The TransAID project defines, develops and evaluates traffic management measures based on V2X equipped road infrastructure, primarily via simulations,to eliminate or mitigate the negative effects of Transition of Control (ToC) along Transition Areas in future mixed traffic scenarios where automated, cooperative, and conventional vehicles will coexist.This document aggregates, integrates, and analyses the results of the TransAID work packages. For each aspect of TransAID the major findings are presented and discussed.As a basis for the simulation studies several vehicle models were implemented successfully to create the right behaviour for lane changing(including cooperative versions), car following (including (C)ACC)and ToC/MRM algorithms. These models were created using a solid theoretical background, however, the availability of real-world data for input and calibration was very limited. From the baseline simulation runs we found that ToCs do not significantly disrupt traffic flow performance unless CAVs establish increased car-following headways during the ToC preparation phase. Disruptions escalate in case of CACC driving, increased share of CAVs in the fleet mix, and the occurrence of multiple ToCs within a narrow temporal window and spatial domain. Furthermore, in the case that a ToC is unsuccessful or not possible, unmanaged MRMs (taking place in lane and not being guided towards safe spots) can induce significant traffic disruption as well. On the other hand, simulation results indicated that cooperative lane changes minimize the frequency of ToC/MRM and their consequent adverse impacts on trafficflow operations. The benefits of cooperative lane changing are amplified with increasing share of CAVs and especially upstream of lanedrop locations.Building upon the vehicle models, simulations and the defined use cases, specific traffic measureswere developed to mitigate the effects of ToC events in transition areas. The traffic measures were implemented to study their effectiveness. Specifically, for each of the selected use cases the effects of the TransAID measures are evaluated regarding emissions, safety and efficiency. There is a trade-off between traffic safety versus traffic efficiency (as measured via throughput and travel times). It is often inherently difficult or even impossible to optimise both in the same context. Hence, typically a policy choice needs to be made, as to which of the two will have to be prioritised. Otherwise, results either improved or remained similar for all use cases and KPIs, with the exception of use case 3.1 (see Section 2.2.2 for details and Table 1at the end of Chapter 6). All use cases have in common that a reduction of MRMs is possible by providing infrastructure advice. Such advice, and the availability of safe spots, clearly reduces the number of stopped vehicles blocking the road.There is also a heavy dependence of the results on the mixture of vehicle types, in addition to the observation that less efficient traffic management performance is obtained for a higher LOS. The latter is in part logical, as for higher LOS there is more prominent congestion and the physical limits of the infrastructure remain a hard obstacle. By itself this is not a problem for TransAID, as the focus of the traffic management schemes is to prevent/postpone traffic breakdowns before they occur. While implementing and testing the traffic measures TransAIDalso identified or created the needed message sets and protocols to implement the measures using V2X communications. To that end, no new message sets wereneeded, but (minor) extensions to CAM, DENM, MCM and MAPEM were necessary. Especially MCM from the Manoeuvre Coordination Service (MCS) is key to multiple types of use case. Therefore, it is necessary to define a MCS that is valid for all types of scenarios. Aligned with the work of ETSI and by actively contributing, TransAID has proposed a MCS where the infrastructure takes an active role to facilitate the manoeuvres of vehicles and to increase the overall traffic flow and safety. The traffic management measures designed in TransAID also require that CAVs and road infrastructure units have an accurate perception of the environment. In addition to the MCS, TransAID has contributed to the evaluation and evolution of ETSI's Collective Perception Service (CPS) for cooperative perception. We have demonstrated that cooperative perception can improve CAVs perception capabilities when the trade-off between the perception capabilities and communications performance is balanced. Furthermore, the reliability of V2X communications has been addressed in TransAID using different and complementary techniques: compression, congestion control and acknowledgements.Besides the V2X communication, the communication to unequipped vehicles was of importanceand consisted of two parts. On the one hand, infrastructure needs to inform unequipped vehicles about issues on the road. On the other, automated vehicles themselves should provide information about their actual state to their surroundings, to avoid negative impacts.With regards to the infrastructure information, it needs to be mentioned that visual information on signs, variable or static, will never be as precise as V2X communication could be, esp. when looking to individual advices. Nevertheless, infrastructure can provide valuable information also to unequipped vehicles by signage, e.g., in terms of speed limits, distance (gap) advice or dynamic lane assignments.It will be required to create additional road signs dealing with automated vehicles, at least showing that, e.g.,an area is prohibited for automated vehicles or an area where only automated vehicles are allowed.Regarding signals from automated vehicles, TransAID's solution of having LED light strips at the back of AVswill be beneficial in any case, but the exact content of such lights needs to