Princeton & Patriotism

(See front cover} Throughout the land last week, this week and next week, 1934's college seniors pack their trunks in hot little rooms, cluster on shaded campuses to say goodby, sweat under caps & gowns as they march up to receive diplomas which round out the first great period of their lives. Columbia had already sent 1,000 away from Morningside, their ears ringing with the counsels of Harvard's President James Bryant Conant and of their own pontifical President Nicholas Murray Butler, presiding over his 32nd commencement. At Cambridge next week President Conant was to preside for the first time over a commencement of his own, with frosty President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell back to talk to some 650 seniors about "War and the League of Nations." Yalemen were wondering how many more commencements would be graced by President James Rowland Angell, 65. At this, his 13th, he was to preach the baccalaureate, award an LL. D. to President Roosevelt' (see p. 48), send away some 600 seniors. Joseph Sweetman Ames. 69, who has been student, professor and finally president at Johns Hopkins since 1883, was leaving no doubt in Hopkins men's minds. This week he was to announce that next year's commencement will be his last.

At Princeton President Harold Willis Dodds was to preside at his first commencement. Main feature was to be the second annual faculty-alumni forum on world affairs, with an address by Professor Tyler Dennett, president-elect of Williams. For more than two months Princeton seniors have borne on their white "beer suits" a Blue Eagle with President Dodds's head replacing the bird's. Next week the president was to hand their own class president Arthur Stephen ("Princeton's Best") Lane, the key to the university. Then Senior Lane would lead his 450 classmates behind Nassau Hall where, puffing long-stemmed clay pipes to be smashed on the Princeton cannon when the ceremonies were over, they would hear his presidential address and the class history.

So seniors have behaved in Junes innumerable. In his love for fun, ceremony. ! tradition the undergraduate of 1934 differs little from the undergraduate of 1924 or 1914. But something has happened to I his thinking which, by all accounts, sets him apart from his predecessors.

He was not born until after the Titanic went down one April night in 1912. To him the War is history, not a personal memory. He has lived all his conscious life in a post-War world. He was playing hide & seek during the age of Flaming Youth. When he was in high school the Crash came and that was something real enough to make a mark upon him. It cut his allowance and put a furrow in his father's brow. He heard talk of hard times and an uncertain future. He saw breadlines. And worst of all, as his time to enter it drew near, there has come a terrible fear that the world would have no place for him.

These facts have given him an interest in society, economics and world affairs unknown to his predecessors. In 1914 the War crept on a college generation unaware. All the senior of 1924 had to worry about was which job to take. The undergraduate of 1934 knows where the next war may come, and why, and who will suffer by it. He is grimly determined that if the world has no place for him, the world and not he will have to change.

At Princeton this new earnestness has radically changed the tone of campus life. sent the Departments of Politics, Economics and History soaring above their fellows in enrollment. Princeton, long a haven of rich sons, still has its fair share of stanch conservatives. But Columnist Heywood Broun could write after a campus visit month ago: "When a Princeton man turns Red that's news, and distinctly I detect the edges of that hue mingling with the Orange and the Black."

John Grier Hibben would have frowned at that. Gentle, scholarly, well-loved, he nourished Princeton scholarship, gave it first-rank departments in the natural sciences and mathematics, carried it safely through its "country club" and "smoothie"" eras. He had been retired from the presidency a year and tragically dead in an automobile accident two weeks when Princeton's trustees, recognizing the trend of undergraduate interest and a great Princeton tradition, chose from the faculty to be president a famed political expert. They knew that Harold Willis Dodds's ideal had been stated 30 years before by another young professor of politics when he became Princeton's president. That professor's name was Woodrow Wilson and his inaugural address was called "Princeton for the Nation's Service." Then & there Princeton and Patriotism were joined in a union which has come unbroken down the years.

