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SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS
* * * * *
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
SALES AGENTS
NEW YORK
LEMCKE & BUECHNER
30-32 EAST 20TH STREET
LONDON
HUMPHREY MILFORD
AMEN CORNER, E.C.
SHANGHAI
EDWARD EVANS & SONS, LTD.
30 NORTH SZECHUEN ROAD
* * * * *
SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS
The Soldier's Standards of Conduct
The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship
What Have We Learned?
by
FREDERICK PAUL KEPPEL
Third Assistant Secretary of War
[Illustration]
New York
Columbia University Press
1920
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1920
By Columbia University Press
Printed from type, January, 1920
Printed at
The Plimpton Press
Norwood Mass U S A
TO
NEWTON D. BAKER
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE AMERICAN SOLDIER AND HIS STANDARDS
OF CONDUCT 9
II. THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN
SCHOLARSHIP 36
III. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 66
SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS
THE AMERICAN SOLDIER AND HIS STANDARDS OF CONDUCT[1]
Perhaps the greatest laboratory experiment in human conduct in the
history of the world has been the development of our Army during the
past two years. Under the provisions of the Selective Service Law, this
Army has represented a cross section of American male humanity--even
more representative indeed than was intended; for in the efforts of the
Local Boards to send men who could best be spared, many found their way
into the ranks who were handicapped from the start by low mentality or
disease. What were the guiding forces which operated upon this body of
nearly four million men?
In the first place, our country entered the war with a great moral
purpose, untinged by any trace of national or individual selfishness.
We really have to go back to the Crusades to find the like. And, as
then, each man supplemented this great basal impulse with whatever was
to him the strongest incentive--religion, patriotism, pride of family or
state or regiment, the desire to excel in what all were attempting.
In the second place, thanks primarily to the vision and determination of
one man, the individual appeal to each soldier as to his personal share
in the great enterprise was upon the highest plane. We were fortunate in
having at the head of the War Department a man peculiarly sensitive to
community problems and with no small experience in their solution.
Through the centuries men had come to the belief that if their soldiers
were only valiant and disciplined in arms, it would not do to inquire
too curiously into their personal standards of conduct in other
matters--that a considerable wastage in military strength from
drunkenness and disease was inevitable. And as we all know, this wastage
has in the past sapped, not only the strength of the Army, but
afterwards the very life of the nation to which the soldier must sooner
or later return.
The Secretary of War and his lieutenants, chief among whom in this field
should be placed the Chairman of the Committee on Training Camp
Activities, Raymond B. Fosdick, approached this problem neither in the
fatalistic spirit that what has always been must continue to be, nor in
a spirit of what, for want of a better term, I may call doctrinaire
idealism. They faced the fact that among the hundreds of thousands of
young men who were to be called to the colors, there would be many whose
ears would be deaf to any abstract appeal, and many others to whom such
an appeal might be made under normal conditions, but who in fatigue or
the let-down following the strain of conflict, could not be depended
upon to stand in the hour of temptation. As a result the whole field of
preventive measures was thoroughly studied and vigorous treatment was
applied. The Army regulations as to prophylaxis and the introduction of
intoxicants into camps were strictly and honestly enforced. The Army saw
to it that state and local laws as to liquor and prostitution were
properly carried out, and if these were lacking, they were promptly
enacted. The so-called Zone Law was adopted for the purpose of placing
the immediate vicinity of camps under Federal control. In some cases
where the community showed signs of regarding the Army policy in this
regard as a _beau geste_ and nothing more, it was made to realize that
while the War Department could not compel the community to mend its
ways, it could and would move the camp in twenty-four hours to a more
wholesome environment. I am proud to say that it was necessary in only a
very few instances to bring forward this aspect of the situation, but
when it was necessary the Department spoke in no uncertain tone.
As a result of this general policy, in which the Navy shared, many a
wide-open town received a thorough house cleaning for the first time in
its career; in all between 120 and 140 red light districts were closed
and kept closed; and the underlying sordidness of many a smug
self-satisfied village was brought to light and remedied.
The men who came to the camps tainted with venereal disease or broken by
drink or morphine--and the number of these was great enough to shock our
national complacency (and incidentally to explode the national
assumption that the country is primarily the abode of virtue as the
city is of vice)--these men were salvaged by the tens of thousands and
turned into useful self-respecting soldiers and citizens.
