the test better than the institutions themselves. The latter did not, it
seems to me, as institutions, grasp the situation. Very few studied the
question of the assignment of their specialists as a problem in
conservation as well as in publicity; and as far as the use of their
facilities in the training of soldiers and sailors is concerned, the War
Department and the Navy Department had literally to teach them how to
meet the war conditions. Such help as came from organized bodies of
scholars came rather from the learned societies than from the academic
groups.
Then there was a further difficulty, particularly among the younger men,
though not wholly among them. The expert's job, and hence inclusively
the scholar's job, is relatively safe so far as the immediate risk of
death is concerned, though not the risk of shortening life through
overwork. One Columbia man, well over the draft age, told me frankly
that he would gladly give up an important public office he held for the
privilege of fighting with his hands, but he could not be tempted by an
opportunity to fight with his head. Through this same impulse many and
many a man attempted to conceal his special knowledge in order that he
might fight in the line. The Army Committee on Classification of
Personnel, which was in itself a beautiful example of scholarship in
practical application, was able, however, in most instances to pluck out
the expert from the line and set him, whether he was willing or not, at
the task for which he was particularly adapted and particularly needed.
* * * * *
What, from the point of view of the non-scholar, can be said as to the
general usefulness of the men and women (for the women did their share)
who came forward or were brought forward to take this trial by fire on
behalf of American scholarship? First of all, the scholar must be a real
scholar; he must have the natural ability and the long and rigorous
training necessary for accurate observation, and observation of the kind
which, if I may be forgiven a most unscholarly metaphor, includes the
ability to distinguish the blue chips from the white; his deductions
must be relentless, and his inductions must be luminous. That is asking
a good deal, and it would be enough if his dealings were to be with
other scholars or with scholars in the making. The papers of a leisurely
recluse can be dug out by others from the even more deliberately
published proceedings of learned societies, even as the author has dug
out those of his predecessors, and ultimately the practical application
of his discoveries will be made. In national emergency, however, this
process will not suffice. The scholar must descend from his tower; he
must, if he is to serve effectively, learn to think to order and to do
it rapidly, to deal with all sorts and conditions of men; he must bear
with their amazing ignorances and profit by their equally amazing
knowledge of things of which he is ignorant. He must know the art of
team play. The war has brought out a new type of scholarship, or at any
rate has developed it to such an extent that its implications are new,
and that is the unselfish cooperation of experts to meet a given and
usually an immediately pressing need. The development of the Liberty
motor furnishes a good example of the results of such cooperative
effort. It seems to me that the most important single lesson which our
scholars can learn from the experience of the two past years is the
importance of this team play in scholarship, and not only team play with
other scholars, but team play with those who have the equally valuable
and perhaps even rarer gift of getting things done, who perhaps deserve
the title of scholars in the control of time and space. The scholars who
made good were those who had had not only the training and temperament
for research, but the training and temperament for working with other
people. The scholarship of the man who from self-centeredness or from a
mistaken absorption in his specialty lacked the art of dealing with his
fellow men was likely to prove a sterile scholarship, and in most cases
a useless scholarship in the day of national need.
One of the most dramatic things about the war was the speeding up of
supply and transport under the strong hand of the man who had brought
the Panama Canal to completion. General Goethals was no administrative
theorist. He was willing to try anything and anybody once, but he was
prompt in rejecting what did not promptly accomplish his purpose. An
engineer of General Goethals' distinction can be regarded as a scholar
in his particular field; but the point I want to make is that during his
service as Quartermaster-General, when officers of the regular army and
over-night majors, as they were called, presidents of manufacturing
plants, bankers and lawyers, were passing in what seemed to be an almost
unbroken procession through his office, he retained just two men in his
inner circle from first to last, and both were academic persons. Herbert
Hoover surrounded himself with scholars, entomologists, statisticians
and public health men. He did not always use them for their specialties,
but he evidently liked the type. The great welfare societies did the
same, and the list of academic men whom they used makes an impressive
total.
These instances are typical of a very general success among scholars in
cooperating effectively and helpfully with eminently practical men. This
may be because the scholar has been trained in a form of competition
which the so-called practical man lacked. He is used to having his work
wiped out by some discovery of a rival, and having to begin afresh. He
is used to a checking of his work by his fellows which, if of a
different nature, is no less relentless than the war-time check in the
toll of human lives. The man of high reputation in business often failed
because he had learned to measure success and his own competence only in
terms of dividends, and in the new test he found his measuring-rod worse
than useless.
Our scholars of the cooperative type not only pursued their researches,
but they got their military associates into the habit of thinking in
terms of scholarship. One of their most useful accomplishments,
initiated by a Doctor of Philosophy of this University, was the
organization of Thursday evening conferences for the discussion of the
new scientific and technical problems facing the Army and Navy. This
furnished a nucleus for the exchange of ideas between the different
research groups, both here and abroad; for scholarship was mobilized and
utilized in France, England, and Italy, as well as here, and our Allies
laid their scientific discoveries before us with the greatest loyalty.
At these conferences their reports were discussed and digested and
applied, instead of being pigeon-holed at the War College, as I fear
might have been otherwise the case. It was as a result of one of these
conferences that a member of this Chapter, acting on a hint which came
from a French report, was largely instrumental in developing a method of
submarine detection through sound-waves of a particular type, which,
though it came too late to be of service in the war, may serve in peace
to relieve the greatest terror of the mariner, the danger of collision
in darkness or fog with sister vessel or iceberg or derelict. A potent
factor in breaking down the barriers and delays of departmental
jealousies and bureaucratic tradition all along the line was the
free-masonry of the company of scholars in Washington.
It must not be forgotten that our scholar in war worked under two
powerful stimuli, neither of them operative under ordinary conditions.
Although he was out of his accustomed setting, working with strange
people and at strange tasks, nevertheless the realization of the
national need and the joy of feeling an identification with the forces
facing the adversary tended to produce that fine frenzy which enables a
man to do better than he knows how. Then, for the first time in history,
the scholar had unlimited funds. It is an interesting subject for
speculation as to how he can ever go back to the limits of academic
appropriations. It is to be feared that in many cases he will not, but
will turn to industrial enterprises instead. If, however, there was an
unlimited supply of funds, there was a corresponding deficiency in time,
and the scholar who could not speed up to meet the new conditions had
little chance to make his mark. The men who failed in war because they
could not grasp the significance of the time factor may, however, still
be eminently useful in peace. On the other hand, the training which some
of our scholars received in meeting another war-time condition is likely
to have an important influence upon the relation of scholarship to
industry. Many a scholar found for the first time that to meet a given
condition a beautiful laboratory solution may be no solution at all,
that the answer, to be effective, must meet the peculiar condition of
quantity production.
The merit of the Liberty engine, of which I have already spoken, lies
not alone in the excellence of its design, admirable as that is, but in
the fact that it is so constructed that we could produce fifteen hundred
of them in a single week. Or, to take another example, in 1914 we made
all together eighteen hundred field glasses in this country. Last
winter, thanks to the cooperation of the scholars in the chemistry of
glass and in the field of optics on the one hand, and of the experts in
quantity production on the other, we were making thirty-five hundred
pairs of field glasses each week. There are many other adaptations of
scholarship to industry that are awaiting similar practical solutions.
One of our most distinguished scholars in physics has said publicly that
the day is past when one can defend any distinction between pure and
applied science. One might as well try to distinguish between pure and
applied virtue.
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 passed 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 asset 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 pronouncement 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 institutions, 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 analysis, 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 class 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,
cock-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 shores 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.