"To Act with Restraint"

Last week Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, friend & guardian of the Communist-riven American Youth Congress, took time off from early Christmas shopping to help launch another youth movement. Gathered in the Rockefeller-built International House on Manhattan's Morningside Heights were 295 delegates, from 90 colleges and 15 foreign countries, to a conference of International Student Service. They had met to dedicate their 20-year-old organization to a new purpose: upholding democracy in the U. S.

I. S. S. (headquarters: Geneva) was organized in 1920 to help European students made destitute by World War I. Since 1933 it has been helping refugee students: German Jews, Czechs, Spaniards, Chinese. Studious and conscientious, I. S. S. was disturbed by the activities of the American Youth Congress, by an increasing tendency of grownups to get fed up with Youth. Thereupon I. S. S.'s advisers--among them: Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, Congressional Librarian Archibald MacLeish, Smith's President-emeritus William A. Neilson, Williams' Professor Max Lerner--decided that the organization should have as its main function teaching youth "to think historically and to act with restraint." Said they: "Organized 'action groups' . . . have been able to secure much greater influence than their relatively small numbers deserve. ..."

No rival to the Youth Congress, I. S. S. nevertheless proposed to speak more authoritatively for U. S. Youth, wean Youth from passing angry resolutions to sober discussion. Last week Author Christopher Morley's blonde daughter Louise (Bryn Mawr) started the ball rolling by introducing Mrs. Roosevelt at the I. S. S. conference. Up dashed an ink-black African and a swarthy Brazilian, presented Mrs. Roosevelt with a striped bedspread, a Brazilian student banner.

Delegates proceeded to examine problems from the fifth column to foreign trade, heard themselves scolded for cynicism and "disgusted detachment" by Speakers Neilson, MacLeish, et al., skirmished with a few members of the American Student Union and American Youth Congress who had gone to bore from within. By week's end the delegates had succeeded in squelching these noisy spokesmen, went off to their colleges steamed up to start forums on world problems.

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