The lesson of clean living was taught by the spoken word, by the moving
picture, by the printed page, by the doctor with a scientific
thoroughness and by the layman with a frankness and sometimes a
colloquialism which would for once have rendered Mrs. Grundy speechless.
As an instrument of virtue, the tract is, of course, of time-honored
usage, but the name of George Ade in the list of tract writers is a new
and significant one.
More important than all this, however, in my judgment, was the
realization by the Army of the great truth that the soldier--or any one
else for that matter--goes astray in only the rarest instances from
innate depravity. What he seeks primarily is relaxation and amusement.
And so wholesome relaxation and amusement were placed at his disposal to
take the place of the unwholesome. The whole nation rose to help in this
work of substituting the clean for the unclean. It poured its money by
the hundreds of millions into the coffers of the great welfare
societies, the Red Cross, The Young Men's Christian Association, Knights
of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, and later in recognition of its work
abroad, the Salvation Army. All of these vied with one another in a
rivalry which was sometimes embarrassing in its intensity. The American
Library Association supplied books and other reading matter, and the War
Camp Community Service made sure that, to the towns and villages
surrounding it, a cantonment presented an opportunity for service rather
than for exploitation. Not the least important factor in the superb
showing which our troops made in France was the spirit with which the
men and women of these same towns inspired the men from the training
camps whom they took into their homes and their hearts.
Within the fabric of the Army the chaplains were doing their share, as
were the athletic leaders and song leaders and dramatic coaches. They
were seconded by the officers of the line, most of whom, it should be
said, saw the military usefulness of the whole program from the first,
many of the experienced regulars having always done what they could with
the limited means at their command along the same lines. Other officers,
however, had to be shown--and were shown--the military importance of
the truth that the merry heart goes all the day, and the sad one tires
in a mile.
The work of planning and coordination was in the hands of the civilian
Commission on Training Camp Activities, of which Mr. Fosdick has been
from the first the Chairman. The work of this Commission has been
characterized from the outset by a courage and resourcefulness for which
no praise can be too high. The theatre for example has not always been
looked upon by the American people as a moral agency, but the Commission
saw its place in the scheme of things and no fewer than thirty-seven
great playhouses have been erected at the camps and the audiences have
run literally into the millions. Boxing likewise was encouraged, even
though some of the contests which resulted were not of the most gentle.
Cantonment towns were persuaded to open the "Movies" on Sunday, the only
day on which most soldiers could leave the Camp--the outcries of the
_unco guid_ to the contrary notwithstanding.
For more than a year the Commission and the welfare organizations were
the only organized forces in this general field, but since last summer
their work has been supplemented by the establishment within the Army
itself of a Morale Branch of the General Staff, in the formation of
which the Department was not too proud to take a leaf--perhaps one
should say a Blatt--from the Germans, who had already developed this
type of organization to a high degree, under the direct supervision of
General Ludendorff.
* * * * *
I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of
substitution, and I now come to the most important of all--the spirit of
confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization
that the great mass of our men would go straight for the sake of going
straight. We all instinctively couple the two words, "officer" and
"gentleman." In the great Army which is now being disbanded, its work
having been so gloriously done, we find a new and enlarged conception,
that of the soldier and gentleman. It was, I am certain, the preliminary
assumption that an American soldier was also an American gentleman in
all the fundamentals of that much-abused term, which was the great
factor in keeping down the number of those who proved the contrary to so
negligibly small a total.
A few figures from the official records will show what the result of
this all has been. In 1909, for instance, there were in the Army, in
round numbers, 5500 court-martial convictions of enlisted men, out of a
total of 75,000. For the fifteen months ending July 1, 1918, there were
11,500 convictions out of a total of 2,200,000 enlisted men, the
percentage in the twelve months of peace being 7.3 and in the fifteen
months of war, .53, about one-fourteenth as great. The significance of
these later figures cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of the
underlying circumstances. One case I remember was that of a man who got
drunk, spent his money and that of some fellow soldiers, and stayed
absent without leave to earn money enough to repay his fellow soldiers
and then returned to camp to take his medicine. What on the surface
appears to be the cowardly crime of desertion was, in several instances
of which I have personal knowledge, a misguided effort to get to the
front, through enlistment under another name in some branch of the
service which seemed to have an earlier prospect of getting over. In
France there were many cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the
rear to the front. The progressive success of the policy of keeping the
soldier from strong drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, which
show that early in the war one out of every twelve offenses charged
included drunkenness, but that this proportion dropped until the final
figures were less than one in each thirty offenses, this including
soldiers in France, where the soldier had to stand on his own feet
unprotected by prohibition laws.