Princeton's Dodds. As a scholar President Dodds is a front-rank authority on municipal government, plebiscites and elections. He was 27 when War came. Turned clown by the Army for poor eyesight, he enlisted in the U. S. Food Administration, served as executive secretary for Pennsylvania. In 1920 he began 13 work-packed years with the National Municipal League. In 1922 the League's President Charles Evans Hughes, then U. S. Secretary of State, sent him to straighten out Nicaragua's messy election system. The Dodds Law which he whipped together in a few months still helps to keep Nicaraguans honest. He spent 1925 in Chile as technical adviser to General Pershing's Tacna-Arica Plebiscitary Commission. Hard-pressed Nicaraguans called him back twice in 1928 to help make his law work. After the election everyone shook hands all around--winners, losers and Expert Dodds. He has been called "the best-known North American in South America." Meantime there was work at home. In New Jersey he chairmanned Mercer County's planning commission, served two years on the State's Regional Planning Commission. His biggest job came two years ago. Heading 20 other Princeton experts, none of whom missed a class during their four months in public service, he whipped out a 125,000-word "Princeton Plan" of governmental reorganization which showed New Jersey's rulers how by judicious savings and new revenues they could add $14,000,000 to the State's income (TIME. July 3). The State's Press swept off its hat and talked of Dodds for Governor. "Nothing," says Harold Willis Dodds with this record behind him and Princeton's presidency in hand, "has ever happened to me." Almost the only color in his life is the mercurochrome he put on the fingers of Nicaraguan voters to prevent them from repeating at the polls. He was born on a small farm three miles west of Utica in western Pennsylvania, the summer home of his Presbyterian minister father.-- In nearby Grove City (pop. 6.156), where his father had a pastorate and a professorship of Biblical Literature in tiny Grove City College, he grew up as any healthy, normal boy grows up in a U. S. small town. At Grove City College he played on a class basketball team, made good grades without half trying, captained a cadet corps company, managed the football team, belonged to the Shakespeare Debating Society. One proud classmate recalls him now as the 'all-round outstanding member of his class." Midway in college he was thinking of Becoming a lawyer. But when it was over le decided to pick up some ready money by teaching history for a while in Grove City high school. He liked teaching. In a couple of years he had saved enough to go to Princeton for a master's degree. That got him an instructorship in economics at Purdue, which led on to a Ph. D. in political science at University of Pennsylvania. Since then, between public jobs, he has sandwiched in stretches of caching politics at Western Reserve, Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, New York University and finally, in 1925, at Princeton where he stayed. At 43 Harold Dodds became Princeton's third youngest president.-- At 44 his close-cropped hair is a steely, glittering grey, kept rumpled by a thoughtful hand. He is well over middle height, thickset, round-shouldered, with the stoop and shuffle of a man who has spent much time in libraries. Behind silver-rimmed spectacles his blue eyes are spring cool. Thin-lipped, with a slow, warm, easy smile, he talks softly in a rich baritone. He is an unspectacular but able public speaker, much in demand. For an opener he can generally get a laugh with this old chestnut: "A mugwump is a fellow with his mug on one side of the fence and his wump on the other." In personal life Harold Dodds might be any one of 10,000 college professors, except that he has no children. For fun and exercise he plays golf; a 90 delights him. . He used to like to putter in his garden but such an avocation is not for the resident of big, brown "Prospect." When there is no time for golf he strolls around the campus with his pipe and one of his wife's dogs. Tiny, popular Mrs. Dodds, daughter of a Nova Scotian wholesaler, likes to dance and sing. Dodd's Princeton, President Dodds has neither brought nor promised Princeton a New Deal. "I trust the alumni will pardon me," he wrote last autumn, "if at this time I propose no stirring platform of educational policy or radical reform. Princeton accepts as valid some of the current charges against American education and in a quiet and persistent manner she will continue to improve her methods.'' His only major changes thus far have been an extension of the four-course plan by which high-ranking seniors will be freed from all course requirements in their last term, and an up-to-date pension and group insurance plan for his faculty. His announced objectives are a badly-needed new library building and more student scholarships. He is glad that two-fifths of Princeton's 2,500 students are earning part of their expenses and wants more poor but brainy students. Overshadowing all other aims, however, is