Some War-time Lessons Part 2

I said at the outset that I would venture later on an enlargement of the conception of the American scholar, in the light of what the past two years have made so clear. The scholar himself as well as those of us who are not scholars, needs, I think, to get a somewhat broader conception of the term; to develop it from its present popular connotation so that the attributes which come to one's mind will no longer be the static and selfish, but rather the dynamic and social. Emerson, in his essay on the American Scholar, seems to have some prophetic glimpse of this broader conception. He says, for example, that "action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential; that without it, he is not yet man; that the true scholar grudges every opportunity of action pa.s.sed by, as a loss of power"; and elsewhere, "that a great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think." The old idea of the scholar was the recluse, the individual; the new, it seems to me, should be one of a company of builders, each bringing to the common task, for the general welfare, his training and craft, his knowledge and ideas, to combine them with the gifts which his fellows are bringing.

Thus far almost all my modern instances have been taken from the realms of natural science. I need not remind you, however, that although science has tremendously broadened the range of scholarship, nevertheless the scholarship which is a practical a.s.set is not and never will be limited to natural science. The record of the past two years has many an example of the essentially important work of scholars in other fields. The records are not so clear-cut, the results are perhaps more often negative; but the work was done and it counted. In the field of public information our American scholars in the political sciences did excellent work under the direction of a Doctor of Philosophy of this University, and their record for fairness and sanity makes an enviable contrast with the pathetic propaganda of the German intellectuals.

Similarly, the work of our Columbia scholars of the Legislative Drafting Bureau proved of great value in formulating and, perhaps more important, in discouraging legislation.

In general, however, I think we ought to face the fact squarely that our scholarship in man's relations with his fellow men, in his understanding of himself and his fellows as contrasted with his mastery of physical things, cannot claim so clear-cut a decision. Even in science we should not set too great store by ourselves. Professor, late Colonel, Millikan writes: "The contribution of the United States in research and development lines was less, far less in proportion to our resources and population, than that of England or France, and this in spite of the far heavier strain under which they were laboring." And yet, with us, science was better mobilized, better equipped, and can make a better showing than the humanities. Part of this can be readily explained by the statement that preparation for war is after all engineering on a huge scale. But we must not prove too much if we are to profit by the lesson. For example, the war found us utterly unprepared in foreign-language knowledge; and we are still unprepared. How many real Americans, I don't mean recent immigrants, but men and women with our traditions and our point of view, can speak Russian? How many can speak the languages of the Near East or Far East?

Excellent work has been done by individual philosophers, economists, and sociologists in labor questions, in welfare work, on the war-time trade and industrial boards; but as a whole our scholars in these fields did not dominate the situation as did the men of science in theirs. Of course, their task was infinitely harder. For one thing, though we may be ready to confess our ignorance of calculus or colloidal chemistry or thermo-dynamics, we all believe in the validity of our off-hand judgments in politics and morals, and indeed in all the springs of human conduct. Yet when all allowances are made, the fact remains that there is a scholarship in these matters and we have American scholars in them, but that with distinguished exceptions these professionals permitted the man in the street or the man in the editor's chair, or in Congress, or in the Cabinet, to proclaim his amateur p.r.o.nouncement and to get away with it. Indeed, I will go further and say that not a few who know or ought to know that it is not necessary to be intolerant in order to be patriotic seemed to set their knowledge upon this point at one side. In war time it is a matter for the scholar's judgment and conscience to decide whether it is wise to attempt a leadership which at the moment will be misunderstood and probably ineffective, possibly even dangerous, because of the reaction, to the cause he has at heart; or to bide his time in silence, awaiting a more suitable time to be heard. But I submit that he is sinning against the light when he joins in the hue and cry of the untrained and the half-trained. The war has given the natural scientist his chance, and he has profited thereby. In the years to come the test will, I think, shift to the scholars in the human sciences. The crises of the future will have to do with problems of human conduct rather than of the control of physical things; and, as these crises come, our scholars in human relations should be more ready for the call to mobilize.

In practically every case the instances that I have given of the successful tests of our scholarship involve the work of a member of Phi Beta Kappa or of the sister society, Sigma Xi; and I therefore may be permitted to say a word more directly to our younger members of the society of those seeking the philosophy of life, to our Columbia scholars in the making. In my time, which, by the way, was just twenty-one years ago, a man who wanted to live the life of a scholar was practically limited to teaching as the means of making his living. The result in the way of incompetent and halfhearted teaching we all know.