The welfare program was, from the nature of the case, most effective
among the men of the National Army, where it was possible to take the
soldiers in hand from the first. If we analyze the court-martial
records, we find that the proportion of court-martials was distinctly
lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 1918, show that the
number of court-martials among the Regular Army was a little less than
one per cent, to be accurate 8/10 of one per cent; in the National Guard
the proportion was about 9/10 of one per cent; and in the National Army
it was less than 2/10 of one per cent, the exact figure being .143 per
cent, one-fiftieth of the percentage ten years ago.
Another check on the efficiency of the program is found in the records
as to venereal disease in the Surgeon General's Office. It is hard to
get comparative figures because of constantly changing conditions, but
it has been shown beyond all doubt that the health conditions in the
Army have been far, far better than in the community at large. While the
latter are not so bad as the alarmists have implied, they are serious
enough in all conscience, when in no fewer than seventeen of the states,
sixty or more of every thousand men who appeared at the mobilization
camps were found to be infected. Taking a typical month before the
signing of the armistice, we find that the proportion of cases coming to
the camps from the civil community was fifteen times as great as the
proportion among our soldiers in France, even including the soldiers in
the port towns, where most of our difficulties there were found. The
comparison with the records of the cantonments in this country is even
more striking.
* * * * *
As to the purely religious appeal and its influence on the men it is
hard to speak with any degree of certainty. A visiting British general
in Washington, shortly after our entry into the war, was asked as to
conditions in England, and is reported to have replied, "Upon my soul,
if you ask me, I should say that with us the dear old Church has rather
missed the bus." In this country the organized religious forces have by
no means missed the bus, but if we are honest with ourselves we must
face the fact that since the last great national test, the Civil War,
other appeals to higher standards of conduct have both actually and
relatively been tremendously strengthened, and our religious leaders
must address themselves, in the light of experience during these past
two years, to a clearer understanding of these other forces and to a
closer cooperation with them. We cannot to-day close our eyes to the
truth that many of our finest men played their splendid parts quite
untouched by a religious motive or appeal--or at least doctrinal appeal;
one hesitates to call their attitude a non-religious one. It must always
be remembered, however, that their standards, no matter how unconscious
they may have been of the fact, were fundamentally based upon the
development of a Christian civilization.
If thus far I may have seemed to measure soldier conduct by two
standards only, by his relation to drink and to women, it is because the
results of the policy of the Army in these two matters are measurable,
the records are outstanding. The Army and its experience however would
furnish but a poor guide to the Churches and the other civilian forces
for righteousness if its lessons were limited to the negative virtues,
important as they are, of sobriety and continence.
The real contribution, what we have learned as to the positive virtues,
is harder to describe and impossible to measure, but the lessons are
worth looking for and may be learned from the letters and from the lips
of our men. Perhaps I can best indicate what the men themselves regard
as vital by telling the experience of a friend who started one of the
customary practical talks before an audience of our men behind the lines
in France. His homily didn't seem to be "getting across" and he was
inspired to ascertain just what to their minds were the most serious
offenses. He asked each man to write down what he regarded as the three
very worst faults against which a soldier should be on his guard. When
the answers were collected, one word appeared on practically every slip
of paper, _cowardice_; the second was not so nearly unanimous, but
appears on a strong majority of the papers, _selfishness_; and the third
was evidently _conceitedness_, though the defect was worded in
different ways, as _big head_, _crust_, and the like.
In other words, the virtues which the soldier most admires and regarding
which he had evidently learned the most valuable lessons, are courage,
unselfishness or cooperativeness, and modesty.
The record of our soldiers has proved beyond a doubt that once you get
men into groups with a common and a worth-while purpose, courage--both
the reckless courage that comes by instinct and that higher type, the
courage of the man who recognizes his danger--can no longer be assumed
to be a rare virtue. It is a very common virtue. Cowardice is infinitely
rarer. The citations and the casualty records, for instance, have
completely rehabilitated the Jew as a fighting man, and the faithful
need no longer go back to Josephus for their war legends.
