present and without any very great concern personally as regards the future, for the present has always seemed so absorbingly interesting to me. Owing to the fact that I had worked summers and vacations and one solid year before entering college in a construction firm in their granite quarries, I had expected to go back into that concern until a couple of months before I graduated from college. The invaluable opportunity opening to me for becoming a clerk in President Tucker's office, I eagerly seized that for a two-year term. Our intercollegiate athletics being in transition and the necessity being upon Dartmouth for making new associations, since we had outgrown the old AmherstWilliams associations, and our athletic treasury being entirely empty, Dr. Tucker asked me to take this over as a major responsibility in 1903, and I became Graduate Manager and served there for two years. Alumni activities having in the meanwhile become somewhat tangled and not being very definitely organized, President Tucker asked me to take these over in 1905 under the nomenclature of Secretary of the College and I did this, all of my friends advising me that I was losing valuable time to get started in business. Eventually, however, after Dr. Tucker resigned and I had served here for nine years, I made my start in business with the Western Electric Company at less than to- day we pay a first-term instructor and at far less than most of my classmates were getting at that time. Before too long a time had passed, however, a process of some equalization set in.

So much for personal reminiscing! I do it simply to explain why except for conditions which affect everybody at the present time, I cannot always get greatly perturbed about what has happened to a man in his first ten years after graduation from college, because if he has been gaining maturity, if he has been keeping his intellectual interests somewhat alive, and if he has been keeping his eyes open and has been thinking straight, I don't think it makes a great lot of difference what happens in those years, provided enough competence has been developed by one to maintain himself and such family as he has acquired.

You ask scores of questions in your letter to which I could only reply, "I don't know." There is one question, however, which you ask to which I can make a reply based on very definite conviction and that is that the moment that a college man devotes himself exclusively to the demands of a cause, regardless of its changing relationship to society from time to time, he stultifies himself and largely impairs his usefulness for any worth-while contribution to the world's thinking, If there is anything in the world which the liberal college ought to develop, it is a group of men who are capable of looking at the issues of life as apart from their professional interests, whether these be Republican or Democrat, Baptist or Roman Catholic, industrialist or labor leader, or what you will in the way of contrasts. This country is suffering more today from the fact that men have without reservation adopted causes, parties, or even issues as their own and then have refused to recognize the validity of changing conditions or even existing conditions which ought to have neutralized many of the opinions which they either hold or adopt ex officio. If industrialism, which is predominantly straight and beneficial, would have policed its own ranks years ago, it would have precluded the development of the lunatic fringe in labor organizations. If labor organizations would have policed themselves and got rid of the gangsters and profiteers who constitute so small a minority of their group, they could have attacked the sins of capitalism and industrialism with far more effect and meanwhile could have escaped the alarmingly widespread antagonism that is piling up against them. If the original proprietors of The New Republic and of The Nation had been willing to be truly and tolerantly liberal instead of espousing professional attitudes, they might have been tremendous powers for good in the country and have largely affected the development of affairs rather than simply pandering to the self-esteem of "ultra-liberal" minds who like to have somebody express their points of view, even if intolerance in this definitely circumscribes and limits the progress of true liberalism.

SAYS AMERICA DOES PROGRESS

I sympathize wholly with the thoughts you express in regard to the Republican and Democratic parties and I think there ought to be enough of us in the country to create conditions under which we could get better choices than usually we are offered. Nevertheless, it is a mistake, I think, to let one's desire for perfection becloud his vision so that he does not even see the advantages and privileges which are his under existing conditions. With all the faults of the two parties, with what seems at almost any time to be self-interested and partizan points of view of our legislators, with the inadequacies of the executives and of the courts, America still does progress, still becomes a happier place to live in, and still develops culturally and intellectually despite the cynicism and condemnation of our expatriates or near expatriates. We have freedom, we have material prosperity, and we have opportunities unlike those which have ever been offered to any people anywhere and in greater degree.

I think it was Mr. Dooley who said years ago that one trouble with the American people was that in measuring from the stars down, they had become oblivious to the conclusions to be drawn by measuring from the ground up. In other words, my own conviction is that the mind which endeavors to keep-itself informed and at the same time to keep itself detached sufficiently to decide successive issues by themselves is a good mind, if it is actuated by good-will, intelligence, and some sense of social responsibility. I do not think that one in this life can wholly detach himself from the principle of when in Rome, doing as the Romans do, for if one makes himself a pariah by the complete disregard of custom and the methodology by which life is lived at any particular time, he puts himself so far outside the breastworks that he loses all effectiveness. In other words, personally and after considering the matter. for a great many years, I belive that with an ideal of perfectionism, one should recognize the limitations that such a theory places upon one and that perfectionism Should be recognized as an unattainable even if as an ideal toward which one should struggle. Moreover, I believe fundamentally that having made a definite attempt to establish one's identity by living up to one's convictions and having attempted to make one's convictions reasonable in adjustment to existing conditions, far and away the most effective policy from then 011 is tb" seize upon the best agency available a:nd to bore from within in influence and effort rather than to assume the guise of a Don Quixote and tilt at windmills all around the horizon.

I am not sure that I have answered the questions you had in mind but at least I have given expression to some of the thoughts which your own letter has aroused. If there is anything herein that is helpful to you, I shall be exceedingly glad, and if there isn't why please give me at least the credit of having meant well. I am glad that you felt like writing to me and knowing your own type of mind and your own intellectual honesty, I feel perfectly certain that difficult as it may be, you will work your problems out successfully and without letting yourself become entirely unsettled in the process of doing this.

Yours very sincerely,

PRESIDENT HOPKINS and President Sills of Bowdoin shown leading the academic procession at the sesquicentennial exercises of the Maine college this summer. Behind them are the Earl of Halifax, British Ambassador to the U. S., and Governor Sewall of Maine.

CARL B. HESS '34 of Chicago, author of the thought-provoking letter to President Hopkins printed on the preceding pages. He is secretary of the Brasco Manufacturing Cos. of Harvey, lll., metal fabricators. In his senior year at Dartmouth he was a member of Palaeopitus, president of Junto, city editor of "The Dartmouth," Class Day Orator, and a member of Casque and Gauntlet.

ON LEAVE as Manager of the DOC House, Miss Jeanette Gill recently visited Hanover and while here was promoted from Captain to Major in the Marine Corps Reserve. She is stationed at headquarters in Washington.