Russell's Congress

One day three years ago a smart, dapper, young-looking man named Cortlandt Jackson Langley called on the dean of Columbia University's Teachers College, ambitious, 46-year-old William Fletcher Russell. He found Dean Russell brooding on the fact that his college, long the nation's No. 1 teacher-training institution, had in businessmen's eyes become "The Big Red University."

Mr. Langley introduced himself as a "retired businessman." He had long been interested in education and he had an idea:

Teachers College and Business should get together, do Education and the nation a service by helping businessmen and educators to understand each other. Dean Russell thought likewise. Last week the idea produced a spectacular meeting.

Dean Russell and Mr. Langley began by inviting businessmen to talk at T. C. Then they formed a Lay Council to advise the college, including Chase National Bank's Winthrop W. Aldrich (chairman), A. T. & T.'s Walter Gifford, New York Times's Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Last year, having found that educators and businessmen made uneasy companions, Dean Russell hit upon a cause that he thought would wed them: democracy v. totalitarianism. He decided to ho!d at T. C. a great Congress on Education for Democracy. He and Mr. Aldrich went to Europe to invite bigwigs to their Congress, hired John Price Jones to publicize it.

Last week, in hot and humid Manhattan, delegates and visitors to Dean Russell's Congress jampacked Columbia's biggest hall, its gymnasium and two overflow meeting rooms to hear democracy defended. Present were delegates from 26 noneducational organizations, and an equal number of educators, some 3,000 all told. National Association of Manufacturer's Lammot du Pont rubbed elbows with C. I. O.'s James B. Carey. Only urgent business in Atlantic City and Paris kept away A. F. of L.'s William Green, France's Edouard Herriot (they sent messages). Among the speakers were bigwigs from Poland, Sweden and no fewer than seven from Britain, headed by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had come to address a U. S. audience for the first time. Columbia's Anglophile Nicholas Murray Butler beamed on his visitors, bestowed honorary degrees on four of the Britons (and one on M. Herriot In absentia).

The three major U. S. broadcasting systems and several short-wave stations broadcast speeches to the four quarters of the earth. High point of the Congress came when Earl Baldwin (whom Dr. Butler in the excitement introduced as "Earl of Bewdsley") rose to speak. He began calmly:

"There is one thing our peoples--yours and mine--have in common: freedom is the air we breathe, freedom is in our blood and bones: the independence of the human spirit. But we are so used to it that if we ever think of it at all, we think it has dropped into our laps like manna from the skies, and unless we go a little beneath the surface in our questioning, we may feel that we enjoy this freedom because we are better than other people and therefore more worthy of it. Indeed we may give an impression to the world of that complacent self-righteousness which is said to be one of our most offensive and irritating characteristics.

"The truth is that the vast majority of our peoples have forgotten that this freedom was bought with a great price: that it was obtained by the struggles of generations of those who went before us, by mental wrestlings, by endurance of persecution, by successive failures and triumphs: and we have entered into their labours, the labours of men far better than ourselves. . . ."

He finished less calmly:

"A democrat should work for and be prepared to die for his democratic ideals,* as the Nazis and Communists are for theirs. . . . England has never tolerated dictatorship. . . . Whatever it may call itself, the Thing will never be tolerated by our people. . . . If war comes, it will find us as a people united as we have never been before."

As delegates cheered, a lone dissenter denounced the Congress. Cried Author Ralph Borsodi, director of the School of Living, an experimental self-sustaining community in Suffern, N. Y.: "Every principle of education and every principle of democracy was violated. . . . Why were the speakers selected exclusively from the leaders of one side? Does not that make the Congress seem merely a propaganda agency to help enlist America on the side of Britain and France? . . . If the Congress were truly democratic, it should have invited Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels to debate with Earl Baldwin."

Having listened to Earl Baldwin's fighting words, delegates settled down to discussing in 16 seminars how democracy might be defended peacefully, agreed that religion should play a big part in the education of democracy's children. But the Congress' businessmen, labormen and educators were able to agree on few points. One businessman, Armstrong Cork Co.'s President Henning Webb Prentis Jr., opposed democracy itself, declared the Founders of the U. S. had created a republic because they believed that "a democracy would not work."

Upshot of the 16 seminars: 16 manifestoes composed of glittering generalities. Typical excerpt: "The group agrees that a fundamental purpose of American education for citizenship in a representative democracy is the development of those qualities in the character of growing citizens that will insure the creation and perpetuation of the social and governmental ideals known as the American way of life."

As his three-day Congress, to which the New York Times had devoted 38 Columns, adjourned, Dean Russell beamed, pronounced it a great success, announced that delegates had voted to make the Congress a permanent organization.

*Meanwhile, the London Daily Worker had reported that the British Foreign Office, to avert Nazi displeasure, had censored a lecture by Czechoslovakia's former President Eduard Benes at the Cambridge Liberal Party Summer School, changed its title from "The Future of Democracy" to "Politics As Science and Art."

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