To The Defense of Magoun

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Professors Wiener and Magoun, in their Boston Herald briefs on the German-political-racial situation, might be amused to know how their arguments strike one of the general public who can not boast of great learning, but one who tries to limp along on a modicum of common sense.

I cannot see why Prof. Magoun needs to be called severely to task by Professor Wiener for recounting the philosophy of the Nazis. I was thankful to see it succinctly put, and did not leap to the immediate conclusion that Prof. Magoun was a rabble-rouser. If I explain to the press why Eskimos eat candles, or state what particular gastronomic pleasure cannibals derive from missionaries, is it to be assumed that I approve of such edibles or such ethics, or that I am a cannibal, too?

Professor Magoun, in the last paragraph of his first letter, clears himself of any dogmatic opinion. He states, "Except from a short-term point of view it is highly doubtful if these policies have damaged German universities. And the principles at which they (the Nazis) have struck represent not so much an attack on "academic freedom" as an attempt to check irresponsibility toward what seem (and please note the words "what seem") to the German people to be the highest aspirations of our western civilization." In other words, Professor Magoun says indirectly that for a short-term period the German universities may well be damaged. He answered here Professor Wiener's specific question before the latter asked it. Now I ask, who put up the straw man to be knocked down?

As for the word Aryan, it is a fine one for the experts to quarrel over. I think to the average reader it means that the Germans want Germans for their neighbors and business and scholastic associates. Why quibble about that, or the word German, or Nordic, or Teutonic. They are mere blanket terms for a desired end.

Johannes Steel (a pen name for a German exile who headed the German industrial espionage) tells us in his new book, "The Next World War," just published, that all this Aryan-anti-Jewish patter in Germany is a scheme to make the Germans forget their own class warfare--to weld them into one united family. Elsewhere we are informed that the Nordic-Teutonic stage business is to cover the plan to forge northern and central Europe into a self-contained economic confederation. See the Rosenberg plan in Ernst Henri's book "Hitler Over Europe."

Thus it seems to me that those who take seriously the Nazi chatter on these subjects must make even the Nazis laugh. Professor Wiener does his intelligence no credit if he thinks those who run Germany are fools. Let him call them flends if he will, but not fools. They know exactly what they want (Regard--Oh, Democracy!) and the chances are, that in spite of the nervous French and the nervous Jews, they will get it. In History, is or is it not that that counts?

Where is there lament in the fact that these professorial geniuses have left Germany? If the Nazis had killed them all, Professor Wiener's complaints would be in better order. The world has lost nothing. Harvard and Tech are perhaps guiltiest of all schools in buying outstanding talent from other institutions. Would Professor Wiener dare say that the men who replace these professors in the dispossessed schools are "jealous little men who hide themselves under the skirts of the cloak of scholarship?" No, Professor, we do not believe that after the few Jews and liberals depart the German faculties that only fools are left. The Jews and the liberals did not alone make Germany great.

I pass over Professor Wiener's sneer about the "journalistic status" of certain writers. Journalists must be excused for writing less and less about more and more, otherwise the poor public might lose touch with the profundities of modern research, and not endow the Great Minds with a lifetime (not to mention innumerable vacations and sabbatical years) in which to grow wiser and wiser.

And even suppose that the German universities were destroyed, and the professors with them. It might not amount to much as opposed to the dynamics of history. The poor people who would be left might not speak in the scholastic sense, with authority, but they might, as they have done before, still speak with intelligence. It is too bad that professorial geniuses must die, if Professor Wiener's argument is good, but one notices, in looking through a thousand years, that others, and even smarter, come along to fill their shoes.

Again, I repeat that I can see nothing in Professor Magoun's letter to make him such a target. He underwrote nothing. It is not be who I would charge with propaganda.

What may really be lamentable, and closer home, is that so many citizens of our own country show this same deadly suspicion of the ultra-liberal professorial class, called into the Brain Trust and other high posts to save us lest we perish. The result, so far, seems to be that each is so right the other can be but wrong.

Can there be any mystical relation between the letters after a pundit's name and the alphabetical monstrosities fabricated under the so-called New Deali We wonder. (Name withheld by request.)