Forum's Fifty

Celebrating a half century spent maintaining "a medium for free speech," Forum last week reprinted 18 articles, poems, stories evoking from the past the ghosts of some of its celebrated contributors. Though Forum's editors did not intend "merely to dazzle our readers with an array of great names," such was the primary effect with the names of these spectral scriveners:

Steelmaster Andrew Carnegie prophesied in 1886, the Forum's first year: "I can, of course, picture in my mind a state of civilization in which the most talented businessmen shall find their most cherished work in carrying on immense concerns, not primarily for their own personal aggrandizement, but for the good of the masses of workers engaged therein, and their families; but this is only the foreshadowing of a dim and distant future."

From Vienna, where he had read of the Congressional appropriation financing U. S. Peace Commissioners for winding up the Spanish-American War, Mark Twain wisecracked in 1899: "At a public function in a European court all foreign representatives except ours wear clothes which in some way distinguish them. . . . But our representative appears in a plain black swallowtail. . . . It is found in all countries; it is as international as a nightshirt."

Tracing the movement of peoples from East to West across the U. S., Princeton's Professor Woodrow Wilson in 1895 pleaded for a cultural give-&-take between both sections. " 'Tis thus," concluded the future President of the U. S., "we shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay."

Same year New York's President of Police Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt took a leaf from current melodrama, declared: "There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American . . . bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses--whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter."

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