NOSTALGIA, by NORMAN S

We are assured by the churchmen, the media, and by our own observations, that we live in a period of confusion and woe. With the disastrous Viet Nam war as an exhibit, this premise may be hard to dispute. Yet from time to time, my gloom is lit by flashes of furtive optimism. Possibly, it occurs to me, our troubles are not final or our destruction inevitable. Other periods have had their problems. Our generation did not invent violence, intolerance, or even sex. Perhaps the self-righteous young and old, who so deeply scorn us, do not have a full perspective. Hopefully, the younger generation will survive, as we so far have, to pass on to their children the torch of condemnation. They or their descendants may, in time, develop positive points of view, culminating in faith, or at least in hope. Though our numerous critics sneer at optimism and proclaim doom, a positive approach would be of help in solving the problems which so depress the prophets of despair.

In my struggle for a reasonable approximation to peace of mind, I experiment with several approaches. I study at times the difficulties which befell earlier generations. I remember our civil war, as seen through the eyes of my grandparents. I scan history for ages worse than ours, with fears more dire and deadly, and catastrophes more overwhelming. As I appraise the ingenious and aggressive pessimism of our times, I wonder if our Cassandras would exchange their “today” for the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the wars of religion in France, or the Thirty Years War in Germany? Would they even face a return to World Wars I or II, which, incidentally, their despised elders won?

Can it be that there are styles in pessimism, and fashions in protest? Can our diet, over the TV, of instant bad news, and its hypertrophy by the media, have a warping effect on our judgement?

At other times, when particularly battered by press, radio and television, I escape into my earlier life. I lived, in fact, through a period of great accomplishment. My memories lead me to discount the negativism of today. Since my earlier recollections are, I the main, pleasant, I will skim through some of them.

I was born on the near south side of a Chicago which had just reached its first million. Our Vernon Avenue house, in the thirty-five hundred block, was one of a row of abutting houses, each with its stone horseblock between sidewalk and pavement. Not much pavement at that, alternately muddy and dusty. A row of young trees has long since grown up and disappeared. The houses are also gone, displaced by high rise apartments with their integrated swarms.

By comparison with today, South Side Chicago was rural. There were wide spread vacant lots, often bordered by elevated wooden sidewalks. These provided caverns within which foraged dogs, cats, and, on occasion, children. To the east was the lake shore, lined and protected by the tracks of the Illinois Central, Lincoln’s railroad. Beyond the tracks were timber bulkheads, filled with rough limestone, a precarious protection against lake storms. From the timbers small bodies, as naked as frogs, could dive and splash in the then unpolluted lake. This pleasure our parents denied us, but we could at least watch and envy.

Calm as was my life, I now know that I was born into a period in which dynamic growth and optimism were accompanied by stresses political and economic. I remember the campaign posters of 1896, tacked to the slender trees before our house. I missed the torchlight parades, but heard the larger boys chanting “William Jennings Bryan sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of sixteen cents.”

The recently rural condition of our area was reflected in the name of our major north-south artery. Though we completely lacked cottages and groves, the name was Cottage Grove Avenue. Its tracks contained a continuous metal slot through which escaped the haunting rattle of an unseen cable. Three car trains rode intermittently along the rails, as the gripman alternately grabbed or released the cable. A romantic, if impractical piece of transportational archaeology, such cable cars still ride the hills of San Francisco.

On occasional escapes from parental supervision, I watched the clanking traffic of those street cars and, later, rode them myself. There was much else to see. Heavy teams of percherons drew beer trucks, stacked with barrels and dangling with kegs. Less dignified carts, with unimpressive horses, competed for space on Cottage Grove and Thirty-fifth Street. Men, in black derbies swarmed the sidewalks. Many disappeared through the short swinging doors of the conveniently spaced saloons, their briefly visible legs soon lost in the odorous gloom. There were Indians, too, cigar store Indians, vacant-faced, with tomahawk raised in one hand, and bundled cigars offered by the other.

It was on Cottage Grove that was located the photographer to whom we were periodically taken. We suffered the current indignities – iron tongs to hold the head steady. Proper looking little lads we were, four of us, suits brushed, shoes at least temporarily shined, hair slicked under sailor hats, eyes to the front and no nonsense. A disturbing sequence of such events carried us from infancy to sub-adolescence, dangling curls giving way to an approximation of military haircuts.

