Eye of the Hurricane

by LUCIEN PRICE

1

ANATION in perils falls back upon its most precious possession. That possession is its young men. The burden of maintaining any security in our lives falls on them, and this before they have had their share of the life they are compelled to protect at the risk of their own. As combat deepens, the men on whom the nation calls are younger and younger. We are now down to our eighteenyear-olds. The colleges have been virtually denuded of students in the liberal arts; whatever general education our adolescent boys are to have must now be given before they come of military age.

American life through its whole three centuries has been civilian. We have produced on this continent a type of gracious, kindly youth from whose thoughts the farthest was that of injuring a fellow mortal. His habitual frame of mind was, “If I harm no one, no one will harm me.” While this type was not unique in history, it was produced here in larger proportion than anywhere else previously on earth, thanks partly to a continent bounteous in natural wealth, and thanks even more to an ever widening, free, public, and liberal education.

On this human type is based our democratic system. For social systems are based not on how people think but on how they feel. Their constitutions, laws, and customs flow through the brain from the heart. Legal systems are effects, not causes. Our society prizes mercy and justice because the people on this continent for the past three centuries have prized mercy and justice. These basic concepts are transmitted, almost unconsciously, from one generation to the next, beginning at infancy and coming to focus as adolescence draws to a close, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. These are the very life-stuff of our civilization; we take them in as it were through our pores, and they are what assures the continuance of a civil society.

This peculiar distinction of American life was first pointed out to me by Europeans. We ourselves, never having known the lack, take it like the air we breathe, scarcely giving it a thought; so my reply to my European informants was at first somewhat brusque: that being distinguished men, traveling and lecturing, they were more or less carried around on silver platters by hosts who were flattered to have them as guests. But it appeared that they meant not their hosts but the host of strangers — casual encounters in stores, on streets, at ticket windows; seat companions in railroad trains, taxi drivers; in two words: common people. They all said, and said repeatedly, that the prevailing kindliness in this country was like nothing they had ever experienced or heard of anywhere else on earth.

Three sojourns in Europe opened my own eyes. Our unique contribution to the progress of the world is not so much liberty as it is equality. It is the easy, natural, confraternal mingling of our people. Poverty or riches, education or ignorance, may impede it here or there; but at bottom we take it so much as a matter of course that it we find an individual or a social set where it is not, our instinctive response to its absence is ridicule.

Huckleberry Finn is our perfect symbol. Our imaginations accept him as a completely natural boy. And the presuppositions of that barely literate waif were all humane and equalitarian because Mark Twain put into him the feelings which are common to our people.

If conscription at the age of eighteen be military necessity, then it is the bounden duty of civilians to protect our adolescents from the alienation of their rightful heritage. We are trustees for every article of value which their elder brothers have been conscripted to defend, and which they themselves may be. Some of these articles are concrete— homes, ancestral acres of tillage, jobs in factory or office; others are semi-tangible, as the vote or the right to strike; still others, though highly abstract, are yet the most valuable of all: access to a life of the mind and spirit, what is called “the good life.”

A boy in his teens is a crock of yeast in ferment. “To flaming youth let virtue be as wax.”Instead of successive crops of adolescents indoctrinated at their most impressionable age with the basic practices of civilian life, of civil government, of humanistic learning and the creative arts, suppose you get crop after crop conditioned to something quite different and often exactly the reverse. Behind the warrior are at least three million years of hereditary instinct — plus some glandular adrenalin at the spurt; behind the peaceable civilian are not more than three thousand years, if that.

Does it occur to us that, after this war, the kind of society which will emerge will depend on the kind of ideas uppermost in the minds of men who are now boys? Not since 1865 have our youth been under arms four years; in the previous World War our young men were in action hardly longer than from April, 1917, to November, 1918, and in uniform only until 1919 or 1920; yet the effects on civilian life in America for the next ten years are now known as the Jazz Decade. The form which social dislocation took here after the previous war was mainly personal conduct; that it did not take the form of major civil disturbance may be attributed to the shortness of our participation in that war.

