The Commencement Address
Dr. Frank P. Graham Discusses America's Position as World Leader and Urges Greater Moral Power Through More Democracy at Home
Dr. Graham, President of the Universityof North Carolina and one of the country'sforemost liberals, received Dartmouth'shonorary Doctorate of Laws at the 179thCommencement exercises. His address wasdelivered in Webster Hall, June 13, and ishere printed in full.
WE LIVE IN an age in which civilization has become identified with mechanization. Machines, engines, gadgets, technology and power are the basis of the structure of our economic society. The pressing of buttons and the pulling of levers control the dynamics of modern life. Mechanisms all around us in the home, on the farm, the shops, stores, factories, cinemas, highways, railways, airways, high potential power-lines and the ethereal kilocycles, are the work, instruments and even substance of life in the present world.
History reminds us that close to the center of the three great economic transitions of modern times have been and are three mechanisms: the compass, the power engine, and the atomic mechanisms. These mechanisms are small in size but are revolutionary in impact and global in extent.
The little compass released trade from the narrow confines of thousands of years and made world-wide the great Commercial Revolution. Among the many economic, political, social, and spiritual factors and forces which played their part in the disintegration of the medieval work and the transition to modern times, it was the electro-magnetic needle of the mariner's compass which released trade from its ancient and medieval boundaries and expanded the migration of peoples and the exchange of goods to include all the seas and oceans, all the nations and continents, and all the races and peoples of the earth in the great historic transition from medieval to modern times.
Among the many factors and forces which made the late Eighteenth Century a period of deep-moving transition such as the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of science, the American Revolution and the French Revolution, none was more revolutionary in far-reaching power than the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine was the dynamic heart of the Industrial Revolution which changed the ways men work and live in the last 175 years more than they had changed in the preceding 3000 years.
These mechanisms—the electromagnetic needle, the power engine, and now, most dramatic of all, the atomic machine—have historically and cumulatively reenforced all the gadgets, buttons and levers which mechanize our living and encompass our lives today in their emphatic identification of mechanization with civilization itself.
The history back of us and the life around us has made the case that without engines and machines, without technology and continuous and generous support of applied research, any modern nation would cease to be a modern nation. To fail in applied science, in agriculture and industry would be to abdicate from a position of power and leadership in the modern world.
For this very reason it is the moral responsibility of the universities and colleges as the centers of ideas and idealism, as the homes of the arts and sciences, to interpret clearly and unceasingly the values of pure theories of science and the ideas, which give substance to faith and hope which ultimately are more powerful than machines, technology and the engines of power.
In seeking to make unmistakably clear this thesis, we shall seek merely to occupy the ground already occupied by the machines and engines themselves. We would seek no separation of the pure and applied science, no divorce of theory and technology, no cleavage between the mechanism and the idea which gave it birth. We simply seek to remind people and boards of trustees that the pure theory is indispensable to its application. Without the insight of the pure theory, science becomes static; without the fresh invigoration of humane idealism, society becomes stagnant and great civilizations decay and fall in ruins. Without the vision of great ideas, the people perish in the modern world.
It was two simple but basic ideas which entered into both the substance and the value of the compass: the idea that the earth is round and the idea that the earth is a great magnet. Ships sailing uncharted oceans would not fall off a round earth. The little compass needle would always be true to the electromagnetic lines of forces running north and south through the great magnet called the earth. Basically, then, it was an idea which became a mechanism and without which there would have been no world-wide Commercial Revolution.
Some three centuries later it was the pure theory of the expansive power of latent heat in the mind of Professor Black, in the University of Glasgow, which James Watt, his instrument mender, used in the invention of the modem steam engine. James Watt, instead of mending the defective parts of the old Newcomen engine, rather, mended the defective ideas of which the old engine was made. When James Watt took the pure theory from the mind of Professor Black and rearranged the ideas of the steam engine in his own mind, he rearranged the whole structure of the modern world.