In contrast to our current permissive informality, we wore painfully tight little pants, ending well above the knee, to leave room for long stockings. On the sensible assumption that we would scramble about on floor or ground, they buttoned cup-shaped leather knee protectors about our skinny legs. A minimum protection against wear, the hampered our circulatory systems, and were often discarded.

We managed a reasonable life, for children, and like Abbe Sièyes in the French Revolution, we all survived, and still do. I was supposed to be delicate, and antagonized my brothers by my relative freedom from the more violent punishments. One brother, who developed some ingenuity in mischief, was not always so fortunate. He, with the son of the minister, on the eve of a baptism, entered the local Baptist church. Their swim in the baptismal font was terminated by a minister of considerable disciplinary competence. Years later, I was told by a charming old lady of Glencoe who, when a girl, lived near us, that on the occasion of my birth, she tried to buy me from my mother. Her offer of twenty-five cents having been found insufficient, I remain to this day a Parker.

By the time I had entered first grade, our mother decided that her flock would have fewer colds if taken south. We moved, therefore, to the Gulf Coast. I remember somewhat dimly a winter in Pass Christian. I found Saint Petersburg, the following winter, more tropical and more interesting. The Saint Petersburg of that day would shock the modern boosters. An unpaved, sandy main street led down to a limitless beach, and to the land end of a long pier. Our hotel, the Paxton House, a small wooden edifice, was on the beach’s edge, a stone’s throw from the pier. Nearby was the sole invasion of industry, an ice factory. At the far end of the pier schooners docked, to pick up the ice cakes for transport along the coast. Some genius had conceived the idea of sailing the cakes out to the schooners. Little cars with flanged wheels, each car with a mast and a bit of sail, rode narrow gauge tracks to the pier’s outer end. We could not ride the cars, but to watch them was a constant pleasure. We fished from the pier, but rarely hooked anything worthwhile. Now and then a pelican grabbed our bait, but inevitably escaped before we could pull him in.

When properly tired, we took to the windswept hotel porch, haunted by a character who called himself a captain. He had but one leg, a fluent tongue, and the well-earned reputation of being the prize liar of the Florida Gulf Coast. As our eyes bulged out like buttons, he told us, on demand, his favorite story, the tale of his missing leg. A vigorous swimmer, so he claimed, he once had a race with a shark. The shark won and, for prize, snapped off the captain’s right leg. Resenting this loss, he swam ashore, got a skiff, and rowed in pursuit of the shark. Having hooked his prey, he landed him on the beach, and with his clasp knife ripped from the shark’s belly his missing leg. This he gave an honorable burial under a nearby orange tree, thus originating, so he said, the Florida blood orange.

In this small Florida town, oblivious of all social and racial problems, we enjoyed every day and hour. Our parents commented on the local political eccentricity of voting always the Democratic ticket. We concentrated our interest, rather, on the food, which included beaten biscuit, salt-rising bread, and pancakes with sorghum syrup.

We learned to assume, as all about us did, that Providence intended blacks to work for whites. The blacks, I may say, very cheerful about the whole thing, treated us with the greatest kindness. There were of course, no black children in our schools. Such blacks as we knew, cooks, waitresses, maids, laundresses, seemed the happiest people in the world. I mention this not to defend the wrongs of the past, but to note that, as we seek to solve the racial puzzle, each forward step seems inevitably to bring increasing bitterness and even more violent protest. Perhaps both races should be alert to develop more positive and constructive approaches. In any event, serenely unaware of problems of race and class, we were shortly to be removed to new scenes, to a new set of political and social problems.

Instead of returning to Chicago we ventured to the slate grey sky and pungent coal smoke of London. A stormy passage delivered us to Gravesend, downstream from London. My mother, convoying four small boys and an arthritic grandmother, deserved a medal. The permanent overcast of London contrasted to a Florida winter which had consistently lived up to Chamber of Commerce specifications.

But London also had its rewards. Across the street from St. Ermine’s Hotel, Westminster was a lane lined with stamp shops. I remember buying a set of Sudanese stamps, complete with camels. To support the English claim to permanence of all things good and bad, I may say that the hotel is still there, and the lane and the stamp shop.

English toy shops were super. The toy soldiers were works of art, brilliantly authentic, cavalry men could dismount, artillery wheels stayed on guns and caissons, and actually rolled. Our camel corps, with fez on head and camel beneath, would have pleased Nasser.