When the house catches fire, people do strange things. They carry the ancestral musket downstairs after having thrown the heirloom china out of the second-story window. American wartime hysteria goes in fashions. From 1917 to 1920 the fashion was to persecute unpopular minorities; this time it takes the form of a loyalty more enthusiastic than discriminating, which permits, or threatens to permit, the abandonment of education in America, for the duration at least, if not entirely to military science, certainly to the sciences at the further expense of the humanities.

The argument is, of course, for a short war. To end it speedily by overwhelming force is at once the most humane course and the one most likely to save our semi-democratic societies. “Everybody in it! Victory in two years — or five at most. Make it short and snappy. Then back to your books or your jobs.” But suppose the war should not be short — thus far, for us and our friends, it has certainly been neither short nor snappy — the argument for a short war then becomes a gamble.

A central fact in the European situation between 1919 and 1939 was that the young men, whose thinking should have produced fresh ideas and prevented another World War, were dead. The art by which Russia was best known to the world before 1914 was prose fiction; the distinctive art of Germany was music, that of France was drama and belles-lettres; that of England was the art of politics. In the two decades after 1918, the decline of each of those countries in its characteristic art was glaring.

In America we had, until within a year or two, at least this advantage: that while those European arts were mainly non-instilutional and were perpetuated by individual transmission from great talent to great talent, in our newer society it was our educational system which, if working on a humbler scale, did nevertheless transmit to young men of average ability, at the age of their most fertile receptivity, those concepts necessary to the continuation of our liberal institutions. Adolescence is the golden link in our chain of social inheritance. Of this heritage, the essence is continuity. Break that — on the high hazard of a short war — and what have you?

We are in a Mississippi steamboat race. Our lives and money are staked on our own boat. A deck hand has been hoisted up to sit on the safety valve. Fuel! Fuel! More fuel! Stokers feed her furnaces with cargo, deck fixtures, cabin fittings, furniture, passengers’ luggage, then with the family, the school, the university — anything that will burn. But what if we win the race only to find that we have stoked our furnaces with those possessions which alone make the race worth winning?

2

THE schoolmaster in America has been more honored in theory than in practice. He has always been with us — hundreds and thousands of him from Ezekiel Cheever in the Boston Latin School of 1670 to his successors in 1943. Patiently through the years, he has turned out thousands of young citizens who, without knowing how they did it, preserved our social equilibrium against the hard-boiled plutocrat at one extreme and the crackpot agitator at the other. Your man of learning as schoolmaster defeated the ravages of ignorant fanaticism by the simplest of means; his pupils, having been shown cases all through world history in which such excesses had marred more than they mended, having been taught to examine the evidence and decide for themselves, heard the extremists of both camps with mental reservations. They had, as we say, “been around.” When one knows somewhat of the best that has been thought and done by the finest minds for twenty-six centuries, he is no longer a wind vane.

But “easy is the descent to Avernus.” German universities before 1914 were the admiration of the world. Twenty years later, Germans were beheading women with a medieval axe. They also beheaded their universities.

In our firmament the scholar is on the wane if not in eclipse. On the continent of Europe, universities scarcely exist; in England they stand their ground under heavy odds; in America they are being turned over to war effort with a thoroughness which threatens the bases of our liberal institutions. But even before this second World War began, the refugee scholar was a symptom of the prevailing social deterioration.

For the previous five centuries the scholar had been held in esteem. He had been maintained in moderate comfort, especially since the Renaissance, though also before it, because creatively fertile ages are eager for living ideas and these are the commodity which the scholar, at his best, has to offer. But when it is deemed expedient to freeze an existing social system in the hope of perpetuating a dominant class, ideas become contraband, “dangerous thoughts,” and the scholar is outcast.

With us in America until the turn of the present century, the schoolmaster, the scholar, the college president tended to be a comic butt. His usefulness was acknowledged, but he was privately laughed at by his neighbors who were getting on in a worldly way. If he had been any good, why hadn’t he made money? Harmless old party, his sense of property rights was so dim that he forgot his umbrella. This ridicule did him no harm, for a man is never safer than when he is under the laugh. He was able to do his work unmolested, and it was work of supreme value; by humanizing he stabilized.

