Triple Ideal

Last week Kentucky-reared Edwin Rogers Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, went to University of Georgia to make a commencement speech on "How to Tell a College Graduate from the Birds and Fishes." Mr. Embree recalled that when he was a boy the South had its own formula for the ideal man: a scholar, a gentleman and a judge of good whiskey. This triple ideal, said he, is still an admirable goal for education. Solomon, he reminded Georgia's graduates, so pleased the Lord when he chose the gift of wisdom that he received riches also, 700 wives, 300 concubines, and "a prolonged visit from the most famous house guest of ancient history, the luscious and magnificent Queen of Sheba."

Mr. Embree added that to be a judge of good whiskey "implies good taste all along the line." Said he: "An educated man--a judge of good whiskey--will realize the abysmal gap between swinish drunkenness and that mellowness and expansion of personality which the wise men of the ages have appreciated as the gift of the grape."

Mr. Embree's listeners were not amused when he told them the South had no university that approached the scholarly eminence of Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, California, Yale or any of a score of institutions in the North and West. They were shocked when brash Mr. Embree asserted that today the South is producing not only inferior scholars and gentlemen but indifferent judges of whiskey. Said he: "When the concepts of this phrase were widely realized in the lives of her sons, the South bristled with distinction. In so far as these ideals have fallen into desuetude, the South has drifted into mediocrity. This . . . section will regain eminence only as its leaders climb again to the triple peaks of this homely epigram."

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