his desire to expand and bolster his social science departments, prepare businesslike statesmen and statesmanlike businessmen for the era of government in business which he is sure is coming. No more radical than Dodds the educator is Dodds the political expert. One of the few things about which he, a Republican, grows publicly passionate is democracy, "the only form of government which respects personality and which a self-respecting people will bear." He does not know which way U. S. democracy is going, hopes it is in the direction of Walter Lippmann's "free collectivism," with a strong central government checking and balancing private business for the common good. But he is profoundly convinced that government needs better brains. He has seen politics from the inside and has Ions, ago lost the oldtime reformer's faith in good intentions. Says Harold Willis Dodds: "A thick head can do as much harm as a hard heart." He calls the Brain Trust "a sad commentary on our government." He thinks the New Deal, which had to draft its brains from college faculties and private business, has amply proved his thesis of the need for brilliant professional public servants in the U. S. He never tires of pointing at Great Britain's Civil Service tc show what he would do about it. The U. S. Civil Service has a similar rank & file of clerks and technicians, but nothing approaching the 1,500 career men who run things at the top. Can and will the U. S. have such an aristocracy of brains at its helm? "Guarantee them security and a chance for promotion," declared President Dodds last week, "and we'll furnish the boys." Princeton has been getting ready for four years. Its School of Public & International Affairs was launched in 1930, with Harold Dodds as administrative chairman. Its present husky, genial Director is DeWitt Clinton Poole, 48, author of The Conduct of Foreign Relations under Modern Democratic Conditions, which he wrote from long experience as a U. S. diplomat in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Petrograd, Cape Town. An administrative unit, the School embraces the College Departments of Politics, Economics, History and Modern Languages. It has upped enrollment every year, this year reached the limit of 100 with many an applicant turned away for inadequate scholarship. Its students are campus leaders--Princetonian editors, football men, class presidents. They spend their summers living abroad in native homes, attending government conferences. Each year the School has five "confer-ences on public affairs" of its own. From outside come topnotch authorities to inform and argue. Then students pretend they are a Senate committee, a New York City charter commission, a League of Nations assembly, proceed to thrash out the question at hand with all due form & ceremony. At this year's final conference last month the School was the U. S. House Ways & Means Committee, .considering the reciprocal tariff bill (see p. 13). Preparatory experts were chairman and ex-chairman of the U. S. Tariff Commission. The conferees plumped for amendments which the real U. S. Senate adopted one week later. The scheme works. Princeton has lately begun to lead the nation in graduates accepted for the U. S. Foreign Service. The State Department's old "Harvard ring" is giving way to a "Princeton ring." Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long (1904) and Minister to the Baltic States John Van Antwerp MacMurray (1902) head a list of some 55 Princeton consuls and vice consuls. Senator David Aiken Reed of Pennsylvania (1900), Governor John Gilbert Winant of New Hampshire (1913), and Governor George White of Ohio (1895), lead some 95 Princetonian Congressmen, State legislators, Mayors, bureau chiefs. Princeton Economist Edwin Walter Kemmerer has been money doctor to the world. Thick in the New Deal is James McCauley Landis (1921), Federal Trade Commissioner who is slated to chairman the Federal Securities & Exchange Commission. Harold Willis Dodds and his earnest young men have a high mark to shoot at. Princeton's tradition of public service goes back to Alumnus-Professor-President Woodrow Wilson, to Grover Cleveland, longtime trustee and lecturer, and finally to the great years between 1769 and 1812. From exactly 1,000 men whom Princeton graduated in those years the U. S. chose one President (James Madison), two Vice Presidents (Aaron Burr and George Mifflin Dallas), six Continental Congressmen, 31 U. S. Senators, 48 U. S. Representatives, 21 State Governors, four U. S. Cabinet members, seven U. S. and State Supreme Court Justices. That took 43 years. But by 1944 President Dodds and the rest of the country should know whether Princeton's solemn undergraduates of 1934 really mean business.

--A11 of Princeton's presidents have been either Presbyterian ministers or sons of .Presbyterian linisters. --Youngest was Aaron Burr, 32 (1747--57). father of the Aaron Burr (Princeton 1772) whn became his country's third Vice-President, killed Alexander Hamilton and turned traitor.-

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