No less far reaching than the Commercial Revolution and the Industrial Revolution is the coming Atomic Revolution which, like them, came from a revolution in ideas. The long-accepted idea that the atom was the irreducible substance of the universe gave way in the last fifty years to the idea that the atom itself was a little universe of whirling bodies of tremendous energy and power. The Atomic Revolution received its mighty impulse from inside the atom, and the inside of the atom received its revolutionary meaning and source of power from inside the mind of men and women working quietly in university laboratories with little support or reward of the world.
The engines, which have wrought the great economic revolution of modern times, not only came basically from pure ideas which in their birth in the inquiring mind of man were unrelated to any utilitarian intent, but many fundamental ideas which are never mechanized are themselves in themselves as ideas, powerful in their influence on the course of history and the content of civilization.
In this age of the power of machines we need to recognize the power of ideas. In this age of mechanical invention we need the adaptations of political and social inventions. In this age of the scientific mechanism we need the saving values of spiritual idealism.
In our insistent awareness of the many different factors and forces and their interacting power in the complex of history, we find that an idea may often interfuse all other influences with its spiritual power. With due consideration of the powerful factors and forces—geographical, economic, political, religious, imperial and traditional —which focused upon the Eternal City as the center of the ecclesiastical dominion rising upon the ruins of the old political empire, it was an idea, a great idea, the idea and aspiration of a divine compassion and of a universal brotherhood of man which transformed the sackable City of Rome into the unsackable City of God. This noble and catholic idea represents the unity of mankind and a universal sympathy for human beings everywhere in need of mercy and compassion. This idea became Flesh, became a Person in the Judean hills whose followers have carried the cross far and near, across seas and centuries with its call to justice and heroism in the sharing and giving of life. This idea for two thousand years has interfused our medieval and modern Western World with hopes of human brotherhood unfulfilled to this hour.
Not only does the spread of ideas interfuse a whole society, but the lowering of the level of ideas lowers the level of the life and history of an age. It was not only the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the decline of the ancient learning in the disorder of the times, but it was also the lowering of the level of ideas for an adaptation to the untutored, though vigorous, minds of the barbarian conquerors which produced the intellectual recession called the Dark Ages. Scholasticism represents the far upward climb of the western mind, under the tutelage of the church, from the ideas of the Dark Ages to the ideas of the great medieval synthesis which found its stronghold. in the universities of the later Middle Ages.
The university, the child of the medieval church, became, within its ecclesiastical limits, the center of ideas, the center of philosophic conflict and scholastic synthesis, intellectual energy and curiosity, regarding ideas which stirred the minds and spirit of the Western people and thus prepared the way for the revival of ancient ideas.
The ideas and spirit of the ancient learning, long lost or neglected, recovered to transcend medieval boundaries, blew like a fresh wind across the face of Europe, lifted to the sunrise of a new day. Scholasticism gave way to humanism, other worldly ideas to the ideas of the ancient world, ascetic self-repression to aesthetic self-expression. Giving momentum and significance to the Renaissance was a great idea. The conception of the human being as worthy of the dignity and joy of living; the creative impulse for self-expression in scholarship and the fine arts; the noble appreciation of the human form and the human spirit, the beauty of nature and the grandeur of life—all these were a part of the revival of learning and the new liberation of old ideas in that efflorescence of the human spirit called the Renaissance.
The universities, along with parliaments and cathedrals, towering from the later Middle Ages across all the transitions of the modern age still abide as among the most influential and noble institutions of Western civilization. The medieval universities, for all their limits and lags, as centers of ideas, prepared the way for the revival of classical ideas in the Renaissance and of scriptural ideas in the Reformation. The recovery of old ideas led to the discovery of the New World and gave impulse to a new movement in religion.
The Revival of Learning led to the advancement of learning in the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The new conception of science which turned men's minds from accepting old ideas to finding new ideas, and from mere speculation to zestful experimentation with new instruments of precision, entered into the ideas of the Philosophic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, which, in turn, produced the ideas, attitudes, and engines of the Industrial Revolution. These intellectual and economic revolutions led to the Second Scientific Revolution of the last fifty years, during which the idea of the nuclear nature of the atom and the capture of its gigantic power have brought us to the outposts of the Atomic Age. In the long run of history we find that ideas themselves are not only more powerful than engines, but that without ideas there would be no engines. Engines are subject to the hand of man and the hand of man is subject to the mind and spirit of man.