We saw, with little interest, the jewels in the Tower. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, mixing statesmen and criminals, gave us the customary gooseflesh. We learned to tolerate, if not enjoy, the forthright taste of kippers at breakfast. The horseguards were really worthwhile, but we thought their barracks a bit grimy. I dimly remember being herded through the overcrowded shadows of Westminster Abbey, sadly congested with tombs and monuments of every period of taste, or lack thereof.

I remember better the onset of spring, because by April we were installed in a Thames side house in Surbiton. My father had rented it, complete with furniture, five servants, several cats, and at least one dog. We left London by train, passing myriads of chimney pots lining street after street of close-packed houses. Soon suburban green interrupted the parade of dirty masonry, and we were shortly at the door of Melbourne House, our somewhat pretentiously-named home. The housekeeper met us at the door, cook and maids lined up at her side, and a small boy at the end of the line. On my mother’s enquiring as to his function, the housekeeper replied, “ ‘e feeds the fowls, mum.”

From our third floor nursery windows we looked across the Thames and up the long water to the distant rosy brick of Hampton Court Palace. On the river, the queen’s swans floated in formal white. Being warned that they were dangerous to small boys, we carefully avoided them. Over the river was a bit of a pond, on which dignified old gentlemen raced model sailboats. A ferry opposite our front door gave us access to the palace park, with its ancient trees, modern flower gardens and, on week ends, its hordes of London trippers.

As the occasional warm days came on, the river swarmed with craft of various sizes and orders of propulsion. Little steamers carried tourists upstream to Windsor. Rowboats and launches crowded river and locks. We liked, particularly, the frequent locks. Going upstream, you slipped into the wet, cavernous hollow, the lock walls rising high above your head. The gates closed, and you began to rise. Finally, you scrambled to the lockside, and headed for the everpresent slot machines. They took the inconceivably large copper pennies, which showed Queen Victoria at various stages of youth and maturity, and gave, in return, slabs of toffy or chocolate, or tin boxes of smaller candies.

Being used to seeing the queen on her coinage, we asked to see her in the flesh. When she made a ceremonial appearance at Windsor, we had our wish. There were soldiers in red, soldiers in black, and the kilties, and also, the unforgettable, spine-tickling squeal of the pipes! The drummers did amazing things on the bass drum. The pipers swung their kilts in sinuous grace. But the Queen, in her open carriage, was small and fat, and dressed in depressing black. There was not much life left for her or, as we now know, for the vast empire she ruled. Completely satisfied, we went home to tea.

We never tired of the river and the park. In the spring, we had the white hawthorn and the red may. The gardners of Hampton Court maintained a kaleidoscopic sequence of colors. The wet English climate played on their side. To us, all England was a quiet, peaceful garden really, provided with toy and sweets shops and filled with interesting sights.

Looking back, I can see signs of social strain which we children only vaguely appreciated. The boys in the private school boasted that their fathers were gentlemen. We learned that this was a matter not of manners but of status. That our father was a lawyer, and thus no in trade, saved our social self-respect. Our maids, of which we had three, at rates of pay which would give our help of today epileptic fits, oozed social stratification. They warned us against careless association with the common village boys. Our governess, Miss Morris, was sternly class conscious. Every human being had his or her place in the world, and should stick to it. Nor was she too certain of the position of a family of four noisy American boys. However, before we could be completely indoctrinated in class consciousness, we left aristocratic England for theoretically democratic France.

On a brilliant autumn day, we steamed calmly across the channel. I remember only the boat from New Haven to Dieppe, and the impression of motion and color as we slid up to the quay. It may have been a holiday, to judge from the blue, white and red flags, and the swarms of people. But my memories of France abound in color, motion and crowds. Even the Paris workmen flaunted colored sashes about the waists of their baggy corduroy pants: red for socialists, blue for republicans, and a few lonely royalists in white.

Our flat, on a side street near the Etoile, was over a butcher shop, but high up. Miss Morris thought it lower class. She thought us lower class, too. She claimed to have served in many an aristocratic British family, caring for children who sounded, to us, disgustingly well-behaved. Shortly, in aloof dignity, she returned to England, leaving us boys convinced that she had pinched part of my growing stamp collection. She had a bad disposition, a red nose, and a fund of useless geographical information. I still have latent in my memory the names of the three largest lakes in Sweden, and its water boundary with Denmark.

