Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One field in which the right leadership has been most brilliantly rewarded is that of medicine. Just consider what we have done in this field: The success of the anti-typhoid injections; the reduction in dysenteric diseases due to chlorination of drinking water; the encouraging fight against cerebro-spinal meningitis and pneumonia; the identification of trench fever, and the practical freedom from typhus. As to wounds, a tetanus antitoxin which has made lock-jaw almost a negligible disease; a serum against gas gangrene; the Carrel-Dakin method of chemical sterilization of wounds; the splinting of fractures on the battle field and overhead extension apparatus in the hospital. To quote Simon Flexner, "The entire psychology of the wounded men was altered, the wards made cheerful and happy, pain abolished, infection controlled, and recovery hastened by means of the new or improved surgical and mechanical measures put into common use."

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

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

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

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

It was Pitt who said, "The atrocious crime of being a young man I shall attempt neither to palliate nor to deny." Nor should a university seek to palliate or to deny the charge of being a place of resort for youth. A university, it seems to me, should be a place where the primary object is not the repression of youthful exuberance nor the correction of youthful failings (though both may be necessary on occasion), but rather, a place for the encouragement of the great and vital qualities of youth--enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sensitiveness of impression. It is the place where the older members of the community have the best chance to stay young. The university should be essentially a company of enthusiasts, of pioneers. There is a frontier for every worker to clear--no matter how narrow or how wide his horizon may be. In a university there is no proper place, among faculty or students, for the disillusioned, the cynical, the defeatist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know now that men and women can be measured by impersonal tests and that it is practicable to put aside the material which it is either impossible to fashion in the academic mould, or for which, even if the job is possible, the expense in wear and tear is entirely beyond the value of the result to be obtained. To be specific, why shouldn't we have an intelligence test of candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, just as we had a physical and psychological examination for candidates for the flying schools?

I don't mean that we should leap from one illogical position clear across the road into another. Mental measurements are not yet an exact science, and a man of moderate ability, with a will to succeed, may be a better academic investment than his more brilliant brother who lacks that quality; but, by pruning very sparingly (one does not have to chop down a tree to prune it) the saving in time and energy will be enormous.

Fundamentally the human relationships are what count, the qualities leading to team play and coöperation, and away from isolation and its ills. This means that if a faculty is to exercise its leadership, it must know the student body, it must maintain and develop points of human touch. Impersonal tests, impersonal records, all that modern practice and modern science can teach us we must have, but these must be used only as the framework for what is after all the fundamental thing, direct human contact between teacher and teacher, teacher and student, and student and student.

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Now as to leadership, and in a university we can identify the leaders with the teachers, there is no doubt, I think, that the teachers' profession comes out of the war in a higher place than it went in, and the scholar goes back to his work with a feeling of confidence in himself in view of his record in competition and comparison with men in other callings. I venture to predict that we shall hear a good deal less frequently in the future the old gibe that the man who could do things did them and the man who couldn't, taught them. The teachers made good, not only because of their scholarship, but because of their personality. I think this experience of the last two years is going to accelerate greatly the movement which had already started of turning to the academic world for the man who can do things and do them with other people. Entirely apart from the contrasts in income, the sheer fun of executive work, with plenty of money to spend on what you want to get done, is a pretty strong temptation for a man with a heavy teaching schedule and an annual department appropriation of say $75. Both the regular army officers who have made conspicuously good, and the scholars of the coöperative type who have made conspicuously good, are being actively bidden for by bankers and manufacturers and all sorts of people. Neither profession can compete on the purely financial side with these tempters and, in order to hold their first-rate men, they will each have to make some greater contribution in the things that money alone can't buy.

Both in the nation and in our republics of letters and science, we must learn to distinguish more clearly between the power that comes with knowledge, and the ability to talk about things. It was very interesting to watch in Washington the gradual substitution of the man with the latter quality by the man with the former in positions of responsibility, and I am going to confess that, in the early days, some of the conferences which it was my privilege or my duty to attend, reminded me for all the world of certain faculty meetings, in which gentlemen without definite knowledge of the matter in hand were discussing at considerable length what they were pleased to call principles, but which were really off-hand impressions.