We have never missed him because he has never been gone; his perpetuity has been taken for granted like a parent’s, for we cannot remember a time when we did not rely on him. The schoolmaster, the professor, the liberal scholar is the other half which, with the adolescent boy, makes our social system what it is. He is our bulwark against the destructive violence of the ignorant from whatever camp — political, military, plutocratic, religious, proletarian. That old party who forgets his umbrella is still our best friend, and for the very reason that he knows how much more valuable ideas are than an umbrella.

Since 1920, however, that old party has become a young party. In 1910 a talented college graduate who went into secondary-school teaching was regarded by his classmates as either a fool or a fanatic. For the past twenty years the teaching profession has been getting more and more the pick of the crop. While this trend has been more pronounced in the endowed schools than in the public ones, nevertheless both kinds have benefited; for however able and devoted our women teachers may be (and the debt this Republic owes them is incalculable and unpayable), adolescent boys are best taught by men, and preferably by young men.

Conscription reaches for our young men teachers. The vitamin deficiency in our civilian life thus attacks both parties at once — the adolescent on one side, the schoolmaster on the other. A good many people were shocked, I myself not least, that the liberal arts faculties and men teachers of nonmilitarizable subjects in secondary schools put up so little protest against the abrogation of their functions. You might have supposed there was no halfway house between total war and conscientious objection.

These men of the teaching profession were too modest, too high-minded, and too well-bred. The fact that they might be deemed to have a grubstake in the position which they needed to defend was taken by the majority of them as a reason for not speaking out. Other groups are not so self-denying. Had it been any one of a hundred other occupations you can think of, just imagine how they would have howled blue murder to high heaven!

3

IN MARCH, 1927, on the stone quays at Naples I watched files of black-shirted ten-year-old urchins being toughened for military drill. The Germans less openly were doing the same. Fascism reaches down into the lower adolescent age-bracket, and beyond into childhood, stultifying school curricula and conditioning the lads before they reach Boy Scout age. These hardened babes, now in their twenties, are an acknowledged post-war problem for the world. They are virtually a criminal class which requires to be kept under restraint if it cannot be re-educated and de-bamboozled. Is it suggested that we dilute our school curricula, carry pre-military training down to our own lads at or before the Boy Scout age, and create a problem generation of our own by way of reforming Fascism’s problem children?

Let the education of American boys below the age of eighteen remain civilian. The Army and Navy are demonstrating their ability to train and condition recruits fast enough. What schooling these lads receive before they are conscripted at eighteen may be their only access, for no one knows how long, not only to a general education, be it vocational or liberal, but also to the formation of those civilian habits of mind on which our society has hitherto depended for the maintenance of its liberties and its powers of origination.

We hope for a short war. But to gamble our future, as contained in the civilian-mindedness of our youth, on that hazard would be as dangerous a folly as to gamble militarily on a short war by preparing to win or lose by a certain date and staking all on that throw. Should the war be prolonged beyond all expectation by that enormous complex of causes which no man can compute, and crop after crop of eighteen-year-olds go into the armed forces without having had the utmost that can be given them, preferably by men teachers, of non-military education, our Mississippi steamboat race could end with a victory won by a hulk empty of everything but its industrial boilers and military engines.

In peacetime the army skeletonizes its forces. In wartime our educational forces are of necessity skeletonized. To skeletonize too far could be as fatal in the one case as in the other. Men teachers vital to a school, public or endowed, should be exempted from conscription as a matter of course. Let them wear an emblem, or a distinctive dress if you will, military uniform if that be needed to relieve them from the occult pressure of public disapproval. Call them a “force” if that would satisfy the emotional requirements of their neighbors, for a force they are, at once requisite and saving.

