Education: Peace Day

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At Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa at 8:30 one morning last week, undergraduates dozing through their first class were suddenly awakened by a clamor of chapel and class bells. Soon student messengers rushed into their classrooms shouting: "War has been declared! Go to the chapel!" Five minutes later, as 600 excited undergraduates jammed into chapel, the organ played My Country, 'tis of Thee. To the platform marched the college dean, followed by an army officer.

The "officer" read a telegram from "the Commander of the Sixth Corps area." It ordered all young men to report their names at once, be prepared for a war draft. As the collegians sat speechless, up jumped one of their number to cry: "You'll be fools to enlist!" From a hundred throats came a roar: "Yellow!" In a trice Cornell's student body was on its feet, shouting, screaming, stamping. In the midst of the uproar the leader of Cornell's swing band leaped on the platform, saxophone in hand, and began to jam. As Cornell's undergraduates realized that they had been summoned not to a real war but to a fake, they fell in relief to singing pacifist songs.

Such was perhaps the most successful bit of peace propaganda* attempted as an estimated 1,000,000 U. S. undergraduates observed annual "Peace Day" on Adolf Hitler's birthday. While most cheered collective security and President's Roosevelt's peace appeal to the dictators, on many a campus isolationists held rival meetings.