Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly [1944-1945]

SCOTT
LLEGE

' k * \i

mnsH

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2011 with funding from

LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/agnesscottalumna23agne

\ I U M N

ES SCOTT

QUARTERLY

President McCain s House

from the gouache by Helen Pope

lOMMUINITY OF MIND"

OUR QUARTERLY

We owe to Ellen Douglass Leyburn '27
the planning of this autumn number
and the fortunate choice of contribu-
tors. We regret that she had to resign
as Chairman of the Publication Com-
mittee because of illness during the
summer, but we rejoice that Lita Goss
'36 is her successor.

Here Ellen Douglass acquaints us with
the origin and meaning of "Community
of Mind."

t C c C < ' ' ' .

, ( ( r r c t ' '

C II <

e c c c c c

"No, Sir, it is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical
quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world." The speaker, of
course, is Doctor Johnson; and the date, 1781. We can no longer say that classical
quotation is our parole, alas even among literary men. But we do have the possi-
bility of participating in the sort of community of mind which Johnson and his con-
temporaries found in their common possession of classical learning brought to bear
upon the mingled currents of their own perplexing times. For the alumnae of a
college like Agnes Scott the warmth of belonging to such a community of mind
comes from our associations with the college. We have all felt the quickening of
spirit that comes from being part of a group where life-enhancing ideas move from
mind to mind, from sharing in the "dance of thought," from catching

Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during poiver,
And central peace, subsisting
At the heart of endless agitation.

The writers of our first four articles have tried to capture for us in expression
some of the conceptions which we all in varying degrees of clarity or vagueness
associate with the college. It is the object of this part of the Quarterly, however,
not just to "endow our purposes with words," but to renew for all of us the feeling
of participation, of being part of a real community of spirit bound together by
our faith in ideas which endure and to which the college and "the band of her
daughters" are committed. The next group of articles, and indeed the whole move-
ment to establish the Alumnae Fund, grows directly out of our common feeling
about the heritage that belongs to us as alumnae of Agnes Scott. The more effec-
tive functioning of the Alumnae Association which the success of the Fund will
bring about will help us all to possess this heritage by maintaining more vital con-
nections with the college and among ourselves. Contributions to the Fund make
possible a tangible expression of our devotion to Agnes Scott. They are a way of
showing that we are still a part of "the college community."

Published lour times a Year (November. February, April, and Ju.lv) br the Alumnae Association of Agnes
Scott College at Decatur. Georgia. Contributors to the Alumnae Fund receive the magazine. Yearly sub-
scription. $2.00. Single copies, 25 cents. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office of Decatur,
Georgia, under the Act of August 24. 1912.

Agn^s Scott Alumnae Quarterly

Vol. XXIII "Community of Mind," Autumn 1944 No. 1

PRESSER HALL, frontispiece 2

THE CONTINUING QUEST

Dr. George P. Hayes 3

INVOLVED IN MANKIND

Virginia Prettyman 11

MAKING MEN AND WOMEN

Patricia Collins . 13

HOTSPUR AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Margaret Bland Sewell 17

TELL ME OF FALL, poem

Lulu Croft 19

OUR PRESIDENTS SPEAK

Dr. J. R. McCain 20

Katharine Woltz Green 21

OUR STAFF SPEAKS
CONTENTS Eugenia Symms 22

Billie Davis Nelson . 23

SOME ALUMNAE SPEAK . , ; 24

OUR NEIGHBORS SPEAK : 26

WE SPEAK 27

The Campus

LETTER TO AUNT JO

Martha Baker 28

GRANDDAUGHTERS CLUB 31

DEATH OF MRS. F. H. GAINES

Dr. J. R. McCain 32

FACULTY NEWS 33

CAMPUS CARROUSEL 59

The Alumnae

ALUMNAE DAY 30

CLASS NEWS . 35

CLUB NEWS - - -- - 57

LOST HOTTENTOTS 60

6C8G7

PRESSER HALL, the newest of the campus buildings.

Dr. Hayes grew up in Pennsylvania in the family's
original hard-logged farm house playing football,
dancing, reading, and acting out scenes from Shakes-
peare with his brothers, sisters, and cousins. After
attending Swarthmore, he served for a year in the
Army Medical Corps, stationed at Ellis Island. Next
came two years at Harvard, then four years teaching
at Robert College, an American school in Turkey.
Before his last year there he had met and married
the charming, artistic Nina Nissiat, of Lyons, France.

It was while he was at Harvard working on his
Ph.D. that Dr. McCain found him for Agnes Scott.
His family now includes two daughters at Agnes Scott
and a fourteen-year-old son. His home is a gracious
gathering place, a favorite with students and faculty.

For fourteen years our Dr. Hayes has jolted us into
thinking when necessary, constantly challenging us
in the search for truth by his own enthusiasm for and
understanding of what is real and abiding.

THE CONTINUING QUEST

George P. Hayes

Of all the older poets Matthew Arnold is the
one, I think, who has analyzed with the most
penetration the ills of modern man. The plight
of the person in Requiescat, for example, prob-
ably comes home to every one today:
"Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound,
But for peace her soul was yearning . . ."
In one of his best known images Arnold likens
modern man to a weary titan, "with deaf ears
and labour-dimmed eyes," staggering on to his
goal,

"Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load,
Well-nigh not to be borne,
Of the too vast orb of (his) fate."
The goal toward which the modern man is
making he does not himself know. Arnold com-
pares him elsewhere to a helmsman
"bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore."
Caught in an "iron time

Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears,"
and "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall,"
he is consumed by sick hurry, by divided aims,
his head o'ertaxed, his heart o'erlabored. He is ,

in a furnace, in whose hot breath his spirit is
upcurled until it crumbles or else grows like
steel. Under such conditions, asks Arnold of
us all,

"What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?"

Arnold's picture of what he calls "the strange
disease of modern life" has a grim relevance
today. As in Arnold's day, we are not clear as
to our goal: hence we concentrate on means
rather than on ends. Making a living, winning
the war, organizing the state or the world state,
producing and distributing, developing tech-
niques and machinery of all sorts these are all
means, necessary indeed but ultimately only
means, not the final ends of life.

Even more than in Arnold's day there emerge
from this confusion and from many other influ-
ences the lopsided specialist, the unintegrated
person, the machine mind, the materialist, and
the fragmentary man, torn by conflicting aims
and stresses, increasingly concerned, at least in
peace time, with personal security and decreas-
ingly concerned about the public good, more
and more coming to look upon themselves as

[3]

determined in their actions rather than determ-
ining them. Centered in themselves and their
families, their minds shaped by chance moods,
whims and prejudices picked up at random from
their immediate surroundings, they gradually
settle back into an easy reconcilement with the
native laziness and arrogance of human nature,
slaves to routine and to an incredible banality.
They illustrate the Socratic maxim that the un-
examined life is not worth living.

But there is a remedy. "Once read thy own
breast right," says Arnold, echoing Socrates.
To look within is to discover that, as the poets
have witnessed from the beginning of time, each
one of us has the power of transcendence of
rising above and evaluating himself and the
world, of setting up

"a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow."
From this capacity to stand above and apart
from his own past and even to regard as object
the present moment of experience come man's
intuition of inner freedom and his awareness of
his dignity, responsibility and significance as a
man.

One form of this transcendence, that of the
intellect, has been best described by Cardinal
Newman. He calls it enlargement or illumina-
tion, and finds that it results when we compare
one idea with another as they come before the
mind and then proceed to systematize them.

"We feel our minds to be growing and ex-
panding then, when we not only learn, but
refer what we learn to what we know already.
It is not the mere addition to our knowledge
that is illumination; but the locomotion, the
movement onwards, of that mental centre, to
which both what we know, and what we are
learning, the accumulating mass of our ac-

quirements, gravitates . . . Seafaring men, for
example, range from one end of the earth to
the other; but the multiplicity of external ob-
jects, which they have encountered, forms no
symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human
life, as it were on the wrong side, and it tells
no story. For them nothing has a drift or re-
lation; nothing has a history or a promise,"
for they have "no standard of judgment at
all, and no landmarks to guide them to a con-
clusion . . . That only is true enlargement of
mind which is the power of viewing many
things at once as one whole, of referring them
severally to their true place in the universal
system, of understanding their respective val-
ues, and determining their mutual depend-
ence . . . That perfection of the Intellect,
which is the result of Education and its
beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in
their respective measures, is the clear, calm,
accurate vision and comprehension of all
things, as far as the finite mind can embrace
them, each in its place, and with its own char-
acteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic
from its knowledge of history; it is almost
heart-searching from its knowledge of human
nature; it has almost supernatural charity
from its freedom from littleness and preju-
dice; it has almost the repose of faith, because
nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty
and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so
intimate is it with the eternal order of things
and the music of the spheres."

But transcendence by means of the intellect

which organizes its concepts into a philosophy

is not the only form of transcendence because

the thinking power is not the whole of man. Be-

> sides the understanding, we human beings have

[4]

imagination and emotion, will power and a sense
of beauty, courage, love, magnanimity, and con-
science. The highest transcendence calls upon
and elevates all the powers of man.

Consider, for example, this passage from
Stephen Spender:

"I think continually of those who were truly

great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's

history
Through corridors of light where the hours

are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head

to foot in song . . .
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest

fields
See how these names are feted by the waving

grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought

for life.
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun they travelled a short while

towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their
honour."

These lines bring us into "the presence and
the power of greatness," and in so doing fire the
imagination, activate all our energies and iden-
tify us with the images of beauty and of gran-
deur. They mould us to their accent and tune us
to their spirit. They make poets and creators of
us all and send us voyaging on imaginative
journeys of our own. In moments of vision such
as these "the mind and heart move out together
into a country where the perspective is large, the

pattern is unbroken and immense." Such is the
emancipation wrought when imagination and
feeling, released yet controlled, are fused with
the thinking power and achieve the transcend-
ence of beauty.

Imagination is dominant in this experience.
But imagination alone, dissociated from the
other powers, does not in itself give true trans-
cendence. If allowed to separate itself from
reason and will, it becomes the tyrannical, devas-
tating power described by Pascal "mistress of
error and falsity," victimizing the child, the fear-
ful person, and the man who gives rein to any
of the numerous forms of lust. It revels in the
materials brought to it by eye and ear the flux
of sense imagery, changing momently, which
philosophers denominate illusion.

On the other hand, as we have seen, the think-

Entrance to Buttrick Hall

[5]

ing power alone does not lead to the highest
transcendence. Truths abstractly stated do not
move us because they seem not to belong to the
sensuous world which is our home. Abstract
concepts must be brooded over by imagination,
wrought upon by the feelings, and steeped in the
experience of living until they take on form and
color, before we can regard them as aliens no
longer and invite them as intimates to a place
beside the hearth of the inner life.

Here is a central function of imagination: to
clothe with the rich harvest of eye and ear those
concepts of the mind, those realities of the spirit,
which, until thus given concrete representation,
seem only half real and move us hardly at all.
The image gives us delight; the idea behind it,
if a true one, gives a measure of wisdom. "One
can at the same time," says Joubert following
out this thought, "enjoy illusion and know the
truth." "Illusion and wisdom united are the
charm of life and of art." A deep insight, says
Emerson, will ultimate its thought in a thing.

These "imaginatized ideas" are the subject
matter of great literature, and they are also the
motivating power of most great living. The early
Puritans, for example, suspicious though they
often were of sensuous representation, were pos-
sessed intensely and profoundly by certain imag-
inatized ideas. Similarly possessed were Plato,
Dante, Shakespeare and Emerson.

The combined powers of the whole man, as
operative in the poets, were called by Matthew
Arnold the imaginative reason. The imaginative
reason is active and creative. It pictures what
the gross earth, and what we creatures of earth,
are striving to attain but fail to realize com-
pletely, and represents it not abstractly, but with
all the luster and the native hues of life. It thus
creates the illusion of a reality larger than actual

existence, in proportions so majestic and har
monious that they linger on in the memory, de
lighting the heart and illuminating the mind
Here is a transcendence which is a supreme re
ward of living. It yields insight, joy in beauty
and the desire and determination to carry insight
into action.

That insight gives glimpses into the reality
and preeminence of spiritual values beauty,
truth, goodness, all that the Christian calls God
values which transcend our finite limitations
in time and space. The saint and the mystic,
says T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, make it their
one aim to lay hold on that reality:

"To apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender."

This vision, which is attained in full measure
by the saint and the mystic, is given, more fit-
fully and dimly, to all of us who seek it. In the
words of Eliot, who is speaking as a Christian,

"For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the

music
While the music lasts. These are only hints

and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and

action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half under-
stood, is Incarnation."

[6]

West Lawn

In proportion as we have attained to trans-
cendence of the spirit, our desires are univer-
salized. Of this principle love is the supreme
example. In Eliot's conception, as in Dante's,
love is expanded beyond desire for the posses-
sion of an object and finds its joy in contempla-
tion:

"not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus,

love of country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little impor-
tance
Though never indifferent. History may be

servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they van-
ish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as

it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another
pattern."

One who has achieved this transcendence, or
anything remotely comparable to it, discovers
that his anxiety as a fragile, finite creature falls
largely away. He becomes keenly aware of the
paradox of man's position: in a sense the attach-
ments of -earth matter greatly, but in another
sense they matter not at all. As anxiety about
his insecurity diminishes, the passions which are
partly the product of that anxiety, such as
pride, envy and greed, diminish too. And the
truth comes home to him that it takes the super-
human to make a man truly human.

Some people, having seen the beatific vision,
return grudgingly to the active life. They have
an "otherworldly" outlook such as scholars have
noted in Plato. However, the world will hardly
be saved by such withdrawals from life, nor
is it clear that transcendence alone is to the best
interest of the individual, who is, according to
Thomas Aquinas, not merely a soul but such
a union of soul and body as to make one being.
We are implicated in physical events whether

[7]

we will or no, and man's richest development
perhaps lies in the successive action, or indeed
the simultaneous action, of attachment and de-
tachment, theory and practice, the ideal and the
real, and their cross-fertilization. The aim of
education, says Whitehead, is the production
of active wisdom; and the final possession of
wisdom is "the habit of the active utilisation
of well-understood principles." It is merely a
barren game, he continues, to ascend from the
particular to the general unless afterward we
can reverse the process and descend from the
general to the particular, ascending and descend-
ing like the angels on Jacob's ladder. Thus we
achieve what Newman calls the repose of the
mind which lives in itself while it lives in the
world.

As a matter of fact, the men with the finest
balance and proportion are those who have the
greatest capacity to immerse themselves in life
and also to transcend it who live most fully
in the objects of sense and the world of men,
savor them with the most relish, love them the
most dearly, and yet also have the greatest power
of detachment from them. The ideal, says Pas-
cal, is to combine opposite qualities and occupy
all the space between. Emerson, for example,
passionately loved his boy who died that boy

"for whom

Morn well might break and April bloom"

but Emerson also had a serene elevation of
spirit which diffused about his presence a pure
intellectual gleam "like the garment of a shining
one." We prize the earthiness, the homespun
quality, the rugged sense, the Western humor of
Lincoln, yet Lincoln was also capable of speak-
ing "with malice toward none, with charity for
all." Never was there a man more completely

of the marketplace than Socrates that "bare-
foot, begging chatterbox" yet in the words of
Jowett, "There is nothing in any tragedy ancient
or modern, nothing in poetry or history (with
one exception) like the last hours of Socrates in
Plato." The keystone of the arch is the Christian
doctrine of God immanent and transcendent and
the dogma of One who so loves the world that He
bridged the abyss between divine and human,
spirit and flesh.

Now the end of liberal studies, whether pur-
sued in college or out of it, is precisely to
achieve transcendence or detachment but a
detachment which will give a richer apprecia-
tion also of the values in attachment. Science,
philosophy, literature, the fine arts, history and
religion give to man, "in the adventure of his
spirit, an enabling act for his soul." These stud-
ies help us to understand man's nature and his-
tory and his relation to his physical background.
By showing us his power of transcendence
through the right exercise of all his capacities,
they emphasize man's essential dignity, signifi-
cance, and inner freedom. They thus furnish
each one of us with a clue to the proper integra-
tion and direction of his energies.

Never was there a time when it was more im-
portant for every person to lay hold for him-
self on the aids to transcendence which liberal
studies can give. For one thing, the idealism and
the self-sacrifice always manifest in a conflict
in which the national existence is at stake will
almost inevitably be followed after the war by
a long period of materialism, self-centeredness,
disillusionment, cynicism, and in the defeated
nations, something like despair. If we are not
to fall ready victims to the time-spirit, we shall
need all the spiritual values we can summon up

[8]

plus the long-span view which a broad knowl-
edge of history and human nature can give.

In addition, we shall stand greatly in need of
imaginative flexibility and sympathy both in our
personal relations and in our attitude toward
other nations. In our personal contacts with the
returning soldiers, all of us particularly those
who are wives or sweethearts of men who have
seen active service are going to need all the
imaginative identification which the reading of
good literature has bred in us. We shall re-
quire for ourselves all the understanding, mag-
nanimity and humility which we have so ad-
mired in the great men and women of the past,
real or fictional.

So, too, in our attitude toward peoples of
other lands and oppressed groups in our own
country. When we read about a great epoch of
history of whatever nation or when we lose our-
selves in a literary masterpiece of the past, we
are no longer Republicans or Democrats, North-
erners or Southerners, Protestants or Catholics,
Americans or Russians or Germans. Each one
of us is, for the time being, universal man,
identifying himself imaginatively with all that
is beautiful and generous, and glorying in the
triumphs of the free human spirit of whatever
race or period. But when we leave our reading
and come back to the present moment, we tend
to erect again the same old barriers that im-
prisoned us before. We begin to lose perspec-
tive, become confused, shortsighted, impatient,
resume our prejudices and private crotchets, and
judge others prematurely and harshly. This
resumption of our old, ordinary selves might
be called (to adapt a phrase of Julien Benda)
the Betrayal of the Educated a betrayal of
which each one is guilty every day. In the words

of Edmund Burke, "Men are wise with but little
reflection, and good with little self-denial, in
the business of all times except their own." In
the postwar period we must bring to a considera-
tion of other peoples, abroad and at home, that
standard of universal reason, that "pure flame
of truth," that imaginative flexibility and broad
experiencing power which liberal studies im-
part. Then the books which in college have
awakened us to the rich possibilities in living
will have become merely the starting point of a
continuing quest. To be faithful to this quest is,
I believe, part of our private share of responsi-
bility as educated persons toward building a
better postwar world.

We shall need to begin, we have seen, with a
confession of personal failure. Such a sense of
falling short, even a sense of sin, is critically im-
portant for us as individuals and as a nation
at the present moment. We are about to be vic-
tors in war. If history and literature teach us
anything, they tell us that the victorious nation
almost inevitably falls into arrogance and blind-
ness which will in time be punished inexorably.
The victors in war, still under the domination of
the passions of war and acting like petty gods
forgetting first of all their own past sins and
their own limitations as frail mortals, and then
forgetting that even their enemies are human
beings reject the suppliant pleas of the fallen
and proceed to wreak vengeance far beyond the
dues of justice or the needs of future security.
At the moment of victory in the great world they
fall victims to an inner defeat of the spirit of
which they are unaware. Our hymn of victory
must be Kipling's Recessional "Lest we for-
get." The task before us, then, is basically a
spiritual one, and our prime need, humility.

[9]

These, as I see it, are some of the social
implications of the transcendence which liberal
studies help to give. Yet after all these impli-
cations have been explored, the ultimate fact
is that we pursue the liberal arts for the enrich-
ment and elevation they bring to each one of
us as individuals. Pascal notes that a man can-
not remain solitary in his room without bore-
dom; and he must die alone. When we lie
awake during the long courses of the night or
even when we are talking to others, in the inner
recesses of the spirit each one of us is alone.
And each one must needs fortify his inner pal-
ladium as best he may. We should treat all
things in life playfully, says Joubert, except a
very few. Having disengaged these few, let us
move, "unhasting, unresting," toward the ever-
increasing joy of possessing them in very deed.

Note: Anyone interested in carrying further

the line of thought suggested in this essay will
enjoy reading some of the following books:
The Idea of a University by John Henry New-
man, Literature and Science and other works
by Matthew Arnold, Liberal Education by Mark
Van Doren, Liberal Education Re-examined and
The Meaning of the Humanities by Theodore
M. Greene and others, The Aims of Education
by A. N. Whitehead, Literature in American
Education and Matthew Arnold and the Modern
Spirit by Howard F. Lowry, Education at the
Crossroads and other volumes by Jacques Mari-
tain, The Humanities after the War and other
books edited or written by Norman Foerster,
The Higher Learning in America and other
volumes by R. M. Hutchins, The Future in
Education and other volumes by Sir Richard
Livingstone, and The Nature and Destiny of
Man by Reinhold Niebuhr.

[10]

INVOLVED IN MANKIND

Virginia Prettyman '34

"She knows as much about the breeding of fine
pigs as she does about an 18th century manuscript"
is what one friend has said about Virginia Prettyman.
"A keen sense of humor" is the remark of another.
Her varied experience includes her college course at
Agnes Scott, graduate work at Chapel Hill, two years
of English teaching at her Alma Mater, more gradu-
ate work at Yale, and now an English professorate at
Smith College.

Hearing my freshmen chat about "schedules,"
and thinking back over the ten years in which
experience has tested the strengths and weak-
nesses of my own college program of studies,
I have been prompted to a more than casual
inspection of this year's college catalogues.
What courses should I have chosen could I
have foreseen the problems and the opportunities
of the past decade? Even now, of course, the
question is a difficult one to answer. There are
many, many subjects that I could wish to have
studied ; and yet I cannot think of a single
college course that I would willingly have fore-
gone. Since there must be a limit to the num-
ber of hours even in an ideal program, let me
choose a bare minimum from the great number
of courses which I have needed or wanted in
the years since I left Agnes Scott.

Biology with emphasis upon zoology
would probably head the list. And to this I
should add a group of tool-knowledges which
I might easily have acquired in college but
which are difficult to attain in spare-time read-

ing, without expert direction and without access
to specialized libraries. I need a good founda-
tion in geography, a basic survey of the eco-
nomic structures of the world, and an acquaint-
ance with the workings of the principal forms
of modern government. These four courses
would, I think, contribute toward my better
understanding of the complex nature of the
human mind and of the structure of laws and
regulations and impulses which bind the indi-
vidual to and separate him from his fellows.

To balance these subjects I should elect one
which records the constant search for the prin-
ciple of unity for a conception of life which
might give direction and meaning to man's ac-
tions. Readings in philosophy too discursive
for the most part have made me wish for the
framework of a survey of the basic systems of
human thought. I should like a knowledge of the
many ways in which different minds have ap-
proached the single problem of the meaning and
value of human life.

[11]

It is idle, however, to dwell on the inevitable
gaps in my program of college studies gaps
which might have been bridged in ten years by
a person of well-directed energies. I should like
in all fairness to try a harder task: to give some
hint of a debt which must finally remain incal-
culable. For now and again, as I talk to a class,
or read a newspaper, or listen to conversation
or to music, I am made suddenly aware of the
powerful way in which my years at Agnes Scott
have wrought upon the scope of my interests, the
bent of my purposes, the very quality of my pleas-
ures. Were I to choose again the courses that
make up a four-year program in college, I
should hope to include the five which I have
spoken of. But I should make sure that the
majority of the work should be in those fields
which I chose as a sophomore: English and
French literature and modern history.

It is impossible in a short space to indicate
the riches which such a course of study may be-
stow. One falls back upon a description of
moments which flash in the memory: perhaps
the introduction to the old rogue Falstaff, whose
career provided an astonishing glimpse into the
springs of human vitality or to the man Mo-
liere, whose brilliant mind one came to discern,
refracted in the glittering prisms of a dozen
comedies. Or one tries to suggest the illumina-
tion of a moment when after long study some
pattern of human purpose was seen in a maze of
confused events and violent actions. Such mo-
ments of illumination are the frequent rewards
of students of history and literature, and es-
pecially of those students who have the good
fortune to study with men and women who have
the art of being teachers.

How much we owe to them, professors and

instructors! And how pleasant it is to acknowl-
edge the debt not only for the structure of
fact with which we could correlate our own find-
ings, but more especially for the hints and sug-
gestions which moved us to ross the bounds of
"courses" and "subjects," to listen to any voice
which spoke with the authority of greatness: the
voices of Plato, of Darwin, of Saint Augustine,
of Voltaire. And if we heard these separate
voices not as a confused babel but as a sympo-
sium upon human problems, it is because we
owed much to the example of and the associa-
tion with truly liberal and inquiring minds.

In estimating the rewards of a study of liter-
ature it is happily impossible to separate no-
tions of pleasure and of utility. To my expe-
rience as an undergraduate at Agnes Scott I
owe large thanks for a possession which has
been to me a source both of profit and of delight.
This possession is the habit, the discipline of
reading with all the resources of my mind. It is
a faculty which I covet for my students. And it
is one which I feel that a study of literature can
best develop in them, whether their individual
bents lead them to work chiefly in science or in
art or in any of the other subjects which make
up the body of literal knowledge. For the study
of literature is fundamentally a practice in in-
vesting with reality the deeds and thoughts of
other people: that is, a practice in communica-
tion. And he who acquires the tool of commu-
nication may break out of the isolation into
which each of us is born, and in which many of
us continue to live. He may become aware of
the urgency of facts and of ideas which are not
contained in or explained by his own expe-
rience. He may begin to discern his place, his
relationships, his responsibilities in a world in
which each of us is truly "involved in mankind."

[12]

MAKING MEN

AND WOMEN

Patricia Collins '28

It is at the office of the Attorney General, Wash-
ington, D. C, that you find Pat Collins. Her career
has included a liberal arts course at Agnes Scott, law
school at Emory, and research for the State of Geor-
gia. On the basis of outstanding achievement in her
graduate work and profession she was received into
Phi Beta Kappa in 1943.

Recently Time Magazine published an article
which described the results of an examination
given thirty-two successful business executives.
Half of the examinees had never been to college
and the questions given them covered the hu-
manities, and the social, biological and physical
sciences. The results, according to the announce-
ment made at the University of Chicago, where
the experiment originated, indicated that suc-
cessful people pick up a general education in
the course of their careers that is broader than
they know. "The self-made businessman," the
spokesman pointed out, "who spends his life
lamenting the cultural opportunities he missed
by not going to college may be better off than
he thinks."

I doubt that reports of this experiment will
have any far-reaching effect. The examination
was confined to successful business executives

and self-education is nothing new among people
of native ability, application and perseverance.
I find the statement provocative, however, as I
attempt to visualize my own college years in
terms of their usefulness to me in the profession
which I have chosen.

A glance at late issues of the Readers Guide
to Current Literature convinces me that I am
far from alone in my analysis of an education
and its usefulness. The number of articles and
comments on past, present and future education
in its various phases is legion. Certainly there
is no dearth of thought on the subject, though
I think it is characteristic of most present-day
writers to betray a tone of pessimism and a
tendency to view with alarm. The alarmists fall
into two groups: those of the practical school
who lament figures released by Selective Service
which indicate that subjects taught in our schools
fail to equip the youth of the nation to meet
the demands of technical changes which have
taken place in all fields, and those who regret
the present emphasis on the sciences and the
consequent neglect of culture and the humanities.
Of more than passing interest too is that group
of writers which projects the education problem
of the immediate post-war future in terms of

[13]

G.I. students returning to school, matured by
battle or other previous conditions of war servi-
tude, to be thrown with a student body whose
days in the classroom have remained blissfully
uninterrupted. Many a warrior today yearns
for a college course. Education, we are repeat-
edly told, is at the crossroads.

I talked the other day with a friend of mine,
whose job it is to keep a jump ahead of planning
in one of the Government Departments. "Per-
haps we made a mistake," he said, "in putting
the young women in the armed services to work
at full time jobs. It would have been possible
to reserve a portion of the day for continued
education at least for those who have remained
in the United States." It is his idea that war
being what it is, the young women, who are
spared the necessity of going into combat, should
help to bridge the education gap which will
result from this war for that generation whose
normal college years are being spent in the
service of the nation. He has a point, I think,
although some assurance is offered that real
thought is being given to the post-war education
of veteran service men and women.

It is hard for me to picture what direction
my own life might have taken had I not entered
Agnes Scott in the fall of 1924. I did not then
think of the years ahead in terms of pre-pro-
fessional training. I was the greenest of fresh-
men and my decision to go to Agnes Scott was
influenced by a strong-minded friend for whom
the goal had never wavered during four years
of high school. Her foresightedness, which gave
direction to my indecision, was a stroke of good
fortune for me. I was reading something of
Justice Holmes the other day and a passage of
his stuck in my mind. It comes back to me
now for the sentiments he expressed fit mine

as I look back, with what I should have to
characterize as smugness in someone else, upon
the lucky chance which sent me there. "It makes
me enormously happy," he said, "when I am
encouraged to believe that I have done some-
thing of what I should have liked to do, but
. . . this is private talk, not to be quoted to
others, for one is shy and sensitive as to one's
inner convictions, except in those queer moments
when one tells the world as poets and philoso-
phers do."

I acknowledge, now that I am making a clean
breast of it, that I concentrated every ounce of
energy on making the grade in that first year
and it was a narrow squeak. Without meaning
any discredit to my high school very few there
contemplated college courses at the time and
the curriculum was geared to the majority
the preparation I received was not such as to
fit me for the competition I met among students
from college preparatory schools. So like Alice
in Wonderland standing under a tree with the
Red Queen, I found it necessary to run at least
twice as fast in order to keep up with those
going at the normal pace.

I got my stride in the second year and I am
sure now that one of the things that got me
through the first year was the pride I felt in
being a student at Agnes Scott. That pride has
stayed right with me up to the present and it
has given me, as it has countless other Agnes
Scotters, a confidence which is an ever ready
support to lean upon. I used to think that Agnes
Scott girls had a look all their own which made
it easy for me to pick them out when I saw them
away from the campus. I was probably labeling
as a Hottentot any girl whose looks and manners
pleased me. And I used to resent an enumera-
tion of the leading colleges in the East which

[14]

omitted a mention of Agnes Scott. I have noticed
that I am not alone in that respect; I have seen
other alumnae assert fierce pride in their Alma
Mater under similar circumstances, particularly
since I have lived in Washington.

Often as I look back I try to separate the
elements of that comforting security which
warms me when I think of "school." (My
mention of school has always meant Agnes Scott
to me though I have spent pleasant intervals of
my learning years in other institutions.) There
are, of course, those friendships which race to
one's mind immediately, but it is, apart from
the friendships, the lasting values which flowed
from the discipline and the training which I
have sought.

There are few of us who have not at one time
or another cried out against the drudgery of
application to a dull task. I can think of nothing
more illustrative than the memorizing of French
irregular verbs. I should have replied, if ques-
tioned while working at the task, that only a
philosopher could discover the usefulness of
such wearisome toil. And yet even at the risk
of noting a fact to which attention is repeatedly
drawn I cannot help but record a word in men-
tion of the benefits to be derived from such dis-
ciplined study. It provides the start, no matter
what direction plans after college take. It has
been my observation that a college graduate
with an adaptable personality who retains the
habit of disciplined application and thinking
may count upon waking up one day, no matter
what her college, to find herself one of the
competent ones of her generation. Certain in-
tellectual tools are of course necessary to make
the training useful. Of these I think first of
skill in the written and spoken use of language.

One needs a good head start in striving for the
ability to talk and write and to understand and
be understood on ordinary subjects. To succeed
is to be equipped for attainment and for turning
one's educational experience to advantage.

But I have not been able thus far to place
my finger upon particular college subjects and
to say to my satisfaction that they have been
helpful to me in a specific way or that one was
more important than another. Since entering
law school in the fall of 1928, I have striven
to answer two questions which have been put to
me many times: How did you happen to study
law? What subjects do you consider useful as
background for the study of law? I have been
exceedingly inarticulate on the first and I do
not have an adequate answer to the second. To
me it is useless to attempt to identify particular
college subjects as foundation stones for the
professions or trades, with the exception per-
haps of the physical sciences; Latin for law,
economics for business, and so forth. To strain
for such a relation back and to urge such a
practical justification defeats the very purpose
and aim of the liberal ideal which is to furnish
intellectual rather than technical training. The
liberal arts college is now as it was many years
ago when Alexander Meiklejohn described it,
"not a place of the body, nor of the feelings,
nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place
of the mind ... a time for thinking, an oppor-
tunity for knowing ... a preparation for living."

A student who begins four years of liberal
college training has within grasp the opportunity
to stand, on the day of graduation, at a door
which opens upon a life enriched by a capacity
for enjoying literature and for understanding
history. Insofar as her studies have included

[15]

foreign languages, she has had an opportunity
for a wide understanding of her fellowman and
has obtained a key to a vast storehouse of the
knowledge of the past. She has the foundation
which enables her to orient herself into the
world's various activities, to speak its language
and to become conversant with its manners and
thought. Someone has said, "Make a man and
he will find his work." It is the purpose of the
liberal college to make men and women into
human beings intellectually fit for the pure joy
of intellectual activity and equal to the tasks
of growth. Their college training has touched
upon a wide range of subjects in order to give
them a footing for understanding and apprecia-
tion in many fields of learning. Thus equipped
they will find a niche in which to apprentice
themselves in order to make a livelihood or
to select the field in which they will train for
increased skill. They have the foundation upon
which to develop wisdom, judgment, experience,
and the other characteristics of a richer life
which distinguish persons destined for active
leadership.

Few will deny, I think, that the need for
leadership is keener now than ever before. The
acceleration which the war has brought to our
lives is a familiar theme. The travelers who
leave us today can cable us from the other side
of the world tomorrow. Countries and their
peoples and the respective problems of each
have a new and different relation to our own
problems in this stepped-up world, which is
closer knit and therefore smaller.

The education for leadership begins in train-
ing for intelligent thinking. The college grad-
uate in the coming years will find it more im-
portant than ever before to be able to reason

in terms of clear definitions from a background
of varied factual knowledge. As President Sey-
mour of Yale has put it, "The rhythms of learn-
ing need to be respected, and subjects which
give the student breadth and solidity be made to
precede those which call for concentration and
mastery of a narrowed field." "Above all
things," Alfred North Whitehead stresses, "we
must beware of what I call 'inert ideas' that
is to say, ideas that are merely received into
the mind without being utilized or distinguished
or thrown into fresh combinations. . . . There
is only one subject matter for education, and
that is Life in all its manifestations."

This war has been a test. Women have learned
that education counts and they will not forget
their lesson. They have had a chance to do
some of the big jobs of the war and they will
continue to do big jobs in the post-war world.
They have recognized that college-trained women
have an advantage. While it goes without saying
that college does not always produce the edu-
cated woman, education is offered, and when
it "takes" it has been observed that the college-
trained woman is likely to possess ability, initia-
tive, adaptability, and a desire to assume re-
sponsibility. All are qualities which, it seems
safe to assume, were nourished in her years of
disciplined study and in her cumulative intel-
lectual experience. Dean C. Mildred Thompson
of Vassar College has summed it up, I believe,
when she said, "However accomplished, educa-
tion aids the human being to think, to under-
stand, and to decide, and never have we been
more in need of such qualifications. The per-
sonal satisfactions of education are many, they
cannot be overlooked; but in our time these
private solaces are not enough. Women must
put education to work."

[16]

"Pink and Patches," which shows a warm under-
standing of the character and ways of mountain peo-
ple, is Margaret Sewell's most remembered play in
Agnes Scott circles. Margaret's combination of tal-
ent, intellectual alertness, home, and family makes
her indeed well qualified to set forth the ideals of
balance and wholeness of life.

HOTSPUR AND
HIGHER EDUCATION

Margaret Bland Sewell '20

"I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur
of the North, he that kills me some six or seven
dozen Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands,
and says to his wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life,
I want work.' "

This gently ironic tirade of Shakespeare's
Prince Hal against the lovable, impetuous but
impatient popular hero of his day is a superb
criticism not only of Hotspur but of all those
of his type, individuals who plunge into action
for the sake of action. The feminine Hotspurs
of today may not kill their six or seven dozen
Scots at a breakfast, but they can usually man-
age the six or seven dozen duties of their house-
holds between breakfast and lunch and be ready
between lunch and dinner for meetings of Gar-
den Clubs, P.T.A.'s, Church Circles, Girl Scouts,
Boy Scouts, U.D.C.'s, D.A.R.'s, League of
Women Voters, and for innumerable other meet-
ings of innumerable other organizations.

One of the admirable qualities of the modern
American woman is her ability, the practical
ability with which she runs her home and the
executive ability with which she directs various

organizations, the power of which amazed the
simple, scientific Madame Curie when she visited
America years ago. But this very ability of
the modern woman constitutes a menace to the
opportunities for the development of her own
personal and intellectual life, for once she is
recognized as a capable person, she is in demand
for organization after organization, for activity
after activity until before she herself realizes
it, like Hotspur she is killing her six or seven
dozen Scots at a breakfast and thirsting for more
blood so that life will not be quiet, or, like one
of George Eliot's characters, she is fluttering in
all directions and flying in none.

With the realization of that danger in mind,
there are questions that we should take time to
ask ourselves. Should activity for the sake of
activity be an end in itself? And is there any
place in our modern world, with its emphasis
on success and accomplishment, for the indi-

[17]

vidual who leads or seeks to lead a contempla-
tive life?

I think that if we were to answer the first
question in the affirmative and were to plunge
headlong and pell-mell into action merely for
the sake of action, we would soon be protesting
the demands of too much activity like the fat
and lazy Falstaff, who preferred to be "eaten
to death with a rust than scoured to nothing
with perpetual motion."

As to the second question, I think it would
certainly be difficult for us, in this modern
world when most of our companions are in the
whirl of perpetual motion, to withdraw entirely
and to seek, even if we wished it, an ivory
tower. It would scarcely be possible, and would
hardly be honorable to turn our backs upon the
opportunities for making a contribution of some
sort to the life of our day and generation.

Then if neither the extremely active life nor
the wholly contemplative one is entirely desira-
ble, is it possible for one individual to combine
a life of activity with a life of the intellect?

I, for one, think that it is extremely difficult
but not quite impossible and that it is certainly
the ideal toward which we should all work.
That is why I believe in the traditional liberal
arts education and why I cherish the rewards
of the years that I spent in study at college.
Certainly, if we have had in our youth some
time for "beholding the bright countenance of
truth in the quiet and still air of delightful
studies," we are better prepared to develop an
adult intellectual life. And I feel, too, that we
are better prepared to make a contribution to
our active modern life if we have first become
familiar with our past by studying and under-
standing the classical and Christian traditions

that have established the foundations of our
present.

Many of my friends disagree with me. Often
I hear them lament, "If only I had learned to
cook or to make speeches instead of having
spent time on translating Virgil and on reading
Chaucer, how much better off I would be." How
large a percentage of college-educated house-
wives feel that way, I do not know, but as
domestic problems increase with the shortage
of well-trained servants, I suppose there may
be more and more. But it seems to me that in
adult life, there abound opportunities for learn-
ing to cook and to sew, for improving house-
keeping methods, for mastering the mechanics
of smooth daily living, and for developing one's
taste for making speeches. But, seldom if ever,
is there either time or adequate opportunity for
grown women who have already assumed the
responsibility of homes and families to read,
mark, and inwardly digest the facts and phi-
losophies that are our intellectual heritage. But
if they have been fortunate enough in their
youth to have acquired some foundation for a
life of the intellect, they can from time to time
renew their interests and continue the,ir quests
even though they give most of their days to
cleaning house, to cooking, and to ever neces-
sary meetings. And even if in the press of
practical life, they never again find time for
hours of contemplation, they have acquired
already an inward resource of intangible value
that can never be taken from them.

It is something of the same principle on which
young girls lie out in the open on summer days
and let their bodies soak in enough warm sun-
shine to last them through the long winter months
when sunshine is rare. So, those who have the

[W]

opportunity of a liberal arts education have to
absorb enough philosophy to last them through
the years when opportunity for study is rare, for

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day.

Then when we have achieved this reserve of
thought and philosophy upon which we can draw
in needy years, we should be ready to come
down from our ivory tower, for, like Milton,
we would not wish to "praise a fugitive and

cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary
but slinks out of the race where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat."

If only we can take to ourselves Hotspur's
fine eagerness for action and add to that a sense
of the weighing values, a spirit of contemplation
trained in the liberal arts, then perhaps we can
achieve an active, useful life, tempered and
enriched by a life of the intellect.