After the departure of Miss Morris, our little French maid, Josephine, doubled as a caretaker for small boys. Under her tolerant eye we played whip tops around the Place de L’Etoile, saw Punch and Judy fight it out in the little Guignol theaters along the Champs Elysees, and rode the wooden horses of the merry-go-rounds. She it was who explained that the steel shutters which covered all shop windows at night were there to thwart the rioters whose activities punctuated French history. They are still useful in France, and might even soon be in order with us. On some Sundays she took us to the churches where, at communion, they passed out the better brioche. Though a pious Catholic and faithful in church attendance, she pointed out that the priests kept all the wine for themselves. This, she said, explained the deep red faces so typical of gentlemen of the cloth.

Small children learn a new language without effort. Later, in high school and college, I profited by a French vocabulary far beyond that of the American curriculum. Having box seats for Odeon matinees, we heard Corneille and Racine to repletion. In contrast Josephine taught us a popular vocabulary of more vigor than polish. On the occasion of the execution of a murderer, we learned that to be guillotined was to spit in the basket, “cracher dans le panier.” My mother was not enthused.

Perhaps the best thing in Paris was the one ring circus immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec. Thus lives, in his prints, the black clown Chocolat. He it was who, no doubt with a board inside his coat, fell a victim to a knife thrower, and bristled like a porcupine as he fled from the ring. Of Versailles I remember chiefly that my feet hurt. Also, the spicy smell of box hedges under a hot sun. Then, there was the cold, soothing smoothness of the marble table top at the open air restaurant where I was given grenadine with water from a “syphon.” The food was always good, starting at breakfast with Bar le Duc preserves, and “crème double.” It was too good to last, and we were finally whisked away from Paris, “Ville Lumière,” to prosaic, efficient Berlin.

Though we may have realized it but dimly, the world, as is usual in history, was in a bit of a boil. During our carefree days in England and France, the Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor, and Hearst managed to start the Spanish war. By December the war was over, the treaty being signed in Paris while we were there.

We were not thinking of international politics when we took our two day trip across France and Belgium, through Cologne, and over the level North Prussian fields, to Berlin. It was a compactly built city. The sudden transition from open fields to a close city mass was startling. I can now realize that what I saw was the product of a centralized and efficient organization. Street after street of tall apartment buildings, uniform in height and dull in style, lined the asphalt pavements with their border of stone mosaic sidewalks. All was very neat, very clean, even rows of trees, balconies erupting with a giddy mixture of geraniums, red and pink. The city might have been created all at one time. City and land were orderly, well run, the product of a true police state.

We lived in a pension, on a private street of almost rural appearance, its entrance gate locked at night. To insure our return in case we wandered, our careful mother taught us the address, 121 B. Potsdammer Privat Strasse. Since I never got lost, I missed my chance; I was never brought home by one of the overstuffed, helmeted policemen who were everpresent on Berlin’s streets.

Our governess, born of a German father and a Hindu mother, was a sad eyed little brunette, a loyal and unquestioning Lutheran. We thought her sadness caused by the rarity of her birthdays, she having been born on the twenty-ninth of February. She taught us the cursive German script, and inspired us to read children’s tales in gothic print. Our German playmates introduced us to “Max and Moritz” and “Struwelpeter,” books in which bad boys did no end of mischief, but ended very sadly.

A sequence of student tutors gave us a tenuous contact with university circles. The first was short and unimpressive, with a fat face unscarred by dueling. To make up for this, he frequently rolled up his sleeve, to show off a savage slash on his forearm, badly patched with borrowed skin. His successor was a more aristocratic type, a “Korps Student,” with a lean, keen face appropriately criss-crossed and chopped up. He was, nonetheless, kindly and genial. Conscientiously he tried to indoctrinate us in the history and customs of the Prussian Reich. Our German flourished, and our interest in the land, but, in our secret sentiments, we remained uncompromisingly republican.

Berlin, a smug, prosperous and, for the time, ultra-modern city, was as efficiently organized for pleasure as for work. By train and boat the plump populace, on summer weekends, headed to the open air restaurants so frequent on the rivers and lakes of the lowlands in which Berlin lay. Beer and bands, tables under the trees, fat waiters toddling from table to table, balancing the heavily loaded trays. A thousand sturdy Germans eating and drinking in unison, to a brass band obbligato, is a sight and sound worth remembering.