Not all the courage and fortitude was shown on the field of battle. We
must not forget that last fall we suffered from by far the most serious
epidemic in the history of America, and, in the dark days in our
training camps, opportunities were offered, and gladly accepted, for a
display of heroism and devotion of the highest type.
In the realm of fortitude, if not of physical courage, the war certainly
tapped new sources of determination and provided a kind of stimulus
which would keep a man to whom no personal glory or conspicuousness
could possibly come, some poor devil sentenced to a swivel chair,
laboring in that same chair day and night for the purpose of making some
single improvement in nut or bolt, or perhaps filing card. Given the
impetus of a great common purpose, our possibilities for industry are
limitless.
One thing that mankind should have learned long since is that, broadly
speaking, selfishness as a guiding motive is essentially negative--the
absence of something better--the man is a rare exception who does not
lose himself and his self-interest in the conception or the ambition of
the group, the squad or battalion or regiment, the division, the army or
the nation. An interesting side-light upon this is the fact that
two-thirds of the men who get into trouble in the Army, or at any rate
who get into sufficiently serious trouble to land them in Fort
Leavenworth, are markedly of the ego-centric type; in other words, are
men for whom the group cannot overcome the individual bias.
That our soldiers as a whole possess the virtue of modesty, though it is
often overlaid by a veneer of innocent swagger, is beyond dispute, as
any one who has had to do with them can testify. And underlying
and inspiring their whole conduct have been the qualities of
whole-souledness and determination and an indomitable cheerfulness.
* * * * *
We must learn the lessons which the soldiers have to teach us in the
large just as we must grasp their accomplishments in the large. There is
a morning after for nations as well as for individuals, and we seem just
now to be in danger of losing our conception of the greatness of the
enterprise, and its essential soundness, through the intrusion of the
instances, relatively very few, where things did not go right; where
human nature did not reach the heights, or having reached them, failed
to remain upon them.
It has, I think, been definitely proved that the mixing up of the
so-called welfare work with the special function of the clergymen or
other religious adviser, in order that the latter may be made more
palatable to the soldier, has an effect exactly the reverse of what was
intended. The policy of interpolating a prayer meeting, or a
heart-to-heart talk, between the third and fourth reels of the moving
picture play, and I grieve to say that such a policy was actually
followed for a while, is of course a fantastic example, but it shows
exactly how we ought not to do it.
The soldiers are peculiarly sensitive to any feeling that what is done
for them is done for some other purpose than the ostensible one,
entirely apart from how worthy such other purpose may be. Let me quote
from a letter written by an officer of the Army who had been visiting a
number of camps:
"The Camp Library to my mind fulfills one of the most vital needs of the
camp. It is a place where our men can get relaxation and mental
stimulus, and where they can feel at ease without the 'God-bless-you'
atmosphere of the other welfare organizations."... "It is the one place
in camp where you can go and have a chance to meditate or read in peace
and quiet without a piano jangling in your ears or the imminent
possibility of a prayer meeting."
The chaplain or the lay religious worker to whom a man instinctively
turned at the moment when he needed spiritual help was the one whom he
had learned to respect for courage and devotion and dignity, the man who
had helped to bury his dead friend, to comfort and amuse his wounded
friend, and to advise his misguided friend in the guard-house; not the
one whose ill-timed ministrations he had learned to avoid. I understand
that the story of the chaplain who entirely forgot that he was to appear
at a review for the purpose of receiving a medal and delayed the entire
proceedings while he was sought for and found in his customary post in
the connecting trench, is absolutely authentic.
The man who could forget his denomination in his devotion to the great
common mission was the man whom the soldier learned to love and to trust
and who could do the most in the day of battle. The most popular tales
among the chaplains are the tales of unorthodoxy: The Catholic priest
who baptized a group of his men before action in a shell hole with water
which was not only unblessed, but I fear unsanitary, and who simply
referred to Philip and the Eunuch when reproved; the Methodist and
Baptist, and I think the Episcopalian, who in the absence of their
Presbyterian colleague, solemnly and quite illegally received a
youngster into the Presbyterian fold before he went overseas, and
confessed the next morning to the Presbyterian Board; the Wesleyan
chaplain in the British Army who carried a crucifix to comfort the dying
Catholics on the battlefield when no priest of their faith was near, and
who administered the last rites to them as best he could. There are
hundreds of such stories.
The appeal of any denomination as such, or of the Y, or the
corresponding societies of other faiths, as such, was always mistaken.