TELL ME OF FALL

Lulu Croft ex- 38

Tell me, have the leaves begun to turn
And does the autumn toss her brilliant head
Of oak leaves now a dull and purple red,
And poplar trees with yellow on display?
The maple does she through the forest shed
A flash of gold and crimson bright and gay?

Tell me, is it fall at home again?
Write it to me in your simple art.
Describe to me each little minute part
Of beauty and each dash of color show,
That I may take the picture to my heart
And visualize the sloping woods I know.

So through the haze of dreams and tropic heat
My mind shall see the native woods afire
With the vivid views your written words inspire:
And I shall know if color fills the wood
That beauty reigns at home
And life is good.

Lulu Croft, now Lieutenant (jg) in the WAVES, is
stationed at Casa Marina Hotel, Key West, Florida.
In this poem, composed in October, 1944, she ex-
presses her longing for a real fall. . . .

[19]

OUR PRESIDENTS SPEAK

Agnes Scott College
October 17, 1944.

Dear Alumnae:

Your new program is significant in a number of ways. It moves Agnes Scott from the small college
conception of relations to that of the larger institutions. In many respects we wish to avoid the policies
and programs of large universities. In the relationship of alumnae to the Alma Mater, however, we
feel that they have had a better plan than our former one.

The substitution of voluntary gifts, whether large or small, for fixed dues is very wise. The invita-
tion for all to share, without distinction between those who give much or little, is wholesome. The
preparation of our publications to serve all the former students instead of a select few gives the editors
greater stimulation; and the distribution of them will be limited only by the lack of accurate mailing
addresses.

The whole plan was thoroughly discussed at the last meeting of the Board of Trustees for the Col-
lege and was unanimously and heartily approved. The fact that the Trustees are providing $5,000 this
year for the launching of the program indicates their confidence in its success.

Many interesting gifts are coming to the College now,
and great opportunities lie ahead of us. We hope that all
you alumnae will keep up with these and may share as
fully as you may find possible.

Cordially,

J. R. McCain,
President.

2834 North Hills Drive, N.E.
Atlanta, Georgia,

October 16, 1944.

Dear Alumnae:

When the school bell rings and there is fall in the air, our hearts beat a little faster and we feel an
urge to go back to Agnes Scott. If only in retrospect, we see again the towers of Main, the fountain
in the Alumnae Gardens, the stately procession of Investiture. Perhaps at Alumnae Week-end, con-
centrated this year into one day's activities, we can go back on the campus. We shall feel at home,
for in spite of war changes and improvements of the years, our Alma Mater is fundamentally just as
we remember her.

This September marked the opening of the fifty-sixth session of Agnes Scott with one of the largest
enrollments in the history of the college. Remodeling of the fourth floor of Main made it possible to
accept an increased number of boarding students. The promotion of interest in music and art, the
addition of many books to the library, and the participation of the campus in war activities are inter-
esting phases of life today at Agnes Scott.

You will be proud that one of our alumnae, Mrs. Frances (Winship) Walters, has given $100,000
for the erection of an Infirmary on the campus. Although her gift was made this summer before our

Alumnae Fund Plan was inaugurated, Mrs. Walters has set
an example for all of us in expressing her loyalty to Agnes
Scott through a voluntary contribution. It is our hope that
each alumna may make a gift, be it large or small, to the
College each year and thus participate in its development and
in the growth of our Association.

There is a warm welcome awaiting you whenever you can
come "home" again.

Yours sincerely,
Katharine Woltz Green,
(Mrs. Holcombe T. Green)
President Alumnae Association.

\

OUR STAFF SPEAKS

We alumnae of Agnes Scott have many reasons
to be proud of our Alma Mater. Founded in
1889, our school has been a college only since
1906. We are young, but we have attained
recognition for academic achievements; our fac-
ulty and officers have received national honors;
and our alumnae have distinguished themselves
in many fields. Our buildings, grounds and
equipment are valued at over $2,194,000, and
our invested funds total more than two and one-
half million dollars. The income from these
invested funds amounts to more than $85,000
each year and is applied to the operating ex-
penses of the College. This means that each
student pays less tuition than would be necessary
otherwise. In the last twenty years our total
assets have increased from less than a million
to almost five million dollars.

As the College grows, so should the Alumnae
Association increase its scope of service. Since
the date of its organization in 1895 the Asso-
ciation has followed- its purpose "to promote
the welfare of the College and its alumnae by
increasing the interest of its members in the
College and in each other." The Association
has made progress but the one or two part-time
secretaries have found it difficult to keep up the
files (28,000 cards catalogued in five ways for
over 7,000 alumnae) ; to publish the Quarterly;
and to handle the direct contacts with alumnae
through clubs, reunions, correspondence, and
visits. The low budget of $3,000 for 1943-44
was supplied by alumnae dues, income from the
Alumnae House, and a grant from the College.

We realized that our Association was not meet-
ing the needs of our expanding Alma Mater and
of the ever increasing number of alumnae. A
committee was appointed last spring to study
other associations, to survey our Association,
and to make recommendations for growth. This
committee found our Association hampered by
an inadequate budget (only 450 alumnae paid
dues last year). They recommended that we

./

'

Eugenia Symms '36, Executive Secretary
Agnes Scott Alumnae Association

abandon dues, establish an Alumnae Fund, and
invite all alumnae to contribute. This plan was
accepted at the annual meeting of the Associa-
tion in May, 1944, and the Trustees agreed to
provide $5,000 for the first year.

This new budget provides for more adequate
supplies and two full-time secretaries to enlarge
our contact with students and alumnae through
publications, clubs, and personal relations. We
are grateful to the College for this assistance.

As students we reaped benefits from countless
friends of the College who made immeasurable
contributions of service and financial aid. As
alumnae we wish to strengthen Agnes Scott for
greater development of sound scholarship and
spiritual training. As inheritors of the privilege
of education, we wish to "continue the quest"
and have a part in building a world of peace.
We can do this more effectively through a vital
Association, an informed and united member-
ship, a working "community of mind" and heart.

[22]

My appreciation of the Alumnae Fund grows
with each hour that I spend back at Agnes Scott
and that includes eight hours a day "on the
job," plus the "extras" for the Bacon Bat, Alum-
nae Day, lectures, concerts, Granddaughters'
parties, and "just visiting." You see, without
the Fund and the new set-up that it brings, there
would have been no chance for two secretaries
on the Alumnae Association staff and no thought
at all of having "yours truly" as editor of the
Alumnae Quarterly. I thank you for this oppor-
tunity you are giving me, and I pledge you my
best effort toward helping make the Quarterly
what we Agnes Scotters want it to be.

After two years out of college, with one year
spent in Public Welfare work, I feel the need
for re-stimulation of thought, faith, and vision;
a need for help on such questions as "How can
we enable the State of Georgia to allow more
than $10 a month for food for one person, $16
for two; to provide milk and fruit for children

Billie Davis Nelson , 42
Editor of Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly

stunted with pellagra; to clean up the house
where Mrs. T. has a constant battle with bed-
bugs and rats?" "How can we who have the
chance for laughing, playing, seeing beauty,
searching, learning, and finding God make pos-
sible this same chance for those now dispossessed
of it?"

Your questions and problems may be similar,
they may be different. But in whatever field you
are, you too must feel the need for reassurance,
for knowing yourself to be a part of what Agnes
Scott stands for. It is for this purpose that we
choose stimulating persons to share with us the
ideas and experiences contained in the feature
articles of each Quarterly.

In loyalty to our Alma Mater, we want to keep
up with its progress, its problems, its plans. The
Quarterly keeps us informed, and the Fund gives
us a means of action. This autumn Quarterly
is sent not only to all paid members of the Asso-
ciation but also to all graduates whose addresses
are known. In time we hope to get the address
of every former student. Contributors to the
Alumnae Fund, receive the four copies of the
Quarterly and whatever bulletins are published
during one year's time. The best plan is for each
one to make her gift in the fall so that your edi-
tor can know the circulation for the whole year
in advance.

News of friends is a delight, and Class News
in the Quarterly is one of our first interests.
With the new addressing-machine (which runs
off a little stencil of the name and address of
each graduate and eventually of every alum-
na ) we will be able to send the class secreta-
ries up-to-date lists of new addresses and names.
We are counting on you to keep your little sten-
cil correct.

Please feel free to send in whatever sugges-
tions you have for the Association and for the
Quarterly. They exist for our benefit and for
our service to the college. When you think of a
way in which they can better fulfill their purpose,
let your thoughts be known.

[23]

SOME ALUMNAE SPEAK

Among many alumnae who have expressed
their enthusiasm for the fund are the following
six who have written out their statements of what
they hope will be accomplished for the College
and for the Association:

Penelope Brown Barnett '34 (Mrs. Crawford Barnett),
Alumnae Association President 1940-42, Alumnae
Trustee 1942-44, Chairman of the committee which
planned the Alumnae Fund.

"I believe that the adoption of the Alumnae
Fund will give each alumna a feeling of active
participation in the progress of the College itself,
which after all is the 'raison d'etre' of any
alumnae association. I feel that the dues failed in
this objective both because of the connotation of
the word itself, and because it limited the reach
of the mailing list as a result of a vicious circle.
The Alumnae Fund plan will give everyone every
year the opportunity and privilege of hearing
from and contributing to her Alma Mater. It
will greatly enlarge the scope of the Association
and bring it and the College closer together."

Margaret Ridley '33, President of the Alumnae Asso-
ciation 1942-44, Alumnae Trustee 1944-46, College
Recorder 1943

"Agnes Scott College is strong because indi-
viduals have given generously of money as well
as of loyalty and faith to its development. The
Alumnae Fund offers each of us a new opportu-
nity to become a vital contributor to our Alma
Mater's continued growth."

[24]

Grace Walker Winn '40 (Mrs. Albert Winn), fellow in
English at Agnes Scott 1940-41.

"It seems to me that the two greatest weak-
nesses of the Alumnae Association in the past
have been ( 1 ) a failure to secure the interest of
the majority of the alumnae, and (2) a failure to
make a vital contribution to the life of the college
through either substantial gifts or an intelligent,
effective 'alumnae public opinion' on college
problems. I believe that the Fund will do a great
deal to strengthen the Association in these two
weak spots."

Polly Stone Buck '24 (Mrs. N. S. Buck), Alumnae
Secretary 1925-30. Wife of Dean of Freshmen at Yale.

"It may be as well to remember in connection
with our building up a substantial Alumnae
Fund that the value of a college diploma is not
a static thing, but grows or shrinks with the for-
tunes of the institution that gave it.

"All of a college's alumnae benefit from its
rising fortunes in the added prestige attached to
its degree.

"The act of graduation may sever the physical
connection between student and college, but as
long as she lives, each alumna continues to reap
benefits from her Alma Mater, truly a 'foster-
ing Mother,' whose scattered daughters owe her
in return life-long devotion and support."

Eleanor Hutchens '40, journalist on the staff of the
"Times," Huntsville, Alabama.

"I should like, as I think all alumnae would,
to see an adequate part of the fund used to keep
a real tie between us and the College: that is, to
prevent our forgetting the basic things we learned
there. There is too great a tendency to think
that we are plunged into the realities of life
after we leave college; whereas we were closer
to the realities there than we may ever be again.
If we were reminded, now and then, of the actual
purposes of our study, we might not look back
and laugh so pityingly at our younger selves for
thinking our lives and honor depended on pass-
ing an exam. And there might not be so sharp a
cleavage between the ideas we saw there and the
notions we follow after graduation. The Fund
could be applied to this end through the Quar-
terly and through the presentation of scholarly
programs at alumnae reunions. Other alumnae
will have their preferences, and I believe that

interest in the fund will be increased as each of
us expresses her ideas and suggestions."

Maryellen Harvey Newton '16 (Mrs. Henry E. New-
ton), Chairman of Alumnae Week-end 1941, Class
Secretary, mother of an Agnes Scott Sophomore 1944.

"Our Alumnae Association has made a step
forward in asking alumnae for gifts instead of
dues. Making a gift lovingly to Agnes Scott,
our Alma Mater, is a gracious joyous thing to
do. Paying dues to anything is a 'must' and is
often irksome. May the gifts be bounteous and
may they be used for added happiness for our
Agnes Scott girls of the nineteen forties and the
decades ahead. As a loyal alumna of the 'teens,
which to me was the 'Golden Age of Agnes
Scott,' I'd like to see the gifts of the alumnae
go into fitting memorials to such people as Miss
Hopkins, Dr. Sweet, Miss McKinney and Miss
Lillian Smith. I believe Dr. J. D. M. Armistead
has already been honored. These people did so
much for us, let us in some way honor them."

[25]

OUR NEIGHBORS SPEAK

Here the selected reports from other colleges
tell how their alumni have received the alumni
fund plan. Although the set-up in each college is
different and the figures given below do not al-
ways include all gifts made by alumni to the
college, they do show that the alumni fund plan
receives enthusiastic support.

Randolph-Macon

"1,153 alumnae gave $5,347 to the Alumnae
Fund: alumnae contributed also the sum of
$2,417 to the Nursery Shelter." (October,
1944.)

Sweet Briar

The eleventh annual report of the Alumnae
Fund shows that 1,103 alumnae contributed
$9,159.10. This is almost $3,000 greater than
the 1942-43 Fund Total. The per capita gift
was $7.09. (October, 1944.)

University of Georgia

For this the first year of the Alumni Endow-
ment Fund, the goal is $20,000; the slogan,
"Every alumnus give something, according to
his means and faith in the future of Alma
Mater." (October, 1944.)

Wellesley

". . . the total of $71,415 has surpassed all
previous records for annual fund contributions
to Wellesley . . . the Fund made up of more
individual gifts than ever before . . . 9,496
alumnae contributed, 1,073 of whom are new
givers. We know that you feel rewarded for
your generosity by a renewed pride in the
achievements and progress of your college, made
possible through your gifts." Alumnae also
made direct gifts to the College of $39,247.
(The Wellesley Magazine, October, 1944.)

Emory University

1,171 alumni contributed $4,023 to the Alumni
Association through dues, magazine subscrip-
tions, and gifts to the Loyalty Fund in addition
to the $9,109 contributed to the University Cen-
ter Campaign in 1943-44. (October, 1944.)

Goucher College

The $11,165 contributed was more than enough
to take care of the operating expenses of $10,156
for the Association. A gift of $2,500 to the
College was included in the operating expenses.
(August, 1944)

Davidson College

"Checks, large and small, coming from far and
near, have swelled the total of the Living Endow-
ment for this year to $12,600. . . ." (May,
1944.)

[26]

WE SPEAK

There are more than 7,000 of us, scattered all over the United
States and in many foreign lands.

We love our college quite as much as the alumnae of any
other institution.

We have proved it in every campaign Agnes Scott has pro-
moted, and we have helped to make it what it is.

We will give loyal support to the Alumnae Fund.

We recognize that promptness in having a part is almost as
valuable as the contribution itself.

SO HERE IS MY GIFT

1944-45 AGNES SCOTT COLLEGE ALUMNAE FUND

President Katharine W. Green,
Agnes Scott Alumnae Association.

Dear President "Kitty":

Please use this check (or War Bond) for the joint advantage of the College and the Association as
outlined in your plans.

$

Signed

Maiden Name, Class

Address

Make checks payable to the Agnes Scott College Alumnae Fund, and War Bonds, which should be of the "F" or "G" type, in the
name of Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Ga. These gifts are deductible for tax purposes.

1

[27]

Martha Baker, a student at Agnes Scott taking
journalism at Emory, writes the first in a series of
four "Letters to Aunt Jo." Here she catches the
"freshman feeling."

Letter to Aunt Jo

Dearest Aunt Jo:

I'm sitting in the library supposedly studying
for a history test, but instead I've been watching
the sophomore hockey practice outside. I can
see the leaves beginning to turn on the trees
by the May Day Dell and the dull red of the
far tennis courts.

It doesn't seem that I've been at school for
over a month or even that it could possibly be
the middle of October. But it is, and I find
that I love Agnes Scott more every day. Guess
there's so much going on that I've never had
time to get homesick. There's just something
about the atmosphere here that makes me feel
a part of things. Maybe it's the girls ... so
friendly and all. I don't know.

Take the "Black Cat Stunt" for instance. . . .
Remember I wrote you we had started working
on it? Well, if it hadn't been for our "sister"
class backing us, giving us pointers on how to
save money, staying late and helping us finish
painting the scenery down in the gym, coming
to practice and just everything, why we'd never
have finished. They even taught us the songs
at the "pep" meetings.

But the best part was that night. . . . The
rafters shook as we zig-zagged into the gym,
wearing our class colors and singing "Here's
to the Freshmen." You should have seen our
cheer-leaders leading us and the junior ones
too. There was a lump in my throat when we
sang our Alma Mater . . . the freshman Alma
Mater, the only one they've ever had and it was
written music and all by two frosh.

I'll never forget the suspense of waiting for
Miss Cobbs to announce the winner. It seemed
she'd never get to the point, but when she did,
did we cheer! That kitty had sense!

It was hard to stand in the breakfast line
next morning after that swell all-night "bull

[28]

session" we had. You know, I did tell you,
didn't I, about the cafeteria-style meals we have
now? Another instance of the war and the help
situation. It's not bad and really rather con-
venient to eat any time during the hour you
choose. You see people doing everything from
writing letters to the frosh reading "Mill On
the Floss" while they wait. A hundred people
can go through in fifteen minutes.

I surely was glad I wasn't on dining-room
duty first, for I'd have poured coffee down some-
one's back so early in the morning. You see,
all of us have been drafted, in different groups
of course, to help out in the dining-room. You
only serve for three weeks in all and that's not
bad. Our favorite expression now is, "How're
you crumbing along?", as we brush the tables.

I tried to find Ella Cary, the maid you said
was in Main, but she's been retired. Now we
have different girls who take turns staying in
Main Hall to act as hostesses and greet visitors
as they come in. There surely is a note of
informality and homeliness.

While I'm on the subject, I asked Miss
Scandrett about John Flint at the same time
I asked about Ella and discovered he's the one
who serves our plates every day. He says the
cafeteria is all right, but he will be glad when
he can serve the tables again. We will too, John.

I'm doing switchboard duty as my student
aid and love it. It's exciting to transfer the
long distance calls and to know just who is the
"popular one" each week. The other day, I
accidentally cut off a faculty member and it
really scared me. Switchboard is busy these
days for we even have a new floor to transfer
calls to. It's fourth Main where not so many
years ago, Miss Lewis had her art classes and
Mr. Johnson, his practice rooms. The rooms
are beautiful and I want to room there next
year, that is if I ever get to be a sophomore!
Anyway, I'd get to ride the elevator every time

I went to the room.

Friday was really a rush day. I took a light-
cut Thursday so I could go to Blackfriars' play
and wasn't up to par to begin with; you can
imagine my condition when I finally fell in bed
Friday night. Here's what I had to do besides
study. Spent all the afternoon collecting leaves
for biology 101, then rushed to hockey . . .
Barbara really gave us instructions and did
we carry them out and beat the sophs again.
Didn't have time to even shower, but dashed
to Art Students' League for a short meeting.
It's just been organized and is going to be
wonderful. Our art teacher, Mr. Thomas, has
marvellous ideas and is going to have Lamar
Dodd over from Georgia to lecture to us. After
supper, "Room-mate" and I went to the room-
warming the Recreational Council was having
for the game room they've just fixed in the back
of the old chapel. Then came studying!

I'm going to my second "coffee" next Sunday.
They don't have them now except every three
weeks or so. This one will be investiture week-
end and a very special one at that.

I want you to come see me soon. I want to
show you the campus ... let you be waked up
in the morning again by those "golden toned"
bells . . . see the colonnade on a Saturday night
when the dates start coming in ... go with me
to package call . . . dash for the trolley . . .
smell the next meal cooking even before the
last one's digested .... meet Miss Scandrett
for she wasn't here when you were ... do all
the things you've told me about and especially
feel the "Agnes Scott spirit" together. I want
to show you everything that's changed and let
you meet all the crowd, too. Must get ready
now to go to Lawson General Hospital and talk
to some of the wounded. This is just one of
the projects of War Council this year.

Give my love to all and write soon.

Janie.

[29]

Family Reunion of 200
on Alumnae Day

Alumnae Day, held on November 9, 1944,
brought to Agnes Scott a reunion of about 200
members of her "greater family" including sons-
in-law and grandchildren as well as "the girls."
Everyone enjoyed being back on campus and
seeing everybody else.

Welcome and Trip to Britain

After the first delighted and informal greet-
ings at the registration table in Presser Hall,
the alumnae and their husbands gathered at
Maclean Chapel to receive the "home-coming"
welcome from Dr. McCain and Katharine Woltz
Green, president of the Alumnae Association,
and to hear Miss Emily Woodward's talk on
"My Trip to Britain." Everyone gave full in-
terest to her account of her humorous, tragic,
enlightening, and challenging experiences.

tomato salad, and brick ice cream plus all the
' 'catching-up-on-news . ' '

The library, where the coffee with the faculty
was held, looked most intriguing lighted up with
candles in the windows and a real log fire in
the huge fireplace a perfect setting for the
delightful occupation of drinking coffee, eating
cookies, and mostly talking. ... It was a strug-
gle to tear away from the scores of fascinating
books put on exhibition by Miss Hanley. The
series of cartoons in "Naming the Baby" seemed
especially popular.

The Lessons of History

Dr. Will Durant, first lecturer of the year on
the Lecture Association series, gave everyone
plenty to think about in his discussion of "The
Lessons of History," naming the principle of
struggle as basic and essential in the develop-
ment of mankind. At the reception which fol-
lowed the lecture the alumnae and students were
given an opportunity to meet Dr. Durant.

Art Exhibit

Braving the three flights of steps to the Art
Gallery in the library, the alumnae were re-
warded with paintings by Harriett Fitzgerald,
an alumna of Randolph-Macon, and with Pro-
fessor Thomas' light but nevertheless enlighten-
ing demonstrations on the use of color.

Dinner and Coffee

Dinner at 6:15 was a delightful and memora-
ble treat with Miss Charlotte Hunter's friendly
and expert service as "traffic director" in the
dining room, Miss Harriss' delicious dinner of
fruit cocktail, fried chicken, candied yams, peas,

[30]

Children's Comments

The main impression left with the children is
that Agnes Scott is a clsce of wonders. Little
Holcombe Green confided to his mother that
"the hockey game is a swimming pool" and
that he liked very much the "ice cream like a
piece of cake." Harriet Daugherty and Kate
Ellis, who headed the Granddaughters' Commit-
tee, report that the children and the Grand-
daughters had loads of fun playing drop-the-
handkerchief and watching the swimming-pool
activities.

Comment from the mothers was that the
Granddaughters should be entitled to cuts all
the next day to recuperate!

Alumnae Day Committees

The success of Alumnae Day is shared by
all who took part in it, giving their interest,
enthusiasm, and friendship. There are those who
deserve special mention for special services
Mary Louise Crenshaw Palmour, chairman of
Alumnae Day; Fannie G. Mayson Donaldson,
publicity; Miss Emma May Laney, chairman
of Lecture Association; Margaret McDow Mac-
Dougall, Atlanta Club president; Annie Johnson
Sylvester, Decatur Club president; Miss Edna

Hanley and her staff for the after-dinner coffee
and book exhibit; Isabel Leonard Spearman for
the flower arrangements on the stage and in the
library; Julia Pratt Smith Slack for the flowers
in the Alumnae House ; the telephone committees
in the Decatur and Atlanta Clubs for the per-
sonal touch in publicity; Miss Jessie Harriss
and her staff for a wonderful dinner; Professor
Howard Thomas for the art exhibit; and Kate
Ellis and Harriet Daugherty and other Grand-
daughters for the entertainment of the alumnae
children and help with registration.

GRANDDAUGHTERS CLUB

The Granddaughters Club held its first meet-
ing in the Alumnae House with Beth Daniel
presiding. Plans were made for the first party
in honor of the new members a picnic supper,
at Harrison Hut on November 4 and for the
entertainment of the alumnae children on Alum-
nae Day. The ' Granddaughters' activities also
include rolling bandages at the Decatur Red
Cross.

Listed below are the freshman granddaughters
with the name and class of their mothers.
Elizabeth Dunn Clara Whips Dunn '16.
Lady Major Eunice Dean Major '22.
Janet van de Erve Mary Kelly van de Erve '06.
Bobbe Whipple Carolyn Smith Whipple '25.
Flora Bryant Ruth Hall Bryant '22.
Anne Treadwell Lillian Ozmer Treadwell, Inst.

Sally Bussey Sallie Carrere Bussey '15.

Julia Ann Coleman Julia Heaton Coleman
ex-'21.

Jane Barker Mary Evelyn Arnold Barker
ex-'24.

Martha Hay Frances Dearing Hay ex-'21.

Jean Bellingrath Margaret Shive
Bellingrath '20.

Ruth Blair Edith Patterson Blair ex-'21.

Adele Dieckmann Emma Pope Moss Dieck-
mann '13.

Grace Harris Durant Grace Harris Durant '15.
Mary Manly Mary McLellan Manly '22.
Virginia and Anne Tyler Mary Susan Christie
Tyler ex-' 16.

With advanced standing: Anne Burkhardt
Lutie Nimmons Powell Burkhardt ex-'lO.

[31]

Death of Mrs. F. H. Gaines

Mrs. Mary Louise Gaines, widow of the late
Dr. F. H. Gaines, first President of Agnes Scott
College, passed away in the early evening of
Friday, October 27, 1944.

She came to Decatur in 1888 when Dr. Gaines
was called to be pastor of the Decatur Presby-
terian Church. When under his leadership Agnes
Scott was organized as a small school in 1889,
she was quite active in the preliminary plans
and in all the work of both the church and the
college at that time.

In 1897 Dr. Gaines was elected President of
the institution, and his family moved to the
campus. Their home was open to both faculty
and students, and many of the older girls at-
tended a voluntary Sunday School class which
she taught for quite a number of years. Until
a comparatively recent time she has been active
in both the church and college life.

Mrs. Gaines was gifted as a writer and pub-
lished a volume of poetry and stories in 1916
entitled, "I Heah de Voices Callin'."

After she had passed her ninetieth birthday,
she wrote some lines as an expression of hope
and faith, and these particularly express her
trust in Jesus as Saviour and Guide:

"Someone came in the evening gray,
Clasped my hand and took me away,
Led me away to a sunbright land,
Where morning reigns and we understand,
Where blighted lilies are fair and sweet,
And naught that we do is incomplete,
Where yesterday's failures are unknown words,
And sorrows are nothing but broken swords.

"Sin was no jest in that bitter past,
And the Devil lied from first to last.
My heart beat hot in my burning side;
I turned and looked at my brilliant Guide.
I scanned Him close as He walked in front,
And saw in life's fray He had borne the brunt;
Dyed in blood were His garments bright,
But those that followed were robed in white."

FACULTY NEWS

Miss Helen Carlson, who is reported
"as charming as ever," made a two-
week visit to the campus just before
college opened. She is now Head of
Residence at Barnard College, New
York City, delighted that she is assigned
to teach a course in French literature.

Miss Lillian Smith, who is living with
her brother-in-law, Bishop Keeney, in
Miami, Fla., stopped by the campus
for a two-week visit with Miss Harn and
Miss Omwake on the way from Syracuse
to Miami this past summer. If she had
not known before, she found out then
how many are her friends in Decatur,
for she was entertained for every meal
except breakfast, perhaps!

Miss Louise G. Lewis is keeping
house and painting, too, in her apart-
ment at 403 South Candler, not far
from the campus. She keeps so busy
with her art that she sometimes forgets
to eat!

Miss Louise McKinney and Dr. Mary
F. Sweet still make their home on
campus a cordial gathering-place for re-
turning Hottentots. Paintings by Miss
Lewis, thriving African violets, and pic-
tures of alumnae babies make their
living-room delightful. Their summer
was enlivened with a visit from two
small boys, grandnephews of Miss
McKinney's.

Miss Catherine Torrance enjoys
teaching Latin three times a week at
Spellman College, where she finds her
students quite eager.

Thirty-five meals with friends, two
long rides, flowers, and teas were all
among the many attentions received by
Mrs. Alma Willis Sydenstricker during
her visit to Decatur in October. She
brought exciting news of her "doctor
son" whom our government is sending
to England a second time, this time to
% study and advise regarding plans for
feeding the liberated countries. The
other son, 'with whom she is making her
home, heads the English department
at the college in Batesville, Arkansas.
One of the first things he saw on ar-
rival was the portrait of one of his
uncles, a former teacher at the college.

Dr. Henry Robinson (now a colonel
in the U. S. Army) writes that he

enjoyed very much his summer studies
at Brown University, in Providence,
Rhode Island. He is back at West Point
this fall for the duration after which
he will return to us.

We have first-hand news of Dr. Flor-
ence L. Swanson brought from Denver,
Colorado, by Miss Laney, who visited
there during the summer. She reports
that Dr. Swanson looks fine and that
she is thoroughly enjoying her work in
the psychiatric division of the Denver
Hospital.

Elizabeth Mitchell also was in Denver
last summer during the illness of a
brother there. She is now back home
in Atlanta, putting to good use her
domestic talent.

Dr. W. W. Rankin, now head of the
Mathematics Department at Duke Uni-
versity, and Mrs. Rankin keep up their
interest in Agnes Scott, going to the
various Hottentot meetings and reunions
on the campus. Their paratrooper son,
Billy, was disappointed in that he
landed in England one day after the
Invasion.

Mr. Lewis H. Johnson reports a quiet
summer in Decatur "supervising the
campus with his feet propped up on the
banisters." His opinion is that the lawn
beside Presser is the most beautiful he
has seen.

Dr. James T. Gillespie spent most of
the summer in the North Carolina moun-
tains "keeping them from falling down"
and serving three mountain churches.
He was also inspirational speaker for
the Young People's Leadership Confer-
ence at Montreat.

Montreat also attracted Dr. Paul
Leslie Garber, who was one of the lead-
ers in the Woman's Leadership Train-
ing School and a participant in the
seminar on "The Church and the World
Order." Later in the summer, he and
his wife- visited the Trinity Avenue
Presbyterian Church in Durham, North
Carolina, where Dr. Garber held his last
pastorate before coming to the Bible
department at Agnes Scott.

Miss Lucile Alexander found plenty
of entertainment this summer helping
look after her small great-niece and

nephew. Her two weeks of rest came
at the end of the holidays when she.
Miss Phythian, Miss Scandrett, and
Miss Christie went to Highlands and
kept house in a little cottage on the
top of "Brushyface."

Miss Louise Hale's vacation was spent
largely "in the water" at Manchester by
the Sea and Pawley's Island.

A "distinguished service medal" goes
to Miss Katharine Omwake, who taught
evening classes all summer in Wash-
ington.

Mr. Howard Thomas is becoming
more and more sought after in the art
world of Georgia. He was in the art
department of the University of Georgia
this summer teaching ceramics and
water colors. The samples of his own
pottery work make you long to try your
hand at it.

Dr. George P. Hayes was sent by
the college to visit the outstanding col-
leges and universities of the Eastern
states, among them Vassar, Smith,
Princeton, Mount Holyoke fourteen in
all. He returned enthusiastic about
many people he had met and impressed
with the liberal arts spirit at Vassar
and Princeton. One of his biggest thrills
was D-Day at Cambridge with the Navy
parade and church services.

Dr. Walter B. Posey and Dr. Hayes
represented the college at conferences
in Nashville, Tennessee, held for the
purpose of discussing the place of the
humanities in the new world order.
Dr. Posey also taught at Vanderbilt.

Two months at the reference desk of a
New York public library at Fifth
Avenue and Forty-second Street com-
prised most of Miss Edna Hanley's
summer. Just after school started, she
went to Bennett College, a Negro school
in Greensboro, N. C, to make a survey
of the book collection there.

Miss Roberta Winter describes a "do-
mestic summer" spent with her mother,
sister, and three-year-old niece at Berry-
ville, Virginia, her mother's old home.

U.S.O. recreational work kept Miss
Llewellyn Wilburn busy, interested, and
traveling from Atlanta to North Charles-
ton, S. C, to Miami, Fla.

[33]

Miss Susan P. Cobbs reports a
leisurely time spent in Connecticut and
in the Adirondacks.

Mexico proved fascinating and stimu-
lating to Miss Muriel Harn and Mrs.
Florene J. Dunstan who spent six
weeks at Mexico City as delegates to the
Instituto de la Lingua Espanola. Among
Miss Harn's duties as secretary of the
Spanish-American Institute was a letter
to Secretary Hull.

Miss Leslie Gaylord is proud to show
the pictures of her nephew's lovely wed-
ding in New York this summer. After a
month with her brother on Staten
Island, Miss Gaylord visited friends in
Winchester, Va., then went to Macon
for a few days.

Mrs. Ann Vann Sweet was with her
Army husband on the Great Lakes.

Miss Ellen Douglass Leyburn spent a
busy summer doing research work at
Emory and Columbia Seminary, then
recuperating from a severe case of
typhus fever.

Dr. Ernest H. Runyon found the
laboratory in the Georgia State Public
Health Department most interesting.
He and Mrs. Runyon are back in the
Agnes Scott biology lab this fall.

Miss Charlotte Hunter saw Miss
Thelma Albright and scores of other
Hottentots at Duke University where
she and Miss Albright were visiting
counselors for the summer.

The kind of summer that Mr. S. G.
Stukes and Miss Margaret Ridley had
working in the registrar's office was
summed up by Mr. Stukes in three
words, "Worked like thunder!"

Mr. Christian Dieckmann's music and
Mrs. Dieckmann's work with the DeKalb
County Ration Board kept them busy
during the summer. Adele, who is a
freshman at Agnes Scott, made a big
hit in the Black Cat Stunt.

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Holt took a
trip to South Alabama just before the
opening of school.

Miss Emily Dexter, after teaching at
Wesleyan, went to a mountain school
where she learned to make pottery.
Those of us who have seen her hand-
painted china know that she must have
been quite successful in her ceramics
work.

"Start them early" was Mrs. Har-
riette Haynes Lapp's motto as she
taught dancing to five-and-six-year-olds-
and-up this summer in the gym when
it was rainy, in the May Day Dell when
the sun was out.

One month of Miss Philippa Gil-
christ's summer was spent at Sewanee,
Tennessee, where she taught chemistry
to the Navy boys.

Miss Janef Preston vacationed in
Montreat, North Carolina, her usual
summer haunt.

Miss Ruth Domincovich put forth
quite a bit of research work and intel-
lectual effort on her dissertation this
summer.

Miss Melissa Cilley contributed her
services to the Open Door Canteen at
the beginning of the summer ; then went
with her mother to visit their home in
New Hampshire.

Dr. and Mrs. J. R. McCain made their
usual summer trip to Montreat, where

they enjoyed seeing many old friends
and Hottentots.

Miss Mary Stuart MacDougall spent a
profitable summer doing research on
malaria. It seems that she has discov-
ered a second cycle in the mosquito,
one hitherto unsuspected.

For once in a long time Dr. Schuyler
Christian took a real vacation or so he
claims.

Miss Mildred Mell also took a rest
and spent it at Pawley's Island.

Miss Frances K. Gooch was at home
in Kentucky with her sister. We ex-
tend to her our sympathy in the death
of her nephew.

Miss Emma May Laney was with her
brother in Florida after her trip to
Colorado.

Miss Elizabeth Jackson went to Bos-
ton to be with her mother. She states
that grocery shopping was her chief
excitement until the eventful trip from
Boston to Atlanta on the night of the
hurricane. Putting up an umbrella to
keep off the rain pouring in from the
windows, riding in darkness from Wil-
mington to Washington, taking four
hours to get from New York to Phila-
delphia were minor inconveniences. The
trip was a safe one.

Miss Florence E. Smith was at home
in Decatur for the summer.

Miss Kathryn Glick's end of the sum-
mer trip took her to her home in
Columbus, Ind.

Mrs. Catherine Strateman Sims was
at home in White Plains, N. Y., for the

[34]

Deaths

Frederica (Reed) Lynch at Hampton
Sydney, Va., July 24, 1944, at the home
of her brother, Professor Macon Reed.

Idalene (Edwards) Lewman in the
spring of 1944.

Truth (Cousins) Dyson in October,
1944, as a result of being struck by an
automobile.

Ida (McGinnis) Arbuckle, wife of
Professor H. B. Arbuckle, formerly of
the science department of Agnes Scott,
on May 24, 1944. She is survived by a
daughter, Adele (Arbuckle) Pfohl '31,
who is in the treasurer's office at David-
son College.

Belle H. Williams in June, 1944.

Lost Hottentots

Mary Lucy Duncan Howe (Mrs 1
George).

Lucretia Black Roberts (Mrs. Rich-
ard).

CAMPUS CARROUSEL

MORE THRILLING THAN EVER is the

Agnes Scott of 1944-45. 535 girls running to the
tune of bells, books, and bull-sessions. Student
Government, with Molly Milam at its head, urg-
ing every Agnes Scotter to "Respect, Share, Par-
ticipate^ and Live in a Happy Community";
Athletic Association running a full schedule of
hockey, archery, badminton, Outing Club hikes
and a "special feature" tennis exhibition with
two Tech stars; Christian Association challeng-
ing and strengthening faith with the theme of
"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and
forever," sponsoring such speakers as E. Stanley
Jones and Michael Coleman from England.

YOU CAN EAT and still keep your figure if
you stop by the old chapel and make use of the
ping-pong paddles and shuffle-board sticks pro-
vided by the Recreational Council. Lots of fun!
War Council keeps you up-to-date and doing
with splendid news summaries by Mrs. Sims,
war stamps and blood-donor cards available in
Buttrick lobby, bandage-rolling at the Decatur
Red Cross, and encouragement (plus chaperone)
to go to the Canteen on Wednesday night.

MIRACLES STILL DO HAPPEN is your con-
viction after seeing Fourth Floor Main. Gone are
the creaky floors, black spider webs, dust-covered
piano stools, and the whole abandoned-attic
atmosphere. It has come to life with polished
floors, newly-painted walls, Hollywood beds,
curtains, pandas, sleepy-dolls, family and boy-
friends' pictures, notes on the doors, ringing
telephones, and girls thrilled to death over the
use of the elevator, the absence of jitterbuggers
overhead, and the unimpeded view of tree-tops,
sunsets, and stars.

IT WARMS YOU WAY DOWN INSIDE to

see the chapel filled clear to the back; to sing be-
side Dr. McCain, Miss Scandrett, or Mr. Stukes;
to see Mr. Cunningham back on campus once in
a while; to be the object of Tabby's vague but
sincere "Hello Miss . . ."; to see Henry-the-
waiter's wide smile when you tell him you saw
Miss Gay and she asked about him; to hear
the brown thrasher singing full tilt from his
favorite haunt in the hawthorne shrubs behind
Main; to realize that the graceful adolescent
live-oaks on the quadrangle as proud of their
acorns as an eighteen-year-old of his first shave
are the tender infants of 1938 for whom Dr.
Runyon expressed such tender concern when the
leaf collectors got under way.

HOTTENTOT DOINGS: Little Kady Mac
Gregor, newly appointed senior mascot, striding
up Buttrick walk, yellow bandanna on her head.

Nineteen-teen vintage alumna overheard in
chapel. "Look at those pigtails and long middy
blouse! Haven't seen any since I wore them. . ."

Freshman standing by the dining-room door
as everybody else rushes in to stretch the cafe-
teria line all the way down the wall. "I'm
loyal," she replies to questioning remarks and
continues waiting for friend.

Bill Hunter, Charlotte's brother, a general
favorite during his campus visit in October, put
forth such good effort digging in the Alumnae
Garden that he claims it should be renamed in
his honor. But he missed an okra plant right
in the middle of a flower-bed. There it stands,
little okras and all.

ECHOES FROM THE QUARTERLIES have
been most thrilling congratulations from Peach-
tree Parade for the "notable journalistic achieve-

[59]

merit in the artistic edition of the Alumnae Quar-
terly" hearty congratulations and highest praise
from Mrs. Robert Sibley, Executive Secretary of
the Wellesley Alumnae Association and best of
all, letters and more letters from you saying
that you were proud of the last three issues
and most interested in reading them. It is a
splendid precedent to carry on and a chal-
lenging one, too.