Let me say to you of to-day that unless you want to teach, there is no reason under heaven why you should do so. There are plenty of other means of earning an honest living. The scholar is not nowadays limited to the academic halls. We have scholars of the first quality not only in special research inst.i.tutions, but in government bureaus and in industrial organizations. The men in government service who could be spared from their other responsibilities for war work made an excellent war record. On the other hand, we want to remember that the real teacher, whether in the faculty or out of it, has a tremendous advantage in the art of presentation. During the war the effectiveness of our scholar teachers was well tested by an entirely new set of pupils, pupils sometimes with eagles or stars on their shoulders, or in the civil field, captains of industry, clad in the glittering armor of a big business reputation.

Nowadays one cannot be a scholar in general. One has to have some specialty. As to what that specialty shall be in terms of usefulness to the community, I think I have given you examples enough to show that the range is almost unlimited. I had planned to sum up this by a brief record of the discovery and application to war purposes of helium; but I find that one of my own students in Columbia College, now a member of the Geological Survey, has beaten me out; and you can find the whole story in the May issue of the _National Geographic Magazine_. I cannot resist, however, a summary of the steps. First, the astronomer, just about the time this chapter was established, finds a new line in the solar spectrum. Thirty years later, the geologist comes upon an unusual stone and turns to a great chemist for its a.n.a.lysis, with the consequent recognition of helium as a mundane element. About the same time comes its identification as one of the newly recognized ingredients of the air, and the study of its properties. Then a Kansas chemist discovers its presence in some natural gas about which he was consulted because it would not burn properly. Then comes the war with its incendiary bullet and the need of a non-inflammable content for balloons and dirigibles.

Then the cooperation of physicist, engineer, and geologist--Canadian and American--makes helium available for this purpose. Before these researches helium cost $1700 a cubic foot and was obtainable only in Germany. The present price is 10 cents a cubic foot, and it is falling.

The importance of all this for peace is very great. In these days of airplane hops we are forgetting that a Zeppelin made the trip from Bulgaria to what should have been German East Africa with medicines and ammunition. The Germans having disappeared in the meantime, the Zeppelin turned around and came back, making a continuous voyage of several thousand miles.

But do not forget that not all scholars made good in the great test. Let me sum up what I have already said. In the first place, to be useful the scholarship must be sound. The near-scholar, the man who took the short-cut in preparation, proved to be a positive danger. The mere expert in some narrow field, the man who did not realize the implications of what he knew, was relatively useless. A man to succeed had to be intense without being narrow. Even among the sound scholars, the men who really knew, the isolated and insulated individual could very rarely make much headway. It was the open-minded scholar, the maker and keeper of friends, who got his chance, the scholar whose learning was to him a living thing, not necessarily to be displayed in the market place, and never for the sake of the display, but on the other hand never wrapped in a napkin and buried in the earth.

Will the scholar, now that his practical worth has been tested and proved, be content to slip back into relative obscurity; or will he, on the other hand, be tempted too far into the limelight and thereby lose those very qualities which gave him his value? Will he be satisfied with positions of leadership rather than leadership itself, which may be a very different thing? It is largely for you young men and young women of the rising generation of scholars to say.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: An address delivered before the New York Delta of Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia University upon the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Chapter, June 3, 1919.]

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?[3]

I am going to try to select three or four general fields in which we Americans have had a chance to learn lessons of permanent value as the result of our war experience. Then I shall try to apply these to what seems to me the most typical specimen of the best in American life, a great American University; and finally, I shall try to apply them to the situation which faces you young men and women of the graduating cla.s.s as you step out to take your places in the world. And in so doing I'm going to look deliberately on the bright side. There are troubles enough in the world to worry and depress us, and we have to face them, but let us face them with a confidence that is justified in the light of the examples of man's endurance, of his courage, of his possibilities of accomplishment, which it has been our privilege to witness within the lifetime of this academic generation.

What have we learned? In the first place, we have learned that as a nation we possess the power to see a big job through, and we possess it because we have the qualities of youth--enthusiasm, learning capacity, energy, elasticity, initiative--the pioneering spirit. We have the shortcomings of youth also--impatience, superficiality, improvidence, c.o.c.k-sureness--but when the test came we managed to strengthen our virtues and to a large extent to overcome our failings.

The various stocks that have emigrated to our sh.o.r.es have come as successive waves of pioneers, of men to whom new and unfamiliar conditions serve as an incentive rather than a discouragement, and it is the persistence of this pioneering spirit, essentially a youthful spirit, which has had much to do with our success.