It was the united appeal of all the doers of good deeds which counted.
If we never knew before, we know now the truth of the fable of the
bundle of fagots. Personally, I believe the united drive for welfare
work last fall, during which Protestant, Catholic and Jew, and men of no
formal religion whatever, appealed from the same platform for the same
great purpose, was an event of the greatest importance in our nation,
and it will go ill with us if we forget the lesson that it has to teach.
The appeal must be not only disinterested, but it must be simple and
direct. This, and the careful selection of its personnel, had much, if
not most, to do with the extraordinary success of the Salvation Army.
There are times in a soldier's life when the sewing on of a button at
some vital spot will do more to "get" him than anything else in the
world.
Out of this spirit of general helpfulness, there were developed at
almost every point the most beautiful and sympathetic adjustments to
immediate conditions. For example, take the plan of showing moving
pictures upon the ceilings of hospital wards, so that the very ill may
enjoy them without the strain even of raising their heads. This small
piece of thoughtfulness to me represents the standard of thinking a
problem through which we will have to maintain if we are to hold what we
have gained, and what we have gained includes, or should include, a
realization that active and willing loving-kindness furnishes the
keenest of all pleasures.
* * * * *
Thus far I have spoken mainly of the work of preparation in the United
States. Overseas our soldiers and their officers found new conditions
and were forced to make new adjustments. We no longer could control the
laws and ordinances, and we found different standards of conduct--not
necessarily lower standards, but different standards. We could no longer
enforce prohibition for example, but we did maintain a high average of
temperance. We showed our allies, some of whom I may say were honestly
sceptical on the subject, that with our soldiers continence was the
rule, and not the exception. When I was in France last year, I asked
those who were in a position to know upon this point and was told that,
comparatively speaking, very, very few of our men lowered in France the
standards of conduct which they held when they came into the Army, that
many more greatly improved those standards, either because of the
lessons they had learned in our training camps, or because of the
wholesome companionship of the women workers with whom they were daily
brought in contact, or because, and this was probably the most potent
factor of all, they were so desperately keen to get into the fighting
line that they were taking no chances of being put out of commission
beforehand. Their morality was the morality of the team in training for
the big game, and it kept tens of thousands of boys straight. Indeed,
until November 11, disciplinary problems may be said to have been
practically non-existent among combat troops and almost negligible among
the others. After the armistice was signed, there was a let-down, this
being after all a very human body of young men, and the first remedy
tried by some of the old-time regulars did not help a bit. This was to
"give 'em plenty of drill and make 'em so tired they won't have energy
to get into mischief," but as one returning artillery officer pointed
out to me, when a battery a month before has fired 50,000 rounds of
high-explosive at the Boche, and worked its guns over craters and
through thickets, a drill with dummy ammunition on a parade ground is
almost a justification for mutiny. Wiser counsel soon prevailed and the
welfare work, which had slumped with the rest, was again brought up to
concert pitch. It was for the first time in France, properly coordinated
under Army control. The misfits and the workers who had worn themselves
out were returned to this country and their places taken by fresh blood.
I remember in this connection a paragraph tucked in the middle of the
uncompromising officialdom of the daily departmental cable: "Send over
plenty of welfare workers and remember the best men you can send are the
women."
Let me take this chance to say a word about the criticisms we have been
hearing of this welfare work abroad. In the first place, the success of
the work in this country among the men in training set up an expectation
which it was humanly impossible to meet under the conditions overseas;
in other words, the men who went over assumed standards as to the
minimum amount of attention which it was their right to expect, the like
of which had never been dreamed in the history of mankind. As a matter
of fact, and taken as a whole, the treatment which they received was
admirable and the comparatively few who now doubt the truth of this
statement will come to realize it as time goes on. They will see that
the misfits, the over-wrought, stood out in their minds like men out of
alignment at parade, that they simply did not notice the thousands of
men and women whose work for them was all that their own mothers could
have asked.
The following official cablegram records the state of educational,
recreation and welfare work at the end of April, 1919.
"Educational activities: Roughly there are 209,000 students embraced in
this scheme. Ten thousand are at A.E.F. University at Beaune, some 7,000
are attending French universities. 3,000 attending British. There are
roughly 130,000 men at Post Schools, which correspond to our elementary
schools in United States. 55,000 are attending the Divisional
Educational Schools, which correspond to our High schools. In addition
there are approximately 58,000 men in specialized vocational schools
where they have full shop facilities of A.E.F.