America, whose thought was originally an inheritance of European thought, has long continued to inherit and borrow its basic ideas from the Old World. In view of the destruction of much of the resources and vigor of European peoples it is now the imperative obligation of a powerful America to be the home of original ideas; of basic research; of the ideas and theories upon which depend our spiritual and intellectual health and our scientific and technological progress. As the basic scientific, ethical, humane, and spiritual ideas and ideals of the American college and university go, so goes America. As America and the other democracies go, so go up or down the humane and spiritual hopes of mankind.
America must be strong in economic and military power, but a strong America must rely more on democratic ideas and moral idealism than on economic and military power. America must become more democratic at home for the saving of her own soul and for moral power in saving the freedom of the people of the world. The great human freedoms for which the war was won make dangerous lags out of the idea of the innate superiority of a master class, a master race, and a master state.
The atomic bomb in the hands of the absolute state is the greatest threat which has come to man. With regard to the other dangerous lags we have the freedom to struggle for freedom and hope for a better day. With the lag of the idea of the absolute national state in an atomic age, we may have no world in which to struggle or hope or even to live. The one world truly begins at home, but without the one world we may have no home in which to begin.
The transitions of history impelled by the compass and later by the power engine were processes of slow centuries and gradual adjustments. Social drift and slow adjustments did not then, on such a scale as now, mean swift and global tragedy. Mankind, with his swift scientific inventions and his slow social adjustments, has, with much economic progress and much human misery, muddled through to this fateful hour. Human society with an atomic bomb in its bosom cannot lag in adjustment to its explosive power.
Among the presently feasible measures of adjustment as minima for democratic morale in America and moral power in the world, the Congress should adopt now the pending bill for federal aid to schools; the minimum wage bill, the national housing bill; the anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills, and without nullification by any state of the decisions of the United States Supreme Court regarding equal suffrage and education in the state as the supreme law of the land; the National Science Foundation bill; plans for the strengthening of agriculture and social security in America and economic recovery in the world; and measures inaugurated here in historic Hanover toward strengthening the United Nations as a chief hope of peace in a broken and bewildered world.
The contemporary world is the battleground in the global struggle of ideas for the possession of the mind and spirit of man. The colleges and universities are the outposts in this struggle of ideas. The college of liberal arts, the land-grant college, the university graduate school with its scientific, social, and humane researches, hold the farthest outposts. It is a cause for alarm that not only the humane and social studies in the colleges but even elementary and secondary education are conceived by the Congress to be almost non-essential in programs of national and democratic defense.
The leadership of the House of Representatives of Congress which uses the billions appropriated for the critical needs of national defense as an excuse for not appropriating three hundred millions for the critical needs of the elementary and secondary schools of the people; which turns thumbs down on the housing needs of the veterans and the people; which champions the passing of the Mundt-Nixon Bill and refuses to allow the National Science Foundation Bill to reach the House floor; which, with reckless irresponsibility for the freedom of democratic nations, cut two billion dollars from the heart of world recovery, is arousing the indignation of the American people who sincerely care about democracy in America and the recovery and freedom of the stricken peoples of the earth. This undemocratic imbalance of ideas and reckless global irresponsibility of a tragic isolationism in the atomic age is a part of the democratic lag of national leaders who themselves may reveal the failure of the universities to give them the balance of democratic ideas and the perspective of the general view of the oneness of freedom in the modern world.
Modern men find themselves as biological organisms in possession of unmastered dynamic scientific mechanisms; of an unchanging human nature with a slow-changing social mind and motive caught in the meshes of a fast-changing mechanical civilization; the multiplication of mechanical contacts without a deepening of spiritual content; political and economic ideas evolved in the handicraft age reaching over with their lags and controls in the age of the power engine; and the shibboleths of liberty which came racing from the soul of a Thomas Jefferson in behalf of forgotten men in the Eighteenth Century turned in reverse against the freedom and equal opportunity of forgotten millions in the Twentieth Century.