be defined by performing more detailed analyses of such components. This goes to all external and dynamic HMI components of automated vehicles. In this light, it will be crucial to have an intuitive way of understanding the automation related additional information. One key question in this area is if driving with enabled automation should be indicated by an additional external light, and if so, where should this light be and whatcolour?Combining the work on the traffic measures and communications, the iTETRIS framework was used to evaluate the selected use cases while deploying the traffic measures using V2X. The goal was to see if the V2X communications impacted the effectiveness of the measures in any way.After adding V2X, the simulation results forthe project's first and second iteration use cases showed very similar results to the previous evaluation. All traffic measures were found robust enough to show the same results as with idealV2X, even in light of increased traffic demand and thus more V2X enabled vehicles.There were some minor differences between the realistic V2X and ideal V2X implementations, but those could be traced back to easily fixed technical aspects (see Section 2.4 for details). As a final step in our use case assessment,the feasibility of measures and communications introduced were implemented in real-world demonstrators. The real-world implementation was done by performing three different feasibility assessments. Two of them have been performed on test tracks in Germany, and one on public roads in The Netherlands. On the test tracks, several detailed tests of all scenarios have been performed, revealing that all traffic management measures could be successfully integratedand applied to automated vehicles in all use cases and scenarios. This includes the successful setup of the RSI and the automated vehicles. It has to be mentioned, though, that the implementation was done in a prototypic way.The development of related series products would require much more testing under real world conditions, which will be challenging at the current time since no highly automated vehicles are present on the roads. Nevertheless, it is very important to start the investigations at present times. As already described in Section 3.3, standardisation of messages is happening already now, and it was very important to include the role of the infrastructure at this stage. The detailed results of the real-world implementations per use case can be found in Section 2.5.In addition to the design and technical implementation of traffic measures in simulation and the real-world, TransAID gained some insights on issues of a less technical nature. For example, it was determined a close collaboration between OEMs and (N)RAs would be beneficial in the identification and managing of TAs. To facilitate such a collaboration TransAID proposes a traffic management frameworkin the form of an intermediary service provider, acting as a trusted (and possibly mandated) third party. The framework allows TransAID to be scaled up and generalised. We approached this from both a technical and a business-oriented perspective. For TransAID to become part of a complete traffic management system, we focused on the technical side on how to detect transition areas, select (and possibly combine) services, and then detect when they are most appropriately timed for deployment. To this end, detection can be done via the infrastructure (e.g. road sensors or even digital communication infrastructure), via the OEMs, or by comparing an infrastructure's newly-defined ISAD level (Infrastructure Support levels for Automated Driving; see Section 1.4.2) to theoperational design domain (ODD, see Section 1.4.1) of the vehicle.Considering the mentioned technical challenges (detecting TAs, selecting services, and timing their deployment), the intermediary service bridges all these parties in such a way that the detection of TAs is performed in a centralised way, and OEMs and (national) road authorities ((N)RAs) have a single point of contact for providing and receiving information about TAs.Another point where OEMs and (national) authorities could collaborate,is the legislation related to automated driving since an important gap in current modelling and legalisation is how (C)AVs would/should react when (given) advice and/or actions conflict with traffic laws. With the real-time coordinated instructions of a TMC, (C)AVs should drive adequately during their journeys. However, it is necessary to concern to what extent such instructions should/can be made, especially when considering legal issues.In addition, legal aspects like the definition of special signage for automated vehicles and their handlingalso need to be considered, as those aspects will take time. This also means signage at the roadside, including VMS content, and signage from automated vehicles to surrounding traffic.Collaboration is also required regarding the definition and standardisation of V2X messages and protocols. The mechanisms proposed in TransAID to improve the reliability of V2X messages can be key in the near future. In general, V2X communications solutions require to be incorporated into standards to be effectively deployed. That is the case for, for example, collective perception solutions, message generation rules for manoeuvre coordination, V2X message compression or broadcast acknowledgement mechanisms. In TransAID we have been intensively working to promote and disseminate all the proposed solutions in top-tier journals and international conferences, as well as in organisations like ETSI and C2C-CC. The above shows a broad range of aspects studied by TransAID in the very dynamic and rapidly evolving field of automated driving.To provide links to additional information and to place the work of TransAID into context, Chapter 5 provides an overview or close related initiatives.
