Peace Day

Two years ago when the radical American Student Union tried to prod U.S. high-school and college students out of their classrooms for an hour to protest against war, only 25,000 students responded. Last year the Union held a second strike, rallied 200,000 strikers. With better organization and a European crisis at hand, an estimated 500,000 student strikers last week observed the third Peace Day. While the Emergency Peace Committee was imparting to the occasion a religious flavor (see p. 32), the student Peace Day gave signs of turning into a full-sized and characteristically noisy national institution, like Halloween.

P: Before 150 undergraduates in the courtyard of Yale's Pierson College appeared a small, mild-faced Negro. .No Yaleman but a collectivist who was sentenced to a Georgia chain gang three years ago for possessing radical literature and is now out on bail, Communist Angelo Herndon gravely announced: "We love our country so much that we are not willing to see her plunge into another war. . . ."

P: In Seattle 500 University of Washington students clamorously piled wreaths fashioned from green editions of Publisher William Randolph Hearst's PostIntelligencer on the tomb of a future Unknown Soldier, heard a student impersonating J. Pierpont Morgan gloat: "We made money out of the last war. We'll make money out of the next war."

P: At Princeton 500 well-behaved demonstrators gathered to hear a pacifist message from Physicist Albert Einstein, a speech by Columnist Dorothy Thompson Lewis who advised: "Go into politics, young men. There's plenty to do in this country, getting it back from the pioneers who nearly ruined it."

P: Onto a platform at Philadelphia's Temple University climbed Oswald Garrison Villard, oldtime editor of the Nation, to deliver a ringing peace message. Into the meeting charged a flying wedge of unsympathetic Temple athletes who pelted the demonstrators with lemons and vegetables, triumphantly upset the speakers' platform.

P: When 3,500 students from Brooklyn College, Seth Low Junior College and Long Island University marched to a demonstration on the steps of Brooklyn's Borough Hall, a short, middle-aged woman, mother of one of the students, ran up to a sound truck, dramatically cried into the microphone: "We came to see our children in life, not in death. ..." Enthusiastically adding to Peace Day's confusion was a new society, the Veterans of Future Wars, which sprang up at Princeton three months ago to advocate the immediate payment of a $1,000 cash bonus to every U. S. citizen who might some day serve in a foreign war (TIME, March 30). Now entrenched in 300 of the nation's colleges, the Veterans were much in evidence on Peace Day. Manhattan's "William Randolph Hearst Post No. 1," composed of 350 derisive Columbia students, hoisted a death's head banner of Publisher Hearst labeled "Our Willie," carried battered dolls marked "War Orphans," paraded up Broadway behind a 50-piece band whose drum major twirled a crutch. In California, while Stanford students assembled to hear Socialist Norman Thomas in a pre-Peace Day meeting, the University's Future Veterans marched about singing: "Down with peace! We want our bonus!" In Appleton, Wis., Chief of Police George T. Prim withdrew a permit for a Future Veterans' parade of Lawrence Collegians. During a peaceable campus demonstration half a dozen students stepped out of bounds, were set upon by police, clubbed.

Last week Commander Lewis Jefferson Gorin of the Veterans of Future Wars rushed to a timely publication his first book, Patriotism Prepaid.* Commander Gorin, a small Princeton senior, wrote feverishly for six days & nights, described his scheme with high-pitched humor. With a professional competence which hard times have brought to most U. S. campuses, he gibes: ". . . We shall wear our caps in an east and west direction. . . . Napoleon wore his hat east and west but Nelson, who was something of a fop, affected a north and south direction. Nelson cannot be an example for us for he very foolishly died in battle. Napoleon, on the other hand, outlived the war for 20 glorious years supported by a government pension. He is our man."

*Lippincott

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