In another mood was the “Früjahrsparade,” the spring review of the Berlin garrison. These were the adored troops of the German Reich. Rank on rank of spiked helmets, “pickelhauben,” bands on foot and on horseback, and citizens on the streets, in the windows, craning from balconies, all dazed with delight. I remember the pleasant sting of the unaccustomed “Maiwein” with which I was plied on the balcony of a strategically located flat. From this vantage point I looked down on the surging crowds and the sinister marching masses of perfectly drilled troops.

In high summer the great German treat was the country excursion, the “ausflug.” It might be a boat trip on the Elbe, or the nearby Havel. For me, it was a walking trip in the Hartz mountains, complete with small rücksak and alpenstock. The Hartz were a bit on the order of our Berkshire hills. But every valley, every height, every vantage point had its convenient inn or restaurant. Bread and ham, bread and sausage, bread and cheese, potato salad, and beer! For us children it was “limonade” which was synthetic, or “citronenlimonade” which cost more, but was real, and slot machines for “Stollwerks chocolade.”

One picture I remember, which linked us to the past of the Brothers Grimm. A small boy, me, sitting at a table, under trees, along a brook near the Ilsenstein, a mountain picturesque but minute. The brook gurgled and splashed as along it an ancient dame trudged in rags, stopped under a heavy fagot of fresh cut wood. Regardless of the diners, she tottered along the brook, and disappeared in to the dense forest shadows.

Back to Berlin for a final month’s inspection, full time, of the monuments and museums with which Berlin was so well provided. Our next stop was to be Switzerland, for a school term at Lausanne.

Before we left we had come to realize that Germany was very different from England, France, or the United States. Our radicals who so carelessly and inaccurately call the United States a police state, ought to see the real thing. Every citizen was registered at his appropriate police station, as were all tourists and strangers.

Being in Berlin on July 4, 1899, we decided to celebrate in the then usual American fashion. This involved firecrackers which, we were told, were contrary to police regulations, “strängste polizeilich verboten.” My father went to our local “polizeiampt” for permission. After a long argument he got it. At a reasonably late hour, in the court yard, we set off a few tentative crackers. The court was surrounded on three sides by buildings; on the fourth side was a low wall. In an instant, the windows filled with indignant faces and angry heads popped up over the wall. Shortly, two helmeted policemen arrived “to find out why.” Our permit was effective, but one officer stayed to supervise and protect. I suspect that the Germans were so police ridden that they enjoyed it.

We sensed that Switzerland, a republic, was to be different. We remembered the story of William Tell. Democratic or not, it took us back to the middle ages. We lived, at Ouchy, in a hotel built around the keep of a mediaeval castle. Our windows looked out over the broad lake to the far French shore. Up the lake, to the East, weather permitting, the icy mass of the Dent du Midi closed the horizon. Below our windows lay a dock where lake steamers in rapid sequence came and went. They were side wheelers, named after river heroes whose names we soon learned by heart. Back of us rose a steep slope to the crest on which Lausanne lay. Up a funicular we went, to attend a small private school. There we were in association or competition with a hundred English lads, mostly sons of officers in India. Life in Switzerland being cheaper than in England, the Swiss terrain and climate being well thought of, and Lausanne having an educational aura, it was a good place for these boys from India. There were a number of such schools, alien enclaves with masters, some English, some Swiss, all imbued with disciplinary ideals. The rod, when thought to be needed, was used. Athletics were compulsory. Student protest was non-existent. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, our half-holidays, we played tennis or soccer, or were taken for swimming lessons. On occasion, we went to the high country for paper races, the hares dropping bits of paper, and the hounds pursuing to the point of exhaustion.

Normally, we were all forced to speak French. An East Indian cuisine prevailed, appropriate to the taste of English boys fresh from India. Curries a-plenty, deviled kidneys and rice, and more pepper and spice than I have ever since had. And what was put on your plate you ate, no mistake about that! We were dipped, a bit, in the unconsciously imperialistic mentality of British officers’ sons. We were made aware of the world as it affected the Empire. The Boer war was on our minds, and we accepted the utter justice and virtue of the British position. At home, the next year, we had to make various shifts in viewpoint. On this side of the Atlantic, Kruger and the Boers stood rather well.

