CLASS PRIVILEGE DESTROYS FRONTIER HERITAGE--CONANT

"We must curtail hereditary privilege and extend the doctrine of equality of opportunity." These words spoken by President Conant before an audience of 300 Summer School and College students climaxed a speech during which he traced the origin of American liberty to the pioneer community, "the antithesis of a stable, sophisticated, urban civilization."

"Change, not stability; hard work, not leisure; rewards for initiative and boldness, not assurances of security and safety characterized pioneer life throughout the expansion of the United States," Conant said, underlining his oft-repeated conviction that a lapse into stabilized, hereditary privilege is one of the most grave threats to free opportunity. "We must reverse the trend of the last 50 years and restore a high degree of social mobility," he stated.

Simultaneously with the breaking down of threatening social and economic barriers, the United States must take the leading role in world reconstruction, according to Conant. "Unlike the situation 25 years ago, we harbor no illusions that the United States can take a few years off to win the war and then return to normalcy."

President Conant investigated the frontier condition of American society during the nineteenth century to clarify the concept of human liberty specific to this nation and passed on by tradition. "Those of our frontier were not concerned with the past. They were little bothered by tradition or custom; what stability and order they possessed came from the needs of the present, not from an inherited pattern."

"In spite of slavery, of the landed aristocracy of the South and the families of seaport merchant princes, in spite of later industrial barons in the North and East," the American ideology became fixed in the ideal of a classless society, rejecting the idea of hereditary privilege. The strength of that ideal was illustrated by Conant with the melting-pot tradition, whereby immigrants were not permanently relegated to an inferior social condition. Even the radicals, he said, soft-pedalled the class struggle.

The instability of the early days of the Republic not only manifested itself by continual and convulsive movements westward, but also by the rapidity with which fortunes were gained and lost, with no more than temporary hopelessness. In this condition of flexibility, Conant said, the "unique heritage" of the country's liberty from permanent social stratification was moulded.

Conant concluded his address with an appeal for a new approximation to the social mobility and devotion to the welfare of the average man characterized by the frontier society.