What single group made the finest impression in the great war? I think we will agree that it was the American doughboy. As one saw him in France he was absolutely youth incarnate, and he is a cross section of our complex population. If anyone still doubts that all of these stocks, the Teutonic included, have been willing to do their share even at the risk or cost of life, let him read any of the lists of battle casualties or the list of honors for heroic conduct and he will have the best kind of proof. Let us remember in this connection that nearly one-fourth of our drafted men couldn't speak and write English adequately when they entered the Army. In spite of a number of unsightly pieces of slag, which are either floating on the surface or have sunk to the bottom, the great national melting pot has evidently done its work well.

Our heterogeneous immigration, our enormous national resources, which have tempted us to live on capital rather than on interest, our prosperity, have made us neither fat nor flabby. We now know that as a people we don't really care about money or the money game if we are shown some other game better worth playing; that selfishness and luxury drop away as if by magic when they interfere with the keener satisfactions of giving one's self. Even for us stay-at-homes, the Liberty Loan people, Mr. Hoover, the Red Cross and other welfare workers were on hand to show us how to play the better game. I don't need to remind you of the details, nor that in spite of human grumbling and talk of sacrifice, in the bottom of our hearts we all enjoyed the process.

In the second place, we have learned that to see the job through we need all of the nation, men and women, not merely the profession of arms and the mysterious powers of finance--we need all of everyone. We need them not as individuals but as a team, and we have learned that we can develop team play.

Our easiest jobs were the raising of our men and our money; our hardest, the moulding of the whole into an organic unity. Just as our young men by the millions took their place in the line when the bugle blew, older men by the tens of thousands left their private affairs to get along as best they might, and regardless of political affiliations or personal convenience, found place for themselves in the administrative army. And they were ably seconded by the women. Hundreds of men in key positions have gladly borne witness to the share which their secretaries and their other women a.s.sociates played in bringing about the needed results.

The first days of the war were days of whirling confusion, colored by glowing forecasts. Then followed months of experimentation, by trial and error, of hope deferred by long delays, of well meant but none the less embarra.s.sing internal rivalries, of sudden spurts. Later came the days of last autumn, when the whole great machine was throbbing rhythmically and steadily, with only a minor "knock" here and there--a sure indication to the watchful enemy, who had had more than a taste of what the machine could produce, that the game was up; and finally the eleventh of November and the order to reverse the engines.

It ought to be evident from our experience that for any great enterprise we need all the young men and the young women, and all the older ones who are still young in heart. We need to know who they are, where they are, what they can do, and we need to touch them at every point; for not only do we need them all, but we need all of each one of them. We should never again face a great national crisis with nearly one-third of our men of military age unfit for hard physical work. We need campaigns of physical education and social hygiene, and we need to apply the lessons in human salvage which the army has learned during the war. But we need more than each individual and all of him. We must see to it that the individual star, of whatever magnitude, is subordinated to the team play of the group. And team play means more than energy and "pep." It means a marshalling of the old fashioned and homely virtues of courtesy, deference and consideration.

In the third place, we have learned that to accomplish a great result we need the leadership of those who know and who know vividly and constructively. Our experience has been that in certain fields, finance, science, manufacturing in quant.i.ty production, medicine, we had a supply of those who knew. In other fields, in intimate knowledge of foreign conditions and foreign languages for example, we had not.

At first we didn't know where our leaders were, and in many cases we began by following false prophets. The value of one man with training, brains and persistence can be shown by a single example: There was a man who answered these qualifications connected with the Council of National Defence, not in a very exalted position. He was the first in all this country to see that the army program and the shipping program did not fit. It took him a long time to convince the two groups of overworked, harried officials that neither could play the game alone; that the closest cooperation was necessary. He had no access to the records, but he finally managed to build up a convincing statement out of the shreds of information which he gathered here and there, and at last he succeeded in getting everyone concerned into the att.i.tude of wanting to face the facts. Everyone would have had to face them sooner or later, but without the devotion and leadership of this one man, it would have been only as the result of a very serious dislocation of function.

One field in which the right leadership has been most brilliantly rewarded is that of medicine. Just consider what we have done in this field: The success of the anti-typhoid injections; the reduction in dysenteric diseases due to chlorination of drinking water; the encouraging fight against cerebro-spinal meningitis and pneumonia; the identification of trench fever, and the practical freedom from typhus.

As to wounds, a teta.n.u.s ant.i.toxin which has made lock-jaw almost a negligible disease; a serum against gas gangrene; the Carrel-Dakin method of chemical sterilization of wounds; the splinting of fractures on the battle field and overhead extension apparatus in the hospital. To quote Simon Flexner, "The entire psychology of the wounded men was altered, the wards made cheerful and happy, pain abolished, infection controlled, and recovery hastened by means of the new or improved surgical and mechanical measures put into common use."