In our European experiences we hear little of our own Spanish war. We heard nothing of the rumbling which must have been going on in the lower third of European society. Our playmates and their parents lived in a comfortable world of implied stability and permanence. Mainly from France did some mutterings reach us. The Dreyfus affair was a live issue, Dreyfus having seen sent, on faked evidence, to Devil’s Island. And there were always the section of French workmen who flaunted red sashes. Switzerland, of course, was ultra-conservative, tightly nationalistic, and soberly practical, no riots and no complaints. Germany, to a foreigner, was completely stable and settled. We saw nothing in Berlin that had the outward appearance of a slum. The old dame with the fagots, by the Ilsenstein, was only a picturesque vignette. Still, the military cult in Germany, and the red sashes in France, might have been taken as omens of future troubles.

In Switzerland the days and months passed like a happy dream. Snow came and went, and then the spring flowers on the uplands. Distant peaks stayed white all year. On the lake the stone barges, with twin masts and crossed lateen sails, floated like butterflies over the blue water. At Ouchy we saw the end of the nineties, and welcomed in the new and sinister century.

In June, with an interlude at the Paris Exposition of 1900, we returned to the safe republicanism of a very nationalistic, optimistic and prosperous United States. It had won an easy and at least superficially profitable war. On our rail trip west we had a fleeting contact with one of the apostles of American vigor. We four boys, aged from six to thirteen, were ushered into the stateroom of the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt. On hearing that we had had boxing lessons at school, he lined us up for further instruction. Being an individualist, he gave us advice rather critical of our English coach. Such a magnetic figure I never again met. A cartoonist’s delight of flashing teeth and gleaming glasses, he oozed an optimism and positive vitality which we could well use today.

Before plunging into city life, we settled on the shore of a small lake near Antioch, Illinois. Our old friends of the south side had breached a grove of oaks and hickories, to give space for a dozen cottages of what we took to be considerable comfort. Outside facilities, of course, but vine covered, for aesthetic reasons. A plank pier in front of each cottage, and an outside pump, to produce iron flavored drinking water.

We beat the hippies to it, with our bare feet, torn pants, and tattered shirts. But, unlike them, we did a great deal of bathing. Mostly, we made our own toys, the American Boy’s handbook being our major work of reference. To risk moralizing, the less we had, the better we liked it. The less that was done for us, the more we did for ourselves. No autos, no electricity, no phones, no plumbing, but lots of food and air. Swimming, boating, digging play harbors on the beach, and occasionally walking to town. I couldn’t go back to it, but I love to remember it.

For some years we had that kind of summer, each followed by nine months of city and school life. In the city we wore shoes, but bathed only on Saturdays. On the south side of Chicago we played mostly on the vacant lots of the university area. These playgrounds are gone now, swallowed up in the educational gray stone explosion of the University. We played also in Jackson and Washington Parks, which were then still safe for civilians. In winter we skated. When it snowed we got out sleds, and hooked rides on the horse-drawn delivery wagons. In spring and fall we played endless games of vacant lot baseball and football. We organized sequences of track meets, laying out and leveling our own tracks. We looked for holes in the wooden fence that then surrounded Stagg Field. Thereby we were sometimes successful in seeing Stagg’s teams perform in their period of greatness. We finally struggled through grammar school and high school, and launched into college.

It is hard to analyze the differences between the points of view of the college students then and now. I was lucky, in my experience, going from the University High School to Williams, Harvard and Chicago. Throughout, the classes were small and the professors superlatively good. We knew that they were outstanding. We respected them but felt free to contact them for help and advice. We knew that we were lucky to be in college. Many worked their way through. We had no government assistance. There was no assumption that everyone had a right to go to college. Compared to the figures of today, the number of college students was microscopic. Our college spirit was almost chauvinistic. We thought in terms of what we could contribute, rather than what we could get. Theoretically, we would all, or most of us, die for Alma Mater, a sacrifice we were fortunately never called upon to make. There was no problem of student rebellion or violence because we were all busy squeezing all we could get out of our courses and preparing for careers. It seemed to us that anyone who was willing to work could get an education and a career. In practice, with the boys I knew, it worked that way. If we had been conscious of an “establishment” we would have been grateful for it. Actually, in American conditions, the word is meaningless.

But this was all before the First World War, before the rise of communism, before the wreckage of world stability. What we did not realize was that we were enjoying one of the rare periods of relative peace so far given to mankind.