Many a man who could have been far more valuable at his teaching post than at an army post has enlisted because he could not endure the unspoken query behind his neighbors’ eyes. Schoolboys, who are not so reticent, ask them outright why they do not enlist. The reply they should be authorized to make is: “Because my government orders me to stay where I am and try to make civilized human beings out of you.” A certain university president has suggested that it takes no courage to stay out of uniform on grounds of public principle. Such a remark could be made only by one who, however intellectually acute, is spiritually obtuse. To stand alone against crowd opinion takes a degree of moral heroism which we have no right to demand of men teachers when their position could be and should be publicly regularized.

4

MECHANICAL ingenuity is a trump card in America’s hand. That form of skill is native to us; we have it in every sort from knack at tinkering to advanced scientific techniques. It is the skill which seems most valuable in such a time as this; we exult in it — and we are in danger of overplaying the hand.

We must take our seat at the world table. Victory would devolve upon us tasks on a global front — military control, civil administration, disbursements of food and medical supplies, the myriad details of de facto management. Whether such control were permanent or temporary, it would require a large, specially trained force, and such a force is, as a matter of fact, in preparation. The proposed studies, besides military subjects, appear to lean heavily toward science, mathematics, and machine technology. “Stock pile” is the term used by a Brigadier General of War Department Personnel to define this group.

Countries with large colonial possessions are familiar with corps of this sort — the British civil service is one and the pre-war French colonial administration was another. On any large scale, it is new to us, and there is also a major difference. Those older hands at the game have taken care to equip their men with a twofold training: their technical equipment came second; it was preceded by a thorough schooling in languages ancient and modern, history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and the whole content of historic cultures. If you wonder why Honours at the English universities are given such prominence, here you are: the prize men get the careers. Their proficiency is decided first in the humanistic studies; their technical training is considered secondary. And their drill in these humanistic studies begins when they are schoolboys in short breeches.

Our allies, the British, have been running a colonial empire for generations. How, despite their blunders, have they kept it up? Have they some secret, esoteric doctrine? Yes — one of those secrets which are all the harder to guess for being in plain sight. Anybody who has himself been through the drill of humanistic studies from schoolboyhood to middle age finally comes to with a start, and a great light dawns on him. “Here, in these subjects, are charted the successes and failures of human society, with reasons for both. Here is a manual of civilization— examples of what has been tried, of what works and what does not. Here are the implements of long-range wisdom, hammered out on the ringing anvil of time.” Is this how Britain does it? Ask an Oxford don or a London newspaper editor. In urbane language he will reply, “How did you guess it? ” And these are the studies which are commonly spoken of in America as “dead.”

Abstract mathematics are prerequisite for military science; modern foreign languages are necessary to us now as never before, since we must take our place at the world table; and the ancient tongues, Greek and Latin, together with history, literature, philosophy, and science are the thinking, speaking, and doing apparatus of civilized Western man. Yet there is a concerted attack on foreign languages ancient and modern, by a formidable faction of educational theorists. (Taking advantage of public disaster to go after private loot is an offense punishable by shooting!) If our youth, either at home or abroad, lack the elder and deeper training, they will be illequipped to cope with the complicated human situations which lie before us. The term “stock pile” is not too felicitous. It connotes replacement parts in a machine. In the years ahead we shall need far higher forms of skill than mechanical ingenuity.

The eye of the hurricane is that spot, halfway through, where the wind drops, sky clears, sun shines, and sea moderates. Beyond this the hurricane resumes full force, but blowing from the opposite direction. Until navigators learned better, they mistook the eye of the hurricane for the end of the storm, were caught in the second blow, sails taken aback, and foundered. Military victory for our side will be no more than the eye of the hurricane. Beyond it lies an equally heavy storm from the opposite direction. We need our military crew for the first half of this hurricane; for the second half we shall need all the help we can get from our civilian crew. Are there some among the captains of heavy industry and high finance who think they can use the military crew to dominate the civilian? The Fascists thought so too.

Liberal education, from boyhood to manhood, has been and must be our apparatus for peaceable social evolution. Wreck that in any part and you have wrecked your vehicle of orderly advance. If we sever the hard-won wisdom of the past from the urgencies of the present, then young men, who are notoriously the ones who make revolutions, will seize the title deeds of society by those engines of violence which they are now being taught so expertly to wield.