YOU WILL AGREE that Ellen Douglass Ley-
burn was really inspired when she asked Dr.
Hayes, Pat Collins, Margaret Bland Sewell, and
Virginia Prettyman to write for the autumn
Quarterly and that they in turn were equally
inspired to inspire us. . . . The drawings done
by Mr. Thomas and his art students and Leone

Hamilton's make-up work are also an invaluable
contribution. To each of all these goes our
sincere appreciation.

IT IS YOU, YOUR HUSBAND, children,
pupils, house, garden, picnics, trips, anything
that is part of your life that are wanted for the
picture page in the next Quarterly. Mail in your
snapshots and photos right away while you
remember. Even if they don't make the press,
you will know that they are on file in your
scrap-book to be the wonder of admiring friends
when reunion days are back again.

SEE YOU IN FEBRUARY for you will surely
respond right away with a gift to the Alumnae
Fund and be on the docket for each new pub-
lication this year!

In each class voi
We have sent tracers.

Look through your
the information of

Name

LOST HOTTENTOTS

find listed under "Lost Hottentots" the names of alumnae w
made phone calls, spending time and money to no avail.

college "generation" and if you know where the "lost one" is or

bose addresses
somebody who

are incorrect and unknown,
has her address, please send

Class

Married Name
Address

Thanks a

Million!

[60]

OFFICERS, COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN, AND TRUSTEES OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Katharine Woltz Green, 1933
President

Susan Shadbukn Watkins, 1926
First Vice-President

Patricia Collins, 1928
Second Vice-President

Ida Lois McDaniel, 1935
Secretary

Betty Medlock, 1942
Treasurer

Eugenia Symms, 1936
Executive Secretary

Lita Goss, 1936
Publications and Radio

Emma Pope Moss Dieckmann, 1913
Newspaper Publicity

Frances Winship Walters, Inst.
Alumnae Trustee

Margaket Ridley, 1933
Alumnae Trustee

Annie Pope Bryan Scott, 1915
Tearoom

Alice McDonald Richardson. 1929
Second Floor

Lucy Johnson Ozmer, ex-1910
Constitution and By-Laws

Julia Smith Slack, ex-1912
Student Loan

Mary Warren Reed, 1929
House Decorations

Mary Louise Crenshaw Palmour, Inst.
Alumnae Week-End

Martha Rogers Noble, 1914
Entertainment

Charlotte E. Hunter, 1929
Grounds

Editor
Bii.lie Davis Nelson, 1942

EDITORIAL STAFF

Art Editors

Professor Howard Thomas

Leone Bowers Hamilton, 1926

ART CONTRIBUTORS

Cover Dr. McCain's House, gouache by Helen Pope '46.
Entrance to Buttrick, water color by Leone Bowers Hamilton '26.
West Lawn, gouache by Margaret Johnson '46.
Street Scene, scratchboard by Anne Newbold '46.
Acnes Scott Library, gouache by Sue Mitchell '45.
Faculty House, scratchboard by Joan Crangle '46.
Decatur Depot, scratchboard by Peggy Pat Home '46.
Scene, water color by Professor Howard Thomas.

LUMNAE QUARTERLY

ies Cottage (home of first college president)

scratch-board drawing by Peggy Pat Home

OUR QUARTERLY

Liberated Russians going to a Belgian beauty-parlor, soldiers in casts listening
to bedtime stories from Winnie-the-Pooh, and Mr. Dieckmann's opinion of boogie-
woogie these are some of the things we will read about in this Quarterly.

Swords and plowshares, war and peace now mingle in our daily lives, but even
as we work for the war effort, the dream in our hearts is of the day when "the lights
come on again" and all over the world people will be beating their spears into
pruninghooks . . .

Meanwhile, Agnes Scott is doing her share in relieving the suffering of war
and rebuilding for peace, as her ideals of growth and service find daily realiza-
tion in the lives of her daughters. The articles of this Quarterly represent service
rendered not only by their authors but by hundreds of Agnes Scotters from Cand-
ler Street to France and New Guinea . . .

Although the Founder's Day broadcast has to make way this year for war news,
the Quarterly brings to each Hottentot the message from Dr. McCain, Letter to Aunt
Jo, and sketch of Mr. Dieckmann plus the campus scenes drawn by Mr. Thomas'
art students. These reminders of the actual life of the campus make us aware of
what one alumna has said "We who have left Agnes Scott like to know that she
stands now, serene and steadfast, invincible against the desecration of today."

OFFICERS, COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN, AND TRUSTEES OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Katharine Woltz Green, 1933
President

Susan Shadburn Watkins, 1926
First Vice-President

Patricia Collins, 1928
Second Vice-President

Ida Lois McDaniel, 1935

Secretary

Betty Medlock, 1942
Treasurer

Eucenia Symms, 1936
Executive Secretaiy

Editor
Billie Davis Nelson, 1942

Lita Goss, 1936
Publications and Radio

Emma Pope Dieckmann, 1913
Neivspaper Publicity

Francis Winship Walters, Inst.
Alumnae Trustee

Marcaret Ridley, 1933
Alumnae Trustee

Annie Pope Bryan Scott, 1915
Tearoom

Alice McDonald Richardson, 1929
Second Floor

EDITORIAL STAFF

Lucy Johnson Ozmer, ex-1910
Constitution and By-Laws

Julia Smith Slack, ex-1912
Student Loan

Mary Warren Reed, 1929
House Decorations

Mary Louise Crenshaw Palmour, Inst.
Alumnae Week-End

Martha Rogers Noble, 1914
Entertainment

Charlotte E. Hunter, 1929
Grounds

Art Editors

Professor Howard Thomas

Leone Bowers Hamilton, 1926

Published four times a year (November, February, April, and July) by the Alumnae Association oi Agnes
Scott College at Decatur, Georgia. Contributors to the Alumnae Fund receive the magazine. Yearly sub-
scription, $2.00. Single copies, 25 cents. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office of Decatur,
Georgia, under the Act of August 24, 1912.

Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly

Vol. XXIII "SWORDS AND PLOWSHARES," SPRING, 1945. No. 2

FIGHTING THE BATTLE OF GREENSBORO

RuthBastin 3

"THEY ALSO SERVE . . ."

Frances Gilliland Stukes 6

Mary Williamson Hooker 7

WHAT NEXT, YOUNG MAN?

Martha Crowe 1 1

WOMAN'S TRADITIONAL TOOLS IN THE WAR

Fannie G. Mayson Donaldson 14

HOSPITALITY STILL COUNTS

Mary Willis Smith 17

CONTENTS THE CHALLENGE OF U.S.O.

Harriotte Brantley 19

HOME SERVICE TODAY AND TOMORROW

Elizabeth Warden 2 1

LIBERATED BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG

Roberta Morgan 23

FOUNDER'S DAY 1945

Dr. J. R. McCain 28

CHRISTIAN W. DIECKMANN

Jane Guthrie Rhodes 30

LETTER TO AUNT JO

Sophia Pedakis 33

CLASS NEWS 35

CLUB NEWS _ 50

CAMPUS CARROUSEL 51

ALUMNAE FUND REPORT 55

SPRING CALENDAR

MARCH

1 Water pageant, Bucher Scott Gymnasium

7 Mrs. Roff Sims discusses current events in chapel

10 Exams begin!

10 William Kapell, Atlanta Music Club

21 Ballet Theater, City Auditorium

23 Alumnae Tea for New Students

26 Glee Club Program, Music Appreciation, Presser Hall

28 Good Friday Service in Maclean Auditorium

APRIL

1 Easter Sunrise Service

2 Hugh Hodgson, Music Appreciation, Presser Hall

12 Maurice Hindus, Lecture Association, Presser Hall

12- May 3 Exhibition, Wood block prints in color from Museum
of Modern Art, Art Gallery, Library

20-25 Mary Ellen Chase, Professor of English at Smith College

Fighting the Battle of Greensboro

Ruth Bast in ex-'45

Leaving college to join the Army Nurse Corps, Ruth
Bastin is now a 1st lieutenant at the Regional Hospital
in Greensboro, N. C, an Army Air Forces Overseas
Replacement Depot.

"I remember how excited you were about going
into the Army Nurse Corps when we left school
last year. And isn't it grand you are a lieuten-
ant? How do you like it now?" wrote a Hottentot
to me recently.

Was I excited? It seems to me now that I was
very matter-of-fact about coming into the service,
and after eighteen months in the Army Nurse
Corps here in Greensboro, I still feel that way.
It is a bit difficult to see yourself as a romantic
figure in a setting full of excitement. Make no
mistake. I am glad to be in the Army; I like it
tremendously ; and if I were out, knowing what I
know now, I would volunteer again. Much as I
hated to leave Agnes Scott and anxious as I am
to return to finish school, I have felt from the first
that I am where I belong for the duration. But I
do not feel patriotic or romantic or excited. I am
in the Army doing a routine job of nursing, and
wearing a bar because some thoughtful person
passed a law granting military rank to nurses.

When I arrived at Basic Training Center Num-
ber 10 in July of 1943, the post was rather new,
having been open about four months, the hospital
was newer, the nurses were still newer, and I was
the newest of all. The post was made up of mud,
rocks, and barracks in the cleared areas with the

most beautiful woods and streams in between.
The hospital buildings were drab and to my eyes,
unfinished, connected by several corridors, each a
third of a mile long. The nurses, of whom there
were then about twenty-five, were friendly and
helpful, looking most un-"G.I." (actually mean-
ing government issue but connoting anything dis-
agreeably army-like) in the civilian clothes we
all wore several months because of uniform
shortages.

Twelve hours after arriving on the post, having
pinned a borrowed gold bar to the collar of my
duty uniform, signed my name about one hun-
dred times, and had my picture and fingerprints
made, I was assigned to duty in Ward 6 where
fractures, sprains, and other orthopedic condi-
tions are treated. I was a little bit scared, yet
quite apathetic toward everything but my ward
duties which completely exhausted me after my
months of book-holding, test-tube heating, and
microscope adjusting.

Army hospitals are unlike civilian ones in that
here are so many convalescent patients. Since the
soldier must be able to participate in full duty
immediately after his discharge, there are pro-
portionately few sick patients. Our ward is
rather more difficult than most, not because the
men are more ill, but because they are handi-
capped by a body cast or an immobilized arm,
by being pinned to the bed with traction applied
to a limb, or by having to use crutches. I was
very glad to learn that the nurses actually give
personal care to the patients rather than dele-

[3]

gating all such duties to men assigned to the
Medical Detachment.

After two months of service as assistant nurse,
I spent four months in other departments, re-
turning to take charge of Ward 6 last January.
During the four-month interval, I worked on prac-
tically every ward in the hospital enjoying
such a variety of services as assistant in the ear,
nose, and throat clinic; charge nurse of a Negro
surgical ward; night nurse for twelve-hour duty
on several wards so full and busy that I was
bewildered; and special nurse to cases as inter-
esting both personally and medically as any I
have ever known.

Ward 6, however, is my love, and my boys, the
"brats," make up my twenty-eight first considera-
tions. In nearly all cases orthopedic patients re-
main in the hospital a minimum of four to six
weeks, and some of my boys will remain at least
six or eight months, so that I am able to become
rather well acquainted with many of them. It is

my personal contact with these boys and men that
has been one of the most satisfying parts of my
Army career. From the eighteen-year-olds who
look all too young to be soldiers, to the forty-
year-olds who look almost senile to me now, they
are all "Miss Bastin's children." At present these
"children" include a farmer, an accountant, a
mortician, a dramatics teacher, a few profes-
sional soldiers, a singer, several students, a
pianist-composer, a lawyer, a jockey, a skilled
machinist.

I wish I could tell you about each one of my
patients and about the daily ward occurrences
which may be amusing or annoying, but are at all
times interesting. You should see my tall
sergeant in a cast from the top of his head to his
hips leading by the hand a monkey-like private
hopping on his unbroken leg. You should hear
the four-way arguments about the radio. Which
shall it be? Classical music, swing, hill-billy, or
no music at all? You should have been there the

RAILROAD UNDER-PASS LEADING
TO AGNES SCOTT COLLEGE
Scratch Board Drawing
by Jane Anne Neivton '46

[4]

night all of my "brats" sounded their bells at
once and continued their frantic tapping until I
appeared at the door of the warkened ward. They
stopped the lecture at my lips and brought tears
to my eyes by presenting me with a birthday cake
full of lighted candles.

The responsibility of managing these boys is
very largely mine, and ticklish problems occur
almost daily. Each one needs individual atten-
tion and a different method of handling. I often
think what great consideration and what in-
telligent understanding will be needed to make
finely-adjusted civilians of these men who have
seen military service whether it be a few weeks
in this country or years in theatres of operation.

The Army nurse's life is not completely filled
with her patients, however. Living conditions in
this country are good. We have individual steam-
heated rooms now very comfortably furnished
(even to an inner-spring mattress!) We have our
own recreation hut and our own mess hall. Basic
training classes with movies, lectures, marching,
and gas mask drill were diverting as well as help-
ful. And you should see how beautiful I am in
fatigue clothing and gas mask!

Entertainment within the limits of the post is
more than adequate for the average individual
with a variety of tastes. Flying is not one of our
recreations since no plane has ever landed on or
taken off from the base. Movies, dances, sports
events, and special shows of all kinds go on every
night. Even though our wardrobe is now limited
entirely to uniforms, we manage to dress our
prettiest to "go places and do things." Most of
my rare days off when I was able to get away
from here have been filled with bubbling conver-
sations with several delightful civilians of North
Carolina who have spent a few months or years
in Decatur.

Officers? Of course you are interested, and so
are we! There are two officers' clubs on the post
and there is a dance nearly every night. Since
many of the men show a definite preference for
the Nurse Corps olive drab or beige "formal"
complete with tie, we have plenty of dates. There
are always a number of interesting persons with
much to offer toward good company as well as
other forms of entertainment. And we have had
several engagements, some of which have already
led to marriage.

You are interested also in the nurses' prospects
for overseas duty. Since the Army Air Corps
does not maintain hospitals overseas, the only
nurses wearing wings who go over are those in
Air Evacuation Units. I should like that type of
overseas duty, but the requirements for that
service indicate that I am not tall enough to
reach that third tier of litters in a plane. Until
Uncle Sam sees fit to transfer more Air Corps
nurses to other branches of the service, it seems
that we shall continue to fight a quiet battle on
some home-town front. Interesting and busy
though our lives are, we feel that they are much
more routine than they might be. Even the law
passed last summer making the Army Nurse
Corps part of the regular Army of the United
States has made little apparent difference, though
it undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the
change of my gold bars to silver just before
Christmas.

Being perhaps the only Hottentot in the A.N.C.,
I wish to let you know that a liberal arts educa-
tion is excellent preparation for this life. It is
difficult for me to measure the value of all I re-
ceived from Agnes Scott, but I can tell you that
Winnie-the-Pooh offers the finest material for
bedtime stories for my boys!

[5]

'They Also Serve

//

Three years of service as a Gray Lady at Lawson
General Hospital have won Frances Gilliland Stukes
much satisfaction plus the chairmanship of the Hos-
pital Recreation Corps of the DeKalb County Chapter
of the Red Cross. She is the wife of S. G. Stukes, Dean
of Faculty at Agnes Scott.

Frances Gilliland Stukes '24

Whenever people question me about my
Gray Lady work at Lawson General Hospital
and want to know just what I do, I usually start
stammering "Well uh we do so much it's hard
to explain!" It is true that our duties are so many
and so varied and some of them so intangible that
it is difficult to explain. To quote the "Hospital
and Recreation Corps" handbook, we "bring en-
couragement and cheer to those who are sick and
convalescent." I will try to tell a little of how we
Gray Ladies as members of the "Hospital
and Recreation Corps" are called go about that.
Lawson General Hospital was opened in July
1941. In January 1942 the first Lawson Gray
Lady class started its training with only twenty-
five women from the Atlanta and DeKalb chap-
ters of Red Cross. So well did such a group of
volunteers show their worth that there have been
three subsequent classes. At the present there are
one hundred and sixty-four active members of
the Lawson corps. We sign up to give a minimum
of a hundred and fifty hours a year, but the time
cards of some of us amount up to five, six, and
seven hundred hours. I think that one Gray Lady
needs special mention because, after teaching in
grammar school five days a week, she goes to the
hospital on Saturdays and works nine or ten
hours as a volunteer!

Of the total number, about fifty are Occupa-
tional Therapy Aides. After completing their
Gray Lady training, they had an additional
twenty-hour course under the professional Occu-
pational Therapists. These women are assigned
wards in which they teach all sorts of handi-
crafts to the men. Theirs is a most important part
of the Army Reconditioning program. There are
ten women who serve in the library, sorting books
and magazines, and taking the book carts out on
the wards to bed patients. We have fifteen or
twenty who go to the hospital only in the eve-
nings after having worked in offices and school-
rooms all day. These women help mainly with
recreation showing movies on the wards, serv-
ing as hostesses in the Recreation Hall, helping
with parties, or taking groups of entertainers to
the wards. One Gray Lady is teaching elemen-
tary reading and writing to several of the patients.
One, on her day, takes a small-sized piano on a
rolling platform from ward to ward. Sometimes
she brings singers out from town. On other days
she gets the men to singing with her while she
plays. Another one, who is especially talented
in flower arranging, receives the truckload of
flowers which arrives from town once a week all
during the blooming season, has charge of gel-
ting them into hundreds of bowls and vases and
distributed to the wards of our huge sprawling
hospital.

I belong to the largest group of all, which is
known as "Regular Gray Ladies." Our duties
are legion. We shop for the patients, both at the
Post Exchange and in town, send telegrams and
money orders, do the banking for bed patients,
wrap and mail packages, write letters, give birth-
day parties (every man receives a cake and a
present), distribute Red Cross comfort articles,
stationery, and games. We help with USAFI,

[6]

which by interpretation means "United States
Armed Forces Institute." We encourage and help
patients taking these correspondence courses for
which they can get credit in high school or col-
lege. There are also vocational courses in this
series which will help them in their jobs when
they are discharged from the army. In connec-
tion with USAFI I have discussed with the men
everything from high school English to cattle
raising and cotton mill management! At all
times we work in close cooperation with the Red
Cross social workers, referring those problems to
them which we as volunteers cannot handle.

Those are the specific jobs, but above all, we
are the friendly visitors. We have to learn to be
good listeners, to let a man unload his troubles
and grievances on us or rejoice with him over
some especially exciting news from home, to re-
frain from being overly sympathetic or exces-
sively cheerful. Through all this we have to re-
member that each of us is a link in the big chain
which is the American Red Cross and that if one
of us falls down on the job she has been given to
do, she is likely to break down some patient's
confidence that confidence which is absolutely
necessary for a man's complete recovery in mind
and body.

In my three years of going to Lawson twice a
week, I suppose I have run the gamut of all Gray
Lady experiences. I have listened to stories of
heroism on the battlefronts as strange and thrill-
ing as any you see in the newspapers and I have
heard stories so sad that if I had been reading
them in a book I would have started crying but
Gray Ladies can't cry on duty. I have met up
with people from every walk of life, from the
highest to the lowest, and sometimes I have found
courage and greatness where you would least ex-
pect them. I have been called down for mistakes

I have made and I have had words of praise from
the commanding officer himself.

It is hard work and sometimes it is depressing
work, but I feel that we Red Cross volunteers in
government hospitals all over the country who
come into close contact with the men returning
directly from the fighting fronts have the highest
of privileges. I believe that we will be better able
to understand the problems of the veterans in our
own families, next door or down the street.
Sometimes when we are leaving the hospital late
in the afternoon, one of the Red Cross staff work-
ers will say, "Thank you for coming," and I
always feel like answering, "Thank you for
letting us come!"

Thinking of her husband in the service, Mary Wil-
liamson Hooker takes time out from her publicity
writing and singing career to help keep the book trucks
going for the soldiers at Lawson.

Mary Williamson Hooker '31

Men make wars but women wait them out. Al-
most every woman resents this lack of active
participation and she makes an effort to find the
place where she can best fit into the picture.
Some women put on uniforms of one kind and
some put on others. The group of women who
put on the uniform of service to wounded soldiers
in hospitals do the things that women instinctively
know how to do. Their lack of specialized train-
ing is made up for by a capacity for hard work, a
cheerful disposition, and a willingness to do a
great deal for little glory. The only reward is
the gratification of doing something for others
and the feeling that her work gives her a share in
the war. World War I named one particular
group of such women "Gray Ladies" and the
World War today calls them "Gray Ladies," too.

[7]

During World War I, a group of older women
working as volunteers at Walter Reed Hospital
decided they wanted an official name. Since
many of them wore the fashionable color of the
time anyway, they adopted it as their distinguish-
ing mark. So, the ladies in gray became, in time,
the "Gray Ladies." Their work amounted to
taking baskets of fruit and flowers to the wards,
sewing and writing letters all the nicer, neces-
sary little things of life which men on a battle-
field could easily forget existed, but which they
gratefully reclaimed. These women were inde-
pendent of any national organization and were
bound together only by their mutual desire to
serve. Soon, the American Red Cross adopted
them. With its capacity for knowing what to do
for the right people at the right time, the work
was more clearly defined and the Gray Lady
grew in stature. She has grown so much that
World War II sometimes gives her the happy
distinction of calling her the "G.I's best friend."

The Gray Lady Corps today is nationwide and
only one of many volunteer uniformed groups
which the American Red Cross sponsors. The
uniforms are the same color as they were in
World War I. The reasons for doing this type of
work are the same. Those whose thoughts wander
across land, sky, and water more often than they
remain at home are doing unto others what they
hope others will do for their own. The reasons
for doing this type of work may be personal or
impersonal, but all Corps members are bound to-
gether by a mutual faith that the work is vitally
needed, by a mutual desire to be of service, and
by a conviction that this is one of the ways that a
woman can best fit into the pattern of war.

Almost any Gray Lady you are likely to meet
is rather reluctant to talk about her work except
in very general terms. It sounds a little ambitious

to her to call her service a part of the veteran's
mental and spiritual rehabilitation, but that is
what it actually is. She never knows exactly just
how much she does contribute to this. Some in-
significant thing which she has said or done may
be the very thing that has meant the most to a
wounded man. She is a psychologist without
knowing it and a diplomat without portfolio.

The work done by Gray Ladies in every vet-
erans' hospital follows the same general pattern.
There are three different groups of activity. One
type is called "regular work." In another article
in the Quarterly this service is described. Then,
there are those who give the men something to do
to occupy their time and to help them regain the
use of injured muscles and nerves. This group
works under the supervision of professionally
trained Occupational Therapists.

The third group works entirely with the post
library. At Lawson Hospital each volunteer has a
specific day so that every ward in the hospital
may be covered at least once a week. Service to
the men in the wards could not be accomplished
without the aid of a rather remarkable book
truck. Even though eighty to one hundred books,
as well as newspapers and magazines, can be
taken at a time, the truck is relatively easy to
handle. It is almost triangular in shape and its
width is the space between two beds. Five shelves
take care of the books, which are systematically
arranged with non-fiction on top. There are two
shelves for general novels, one for mystery
stories and Westerns range the lowly bottom.
On the opposite side are shelves for magazines,
newspapers and returned books. Lawson Hos-
pital subscribes to 450 magazines and 20 daily
newspapers from different parts of the country.

Each Gray Lady is responsible for filling up
her own truck on her special day. While she

[8]

REBEKAH SCOTT Dot Almond '45

may have certain men in mind when the selection
is made, it is best to make a general choice and
include a little of everything. Her own personal
taste in reading doesn't affect her decisions. Her
welcome to the wards depends on how enthusias-
tically she can talk of writers from Thorne Smith
to Thomas Mann. A glib tongue helps her along
in this, but a patient ear is better. If the conver-
sation is centering on Zane Grey and a book for
the next week is wanted, common sense guides
her hand to the bottom shelf of the truck and not
to a cayuse of a different color.

"Best sellers" aren't limited to the civilian
world and the waiting list for them here is just as
long as it is in any public library. An Army
hospital, after all, is made up of the men from
your town and mine. Their reading habits
haven't been materially altered by the war. The

only reversals are an objection to books whose
scenes are reminders of their former overseas
stations and of battle descriptions which strike
a too familiar note. These men have seen war!

There are ninety hospitals for veterans in the
United States at which trained librarians are
employed. A central office in Washington is in
over-all command of each of these, but the bur-
den of responsibility remains with the librarian
in charge. Every hospital all over the country
undoubtedly points to its library with pride.
Small gift collections of books have grown with
speed and precision into important collections to
meet the growing need. Lawson General Hos-
pital has every reason to be proud of its rapidly
expanding library and its librarian, Mrs. Helen
Earnshaw, whose work has been valiant as well
as prodigious.

The "library" at the time Mrs. Earnshaw was
employed October 1941 consisted of 650 gift
books and was housed in a Chaplain's office.
The first change was to move the books into a
room in the Red Cross Building. Odd pieces of
available furniture went with them wicker
divans, folding chairs, and bridge tables. The
need for additional books and magazines re-
sulted in appropriations for their purchase. A
systematic library classification system was
started and a catalog set up. New, approved
furniture replaced the old, and today the library
not only operates as one, but looks like one as
well. Compare this orderly arrangement to the
650 unclassified titles which she was given to un-
scramble and you have yet another proof of
woman's desire to be of service during the days
of war.

The staff today consists of two civilian clerks,
two enlisted men, two Red Cross Staff Assistants
who do clerical work and repairing, and eleven

[9]

Gray Ladies who "man" the trucks. While pref-
erence is given to bed patients, all the personnel
use the library freely. With the collection of
books at the twelve depositories at the hospital
the waiting rooms, day rooms, nurses' quarters,
etc., and those in the library itself, there are
now 8,500 titles. In November 1944 the circu-
lation count was 8,003 almost every book in
the library used. Statistics are given merely to
show that the Library has an important place in
hospital life and that libraries, and librarians,
too, have kept pace with the war.

While most of the reading is for recreation
only, many of the men make hay while a dubious
sun shines and study professional books on chem-
istry, accounting, farming, etc. Whether the

reading is only for recreation or is definitely
educational, all of it has therapeutic value the
printed word provides an easy avenue of escape
from the memories of war.

The satisfaction of having a share in this
phase of war work is one reward, but a Gray
Lady must count this as one of her lesser bless-
ings. What she receives in return is her greatest.
The courage and fortitude of the men she serves
is so intense that she cannot help but absorb some
of it for herself. Each Gray Lady does something
for each patient she contacts, but he, in turn, does
something for her. It works both ways. To a
wounded soldier, a Gray Lady is a symbol of
service. To her he is a symbol of abiding
strength.

[10]

As a psychometrist at tlie Georgia Tech Guidance
Center, Martha Crowe helps the returning veteran find
where he fits "back home."

What Next, Young Man?

Martha Crowe , 27

For real happiness that comes from the results
of one's efforts in his everyday occupation there
is no more satisfying work than that in one of the
many fields which the term Rehabilitation em-
braces. One of the most interesting of these is
the Veterans Guidance Center at the Georgia
School of Technology where vocational rehabili-
tation in the field of education and training is
the goal.

While Georgia Tech is one of the first colleges
in the South to be chosen as a center of such
activity, there are nevertheless many similar
centers throughout the country located in colleges
and universities that are working on these projects
in close cooperation with the Veterans Admin-
istration. The Georgia Tech Guidance Center is
concerned with the returning veterans who are
affected by the provisions of Public Law 16 and
Public Law 346, commonly known as the G.I.
Bill of Rights. Public Law 16, the Vocational
Rehabilitation Law, provides that veterans of this
war who have a service-connected pensionable
disability found to be an actual handicap may
apply for and, if need is found, receive voca-
tional training to reestablish his employability.
It offers, along with a training allotment which
differs according to whether the man is single
or married, institutional and on-the-job training.
The young man who has not had a high school
education or its equivalent is entitled to the

former in some determined institution of learn-
ing. A young man without the necessary back-
ground for further school training is given on-
the-job training that is, he is placed in some
business establishment where he is allowed to
learn a trade and gradually to work into a good,
well-paying position with that firm.

Among other things the G.I. Bill of Rights
provides training for three groups of veterans:
(1) a man under twenty-five years of age (and
it is assumed that for this group, his training is
interrupted) is entitled to one year of training
plus the amount of time he has spent in the
service; (2) a man over twenty-five years of age
who can prove that his education has been in-
terrupted by his entry into the service this ap-
plies ordinarily to doctors, lawyers and other
professional men is eligible to receive the same
amount of training as the above; (3) a veteran of
any age desiring a refresher or retraining course
is entitled to as much as and not more than one
year of training. Under this bill, too, a veteran
receives from the government an allotment that
varies according to his marital status.

All of these preliminaries are given as a
background in order to make the procedure at
the Georgia Tech Center understandable. Let us
suppose, for example, that young John Smith
has just returned from two years' overseas duty
in the Central Pacific. He has received a letter

[11]

from the Veterans Administration informing him
that he might report to the Georgia Tech Guid-
ance Center for vocational advisement. He ar-
rives and first consults the vocational advisor who
discusses his case with him, explains Public Law
16 and 346 to Mr. Smith and how they affect
him and whether he is interested in training.
His interest once established, Mr. Smith next
talks with the interviewer who secures informa-
tion about his family, social, educational, and
pre-war and post-war occupational background
and his services in the armed forces of the
United States. Let us say that from the inter-
view it is learned that Mr. Smith comes from a
good, substantial, middle-class family. He has
completed four years of high school and is de-
sirous of continuing his education in order to
qualify as a junior executive in some foreign
trade business. Next he is confronted by the
vocational appraiser who along with the claim-
ant determines as far as possible at this stage of
the procedure whether the objective selected by
the claimant is a fitting one. He then goes into
the laboratory where tests are administered by
the psychometrist in an effort to determine his
mental ability, his scholastic achievement, his
personality traits, his vocational interests, etc.
If the results of these tests tie up satisfactorily
with the objective selected, the claimant is then
introduced to the training officer whose duty it is
to place him in an institution of learning that
best offers the training that will lead to the suc-
cessful pursuit of junior executive in the field
of international trade. The training officer is also
called upon to check up periodically on the
activities of John Smith and to keep accurate
records as to his whereabouts, his progress, etc.,
which may be consulted at any time.

Now, by contrast, let us consider for a moment

the different but equally as interesting case of
Bill Jones. Through the various channels ex-
plained above, it is discovered thai Bill comes
from a family of farmers. As a youngster Bill
had helped on the farm, but his interest had run
to tinkering with his father's tractor and auto-
mobile. After completing two years of high
school he had gone to work as an apprentice in a
garage in his home town where he learned by ap-
plication the business of being an automobile
mechanic and was very happy indeed in this
vocational pursuit which he followed for several
years. Then along came war and Bill found him-
self in Uncle Sam's armed forces defending the
cause of freedom. There follows a succession of
readjustments rigid discipline, military train-
ing at home and fighting on the battlefields
abroad and finally, Bill is seriously wounded in
both legs. After medical treatment, hospital con-
finement and his discharge from the service of his
country, he finds that he must walk with a cane,
cannot be on his feet for long periods at a time
or do any strenuous physical labor.

Indeed for a while the future looks dismal for
Bill Jones. Somewhere during the advisement
procedure Bill shyly admits that he still has the
old love for mechanics but doesn't believe he can
dare dream of carrying on his life's ambition in
this field. Once in the testing room a series of
aptitude tests are administered to him and it is
discovered that he has remarkably quick finger
movement, that he is quite adept at handling
tweezers and small objects, and that he has ex-
cellent coordination of eye and hand movements.
The future begins to look brighter for Bill he
finds that there is a chance of his becoming a
radio repairman. His old love of mechanics can
be put to use after all without his disability in-
terfering in the performance of his duties as a

[12]

radio repairman. The training officer places him
in the XYZ Radio Shop where he rapidly learns
the details of the business. Who knows but what
one day we may have the extreme pleasure of
hearing that that attractive little radio shop on
the corner of Main and Maple Street with the
sign proudly displaying the words, BILL JONES,
Proprietor, belongs to none other than our
veteran Bill Jones who consulted us only a few
years ago about a vocation which he could carry
on in spite of his physical handicap.

As is seen from the foregoing the selection
of the vocational objective is based upon the
following considerations: the psychological fac-
tors that surround the individual that is, his
normal or abnormal home life, the successes or
failures with which he has met in his previous
occupational experience, the results of the
psychometric tests which are administered him;
and finally the status of the occupation that is
being considered that is, whether this field of
earning a livelihood is overcrowded, whether

there are opportunities for expansion, for future
development in the particular vocation selected.
It is the primary concern of the Center first to
find a vocation objective in which the veteran
will be happy; second, one for which the veteran
shows some ability, some skill or aptitude; and
third, one that is of the same occupational level
as that in which he was employed before his
entry into the service. If the latter is impossible
an effort is made to raise that occupational level
and never to lower it.

After a long, full day of interviewing, testing,
advisement evaluation and other advisement
action, when many young men leave the Center
with dreams of becoming and actually having
the opportunity to become the finest librarian,
watchmaker, electrical engineer, artist, radio re-
pairman, personnel manager, teacher, citrus fruit
grower, etc., one would indeed be strange who
did not feel in his heart a great satisfaction for
having had the privilege of being part of the
organization that is making all these dreams
come true.

[13]

How one's weakness for food leads to canteen work,
then to the Blood Donor Center, then to conversation
with hundreds whose loved ones are overseas.

Woman's Traditional Tools-ln the War

Fannie G. May son Donaldson '12

In the fall of 1941, along with thousands of
other women, I began to think about some service
that I could render. December 7 gave me the
necessary push into a choice. Of course, with the
natural perversity of a woman, not having any
qualifications for canteen service except a dis-
astrous love of good food, I registered for that
course. I received a four-weeks course in nutri-
tion and then a four-weeks course in canteen
work, followed by a short course in buying with
the emphasis on wholesale buying. (This latter
course was not required, but I was so entranced
by the fact that I could study again and pass
exams that I went a little wild on the subject; I
sobered up after this course which taxed my
never-very-strong-mathematical brain.) I am
sure I was not as thrilled at my Agnes Scott
graduation as I was when I received my diplomas,
got my uniform, and finally after so many
hours my pin. But to how many of you this is
your story, too!

At that time, the Atlanta Red Cross Canteen
Corps was operating only two regular canteens,
serving the workers at two Red Cross units. It
was also beginning a Sunday afternoon service
at Lawson General Hospital, where the first

[14]

casualties were beginning to come in, mostly
from accidents at training camps. Now, the
Canteen Corps in Atlanta has the following out-
lets of service in operation: the original two
canteens at Red Cross Headquarters and at the
Surgical Dressing House (these operate for a
small profit which is used in the work for the
soldiers), the two Blood Donor Canteens, Mobile
Kitchens (which serve troop and hospital trains,
and accompany the Blood Donor Unit on near-
by trips), Health Clinics, Recreational Services
at Lawson General and Fort McPherson Hos-
pitals, Army Air Base Canteen, the Doll House
Canteen which serves the Junior Red Cross dur-
ing the summer months, and a canteen operating
for the benefit of inductees and those men being
discharged from the Army at Fort McPherson
(which operates every evening from 6 o'clock
until ten o'clock and is manned by business
women who have charge of the Canteen Corps.)
At the present time, it is estimated that there are
in the Atlanta Canteen Corps about 500 active
canteeners who gave some 50,000 hours last year
serving approximately 250,000 persons of whom
116,225 were members of the Armed Forces.
We can pat our Agnes Scott selves on the back,

for this magnificent Canteen organization was
planned and directed through the first years by
Elizabeth (Tuller) Nicolson, Academy, and
Venice (Mayson) Fry ex-'21, the latter con-
tinuing as co-chairman with Mrs. C. J. West when
Elizabeth had to resign because of serious illness
in the family.

But, as I seem to remember, I was to write
about my particular branch of the Canteen work.
I have an uneasy feelnig that my early efforts, in
the Canteen at Headquarters serving the workers
lunch, must have revealed a basic weakness in the
cooking line, for after a year there I was shifted
to the Blood Donor Center. There I am chairman
with a most invaluable co-chairman, Mrs. Forress
Fisher, of the canteen which serves light refresh-
ments to the donors after their gift. We also
oversee the Workers' Canteen which serves the
men and women of the staff. We have grown
from a tiny corner in the small Blood Donor set-
up originally at Headquarters Building into two
large canteens on the floor of one of Atlanta's
office buildings which has been taken by the Blood
Donor Center.

Since the Donor Centers are few and far be-
tween, particularly in our section, which is dis-
tant from the laboratory, I am going into a little
more detail about this marvelous work on the
assumption that some of you have not had an
opportunity to see one in operation. Donors
make their engagements in advance and are
given some simple don'ts about eating for a few
hours before coming because of the effect of some
foods such as dairy products on the plasma.
On arrival, they are examined by registered
nurses with particular emphasis on blood count,
blood pressure, and general health conditions;
and, if all is according to the book, they are sent
to the hospital-like room where the blood is taken.

This step is simple and short; the blood is
drained into standard bottles which are kept in
refrigerators until they reach the laboratory in
Indianapolis. There the miraculous change is
made into the crystals which are blood plasma
and which will often mean life itself to the
soldier at the front, where it will be delivered
with speed.

But back to the donor! He or she comes into
our Blood Donor Canteen after the donation and
then the canteeners take over. In their blue
uniforms and caps with their crisp white aprons
they make a pleasant picture. With their ready
smile, they offer the donor hot or cold drinks,
cookies, and the best cinnamon toast, buttered
to a queen's taste. The donor relaxes and, ten
to one, begins to talk of his loved ones in the
service. Since most of the canteeners have a
husband or son also in the Armed Forces, the
conversation is most congenial. Most donors
leave us with a cheery "I'll see you again in
two months," for a donation can be made every
two months for several times and then every four
months. The Gallon Club is the most exclusive
club in Atlanta, for there is no way of getting in
except by the gift of that much blood ; but the list
is getting longer and longer and prouder and
prouder. The donor is checked out by a volun-
teer staff assistant, is given his hat and coat by
an attending Gray Lady, and is on his way re-
joicing in most cases about forty-five minutes
from the time he stepped off the elevator onto
the Donor Center floor.

As for our other canteen, it is the joy of some
forty-odd workers who man the Center doctors,
nurses, staff assistants, Gray Ladies, and office
personnel who pay for a most delightful hot
lunch or appetizing salad plate, sandwiches, and
dessert. The profits also go into the work of the

[15]

Canteen among the soldiers. And here, as in the
Donor Canteen, faithful, talented canteeners take
pleasure in making their day a real contribution
to the work of the Center.

There are more glamorous canteen jobs in our
local program, probably, but we feel that our
hours at the Blood Donor Center are the most
satisfying service of them all. Ours is a service
which means boys coming back who would not

have been able to survive without our humble
contribution ; ours is the chance to serve the front
line of battle, and not one of us would exchange
our opportunity for any other service. This poor
resume cannot tell you of the dearness of friends
made in day by day service in a common cause,
of the memories we are laying away, of the con-
sciousness of being useful to our nation, even
if it is at the cookstove and the sink, woman's
traditional tools!

[16]

With a house, husband, and two babies, Mary
Smith still finds time to prove that . . .

Hospitality
Still Counts

Mary Willis Smith '37

MAIN INTERIOR

Sue Mitchell '45

The girl in the narrow, high hospital bed eyed
me cautiously. Clearly through her mind, I knew,
was running the question,

"What on earth does that perfect stranger
want of me? Am I, because I am a wounded
WAC, such a curiosity?"

Sensing her righteous indignation, I spoke
hastily.

"Aren't you Clara ?"

"Yes, I am," she answered slowly, as she
shifted her free arm to her bandaged head.

"And weren't you at Agnes Scott in '32? In
the class with Sara Barnett?"

"Why yes," she answered, comprehension
dawning in her eyes as she gave me a searching
glance. "You must be her younger sister. I see
the resemblance now. And I do remember that
Sara was from Augusta. But somehow I never
associated Sara and Agnes Scott with the war
and the Oliver General Hospital," she ended
apologetically.

"Do sit down," she begged eagerly, "and let's
talk school."

For the next hour we were off, reminiscing
happily of the things we both knew and loved at
Agnes Scott. We discussed the changes made, we

[17]

followed up old friends, we learned the news of
the faculty.

When I stood up to leave, with the promise of
returning soon, the wounded girl said gratefully,

"Thank you for coming, and thank you, too,
for letting me talk school. I hear so much of war
and the tragic changes that it is making, that it is
really a pleasure to talk of Agnes Scott, and to
know that it, at least, is a constant factor."

