The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSome War-time Lessons

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSome War-time LessonsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Some War-time LessonsAuthor: Frederick P. KeppelRelease date: May 30, 2010 [eBook #32608]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Barbara Kosker and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Some War-time LessonsAuthor: Frederick P. KeppelRelease date: May 30, 2010 [eBook #32608]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Barbara Kosker and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)

Title: Some War-time Lessons

Author: Frederick P. Keppel

Release date: May 30, 2010 [eBook #32608]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Barbara Kosker and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS ***

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESSSALES AGENTSNew YorkLEMCKE & BUECHNER30-32East 20th StreetLondonHUMPHREY MILFORDAmen Corner, E.C.ShanghaiEDWARD EVANS & SONS,Ltd.30North Szechuen Road

Publisher's Mark

PAGEI.The American Soldier and His Standards of Conduct9II.The War as a Practical Test of American Scholarship36III.What Have We learned?66

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 byany 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 placingthe immediate vicinity of camps under Federal control. In some cases where the community showed signs of regarding the Army policy in this regard as abeau gesteand 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 ofvirtue 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 ofColumbus, 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 ofthe truth that the merry heart goes all the day, and the sad one tires in a mile.

The work of planning and coördination 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 theunco guidto 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 itselfof 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 willshow 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 strongdrink, 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 ofconstantly 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 withus 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 coöperation 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 areoutstanding. 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 evidentlyconceitedness, though thedefect was worded in different ways, asbig 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 coöperativeness, 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 onewhom 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 youngsterinto 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 timesin 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 longerenforce 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 wassigned, 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 coördinated 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 thiswelfare 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 roughly130,000 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 froman 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 andésprit de corpsof 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 eveninghave 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 hismind. 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.

[1]An address delivered at the one hundredth anniversary of the General Theological Seminary, New York, April 30, 1919.

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 indetail 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 archæologist. 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 archæology 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 wasalmost 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 scholarper se. We haveone 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 theColumbia 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 solutionof 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 oneorganization 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, equallyimportant, 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 apositive 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 anexpert, 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 notonly 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 codemessage 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.

In general, I should say that the individuals in the universities met 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, includesthe 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 coöperation of experts to meet a given and usually an immediately pressing need. The development of the Liberty motor furnishes a good exampleof the results of such coöperative 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. Anengineer 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 coöperating 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 fellowswhich, 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 coöperative 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 amember 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 tobe 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 tothe coöperation 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 thescholar 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 Americanscholars 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 statementthat 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 theman 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.

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