"Athletic activities: Athletic activities increasing daily in scope and
popularity. Figures for February show 6,500,000 individual participants
in games. In addition to mass athletics, unit championships are being
played in football, basketball, soccer, boxing, tennis, swimming, tug of
war, golf, track and field.
"Entertainment activities: Reports of entertainment officers show
monthly attendance for A.E.F. of between eight and ten million. Moving
pictures, professional talent from United States and particularly
soldier shows being utilized in all parts of army and have done much to
take care of leisure hours of troops. Horse shows have been held in
nearly every division of A.E.F. and have proved very popular. Amount of
all this work now being carried on is little short of stupendous."
The following paragraphs from a personal letter are particularly
significant as coming from an officer of the regular army, who when he
was in command of one of the cantonments in the United States was
genuinely alarmed lest the War Department had not lost its sense of
proportion, and was creating parlor ornaments instead of fighting men:
"I served in the Army of Occupation in the Philippines and in China
after the Boxer campaign, and I want to tell you that the discipline and
_esprit de corps_ of these troops in Germany is incomparably better than
anything I saw there.
"I think nothing has so contributed to this result as the welfare work
and the educational work undertaken. We have every reason to be proud of
the fact that we had people in command of the army who had the vision to
see what result this work would bring.
"I took command of the --th Division in the Army of Occupation in
December, and up until the present time I never worked with a happier or
more contented lot of men. Of course they all want to go home, and we
wouldn't have much use for them if they didn't, but an intensified
military course of training in the morning, schools and athletics in the
afternoon, and study and entertainment in the evening have made their
days so full that they have been perfectly contented to stay until their
boat comes in June.
"This has been the experience of all the divisions up here in Germany,
and their enthusiasm, I fear, when they get home, may be taken for
pro-Germanism."
* * * * *
The War Department has learned so much in this great laboratory
experiment in human conduct that the impious wish sometimes arises in
one's mind that we might promptly try it all over again for the chance
of profiting by our mistakes. Thank God we can't do that, but in our
daily contact with these same men restored to their communities we can
to a certain degree carry on the work, and in so doing we can learn much
from the successes and failures of the Army.
In planning for the immediate future, there are some things which we
mustn't forget. In the first place, we mustn't expect these young men
(or any humans for that matter) to be capable of remaining at concert
pitch indefinitely.
For a while, in dealing with the soldier who has returned from overseas,
real ingenuity will be required to make much impression upon his mind.
Not only will ordinary life seem tame but, frankly, he is likely to have
been overhandled and overwelfared. If, however, we have erred in this
regard, it has been on the right side.
May I venture still another suggestion, and that is to be careful and
considerate of the soldier who, despite his earnest desire, failed to
get across, and for the matter of that, of the young man who didn't get
into the Army at all. The morale of these two groups will need our
particular care.
In closing, however, we should not end upon a note of warning, but
rather upon one of exultation; for the war has taught us, if it has
taught nothing else, that, given a great cause and a cross-section of
our heterogeneous American population, the resulting revelation of the
power of human endurance, human courage and human accomplishment comes
pretty near to proving objectively the divinity of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: An address delivered at the one hundredth anniversary of
the General Theological Seminary, New York, April 30, 1919.]
THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]
It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of
to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried.
Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges.
It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all,
the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what
is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the
scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields; but he is more
than the expert as such, in that he knows enough of other matters to see
his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must,
to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception
of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception
includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot
to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it
embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was
established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as
his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the
16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I
shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which
American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me
should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.
We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most
of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional
nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The
scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty
thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those
who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming
from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained
minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a
direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in
detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications
of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no.
That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to
order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some
intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the
idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new
condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it
with our scholars.
When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a
better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for
example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archaeologist. It
is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on
the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty.
Take archaeology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed
during the war was designed by the expert in armor from our own academic
fellowship. I am told that a very important element in the length of
time which it took to control the submarine menace was the fact that
when war broke out the science of oceanography was almost wholly in the
hands of the Germans. When the world's supply of cocoanut husks was
taken up for gas masks and we still needed charcoal, we had to turn for
additional sources to the tropical botanist, who might have been
expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. It remained for a scholar in
perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the
well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving
object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the
head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply
this recognition to artillery problems. The re-designing of our
artillery shells under the direction of this astronomer added miles to
their range. Another astronomer applied his experience in studying the
movement of comets to solving certain problems of long-range artillery
fire where the projectile in its flight rises into the circumambient
ether.
