Ready for Discontent

As commencement speaker at the University of Miami, Editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution was filling an uneasy role. "I am not sure I approve," he said, "of the tradition which calls for a commencement address ... It has sometimes been my idea that instead of a speaker offering sage advice, it would be a far better idea to place before a graduating audience a fine symphony ... or a magnificent ballet, and when this had been completed, to say; 'Ladies and gentlemen, life can be very lovely or very sad. It probably will be a mixture of both . . . Goodbye, and God go with you . . .'"

Many Americans would agree with Editor McGill that there was really little more that a commencement speaker could say, but last week, at graduations all over the U.S., noted men & women were trying. Luther Evans, Librarian of Congress, feared that his speech would seem "the final discipline, the ultimate indignity . . . the last parade of the commonplace" to Atlanta University's class of '49. ECA Chairman Paul Hoffman was humorously embarrassed at St. Louis' Washington University. "As a college student," said he, "I was never on any dean's honor roll. In fact . . . the university I attended showed a strange lack of interest in having me continue as a member of its student body."*

Ruins & Plunder. For other speakers there were other worries. What to say in the face of so uncertain a future? "The ruins are plain to behold," cried President John S. Kieffer of St. John's College. "The plunderers are at work . . . the subsidized athlete . . . the cynical graduate student . . . the stockjobbers and suaver financial promoters . . ." Retiring President Mildred McAfee Horton of Wellesley had no idea "where we are going . . . Those of you who plan to be housewives may find yourselves without houses, or . . . with a house without being a wife."

It was a time when the world had many fears, and President James R. Killian Jr. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted that today's students were remarkably security-minded. Once students looking for jobs would ask, "What salary am I to get?" Now they were asking future employers, "What kind of pension plan have you got?"

This was the so-called New Era, said ex-President Herbert Hoover at Ohio Wesleyan University--an era which holds out "the attraction . . . that you will finish with an old-age pension and your funeral expenses from the Government."

Another fear bothered U.S. Senator Frank P. Graham, speaking at, the University of North Carolina (of which he was president until he went to the Senate last March). The fear of Russia, he warned, could lead Americans "to subvert our free institutions ... In the days of its weakness, America was the haven of heretics and should not in the days of its power become the stronghold of bigots.''

Mosquitoes & Poison Ivy. Did the years ahead, then, offer no contentment? Certainly not, said Novelist John P. Marquand at Massachusetts' Governor Dummer Academy--and a good thing, too. "I have observed," said he, "a number of superficially contented men and women . . . and I maintain they are dangerous. Personally, I am glad to say there are a lot of things today with which I am not contented ... I am not contented with the road system in Newbury . . . nor do I like the control of mosquitoes ... I am not contented with the Boston & Maine Railroad . . . nor do I like the way poison ivy keeps growing near my house.

"I am not contented either with the United Nations or with the general situation in Europe ... I am not contented with myself . . . with the development of my character . . . and with my literary career ... At any rate, there seems to me very little ground for general contentment . . . and I must repeat ... I fear the contented man. I fear him, because there is no progress unless there is discontent . . . Without it today, I even believe, there can be no inner peace of mind."

If Speaker Marquand had anything to be contented about, it presumably was the ample supply of discontent in the U.S. and the rest of the world at graduation time, 1949.

-After one year at the University of Chicago, Hoffman quit to sell automobiles.

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