How true this is! With family ties broken,
homes moved, men dying, we who have left Agnes
Scott in the past years like to know that she
stands there now, serene and steadfast, waiting
for the tumult to cease, invincible against the
desecration of today.

In these busy, changing days, old school years
seem but a hazy, drifting dream, to be pondered
on for a moment, and then thrust back into the
subconscious state of pleasantness, while the pass-
ing duties of today drive us irrevocably onward.
Babies and diapers, washing and ironing, cook-

ing and cleaning are but the everyday grind.
How or when, one asks, could there ever be time
for alumnae work, no matter how loyal to Agnes
Scott one feels?

The answer is, that if we can know when an
alumna moves to our town, we are not only do-
ing Agnes Scott a favor to visit her, but we are
also finding an unexpected pleasure in meeting
old and new friends.

In order to know of any Agnes Scotter who
might be in our town, we have but to drop the
Alumnae Secretary a card, and she will give the
necessary information. And if we are moving
to a new town, we could write the Secretary, let-
ting her know where we are going. Just as the
wounded WAC found old friends in the midst of
her army career, just so those of us who continue
to live in our home towns can be a friend to the
newcomers, visiting them and welcoming them.
In so doing, we are keeping up the best traditions
of Agnes Scott, by being a friend, a helper, and
an alumna.

[18]

"A deeper meaning of democracy" is what Harriotte
Brantley finds in the workings of the U . S. O. She is
Staff Assistant at the Salvation Army U. S. O. on
Market Space, Washington, D. C.

The Challenge of U.S.O.

Harriotte Brantley '32

Many people are unaware of the relationship
of the member agencies to USO, and take it for
granted that USO is in itself a single organiza-
tion; that, although it is backed by the YMCA,
YWCA, the Salvation Army, the National Cath-
olic Community Service, the Jewish Welfare
Board, and the Travelers Aid, these agencies do
not operate as such in the USO. However, it is in
this working together and still functioning as
separate agencies, this unity with divergence, that
much of the strength, spirit, and challenge of
USO lies.

It is inconceivable that a Hitler or a Tojo could
force six such different agencies to work to
gether; it is inconceivable that six agencies, rep
resenting three great faiths and many races
could work together on any but a voluntary basis
This is an example, as our National President,
Mr. Barnard, puts it, of "the higher and deeper
democracy of consonance of opinion and judg-
ment, of judgment and decision, reached after
each has yielded something it did not want to
yield. Were their differences silly? Sometimes,
yes; doubtless they thought so afterwards. But
that is not the point. You do not protect the
thing that is fundamental without being exceed-
ingly cautious about those things that are less

fundamental. You protect the inner works with
the outer works."

The philosophy of USO is something new and
challenging and somehow comforting in these
times when faith in and respect for the innate
dignity of man seems to be lost. Each member
agency has said in effect that it insists not only on
the right to practice its own faith but on the
right of other faiths and other races to serve
their own and to see that they are adequately
cared for also that those of no faith shall be
respected in their independence. Every USO is
to be so conducted that any man or woman in
uniform may feel completely welcome ; that there
shall be no discrimination because of creed, race,
or color.

Each day in the USO is excitingly different;
there may await you a hilarious experience, or
one that tears at your heart, but there will never
be a boring one. You pinch-hit at the check
room or at the snackbar; you fill in for sudden
emergencies at the information desk. The door is
flung open and in comes a tall, blond sailor with
a two-year-old replica of himself in his arms

"Hello. Say, I'm on a spot," he says. "I've
just got to do some Christmas shopping and I
can't make much headway with Ray here. He

[19]

practically gets smashed in the crowds. I won-
der if you "

You install the junior sailor in a chair close to
your side, and you and he gaze solemnly at each
other for a moment. Then

"I can make a noise like a pig," offers Ray.

Again the door opens and this time it is a
Marine. He leans up against the rail around the
information desk and looks at you. Then words
are jostling each other in their hurry to get
said

"My girl is coming here next week and we're
going to be married. Can you tell me what I
have to do about getting the license and the
preacher? We're Presbyterians and we'd like to
be married in a church. Oh, and we don't know a
soul here, and well Anne's always wanted a
wedding with a bridesmaid and stuff like that.
Could you "

Once more the door opens and this time a
soldier enters. His crutches thump on the floor.
He has only one arm and one leg. He's got a
smile, too,

"I sure am tired and dirty, mostly dirty.
Had a long trip getting here, and have to go on
tonight."

He sits down in a chair at one of the writing
desks near the information center.

"We have showers here," you suggest, "if
you'd like to "

"Can't think of anything better," he sighs, "but
I don't see how I can do it."

Instantly understanding and sympathetic, your

supervisor of information, Mr. Boswell, speaks
up, "I'll go along and shower with you. I'm sure
the two of us can manage together."

The Recreation Room on the second floor is
your particular domain. Here you become ac-
customed to the sound of that peculiar composite
the juke box, the piano, the radio, the clack of
ping pong balls, the medley of voices, and
usually a few extras thrown in for good measure.
You go dashing to the office when the ring of the
buzzer indicates a call from downstairs

"Do you have some first-aid supplies up there?
We have a Wave here with a pretty badly cut
finger and the bandage has come off."

Or: "There's a sailor who wants a place to
plug in his electric razor. Could you ?"

Or: "Do you have someone there who can do
some sewing? We have a couple of soldiers who
have some insignia they want sewed on."

Or: "Can you make a voice recording for this
Marine? He's only got a few minutes."

Or: "Do you have a vacant sofa up there?
There's a sailor who's tired out and wants to
sleep for an hour. Will you be sure and call him
at six? He's got to make a bus."

And so it goes. Every morning you wake to
find that your ship has brought you to a new
landing. Behind you you feel the strength and
spirit and unity of USO, you feel a purpose and
an awakening conscience of mankind. And you
realize that never before have you given your ,
efforts and your loyalties with such whole-heart-
edness and with such gladness.

[20]

Home Service Today-and Tomorrow

Elizabeth Warden '38

tells about the "vital link between home and the
boy in camp or on shipboard or even in a fox hole."

In these days of women in uniform, prominent
among the khaki and the navy is the blue-grey of
the Red Cross; and, looking at the wearer, one
wonders what she does as her part in the war
effort. Since the first branch was founded in this
country late in the last century, Red Cross chap-
ters have sprung up across the continent until now
there are nearly four thousand, each with a dozen
different activities, from Blood Donor and Nurse
Recruitment to Motor Corps and Junior Red
Cross. All these activities have been accelerated
since the President first declared a national emer-
gency in September 1939, and of course even
more so since we actively entered the war. To

those of us who have chosen Red Cross as our
place for the duration, there is an undeniable
satisfaction in feeling that in our small way we
are contributing toward ultimate victory.

One of the most important parts of Red Cross
is the Home Service Department that vital link
between home and the boy in camp or on ship-
board or even in a fox hole. It is that boy's
means of knowing that his family will be cared
for and that family's means of knowing that
their boy will be relieved of any concern for their
welfare. In short, on Home Service rests the
responsibility of helping to maintain morale, and
the importance of that cannot be overestimated.

I remember the distracted mother who came to
the office one day with a War Department notice
that the allotment from her son had been discon-
tinued; reason: "soldier discharged." When last
heard from four months previously the son had
been with General Patton's army in France; his

WHITE HOUSE

A Scratch Board
Drawing

Margaret Johnson '47

[21]

mother had not been notified of his being
wounded or returned to the States. Contact with a
Red Cross field director in France revealed that
the son was well; the allotment was reinstated,
and best of all the mother's anxiety was dispelled.

Most Home Service work since the war has
naturally been with the families of boys in active
service. Primarily Home Service gives financial
assistance to these boys' dependents until receipt
of their regular monthly allowances. But also
Home Service helps arrange for medical care,
purchases glasses, assists when possible in
locating homes, straightens out allotment tangles,
learns why Johnny has not written to his family
in six months, provides clothes for the new baby,
and advises about innumerable other problems.
When necessary Home Service suggests another
agency better suited to help with some particular
situation. We never know whether a day will be
comparatively peaceful, with only a few home
visits, office interviews, phone calls, and letters,
or whether it will mean finding a home for Mrs.
M. and her three children because her father-in-
law in a drunken rage the night before drove
them from the house into the cold.

I am reminded of the day Private A., stationed
at a nearby camp, telephoned that his wife had
been taken to the Station Hospital the day before
and that the medical officer had found her in
need of a serious operation. This meant several
weeks in the hospital and several more in bed
at home. Private A. was to report back to camp
at noon of the next day, leaving no one to care for
the seven children between the ages of thirteen
months and fourteen years. Neither he nor his
wife had any relatives able to assume such re-
sponsibility, there was not a practical nurse to be
had, most nurseries did not give twenty-four-hour
care, and those that did were full. A plea was

made to a child-placing agency, and the next day
as Private A. was returning to camp, a Home
Service worker arrived to take the children to a
boarding home for an indefinite period, until
Mrs. A. was entirely able to resume her household
duties.

But Home Service does many things for the
serviceman himself. Corporal H. was notified by
his father that Aunt Susie was seriously ill and
he should come at once. Corporal H's com-
manding officer wondered if Aunt Susie were so
ill that Corporal H's training as an aviation cadet
should be interrupted at a crucial point. At his
request Home Service called the doctor and
learned that Aunt Susie had an acute (and pain-
ful) attack of indigestion, but that she would
recover. Corporal H. was saved time, money,
and considerable hard work.

And there was Sergeant S., at Camp Kilmer,
who had suddenly become unusually nervous,
complaining of pains in his stomach and sleep-
lessness. He was admitted to the hospital, where
the medical officer, finding no organic disturb-
ance, wondered if Sergeant S. had ever had such
attacks before. Through the field director at
Camp Kilmer he asked Home Service to talk to
Sergeant S's mother, who said, "Yes, he did act
like that when he was worried." Further inquiry
brought the information that Sergeant S's family
had been writing him of their own troubles, trou-
bles which were soon solved with Home Service
help. Back went a report to the medical officer,
and Sergeant S. was soon on duty again.

More and more, Home Service works with ex-
servicemen and their families. There are the
wives and mothers of the boys who have died in
service, seeking help in filing their applications
for government benefits and advice about many
things. And there is work with the veteran him-

[22]

self, in filing his claim for compensation, in
directing him through proper channels to employ-
ment, in planning for medical care, and in giving
financial assistance.

Recently there was a call from Mrs. B., whose
husband, a former soldier, was in the veterans'
hospital for treatment of varicose veins. Mrs. B.
and the four children were without food and coal.
These were sent. When a visit was made to the
home shortly afterwards, Mr. B. had been dis-
charged from the hospital. But the doctor had

told him that he should not return to his former
job at the shell plant as this required constant
standing. He was directed to a vocational train-
ing service, and temporary financial assistance
was given; now Mr. B. is driving a bus and is
again supporting his family.

Today as we of Home Service look to the
future, we are aware of the vital part we can
play in the rehabilitation of our veterans a part
which is becoming increasingly important with
approaching victory.

From a series of fascinating accounts "going over"
on a troop-ship, hearing the "buzzes" (robot bombs)
in England, bathing in a helmet, and being welcomed
with pre-war tea and salad oil to a Belgium home
we choose these particularly telling letters written by-
Roberta Morgan to her sister, Bessie. Because of rich
experience and ability in social service work and dis-
aster relief (in the New England hurricane, Louisville
flood, etc.), Bert has been sent overseas by the Red
Cross on a Civilian War Relief assignment. Here she
tells how people live and think in . . .

Liberated Belgium and
Luxembourg

Roberta Morgan ex-'lS

Belgium

October 22, 1944
Dear Bessie:

Have been helping to set up a large reception
center here near the border for allied refugees or
displaced persons as they begin to pour back
from their slavery or imprisonment in Germany.
Am still enjoying my association with Belgian
Red Cross Mission. Had dinner with them last
night and it was most pleasant after a depressing

day. Three young doctors just out of internship, a
young lawyer who was a prisoner of war three
years, and another man their age are all in the
group. They have always been friends as are
their fathers who are doctors and professors.
They are so intelligent and eager; are full of
questions about everything in America. I was
asked a hundred questions about Public Health,
State Medicine (which they are against because
of what they know of the German system), Medi-

[23]

cal Schools, Social problems, voting, sectional
differences and so on. They, as well as the older
members, had all read Gone With the Wind, and
one of the deprivations of the war is the fact that
it prevented the showing of the movie over here!
When I first came here less than three weeks
ago it was comparatively quiet, although one of
the biggest battles was being waged less than ten
miles away. This battle was over yesterday. I
rode through the city in an ambulance in the
afternoon and it was a terrible sight to behold a
once beautiful city of 250,000 or more in ruins
and completely deserted except for an American
soldier at intervals. Saw two groups of five or six
refugees trudging out with bags and baskets
they had evidently been able to subsist in a deep
cellar. As in San Lo and other railroad places
I've seen the shelling seems to pass by the flower
gardens and the fruit trees. It gives a weird
picture. I will probably be going to a more
permanent assignment soon to a very beautiful
small country or duchy to make a survey and to
advise on the setting up of the new social services
. . . quite a break for me. Some officers were at
our table tonight who are here to set up this town
as a rest center for troops from the front. Some
have not slept in a bed since before D-Day and
they look so weary and dirty. The town people
here were courted by the Germans and are
rather well off.

Somewhere in Belgium
October 30, 1944
Am having a day off between jobs. Tomorrow
I begin my most important and I'm sure most
interesting assignment so far. It's to direct a
survey and to make recommendations about
social and health agencies in a small country now
completely liberated. I only hope I can measure

[24]

up will be doing more of this sort of thing . . .
and I'm fortunate to get this experience ahead of
time. Oh, but I've seen such devastation much
of the resultant misery will not be apparent until
later, I'm sure. I have been on the border of
Belgium and Germany for some weeks. No
one smiles, ever, except the good old U. S.
soldiers ....

Luxembourg
November 5, 1944

Came down here Friday, driving in an open
car through extremely beautiful country. Ar-
rived after dark and we were so comforted to
find them looking for us and unusually glad to
see us. It bids fair to be pleasant and not too
hard, at least for the time being. They have had
lots of refugees and displaced persons for the
last weeks, but there is a lull . . . just now. Have
already had several experiences not had since I
left Washington such as using a telephone. Of
course the use is limited but it will save many
trips. Also will have a civilian passenger car for
use. I can hardly believe the latter piece of good
luck.

It is sad to witness the confusion and the lack
of leadership in the liberated countries. Of
course the transition period is always unsettled
but . . . they have turned again in some instances
to the pre-invasion leaders who were admittedly
weak. Those who remained at home to fight and
to work for freedom while they endured much
from the invader are very unhappy and humili-
ated. There are in many instances young people
who are not radical but who may rise up in the
end. One hopes they can do it before it is too late
and the forces of lawlessness and radicalism do
the rising up and throw everything into chaos.
Those who care so much and want good govern-

ment talk freely with some of us Americans.
They think America can perform wonders, poor
things, but they are beginning to see that we, too,
have our weaknesses and that they will have to do
for themselves. This is such a beautiful, neat,
dignified little country. I hope it soon gets its
internal affairs straightened out. As you know,
it was not considered an occupied country but
was annexed by Germany and was to be one of
the Elect to share in all the benefits robbed
from the other countries. Our officers are in a
building owned by a very large steel company.
This duchy is very important for iron and steel.
The soil and rocks as we came through the other
day looked much like Jefferson County. Am to
meet the national Red Cross people tomorrow
. . . will probably have a busy week.

(Somewhere in Luxembourg
November 12, 1944

Have had a busy and interesting week as I
anticipated. The Director of Red Cross for the
duchy (a volunteer) is quite a person. He was
deported to France by Germans in 1940 and in
concentration camp almost all the time until
early September. Have met and worked with six
other men of the intellectual group, all of whom
were in work camps or concentration camps.
And they can all laugh about it, even though
almost all have close relatives still being held
as has every family.

Am surprised and delighted to see the very
modern buildings and the very superior equip-
ment they have, especially in hospitals. Most of
their doctors train in Paris. Their nurses are all
Catholic Sisters except the midwives who train in
the Maternite Charlotte, a maternity hospital
built and run by Red Cross. They are very effi-
cient also in their plans and their care of

refugees. They have reception centers on the
French and Belgium borders and are sending
convoys to bring home 2,000 of their boys who
were forced into the German army, escaped to
France or Beige, and joined their Free Fighting
Forces. They have a ceremony to welcome them,
register them, give physical exam to be sure
they are not bringing infectious diseases to
their families, and send them home. You never
saw a volunteer project done so well as their
clothing project. No one has any new clothes, and
twice a year they have been forced to collect
clothing for shipment to Germany. They laugh
and tell how they gave the worst things they had,
but now they are sharing the best they have for
the Red Cross to use for the returning nationals
and Allied Nationals. They are keeping some
back for the great number who will come when
we get to the Rhine, but it will be only a drop.
They need clothes badly here and in Belgium,
and the Poles and Russians will be desperate.
The forced labor from there whom we've seen
often have only the things they had on when they
were picked up from home a year or so ago.

How interesting to watch the Russians! One
Sunday I saw a truckload that had been brought
from near Aachen where bombardment was so
fierce. They had been deloused, had hot showers,
some clean clothes, a warm meal and bed for the
night. They were being sent to a camp of all
Russians where they will stay until they can be
sent home. They went out the gates of the bar-
racks singing a lusty Russian song. They get
work in towns where they are in camp and pay
for their food. . . . Yesterday I walked behind
three rollicking ones a boy of about seventeen, a
girl of about sixteen, and one younger. Everyone
turned to stare at them as they strode along,
laughing and talking, as unselfconscious as if

[25]

they had been in their own fields. After a while
they entered a nice-looking beauty parlor and I
wanted to follow and see if they got served !

November 23
According to proclamation this is Thanks-
giving Day. . . . Had a special dinner with
guests last night. The meat was wild hare one
of the men had shot on a hunt with some local
sportsman. These hares are several times as
large as our rabbits. It was well cooked and
good. Last Saturday was several red-letter-days
combined L. K. E. came from her headquar-
ters a couple of hours away and brought mail
and my foot locker! It had more nice and needed
things in it than I had remembered. Was
ready to write for shoes because the cobble-
stones everywhere are hard on them, but now I
can get along for another six months or more.
Clothes and shoes are so badly needed here (by
civilians) that I almost wish R. C. would have a
limited campaign for good shoes! Also, there
is a need of books. Junior Red Cross could send
well chosen ones, couldn't it? Here, all were
burned and German propaganda substituted.
They have to wait a long time until they can get
books from France where they are published.

December 10, 1944
Am now busier and more needed than at any
time since I came. Act as liaison on welfare,
health and numerous other matters between Civil
Affairs and other army units, Red Cross, Bureau
of Repatriation, Psychological Warfare and
"what have you." Am going to represent this
outfit at a meeting this afternoon at the office of
the Mission (there is a Military Mission to each
of the liberated countries which deals with the
Government). Friday I felt almost at home a

meeting in a charming room at the Casino which
has been largely taken over by R.C. for its ex-
panded activities. About sixty Board members
and volunteers were there. I sat next to a French-
woman who speaks English. . . . Also across table
from a beautiful and intelligent young woman
who was deported to a German labor camp and
worked there for four months this year! Most
of the faces were serious but alert. They looked
very much like Americans. All the dresses were
1940 styles; the shoes are pathetic; and these
people have (in the past) dressed exceedingly
well. . . . Think Americans will have a Christmas
tree for the children here. Their St. Nicholas
Day was December 6th. They dressed up as we
do on Halloween.

The number of Russian Refugees grows here
and many of the attendant problems have been
brought to me the last two weeks. Have at-
tended a meeting of their own camp committee
and went to a concert they gave at an American
Officers' Club on Friday night. They had made
gay and fairly presentable costumes from old
scraps. They sang well and lustily their national
and folk songs. One of the most stirring was
"0, Odessa," written at the time of the German
siege of Odessa. While they have so few inhibi-
tions, I'm interested to note their pride in ap-
pearance. We don't have enough to keep half of
them warm. Of course there was bound to be this
hard period after the Germans took everything
possible and before we can ship supplies in.
There are several intellectuals in the group who
crave books, etc., ... a doctor, teachers, a nurse,
an architect.

Monday Morning

The first light snow fell here last night. It is

very slushy today and cold as I came across a

[26]

large bridge this morning I was so interested to
observe the satisfaction of many citizens over the
sight of collaborationists, their fellow townsmen,
having to shovel the snow. They are serious
everywhere I've been about the punishment of
them. Of course some innocent and ignorant ones
are obliged to suffer, but, on the whole, these
people know what they're doing about such. . . .
Well, I surely had another job handed me . . .
of Christmas clearance and all sorts of things in
connection with Christmas parties the soldiers
and officers want to give to the poor children.
Carries me back to days at home with men's
clubs which wanted to do the same thing. The
children everywhere adore the American soldier
and the soldier can't keep from spoiling them.
At the concert I mentioned, a group of three
middle-aged officers at one table gave their entire
attention to a sweet little Russian girl about six
the only one present. They gave her money,
gum, and candies. By the end of the evening she
was saying several English words, including
"Could be!"

Many things to write about but will try again

soon.

December 21, 1944

Well, you probably know enough to realize
that I am now extremely busy. It will be a

memorable Christmas. In spite of everything,
the Christmas parties for children will be given.
I believe I am very fortunate from many stand-
points to be where I am and to have been here
long enough to know resources and people to use ;
also, for the reason that I am witnessing some
of the really big things and maybe the end of this
long struggle. I long for ability and opportunity
to tell you of the hundreds of impressions and
facts I've gained and the atmosphere I feel in the
present situation. These from people who were
not "occupied" but taken into Germany. Most of
them would meet a dire fate if ever exposed to
the Germans and are very tense.

I am a combination of Executive Secretary of a
big city Chapter, the Military and Welfare Serv-
ices combined in one for many officers and
troops, and the disaster director. Have been
more than pleased to see that the Red Cross of
this country functions well, almost better than
anything else. They have such fine people, com-
mand respect, and GET THE JOB DONE WITH
DISPATCH . . .

I have gotten a glimpse into how people live
and think . . .

Love to all,

Bert

[27]

Dr. McCain's Message for

Founder's Day 1945

Remembrance

The organizing of a school in Decatur was due
to the local needs for better education; but the
firm establishment of the institution is a tribute
to the high esteem in which a son held the ideals
of his mother. When Colonel George W. Scott
said to his pastor, "The Lord has prospered me
and I do not wish it to harden my heart. ... I
would like to give a permanent home for our
school," he was carrying out the principles of
stewardship taught him by his mother, Mrs.
Agnes Scott.

While Colonel Scott contributed about two
hundred thousand dollars for the establishing of
the institution, his principal value to the school
was not his financial support, but his personal
interest and devotion. He personally supervised

almost every detail in the erection of Main
Building. He was on the campus almost daily
during its first fourteen years. He was one of die
originators of the Agnes Scott "Prayer Cove-
nant," which enlisted a group for daily interces-
sion. It was because of his interest that Dr. F. H.
Gaines was willing to give up the pastorate and
become a full-time president. He enlisted the
support of his son-in-law, Honorable Charles
Murphey Candler. It was through him that Mr.
Samuel M. Inman, the foremost citizen of At-
lanta, became a member of the Board. It is ap-
propriate that Colonel Scott's birthday, February
22, should be celebrated as Founder's Day.

Thanksgiving

As we look back over the fifty-six years of our
history, we can well be grateful for our founders
and for the ideals which they set forth. We may
be thankful, too, for the faculty members and
administrative officers who early joined the insti-
tution, among whom Miss Nannette Hopkins,
Miss Louise McKinney, and Dr. J. D. M. Arm-
istead would certainly be counted. The friend-
ship and support of the General Education Board
has been one of the chief reasons for the emerging
of Agnes Scott as a strong college. We are thank-

THE COLONNADE

A Scratch Board Drawing

by Jane Smith '46

[28]

ful for the confidence of fellow educators who
have given to Agnes Scott all the academic recog-
nition that any college or university in this
country or any other may attain. More than
twelve thousand donors have helped in the build-
ing up of our assets, which now amount to about
five million dollars. Girls of character and at-
tainment have come from consecrated homes and
have invigorated the college life and gone out as
valued alumnae all over the world. Thousands of
others who have not been able to attend the in-
stitution or to contribute financially to its de-
velopment have had an interest in it and have
joined in prayer for its development. We have
had and still have innumerable causes for very
humble and sincere thanks to God.

Dedication

Agnes Scott was organized to assist worthy
young women with their education. About
7,500 girls have already shared in the work of
the institution, and through the years to come
thousands of others will doubtless take their
places. The College now has an opportunity to
select its students with a great deal of care, and
we believe the individual girls will bring to their

alma mater much of interest and profit. We are
very anxious that they find here a happy place in
which to work and one which will develop them
in all the fine qualities of womanhood.

Our friends tell us that Agnes Scott is regarded
as representing unusually high standards of
scholarship and that our program tends to real
intellectual development. We wish the institution
to be a leader in the community of the mind and
in offering to the South education of the highest
type.

In the original Ideal of the College, it was
stated that the glory of God is the chief end of
all. We would like for this to be a daily purpose
of those who are connected with the institution
and for His blessing to crown every endeavor of
individuals and of our college as a whole.

As we face a troubled world just now, we
hope that our college can exhibit a serenity and
inward peace which will stimulate all her daugh-
ters, far and near, to render the best possible
service to country and to the Kingdom of God
while the war continues and as a permanent peace
is established.

J. R. McCain

President

[29]

Again Jane Guthrie Rhodes writes up the private life of
an outstanding campus personality

Christian W. Dieckmann:

40 Years of Music at Agnes Scott

Jane Guthrie Rhodes '38

In 1905, Decatur, Georgia was a thriving
town of around 2,000. It boasted four churches,
several livery stables, electric street lamps oper-
ated at night by the water-driven dynamos out at
Colonel Houston's mill, and a school of higher
learning for young women known as the Agnes
Scott Institute.

In 1905 six students at this institution began
the final year of work on their A.B. degrees, little
realizing that they would go down in history as
the first graduating class of Agnes Scott College.

In 1905 Miss Hopkins, beloved dean of Agnes
Scott from 1889 to 1938, still enjoyed frequent
excursions through the country in Miss Nellie
Candler's carriage.

In 1905 ... a memorable year . . . the music
department of the Agnes Scott Institute had just
acquired a new piano teacher. We can almost
hear Dr. Gaines, our first president and a staunch
Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, as he got up to make
the announcement to the assembled faculty.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he must have said,
"we have been most fortunate in securing as
piano teacher for our music department Mr.
Christian W. Dieckmann from Cincinnati, Ohio.
He is a young man in his early twenties, and Mr.

Maclean, the head of our music department, pro-
nounces him a very talented musician. Mr.
Dieckmann comes with excellent references and
I am sure we will extend him our most cordial
welcome."

"But, Dr. Gaines," perhaps some member of
the faculty protested, "do you think it advisable
to bring such a young man into a college for
young ladies? What of his character and
habits?"

"Sir," Dr. Gaines must have replied in the
brusque manner for which he was famous, "the
young man is a minister's son. And as such,
neither his habits nor his character can be ques-
tioned."

And so, early in September of 1905, the new
piano teacher arrived. He was all that Dr. Gaines
had prophesied and more. He was talented
playing with that rare combination of sensitivity
and skill. He was patient as the young ladies
studying under him could testify. He was anxious
to become a part of the campus and readily ac-
cepted any odd job asked of him. He acted in
faculty plays, accompanied student recitals,
played the organ for various churches throughout
Atlanta, eventually becoming choir director and

[30]

organist for Atlanta's Lutheran Church of the
Redeemer, which position he holds today. And
he offered his services with such humility and
good humor that he soon became a favorite among
the faculty group who nicknamed him, affection-
ately, "The Parson."

But the most important characteristic of this
young man from Ohio was his passion for orderly
thinking, his love for truth. Many a campus
member, misled by the new piano teacher's mod
est demeanor, must have been jarred by his revo
lutionary ideas. We can imagine one of them
perhaps, a feminine member, saying: "Mr
Dieckmann, you are of German descent, I under
stand. I have always admired the music of the
great German composers, Beethoven, Wagner,
Mozart, Haydn, and Bach . . . surely no other
race has contributed as much to the field of
music." To which Mr. Dieckmann must have
replied gently but firmly, "Madam, it is true that
I am of German descent. My father was born
in Hanover and brought to this country at the
age of four. As to music, however, you greatly
overrate the German race. They are a clever
people and have claimed many composers not
their own. Beethoven was Dutch; Mozart, Aus-
trian; Haydn, Croatian; and Bach, a native of
Thuringia. The only true German among the
men you have named was Wagner. And I do not
admire his music. [Here a slight pause while the
feminine member composes herself.] Wagner's
music, in my opinion, is intellectual, selfish, cold.
It preaches the German race above all and is
completely lacking in human kindness. Wagner
in private life was a Jew-baiter [today Mr.
Dieckmann would have said: 'He is one of the
men who made Hitler possible.'] I cannot ad-
mire a man's music if I do not admire his morals.
A composer writes what he is. His private life

cannot be separated from his music."

This was in 1905. And as the years passed,
"The Parson" continued to surprise his friends
and colleagues. He became dissatisfied with the
music for May Day one Spring, and sat down to
write his own score. His choir needed a special
anthem and he produced two which were later
published and adopted by fifteen other church
choirs. He has eighteen compositions in print
today. Again, he had the melodic inspiration
for a hymn and wrote the music for the soul-
stirring "God of the Marching Centuries" with
which Presser Hall, Agnes Scott's new music
building, was dedicated in 1940.

The young man from Ohio had ideas about
teaching, too. He increased the credit hours of
the theoretical courses, Harmony and Counter-
point, thereby raising the standard of the whole
music department. In 1916 and 1918 he took
and successfully passed the Fellowship and As-
sociate examinations of the American Guild of
Organists which accounts for the coveted initials,
F.A.G.O. following his name. Ten years ago he
organized Agnes Scott's first string ensemble
which is open to faculty and students alike re-
gardless of musical experience a group that
illustrates Mr. Dieckmann's favorite theory:
"Music, to have its greatest influence, must be
spread among the greatest number of people. It
is much better to give many students a fairly good
musical background than it is to train a few con-
cert artists."

In 1915 he surprised the campus again by
carrying off as his bride, the vivacious, dark-
eyed Freshman English teacher, Emma Pope
Moss. And three years later he became the head
of the music department.

Today, in his fortieth year at Agnes Scott,
Mr. Dieckmann is still the modest, unassuming

[31]

young man from Ohio. He is undisputed master
of stately Presser Hall with its labyrinth of class
rooms and practice rooms, its vaulted chapel,
auditorium and pipe organ. But he walks as
humbly as he did in the days when he taught
the young ladies of the Institute on fourth floor
Main. The magnificent graying head which he
inherited from his German ancestors, he carries
downward to one side, as if, someone has said,
he were listening to music within him. His eyes
when he looks at you are steady, inquiring, youth-
fully alive. And he still has ideas!

"Boogie-woogie, jitterbugging, bah!" he says,
"the same notes over and over in monotonous
rhythm. I think today's popular music in very
bad taste, and I agree with Rodzinski that it has
had a demoralizing effect. Music is a moral
force. Good music can inspire and unite the
world. Bad music can demoralize it. As to the
classical music that is being written today only
time will tell its true value. I think we should
listen to it whether we understand it or not, be-
cause following its very complicated form is good
mental exercise. Our modern composers deserve
at least the chance of being heard."

"Yes," he says in answer to a question, "ex-
pose your children to music while they are
young and make them practice. My mother
taught all six of us to play the piano, and my
father demanded that we know one other instru-
ment as well. Nothing, I think, binds a family
closer than making music together."

"No," he says in answer to another question,
"I have no favorites among the great composers.
Each one excels in his own field. I admire
Beethoven for his great humanity, Mozart for his
pure melodic inspiration, Bach for his counter-
point, Debussy and Ravel for their subtle orches-
tral coloring. As for our great conductors,

Koussevitzki and Rodzinski are my favorites be-
cause there is nothing of the showman in their
conducting. They are both excellent drill
masters."

He repeats a final question: "Do I think Adele
(Mr. Dieckmann's sixteen-year-old daughter)
will choose a musical career? I'm afraid not.
At present she is much more interested in avia-
tion." y

In the evenings after a hard day's work (he
averages eleven classes and fifty-eight piano les-
sons a week) Mr. Dieckmann relaxes with his
pipe and a novel, or tinkers with one of his radio
sets. "He is just like any other family man,"
Mrs. Dieckmann says of her husband. "He loves
apple pie, pork sausage and the comforts of
home. He detests shopping (I buy all of his
clothes for him even his shoes) and he fills up
his desk with everything imaginable bits of
paper, wire, tools and pebbles for his slingshot
which he uses to keep the squirrels out of our
peach trees in June. I might also add that he
has a very easy-to-live-with disposition."

A close friend makes this comment: "Dieck-
mann, in my opinion, is the most balanced per-
sonality on the campus. He is generous in his
thinking, sympathetic toward the problems of
others, and he possesses a keenly analytical mind.
I feel that if I had Dieckmann's characteristics, I
would be a better man." And we end the vain at-
tempt to put upon paper the substance of a great
man with this tribute from Ruth Simpson '46,
one of his pupils: "When I play badly for him
there is no reproach except that of my own con-
science. In a world at war, it is a privilege to
know a man like Mr. Dieckmann who is at peace
with himself, who lives in harmony and serenity
and communicates this serenity, unconsciously,
to those around him."

[32]

A sophomore from Florida feels her heart "play hop-
scotch" over the joys told here in

Letter to Aunt Jo

Sophia Pedakis '47

Mary Louise Bealer '46

Dearest Aunt Jo,

Tonight I am thinking especially of you be-
cause only a moment ago I met the star you told
me about. As I lay cuddled snugly up in bed, it
looked through my window and winked at me
just as you said it would ! I giggled, flopped over
on my tummy and decided to write you about it,
for a star has never winked at me before!

Aunt Jo, I guess I had to come to Agnes Scott
to wink back at a star for I did, you know,
and to do so many other wonderful things that
sometimes I think I can never tell you about them
all! How can I ever tell you about meeting
Smitty, the adorable fuzzy-grey squirrel who sits
on my window-sill every morning and makes
funny faces at me? How can I tell you about the
wind that plays hide-and-seek with a naughty

wisp of Miss Scandrett's hair as she crosses the
quadrangle? Or how can I ever tell you about
the way my heart plays hop-scotch inside of me
whenever I look and see Main Tower welcome
the twilight sky?

I can never walk by the Tower without feeling
that I should stop and whisper, "Thank you" to
those who built it and to those who have helped
keep it high in the sun. For me the tower is Agnes
Scott. It is all the bull-sessions and "after-lights"
parties I have ever shared. It is hockey games
and the remembrance of the dry taste in my
mouth as I yelled for the Sophomore team. It is
the night before exams and the day before Christ-
mas holidays begin.

Whenever I think of the Tower, Aunt Jo, I
think of my friends and the crazy habit they have
of quoting "Jabberwocky" and "Pooh" to me
when I am trying to memorize one of Shakes-
peare's sonnets for my 211 English class. I see
the rain pelting the red brick sidewalk in front of
the library, or myself stealing peeks into the date
parlors on Saturday nights. I see my Sophomore
class sitting in Chapel and hurriedly trying to
finish that "one and only" letter before Mr.
Dieckmann starts playing the organ.

Perhaps the Tower should stand for bigger
and more important things in my mind, but Aunt
Jo, I think the little things it reminds me of are
the ones that make me love Agnes Scott. They
are the joys which make up the new feeling inside
of me that sometimes whispers, sometimes sings,
and sometimes even shouts that I am a part of
Agnes Scott that no matter how far away I may
go, a part of me will always belong here the
part of me which has forever been captured by
the spirit of the girls we call "Hottentots" and
this place we call Agnes Scott. For it is here that
I have found the "sticky wet leaves of spring"

[33]

and the "streamers of white cloud." It is here
that I have heard the hoarse whistle of the mid-
night train and learned the magic of the word
"Merit." It is here that I have shared the "life-
enhancing ideas" which make me understand

why you can never forget the Founder's day on
which you danced the minuet dressed as Dan'l
Boone. Goodnight, Auntie, and remember
I love you,

Susan

SEND YOUR BOOKS TO SEA

to men on board ship, on shore, and in remote lighthouses, light ships, and Coast Guard Stations.
They need relaxation and will welcome the same kind of books your husband, sons, and brothers enjoy.
Mail books to the American Merchant Marine Library Association at New York, Boston, Norfolk,
Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco.

LOST HO TTENTOTS

We thank you for the information many of you sent in about the lost ones listed in the Autumn
Quarterly.

Again we ask your help.

We are anxious to send bulletins and Quarterlies to all alumnae but many pieces of mail have
been returned to our office marked "Address Unknown." If you can give us any information about
those listed in the class news section, please send us a card.

[34]

UEATH

Annie Grace (Hannah) Booth on Sep-
ember 14, during a visit with her sis-
er-in-law in Thomaston. She had lived
in Atlanta for twenty years before mov-
ing to Coronado, Calif., her home before
her death. She is survived by two sons
and two grandchildren.

Isabelle (Nash) McPheeters, on De-
cember 24 in Cleveland, Ohio. She is
survived by her husband, a son, daugh-
ter, and sister.

THE CAMPUS CARROUSEL

FEBRUARY 22 MEANS FOUNDER'S DAY

to all Hottentots a campus holiday, celebrated
with candle-light dinner, after-dinner coffee, and
minuet, graced with the presence of George and
Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and
Daniel Boone. The Founder's Day exhibit in the
library reminds us that the near-legendary char-
acters, Agnes Irvine Scott and George Washing-
ton Scott were real people after all, who had to
be born, dress, eat, and balance their accounts.
For your own conviction you are invited to see
the spinning wheel brought from Ireland and
used by Agnes when she was both Miss Irvine
and Mrs. Scott (contributed to the college by
Mrs. Mary Scott Sculley of Philadelphia), a
blue homespun suit all handmade by Mrs. Scott
for little George when he was three, a lace and
linen handkerchief belonging to Agnes Scott, a
silver salt dish and spoon also hers, receipts
bearing her signature, a picture of the old home-
place in Pennsylvania where George Washington

Scott was born, and the famikar portraits of
him and his mother that usually hang in a date
parlor in Rebekah. On Founder's Day, then, we
gladly commemorate those great persons who
lived and dreamed, worked and gave, to make
possible our Agnes Scott.

ANOTHER INTERESTING EXHIBIT was

set up in the library when Robert Frost visited
the campus. Among several copies of first
editions were "Two Tramps in Mudtime," a new
poem (Christmas 1934) by Robert Frost, sent
with holiday greetings from Elinor and Robert
Frost; a copy of "A Boy's Will" inscribed "To
Emma May Laney This my very first
Robert Frost." Miss Hanley will greatly appre-
ciate any contribution of Frost's first and limited
editions to be added to the collection started in
the Agnes Scott library. Also welcome are books
written by alumnae.

MAIL ROOM RUSH

At Agnes Scott
Scratch Board
Drawing by
Leone Hamilton '26

[51]

WINTER COMES TO AGISES SCOTT when
once-gay California poppies droop in the frost;
when the little fountain boy in the Alumnae Gar-
den pool holds armfuls of white dripping icicles;
when Inman, Main, and Rebekah loom out
through bare branches of stripped oaks; when
the faculty invade the hockey field this year
all colorful in the gayest of the gay plaid shirts;
and when sounds of cheers, yells, and thumping
basket-balls issue from the gym . . .

Winter's reign is brief, however. Already the
first little violets are uncurling in the shelter of
Science Hall, the January jasmine makes a sun-
bright border along the colonnade, and the blue-
jays and robins invade the Quadrangle pines.
There is promise of beauty in the glamorous-
sounding camellia bushes placed just outside
the Alumnae House dining-room "Pink Pef-
fection," "Leana Superba," and "Tricolor Sie-
bold," in the new rose garden planted last fall
just across from the Alumnae arbor; in the little
pansy plants set out by Charlotte Hunter just
before Christmas. Mr. MacGregor, business
manager for the college, has already done great
things to beautify the campus, and he will wel-
come whatever you would like to send of flower,
tree, or shrub to brighten up some favorite spot.

