Camp-ISS-Bellow Vistas

We're leaders, we're leaders, you'd think we were the best,

But if we are the leaders, ain't you sad for the rest?

In Nazi Germany, where future Fuehrers are chosen at the age of 8 and finish their rigorous training in mountain castles, nobody would think of singing such a ditty. But in the closest U.S. equivalent, a student-leadership institute at President Roosevelt's summer house in Campobello, New Brunswick, a group of would-be young U.S. leaders chanted it lustily last week, thereby pointing out a distinction: a democracy's leaders must have a sense of humor.

The institute was a new idea, tried for the first time this summer by the U.S. branch of the International Student Service, Eleanor Roosevelt's latest fancy. I.S.S., a 21-year-old student relief organization whose chief present function is "to enlist American students in the struggle against totalitarianism," decided to bring college leaders together to train them for the job. From a list of 80 prominent collegians recommended by college administrators, it picked 32 by means of a history test.* Mrs. Roosevelt invited them to the big, rambling Campobello house, scurried round to collect beds for the 29 boys and girls from 25 colleges who eventually showed up. Each paid a $60 fee for the five-week session.

Their instructors were a group of intimates: twinkling Dr. William Allan Neilson, Smith's president-emeritus, as director, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Librarian Archibald MacLeish and other White House favorites. Popular reading matter at the institute: Mein Kampf and Louis Fischer's Men and Politics. At Mrs. Roosevelt the students shot such questions as "Should we enter the war? . . . Are there appeasers in the State Department?" Mrs. Roosevelt answered off the record. They took turns presiding at meetings, organized groups of hecklers to get practice in handling them.

The trainees also published a newspaper, Camp-ISS-Bellow, put salt in the sugar bowl, sucked lollipops handed out by Mrs. Roosevelt, satirized their lecturers in songs, played tennis, danced, picnicked. Curfew was at midnight, but when Mrs. Roosevelt was around they stayed up until 2:30.

Last week they packed up and whooped off home, full of schemes to give their contemporaries a "fighting faith." Said Mrs. Roosevelt in My Day: "It is very exciting to be with a lot of young people. . . . I feel there is for most of them at least a keen desire to open up new vistas. . . ."

* Candidates had to comment on such propositions as these: i) "The course of history is fixed and it is beyond the power of any individual to change it." 2) "The last generation got us into this .mess, and we can't do anything about it."

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