The fourth lesson of which I wish to speak is that a high aim and ideal is what counts most of all, what lifts the individual up from selfishness and sloth. To bind the country together and to make the transformation which still seems miraculous, we had a n.o.ble national aim, a complete dedication to the task before us, an utter absence of any selfish or self-seeking factor in the whole enterprise. The conduct of our soldiers, their submission to a discipline to which most of them were completely unused was, I think, in a very large measure due to the recognition of this aim. We recognized it as a nation and we recognized it in one another. The standard of contact set by our soldiers during the days of conflict is unique in military history. Whole divisions went for months without a single court-martial. The reason was, more than anything else, the national a.s.sumption that they would give a good account of themselves and the fact that they felt themselves in training for the championship, and no man wanted to miss his chance on the battlefield for the sake of a selfish indulgence.

Some of the experiments in conduct tried in the American Expeditionary Forces were extraordinary in their success. The leave areas, an immense enterprise, were run on the basis of absolute freedom to the enlisted man. He lived in the best hotels in Europe and amused himself in casinos where crowned heads had been in the habit of gambling away the money of their subjects. He had no roll calls, no taps, no officers in sight, no military machinery whatever. He arose when he pleased, either before or after his breakfast; he ate and drank when he pleased, and he stayed out as late as he pleased. The physical and moral effect of this absolute change from the military regime was a very interesting and instructive phenomenon, but that is not the point I wish to make. Out of the thousands and thousands of men who were sent to these leave areas, there was hardly a single case in which a man abused the trust which was put upon him or failed to turn up on time to go back to the grind of military duty. This could never have been done with soldiers of another type, with soldiers lacking an ideal.

Someone has recently written that fine minds have been finely touched by the war, and base minds basely. He might have added that wise minds have been wisely touched, and foolish minds foolishly. In general, I think it may fairly be said that when the appeal was to the finest in a man's character, the result was correspondingly fine.

These, it seems to me, are the four main things we have learned, or at any rate we have had a chance to learn. First, that we are a real nation, potentially strong with the strength of youth. Second, that to fulfill our mission, every man and woman and all of every such individual is an object of national concern; that we must be mobilized and we must continue our lessons in team play. We have still plenty to learn in this field. Third, that we must have and must recognize the leadership of those who know, which, after all, is the great test of a democracy. Fourth, that to bring out the best that is in us, as individuals and as a nation, we must have an aim, high, clear-cut and clearly understood. If, now, I attempt to apply these four lessons which we have had a chance to learn, to educational conditions, and particularly to university conditions, it will be for three reasons: The first is the general wisdom of confining one's remarks to things he knows something about. The second, that there is no single inst.i.tution more characteristic of the best in our American life than a great American University. And there is this third reason, that if we had not had a supply of young men with the stamp of the American college upon them, we could never have met the call for officers, for nearly a quarter of a million of them. I am told that the Germans were prepared to admit and to discount our wealth in money, in materials and in man power, but they looked forward confidently to a complete failure on our part in training officers to lead our men in battle. Of course, all the citizen officers who made good records were not college men, but the college trained citizens were the men who set the pace and made the standard.

It was Pitt who said, "The atrocious crime of being a young man I shall attempt neither to palliate nor to deny." Nor should a university seek to palliate or to deny the charge of being a place of resort for youth.

A university, it seems to me, should be a place where the primary object is not the repression of youthful exuberance nor the correction of youthful failings (though both may be necessary on occasion), but rather, a place for the encouragement of the great and vital qualities of youth--enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sensitiveness of impression. It is the place where the older members of the community have the best chance to stay young. The university should be essentially a company of enthusiasts, of pioneers. There is a frontier for every worker to clear--no matter how narrow or how wide his horizon may be. In a university there is no proper place, among faculty or students, for the disillusioned, the cynical, the defeatist.

Now we come to the application of the second lesson, the lesson of mobilization, of team play. In the first place, no university is alive where mobilization is limited to the Recorder's office. In a live inst.i.tution, regent, professor, student, janitor, each is a part of the game and must feel that he is. He must feel that in its administration the inst.i.tution has learned the great lesson of direct and human personal contact. Science, among all its triumphs, cannot include any device for conveying a message from mind to mind or from heart to heart half so good as the human voice and the human eye. Within the faculty, this element of human cooperation should be reflected by the vitality of the organism rather than by the complexity of the organization, which may not be vital at all. Each member must feel that the general repute is safeguarded by honest and intelligent standards, honestly and intelligently administered. The university, like the country at large, must make itself responsible for all of each and every student, his bodily condition, for example, just as directly as his mental.

