WORK-CAMPS AND DEFENSE

To the four million young people who are "out of school, out of work," democracy has had very little meaning. To the sixteen million others of similar age, in schools, on farms, or employed in bare-subsistence jobs, prospects for living seem hardly less bleak. Yet it is upon these young people that America must depend for its defense--in war and in peace alike.

Their morale should be the concern of everyone interested in this country's today and in its tomorrow. A generation, or a portion of one, which feels that it has no stake in this society can hardly be counted upon to strive with eager energy for its preservation.

Until the host of young people are provided with a permanent place in a revised economic order, there are before them two possible futures. They can drift along, bewildered, dissatisfied, listening for the sweet music of a Pied Piper's promises. Or they can sink their roots into the democratic earth, can get a feeling that they are both giving something to, and getting something from, our society.

It is this second alternative that the Work-Camp movement has sought to bring into being. Borrowing an idea from William James, the Work-Camps have gathered young people together in cooperative communities for constructive work. At the end of each day the camp-members are faced with the reality of their own accomplishments. They see what they have made; they know what they have learned. They feel an identification with democracy and a share in the national life. They are acquiring skills to fit them for the happier bejobbed days that are to come, and they are conserving the resources and improving the "plant" of their country in the meanwhile. They are participating in citizenship.

To this pattern conform the CCC, the NYA resident centers, the Quaker Summer Camps, Work Camps for America, and sundry other similar experiments. It is in the type of enrollees that the principal difference occurs. The government organizations consist almost exclusively of young people who would otherwise be entirely on the rocks; the private camps have sought to promote "trans-class associations," through which college youth and working-class youth can come to know each other and to have a more real friendship, a deeper awareness of mutual needs and interests. The private camps, too, have tended to be more democratically organized and led, rather than arranged along military lines as in the CCC.

To Harvard there comes, then, an opportunity. The University where William James once taught can pay him tribute, by fostering one of these work-camps and its "moral equivalent of war": raising money to start a venture patterned after the voluntary experiments of the Quaker and Work-Camps for America variety, and enrolling a number of undergraduates in the camp. With the backing of Phillips Brooks House, of the Student Council, and of other groups in the Yard, the project should readily succeed, for it is not a large sum which is needed. Such a camp would be, in the realest sense, a contribution to the domestic defense--and perhaps even a more meaningful contribution than is now being made by Harvard in other lines.

For this a problem which will face the United States in doubled degree when the war has ended. A demobilized army and the collapse of defense industries will make blacker and more dangerous the post-war unemployment picture. Work-camps may not be a solution; they are an attempt at an answer. To the practical experiments now being undertaken, Harvard owes it to Williams James to contribute.