In proving the case for the American scholar, as I think we can prove
it, we should not be beguiled into the pleasant task of recording the
deeds of scholars and gentlemen when the deeds were those of the gallant
gentleman rather than of the scholar _per se_. We have one here in our
own academic family whose lieutenant's bars I should be as proud to wear
as the stars of any of our generals. Nor need we, I think, cite the
instances where the rigorous training of the scholar clearly laid the
foundation for great accomplishment in some general field of
administration. The man whom we can thank perhaps more than any other
for the brilliant conduct of our war finance was seventeen years ago
editor-in-chief of the _Columbia Law Review_. We may well turn with
pride, but we don't need him to prove our point, to the scholar of this
university, formerly president of this Chapter, who, from his own
talents and experience and his alert sense of scholarship in others, has
earned the place which he now holds as educational director of the
largest university in the world, the A.E.F. University at Beaune.
* * * * *
Our case rests, as I say, upon the direct applications of scholarship,
and not only upon their quality, but on their range. A single division
of the National Research Council, in its report for 1918, showed work of
national significance by the scholars in physics, mathematics, and
allied fields toward the solution of no fewer than sixty-eight
different problems, every one of which needed for its solution men with
training and knowledge and vision. At the outset, who among us had the
slightest conception of the complexity of the adaptations to warfare of
what was known to modern scholarship? We knew that the war was mounting
into the air, but who had any realization of the adjustments which this
involved? Fifteen fundamental problems based on pure physics promptly
arose with reference to instruments for airplane operation. For example,
at night and in the clouds, the aviator must have before his eyes a dial
which will indicate the slightest deviation from his course. Seven
problems had to do with airplane photography. As the art of camouflage
advanced, for instance, color filters had to be devised for its
detection from above. Seven additional problems had to do with factors
of construction and maintenance, as fuel efficiency. Nine others
affected ballooning; and the balloon, as the war developed, came to be
of greater and greater importance. Eleven studies were in signalling:
one, for example, a device for secret daylight signalling, with a range
of five miles or more. And please remember that all these were the task
of one branch of one organization within the field of pure science. By
common consent, the dullest branch of physics was held to be acoustics,
but since 1914 the whole question of sound-ranging has been in the hands
of experts in acoustics. A device developed by American physicists gave
our men nineteen seconds in which to take cover from cannon fired four
miles away. The most brilliant work in this field was that of a former
student of the Columbia School of Mines.
If I were to pick out one field in which the scholarly attitude has been
most brilliantly rewarded, it is that of medicine. If our army surgeons
and sanitarians had been confined to the practical family doctors, who
cannot be bothered with all this new-fangled stuff, our men would have
died like flies from disease, as they did in the Spanish-American War.
It was the laboratory man, the theorist, the highbrow if you like, who
made our health record a matter of national pride and congratulation. It
was the knowledge of a scholar, coupled with his instinctive
understanding of the human heart--neither could have accomplished the
purpose alone--which sent hundreds of shell-shocks, as they came to be
called (people used to call the condition by an uglier, if not a
shorter, term) back into the lines with self-respect and nerve renewed.
To turn to another field, it was a real scholar, even if he were also a
dean, who, in spite of the best efforts of his practical associates to
deter him, brought order out of chaos in the most important of our war
boards through the collection and skillful presentation of statistical
data.
In many cases it was the scholar whom we must thank for the pointing out
of the obvious. The early drafts rejected thousands of excellent
potential soldiers because our existing height regulations were drawn
for men of the northern European races; and the minimum height limit was
well within the normal variation of the men of southern European
ancestry, which has been so large an element in our recent immigration.
Similarly, men of science have pointed out that the length of the
marching step depends not alone on the length of the legs, but even more
on the width of the hips, a simple fact which is of real military
significance. The scholars in the Forest Products laboratories knew how
to make boxes that would not break and spill their contents on the
wharves at Hoboken or St. Nazaire, and, equally important, they knew
how to educate the quartermasters to use them.
