Recalling the Twenties

FRANCIS BROWN '25, editor of The NewYork Times Book Review, as vice president of the General Association of Alumni presided over the Alumni Luncheon meeting in the gymnasium on June 16 of Reunion Week. Following are his introductory remarks:

It is regulation that when we come to Hanover for an occasion like a reunion we wallow in nostalgia and are stalked by reminiscence. Part of the reason we are here, after all, is to indulge in a recalling of the past. Most of us belong to the generation of the Twenties, and I hope the Class of 1919 for the moment will be willing to move into that decade. Many a writer today is telling us that the Twenties was a glorious period in American life. Certainly, whatever reservations one may have about the politics of that time or the state of its business community, it was a dashing time of literary achievement, of intellectual excitement, that pointed toward our cultural maturity as a nation. And I don't need to remind you that it was the speakeasy age when the magic words were, "Joe sent me."

We all know that it was a glorious period at Dartmouth. We made it glorious because we were here. It was a time when men spoke their minds without fear or favor in a world quite different from the one we know today. Iconoclast was an overworked and often misused word in the night-long campus bull sessions. Evolution was still a subject for argument, and Prexy Hopkins set off a small explosion when he said that he would be willing to bring Lenin and Trotsky to the Dartmouth campus if it would stir the student mind. We saw the green-covered American Mercury become the Bible of the campus intellectual, and one spring brought a privately printed volume of Dartmouth verse that is now a collector's item.

The watering trough was still a landmark and a rallying-point for the mayoralty campaigns in which our good friend Irish Flanigan won laurelled fame. The Barbary Coast played on the Commons porch and hums were sweet in the spring twilight. My class of '25 fought '24 outside Rollins Chapel and the Boston papers carried headlines that told of "200 black eyes at Dartmouth." We saw great football teams, and some poor ones. It was a good time to be alive.

I have said that part of the reason we are here is to wallow in nostalgia. Another reason, and the most significant, is to rededicate ourselves to Dartmouth, our college, but a vastly different college from the one of thirty-five, forty years ago. It is not only that familiar landmarks have disappeared. It is the very life of the College that has changed. Change, as we all know, is the law of life itself. To serve a world far more complex, far more dangerous and explosive than that of the Twenties, the College had to change, and none among us, I know, would want it to stand rooted wholly in the past.

The man most responsible for fitting Dartmouth to meet the challenge of the 1950s is, of course, John Dickey. I don't need to tell you what a wonderful job he has done. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Dickey, the President of Dartmouth College.