FOR A GOOD LAUGH you should have seen
the chicken-catching episode in front of Buttrick
and the library. Somebody's big fat hen wan-
dered onto the campus and spent the morning
enjoying "pickin's" on the Quadrangle. Mr.
Poole, then, was delegated to snare it with a long-
handled rake. Such chasing, squawking, beating
of bushes, and stealthy approaches you never did
see until finally the marauder was apprehended
and borne off in triumph. Also diverting was Dr.
Christian's demonstration of Sonja Henie's use
of the law of conservation of motion. The phys-

ics class-room became a frozen lake on which
he spun and twirled, first with outstretched arms
then with folded arms, on imaginary ice-skates.

TALK OF THE CAMPUS Anne Ezzard,
freshman, whose father delivered the famous
"first Georgia triplets for 1945" born at Ros-
well; our new May Queen, Anne Equen, daugh-
ter of Anne (Hart) Equen '21; Martha Jean
Gower's May Day Scenario, "The Creation" (a
physics major ought to know . . . ) ; Bunny
Weems' "three men on a week-end" one from
Seattle, one from Texas, and one back from
overseas; Plaid Shirt Day, when each student
who had one wore the loudest, biggest plaid
shirt she could find; Leila Holmes' [daughter
of Ethel (McKay) Holmes ex-'15] making
"Who's Who"; the Junior Joint, a combination
of Mardi Gras and Junior Banquet; the Paira-
dice Room or Sophomore lounge set up in Mur-
phey Candler with a juke box, cooler, snacks to
relieve the 10:00 P.M. hollowness and murals;
the Freshman Shoe Shop which is putting the
shine on the "elite feet" ; Betty Andrews' twenty
points for the Sophomore basket-ball team; and
Charm week, with our own Alumnae Hostess,
Mrs. J. B. Bunnell speaking on "Social Graces."

THE FACULTY ARE STILL GOING
PLACES and doing things . . . Mr. Stukes heard
General George C. Marshall and Archibald Mac-
Leish at the annual meeting of the Association
of American Colleges in Atlantic City. Every-
thing was fine in the swanky Atlantic City hotels
except for no butter! Miss MacDougall has
ready for publication the findings on malaria
from her research work with the U. S. Public
Health Service. Dr. Christian was in New York
in January to attend the annual joint meetings
of the American Physical Society and the Amer-

[52]

ican Association of Physics Teachers. He reports
that the physicists decided they have been too
long in "an ivory tower or other insulating ma-
terial." Mary Hardin-Baylor College, the old-
est woman's college west of the Mississippi,
called on Dr. McCain to be guest speaker at their
Texas Centennial celebration.

CELEBRITIES AT AGNES SCOTT were
counted by the dozen during the fall and winter
Will Durant, author, philosopher, and his-
torian, who opened the Lecture Association for
the year; Edwin Mims, man of letters and pro-
fessor emeritus of English at Vanderbilt, who
was indeed inspiring in his talk on "Poetry as a
Personal Resource"; Lamar Dodd, on campus to
demonstrate and advise with the art classes;
Robert Frost, long a favorite at Agnes Scott, to
be resident poet for three days and give the sec-
ond public lecture; Howard Mumford Jones,
Harvard professor, to speak in chapel, meet with
the faculty, and participate in the Romantic
Poetry class; Rev. John A. Redhead, Jr., of
Charlotte, N. C, to lead Religious Emphasis
Week; Emil Holzhauer, artist, whose life is so
full of gladness that he loves to paint the sun-
shine but who can also paint in the snow until
his hands and paints freeze.

IT'S A SENSATION the new slide in the
dining-room! It draws almost as long a line as
an electric train in a Christmas window. Truly
amazing . . . Just a long bridge of revolving
cylinders sloping gently around into the kitchen
from the little window at the back of the dining-

hall. All you do when you are through your
meal is to set your tray on the roller, watch it
start merrily down the trail, hold your breath as
it swings around the curve, and start breathing
again when a black hand reaches out and ends
its journey. Miss Mac, Dick Scandrett, Mr.
Thomas, Miss Cobbs all have their comments
as to how it works without spilling; and Llewel-
lyn Wilburn would spend all day eating and
rolling down trays if she only could. . . .

THE QUARTERLY'S POPULARITY keeps
growing to judge from your many, greatly ap-
preciated letters, calls, and comments. One
alumna writes that she and her husband rival
each other in reading it first; another sent in a
contribution for her husband overseas; still an-
other said her husband took it to show to his
friends in the Navy and one student gave it to
her father for Christmas!

The paper is different this time, you notice.
It is grand for the campus scenes, but it will not
take photographs. For this reason, we are hold-
ing your snapshots until the printers are again
able to get good semi-gloss paper. Meanwhile,
they are brought out and shown off with pride
whenever your friends visit the Alumnae Office.
Keep them rolling in, please!

MAIL-ROOM RUSH, mail-room crush, mail-
glow when you do get that one-and-only,
dreamed of, longed for letter ... It will all come
back to you with Red (Bowers) Hamilton's '26
sketch, drawn this winter for an exam problem!

Watch for the Spring Quarterly on the much-talked-about theme, Education.
Illustrations by the Faculty Art Group!

Over
[531

Lost Hottentots
Class and maiden name unknown.
Mrs. Sarah C. Long.
Mrs. John Tyler.
Mrs. Geo. R. Copeland, Jr.
Mrs. C. L. Spottswood, Jr.
Mrs. Chester C. Courteney.
Mrs. Wm. M. Ritchey.
Mrs. Jackson Watson Darby.
Mrs. James M. Russell.

[54]

YOU MADE A FINE BEGINNING

440 gifts to the Alumnae Fund amount to $4,067.97

SPREAD THE GOOD NEWS

A contribution to the Alumnae Fund
Entitles you to active membership
Brings you the Alumnae Quarterly
Increases the services of your Association
Provides annual gifts for your Alma Mater

ACCEPT OUR HEARTY THANKS

Like our Founder, you, too, have invested
money and interest in the growth of our Alma
Mater.

Personal letters of acknowledgement cannot
be sent to all who have contributed. Your
cancelled checks and this Quarterly constitute
your receipt.

Checks made payable to the Agnes Scott Alumnae Fund are deductible for tax purposes.

AGNES SCOTT

V L U M N A E QUARTERLY

"EDUCATION AT THE CROSSROADS"

SPRING 1945

EXPLANATION OF THE COVER

Sarah Leone Bowers, B.A. with ART the dominant interest

The design is composed of parts of experiences which made up my college edu-
cation, and because history was my major subject, the ground plan is a map. I
entered the campus by means of the arched gate-way. Algebra, chemistry,
Spanish, and English were sprinkled along the way. I climbed up steps to
Art, but found time to write often to the boy back home. White House was
where I learned to await my turn at the table and to eat whatever was offered.
Church played a large part in my religious and social life; I played the harp a
little at church and in the college orchestra.

Horn-rimmed glasses were all over the campus friends, professors, and
maids wore them. One of my disciplines was passing the fire gong in Main
I would like even now to make that bell clang. Since I enjoyed painting
more than going to Atlanta, the paint tube is placed before town. Main
Building was important to me: I lived there two and a half years, shared
the date parlors downstairs, and painted on the fourth floor. The train seemed
to come right through the middle of the building. Note courses caused me to
burn a library chair at Senior book-burning. I was invested with cap and awarded
a diploma in the chapel across the colonnade. Between science labs and books I
sandwiched in athletics, as the goal-guard for hockey indicates. In the design, a
path of scansion leads back to the English theme symbol (a paragraph) which
points the eye to a pallette and brush, my dominant interest.

OFFICERS, COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN, AND TRUSTEES OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Katharine Woltz Green, 1933
President

Susan Shadburn Watkins,
First Vice-President

Patricia Collins, 1928
Second Vice-President

Ida Lois McDaniel, 1935
Recording Secretary

Betty Medlock, 1942
Treasurer

Eugenia Symms, 1936
Executive Secretary

1926

Lita Goss, 1936
Publications and Radio

Emma Moss Dieckmann, 1913
Newspaper Publicity

Frances Winship Walters, Inst.
Alumnae Trustee

Margaret Ridley, 1933
Alumnae Trustee

Annie Pope Bryan Scott, 1915
Tearoom

Alice McDonald Richardson, 1929
Second Floor

Lucy Johnson Ozmer, ex-1910
Constitution and By-Laws

Julia Smith Slack, ex-1912
Student Loan

Mary Warren Reed, 1929
House Decorations

Mary Louise Crenshaw Palmour, Inst.
Alumnae Week-End

Martha Rogers Noble, 1914
Entertainment

Charlotte E. Hunter, 1929
Grounds

Editor
Billie Davis Nelson, 1942

EDITORIAL STAFF

Art Editors

Professor Howard Thomas

Leone Bowers Hamilton, 1926

Published four times a year (November, February, April, and July) by the Alumnae Association of Agnes Scott College at
Decatur, Georgia. Contributors to the Alumnae Fund receive the magazine. Yearly subscription, $2.00. Single copies, 25 cents.
Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office of Decatur, Georgia, under the Act of August 24, 1912.

Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly

"Education at the Crossroads" Spring 1945

Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia Vol. XXIII No. 3

POST-WAR EDUCATION

J. R. McCain 5

ARE WOMEN'S COLLEGES FOR WOMEN?

Howard Mumford Jones 7

"NOUS SOMMES DANS LA SALLE DE CLASSE"

Mary Virginia Allen 16

THE PROSTITUTION OF EDUCATION

Julian S. Miller 19

"THAT THE FRUIT MAY MATURE"

Thyrza S. Askew 25

FACULTY ARTISTS FIND REWARD

Roberta Winter 28

INTERRELATION ART AND BOOKS

Howard Thomas 31

THE EMPLOYMENT SERVICE IS READY

CONTENTS for its veterans

Mary Sayward Rogers 32

"THE TEST OF TIME AND DISTANCE"

Lucile Alexander 35

LETTER TO AUNT JO

Shirley Graves 39

COMMENCEMENT CALENDAR 2

CAMPUS CARROUSEL 3

CLUB NEWS 41

CLASS NEWS 43

A STENCIL FOR YOU 65

CLASS REUNIONS 65

ALUMNAE FUND REPORT back cover

COMMENCEMENT CALENDAR

JUNE 2. SATURDAY

1 :00 P.M. Trustees' Luncheon to the Alumnae.

2:15 P.M. Annual Meeting of the Alumnae Association.

4:00 P.M. Class Day Exercises.

8:00 P.M. Program Presented by Department of Music.

JUNE 3. SUNDAY

11:00 A.M. Baccalaureate Sermon, Rev. James A. Jones, D.D.,
Myers Park Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, N. C.

5:30 P.M. Senior Vespers.

6:30 P.M. Dessert-Coffee, Alumnae Garden.

JUNE 4. MONDAY

10:00 A.M. Address to the Senior Class, Ada Comstock Notestein,
President Emerita, Radcliffe College.
Conferring of Degrees.

Campus Carrousel

1. Can liberal arts stand against technical training?

2. Are women's colleges on the wrong track?

3. Is your child's school character-building?

4. Where will education go from here?

These questions, talked of now throughout the country,
are discussed in this quarterly by those who ought to
know!

The magic of Agnes Scott is in full sway this
spring. You remember the little crocuses, push-
ing up in Miss Gilchrist's plot of ground, ruby
seeds over the maples and fine old lace covering
the elms, weeping cherries curving to the ground,
Miss Mac's azalea dressing up in a sunset cloud,
and the dogwood reaching out its whiteness to
the whole world, all leading to the riotous climax
of the full-blown rose arbor, subdued and
chastened at last by the calm loveliness of each
white magnolia.

With the magic of spring goes the whirl of
spring horse-back riding again this year with
red jackets flashing through the woods along
the South Decatur line; May Day, heralded by
the animals created for the "Creation" in the
art labs (a pink and gray bunny, fearsome
baboon, and flashy Ferdinand with curled eye-
lashes and a curled toupe), heralded also by
costumes-in-the-making (still bearing strong
resemblance to the long winter underwear
snitched from father) blowing in the breezes
outside the gym; Seniors, dashing to practice
an episode for the Seniorpolitan production of
"Faustasia"; Seniors pondering over the voca-
tional exhibits in the library and notices of

openings with T.V.A., Rich's, Davison's, or East-
man Kodak. Add to all this the Junior-Senior
luncheon, Sophomore-Senior breakfast, dinners
for major professors, Mortar Board banquet,
Phi Beta Kappa announcements, election of stu-
dent officers, engagement announcements,
weddings, tennis tournament, Swim-a-Mile
Club (only 88 times across the gym pool!)
and you begin remembering what the spring
whirl is like. Special feature this spring was
the arrival of husky, happy Paul Leslie Garber,
Jr., darling of the campus and first child of his
proud parents, Professor and Mrs. Garber.

The stimulation of spring seemed especially
thrilling this year with tall, informal, sound-
thinking Theodore Greene (Professor of
Philosophy at Princeton who visited Agnes
Scott with his charming wife) speaking to eager
audiences on an integrated personality, modern
art, and the meaning of religion; with white-
haired Mary Ellen Chase enlivening our appre-
ciation of the Bible and of the novel, bringing
with her the freshness and strength of her Maine
coast; with two Agnes Scott students, Peggy
Willmon and Lib Osborne, coached by Professor
Hayes, placing first among college women de-

[3]

baters at the Grand Eastern Forensic Tourney
in Charlotte, N. C; with Blackfriars presenting
scenes from Shakespeare; with the college Glee
Club under Mr. Lowrance's leadership, having
an enthusiastic audience call for more; with
the art exhibits of wood block prints; with the
Cocoran Art Gallery of Washington, D. C. in-
viting Professor Thomas to Exhibit his "Hound
Dog House"; and with our Dr. McCain writing
on "The Woman's Revolution" for the Atlanta
Journal Magazine of April 29.

At Agnes Scott also the President's death
stirred sincere sorrow. It happened that Thurs-
day, April 12, was the date for Maurice Hindus'
lecture on Russia. A packed auditorium, before
hearing the dynamic lecturer, bowed in silence
to pay tribute to the friend of humanity and
to seek the Father's blessing. In keeping with
Roosevelt's eagerness to understand other peo-
ples and work with them toward the establish-
ment of peace is the opening of the United
Nations Conference in San Francisco. The
Agnes Scott library, under the instruction of
our ever-alert Miss Hanley has on exhibit bulle-
tins, books, and pamphlets available to all who
care to enlighten themselves as to the proposed
organization for international security.

From far and near compliments on the Quar-
terly (always appreciated!) keep rolling in
"challenging articles," "interesting art work,"

"wonderful news from friends," and "one of
the best magazines of its kind." One of the most
surprising and gratifying letters came from a
lieutenant in the Army Engineering Corps. Mr.
Hayes' article, "The Continuing Quest" inspired
him to write that if more colleges approached
such a liberal arts ideal the postwar world would
be one to look forward to with pleasure.

Mr. Dieckmann asks for the clarifying of the
statement carried in the Winter Quarterly about
making children practice the piano. What he
meant was making them like to practice.

This Spring Quarterly brings to you ideas
from outsanding men and women in the educa-
tional world, drawings (with explanations!)
of the art students' conceptions of education,
fun from the Faculty Visual Arts group, news
from your friends (to make up a little for no
reunions again this year) ; invitations from Dick
Scandrett and Kitty (Woltz) Green, and your
chance to vote. (See separate "eyetone" sheet.)
To each one who has made this Quarterly what
it is goes a dozen red roses (figurative ones) and
to each who suggests improvements for the next
number goes a bouquet of orchids (also figura-
tive!)

Watch for your next Quarterly in July with
a book review from Betty Stevenson on Jacques
Barzun's "Teacher in America" and Commence-
ment news!

[4]

This black and white abstraction represents the four-
fold purpose of education. The top left section is
spiritual development, represented by a Bible and a
cross. When one looks at this section alone, the central
figure (a student) appears to be looking into the
Bible; when the drawing is seen as a whole, however,
the student is looking out and her religion is not a
segment but an integral part of the whole.

Mental growth is represented in the upper right by
symbols of the arts and sciences. In the section just
below this, a tennis court, racket, and ball picture
physical development.

The lower left section symbolizes the social graces
with a cup of tea, the letters R.S.V.P., and the top of a
salt cellar representing everyday living together.

ANNE NEWBOLD '46

Our President surveys the present, takes a long view
into the past, and comes to his conclusions about

POST-WAR EDUCATION

J. R. McCain

FEARS

Higher education has felt the strain of the last
five years. Almost a college generation of
young men has been lost from the field of reg-
ular training. Faculties have been drained of
some of the best material. Financial difficulties
have faced many of the institutions.

The United States Government has leased the
facilities of many universities and colleges, has
prescribed the curriculum and most details of
life and of training for the students who were in
residence, and has largely concentrated on sys-
tematized drill work. In many cases the colleges
have appreciated the opportunity of rendering
service to the Government, even with all its
dictation. Buildings have been renovated, new
equipment has been secured, and salaries of
teachers have been underwritten.

The Government may still wish to lease insti-
tutional facilities. It is quite possible that if
compulsory military training is established,
much of the work will be conducted on the cam-
puses of colleges or universities. If this should
come to pass, there would be undoubted dictation

[5]

and probably a decided emphasis on technical
training and vocational skills.

Many educators fear that men and women
coming out of the army will desire short cuts and
preparation for trades rather than general edu-
cation, and so from many sources the friends
of higher education are apprehensive over the
outlook for the post-war period.

ASSURANCE

Some changes will doubtless come and ought
to do so. Education should not become static,
and institutions should not be self-satisfied. It
seems unlikely, however, that our basic educa-
tion in the field of the liberal arts will be seri-
ously threatened or destroyed.

Not long ago, on the same program, Dr. Albert
Mansbridge of London, England, was telling
what was most significant in the development of
English universities for six hundred years and
President Conant of Harvard was explaining
what has been most significant in American edu-
cation for three hundred years. Without having
the least knowledge of what the other would say,
each spoke in almost identical terms. They
both emphasized that depth rather than breadth
is valuable in both America and in the mother
country. A few subjects thoroughly taught and
well digested will result in very much better
training than a large number of subjects and
courses which can be handled only in a casual
way. Neither believes that true education will
be attracted by the shiny new toys of progressive
education or be troubled too much with voca-
tional training.

Oxford and Cambridge in England have sur-

vived perhaps a hundred wars during their long
history, and almost every type of emergency has
been faced yet the institutions have gone along
with remarkable consistency in the program of
training which has been offered. Since Harvard
was established in this country, we have had
colonial, revolutionary, civil, and modern war-
fare; and yet our educational program has been
generally sound at its core and has been produc-
tive of generally good results.

There is no reason to fear that this particular
war will revolutionize our educational ideas or
shatter the traditions of the liberal arts. I expect
a revival in interest for the classical subjects and
languages and for mathematics and perhaps for
history and the social sciences.

At a recent open faculty meeting, Dr. Howard
Mumford Jones, of Harvard University, raised
the question as to whether colleges for women
ought not to offer more practical training than
at present most of them do. Agnes Scott still
has definitely in mind the establishing of the
Department of the Home. This will give training
both in curriculum and in extra-curriculum offer-
ings, including practical and theoretical work.
The erection of the new science hall and new
infirmary will hasten the development of this
department. Further endowment and a practice
home must also come before we begin the expan-
sion in this field.

The University Center development offers un-
usual opportunities for our girls in business
administration, particularly in view of the new
$300,000 gift to Emory by Mr. Rich, and in
journalism. We think it will be only a brief time
until the Ph.D. degree can be offered at Emory,
perhaps assisted by Georgia and Georgia Tech;

[Continued on Page 40~\

[6]

ARE WOMEN'S COLLEGES FOR WOMEN?

Howard Mumford Jones, Professor of English at Harvard

I shall take off from a sentence of President
Constance Warren of Sarah Lawrence College,
who is quoted as saying: "Fathers want their
sons to have a good education, but don't care
what kind of education their daughters have."
My thesis will be that in spite of the large scope
for exploration this attitude of the paternal mind
gives to women's colleges, most of the standard
women's colleges have passively imitated the
men's colleges because they have failed to study
their own problem.

The war has increased the tensions upon
American education. On the one hand we have
witnessed an enormous increase in the demands

for technical training at all levels in our society.
On the other hand, this action has produced its
counter-action, so that in no previous period in
our history have we been offered so many and so
conflicting discussions of liberal education.
Again, war and industrial demand have emptied
the men's colleges, but they have maintained or
increased the enrollment in schools for women
at the very time that women have moved by hun-
dreds of thousands into industrial plants, cor-
poration jobs, government posts, the army, the
navy, the marine corps and the coast guard. In
the same period both the marriage rate and the
birth rate have mounted ; but of course the death-

As a suitable symbol of education, I
have chosen a ladder, a dynamic lad-
der with two strong hands pulling up.
The hands are grasping firmly the
sturdy rungs, possessing one before
reaching for the next.

Subordinate to the main idea is the
school curriculum expressed through
pictured impressions of college life.

MARGARET JOHNSON, Special

dm

[7]

rate in a whole college generation has also in-
creased. Because in all great wars the ideas of
the vanquished tend to infect the victors, we
have, to our dismay, witnessed a growth of racial
prejudice and of racial violence, and this growth,
education is supposed to help eradicate at the
same time that vast new burdens of juvenile de-
linquency, adult education, courses in citizen-
ship, and vocational training are laid at the doors
of the schools. The number of teachers, how-
ever, is wholly inadequate to ordinary tasks,
their training is poor, and their salaries so un-
attractive that the business of teaching has never
been more unalluring. Meanwhile taxes mount,
so that universities and colleges which have in
the past depended upon private benefactors for
support are wondering whether they may not
have to raise tuition fees, whereas mothers and
fathers, peering into the future, are beginning to
wonder whether they can afford to send son and
daughter both, to college. In the next decade
some sort of training will be easy and inexpen-
sive for hundreds of thousands now in the armed
forces, but we must also sadly contemplate the
probability that not since the Civil War killed
tens of thousands of young Americans, are we so
likely to lose by death an important fraction of
our younger people. Intertwining with these
military, financial, and economic considerations
are even broader problems. Do the present di-
visions of our school structure correspond to the
real needs of our population? Shall we differen-
tiate in secondary schools between the training
of those who are going to college, and the train-
ing of those who are not? What are to be the
numbers, function, and means of support of our
rapidly expanding junior college system? Are
colleges of liberal arts to continue as they have
been? Should our graduate schools become

places of professional training, and how many
doctors of philosophy does the nation really
need? Shall there be federal support for educa-
tion, and a secretary of education in the cabinet?

These and other bewildering questions bear
also upon the education of girls. But women's
education is felt to be a special category, and in
my speculations I am especially struck by three
considerations concerning women's colleges. The
first is that although nobody wants to abolish
higher education for women, nobody seems to be
satisfied with it as it exists; yet nobody is quite
prepared to say what should be done to make it
more relevant to our society. The second is that
the collegiate education of women dates only
from yesterday. In comparison with the educa-
tion of men, which is centuries old, women's
colleges are still in the experimental stage. And
the third concerns the time when most of our
American women's colleges came into being.
They originated in a campaign of general ad-
vance, which, beginning about a century ago, in
its generous enthusiasm, included everything
from transcendentalism to dress reform and from
the Second Advent to the eating of vegetables
which aspire upwards. Women and slaves were
emancipated together. Describing a convention
of Friends of Universal Reform held in 1840,
Emerson said it was composed of men and
women "of every shade of opinion from straitest
orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and (of) many
persons whose church was a church of one mem-
ber only." But he also said these reformers,
though funny, had their aspects of greatness
eloquence, vigor of thought, victories of charac-
ter, lofty reliance upon principles, prophetic
dignity. I am not clear that these phrases are
always applicable today.

The decades when Mary Lyon was collecting

[8]

the dimes, nickels, and pennies which founded
Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary came to be the
decades when the work of Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton, Lucy Stone Blackwell, and Susan B. An-
thony was beginning. Eight years after the
Chardon Street Convention, the first Woman's
Rights Convention was summoned to meet at
Seneca Falls, New York, and propaganda for the
education of women was then, and for a long
time afterwards remained, part of the campaign
for a more civilized treatment for the sex in law,
politics, business, the professions, and private
life. When Lucy Stone was a child, it was still
legal for a husband to beat his wife. All the
wife's property, income, and earnings belonged
as a matter of right to her husband. If there
were children, he had the sole control of them;
and if he died, the widow was entitled to stay
only forty days in her own home without paying
rent. All professions were closed to women,
though one might become a dressmaker. The
first merchant to employ a saleswoman was boy-
cotted, after being visited by a deputation of
scandalized matrons demanding that he end this
flagrant immorality. Of female writers, Charles
Lamb remarked that "the woman who lets her-
self be known as an author invites disrespect."
The great pioneer generation of the women's
rights movement was without women's colleges,
women's clubs or women's professional organ-
izations except what were then created. Today
when women vote, work, drink, and swear with-
out masculine assistance, it takes an effort of
the historical imagination to realize what the
subjection of women was like.

Now that women have on the whole won the
freedoms they demanded, nobody wants to take
their liberties away. But the great achievement
is still new. The women's rights campaign had

all the wild flavor of a crusade, as those of us
who lived through the agitation for woman's
suffrage well remember. But a crusade is not a
reasonable affair. The victory carried with it
certain defects, and of these two are important
in considering the future of women's colleges.
In the first place, since the whole object of the
battle was to attain equality, a word never pre-
cisely defined, it had to be demonstrated that a
woman could do anything a man could do or
at least, almost anything; and in education this
meant that girls could conquer precisely the
same curriculum with which their brothers
struggled. By and large, therefore, the pioneers
of the movement threw themselves upon Greek,
Latin, algebra, natural philosophy and the like,
not so much because they were attracted to the
dead languages and quadratic equations as be-
cause, repelled by the namby-pamby education
thought proper for their weaker minds, they were
going to show they were just as brainy as boys.
In larger terms, this meant that women's col-
leges, which at first appealed only to a highly
selected group and have since broadened their
sociological base, have, in the interests of the
higher evangelism, usually taken over a curricu-
lum originally developed in men's colleges.
They still continue as a group obediently to fol-
low the fashions thus set. Few have paused
until recently, to inquire whether the way in
which women could achieve a sound education is
to repeat all the mistakes of the men.

And the second defect of the crusade is one
that time will cure but one that time has not
yet remedied. Some of the later victories of the
women's rights movements shall I instance the
recent admission of girls to the Harvard Medical
School? have been tardily won, and some are
still to win. A whole generation of women, in-

[9]

eluding the older alumnae of the women's col-
leges and some who teach in them, have re-
mained, as it were, under arms. This militancy
is natural and may be necessary; but it puts the
sympathetic observer into a false position, since
his comments on women's education, if critical,
are likely to be twisted out of a merely educa-
tional reference, into a mean ambush in the War
Between Men and Women whose military his-
torian is Mr. James Thurber. But women who
take this attitude seem to me, at least, involved
in a hopeless contradiction. On the one hand,
they insist that sex differences in education are
so negligible that women's colleges are simply
colleges that do whatever any other college does ;
on the other hand, if one asks whether this is
necessarily the right way to go about giving
woman a liberal education, one's question is
interpreted as a masculine attack upon the
achievements of the sex.

I do not know whether I am reactionary or
radical, but I am bewildered by the existing
situation, and I think I can show why I am
bewildered if I quote from two sorts of writing
addressed primarily to American girls of college
age. I will ask you to be patient while I cite
some characteristic excerpts.

My first group is found in the official publica-
tions of the women's colleges and presumably
represents what they are trying to do. Here, for
example, is the catalogue of a famous woman's
college which quotes from its founder these
words: "I believe God's hand is in it . . . that
He is calling to womanhood to come up higher,
to prepare herself for great conflicts, for vast
reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness."
This may seem to you antiquated and Victorian,
but the college categorically states that it has
clung to the ideal of its founder. Here is a lead-

ing New England college which proclaims that
it "began in the conscience of a New England
woman," and continues: "by the higher and
more thorough Christian education of women,
what are called their 'wrongs' will be redressed,
their wages adjusted, their weight of influence in
reforming the evils of society, their power for
good will be incalculably increased." If this
seems a little vague, I can only quote from the of-
ficial statement of the present head of the college,
which is also printed in the current catalogue:
"the purpose of Blank College is to afford intelli-
gent and adequately prepared young women an
opportunity to obtain such knowledge of artistic
and ethical values as will enable them to develop
their best potentialities to the fullest degree, to
spend their leisure hours valuably, to enjoy life
in a civilized manner and to become forceful
members of the community of which they find
themselves members." Let me hasten to say
that I am not opposed to this noble program. I
am also against sin.

Let me read two or three more statements of
the announced aims of women's colleges. Here
is the purpose of a mid-western school : "to make
women students more valuable members of so-
ciety; to encourage a broad outlook on life; to
teach them to confront general problems, whether
mental, aesthetic, or moral; to develop an intelli-
gent interest in the conduct of their own lives
and to provide some mental resources for the
future." Will you forgive me if I say I do not
have the slightest idea what confronting general
problems, whether mental, aesthetic, or moral,
really means? My problems, as I suspect yours
are, are usually highly specific and personal.
But let us go on. A Southern college for women
will "provide a Christian atmosphere of relig-
ious and intellectual sincerity, in which young

[10]

women may be stimulated to seek in the realms
of the physical, mental, and spiritual those in-
trinsic values which contribute to the fulness,
richness and wonder of life, and which will
enable them to solve life's problems with trained
intellect and Christian courage." It would be
unfair to say that this implies that Christians
have any monopoly of courage, but it would be
pertinent to inquire what is really meant by seek-
ing in the realms of the physical, mental, and
spiritual those intrinsic values which contribute
to the fulness, richness, and wonder of life.
When freshmen write thus vaguely, we return
their themes for correction.

One more excerpt, this time from the Far
West. A Pacific Coast institution flatly declares
that "woman's contribution to war effort is more
conservative than man's. A woman's college
therefore must hold fast to meeting unchanging
needs, while it prepares students for contem-
porary demands." This looks like the beginning
of a program, but alas! the paragraph goes on:
This college "retains its fundamental philosophy
of education for democratic life, encourages
each student to have integrity of purpose and
perspective in plan, patiently to acquire basic
knowledges in science, language and philosophy,
while adjustments and accelerations in courses
and methods of instruction are fitted to current
necessities." The passage concludes: "girlhood
and young womanhood prepare for a creative
life task." I happened to be reading the Chinese
philosopher, Mr. Lin Yutang at the same time I
was looking into these catalogues, and I wonder
whether there is any connection between this
"creative life task" of the Pacific College, and
his shrewd comment that "American women are
far ahead of their Old World sisters in all things

that don't matter, and remain very much in the
same situation in all things that do."

Doubtless you have been saying: "But no-
body reads a college catalogue, anyway." Let
me therefore turn to my second group of excerpts
from writings that you do read. I know that
these are read by women for two reasons: first,
shrewd business men pay out millions of dollars
a year to get words like these before the eyes of
American girlhood and young womanhood; and
second, prose written from what is professionally
known as the woman's angle is the basis for the
existence of magazines avowedly got up solely
or primarily for American women, or else
largely read by them. In retail trade, women
are the purchasers, and it is to their interests
that merchants must appeal.

Well, here is Life magazine, and its opening
advertisement a picture of a siren imperfectly
wrapped in a blue towel, and here is something
of the accompanying prose: "Slip into a private
realm where cares cannot trespass . . . where
moss-soft towels wrap you in colorful caress, and
cheerful tones everywhere sing worries away . . .
Once war's won . . . you'll know the pleasure of a
bathroom beautiful." Here is a Powers model
in a picture hat, and its accompanying lyric:
"the girl he can't forget the girl with a Solitair-
lovely complexion. These, he won't forget: The
way you whisper, 'I love you' (three dots) your
funny little laugh the creamy smoothness, the
Solitair smoothness of your cheek against his
lips. Let him remember you always with a
Solitair-lovely complexion." Here is an article
about a designer of clothes for freshman girls,
and here are some of her aids to their creative
life task: "this white gabardine hummer with
the cartoon character is a real date-bait." "This
is a gag shirt (the picture is that of a sort of meal

[11]

sack) for girls who like to scrounge around in
solid comfort while cracking the books. It's a
two-timing petticoat and blouse of cotton print
topped with a black skirt for school. Without the
skirt it's a fine rumpus rag." And here is the
intelligent prose attached to two petticoats:
"They're the bible in dry goods. Lamp the
ruffles of eyelet and lace 'n' angel 'n' ribbon trim.
It's sheer murder, Jackson, and we ain't clicking
our teeth when we pass the word that the hems
are wide enough to cut a rug." The same maga-
zine elsewhere prints colored photographs of a
dead German boy with his left arm blown off
and resting parallel with his right arm, and of a
more or less headless Algerian, dead beside a
bloated mule. It prints some graphic pictures of
the muck in Burma, and near these, nine photo-
graphs of chorus girls at the Copacabana Club
in New York. Suppose our civilization perished
tomorrow, and a thousand years from now, this
copy of Life survived? What would your de-
scendants infer as to the collegiate education of
women in 1944?

Let me try McCall's Magazine, which is pub-
lished solely in the interests of women. A slick
chick in a big straw hat adorns the cover. The
first sentence on the second page begins: "I want
a miracle hat, Louise, my love-life's in a rut,"
but the advertisement is really for toothpaste,
because this girl was too unintelligent to go to
the dentist. I learn on another page that the use
of a commercial shampoo "puts him in the
mood to woo! Who is she? men ask." An ex-
pensive full-page ad is devoted to a tender mo-
ment in the life of a girl with a Lovable Lux
Complexion. I learn that "Active Lather Fa-
cials" put Rosalind Russell where she is today.
I find that "all your kisses are mine, now" be-
cause of Jergen's Face Cream. I discover that

"this lip-stick gives you social security. It "stays
on! . . . Helps you avoid embarrassing smears."
And, final revelation, a full page is given to a
provocative girl in uniform, smiling between two
soldiers, and the caption runs: "Isn't she pretty
Isn't she sweet! And she knows what she's
about this smart American, dressed in the
WAC's brand new summer uniform, fresh and
crisp and sparkling . . . Picture yourself in this
gallant war-dress! It's calling you to the colors."
In other words, a worried government has been
reduced to sex appeal in order to recruit a
Woman's Army Corps of the size it needs. I
shall not trouble you with my researches in The
Woman's Home Companion, The Ladies Home
Journal, and the like; or into Mademoiselle and
the ads in The New Yorker. I shall merely con-
tent myself with page 47 of the latter magazine
for August 5, an Elizabeth Arden masterpiece:
"The smart college girl Majors in Beauty. Not
a snap course, you say? Of course not . . . but
what results you get! Not mere passing marks,
mind you, but cum laude and with honors that
aren't just written on parchment . . . the college
girl who applies herself to better looks as dili-
gently as she applies herself to chemistry or
athletics is going to have honors as long as she
likes . . . she knows she'll never be an 'old grad'
as far as looks go, anyhow." One touch of
Venus makes the whole world kin.

Let me say at this point that I have the normal
masculine liking for pretty girls. Artemus Ward
once remarked: "I like big girls little ones,
too." So do I. The smartness of American
women is one of their engaging characteristics, a
quality favorably commented upon by many
foreign observers, a quality they have achieved
only in the last half a century and partly because
of advertising of this sort. Moreover, these ap-

[12]

peals do not represent the total interests of the
sex. I am aware, as you are aware, of the lives
of distinguished women jurists, doctors, scien-
tists, social workers, writers, artists, and so forth.
I know about the work of such useful organiza-
tions as the League of Women Voters. I do not
argue that the women's colleges are failures be-
cause smart New York offices find they can sell
perfumes at preposterous prices to gullible girls.
Any woman with talent for law or medicine,
science or engineering, literature or banking
ought in my judgment to have her talents culti-
vated precisely as I should want the talents of
young men cultivated. But the great majority of
girls in our colleges are not going into profes-
sional careers of this magnitude: they seek only
such education as they have been told will fit
them to live good lives as women; and to argue
from brilliant to general rules reminds of the
patriot who claimed that all the great geniuses of
English literature came from Scotland. "What
about Shakespeare?" "How do you know he was
Scotch?" "Ah," he said indulgently, "we
infer-r-r it from his genius." If you think the
catalogues I quoted are just a touch starry-eyed,
may there not have been in them a little too
much inferring of genius? Finally, it does not
move me to be told that the men's colleges are
equally mistaken or that the advertising of shav-
ing creams is just as ludicrous. As I said a
moment ago, why should intelligent women be
content to repeat the errors of the men? And I
think it is an illuminating comment that when
you pass into an area of advertising which has
never attempted any special appeal to college
women, but which is one of the great businesses
of the United States when you turn for example
to the Sears Roebuck Catalog, you find the de-
scriptions of objects to be sold are as compact

and factual as they can be made. Can it be that
those who do not go to college have the good
sense not to be deceived by purple prose?

The fact is there is a deep discrepancy be-
tween what many women's colleges claim to be
true of the place and interests of women in
American society, and what the advertisers find
to be practically true; and while I do not think
the department store or the perfume counter is
the last word in wisdom, I am wondering whether
our women's colleges are necessarily vastly
wiser. If we were perfectly free to create them
afresh; if there had been no crusade and no
embattled feminism; if we had in mind the edu-
cation of both exceptional persons and of the
admirable, average American girl, who quite
honestly wants a job only until she gets married
and has a home, I wonder whether we would
today simply duplicate the curricula of our
men's schools?

I should suppose our first step would be to
study what it is women do and are in our civil-
ization. I tentatively, and even timidly, suggest
that five chief concerns of average girls who
graduate from college, are likely to be: 1) retail
purchasing; 2) the maintenance of a home;

3) certain jobs not necessarily paralleling those
open to men and not necessarily the same as
those open to women of exceptional talent;

4) certain civic interests; 5) a queerly varying
amount of leisure that is, our alumna will have
one amount of leisure time as a working girl,
another when she becomes a wife, a third when
she is a young mother, and a fourth when her
children mature. And when I think of our cus-
tomary Freshman year, which I call the "how to"
year how to write Freshman themes; how to
master technical terms enough to prepare you
for psychology or economics or advanced pro-

[13]

sody, I do not wonder that I receive, each year,
one or more letters, which run : "Dear Professor
Jones: I enjoyed your course very much. But
now that I have my A.B. degree, I don't know
what to do next. It hasn't trained me for any-
thing in particular, and I don't think I ought to
ask my parents to support me any longer. What
do you think I ought to do?"

Now of course my five suggestions may be all
wrong. Certainly they are calculated to infuriate
those who believe that a liberal education is
strictly synonymous with a list of books studied
at St. John's College. Of course the mere men-
tion of retail buying calls up all sorts of horrors,
including the ghost of domestic science and prob-
lems involving the maid, the cook, and the
laundress. This whole area of life is something
the liberal colleges have set their faces against.
Of course, also home management involves the
monotony of kitchen work, and most women want
to avoid this monotony, something the slick ad-
vertisers are quite willing to help them to do.
But I confess the difference between the monot-
ony of dusting and monotony of running a type-
writer or a lathe, or nursing, or even school
teaching seems not so important as the fact that
the gracious preparation of food, the wise buy-
ing of household articles, the proper manage-
ment of one's personal and domestic life seem
to be as much a mark of refinement and culture
as a knowledge of Shelley. I for one do not see
that the two notions of refinement are incom-
patible, and I am not as clear as I used to be
that our present standard liberal arts curriculum
is the only way to educate wise and gracious
women.

And then there is this matter of a job. Are
we to teach that utilitarian horror, stenography?
Well, having had considerable experience with

products of commercial stenographic schools, I
can only fervently wish you would. I think mas-
culine respect for the claims of women to higher
economic and social consideration would in-
crease if the girls men work with in offices were
more intelligently and liberally educated for the
jobs they hold.