I was lucky enough to see Western Europe in this autumnal period. I spent 1911 in Italy, Greece and Germany. The school year of 1913-14 I spent mostly in France. An American could travel without a passport. One could take whatever money one had, wherever one wished to go. France and Switzerland were the only republics; elsewhere, the thrones were occupied by the families that had survived Napoleon. For an American in Europe, it was a good time to be a student, to be a tourist, to be alive.

The warning signs, always more evident as an afterthought, were there. Russia increased her army, as did Germany, and France, with its smaller population, passed its law of three years’ compulsory military service. A waiter in Avignon mourned that “France has lost the battle of the beds.” New barracks went up all over France, to house the increased number of recruits. I saw again the spring review in Berlin in 1911. I watched thirty thousand men, horse and foot, sweep past the Kaiser. To see the goosestep done, company front, is not a comforting sight, but the Germans loved it.

For the French students I met, their heavy military program was a curse. They took it, accepting its necessity, but with bent heads. At the University of Berlin, on the contrary, professors and students were enthusiastic. The professor who taught the course of German for foreigners chanted a nationalistic litany: “Germany,” he said, “is a small country surrounded by enemies. Every student, every German, is a soldier.”

The spring of 1914 I spent in southern France, working on a study of mediaeval trade routes. Going from town to town, I had a close view of the French in their last peacetime months. I spent three weeks at Perigueux, a shrine of French cooking. Thanks to a letter from my professor in Paris I had a desk in the old age pension division, for my dusty manuscripts. On one side of a high barrier were desks, all but mine used by civil servants. On the other side, sometimes pitiful but always picturesque, clustered and drifted the pensioners. The clerks took me for granted, pointing out the interesting characters who shuffled through the room, and talking freely of their personal and national problems. The new military law was on their minds, and the rising taxes. They could not believe that we had no conscription in the United States and no compulsory identification papers, their obligatory “carnet d’identification” or “Etat civil.” Even then, such papers were universal in Western Europe. Conscription, alas, has caught up with us, but not the compulsory papers. If leftist violence continues here, we may yet get them.

I was always amazed at the breadth of interest and the knowledge of international politics shown by the rural and small-town French. I had one interesting day in a peasant home in the mountains. An attendant in the archives at Montauban, near Toulouse, invited me to spend Easter with his aunt and uncle. A cement floor, an oak beamed ceiling, and dangling hams, bacon and sausages made an exotic background. We sat on backless benches about an oak slab table four inches thick. The men wore blue smocks embroidered at the shoulders, the women were in tight black wool dresses and blue or white aprons, the universal peasant uniform. We drank, off and on, the uncle’s red wine, and ate bread, meat and pâté, the bread sliced from the dark cartwheel loaves typical of the peasants of the south.

They talked freely, on taxes, military service, on the need to hold population down, to prevent fragmentation of land holdings. They were alert to their international problems, feared the Germans and somewhat disliked the Italians. They never mentioned the church. It seemed to be a free-thinking area, natural in the land of the Albigensian wars of the Middle Ages. For my benefit, they talked French, though the Provençal, or Languedocian patois might, for them, have been more comfortable.

These peasants in smocks, farming in a rugged area though aware of the international tensions, were jolly, cheerful people far more outgoing than the French of the North, and excellent company for a day long Easter feast.

I went later to Toulouse, to the university library. There, as elsewhere, the students were depressed by the longer military service. Among the scattering of foreign students I ran into an entertaining Turkish medical student. He was a modern type, in the French groove. On a Monday he reported having been to church the day before. What was a Muslim doing in a Christian church? Meeting girl friends. How did he meet them? He pinched them. As he put it, “Je pince leurs derrières.” He was a bit of a contrast to a Turk I had met three years before, on a Greek coasting steamer heading south from the Epirus. On the deck with him, veiled to their bright black eyes in gloomy gray, were six women. Sitting on cushions, they made him coffee. Their lord, in colonel’s uniform, walked the deck, chatting with us occidentals. He had been in Paris, spoke French and praised the French girls he had met. Alas for him, in a few years Epirus became Greek and the veils were to fall from the faces of the Turkish women.

I had one entertaining last glimpse of the German point of view. At Orange, on the Rhône, I chatted, in a café, with a vacationing German school teacher. History being his subject he volunteered that this particular bit of France had once formed part of that German institution, the Holy Roman Empire. It would, said he, rejoin the Reich before too long, and the beer would then be better.