As noble repositories of the great tradition of humane learning and as scientific guardians of the tested and true, the colleges and universities, reflective and creative parts of our modern society, are also parts of the social lag. The colleges and universities were mainly-scholastic in Renaissance times, dominantly classical in scientific times, powerfully but narrowly scientific in the midst of complex economic and social change, too often reluctantly social minded and apologetically philosophical and spiritual minded on the eve of the greatest social, ethical and spiritual crisis of human history.
The curriculum, overspecialized too early, gives a fragmentary view of human learning, the human being, human society and the universe. The colleges and universities, in intensifying the specialization needed in the training of men and women for modern society, also need to equip the specialist to be a better specialist with an integrated view and understanding of his specialty) himself, his society, and his world. Human society, and therefore the curriculum of the college, needs not less science and technology, but more thorough science, and more advanced technology, in all areas of knowledge and in all relations of human beings; more social sciences as ways toward the social mastery of our technology, our haphazard political and lopsided economic processes; more first-hand understanding of the great books of the humane tradition which bring to the plastic mind and spirit of youth the fellowship of the greatest mind? and noblest spirits of all nations and of all ages, whose precious wisdom and goodness provide the basis for the thoughtful perspectives and ethical valuations of our own thinking and selfexpression; and more fine arts for the fine feeling, heightened emotion, noble imagination, the beautiful creations of the human spirit, and the inner vision of the good life.
The curriculum needs more recognition of philosophy and religion as the basis of an intellectual and spiritual synthesis of the physical and moral, the vocational and liberal, personal freedom and social responsibility, stability and progress, ethics and politics, work and justice, democracy and excellence, religion and learning, and man as belonging both to the world of nature and to the world of the spirit in our one world.
Youth in the college needs both the scientific view and the spiritual aspirations of the whole person for the true, the beautiful and the good in the free and responsible self-governing campus democracy, through which the students may have a vital part in their own education in preparation for their part in the great society of man and nations in the high adventure of creative cooperation toward the Kingdom of God.
The college for the sake of the mind and spirit of man now in global issue needs integration, balance, and the general view, and must have freedom for its own sake to offset the idea and fact of the tyranny of the totalitarian state, whether of the right or the left, in the struggle for the possession of the mind and spirit of man.
But this freedom of the college should not be mistaken for approval of those who are merely sophisticated or who superficially or cynically exploit great human freedoms or who debase the deep human passions and poison the springs from which flow the waters of life. Such an abuse of freedom has the scorn of scholars whose intellectual integrity and wholesome life are a source of freedom. True freedom of selfexpression leads neither to self-exploitation nor to self-deterioration, but leads rather to the self-realization of the whole personality for the good life. No abuse of freedom should cause us to strike down freedom of assembly, speech and publication which are the fresh resources of a free religion and a free state.
This is the essence of Americanism. Grown on this soil, Americanism is not a frail plant that must be falsely protected with intolerance or terrorism by those without faith in the depth of its rootage or the robustness of its timber. Its roots are deep in the teachings of our religion, the traditions of our country, and the ideals of your noble institution. Jesus said, "Know the truth and the truth shall make you free." He met fallacy with understanding and hate with His great love. The wise Gamaliel sought to calm his fearful-minded colleagues in the Sanhedrin who feared the subversive power of new and fervent agitators, in these wise and reassuring words, "If this counsel or this work be of men it will come to naught but if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it." John Milton, in the midst of a bitter public controversy over the threatened suppression of free speech and free opinion, said, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter and argue freely according to conscience above all liberties." Thomas Jefferson said, "Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing to fear from the conflict."