I do not claim I am right. But I do feel our
present program for the education of American
girls suffers from two radical weaknesses. First,
it confuses preparation for civilized living with
the pursuit of truth ; and second, it tends to mis-
take bookishness for sagacity. It tends to assume
the beginning Freshman is already so wise she
knows exactly what a liberally educated girl is
like and therefore the only business of the col-
lege, especially in its first two years, is, as we
say, to equip her with the "tools" of knowledge.
The result is in too many cases that too many
students are too badly prepared for the pursuit
of a truth they are never going to pursue. Nat-
urally, therefore, they find much more vivid
interests outside our classrooms, as the adver-
tisers have discovered to their profit. I am
brazen enough to think that if we reversed this
logically defensible, but psychologically falla-
cious, program, we might do a little better. Bor-
rowing a suggestion from the former dean of the
Harvard Business School, I am even courageous
enough to suggest that if we replaced our present
"how to" courses with a rich series of case
studies of actual lives of actual Americans, men
and women alike, trying to find out what quali-
ties in living made them what they are, we might
conceivably be less book-bounded in our educa-
tional theories. The case-study method revolu-
tionized law, and it is beginning to revolutionize
the schools of business administration. I am so
heartily persuaded that women are intelligent

[14]

enough to know what they want, I wish they
would apply the case study method to their own
problems. If, for example, the colleges are sup-
posed to prepare young women for leadership
in various communities, what qualities, what
information, what attitude of mind and heart
really characterize leading women in given com-
munities? I am afraid I am a little depressed by
the enormous gap between the college campus
and the American community for which the col-
lege theoretically prepares its graduates.

I have, you see, no doctrine to present. I have
fulfilled, rather irritatingly perhaps, my promise
to think out loud. I do not say that women's
colleges are failures. I am sure members of their
faculties and administrative staffs know vastly
more than I do about their future plans. These
institutions have contributed greatly to raise the
level of our life, both in private and public con-
cerns. Hundred of graduates of women's col-

leges look back with pleasure upon four years in
classroom and dormitory. I also believe that
women are as amply entitled to a liberal educa-
tion as men. But this education should not be
merely pleasant, not merely superficial and imi-
tative, it should not be an education which leaves
the girl helpless in front of the practical issues
of her own economic and social and domestic
welfare, once she leaves our sheltered college
halls. I wonder therefore if the time is not ripe
for a much more thorough, unprejudiced, and
hard-headed study of the place, the life, the in-
terests of the average college alumna in our so-
ciety than we have hitherto had? I wonder
whether, without giving up the aim of a liberal
education, we could not focus it a little more
candidly upon girls as girls rather than upon
girls as boys who chose the wrong sex at first?
I wonder, in short, whether women's colleges
should not be for women?

The author, and his wife Bessie Zaban ex-'24, visited Agnes Scott in February. His wit delighted the campus, and
his educational ideas, presented at a faculty meeting, provoked lively rebuttals. The reaction of the alumnae is of
such interest to the college that space is reserved in the July Quarterly for your ideas, which will be welcome at the
Alumnae Office.

[15]

The idea of the continuous growth in education is
represented by the spiraling line originating in the
triangle behind the head and ending in the brain. Tlie
triangle in the background represents three ways of
obtaining education from study, from association,
and from experience.

ANNE ELCAN '48

With a certificate of Etudes Superieurs from Toulouse
and a delight for things French, Mary Virginia makes
it a fascinating time when

"NOUS SOMMES DANS
LA SALLE DE CLASSE"

Mary Virginia Allen '35

Sometimes I wake up at night and wonder
suddenly how I can be so incredibly stupid as
to continue in a profession which, according to
popular belief, neither improves one's disposi-
tion nor increases one's glamour; why, during
a period of wartime boom, I work for a salary
which can purchase only a modest room, three
nutritious but bourgeois meals a day, a movie
twice a month, and a new suit every four years ;
why I spend most of my days with girls in bobby
socks and size 42 sweaters, with boys who, be-

cause of their teen-age awkwardness, bump
head-on into me at the door or knock the vase
of flowers off my desk.

One night, after one of these auto-question-
naires, I came to the conclusion that I was a
fool, but needn't continue to be one. The next
morning I wrote resolutely to Washington.
Promptly arrived an elementary correspondence
course in decoding for the U. S. Army Signal
Corps. I looked it over: queer looking charac-
ters, jumbled words and non-sensical syllables
as challenging as a jig-saw puzzle and as un-
human. Within a week the course in decoding
was returned to Washington, with a letter to the
effect that I had decided to continue teaching, at
least for a while.

Perhaps that decision was a mistake. How-
ever, my seven years in the classroom have
been interesting, satisfying and happy ones;
first, because I enjoy the diversified personali-
ties of the youngsters; and second, because I
believe intensely in my subject French.

I am concerned, even anxious, about post-
war education because I have faith in French
(indeed, in all foreign languages) as indispens-
able to the fulfillment of the purposes of educa-
tion, stated so well by William Whewell: "to
connect a man's mind with the general mind of
the human race," and because I believe that
languages are in immediate danger of being
relegated to the background of the post-war
high school curriculum to make way for air
conditioning, refrigeration, baking, plastic in-
dustries, retail selling, machine shop and radio.

During the '30's the country was swept by a
movement toward "Education for Democracy."
When the shadow of the swastika fell across
central Europe, we found a more rousing cry,
"Education for National Defense." Then came

[16]

December, 1941, when we advanced the slogan
"Education for Victory." Now that the prepon-
derance of the Allied war machine is being felt
throughout the world, we begin to talk of "Post-
War Education." Whether the battlecry be
democracy, defense, victory or the post-war
world, the issue is the same; it is concerned with
the kind of education that will teach men to do
the things which become men, that will interpret
the body of truth which has accumulated through
the ages, and which will inculcate faith in our
human heritage.

The demands for vocational preparation can-
not be ignored, but vocational preparation can-
not replace general education. Both are neces-
sary in the development of the individual; and
I believe that our great nation will be the loser
in the long run, if its educators become preoccu-
pied with the economic and technical aspects of
life and remain indifferent to those subjects
which prepare our young people to play their
part as contributors to the political, social and
cultural life of their communities. Teen-agers
need tools which will enable them to formulate
intelligent opinions, to free their minds from
prejudice and fear, to judge fairly and to make
wise decisions. Will administrators abdicate
from their position of leadership and surrender
to the rumbling demands which come, they say,
from the tax-paying public? Will they short-
sightedly substitute quantity for quality until
the curriculum becomes an a la carte menu of
education, cluttered up with courses which fit
into no recognizable pattern, and from which it
will be possible for students to emerge with no
common foundation for their life in a common
society?

It is true that individuals differ in ability,
needs and interests. However young boys and

girls are often unaware of what constitutes an
important subject for them. They are the vic-
tims of fads in course choosing, of the transitory
goal of stacking up sixteen units in a quick-and-
easy way. Will they not blame us in later years
for not having guided them into subjects which
would have helped them become intellectually
mature and emotionally stable?

French is an example of such a subject, I
believe. I say "an example" advisedly, because
I do not wish to leave the impression that lan-
guages constitute the only branch of the curricu-
lum which helps to develop mental grownups;
nor do I advocate that all high school students
study a foreign language. However, I am op-
posed to labeling languages as "college prepar-
atory" subjects. Some of my students who
profited most from the study of French were
financially unable to go on to college. After
finishing high school, they went immediately to
work; yet they sent back to borrow French
books from our school library. Their interest
in things French persisted.

Of course the method is all-important in the
study of a foreign language. The results of the
army's experiments in language training have
a high potential value for the post-war years.
The war has taught us to put more emphasis on
the oral approach ; the limited objective of read-
ing and translating into English is practically
worthless. May I add that the army claims no
great originality for its "method." Its profes-
sors say that "it is Middlebury, Harvard,
Linguaphone and Berlitz adapted by scholars
and assimilated by teachers . . . the students
do not leanr to parlez - vous in six accelerated,
exhilarating lessons. With patience, good will,
a touch of humor, a love of humanity, with a
bit of talent and a lot of training plus the

[17]

method, they will learn." The A. S. T. P.
language program offered conclusive proof that
the American youth can become language-
minded if given sufficient time and the advantage
of intimate contact with the life and institutions
of other peoples. The motivation is "practical"
and "functional" in the most limited educational
sense of the term, i. e., to use the language for
direct communication: to talk with the natives
on New Caledonia, to carry on radio propa-
ganda from Paris, to censor mail in Algiers, to
be a bi-lingual stenographer in a Washington
bureau, to serve as a Navy liaison officer in
Madagascar or to serve with the International
Red Cross in Switzerland.

The post-war "One World" will be even
smaller than the warring globe today. Our
present students will be the reconstruction of
tomorrow's world, the guardians of the peace.
They will need all the seeds of knowledge,
sympathy, humility, insight and cooperation in
regard to foreign peoples which we, as language
teachers, can possibly sow in between the rows
of relative pronouns during the two or three
years we have contact with them in high school.
They will not become true "citizens of the
world" if we do as an American writer advo-
cated recently, "smash the cultural mirrors of
Europe and seek out our own culture." How
suicidal! Shall we stop reading Shakespeare or
refuse to listen to the music of Beethoven because
they were not Americans? We have always
sought spiritual and cultural values from Eu-
rope. It was France's Rousseau, Montesquieu,
Voltaire and Danton who led the way toward a
democratic republic. It was her Hugo, Zola

and Anatole France who were fearless in defend-
ing the rights of man. It has been her de Gaulle
who, since the debacle of 1940, has never lost
faith in the role of France as one of the leaders
in the world of the "four freedoms."

The French know that America has become
the greatest industrial and technical nation of
the world. They know they cannot ignore our
contributions and leadership in these fields. The
average Frenchman today is enormously inter-
ested in the English language and in American
culture. Are we less alert? Are our educators
becoming intellectual isolationists? Paris has
always opened its arms to peoples from all
countries and of many beliefs. It is a veritable
city of refuge for political and intellectual
exiles. From these "foreigners" the French
receive a stimulus. They are enriched by an
influx of new, often radical, ideas. Can we
afford to draw back into our shell, to expect
our neighbors to learn our language, to wait for
them to come seven-eighths of the way to reach
a common ground of appreciation and good-
will? Our democracy will find it hard to sur-
vive if we do.

What has all that to do with French irregular
verbs and my interest in teaching them, you ask.
My reply is that worthwhile results are generally
intangible, perhaps often non-existent. It is rare
that a teacher can point to an individual and say,
"I taught him to free his mind of prejudice," or
to another and say, "His love of the French
people began in my class." Yet how satisfying
when we can see even reflections of potential
good accomplished! How exciting to overhear
down the corridor a girl in pig-tails exclaim
enthusiastically, "I'm crazy about French!"

[18]

Editor of the Charlotte Observer, member of the North Carolina Board of Education, and father of Frances Miller
'36, Dr. Miller emphasizes that "Something must happen to make people better before anything better can happen
to the world in which people live."

THE PROSTITUTION OF EDUCATION

Julian S. Miller

Human society is so far away from a stabil-
ized order of things that it may seem totally un-
intelligent to undertake to arrive at any dog-
matic conclusion as to what shall be "the shape
of things to come."

The disruptions and dislocations which have
occurred incident to the prosecution of the war,
and many of which are likely to be projected
into long years ahead, have explosively torn at
the heart of all normal living.

This present condition of chaos will not be-
come extinct even when the last gun is fired in
the present global warfare.

It is much more than merely a striking phrase
that every age is one that is either dying or one
that is coming to birth. We are now in the pres-
ence of such a phenomenon. The old order, in-
deed, changeth! What the world is enduring
under the impacts of the most devastating and
earth-encircling armed conflict of all time is
much more at its roots than a war in its strictly
historical setting and meaning. It is nothing less
than a world-wide revolution which involves the
social, political, economic, and moral concepts
of the human race.

When the war phase of this sweeping revolu-

The school building is used here in
two forms : the black silhouette of the
"little red schoolhouse" and the white
line-drawing of a modern school su-
perimposed on it.

These architectural symbols repre-
sent the progress that has been made
in all fields of education.

NANCY L. DEAL '48

[19]

tionary orgy is over, the world must come to
terms with the blatant impulses of the revolution
itself.

It is on everybody's lips that the world which
emerges, when it does at long last emerge from
its vast and desolating whirlwinds of war, and
the subsequent chaos with which the best of
human intelligence must wrestle, it will be a
"better" world. The current phrase is that it
will be "a brave new world." And for this ideal
or dream the more high-minded of the peace-
makers and the international planners of the
future are striving.

Let us, however, not be deceived into the
childish notion that better worlds and braver
worlds can be called into being either by the
mere wistfulness of Utopianists or by the archi-
tects of political systems. The world of the
future will be no better nor worse than the
world that has been merely through the applica-
tion of any of the drawn designs of the social
planners or the glamorous political and eco-
nomic theorists.

Something must happen to make people better
before anything better can happen to the world
in which people live. As international as we are
in conviction, as international as we must be by
necessity to say nothing of moral mandates, the
readjustment of human problems according to
international standards, latitudes and terms will
not of itself in any sense guarantee that the
future will be any happier or better or more
peaceful than the past. Whatever hopes we have
any right to entertain that any effective change
can be brought about in the structure of human
society must be based essentially upon the hope
that the major change of all will take place
within the structure of the human spirit.

All of this may seem unrelated to the thesis

in mind which has to do with the part and place
of education as an institutional factor in the
civilization of the future.

Not so, however ! One could tell fairly well
what is to be the shape of things to come, if one
could be sure of the shape of the education that
is to be.

To determine, therefore, the major emphasis
in educational processes is no secondary assign-
ment for all those who are concerned with the
establishment of human society upon a more in-
telligent, co-operative, constructive and perma-
nent basis in the years ahead.

Dr. John A. Mackay in his thoughtful and
philosophical book, "Heritage and Destiny," has
made the arresting point that the wisely forward
view of life, which, by the way, has been made
the chief end and inspiration of modern educa-
tional systems, has crumpled up and fallen
apart. It is his conviction, and one worthy to
command our supporting view, that society
must now take the backward look in order to
find a creative pattern for the building of a
livable and durable civilization.

The human race, he maintains, can only get
an intelligently forward start by first going into
reverse and moving back into historical moulds
and applying timeless principles both to the cur-
rent and coming problems of human destiny.

One senses at once precisely what Dr. Mackay
is believing. He is simply saying that when God,
always as abounding in the groove of the Great
Tradition, is singled out and enthroned as the
chief heritage of all the ages, as being identic
with and relevant to every aspect and facet of
human living, then men can begin to fulfill their
rightful and ordained destiny in terms of every
earthly relationship.

Come to think of it, although it distresses,

[20]

many of us have come to terms with mature life
during a period when the most subtle and in-
sidious of all skepticisms has widely governed
and guided the thought and conduct of human
beings. And that skepticism has been, and still
too largely is, that God amounts to very little
when it comes to getting about and getting along
in a mundane world.

This culture has insisted that what people
think of God and their attitude to all spiritual
or religious ideals and principles is, relatively, a
marginal matter, a sort of intellectual luxury, if
you please. By the same sadly fallacious notion
it has been, and seems yet to be, a rather prevail-
ing idea that what our Puritan forebears and
their immediate successors thought of Him and
made of Him was mostly a matter of sheer super-
stition.

One of the characters in Howard Spring's
novel, "My Son, My Son," is made at one point
in the story to voice the view, all too common,
that there is no purposefulness to life except such
as we self-elect, a philosophy that may respect-
fully admit the governance of God in a former
universe but which has politely bowed him out
of the current picture of civilization.

The point was reached in the fiction by Spring,
when someone in a group alluded to the Biblical
story of God as He came suddenly to the unex-
pectedly and strategically timely rescue of Isaac
as he was about to be slain by the knife in the
hands of his father Abraham. Impressed and
moved by such considerate and dramatic inter-
vention of God, this character in the story was
made fervently and admiringly to exclaim:

"What a good God!"

But he was speaking of the God of the time of
Abraham, not of the God of today. For in the

next breath, this character was made to add "Can
you see Him like that today? I can't."

And there, with a colossal interrogation point
lifted against the whole basis of religious faith
and practice and with a statement of his own
negative answer, he left the matter. There also
the matter is still being left by all too many
God as being good, all right and serviceable for
a less developed era and people, but useless and
impotent, and even unnecessary, for as wise a
world as man has more modernly created for
himself.

All too much of modern culture is so filled
up with such appalling emptiness that one dares
charge that current educational principles and
purposes are being dominantly given over to the
purely mechanistic philosophy of life.

Surely one of the heritages of the past which
must be recovered or rediscovered in order to
achieve a noble destiny for the future of the
human race is that particular emphasis which
was first and long placed upon all forms and
processes of education, not an education that was
an end in itself, as has come to be so much the
case, but as merely the means to the sufficient
end of achieving moral discipline and giving
spiritual interpretations to every experience,
concept and conduct of human beings.

The motto of the old University that "knowl-
edge without morals is vain" set the mark of all
educational objective in the earlier period of
our national history.

One does not read far into the literature of
that era which first saw the establishment of
school systems and institutions of higher learn-
ing before finding that it was the common con-
viction then that unless all education were
brought under the jurisdiction and authority of

[21]

moral precept and spiritual purpose, it were
better to have none of it at all.

The traditions by which college and church
became related at the very beginning of the edu-
cational movement in the United States con-
tinued more or less inviolate until the close of
the last century to bear their testimony that the
only education that could be justified was that
which was joined by an organic affinity with
religion.

That was why the little red school house,
which was seldom red, sat in the church yard.

That was why 104 out of the first 118 colleges
established in America were church-originiated
and church-supported and church-operated.

That was why the Bible, as the Word of God
and the source of all revelation of human values,
in large measure dictated the philosophy of
learning in this country down to near the end
of 1900.

Every educational effort made it a major point
to relate the intellectual with the spiritual, and
found its ultimate seal of sanction and valida-
tion in the trained and disciplined products of
the class room, boys and girls, men and women
who at least had learned the high and important
ends of life if not the mastery of the means of
cheap and easy and secular living.

Consider also these facts: that in 1775 the
text books which were placed in the hands of the
children of that generation were 100 per cent
of a religious or moral nature. The first schoo
house in America was the equivalent of a church
The secular schools of the first days of this re
public were not secular at all so far as the con
tent of instruction and of learning was con
cerned. They were religious or moral in char
acter and in purpose.

But by 1825, just 50 years later, the per-
centage of religious and moral material in the
text books used was only 50 per cent. Today
only one per cent of all instruction received in
our public schools is of a moral or religious
background. Against this background of public
educational history in America enumerate for
yourself the social and moral disorders that
obtain in contemporary life.

And these emphases have been speeding up
in the tempo of their shifting. Seven years ago
in North Carolina a commission authorized by
the Legislature and appointed by the Governor
was engaged for two years making a study of
the needs of the state's public educational system
and the state-supported institutions of higher
learning.

Wisely or unwisely, that commission made
an intensive effort to discover through question-
naires which went to thousands of the citizens of
North Carolina what the people desired them-
selves in the way of changes as to educational
studies and standards.

The results were shocking. A summary of
these polls showed that fifty times as many of
the people of North Carolina demanded more
vocational instruction in their schools than any
other courses. Not a single reply came asking
for more emphasis to be placed upon such train-
ing in the public schools as would reflect itself
in improved character. Nor did a single request
come that there should be any instruction what-
soever for the children of the state in moral dis-
cipline. None had a word to advise that either
the public schools or the colleges should relate
their courses of study or their teaching technique
to the training of young people for useful and
responsible living.

[22J

This incident is illustrative of how the educa-
tional machinery of our nation has capitulated
to the requirements of a mechanical civilization.
Business, commerce and industry, which Emer-
son called the pursuits of vulgar men, needed
technicians, craftsmen, mechanics and engineers,
men and women trained for the utilitarian arts
and services. Our schools and colleges lent them-
selves as institutions to meet the peculiar de-
mands of such a generally secularized and in-
dustrialized order.

In this manner the primary ends of education
became displaced and prostituted to dominantly
secular ends. And this is to pose a stinging
inquiry and to suggest awesome conclusions.

Is there any relation between the secular cul-
ture to which human society has reverted since
the turn of the century, between the apostasy
from the former levels of a spiritualized enlight-
enment, and the horrifying events that have been
shaking and threatening to exterminate not only
the forms, but the foundations of current civil-
ization?

Certainly, without the knowledge of science,
taught and mastered in the modern university,
this frightful scourge of war could never have
happened in the first place, and without the
developed mechanics of this same science, which
has given a new leviathan of power to modern
armies, it could only be prosecuted in localized
areas.

What else but cold, brutal, unfeeling, imper-
sonal scientific learning, detached of all moral
purpose and operating under its own pagan
power, could have turned this earth into such a
bloody shambles?

We are seeing now to the deep and bitter an-
guish of our souls how costly have been the

world's desertions from primary truth how un-
trustworthy the trust we have been placing upon
the sciences of living rather than upon the con-
tent and character of life itself.

We see now to what tragic ends a generation
will come that refers its final destiny to the arbi-
trament of test tube and laboratory.

We see now what comes of educational levities
and follies, of all of our vast material and intel-
lectual achievements when they are cut loose
from all moral and spiritual anchorages.

We see now to what sorry and ironic blind
alleys our servile surrender to the scientific fetish
has brought us, to what inexpressible collapse
and chaos our blind devotion to the tyranny of
things has consigned our generation and others
yet to be.

We see now that the same knowledge that can
create for us a world of external comforts and
conveniences can also, unless motivated by
spiritual inspirations, create for us a world of
nameless horror and hideousness.

We see now that inventive genius that can
provide us with the gadgets that flood our homes
with the finest of music and song and story and
art, can also, and does, rain down upon us ex-
plosive death that leaves whole cities buried
under bloody blankets of debris and their popu-
lations mutilated and massacred.

We see now that mere learning, running wild
and loose and cynically defiant of all moral con-
trol and spiritual dynamic, can give us longer
life, but, at the same time, give us also quicker
and more torturous death.

What is happening in this gruesome hour
tends to make nonsense of our vaunted knowl-
edge and to turn the sweetness and joy of living

[23]

into cold, bitter, dry and acrid ashes, leaving
us to derive our major pleasures from the "per-
verse excitements of hate."

And now it has come to pass that we tremble
and stand aghast at the price we must pay for
having cared so little for the supremacies of the
Christian cultures, for the great concepts of
freedom under law and for the liberties of mind
and spirit which lie centric to, and inseparable
from, a spiritual understanding and acceptance
of human life, and the faith that substands both
democracy and religion.

These realities represent the supreme values
of the race, more potent and persuasive in the
long haul than the realities of force, no matter

how dramatic these may be nor how swift their
temporary conquests realities which set man
off as the only species of God's creation which is
akin to God himself, his morale, his idealism, his
generosity, his nobility, his capacity for sacri-
fice, his devotion to truth, his reverence for the
Eternal.

We call them the imponderables because they
are not to be weighed: the intangibles because
they are not to be touched: the invisibles be-
cause they are not to be seen, but they are as
real and substantial as the warmth of the sun
which we feel, as the operations of the winds
which we see, as the power of the tides of the
sea which we know.

[24]

II'

THAT THE FRUIT MAY
MATURE"

What is education?

I could not picture anything so intangible. I took a
walk, searching for a symbol for education.

A track stretched off before me into the distance
going places, interesting, unknown places. I came to
an underpass, a heavy massive structure built to last.
My imagination began to work and soon the track was
on its way through the everlasting hugeness of educa-
tion, the underpass. The ties of the track were spaced
so that my feet did not always reach them but often
went onto the big, cutting stones between. Then I
would make myself get back onto the ties again.

In the distance was a light in which I anticipated
the multitudinous new exciting experiences which
would come after the darkness.

PEGGY PAT HORNE '47

Thyrza S. Askew, Institute

Teacher at the Agnes Scott Academy, Queens College
Academy, and principal of the Napsonian School since
1917, with a love of life and a charm that characterize
her and her girls.

At the Crossroads in Education is this a new
slogan? It cannot be for we know that no
method of education has ever been or can ever
be a static one. Times change, plans must
change

"The old order changeth, yielding place to
new

Lest one good custom should corrupt the
world"

and even we of the conservative school do not
think that a world geared to flights among the
stars can be satisfied with the ideas of the horse-
man's age; and so, era after era, we have stood
at the Crossroads of Education.

The value of education, however, does not
change, though we could believe it at its greatest
when we have been faced by a nation moulded in
one generation, by education, to a passion for the
ideals of one man who, condemn him as we
may, had the keenness of vision to know that
his State could become what he chose it to be if
he could reach the heart of youth if education

[25]

could do his will, could put into the mind of
youth, Germany as the master race and himself
as the master mind.

Why can we not arouse that passion, turning
ours into one for thinking not learning, for pure
government, for right ideals?

The education to do this must be to me three-
fold, the School and the Church ever adjuncts to
the influence of the Home, yet forming such a
circle that the Home shall be the source of the
highest and best in education.

The School should reach all and, in this pres-
ent complex world of homes under constant
strain, must do double duty. Its first aim must
ever be character building. So long have I
taught in a School with a motto, "And Jesus
increased in wisdom and stature and in favor
with God and man" that I wonder that there can
be any other; so long has "Chapel" been the
center of daily life and the Bible the core of our
learning, that I forget there are many teachers
who, longing for just this Christian background,
are limited by restrictions to being teachers of
ethics but not of spiritual life. Yet we are a
Christian nation and it seems strange that the
teaching of the Bible may not become at least an
affiliated part of every child's school life. Why
must he be left to feel his school life in one
compartment, his religious life in another? To
most of us character means Christian character,
but, should a school not have the happy privilege
of presenting Christ as the great Ideal, there
must still be the same great principles of truth,
of honor and honesty, of unselfish service. We,
many of us, for long avoided the word, cheating,
for we refused to believe one of ours could be
guilty of dishonesty. Open your eyes, Friends,
be careful even of yourself life is so full of

just "getting by," from newspaper jokes to
reality, that the school child easily, if subcon-
sciously, absorbs and uses such principles. He,
and not he only, has forgotten the Master's
words, "He that is unjust in the least is unjust
also in much." Could we teach him the meaning
of honesty in small things, of truth day by day,
we could hope for clear cut thinking as well as
purity of heart. And to these qualities we must
add Charity Love for my neighbor. Youth is
far from always kind. Unexpectedly friendly
and helpful here, it is astoundingly the snob
there. Social groups have lent themselves to
this, and, out of my experience, I believe it to be
the mother as often as the daughter who is the
climber for herself, the destroyer for some one
else.

And we in the Schools must put into practical
use this character we attempt to build. It is not
merely a possession it is a growth from which
there must be fruit. Give me a child with char-
acter and I can educate him his IQ may not be
high but he is willing to work, he possesses a
determination to use all he has, and he has be-
fore him a goal not for self alone, but for others.

Then if we are gaining the character, what
shall we offer that the fruit may mature?

A recent article, sponsored by the General
Education Board, states a fine philosophy of
education "That the over-all purpose of educa-
tion is the training and development of citizens
capable of sustaining the democratic ideal as a
way of life that the schools must help pupils
develop those loyalties, knowledges, and discip-
lines which are distinguishing features of an
effective citizen." Dr. Max Raeber writing for
The American Teacher presents a like thought
from Swiss education that its first aim is "to

[26]

prepare citizens capable of insuring the well-
being of the community," holding "before each
young person the ideal of individual develop-
ment of personality, while working with others
for the common good of all."

For the "loyalties" we find our character; for
"knowledges," not mere learning from books but
from life, from a series of learning experiences;
for "disciplines" the control of self that comes
from a recognition of authority in home and in
school until the youth's own conscience is trained
to control. He must be helped to develop his
individual personality but in the understanding
that he is part of a great whole where there are
responsibilities to others sometimes greater than
those to himself.

Fine philosophies and aims we have set up,
but who shall carry these out? Here we in the
teaching world make our plea: "0 ye Colleges,
develop in more young women and young men
the desire to teach!" Alas, that at present it
should be too nearly a missionary idea and
without even the recognition of sacrifice that may
come to the missionary. Teaching is a great pro-
fession and always there will be those who seek
it, but it requires long, expensive, and continued
training, and yet it is still, save in a few strongly
established systems, an underpaid profession, the
average salary so low that at least in these late

days the teacher has considered the wisdom of
seeking wages, rather than a salary. Let us
strive to make it reasonable for our young men
and young women to choose this fine and (in
the end) satisfying field.

And what shall we say of the young people
whom we seek to educate? It is easy to see the
dark aspect of a picture, to talk of the increase
of juvenile delinquency, to condemn the in-
stances we know in youth of indifference to
authority, of even violation of law and order.
There is the other side, and I believe it is prom-
ising. Our young people are far more of them
awake than are sleeping, far more of them law
abiders and supporters than the law breakers of
whom we hear ; many of them are readying to be
strong spiritual leaders, and many, many to be
the right kind of followers (and I ask you to
remember the value of right-minded followers).

Let us bestir ourselves in Schools and Homes.
Our young people look to us for the opportunity
of an education that will fit them to do more
with this world than we, alas, have done. The
Future demands the best; let us help Youth to
be ready.

I have brought you nothing new: methods
change the principles remain the same we
must train the boy and the girl for the fine
broad field of Christian citizenship.

[27]

Full of delightful whimzy is this article written for
the Agnes Scott News and brought up to date for the
Quarterly by Roberta Winter, instructor of speech at
Agnes Scott.

FACULTY ARTISTS FIND REWARD
IN JOYS OF SELF-EXPRESSION

The Gainesville catastrophe as seen by
Charlotte Hunter '29, one of the survivors
of the Visual Arts class.

Roberta Winter '27

If your professor looks at you queerly these
days with eyes almost closed, head back, as if
from a great distance don't jump to the con-
clusion that, having stood all she can from you
she is contemplating a swift vengeance. She's
just seeing you as a "volume ... a mass; with
length, breadth, and thickness, but no individ-
uality, no personality, no meaning." This atti-
tude of hers is not the result of your own short-
comings (short though they may be); neither
does it prove that she will never more look upon
you as a human being. She is merely following
the instructions of her professor of VISUAL
ARTS ACTIVITIES the course she is taking
Thursday evenings under the direction of Mr.
Howard Thomas, head of the Art Department.
The course can be said to be well-launched
by now: five of the ten sessions have been held.
Even the weakest knees have ceased trembling,
the wildest hearts have stopped pounding, and
some semblance of nonchalance might have been
observed as the group settled down the other

night to make a "color tree."

Members are now looking back on their first
session on LINE as if from a great distance.
"The first session," stated the communication
they had received through the local mail, "will
be devoted to the element LINE. 1. Kinds of
line. 2. Line movement. 3. Line expression
and line quality psychological meanings,
symbolic meanings . . ." No wonder their blood
pressure had leaped. But tight-lipped, desper-
ate, they had rallied to the kind tones of the
instructor and let the pencil cover the paper
with "straight lines between two points," . . .
"a slow line that looks fast," ... "-a fast line
that looks slow," . . . "angry lines," "congenial
lines," . . . "lines trying to get away from each
other," . . . "lines friendly toward each other."
. . . And jaws relaxed and hearts lifted when
the Kind Voice insisted encouragingly, "Now
there isn't any one here who doesn't have beau-
tiful lines!" . . . Still, each tree on the campus
loomed menacingly on the walk home that night:

[28]

so many lines; so complicated; so much inner
life.

And there was the time the class was divided
by seven for group work and it was found that
each group would have two and five-seventh
workers in it. "I never felt more like five-
sevenths of a person in my life," said one mem-
ber, nervously attaching herself to two less agi-
tated workers. It may have been this disintegra-
tion that caused the Kind Voice to be raised
rather higher than usual over the furor: "There
seems to be a little confusion . . ."

But the soothing influence of colors to mix,
the thought of volumes to steady us, and the
rare personal triumphs in sketching have had
their effect; and certain members have even
questioned the professor's warning, "Don't ex-
pect to leave this class as artists, but as people
who appreciate what the artist is doing."

When asked whether he had any comments on
the progress of the group, Mr. Thomas declined
to be quoted. He confessed that financially the
venture had not proved lucrative. Members in-
sist on answering roll call promptly to "get their
quarter back" even though other duties may call
them away immediately. It is believed that there
was one case where a visitor collected a quarter
even though she had never deposited the $2.50
registration fee required of members and re-
turned to them bits by bits for prompt attend-
ance. Another member has expressed disillusion-
ment from discovering that "getting the quarter-
back" had nothing to do with the pair of broad
shoulders she had been anticipating.

With the course half completed, however, it
can be stated without fear of contradiction that
it will be a gratifying experiment, at any rate if

graded on the curve. Word was sent from the
Registrar's office that no credit would be given
for the work unless each evening's signed can-
vases were left for approval of the Academic
Council ; but most of the members agree that they
are working for the joy of self-expression, not
for the grade.

So if your professor looks at you queerly these
days ask her about her etchings. It's as good
as two apples on any desk in Buttrick!

p.s. The foregoing article was written before
the Gainesville tornado. The Gainesville tor-
nado struck the Visual Activities Group between
7:10 and 7:35 on the evening of March 8. The
only reason the writer is alive to tell the tale is
that she cut class that night on account of illness.
Draw no hasty conclusions. The Gainesville tor-
nado was one of those opportunities better not to
survive than not to have experienced. Ask any
survivor. Ask her to show you her canvas.
For the fact is, that between 7:10 and 7:35
on the evening of March 8, the Gainesville
tornado of 1936 was described by an eye-
witness to the Visual Arts Activities Group;
and during the next hour the members were
forced to interpret this catastrophe in water color
on pebbleboard. I say forced advisedly; for I
am told that it was a Bullying Voice that in
sisted: "Go on . . . Put down something! . .
Stop stalling. . . . That's good! . . . Hurry up
. . . Keep at it! . . ." On and on for an hour
Then, "Stop. Put your brushes down. The ex
perience is over!"

That's what he thought. Why, victims will be
talking about the Gainesville tornado of Decatur
years after the original has faded into a pleasant
memory.

They staggered out onto the quadrangle,

[29]

shaken and aged: amazed to find no tombstones
cluttering the campus . . . Main Building still
standing . . . the trees upright against a star-
filled sky.

Margaret Ridley found her way home and
took an overdose of aspirin. Susan Cobbs col-
lapsed in bed with her whole left side com-
pletely numb. Frances Stukes was told by an
unsympathetic husband that if Gainesville had
really looked like that it would have been useless
to try to restore it. (An unjust criticism: her
composition was among the best.)

There's something about a tornado. Especially
when you put it on paper . . .

The next meeting of the class was the last. If
you had missed the tornado, you might just as
well have stayed at home. Unless you had a des-
perate need for your quarter. The subject was
animals. Faced with dampened brown paper
neatly pasted on an awe-inspiring drawing board,
we were challenged with the problem of filling
that yawning space with beasts of the field and
all cattle, creeping things and all vertebrates.
And lo! Margaret Posey's elephants, Melissa
Cilley's llamas, Llewellyn Wilburn's circus
merry-go-round, and Charlotte Hunter's horses
were among compositions hung after class.

It was with reluctance that the group sepa-
rated. Together we had seen windows opened
on a strange land; we had looked out and cap-
tured a sense of the beauty and the terror sur-
rounding us; we had leaned out and breathed
the unfamiliar air; and had even descended
daringly to play a little at the foot of our tower.
We had thrived. Or at least survived.

True, there are many things no one ever
learned. Elation was neatly balanced by humili-
ation; accomplishment escaped as with the nim-
bleness of time. We may never be asked to
exhibit anywhere.

But when we climb the library steps to see the
exhibitions hung in the gallery, it is with an
eagerer step, a keener anticipation. We look
with initiated eyes upon lines, volumes, textures,
and relationships. We recognize the validity of
a green horse. We vibrate to the lop-sidedness of
a bright yellow table. Our hearts go out in
understanding to the creator of a chewing cow.

And as to the professor so sensibly pointed
out, we have been lured into the fascinating pur-
suit of an activity that will fill any empty days
of our old age. And that, we submit, is an ob-
jective not to be objected to!

[30]

Remembering Professor Thomas' illuminating article
in the November '44 Quarterly, we are happy to hear
from him again on

INTERRELATION-
ART AND BOOKS

Howard Thomas

At the beginning of this Spring quarter I asked
the members of my Modern Art class to bring
one thing from their rooms that they thought was
beautiful and to come prepared to tell why they
thought it was beautiful. They brought many
things jewelry, silverware, perfume bottles, re-
productions of paintings, photographs; but not
one student out of the sixty-nine brought a book.
They had not thought of a book as an object of
beauty in spite of the fact that some of their new
text books are inspirational in design. To them,
a book was an object to be read for information
or enjoyment. Beauty was associated only with
luxury, and art was something added as an
appendix.

A beautiful book meets, first of all, its func-
tional requirements. It must be readable. "Form
follows function"is a dictum as appropriate for
a beautiful book as it is for a beautiful building.
Whether by words alone, or by pictures alone, or
by both words and pictures, the primary func-
tion of a book is to communicate its contents to
the reader. The art of the book consists of a

refinement of form and substance to give imme-
diate and unincumbered access to the subject of
the book. It must convey its message by means
of its total form. From cover to cover it should
be beautiful in its clarity of expression and free
from all meaningless ornament.

A book is like a museum; it stores a fund of
information that is available for consumption by
those who need it and desire it. It is also as
John Sloan says about art, "A consumer of art
is different from a consumer of a boiled egg;
one can consume art and still have it."

The book does not intrude itself upon us. It
is remarkably self-contained. It is a silent house
where the works of the scribes and the graphic
artists are brought together into an art form.

The most remarkable thing about a library of
books is its heterogeneous unity. Its content is so
varied that there is hardly a vital force in the
entire field of human interests that cannot be
satisfied in it. And yet, each of the books on the
library shelves is, in its turn and within the
limits of its function, a graphic unit within itself.
Intensely organismic in its make-up, it furnishes
a very important source for the discovery of new
meanings in contemporary life.

Perhaps it is the close kinship that exists be-
tween books and the college studies that causes
us to take books for granted. Perhaps it is our
familiarity with them that makes them common.
And perhaps we just need to become conscious
of the problems of the art and craft of book-
making and how these problems have been solved
in order that we may realize the qualities that
make a book beautiful.

At any rate the exhibition of books which has

[31]

recently been displayed in the Agnes Scott
library through the courtesy of Miss Edna Han-
ley has helped to focus our attention upon the
vital contributions of such men as Goudy, Gill,
Koch, Rogers, Johnson, Nash, Morris and other
followers in the tradition of beautiful printing
that was established five hundred years ago by

Johannes Gutenberg in the first Bible printed
with movable type.

The graphic language of printed books moulds
our thinking throughout life. When that lan-
guage is well presented the book becomes a beau-
tiful, coherent object and takes its place as an
art form worthy of our respect.

THE EMPLOYMENT SERVICE IS READY FOR ITS VETERANS

Mary Say ward Rogers '28, Chief Counselor, Veteran's Division, Atlanta Local Office, United States

Employment Service

"Veterans Division" beckons a large but
friendly sign inside the entrance to the Atlanta
office of the United States Employment Service.
Here dischargees from the Armed Services, men
and women are directed when they seek assis-
tance through this office. A Veteran of World
War I, as Veterans' Representative, is in charge
of the Division. He is assisted by a well-rounded
staff of clerks, interviewers, and several coun-
selors. Though in many instances the individ-
ual's adjustment problem is slight, in most cases
he has one if only because he has been out of
the civilian world for awhile.

After an interviewer has completed a vet-
eran's registration card he takes proper steps
toward making a suitable job-referral if that
is the veteran's desire. Should special assistance
be required in working out the problem, the man
is referred to an employment counselor for fur-
ther consideration. It may be that his qualifica-

tions are very unusual and that the employer-
requests on hand will not make full use of them
or it may be, as is often the case, that he has a
physical impairment or is quite nervous or
mentally upset. Whatever the circumstances may
be, every effort is made toward a happy solution
of the problem.

As you will observe in the following exam-
ples of veteran placement, the method used
though professional is very human. The inter-
viewer or counselor endeavors to understand the
applicant rather than to dissect him. He must
be utterly patient, undisturbed regardless of
circumstances and never doubting as to a satis-
factory outcome of an interview. In completing
a registration card great care is taken to get an
individual's military experience in detail as well
as his civilian employment. Also information
relative to his health is properly noted. The
interviewer or counselor often interprets the man

[32]

in advance to the employer by telephone and
gives necessary counsel as to evaluating the job,
getting the job and holding it.

It is also the responsibility of the division to
provide supplemental information as needed:
such as, where one should go for further school-
ing or to straighten out one's mustering-out pay.
Many agencies such as Veterans' Administration,
State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation
and Travelers' Aid may cooperate with the Em-
ployment Service in working out a problem. It
may be that certain facts pertaining to a man's
health are required in order to make a suitable
referral, or that a newcomer to town needs a
place to stay before he receives his first pay
check.

