Salutes v. Facts

"General Motors presents the Parade of the States!" is the announcement which opens a weekly radio broadcast.* Excerpts from last week's program:

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience, this is Graham McNamee. Last week the Parade of the States took us to Ohio. This evening Georgia."

"In the year 1733, a fleet arrived at the mouth of the Savannah River; and presently back home in London trustees of a new venture heard with joy that the flag of England had been raised over the Royal Colony of Georgia."

(March from Handel's Water Music.)

"Martial music receded as the frontier was driven back, and life in Georgia took on a richer note. Master workmen from over the sea built manor houses of English brick, and English airs were sung to the plucked melodies of harpsichords in great colonial halls."

(Old English Songs.)

"And now. General Motors presents a brief tribute to the State of Georgia, written by Bruce Barton, and read by Charles Webster."

"Wise was Oglethorpe when he chose Georgia. Wise were the early settlers who journeyed from the "North to this rich land. General Motors salutes you, Georgia. Faithfully have you kept lighted the torch of the pioneer."

Less lyrical than General Motors' salute to Georgia is a book which, by rare coincidence, brought statements of indignation out of Georgia on the day of last week's broadcast. As almost every U. S. high-school student knows, Dr. David Saville Muzzey's History of the American People refers to Oglethorpe's colonists as "poor debtors and criminals," says that "the convicts were poor workers," and that therefore Oglethorpe abandoned his charter 21 years after it was issued. To President Charles Ellis of the Savannah Board of Education, these passages seemed little less than appalling. He told the board last week that a local history teacher had called them untrue. The board agreed to ask Ginn & Co., publishers of the history, to make corrections.

A friendly, mild-mannered pedagog. Historian Muzzey nonetheless stood his ground. He quoted Fite's History of the U. S. and Greene's Foundations of American Nationality which call Oglethorpe's colonists "the King's poverty-stricken subjects." and "poor but honest debtors." Said he: "I have never cared to enter controversies. . . . There was no shadow of an idea in my mind of casting any aspersions on the people of Georgia. . . . It is a just manifestation of local pride that the Savannah Board of Education should protest."

Historian Muzzey, 61, is no clod-caster, no iconoclast, yet in his gentle way he habitually offends people who prefer Salutes to Facts. His most famed assailant was Chicago's chauvinistic William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson. Were Dr. Muzzey a vindictive person, he might have taken satisfaction in news last week of former U. S. Representative John Jerome Gorman, special assistant corporation counsel under Mayor Thompson, author in 1928 of savage diatribes against the Muzzey history--for which he apologized when Dr. Muzzey sued him for $100,000. Mr. Gorman was disbarred last week by the Illinois Supreme Court for nonconformity to standards of the legal profession. But Dr. Muzzey, well-beloved graduate professor of American History at Columbia University, has more important interests. A onetime theology student (he is a Bachelor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary), he now disagrees with the tenets of organized religion, occupies himself with Manhattan's Ethical Culture Society, in whose school his daughter and son-in-law teach. Dr. Muzzey helped found last September The American Observer, a weekly paper for schools. Its brightest feature is a page. "Social Science Backgrounds." which he writes in collaboration with Sociologist Walter E. Myer of Kansas State Teachers College.

*Mondays, 9:30-10:00 p.m., Eastern Standard time, National Broadcasting chain.

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