It will be recalled that one of my justifications for applying war experiences to university conditions was the share which the college and university men had in building up our supply of officers. If we study why the college men made good officers, and make allowance for the fact that it is the kind of man who goes to college who is likely to make a good officer anyway, and all the other allowances we can think of, we can't dodge the conclusion that there is something outside of the college curriculum which has been an important factor in bringing about the results. On the other hand, important as the other factors are, the curriculum has had its share, and it is in my judgment a leading and not always an adequately recognized share. The comfortable theory that once he has settled down to something important the college ne'er-do-well will suddenly blossom forth into a competent leader of men didn't work out in practice. It may have happened here and there, but it didn't happen as a general rule. In the fighting line, it was very generally the man with a sound academic record, not necessarily the Phi Beta Kappa lad, but the good scholar and active college citizen, the man who had taken the trouble to learn things and learn people, who made the best record. I naturally watched with particular interest the records of my own old students at Columbia, and I know that this is so.

It is a significant fact, however, for those of us who are interested in the welfare of college boys and girls, that the United States government deliberately built up what was to all intents and purposes an undergraduate college life for the young men of the army, with athletics, dances, dramatics, singing, and all the rest, even including opportunities for reading and study. Even the most hardened of regular officers, who at the first, I fear, regarded this as some of the civilian foolishness with which all soldiers have to contend, came to see that the program was a vital factor in building up such a body of fighting men as they had never seen. And this is only another way of saying that if you want to use the human machine for any purpose, you must concern yourself with the whole of it. Human nature does not come in air-tight compartments.

President Wilson coined a phrase which has thoroughly gone the rounds when he said that the side-shows of college life should not overshadow nor distract from the entertainment in the main tent. We all agree to this. But I think we are more inclined than when the words were spoken to urge that the side-shows, properly and intelligently subordinated, should be under the same management as the main tent. The army has tried the experiment on a large scale and it has worked well. In February last there were in France and on the Rhine six million and a half individual partic.i.p.ants in athletic games, ten million attendants on entertainments, nearly a quarter of a million students.

None of the lessons which the Army has learned are more significant than those which have to do with mobilization and cla.s.sification. The activities of the Provost Marshal General, of the Committee on Cla.s.sification and Personnel, in cooperation with the Committee on Education, furnish the best record of large scale human engineering in the new science of personnel of which we have any record, either in this country or, I think, elsewhere.

A university like this one is an army, and not such a small army either, judging by peacetime standards. The United States found that it was worth while, indeed that it was absolutely necessary in organizing its forces, to find out everything it could about every man in the army, what he needed physically to increase his efficiency; what he needed to keep him interested and out of mischief; what he should have in the way of training--based on what he knew already and based on careful mental tests--to make him of the greatest usefulness; whether he had the will to win, and if not, whether anything could be done to get it into him.

In a word, the United States wanted to know just what each man's possibilities were. Was he officer material or non-com material? Should he go into the line or one of the special corps--or to the labor battalion? As a result of this program, the Army succeeded in finding a place that counted for 98 per cent of the drafted men.

Now I realize that a university can't do all these things with its army in just the way the government can. It can't casually transfer a man from engineering to psychology, nor a girl from philosophy to cookery--or _vice versa_--no matter how desirable such a transfer might be for the individual and the community. But it can do a great deal more than it now does in finding out about all its members, informing them of their strength and weaknesses, in seeing that every student gets a chance to enjoy in so far as possible the high privileges of youth, and to get a helping hand over the b.u.mps in the road, which also come with youth. Every student ought to have the opportunity to round out his character and his capacities. It ought not to be left to chance that any student gets the best personal contacts for him or her with faculty and fellow-students, the best opportunities for learning team play. Every student ought to leave with some definite aim in life, and if possible an aim high enough to be an ideal that is worth working for.

A university is not doing its full duty if its athletics and social life are limited to those who need these the least; if its alumni are regarded merely as fillers of the grandstands or recipients of oratory, and possible sources of pecuniary support. The alumni are the best possible sources of keeping the faculty informed as to what the world really wants in the way of trained men and women, and, for the students, of information, suggestions, and jobs, both temporary and permanent.

I realize that many of these things are now done here and elsewhere, but in the light of what we have learned from the experience of the University of Uncle Sam, I am sure that our American universities and colleges have hardly scratched the surface of what they might do and what, I think, they will ultimately do in the realm of human engineering. Nearly all educational inst.i.tutions merely follow what they find the leaders are doing, and in this field there is an opportunity, I am sure, for real leadership.