One of the most difficult and most interesting
placements that lately has been made in the
Division is that of a young man 25 years old
with almost two years of Army Service. Though
he was not a combat casualty, he was injured
in a serious motorcycle accident which occurred
while on active duty his left arm had been
badly broken. The Army did all in its power to
repair the injury and to all appearances the arm
had mended but the boy kept complaining of
terrible pain. After quite sometime the cause of
the trouble was discovered and corrected but it
left the boy in a serious nervous condition which
increased after discharge. About two years from
the date of discharge, a representative of the
Veterans' Administration told the counselor that
they were at a loss to know what to do with him
he had become almost a mental case. In fact,
there was serious thought that on this basis they
should request reconsideration of his disability
pension by the Rating Board.

The boy appeared extremely worried, afraid,

very argumentive, and unreasonable in manner.
He had lost a good deal of weight. For the last
two years he had done very little of value. An
employer who recently had attempted to use him
advised the counselor that in his opinion he
was suffering from a "severe nervous condition."

In about three weeks after this situation was
brought to the attention of the counselor, through
sympathetic understanding, great patience, per-
severance, and "straight from the shoulder" talk
to the man himself, a job was worked out for him
as bakery routeman. This placement was based
on his liking to drive a truck, his desire to be
"on the go" not confined to a stationary job
and his liking to meet people. Only light work
was involved. Having been with the employer
now for six weeks the report comes in that he has
not missed a day nor been late a single time
since being there. He needs concentrated train-
ing in sales technique, after which he should
hold his own in the organization, according to
his employer.

On the first of October of last year, a 25-year-
old dischargee of Lawson General Hospital came
into the office to keep a previously made appoint-
ment with an employment counselor. The party
who made the appointment advised the coun-
selor to urge the boy to study drafting under the
Vocational Rehabilitation Program of the Vet-
erans' Administration. "He liked mechanical
drawing in high school, he must have something
light, and I know where he can get a job when
he completes the course; so that ought to settle
it," he said.

As the boy and the counselor proceeded with
the interview, it became quite clear to the coun-
selor that there was more to consider than the
friend had thought. The boy was completely at

[33]

sea as to what he wanted to do but he knew he
did not want to go to school not now at least
or to become a draftsman. Due to a ruptured
disc incurred in service he not only could do no
lifting to speak of but could neither sit nor stand
long at a time he must be able to change his
position frequently.

The boy had entered the Army October 15,
1940, and had been given a medical discharge
October 7, 1944. He had served as machine
gunner in three combat zones the Eastern, the
Papuan and the New Guinea zones and for
each he wore a bronze star.

The work he had followed prior to service
was out of the question now welder trainee and
carpenter's helper. However, while he had been
in the hospital just to have something to do
he had taken up leather work at which he had
become pretty adept. This information com-
bined with the fact that he had done pretty well
in drawing in school showed the counselor that
he must be pretty able with his hands;

He was a quiet boy, liked to read, had never
cared for sports and preferred working with
"things" rather than meeting the public.

It happened that there was an order on hand
for a young man to train as laboratory techni-
cian with a prominent chemical company. The
possibilities of the job impressed the boy imme-
diately. The counselor called the employer who
was rather skeptical at first as to how things
would work out but suggested an interview. As
a result the boy has been with this company
sometime now. A recent "follow-up" shows it to
have been a very satisfactory placement.

Recently a 21 year old boy not yet discharged
from Lawson General Hospital, his right leg am-
putated above the knee, came in on crutches to
keep a previously made appointment with a
counselor. He had been in the Army since 1939
and had lost his leg in France. His prosthesis
was not yet ready but due to certain circum-
stances it was both possible and very essential
that he find suitable employment. His wife was
"expecting" and the young couple had not been
able, on a private's pay, to lay aside the neces-
sary funds to take care of the situation. They
were to remain in Atlanta after the discharge;
so it was desirable, if possible, that he make a
connection where he might hope to stay and
advance.

He had completed the 10th grade in school.
Due to his youth and length of service he had
no previous civilian employment. While in the
Army he had worked on an observation post
range finding and map reading. He was a most
likable young man, very alert and very much in
earnest.

Since there was no suitable "opening" on file
at the time, it was up to the counselor to initiate
one. After making a couple of "stabs in the
dark" which led no where, she communicated
with a public utility which resulted in the boy's
being placed as night dispatcher of emergency
vehicles. There was no lifting to be done and he
might move about or sit at will. Should assis-
tance be needed at any time the night watchman
would be on hand. The employer has expressed
himself as being very much impressed with the
boy and his chance for advancement and the boy
is delighted with his entrance into civilian life.

[34]

/ took the purely formal side of education,
representing it as a progression from
grammar school to high school and on
to college. Each level in school becomes
larger as it grows more important.

DOT DeVANE '46

prngLI 5

"THE TEST OF TIME AND DISTANCE"

Lucile Alexander '11

So challenging and so fascinatingly human was the
account of the birth and growth of our Alumnce Asso-
ciation given by Lucile Alexander at the Decatur Club
Founders Day meeting that it is printed here for all
to see.

If you would have the past come alive, ask the
program chairman of an alumnae club to insist
that you write the history of Agnes Scott Alum-
nae Association; spend your Founder's Day
holiday as I have, looking through dusty files of
Agonistics and Silhouettes, turning the yellowed
pages of early catalogs, scanning every available
scrap ever written by anybody about us. I have

borrowed without scruple, I acknowledge my
debt and take a grateful look at our past.

Though relatively a young college, Agnes
Scott dates back to the days of Hart's Rhetoric
and Haven's Mental Philosophy, to Calisthenics
"now considered Ian important auxiliary of
female education and so promotive of good
health," and to the days when our Dean was
"lady principal" firmly solicitous of the physi-
cal, social and moral welfare of every young
lady under her tutelage. Behind the gentle firm-
ness and charming quaintness of the counsel
under "Domestic Government" every alumna
recognizes Miss Hopkins:

"Every young lady shall be provided with
gossamer, umbrella, rubber shoes"; she shall

[35]

avoid such imprudences as "thin shoes in cold
weather, sitting on the ground, promenading
out-of-doors with head uncovered, the too early
removal of flannels or the neglect to put them
on at the approach of cold weather"; and in the
interest of seemliness: "no young lady is allowed
to appear in a wrapper out of her chamber";
"no exchange of clothing will be permitted."

The Decatur Female Seminary was chartered
in 1889, but it was co-educational! The first
catalog carries in small type at the very end
this confession:

"The following resident small boys were ad-
mitted to the Primary Department during the
past session, to wit: (here follows the list of
seven Decatur boys), and then, as though in
haste: "N. B. The Trustees, however, have de-
cided to exclude boys of any age during the
future." And so with the disappearance of
"female" from the official title went the boys,
and Agnes Scott Institute was launched in Main
Building, made possible by the generosity of
Colonel George Washington Scott inspired by
gratitude to his mother, Agnes Scott.

The Alumnae Association has grown with the
college which it serves, has worked shoulder to
shoulder with it, and at times, has had the joy
of sowing the seed of fruitful ideas. It has been
our good fortune to have as presidents alumnae
who have made themselves felt in civic affairs,
in the social betterment of their communities.

In 1895, six years after the founding of
Agnes Scott, a small group met at commence-
ment time in the parlors of Main to organize an
alumnae association a mere handful, for the
list of potential alumnae was limited. Agnes
Scott has always stood for quality and has never
been hasty in graduating students. For four

[36]

years there were no graduates; the first senior
class numbered two; the second, one; the third,
six. The first graduate, Mary Barnett (Mrs.
Venable Martin), daughter of Atlanta's best-
loved pastor, was elected president. She served
for five years.

A small and penniless band, there was little
they could do. Without the guidance and warm
interest of Dr. Gaines, Miss Hopkins, Miss Mc-
Kinney and Miss Shepherd, they would have
grown discouraged. Their first act was the estab-
lishment of a Reading Circle; their second, the
establishment of a scholarship. Help others and
keep our minds from going to seed, the two
phases of the original ideal which we have pre-
served to this day. The first statement of our
purpose appears in the catalog of 1897: "to
strengthen our interest in each other and in the
Institute; to place alumnae in a helpful relation
to the Institute; to quicken interest in Christian
education." The catalog of 1898 reports prog-
ress: "During the past year two hundred dollars
have been collected toward the establishment of
a permanent scholarship fund."

Those early alumnae devised small schemes
of raising money, they planned, they worked,
they dreamed dreams, they formulated an ideal
of loyalty and service that is ours today, and we
are what we are today because we stand on their
shoulders. Many of those early graduates are
still towers of strength in our Association. Their
loyalty has stood the test of time and distance,
and their wisdom, ripe with experience, has in-
spired the emulation of the newer generation.
Most of their dreams have become realities:
(1) The Alumnae Infirmary, so named by the
Trustees "in recognition of their generous and
affectionate interest in their Alma Mater." This
Infirmary is about to be replaced by a glorified

hospital on the campus through the generosity
of an alumna-trustee, Mrs. Frances Winship
Walters;

(2) Ten-years of effort resulted in raising one
thousand dollars for the scholarship. This sum
later became the nucleus of the Mary D. Shep-
herd Memorial Scholarship;

(3) An endowed college;

(4) The Alumnae House. The minutes of the
General Meeting in 1915 record the suggestion
of Lottie Mae (Blair) Lawton, alumna of one
year's standing that we undertake to build on
the campus an Alumnae House. Her daring
young optimism caused excited comment and a
consternation that dismissed the idea as im-
possible. But the seed was sown and in 1921,
by the sympathetic interest of Dr. Gaines and the
generous gift of fifteen thousand dollars by the
Trustees, the Anna Young Alumnae House was
built and named in honor of an outstanding
alumna. It was the first house of its kind on
any college campus.

(5) Representation on the Board of Trustees
granted in 1925. We now have three alumnae
Trustees.

The year 1919 marks a crisis. Futile efforts
had been made to establish branches, but our
association continued to be composed of those
who lived in the shadow of the College walls. In
1919, Mary Wallace Kirk ('11) was elected
president. With a genius for organization and
an experience in executive work (broad for her
years) she submitted a revised constitution, got
it accepted and printed, and thus she began the
transformation of a local into a general Associa-
tion whose work is accomplished by an Executive
Committee and an Alumnae Council which inte-

grates the interests and coordinates the efforts
of all concerned by representatives from the
branches, the faculty, and the student body. The
work of the general office is done by a full-time
general secretary who also publishes the quar-
terly (which began as a modest Alumnae Reg-
ister, the protege of the Publicity Committee).
Polly (Stone) Buck ('24) was the first general
secretary to become sole editor of the Quarterly.
By her talents and industry she made the Quar-
terly a welcome messenger to distant alumnae
and set a standard of excellence which has been
ably maintained by her successors.

Many and delectable are the fruits of the
quickened and enlarged interest stimulated by
being a general association:

(1) the Alumnae Garden in 1931, born of the
enthusiasm of Louise (Brown) Hastings and
successfully carried on by Frances (Gilleland)
Stukes and her helpers and successors. The gar-
den is a thing of beauty;

(2) Alumnae Week-End which brings together
from far and near the alumnae for intellectual
pleasure and the joy of taking up old friendships
where they were left off.

The work of the alumnae in the College cam-
paigns has been a unifying influence. Consult
the old files and scrap-books of these campaigns
and you will understand why it is hard to say
how many campaigns we have had. For Dr.
McCain it has been a continuous performance.
In 1916, as faculty member of the senior class
he made the Investiture talk on the theme "Agnes
Scott, a growing thing." He was the sower who
went forth to sow. He is still the sower but he
has begun to reap. That very year, under the
leadership of Emma Pope (Moss) Dieckmann,

[37]

the campus alumnae set for themselves the task
of raising thirty-thousand dollars. When the
Trustees heard of it, they took over and set the
goal at five-hundred thousand the contagion of
heroism !

Many of you who are now alumnae were stu-
dents who saw the triumphant beginning of the
1929 campaign when the campus set the pace
by its one-hundred-percent subscription of dou-
ble its quota and thus convinced Atlanta and the
General Education Board that we believe in
Agnes Scott and its future.

The success of our last campaign, undertaken
during the depression and pushed to a successful
close in face of the advice by business men
against the attempt, is recent history that needs
not to be chronicled. But as veterans of past
wars let us say to you veterans of future wars
that it is well worth while. The esprit de corps
developed by working shoulder to shoulder in a
cause big enough and fine enough to inspire our
loyalty and challenge our best effort is the finest
fruit of any campaign. It is the loyalty born of
common effort that stays with us and goes. with
us into larger spheres of action and that develops
our sense of responsibility to society.

With the inauguration of our Alumnae Fund
plan in June, 1945, wider horizons are opening
before us. Dues are abolished; every former
student of the institution, under any of its names
from Decatur Female Seminary to Agnes Scott
College inclusive is a member if she follows
the urge to make an annual gift, however small,
to her association; she thus secures for herself
the satisfaction of knowing she is a part of an
organization efficiently run, the inspiration of
closer contacts with her college through all
alumnae publications, and the joy of helping to
make possible substantial and regular gifts to
the college.

True to their best traditions, the Trustees
voted the sum of five thousand dollars to finance
our association in the period of transition. The
voluntary contributions have been numerous and
prompt and since they still come in daily, we
are optimistic enough to hope that the loan can
be repaid and a small gift made to the college
at commencement.

Ours is a goodly heritage to think on and to
tie to on this Founder's Day, nineteen hundred
and forty-five.

[38]

Shirley Graves, a Junior from Atlanta and newly-
elected editor of the Aurora, compares the Agnes Scott
of three generations of Hottentots.

Letter to Aunt Jo

Dearest Aunt Jo

You were right the Silhouettes in the libra-
ry did tell the story of Agnes Scott as it used to
be better than words can ever do it. I looked
all through all of them up to my Freshman year,
and it was certainly interesting to notice the
changes that had taken place here. With each
successive year something new had been added
a new building, a new faculty member, or a
new club. And by the way, why didn't you ever
tell me that you were the captain of your basket-
ball team all four years? I didn't know you
had such an athletic record. But Aunt Jo, wasn't

it a little difficult to run around in those funny,
full bloomers, long black stockings, and middy
shirt? And how serious-looking you were in
your graduation robe, with your cap placed
exactly in the center or your forehead and your
glasses which I remember you said served only
to impress the faculty! But as I looked at the
picture a little longer, I could see a twinkle in
your eye, and you seemed to be saying: "Now
please don't make me smile and lose this new
Senior dignity I've just acquired!"

I wonder how you ever got along without the
new library, Presser, and Buttrick. But since
you didn't know about them, I guess it didn't
bother you. And just think, a few years from
now, when / have a little niece going to Agnes
Scott, I guess she'll look over the Silhouette of
my Senior year and wonder how in the world I
ever got along without the new Science Hall. I
haven't told you about it yet, have I? The plans
are all drawn up, and it looks as if it's going to
be wonderful. The work on it will begin right
after the war; so it won't be long before it's an
actual addition to the campus instead of just a
dream. And think of having a glass-covered
observatory on the top floor, where classes can
look at real stars instead of studying them from
charts.

My niece will also be able to take advantage
of the new Home Arts Department that will be
here in about five or six years. She will have
her choice of courses in cooking, sewing, house-
keeping, and child care (with real children to
experiment on!) The practice home that will be
the center of the Home Arts Department sounds
too good to be true.

[39]

Then, too, by my niece's day, the cooperative
program between Emory and Agnes Scott will be
more fully developed, and girls who want to go
into business journalism, commercial art, and
similar vocations can get special training at
Emory. I hear there will be a special bus, maybe
as early as next year, for girls who take courses
at Emory. Now that's what I call real service.
And I grow green with envy thinking about the
new dorm she'll be living in, which will put
even rejuvenated Main to shame.

So I guess my niece will feel that her Agnes
Scott is as superior to mine as I feel that mine
is to yours. Yet when you get right down to it,
we'll all three be remembering and loving the
same things about Agnes Scott because her tradi-
tions and her spirit stay the same from year to
year. And won't we have fun some day, com-
paring notes and talking together about our
school days?

All my love,

Sally.

POST-WAR EDUCATION

[Continued from Page 6]

and this will add real zest to much of our own
program.

We are quite sure that women will have an
increasingly important part in setting the edu-
cational pace and in the selection of subjects to
be taught. This is wholesome, and we believe
that it will result in a fine combination of old

conservatism and of modern emphases.

We certainly hope that Agnes Scott may set
an example among institutions in the South of
being open minded about change, but in being
determined that whatever we do will be of real
quality and will appeal to the heart as well as
to the head.

[40]

.

)eaths

Cllie (Cheshire) Kemp on February
i at home.

Culalie Lawton on February 28 at the
nfirmary of Crawford Long hospital,
ihe was affectionately called Mother
.awton, because of her position as head
f the hospital's nursery. Over 200
urses marched from the hospital to
pring Hill in tribute to her long ser-
ice.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this Quarterly is set on the Linotype in
Bodoni Book, a modern variant of the original type
designed by Giovanni Battista Bodoni, 18th Century
Italian printer at Parma.
Printed by The Bowen Press at Decatur, Georgia.

[64]

A STENCIL FOR YOU!

2,275 of us already have an individual stencil!

With our plan to set up the remaining alumnae on the addressing ma-
chine during the summer approximately 5,000 more of us we are
eager to "find" everybody.

Put to use your detective flare, see what you know about the "Lost Hot-
tentots" listed at the end of each class, and send a card to your alumnae
office, please.

A permanent address is preferable because each move costs a new stencil
and three card changes.
Many thanks to all who have already helped!

REUNIONS FOR THE CLASSES OF

1893 - 1909 - 1910 - 1911 - 1912
1928 - 1929 - 1930 - 1931 - 1944

Because of government restrictions on travel
we cannot encourage classes to make the reg-
ular plans for reunions at Commencement.
Those who live near the campus and those
who are to be in the vicinity on June 2 are
invited to join their classmates for the annual
Trustees' Luncheon in Rebekah Scott.

$5,683.49 had been contributed

to the Agnes Scott Alumnae Fund by 689 alumnae and

friends before May 1, 1945. Your Association is

grateful for this expression of faith and is proud

to be the medium of your service to Agnes Scott.

ttmmmimmmmammmmm^immmaammKmmgmamsmKammmKaBBmmteaauBm

AGNES SCOTT

NAE

TE RLY

lorning Glory Country

Scratchboard drawing by Howard Thomas

COMMENCEMENT NUMBER

SUMMER 1945

COMING IN THE AUTUMN QUARTERLY

THE LIFE OF DR. McCAIN

Written with Jane Guthrie Rhodes' enthusiasm
and insight. Illustrated with a pen-and-ink
drawing by Leone Bowers Hamilton.

OFFICERS, COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN, AND TRUSTEES OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Katharine Woltz Green, 1933
President

Susan Shadburn Watkins, 1926
First Vice-President

Patricia Collins, 1928
Second Vice-President

Ida Lois McDaniel, 1935
Recording Secretary

Betty Medlock, 1942
Treasurer

Eugenia Symms, 1936
Executive Secretary

Lita Goss, 1936

Publications and Radio
j
Emma Moss Dieckmann, 1913

Newspaper Publicity

Frances Winship Walters, Inst.
Alumnae Trustee

Margaret Ridley, 1933
Alumnae Trustee

Annie Pope Bryan Scott, 1915
Tearoom

Alice McDonald Richardson, 1929
Second Floor

Lucy Johnson Ozmer, ex-1910
Constitution and By-Laws

Julia Smith Slack, ex-1912
Student Loan

Mary Warren Reed, 1929
House Decorations

Mary Louise Crenshaw Palmour, Inst.
Alumnae Week-End

Martha Rogers Noble, 1914
Entertainment

Charlotte E. Hunter, 1929
Grounds

EDITORIAL STAFF

Billie Davis Nelson, 1942
Editor

Professor Howard Thomas
Leone Bowers Hamilton, 1926
Art Editors

Published four times a year (November, February, April, and July) by the Alumnae Association oj Agnes Scott College at
Decatur, Georgia. Contributors to the Alumnae Fund receive the magazine. Yearly subscription, $2.00. Single copies, 25 cents.
Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office of Decatur, Georgia, under the Act of August 24, 1912.

Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly

Commencement Number Summer 1945

Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia Vol. XXIII No. 4

CONTENTS

PHOENIX ? poem Virginia L. Newton 2

FEDERAL AID TO EDUCATION

FACING FACTS J. Harold Saxon 5

DANGERS C. Murphey Candler 7

AN EXCELLENT THING IN WOMAN

Ada Comstock Notestein 9

RESPONSES TO "ARE WOMEN'S COLLEGES FOR WOMEN?" 16

BOOK REVIEW, TEACHER IN AMERICA

Elizabeth Stevenson 18

ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION 20

COMMITTEE REPORTS.. 22

CLASS NEWS 24

CAMPUS CARROUSEL 3

PHOENIX?

Virginia L. Newton '19, author of "Red Clay to Mould," returning to the campus in 1939,

compared the book-burning of that year with her own of 1919.

The fire light flickered on the faces there

And leaped upon the somber robes that kept

The shadows intermittently. And flames

Danced in our hearts, warm moving melody,

A leaping harmony with freedom's song

Democracy crowned with the victor's wreath.

With eager laughter we could greet the flames

That snatched distasteful books and made them theirs

More eagerly, perhaps, than our young minds,

In those four puzzling years, had made them ours.

No war flames now glowed red in Flanders' Fields,

And all the smouldering fires of hate we saw

As cool gray ash. The Phoenix was awake

We knew! The glittering of his plumage caught

The sunlight of our youth. His lifting wings

Soon now would flash above, and he would soar.

What if no swift, sharp silhouette save this

Be cut by us for other youths to read?

We stood there tiptoe, ready to depart,

And watched the flames and knew a world at peace.

And who then in a somber mood could know

Of other books to be hurled in such flames

As had not rumbled through the nations' homes

Since Heaven taught Earth the source of Power and Light.

If one had whispered "Inquisition" then

To black-robed neighbor in the circling group,

Perhaps a smothered giggle would have died,

The while eyes followed flame and smoke toward stars.

What think they now, the girls that burn their books

As part of youth's retaliation, gay

With laughter as the pages flutter, blaze?

Can their keen eyes pierce coiling smoke and fire,

That somehow earth has kindled in the dark,

And know the Phoenix ready to arise?

CAMPUS CARROUSEL

Wherever there may be an Agnes Scotter, her
heart responds with warmth to the suggestion of
the campus at commencement-time, her mind
answers to Mrs. Notestein's challenge to think,
and her eagerness to act on vital national issues
makes her welcome the pro and con discussion
of federal aid to education, all contained in this
Commencement Number. Also stimulating are
the alumnae responses to Howard Mumford
Jones' article of the spring Quarterly and the
promised book review by Elizabeth Stevenson.

Our cover artist, Professor Howard Thomas has
made such a vital contribution to the life of the
campus and to the rebirth of the Quarterly that
his leaving is a real loss. We wish him, however,
the best of success in his work at the University
of Georgia. We are particularly pleased with
the cover drawing in that it illustrates so well his
gift of catching the vitality of a place in relation
to the people living in it. He writes about "Morn-
ing Glory Country" that "it is from a section in
the Piedmont where morning glories grew, hence
the name. There were four Negro children
in the yard, a Negro mother on the porch,
and the father was going hunting for rabbits."
The College has bought one of his oil paintings,
a particularly fascinating one called "Dry
Earth." It hangs in the Rebekah Scott lobby.

Mary Wallace Kirk '11 was one of the delightful
guests on campus for commencement (and for
the Trustees' meeting since she is one of our
alumnae trustees). Although she readily made
known her enthusiasm for mangoes and for Pro-

fessor Thomas' work, she was reticent in talking
about her own art. Through a friend, we learned
that her etchings were held over in New York for
a special exhibit during a nation-wide tour. With
some persuasion and much pleasure we have
obtained one of her etchings, reproduced on page
7 of this issue.

No reunions again this year, but many of the
close-by Hottentots were back on campus to feel
chills up their backs at the playing of "Ancient
of Days"; to worship on Baccalaureate Sunday
under the leadership of Dr. James A. Jones; to
remember the feeling they had walking across
the stage for their diplomas and kneeling for
their hoods; to join in the beaming, congratulat-
ing throng hovering over the newest graduates ; to
wander over the campus exclaiming over a new
building, reminiscing over a certain room on
third Inman or a date parlor in Main, reporting
her doings to a favorite faculty member, wish-
ing for a real reunion, and feeling proud all
over again that she belongs to Agnes Scott and
Agnes Scott to her.

The fortunate ones who did attend the commence-
ment activities (See them in your class news)
will remember the lovely tea in Miss Scandrett's
face-lifted home on Faculty Row, the dash for
the gym when a sudden thunder-shower inter-
rupted the class prophecy, the botanical confu-
sion caused by the magnolias blooming on the
water-lily pads in the alumnae pool (very lovely
indeed!), the applause for Molly Milam when
she received the Hopkins Jewel, and the applause

[3]

again for Bet Patterson, rising junior from Win-
ston-Salem, who won the Collegiate Scholarship
with a straight A record
the first one in school his-
tory. Peggy Wilmon of De-
catur was runner-up. The
Rich Prize went to Mary
Sheely Little of Hickory, N.
C, with Anne Henderson,
Martha Hay (daughter of
Frances Dearing Hay), and
Dabney Adams receiving
honorable mention.

Speaking of honors, Miss
Elizabeth Jackson, of the
history department at Agnes Scott, has received
from the Florida Division of the AAUW a reso-
lution acknowledging appreciation for her out-
standing leadership as regional vice-president
of the South Atlantic section of AAUW for ten
years, for her inspiration and encouragement to
all members of AAUW within her jurisdiction,

Mary Codington

for her distinguishing herself in educational pur-
suit, and for her charming and distinguished per-
sonality.

Summer stillness lies over the campus this July.
No bells, no calls to the telephone, no dashing
across the quadrangle, no talk of Mill on the
Floss or Dante's Inferno, no clatter of dishes nor
of tongues in Rebekah dining-room,
where the chairs do acrobatics on the
tables . . . Already, though, prepara-
tions for fall go full steam new
roofing on Lupton, Boyd, Sturgis and
Ansley, new plastering in Murphey
Candler, and insulation for Main,
Inman, and Rebekah. More about
the improvements in the fall. And until then,
your publications committee and your editor
will be working on what we expect to be one of
the most thrilling Quarterlies yet with the story
of Dr. McCain and the thoughts of everyday peo-
ple around the world on planning for peace!

[4]

FACING FACTS

ABOUT FEDERAL AID TO EDUCATION

/. Harold Saxon expresses his views of the bills proposing federal subsidy to public schools. He is execu-
tive Secretary of the Georgia Education Association, an Agnes Scott "son-in-law" and father of a '49 Hottentot.

Wendell Willkie said: "For a long time our
society left the education of children to the indi-
vidual parents' ability to pay. Then it made a
decision which changed civilization. It decided
that all children should be educated, regardless
of their parents' income ... No wage or income
based on the value of the economic contribution
of the individual can ever be made to take into
proper consideration the needs of his depend-
ents."

Significant as were his words when he uttered
them a short time before his death, they are even
more signficant today when the Congress is de-
bating Federal Aid for Education, which, if
enacted into law, will have a profound effect on
the destiny of the youth of this nation.

Educational progress in Georgia during the
past decade has been largely due to the fact that
our leaders recognized the fairness and the ne-
cessity for equalizing educational opportunities
as between rich, populous centers and sparsely
settled rural areas. Through the equalization
program, the richer and more densely populated
counties are helping to educate children from
rural areas, and a teacher is paid from state

funds according to training and experience, with-
out regard to where the teaching is done.

There were those who opposed the setting up
of an equalizing fund on the theory that every
county should pay for the education of its own
children. Today the plan of equalization in Geor-
gia is recognized and accepted as equitable, prac-
tical, and truly democratic.

The necessity for equalizing educational op-
portunities on a national scale, comparable to
our own state plan, has received added impetus
by the adoption of a Federal Aid plank in the
national Democratic platform last summer.

Georgia's Robert Ramspeck, Democratic
Whip, member of House Committee on Educa-
tion, and Congressman from the Fifth District,
is the author of H. R. 1296, and Senator Lister
Hill is author of the companion Federal Aid bill,
S. 181.

Said the Atlanta Constitution editorially Jan-
uary 11th, "Federal Aid for education, in short,
is the only possible way through which southern
children may be insured equality of educational
opportunities. The Ramspeck bill will receive
the support and influence of every southern rep-

[5]

resentative who is worthy of the name."

Editor John Paschall of the Atlanta Journal,
in "Views of the News" said, "The first section
of this bill seems to be a complete answer to those
who fear Federal Aid for schools might be the
beginning of Federal Control of education. Let
me read this section: 'Section 1. No depart-
ment, agency or officer of the United States shall
exercise any supervision or control over any
school or State educational agency with respect
to which funds are expended pursuant to this act,
nor shall any term or condition of any agree-
ment under this act relating to any contribution
made under this act to or on behalf of any school
or state educational agency, authorize any agency
or officer of the United States to control adminis-
tration, personnel, curriculum, or materials of
instruction'."

Governor Ellis Arnall is vigorous in behalf of
Federal Aid. Said the Governor, "The pending
measure to provide Federal assistance to educa-
tion deserves widespread support. It is a sincere
effort to face the facts and to deal with them
realistically . . . We cannot escape the tenacity
of facts; for facts are stubborn and unyielding
things. And these are facts: that State and local
resources, especially in Southern States, are in-
adequate to maintain the educational systems
that we need and that our children deserve; that
Federal assistance is a sensible solution; and that
the pending Federal Aid Bill is an equitable
measure projecting a wise solution to the prob-
lem."

On December 20, 1944, President Roosevelt
signed the Federal Highway Act, which appro-
priates Federal Aid to Georgia in the amount of
$11,581,025 annually for building and main-
taining an adequate system of highways.

Annually, the Georgia delegation votes Fed-
eral Aid in the amount of $1,131,355.39 for the
maintenance and support of the University Sys-
tem of Georgia. (Morrill since 1862, Smith-Le-
ver since 1914, and the Bankhead-Jones since
1918.)

There is now pending in the Congress, Federal
Aid legislation (S. 181 and H. R. 1296) which,
if passed, would appropriate to Georgia annually
$10,465,580 for building and maintaining an
adequate system of public schools.

While we are glad that Federal Aid funds are
available for road construction, highway mainte-
nance, and support of the University System, we
cannot understand why when Federal Aid funds
are asked to maintain the most important func-
tion in a democracy public schools offering
better opportunity to every rural boy and girl in
every congressional district in Georgia some of
the same people who favor Federal Aid for high-
ways and Federal Aid for higher education be-
come "fearful" of Federal Control and State's
Rights.

The lack of understanding of the benefits of
Federal Aid for public schools continues to be a
major hindrance in securing this legislation.

[6]

C. Murphey Candler

The great-great-grandson of the original Agnes Scott,
a Decatur lawyer and editor of the DeKalb New Era,
points out the

DANGERS

IN FEDERAL AID

Two measures, S. 181 and HR 1296, recently
introduced in Congress, merit serious consider-
ation. Both provide for the same thing, Fed-
eral aid to Public School systems.

That Public Schools need financial aid is un-
questionable. Teachers in many sections are
underpaid; school rooms are over-crowded; fa-
cilities are inadequate. All of this is due to a
lack of money.

Federal aid to education is not a new idea.
Vocational agriculture,
home economics, school
lunch rooms, shop
equipment, nursery
schools and other ac-
tivities have for some
time received Federal
funds.

The trend toward
subsidies has become
greater with each pass-
ing year. We find our-
selves accepting Fed-
eral aid as a matter of

course and are growing to expect it in greater
abundance. Conversely, we are looking less and
less to our local governments for sustenance. The
inevitable results will be impotent local govern-
ments and a powerful central government with
complete control of our local institutions and
functions.

The question then is not so much the passage
or defeat of these two measures per se. It goes
far deeper into the American way of life and
concerns itself with the question, do we want
our local affairs to be controlled by a highly
centralized Federal government or by our friends
and neighbors. If we accept the former we must
abandon that under which we have prospered for
nearly two centuries and rely on a system that
has destroyed both ancient and contemporary
governments. The decision on these two bills will
not decide the issue but will set a precedent that
will directly affect our people in future genera-
tions.

For they, unlike other subsidies, do not deal
with financing homes or businesses, nor with aid-
ing the needy, the blind and the aged. They deal
with a subsidy on the factors in our everyday

life that teach our chil-
dren in their formative
years and give them
training, theories and
fundamentals that will
rule the destinies of
our nation. The mould-
ing and fashioning of
young minds is not a
thing of a temporary
nature but is of the
very essence of perm-
IH^IHHH^H anency. As is always
Mary Wallace Kirk true of acts having

[7]

permanent results they should be entered into
only after exhaustive study. Ours is the choice
now. Once we have set our course it will be
extremely difficult to alter it.

Aside from this long range view-point, mat-
ters that relate specifically to these bills should
be considered. In Section I elaborate details are
given whose purpose is to eliminate the possi-
bility of Federal control. No doubt this is the
intent of the authors and we do not question their
good faith. But what of the potential power of
Congress? Congress makes laws and by the same
token has the perfect right to amend them. Sup-
pose this law is enacted as innocently as it is
written and later a different Congress should
amend it and give wider control. The result
would be calamitous. For once our school sys-
tems are built around these funds they would be
so dependent upon them for existence that they
could not withdraw.

Furthermore, Section VI imposes ten so-called
qualifications on the acceptance of this money
which though they avoid very adroitly contra-
vening Section I in letter do contravene it dis-
tinctly in spirit. They include among other
things, a strict compliance with the apportion-
ment fixed; reports to the Federal government
on expenditures; audits by the Federal govern-
ment; the amount of local funds that must be
paid to schools receiving Federal funds. Penal-
ties are provided for the violation of these qual-
ifications if once accepted.

If these qualifications, which are nothing but
control even if mild, are plainly incorporated in
the original bills despite Section I, what is to
prevent a future Congress from increasing them?
For instance, because not all the people want
their children taught the Bible and because these
funds are derived from all the people, it could
be said that teaching the Bible in Public Schools
was prohibited as being contrary to freedom of
religion. Likewise it could be claimed that ra-
cial segregation was in violation of the Constitu-
tion, that schools were improperly located, that
curricula should be adjusted and other things
equally as antagonistic to sections and localities
could be made mandatory.

Money is a very necessary thing and delightful
to have and as stated our schools unquestionably
need more money. But it is even more necessary
that they be controlled locally. That is one of
the cardinal features of our birthright and we
must keep it inviolate. If by being the recipients
of a benign central government we lose or even
jeopardize our inherent right to control locally
the teaching of our children, all the money in
the world will not be worth a farthing and our
way of life as we have known it will be a mean-
ingless thing.

Let us therefore be quite sure where this pleas-
ant looking and enticing road leads before we
enter too far. Let us remember too that "all that
glitters is not gold."

[8]

AN EXCELLENT THING IN WOMAN

Ada Comstock Notestein

With Tichness of human understanding, with the re-
sources of her own full mind, and with an urgent sense
of the world's need of remaking, Mrs. Notestein appeals
to the college graduate to think and keep on thinking.
She is president emerita of Radcliffe College.
We publish her commencement address.

My title "An Excellent Thing in Woman" may
be somewhat misleading to you if you remember
your Shakespeare. I will give you another clue,
therefore, to the subject on which I wish to speak.
If I had a text it would be taken from that poem
of Blake's which contains the stanza :

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand :
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant land.

The heart of the text is to be found in the
words "I will not cease from mental fight."

People now in their fifties often say that their
generation has seen more than its share of
trouble. They fought in the first world war; they
had to endure the worst depression this country
has ever seen ; and now their sons and daughters
are having to bear the brunt of this second and
greater war. It is true that the last 30 years have
included more of destruction, death, and loss
than any comparable period of which I know.
Worst of all, it has given body to fears which,
though they have sometimes been uttered, have
hitherto been vague and remote. Men who have
visited the bombed areas of Europe speak now

with sober realism of the possible destruction of
civilization or even as I have heard one do of
"the extinction of the human race." They have
seen such devastation, and they know by what
means it can be extended and made more com-
plete. Wholesale obliteration of libraries, mu-
seums, and works of art; wholesale slaughter of
the population of a country it is not hard to
imagine that a world so wrecked would be per-
manently crippled and degraded. Almost more
terrifying than the thought of physical destruc-
tion of peoples and their monuments is that of
the damage to civilization if it should cease to
respect anything but force. We are seeing some-
thing of that kind of moral deterioration now. At
the time of the first World War Germany's refer-
ence to a treaty as a scrap of paper was highly
shocking. Today, it shocks no one that treaties
should be binding only so long as they are ad-
vantageous to the parties concerned. "Don't you
think it natural, Sir, that a very powerful coun-
try should try to control the world?" a thoughtful
and decent freshman remarks to his history
teacher. We have seen extraordinary instances
of courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice in this war, but
we have also seen, I think, a general lowering of
belief in mercy and integrity as standards of con-
duct. Sometimes the words of the Old Testament
prophets, their denunciations and lamentations
seem more applicable to the present day than
any passages we can find in the New Testament.

[9]

Nor have those of us, who lived through the
last war any illusions about a quick recovery.
The European war is won, Hitler and Mussolini
are dead, the war with Japan will perhaps be
over earlier than we supposed. Then for the long
slow upward climb. Perhaps we learned some-
thing from the years following 1918 and may
know how to prevent some of the evil conse-
quences of a world war. Our best-learned lesson
is that a great war does not end wars, but instead
sows the seeds of further trouble. The change in
the general attitude in this country toward a
world security organization is the most striking
instance of our having learned something from
experience. But all that 1918 and succeeding
years taught us is inadequate for meeting the
problems of 1945 and hereafter. It is not only
because of the greater scale of the conflict, and
the implication of new weapons and methods. It
is not only because destruction has been so com-
plete, and the loss of life so terrific. It is the
poisonous ideas, still dominant in the minds of
our enemies, which must appall us. Those ideas
are infectious; their influence is felt even in the
ranks of those who have been giving their lives
to oppose them. The wounds which civilization
has received in this war cannot be healed alone
by rendering Germany and Japan impotent for
the next quarter century, or by re-building shat-
tered cities and restoring industry and commerce
and decent living standards. The prevention of
another war cannot be left to an organization or
organizations, however carefully set up. Minds
have been distorted and spirits corrupted, and
there is no single or rapid way of bringing about
their reformation. A poet of today has said,
"There never was a war that was not inward: I
must fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war." There is a long task to be under-

taken, and it so relates itself to our private, so-
cial and national life as well as to our foreign
relations that its weight leaves free no pair of
honest shoulders.

It was the thought of that long and all-com-
prehending task that brought me to this subject.
For clearly, not much of it can be done by people
of my generation or even by those who belong to
the generation of your parents. You and those
a little older than you must bear the brunt. Some-
times people of my age, when they are thinking
only of themselves are glad that their responsi-
bility in this matter is soon to be ended.

The relief is only momentary, however, for
you and your children and the future of civiliza-
tion are of too great concern to us. It is from
our point of view, anxious, though not unhopeful,
desperately eager to see you do your job that I
speak. We know that if the world falls to pieces
again the labor and sorrow, the blood and sweat
and tears, will be yours. A few years ago, I be-
lieve, a group of students in one of our universi-
ties started as a joke an organization which they
called "Veterans of Future Wars," demanding
that they be given pensions and bonuses while
they were young and could enjoy them. I saw it
stated recently that of the nine charter members
of that care-free organization, eight are today in
the armed services. They are that which they
laughed at the thought of being. It is against
such a fate for you that we want to see you arm
yourselves today.

It seems a rather solemn and portentous issue
to urge upon you just now. After all, what can
you do? You can help in various ways to aid
recovery from this war. You can work in hos-
pitals and the Red Cross, you can perhaps enlist
in one of the services. What part, after all, can

[10]

you take in the activities directed toward the pre-
vention of future wars? No one of your genera-
tion sits in the Security Conference. You were
not represented by contemporaries at Bretton
Woods or at the Food Conference at Hot Springs.
It will be a long time before you or your broth-
ers or friends will be in Congress or even in the
legislatures of your states.
You may well think that for
some years to come you may
and should concentrate your
energies and thoughts on
more immediate and practi-
cal concerns. There is a phase
of your situation in that re-
spect which deserves men-
tion. Many of the young men
who will soon be mustered
out are of your age or only
a little older. It is hard to
believe that they will not have a burning eager-
ness to prevent the development of another war.