The heroic souls who have fought and ever given their lives for the freedom of the human mind made no reservation against the free conscience of those whose ideas might be hateful to them. In the cause of freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly, spiritual heroism shines out all along the way of the human pilgrimage. The cross, the stake, the Bastille, the Carlsbad decrees, demolished presses and all other symbols of repression but emphasize the unconquerable aspiration of the human spirit for a freer and better world. Idealism does not cringe before power. Repression is the way of frightened power, freedom is the way of enlightened faith. History teaches beyond the denial of bigotry or the sneer of cynicism that the answer to a difference in color or creed is not the Klu Klux Klan, that the reply to a difference of opinion is not denunciation, is not a concentration camp, is not the Mundt-Nixon Bill now pending in the Senate, or any new form of the long discredited Alien and Sedition Laws; the answer to error is not terror, but the cleansing power of light and liberty under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States.
To be American in the great American traditions is sometimes miscalled un-American. To stand by our historic American Bill of Rights is not a subversive activity. It is unfair to our religion and our Americanism to call communistic the most decent, humane, and spiritual hopes. The more Americans who understandingly and sincerely subscribe to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the better for America and the world.
The freedom of the college means not only the freedom to inquire and publish the theological implication of the geologic structure of the earth and the biological implication of the physical structure of a fish, but also the human and spiritual implication of the economic structure of society and the international implication of the nuclear structure of the atom.
The Hebrews discovered the sovereignty of the one God; the Greeks made us aware of man as a person of noble proportions and creative capacities; and modern man has with microscope, test tube, and telescope uncovered the world of nature, matter, and things. The world of science, of things, of machines and gadgets, crowds hard upon the conception of both God and man. The world of science, technology, and things needs the saving balance and deeper meaning of the liberal arts, the humane tradition and the spiritual conception of man and the universe. Without a sense of values, ethical and humane, and without the insights of the human spirit, the discoveries of one generation become glibly exalted above the wisdom and insights of one hundred generations. You will continue your education in all these fields. Modern science, industrialism and materialism need the balance of the humane and social studies, need philosophy and religion to prevent a destructive impact upon the conception of the freedom, dignity, integrity and moral autonomy of the individual human being.
In this College and in the modern world you have become acquainted with the discoveries and ideas of the scientific age which includes the Seventeenth Century mechanistic conception of the universe; the Eighteenth Century theory of the free and automatically self-balancing economic system; the Nineteenth Century theory of evolution with the identification of man with animals in their primitive struggle for survival; and the Twentieth Century behavioristic psychological conception of man as an organism of drives, reflexes and reactions, developing amid the power of environment; the Twentieth Century theory of relativity in both the physical and the moral world; and the latest theories of the atom, once ultimate, now revealed as a whirl of undetermined energy and power. The ideas of biological evolution should be balanced with the ideas of spiritual evolution. The ideas of the physical descent of man from the lower animals should be balanced with the ideas of the spiritual ascent of man toward the likeness of the Son of God as the brother of all men.
The conceptions of the modern scientific age have contributed greatly to the knowledge and progress of man and civilization but deeply need an emphasis on the sovereignty of the moral law, moral values beyond science, ethical ideas above force and totalitarian power, and spiritual insights which will make a deeper and wider synthesis—a new integration of ideas in the unity of learning, the unity of human personality, the unity of mankind, and the unity of the universe—one world, one family, one God.
As surely as the Italian and Iberian peninsulas were the home of the Commercial Revolution and Britain was the island home of the Industrial Revolution, so America is the continental home of the Atomic Revolution. Standing where cross the high road and low road of human destiny, may our country, with her ideas, her mechanisms and her colleges and universities not fail mankind in this tragic hour. Rather, may America, rising to the responsibility of her power and the opportunity for her greatness, become more free and democratic in her own life, and give, through the restoration of the appropriations for world recovery, renewed and generous hopes of food and freedom to the starving and fearful peoples of the earth as brothers of men and sons of God in one world neighborhood of human brother-hood, we humbly pray God, in our time.
TWO COLLEGE LEADERS: Dr. Frank P. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, shown with President Emeritus Hopkins shortly before he gave the Commencement Address in Webster Hall.
DIRK B. KUZMIER '4B, LEFT, GIVES SACHEM ORATION FROM STUMP OF OLD PINE WHILE SENIORS, RIGHT, SMOKE PIPES AT CLASS DAY EXERCISES