The fact that in many fields we reached the limits of available
man-power meant a wonderful stimulation to the study of certain problems
affecting human welfare. Take for example the physiological aspects of
industrial fatigue. In this field an excellent theoretical start had
been made before the war, but the appeal was limited to those interested
in the individual worker. With the war, however, and the shortage of
labor, came a new and, I fear, a more potent appeal--the interest in the
product and its prompt production. The worker who collapsed could not be
replaced. Long hours or unsanitary surroundings meant spoiled material
and broken-down machinery and resultant delay. And when there was a
scholar at hand to show why this was so, you may be sure he had his day
in court.
The work of the scholar has not wholly been in getting things done.
Perhaps an equally important side was in keeping impossible or
unprofitable things from being attempted. When time was of the very
essence of the whole program, the man who could say "No" and prove the
validity of his objection, performed a positive work of great value.
One of our associates at Columbia had a leading share in devising tests
for candidates for the flying school, which, by rejecting the unfit at
the outset, saved many lives from the time of their adoption and many,
many thousands of dollars; for the training of a flyer who cannot be
used when the time comes is a very costly piece of national extravagance
in both money and men.
Our scholars did not confine their activities to the battle of
Washington. Not only as engineers and doctors, but as geologists and
geographers, as meteorologists and sanitarians, they went with the
troops to the front, and their counsel as to actual military operations
was welcomed and followed. One of them, a bachelor and doctor of this
University, died in the service in France. The scholar, like the
soldier, stood ready to step forward to fill the gap in the ranks as he
saw it, regardless of whether something more dignified might be found
for him to do. Our own Barnard, Professor of Education, took what he was
pleased to call his vacation in applying his scholarship to organizing
an educational program for the wounded men in our hospitals, as a
therapeutic measure. Being a scholar and not merely an expert, he saw
the broad human aspect of his specialty; that the first thing to do with
the man who is blinded, or otherwise maimed, is to make him realize that
it is worth while to get well; that he can have a life which is worth
living; that if his old job is no longer possible, there are others for
which he can be trained. One of America's most distinguished
philosophical chemists settled down to the humble but very essential
problem of making mixed flours rise and bake with a crust--and solved
it. The war services of a past President of this Chapter, now, alas, no
longer with us, and those of our present President have been as useful
as they have been inconspicuous.
The need for the scholar was not only qualitative, but quantitative. But
for the general distribution of chemical knowledge in France and
England, and the presence of men capable of promptly applying that
knowledge to combat the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the war
would have been lost before we could possibly have rendered the
slightest assistance; and on our side of the Atlantic when the armistice
was signed, there were two thousand trained chemists engaged in the
problems of gas warfare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not only
to have some men with the requisite training, but men enough to meet
simultaneously many needs in many fields, and these men were drawn in
large measure from our academic faculties. While one must not press the
identity between the scholar and the professor too hard--for a number of
reasons--the fact remains that the teaching profession provided the main
reservoir from which the country drew. One of my friends in the Chemical
Warfare Service has summarized the relation between the academic scholar
and that branch of the army activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical
Service Station were college professors, one of them a member of this
Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of the fourteen heads of the Research
Division, eight were college professors. It was the college professors
who made fundamental improvements in gas masks on the one hand, and who
devised new gases to test the German masks on the other.
* * * * *
As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, as Germany did, the
importance of the man who knows, and of knowing who he is and where he
is; and here, perhaps, lay our most fundamental unpreparedness. What
this cost us may be judged from a single instance. A code message from
Germany directing the dismantling of the German ships lying in our ports
was intercepted. If we had known that there was a professor of English
in the University of Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval
researches, had developed the power of reading ciphers almost at sight,
that cable from Germany could have been promptly deciphered, we could
have forestalled the sabotage, and something like six months in the use
of these ships for the transport of our troops and munitions could have
been gained.
The job of getting the man who knew into the right niche was not an easy
one. The scholars could not all be spared; for, after all, education and
research are essential industries, and, fortunately for our institutions
of learning, for our reviews and scientific agencies, and fortunately
for the country as a whole, all of our scholars did not rush immediately
into government work. The less thrilling task of keeping the lamps
burning in our lighthouses was never more important than during the
stormy days which we have just gone through. Furthermore, the scholar is
a modest person, though he has his human vanities, as we all know who
have seen our colleagues in uniform; but usually some one had to know
about him and invite him to his place, a very sharp contrast to the
business men and lawyers who came down to Washington by the trainload to
impress us with their capacity to do any job which involved a commission
of properly high degree.