Young though you and they are, you make a
group which by its very size can exercise great
influence from the beginning; and which might
easily, as its members come into positions of
power shape the policy of this country. There
are sometimes generations which leave their
mark on the world more than those before or
after them. With the incentive provided by its
experience of this war, yours might be such a
generation. Even though great decisions are now
being made without your having any part in
them, in carrying them out, in modifying or dis-
carding them, you will have your chance and
your responsibility. It is none too soon to begin
to study them and their workings.

In a good many colleges just now, perhaps in

Mary Codington

all, thought is being given to revision of the
course of study and methods of teaching in the
hope of preparing students more adequately to
grapple with the post-war problems of life. Some
colleges are trying to enlist the aid of their grad-
uates by asking pointed questions. These, for
instance. "What have you found lacking in your
own college education?"
'"What can this college do
to give more meaning and re-
ality to its training?" I have
known students in less exact-
ing times than these, who
tried to assess at the end of
their senior years what they
had gained; what they had
missed; where they had been
wise or foolish in their choices
of studies and in the use of
their time. Often there is
something of the feeling people have at the end of
life "How much better I could do it if I could
begin all over again ! " But the fact that you are in
this group today means that you have certain re-
quirements which will be helpful to you in the
future. You have stored up some knowledge.
You have shown some capacity for independent
work. Your susceptibility to beauty in one or
more of the arts has been heightened. You have
proved yourselves capable of living under a fixed
if not too rigorous routine and of accommodating
yourself to living in a group. On the whole, you
probably feel more at home in the world than
you did when you came; and I suspect you may
think of that sense of initiation as your greatest
gain, and the acquirement on which you can most
surely build. I do not minimize it, and I believe
that the American college for woman can be

[11]

proud of the ease with which its graduates enter
into the life of their communities. What I am not
sure of is that you estimate properly and will
make efforts to improve whatever you have
gained in the sheer ability to think to think as
distinguished from to learn or to be responsive
or to exercise intuition or to be efficient in doing.

You can hardly be blamed if that is the case,
for one of the odd paradoxes in this country of
ours is that we should be so committed to the
idea of education, and yet so prone to disparage
the faculty at which education is chiefly aimed
the intellect. Highbrow, brain trust, blue stock-
ing are terms of reproach. We speak of the in-
telligentsia, the intellectuals with something of a
sneer. The processes of the thinking mind seem
to us cold, rigid, a little inhuman in their depend-
ence upon logic and proved fact. Those who de-
vote themselves to thinking, research, the pursuit
of truth for its own sake are generally supposed
to be lacking in practicality and an understand-
ing of daily life. "You got to eat, too," the New
Yorker commented after quoting a highly scien-
tific and polysyllabic definition of life culled
from a Ph.D. thesis.

Necessarily our human ideal is that of the all-
round person. To possess all good attributes in
perfect balance is obviously desirable. The cu-
rious thing is that a slight surplus of energy or
emotional warmth rouses no such criticism as a
little preponderance on the intellectual side. So
pure an intellectual as Santayana speaks wist-
fully in his latest book of respecting and loving
the English psyche "because of the primacy of
the physical and moral nature over the intelec-
tual. It was the safer order of things, more vital,
more manly than the reverse. Man was not made
to understand the world but to live in it."

Yet I would say that the present situation sug-

gests that unless men understand the world bet-
ter than they have done they may find themselves
robbed of the chance to live in it. The blindness
of the Allied Countries in allowing events to
shape themselves for this war is a different kind
of blindness from that which led our enemies to
plan it; but on both sides, it seems to me, intelli-
gence might have prevented the horrors of these
last six years. It has been an inexpressibly hid-
eous example of the folly and shortsightedness
of men. To indict the leaders for failure to ana-
lyze and discern and foresee it not enough. The
indictment must also be against the mass of peo-
ple who chose or accepted such leadership and
let themselves be led into such a trap. Let it be
granted that greed, ambition, lust for power,
selfish and evil impulses played their part. I am
not decrying in any way the importance of seek-
ing to establish better feeling in the world, to
make justice prevail; but it seems to me clear
that our surest hope of better management of
world affairs lies in bringing into them a higher
degree of intelligence. It is not enough to mean
well. I recall a remark made to me by Justice
Brandeis many years ago, when in response to
his question about the outlook of Radcliffe stu-
dents I said that they had pretty generally a great
desire to be helpful in the world. "That is very
dangerous," he said, and I was too dashed to
make him explain himself. He referred, of
course, to the mischief that may be wrought by
good will which is not backed by knowledge and
wisdom.

It would hardly be possible for young women
even when by the very act of going to college
they confess a leaning towards things of the
mind, not to be a little sensitive to disparagement
of the intellectual. It is a temptation often to
play down or disguise an aptitude for mathe-

[12]

matics or physics or philosophy, a taste for se-
rious reading, a liking for the library even
greater than that for the tennis court or the dance
floor. A young woman of whom I heard not long
ago transferred at the end of her sophomore year
from one college to another. The record she
brought with her was good, but not excellent.
It was made up of B's except for two C's. The
admissions officer questioned her about the C's.
"I had to get them," she replied. "If my record
had been all B's it would have put me on the
Dean's list." One likes to record that an ener-
getic dean persuaded this young woman to give
her good mind free rein, and that she graduated
finally summa cum laude. I remember another
young woman who married just before she gradu-
ated magna cum laude. She did well, one would
think, but her dean was not satisfied. "You could
perfectly well have taken a summa," she com-
plained. The student didn't deny it, remarking
only "Don't you think it would have been a little
excessive to be married and graduate with a sum-
ma all in one June?"

One may sympathize with a desire not to pa-
rade a superiority over one's fellows, one must
respect a shrinking from anything like arrogance
of mind. But often the failure to satisfy a natu-
ral desire for study and learning, an attempt
even to stifle or disguise it is a pose, an insin-
cerity which weakens the whole personality.
Sometimes the failure to seize the opportunities
for mental development which college offers is
due to a belief that a trained mind is a rather
useless piece of baggage unless it is to serve a
specific purpose such as earning a living. It is
that point of view which leads often, even after
an academic success in college, to the abandon-
ment afterward of all intellectual exercise. How-
ard Mumford Jones, you will perhaps recall re-

marked bitterly once that the purpose of putting
a student through a thorough course in English
literature and finally stamping him with an A.B.
is to make him feel entirely free to read nothing
but the Saturday Evening Post all the rest of his
life.

Nevertheless, there is usually less to complain
of in this regard about students in college than
about the alumnae they become. While they are
undergraduates they feel, in varying degrees, of
course, a certain responsibility for the exercise
and betterment of their mental powers. They ob-
serve their teachers, sometimes critically, more
often generously, and are sincerely appreciative
of those who have opened a field of knowledge to
them and have shown them how to use the tools
of thought. When they graduate they often mean
to go on in the lines of reading or investigation
which they have begun. What they do not realize
is the obstacles which will present themselves to
any such program. The necessary labors and oc-
cupations of daily life sap this energy. Some-
times those labors involve discipline of the mind
or hand, but often they are routine duties, mak-
ing more demand upon character and emotional
qualities than upon those of the intellect. They
afford their own kind of discipline, but may do
little to keep the mind alert and eager. Perpet-
ual interruptions such as the quiet of the college
library or laboratory never knew prevent con-
tinuity of thought. Our national habit of busy-
ness, and our cheerful gregariousness rob us of
the solitary hours in which we could concentrate
on some line of reading or thought or study.
Moreover, except in the professions, the kind of
work women do in their homes or in offices and
places of business is less conducive than that of
men to the acquirement of precise knowledge and
the development of the capacity to analyze facts

[13]

and to reach responsible conclusions. Altogether,
to maintain the life of the mind, the steady im-
provement as the years go on, of the ability to
think, requires conscious and determined effort,
and even one whose intentions are of the best
may find circumstances too much for her. I re-
member in 1931 meeting in Shanghai a young
Chinese woman who had graduated recently
from an American College for women. She had
done her major work in economics and sociology,
and had had as a teacher a very gifted woman
who often sent her students out with projects to
carry on after graduation. It occurred to me to
ask the Chinese woman whether she was follow-
ing up any line of work begun in college. You
should have seen the look, almost of guilt, which
convulsed that calm Oriental face and have heard
the flurried excuses which she poured out to me
as if I were that faraway teacher. She had meant
to carry on those studies, her marriage and her
baby and the work she was doing for the Y. W.
C. A. had prevented her, she would soon get at

them, would I please tell Miss that she

hadn't forgotten what she had undertaken to do.
I laughed and tried to assure her that no one
could fail to understand her situation. Yet in
very truth she was facing in concrete shape the
issue which I want to present to you. It was not
that the studies she had expected to continue
were necessarily of great importance. The point
is that she was in danger of losing in the heat and
labor and preoccupations of the day her skill
with important tools of thought.

I wish I had the eloquence to convince you that
hard, slow, painful though the process may be,
the continued development of your mental pow-
ers is the obligation which your diplomas lay
upon you. It is a part of your obligation as citi-
zens. The country and this world have been ask-

ing of men, and women, too, that they should
give their lives. It is asked of them now that
they should give their minds to problems on the
solution of which depends the continuance of our
civilization. A good many years ago, in times
far less critical than ours, a writer said "When
we consider the nature of the problems to be
solved in our day, it seems that intelligence is the
virtue we particularly need. We make a moral
issue of a economic or social question, because
it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question
for intelligence. If you want to get out of pris-
on, what you need is the key to the lock." I do
not believe that the infinitely complex questions
which confront the world today can be left to
our leaders. The very fact that they are leaders
subjects them to pressure from those they repre-
sent. Naturally, those whose selfish interests are
concerned exert such pressures. It is, I think,
quite literally, a life or death matter for this
country and the world that leaders should feel
the pressure and the support of men and women
who give the honest and unselfish thought of dis-
ciplined minds to the issues which must be met.
Men and women who have no axes to grind, who
have learned to detect the hollow tone of parti-
san propaganda, who can look for the heart of
an issue and make a reasoned judgment regard-
ing it these are the citizen-soldiers most needed
in the years ahead. Your diplomas should con-
script you into that army.

It is not only in your life as citizens that the
keen and good and dispassionate mind serves
you well. I have always believed that many of
the private and personal problems of our lives
suffered from the lack of thinking through. You
will understand that I am not advocating the ap-
plication of a cold and pitiless logic to matters
of personal relationship and duty. One of the

[14]

highest functions of the thinking mind is to dis-
cern and weigh values. Have you ever thought
in how many of the great tragedies it was a fail-
ure of knowledge or insight which brought about
the unhappy end? If Othello had done a little
research on the subject of that lost handkerchief,
if Romeo had known about Juliet's sleeping po-
tion . . . ! It seems almost blasphemous to make
such suggestions. Strong feeling, right feeling,
the sorrows and exultations of the human heart,
the magnificent exercise of the human will are
the sources of magic and power in our lives, as
well as of our anguish and despair. To recog-
nize them for what they are and to give them
their proper outlet is one of the functions of the
thinking, considering mind.

There is a sense, moreover, in which we live
only insofar as we are aware of our living that
is, only so far as we think. This seems like a
dangerous doctrine leading to an indrawn and
introspective habit of mind. But the adventure
of humanity is to be felt and shared in only by
an act of the imaginative mind, observing, re-

flecting, considering. If you have read Rumer
Godden's "Take Three Tenses" you will recall
what Rollo says of his retirement. "I had ex-
isted for a considerable space of time. Only then
did I begin to live." One need not, however,
wait until the end of life to live. Action need not
be incessant, one need not be rushed along so fast
on the stream of events that the world cannot be
seen. The mind affords us, if we will give it the
chance, not only guidance in life but the very
means of savoring our lives, of knowledge that
we live, and of carrying from one year to an-
other the residue of wisdom which means in-
creasing skill in living and appreciation of the
possible depth and intensity of human expe-
rience.

The excellent thing in woman, as Shakespeare
denned it, was the voice ever soft, gentle, and
low. It is another excellent thing, in man or
woman, which I have been trying to commend to
you this morning the life-long effort to strength-
en and improve the mind as a tool for enjoying,
serving and living.

[15]

REACTIONS to "are women's colleges for women?'

Amelia (Nic

Icels)

CatK Mn

'39

I have read Professor Howard Mumford Jones'
article with interest but with concern. It seems
to me that his argument is unsound: it places
disproportionate emphasis on the utilitarian as-
pect of education; and it disregards women as
human beings and not as a group apart from
men. I wonder what this educated woman of his
will talk about after a dinner 'graciously' pre-
pared.

The question is whether the liberal college
prepares us for life. I believe that it does. I
believe that a woman liberally educated can ac-
quire for herself the practical knowledge neces-
sary to meet adequately problems of home man-
agement and of professional life. But she needs
also resources of mind and spirit that help her
to view life as a whole with a sense of propor-
tion. Thus fortified she can bring to the humb-
lest task an element of dignity. I am convinced
that it is my "life of the mind," such as it is, that
enables me to maintain a measure of balance in
this disordered world. For me it is exciting and
challenging to contemplate a life of continuing
development of these resources.

Mary

(Sturte*

ant) Bean

'33

The average woman in college needs above
all to be taught to know herself, and secondly to
have as many avenues as possible opened before

[16]

her for future development and enjoyment. Call-
ing our graduation from college "Commence-
ment" should be just that: the beginning of
learning, not the end. In a group of women, the
college graduate should be distinguished not so
much by what she already knows, but by the
willingness of her mind and heart to continue
learning.

There is a second function of a women's col-
lege pertaining to personal appearance. I do not
mean that a woman's college should turn out a
group of fashion plates. Far from it. But I do
mean that it should help its undergraduates to
learn how important good taste and careful
grooming, health, diet and carriage are in every-
thing she does. If a girl looks her best, she acts
her best. She is more appreciated by others, and
consequently is more successful in everything
she undertakes, and is ultimately happier.

fiaertio

ni ( w>uo) **

'30

Being a wife, mother, homemaker, and there-
fore falling into the category of the "admirable,
average American girl" to whom Professor Jones
addresses his excellent ideas, I find myself re-
sponding warmly in the affirmative to their time-
liness and pertinence. It is not, I think, that the
college curriculum offered me the wrong sub-
jects, but that the very courses which might have

aided me greatly in doing my present job effec-
tively were lacking. Although my ultimate career
of homemaker came after brief periods in adver-
tising, teaching, and editorial work, I still think
that courses in Home Arts would have been valu-
able to me in the interim. Every woman is poten-
tially a homemaker no matter to what intellec-
tual heights she aspires.

I shall hope, however, that the auricular re-
forms Professor Jones's suggestions call for will
not necessitate the rejection of such essentials as
chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, modern
languages, history, literature. For what will it
profit a woman to be adept in the "gracious
preparation of food," wise in the "buying of
household articles and in the proper management
of her personal and domestic life," if she lacks
knowledge and understanding of the world in
which she lives?

Betty Stevenson

'41

I consider Howard Mumford Jones' article, "Are
Women's Colleges for Women," underhanded
and hypocritical, especially coming as it does
from someone with a "name."

As if women, by the very facts of their physi-
cal nature, do not have two strikes against them
to begin with! What with an unavoidable
amount of time given up to housekeeping and
child rearing (enjoyable as these occupations
may be), why bind them hand and foot to the
material side of their life? What snobbery there
is in his tone of setting aside certain walks for
women, certain garden paths down which they
can gracefully walk.

Not all women, any more than all men, want

to go to a liberal arts college. Like men who go
in for business management, or advertising, or
salesmanship, there is no reason why they should
not get special training in special schools. But
for women who go to colleges to learn, it would
certainly be a gross injustice to train them in
skills rather than to enlarge their minds.

I would like to call Mr. Jones' attention to the
simple fact that the objectionable advertising
which he quotes at length (campus clothes,
beauty majors, etc.) is directed as snob appeal
largely to women who did not go to college and
who have the distorted Hollywood idea of what
college is rather than the remotest notion of the
real thing. It is the liberal arts college trained
woman who sees through such cheap showman-
ship and escapes the domination of the slick
magazines.

Charm of manner in the author is only a veneer
covering for an essential contempt he feels for
women as educated human beings.

Mary

Wallace Kirk' 11

Mr. Jones has written a lively and provocative
article distinguished more for its wit and clever-
ness than for any constructive ideas. Although
he is disarming in his approach, one suspects his
basic conception of woman to be solely that of
"an help-meet" to man. Insisting that his inquiry
into Women's Colleges is purely an educational
affair and removed from the man-woman con-
flict, he forthwith throws it into that arena by
putting woman into a separate category and
treating her only as woman not as a person.
Today as never before both men and women need
greater power in viewing the world as a whole,

[17]

of integrating and humanizing knowledge, of
acquiring the ability to assess values and make
reasoned judgments, of greater awareness of
living. This goal of the liberal arts college is
well worth the striving.

"Held in your hand,

The world can weight your hand, strengthen

it, fix it,
Till you can move your hand with the weight

in it,
And you, the flexible hand, the world, are

one."

BOOK REVIEW

TEACHER IN AMERICA
by Jacques Barzun

Little, Brown and Co., Boston, $3.00

Elizabeth Stevenson '41

"Teacher in America" is the plain speech of
a teacher who has pride in teaching. It takes,
he says, "the stubbornness of a saint coupled with
the imagination of a demon." He levels proper
scorn at the piddlers, dilletantes, and sterile
drudges of the profession and at the softness of
fiber which wants an adulterated product in
place of real learning or teaching.

Barzun is a young man, with the energy and
zeal of the young who fling out their ideas in the
face of all pomposities, conventionalities, falsi-
ties which they see standing idly in the way of
the real thing. However, this real thing must
be fun too. He is particularly impatient of the
wrong kind of solemnity.

In this book, which is a modest book, written
in a light style, the author attacks his central

problem from a series of angles. He covers his
subject thoroughly enough to tread on a number
of toes. He is not tilting with windmills but with
the average stupidities of any college campus.
Those who share his seriousness about teaching
should be glad for his honest anger.

The colloquial diction is not that of a sloppy
mind, but of a direct man conscious of the value
of a simple style. To begin with, definitions are
in order, and he limits his theme to teaching
rather than "education," that is, the practical
rather than the theoretical problem, and further
narrows it to college teaching, the kind he has
done.

He begins with a hit direct at the merry propa-
gandist: subjects should be taught, or rather can
be taught, and not principles. He may dismay

[18]

the near-sighted optimist by stating flatly that
"tolerance" or "democracy" cannot be taught,
but that such attitudes "occur as by-products."

Thus he starts: subjects not principles must
be taught. And after examining humorously and
sharply the difficulties of communication between
one human being, the teacher, and another, the
student, he devotes the solid middle portion of
the book to a discussion of what he considers the
true subject matter of the curriculum. I cannot
think of a better way of suggesting the tone of the
book than by giving a brief summary of this
curriculum as much in the author's sense and
wording as possible.

Mathematics should be induced into the un-
willing student's mind (unwilling because it has
been taught stupidly) as a system and not as a
meaningless set of formulas and might well be
studied in conjunction with informal elementary
logic. In this way, "the poetical imagination
behind the invention of zero" is not wasted.

Bring back the sciences, he says next, into
the humanities. Knowledge should not only add
to one's powers, but should "enhance the quality
of all of them." Also, "The worst danger is the
creation of a large, powerful, and complacent
class of college-trained uneducated men at the
very heart of our industrial and political sys-
tem."

History he recommends for a sense of propor-
tion about the present as well as the understand-
ing of the past ; again impatience with the unim-
aginative piling up of facts in poor teaching of
history. His own words: "Make the sense of the
past a function of your mind and you heighten
the flavor, enrich the texture of every experience,
from politics to art. It is the humanizing faculty
par excellence." (Barzun is a teacher of history.)

"What once were frills," music and art, he

would bring into a central position in the college
curriculum. "The aim ... is not to make picture
dealers or musical stenographers, but to teach
future 'educated' citizens two new and special
languages visual and auditory."

Barzun is entirely dissatisfied with our teach-
ing of languages. Frankly, he thinks they are not
taught, and sets out to combine the concentration,
or a moderate portion of it, of the army and navy
methods with the intelligent relations of these
studies (for which the army has no time) to the
fact that French or Russian or Portuguese are
live languages spoken by live people. And, "Of
course, there is one language though it may be
rude to mention it which was once taught, and
which is still a very good introduction to a fairly
large group. I mean "L-t-n." It was dropped
like a dead thing when the Classics went under
for the third time, about twenty years ago. But I
see no reason why it should not be revived."

The study of any literature (his chapter title
is, "Classics Off the Shelf") should be no genteel
pastime but the "gradual and deliberate accus-
toming of the feelings to strong sensations and
precise ideas." One of Barzun's finest passages
follows which should be quoted fully: "It (the
study of the arts in their great manifestations) is
a breaking down of self-will for the sake of
finding out what life and its objects may really
be like. And this means that most esthetic mat-
ters turn out to be moral ones in the end. Great
art offers a choice that of preferring strength
to weakness, truth to softness, life to lotus-
eating."

The rest of the book deals with the sad and
satirical chasm existing today between what the
college might be and what it is (not hopelessly)
as conditioned by social and monetary pressures.
The undeclared war between administrators and

[19]

teachers, the ridiculous degradation of the Ph.D.
requirement, the disposition of money left to
colleges it becomes buildings which the institu-
tion cannot afford or is wasted on tests or projects
(easily reported to donors) rather than on the
needed number of excellent teachers.

What Jacques Barzun emphatically does not
like is hokum, especially the elevated brand of
hokum dispensed so delicately in the place of the
tougher truth. He ridicules it where he finds it

in our present universities and colleges, where
too often it surrounds with the odor of sanctity
the mediocre while neglect is dealt out to the
authentic teacher. The fact that the college ordi-
narily has less of this commodity than other com-
munities, only makes the incidence of such
hokum more sameful. "Teacher in America"
should clear the air at least, and act as a stimulus
to another of the many fresh starts that teaching
goes through over and over again.

ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Annual Meeting of the
Alumnae Association

The Agnes Scott Alumnae Associa-
tion met on Saturday, June 2, 1945,
immediately following the Trustees'
Luncheon.

The meeting was called to order by the
president, Katharine Woltz Green, who
extended a cordial welcome to our new-
est alumnae, the Senior Class. She an-
nounced that due to the success of the
new Alumnae Fund Plan the Trustees
would renew their guarantee of $5,000
for the Alumnae Association budget for
next year. She then read her report
which summarized the year's activities
of the various committees of the or-
ganization. This report will be pub-
lished in the July Quarterly. Detailed
reports from the chairmen of the differ-
ent committees will also be published;
so they were not read.
Visiting alumnae were welcomed. Class
reunions were curtailed this year be-
cause of travel difficulties.
Changes in the Constitution and By-
Laws were presented by Lucy Johnson
Ozmer and were accepted by the mem-
bers. (See committee report.)
The continuation of the term of Mrs.
Frances Winship Walters as a Trustee
of the Alumnae Association was ratified
by a unanimous vote of the members
present.
Allie Candler Guy presented a list of

the names chosen by the nominating
committee. Eugenia Symms presented
nominations sent to the Alumnae Office.
The following officers were elected for
the new term: President, Margaret Mc-
Dow MacDougall; First Vice-President,
Lulu Smith Westcott; Recording Sec-
retary, Elizabeth Flake Cole; News-
paper Publicity Chairman, Jean Chal-
mers Smith ; Tearoom Chairman, Louise
McCain Boyce ; Second Floor Chairman,
Nell Pattillo Kendall; Constitution and
By-Laws Chairman, Marie Simpson Rut-
land; Grounds Chairman, Charlotte
Hunter.

Kitty Green expressed her thanks to
the members of the Executive Board
for their cooperation and fine work.
Penelope Brown Barnett proposed a
rising vote of thanks in appreciation of
the service rendered by our retiring
president, Katharine Woltz Green.
The meeting was turned over to the new
president, Margaret McDow MacDou-
gall. She introduced the other officers
elected for the new term.
It was announced that Carrie Scandrett,
Dean of Students, invited the alumnae
to an Open House at her new home on
the campus after this meeting. There
being no further business, the meeting
was adjourned.

Respectfully submitted,

Elizabeth Flake Cole

Recording Secretary

President of the Alumnae Association

Editor's Note The reports of the
President and Executive Secretary have
been cut to avoid repetition of Commit-
tee Reports.

In many ways the year 1944-45 has been
an outstanding one in the history of the
Agnes Scott College Alumnae Associa-
tion. Through the Trustees' generous
financial support of five thousand dol-
lars, we have been enabled to inaugu-
rate the Alumnae Fund Plan, whereby
alumnae have expressed their loyalty to
the college and have participated in its
development through voluntary contri-
butions.

Not only did the new plan abolish the
old system of dues, but it also insured
our having a democratic association in
that membership was based on a gift
of any size. The Alumnae Fund plan
provided for a more progressive organi-
zation with two full-time secretaries
employed, an office equipped with an
addressing machine and modern filing
materials, and with an enlarged publica-
tions system.

Under the direction of Dr. McCain, the
Alumnae Fund Campaign was launched
in October. An illustrated pamphlet
explaining the new plan was sent to all
alumnae on the mailing list. A letter
from the President of the Association
was sent to those who had not com-

[20]

pleted payments on their pledges to the
Semi-centennial Fund, stating that pay-
ments on their pledges this year would
entitle them to Alumnae Association
membership. The fall edition of the
Alumnae Quarterly devoted eight pages
to further promotion of the Alumnae
Fund Plan. In March a folder sum-
marizing the results of the plan through
the first six months of the school year
was circulated to all contributors to the
fund, to all graduates, and to those
other alumnae who had not been con-
tacted during the year. A real effort
was made to keep the file of alumnae
addresses accurate and up-to-date.

The results of our experimentation
under the new system have been very
gratifying. The alumnae have responded
generously to our appeal and as of to-
day, June 1, 1945, 798 alumnae have
given a total of $6,156.74. This in-
cludes in undesignated gifts $3,546.25,
which will enable us to repay to the
Board of Trustees the loan of three
thousand dollars. In addition scholar-
ships amounting to $1,100 have been
given to the college through the Fund
and payments of $1,510.49 have been
made through the Alumnae Fund on
Semi-centennial pledges. The Alumnae
Association is indeed happy to repay
the loan made by the Trustees and to
make these contributions to the college.
It is our hope that the Alumnae Fund
Plan may become so well established
that the Association may be entirely
self-supporting and that we may be able
to make a substantial gift to the college.
Although Mrs. Walters' magnificent
gift of $100,000 was made last summer
before our Alumnae Fund Plan was in-
augurated, we may claim it for the past
year's administration of our Alumnae
Association and accept her generosity
as an example and a challenge to all
loyal daughters of our college.

The Alumnae Quarterly has, during this
year, maintained a high standard not
only in regard to editorial policy and
lay-out, but also in regard to the num-
ber of alumnae reached through its cir-
culation. The associate secretary served
as Editor of the Quarterly and, in the
fall edition, circulated four thousand
copies. Subsequent editions have had
smaller circulations but have been
very favorably received throughout the
country.

In compliance with government regula-
tions, the Association has simplified
plans for Commencement and has cur-

tailed travel and unnecessary expendi-
tures as much as possible. No class re-
unions have been planned, but members
of the Association living in the vicinity
of the college have been invited to the
Trustees' Luncheon on June 2.

During the past year we of the
Alumnae Association have worked close-
ly with the college administration; we
have endeavored to strengthen the ties
between alumnae and students; and we
have sought in every way to promote the
best interests of the scattered daugh-
ters of our Alma Mater.

Respectfully submitted.

Katharine (Woltz) Green

Executive Secretary

During this first year of the new
alumnae fund we have made many pro-
gressive steps. When this plan was
presented to the Trustees of the college
in May 1944, they heartily endorsed the
plan and agreed to finance us to the
extent of $5,000. They increased their
annual grant to $2,000 and made us a
loan of $3,000. This enabled us to in-
crease our budget from $3,978.16 to
$6,689.46. This new budget permitted
the enlargement of our staff from one
to two full-time secretaries, and thereby
increased the services of the office.
The increased appropriation for print-
ing and postage made it possible for us
to send the October Preview, the Au-
tumn Quarterly and the March Report
of the fund to all graduates whose ad-
dresses were known. The new address-
ing machine greatly facilitated this pro-
cedure. The contributors to the fund
have received all publications. All of
the non-graduates have received one
publication.

Numerous letters and comments re-
ceived from alumnae and friends tell of
their wholehearted approval of the new
plan and of their appreciation for the
enlarged publications and increased ac-
tivities of the association.

Alumnae Clubs have been active during
the year. The groups in Charlotte, At-
lanta, Decatur, and Lexington have met
quite frequently. On Founder's Day.
thirteen additional Clubs held very in-
teresting meetings. The office supplied
these club officers with lists of alumnae
in their vicinity, names and addresses of
possible speakers, recent college pub-
lications and view books, victrola rec-
ords, and a letter of greeting and in-
formation from the office. The club of-

ficers returned to the office a report of
the meeting and the officers elected, a
corrected list of the addresses, and news
about all present at the meetings. The
lists of new addresses were a great
help to our files. Many of the clubs
have planned other meetings for the
year. At the expense of the college the
secretary met with the Charlotte Club
in December.

As we believe it is wise to acquaint
the students with our activities, several
events were planned with the Enter-
tainment Committee to honor students.
All during the year the secretary has
assisted the Granddaughter's Club with
their bi-monthly meetings, and a picnic
supper and banquet. The club meets in
the alumnae house and the members
have visited in the office and have en-
joyed looking for their mother's names
in the files and scrapbooks. The asso-
ciation provided refreshments for a few
of these meetings. These club members
have entertained alumnae children on
alumnae day and during some meetings
of the Decatur Club.
The freshman class was honored at a
tea in the Alumnae House and enjoyed
visiting the rooms upstairs and the
office. The seniors are well on the way
to becoming active members of the as-
sociation. Early in the year they elected
their life president and class secretary.
Then the class was divided into small
congenial groups of eight or ten. Two
or three of these small groups were
invited to meet together at the Alumnae
House in the spring. Out of the 92
invited, 76 came. Light refreshments
were served. They elected a group
leader who is to gather news for the
class secretary, and they filled out their
master card for our files. They were
given a complimentary copy of the
Autumn Quarterly and a report of the
Alumnae Fund. Then they observed the
files and scrapbooks in the office, and
the addressing machine. These seniors
were enthusiastic about the work of thp
association and were especially inter-
ested in the Clubs in other cities. The
finance committee has approved a rec-
ommendation to encourage seniors to
make a gift to the association before
they graduate so as to make them active
members for the remainder of this year
and all of the next year.
The increasing circulation of our publi-
cations has given us a check on the
names and addresses of graduates and
non-graduates in our files. Between

[21]

October 1944 and April 30, 1945, our
office had sent out 12,700 pieces of mail
to 6,348 alumnae.

Because this has been a transition year,
many problems which came up this year
will not develop again. Those alumnae
who had contributed dues in the past
had to be carried along with new con-
tributors until the dues expired. The
addressing machine was purchased this
year and we had to work out systems
for its effective use. A new bookkeep-
ing system was established for the fund
and a method of recording contributions
on new permanent cards had to be
worked out. This reorganization has at
times been difficult, but we believe that
the stepping stones are laid for a more
serviceable organization in the future.
With the trustees continuing their finan-
cial assistance, we have every reason
to believe that our alumnae will con-
tinue to contribute generously to the
Alumnae Fund and perhaps in a few
years will be able to make a substan-
tial annual gift to our Alma Mater.

Respectfully submitted,

Eugenia Symms

Alumnae Quarterly Editor

With genuine pleasure I signed a con-
tract with the President of the Agnes
Scott Alumnae Association to serve as
editor of the Alumnae Quarterly from
October, 1944 through July, 1945. Not
having any previous publication experi-
ence, I was indeed grateful to Ellen
Douglass Leyburn, then Chairman of
the Publications Committee, for having
planned the theme and requested the
articles for the Autumn Quarterly; to
Eugenia Symms for helping prepare
copy and proofread; to Professor How-
ard Thomas for advising on the make-
up; to Leone Bowers Hamilton for
planning and executing the Quarterly
layout; to Jane Guthrie Rhodes for ad-
vising on editorial policy, and to Dr.
McCain for his helpful suggestions.
In October, Lita Goss was appointed
Chairman of the Publications Committee
to succeed Ellen Douglass Leyburn,
who resigned because of illness. (See
report of this committee for details of
its work.)

Besides reading alumni publications of
other colleges, planning the Quarterlies,
requesting and acknowledging articles,
preparing copy, proofreading, confer-

ring with the art editor and publications
advisors , and keeping informed on
campus events, the biggest claim on the
editor's time has been compiling the
class news, which has been more abun-
dant this year than ever before.
The Four Quarterlies published in
1944-45 are as follows:
Autumn Quarterly, "Community of
Mind," 64 pages; Circulation, 4,000;
Cost, $726.87.

Winter Quarterly, "Swords and Plow-
shares," 56 pages; Circulation, 1,200;
Cost, $412.38.

Spring Quarterly, "Education at the
Crossroads," 68 pages; Circulation,
1,400; Cost, $511.75.

Summer Quarterly, Commencement
Number, 32 pages; Circulation, 1,400;
Cost $278.83.

The valuable cooperation given by au-
thors of articles, Publications Commit-
tee, art students, class secretaries,
proofreaders (Miss Louise McKinney,
Kitty Cunningham Richards, and Kath-
erine Philips), plus the thoughtful let-
ters and comments from alumnae and
the privilege of being at Agnes Scott
have made this editorship a real joy.

Billie (Davis) Nelson

COMMITTEE REPORTS

Alumnae Week-End Committee

Approximately two hundred alumnae
attended Agnes Scott Alumnae Day,
November 9, 1944.

Delightful features of the afternoon
were welcome addresses by President
McCain and Katharine Woltz Green,
Alumnae Association president; a lec-
ture by Miss Emily Woodward, Director
of Georgia Public Forum, on her visit
to Britain; and a tour of the campus
alumnae house and art gallery.
In the evening, the alumnae with their
husbands and children were the guests
of the College for dinner and for coffee
afterwards in the library with the
faculty. Dr. Will Durant concluded the
evening's program with a brilliant lec-
ture on "Philosophy and the War."

Mary Louise (Crenshaw) Palmour

Chairman

Constitution Committee

The following changes in Constitution
and By-Laws were approved by the
Executive Board and voted on at the
Annual Meeting:

Article 1. Membership.
Section 2. Life Memberships. There
will be no life memberships in the
future, but the full rights of those who
are already life members will be pre-
served.

Article IV. Officers and Committees.
Section 2. Change Executive Commit-
tee to Executive Board wherever the
term appears.

Section 5. (j) Leave out Preparatory
Schools Committee. Change other num-
bering in this section to conform.

Article VIII. Amendments.
These by-laws may be amended at any
meeting by a two-thirds majority vote
of the members voting provided that
the proposed changes have been au-
thorized by a majority vote of the Ex-
ecutive Board and have been sent to the
membership in advance of the meeting.
Article IX. Parliamentary Authority.
Section 1. Robert's Rules of Order Re-
vised shall be the Parliamentary Au-
thority of this organization.

Lucy (Johnson) Ozmer
Chairman

Entertainment Committee

The Entertainment Committee of the
Agnes Scott Alumnae Association ar-
ranged a Freshman Tea in February,
and a Dessert-Coffee for Seniors during
Commencement. The committee also as-
sisted in entertaining at Alumnae Day
and furnished funds for ice cream and
cookies for a granddaughters' picnic.
The Alumnae Secretary invited groups
of Seniors to the Alumnae House to
explain the workings of the Association
and its importance. For these she fur-
nished punch, and the committee paid
for cookies.

An interesting feature of the Freshman
Tea was the presence of two of our
distinguished alumnae, Sara Bell Han-
sell and Marian McCamy Sims as guests
of honor.
Expenses for the year were as follows:

Alumnae Day $16.49

Freshman Tea 16.00

Granddaughters' Picnic 6.35

Senior Groups 4.72

Senior Dessert 31.77

Total... $75.33

[22]

The chairman wishes to thank all those
not on her committee who so generously
gave their help at each of these times.

Martha Rogers Noble
Chairman

Garden Committe

Expenses from September 1944 through
May 1, 1945:
September 1944

Cutting hedge $ 1.90

Cutting grass and trimming ... 1.60
December 1944

250 pansy plants 8.75

April 1945

Cutting grass 75

Cutting hedge 1.90

Scraping walks, heavy clean-
ing around house and in

garden 8.00

Spreading gravel dust, clean-
ing pool, replanting water

lilies 7.75

3 tons of gravel dust at $3.50

(DeKalb Supply Company) 10.50

Labor, hedge, gravel % 7.50

Total $48.65

Gifts to garden: Camellia plants.

Plants for pool by Julia Pratt Smith
Slack.

The committee is very grateful for the
time given so freely by Mrs. R. B. Holt
during the summer of 1944 in caring
for the pruning of the shrubbery and
the essential trimming of the hedge and
lawn. Her continued interest during
the entire year and her willingness to
serve in an advisory capacity when
asked to do so have been deeply ap-
preciated.

Many of the "man hours" for the past
year have been contributed by Eugenia
Symms whose interest in and loyalty to
the cause of weeding and planting will
not be forgotten! The camellia plants
which she gave and set out are welcome
additions to the Alumnae House yard.

Charlotte Hunter
Chairman

Honse Decorations Committee

The expenses of the House Decorations
Commitee amounted to $3.76 spent for
one uniform, two caps and two aprons
for the housemaid. A carpet sweeper

was donated. As house furnishings are
hard to get now, we are postponing ad-
ditions and changes to a later date.

Mary (Warren) Reed
Chairman

Publications Committee

The Committee on Publications held
four meetings during the past year.
Themes and contributors for the in-
dividual issues of the Quarterly were
discussed as well as topics involving a
long-range view of the publication.

Early in the year, the function of the
Quarterly was denned and it was de-
cided to slant the appeal of the maga-
zine not only to the selected group of
Agnes Scott alumnae but to a wider
reading public as well. Each issue was
scrutinized with this purpose in mind
and the effort was made to balance re-
ports and news of localized interest
with articles of more general appeal.

A change in the type paper used, con-
sideration of methods of enlivening and
enriching class news, the substitution of
drawings for photographs, an enlarge-
ment of the field of contributors, and
the mixture of articles of a topical
nature with others of a more abiding
value were some of the means whereby
the committee sought this year to make
the Quarterly the organ of expression
for not only an alumnae group but
also a liberal arts college.

Lita Goss
Chairman

Second Floor Committee

Receipts from Alumnae Fund $50.00
Expenditures :

12 bath towels ._ $10.68

6 sheets 12.54

1 blanket 6.28

1 blanket 6.28

1 blanket 4.99

2 shades 1.18

1 bath set 2.98

12 wash cloths 1.80

1 pair bath
curtains 3.27

Total $50.00

Balance on hand None

Alice (McDonald) Richardson
Chairman

Student Loan Committee

Amount on hand 5/44, savings
account (and Gov't Bonds,
$300 ) $248.56

Deposited 7/44 129.96

Loan payment and interest

Deposited 12/44 44.35

Loan payment and interest

Deposited 1/45 1.77

Interest

To be deposited in May

Interest 3.75

$428.39
No loans this year!
Outstanding loans 8/44... $761.40

Nine letters written to try to collect
$381.00 of this amount. Some was col-
lected. At least $475.40 may be col-
lected. Several old debts amounting to
$200 seem hopeless and it is the recom-
mendation of this chairman that they
be dropped from the books.

Julia Pratt Smith Slack
Chairman

Tea Room Committee

The Tea Room Committee presents the
following report:

Receipts

Income from Alumnae Asso-
ciation $50.00

Expenditures

Painting back porch of Alum-
nae House 6.50

Three uniforms for maids 8.94

Linoleum for table tops 3.65

Two serving trays 6.98

Twelve dinner plates 9.48

Two dozen cups and saucers ... 4.80

Various articles of equipment 9.65

Total $50.00

Gifts have come from three sources
From the Decatur Club, six soup plates;
from Mrs. Roff Sims, a linen table
cloth; from the Tea Room Committee, a
large serving tray, a casserole, and one
maid's apron.

With pleasure is the announcement
made of the return of Mrs. James
Bunnell and Mrs. Ewing G. Harris as
hostesses and Tea Room managers for
the 1945-46 session.

Annie (Bryan) Scott
Chairman

[23]

i?i

For Reference

NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM THIS ROOM

/