My last weeks in pre-war Europe, poignant as a memory, were at the time delightful. In July of 1914, I took one of those cut-rate excursions so attractive to impecunious students. This one took me to Belgium. Clear, hot weather, cities swarming and bursting with tourists, the country fertile in green and gold. The sands at Ostend were carpeted with scantily clad bodies. In Ghent and Bruges the treble chimes drifted down over the canals. Natives and tourists alike fought the summer heat with oceans of good Flemish beer. No one talked of war. Buy July 13 I was back in Paris, to see the city at its gayest, and to help it celebrate its last peacetime July Fourteenth for many a year. There was dancing in the street corners, marching troops in peacetime regalia, and no apparent realization of the disaster so soon to strike. I leaned my elbows that night on the chilly stone parapet of a Seine bridge, watching the fireworks. The oily black water mirrored the golden lace of a sky spangled with exploding flowers of fire.

By chance, I was on my way home on the last peacetime trip of the Lusitania. The archduke was dead. The fuse was lit. By the time we reached New York, the declarations of war were exploding. An era was over. The long, if precarious peace gave way to the first world war.

I don’t know why my memories make me optimistic, but they do. Perhaps it is because I have watched such tremendous accomplishments. It was no small thing to stop the Kaiser, thwart Hitler, defeat Japan, and contain a victorious, revolutionary Russia. Nor are our advances in wealth, industry, science, and in social justice, trivial. They do not justify the current styles of fanciful pessimism. These are a most incomplete and lopsided response to reality.

Many weep over the misnamed ghettoes, but forget the end of Jim Crow, the integration of all but a remnant of our schools, the competition between leading corporations for black employees, and the acceptance of equal opportunity as a desired norm. We are legislating to make poverty, for black or white, illegal. It may not work but it is what the much maligned government is trying to do.

That we have problems of vast complication should stir us not to destruction but to work. We realize the problems of pollution, and are attacking them. We know the risks of overpopulation, and, by efforts public and private, are reducing our rate of increase. With our techniques of engineering and organization, if we can reach the moon we can solve the problems nearer to home. Notwithstanding idle chatter about “the establishment” we live in a period when every qualified person willing to make the effort can get a college education, as can the hordes of college students who are not qualified. Labor, in economic affairs, bargains with management as an equal, if not as a superior. The computer is magnifying human effort and revolutionizing its results. With this background, our challenges call for optimism, faith in ourselves, and a determination to solve problems rather than to cringe before them.

One disturbing tendency is an increasing decline in the sense of history. There is a failure to appreciate the inevitable continuity of human experience and effort. Many students and man of the younger teachers mistakenly believe that the past is irrelevant. Problems which have dogged humanity for thousands of years are now blamed on the present elder generation. Those over thirty are charged with all the failures of human history. This is silly, but such ideas, wedded to vacant protest, can be used to wreck a civilization. Only evolution and change can maintain the health of any system, but the historically illiterate are not competent to guide the process. Youth, per se, is not a fit substitute for experience and wisdom. Crises and troubles have been with us since Eve ate the apple. We should face them with fortitude, skill and insight, rather than with four letter words and violence.

A very vocal minority of the young are arrogant, ignorant and self-indulgent. Ignorant of the past, I mean, and of the obstacles arising from ordinary human nature. Some, promoting violence, seek a most intolerant control over the thoughts and actions of their fellows. Rather than reasoning, they insist, proclaim and threaten. They ask for limitless rights, but deny responsibilities. From the media they get far more than their share of attention. The hollow pomposity, on this subject, of a few of the commentators, would be amusing, were it not depressing.

Fortunately, raucus youth should be cured by time. Hippies of today may be constructive citizens of tomorrow. Most young people are better than the pessimists admit. They are aware of the challenges of race and racism, black or white. They know the dangers or overpopulation, pollution and war. They are facing the threat of atomic destruction. They are sensitive to the third world of underdevelopment and deprivation.

They are boiling with ideas and energy. They have the skills and determination to solve as many of the world’s problems as can be handled by any single generation. They will necessarily change the world, and alter much that we take for granted. This is proper. In their hands, I do not fear for our future.

As for me, I have been lucky to have lived in a period of change and development. I have tried to think of our troubles as great human opportunities. Yet when the impact of the present wears me down, I like to take occasional refuge in the past. I return, then, to the present all the more encouraged for the future.