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Gabrielle Hecht on Nuclear Ontologies, De-provincializing the Cold War, and Postcolonial Technopolitics
This is the fourth in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
Nuclear power has formed a centerpiece of Cold-War IR theorizing. Yet besides the ways in which its destructive capacity invalidates or alters the way we should understand questions of war and peace, there are different powers at play in the roles the nuclear assumes in global politics. Through careful investigations of alternative sites and spaces of nuclear politics, Gabrielle Hecht has uncovered some of the unexpected ways in which what one can call the 'nuclear condition' affects politics across the globe. In this Talk, Hecht, amongst others, explores what it means to 'be nuclear'; explains how we need to deprovincialize the Cold War to fully grasp its significance in global politics; and challenges us to explore technopolitics outside of the comfortable context of OECD-countries.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is according to your view the most important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?
I think one of the most important challenges in global politics is the question of planetary boundaries. In the 1970s the Club of Rome published the report 'the Limits to Growth' (read PDF here), which addressed the finite quality of the planet's resources. It exposed the problems that the ideology (and practice) of endless economic growth posed for these limits. The question of climate change today really is all about planetary boundaries. We have already exceeded the CO2 level that is safe for the planet to sustain human life: We have just passed 400 parts per million; the desirable level is rated at 350 parts per million; the pre-industrial level of CO2 was 270 parts per million. So we have already produced more CO2 than is sustainable. And that is just one indicator. There are all kinds of other planetary boundaries at play—energy supply being the most salient one in terms of climate change. How can we even produce enough energy to maintain the lifestyles of the industrialized north? What about the requirements of the so-called 'rest'?
Obviously this is a huge issue and there are many parts to it. One part of this—the piece that I have studied the most—is nuclear power. Many people are enthusiastic about nuclear power as a solution to climate change. Some prominent environmentalists have been converted, because they believe nuclear power offers a way to produce a large amount of energy with a very small amount of matter, and because they see it as carbon free. (That's pretty clearly not the case, by the way, though nuclear power certainly produces less carbon than fossil fuels.) But are the human health and environmental costs worth the savings in carbon? Do the resources poured into nuclear power—some are predicting a thousand new reactors in the next few decades—take away resources from other forms of energy production, forms that could potentially address the emissions problems more rapidly and with lower costs for the environment and for human health? Moreover, nuclear power in any one location ends up becoming a global issue. So in that sense nuclear power in China, in India or in Japan is inherently a global problem. And the industry everywhere certainly needs global regulation—at the moment, there is none. The International Atomic Energy Agency is not a regulator. These are serious questions for international relations, and should be fodder for analysis.
One can obviously put this into perspective by comparing the death toll from nuclear power with that related to coal—would one then actually have to be against the use of coal? The numbers of coal-related deaths are astonishing. But the first, most obvious point to make is that being against coal doesn't require being in favor of nuclear power! It's also extremely important to realize that death and morbidity figures for nuclear power are highly contested. Take the figures concerning Chernobyl. The IAEA and WHO put Chernobyl deaths at 4,000. A study published by National Cancer Institute in the United States puts the deaths at something like 43,000. A meta-analysis of 5,000 Slavic language scientific studies estimates the total number of Chernobyl deaths (some of which are yet to come) at 900,000. These discrepancies have a lot to do with controversies over the biological effects of low-level radiation, and also with the technopolitics of measurement and counting. Comparing the two energy technologies is much more complicated than merely counting coal deaths vs. nuclear power deaths.
How did arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?
Actually, the real question is how I came to study politics. I got my bachelor's degree in physics from MIT in the 1980s. The two biggest political issues on campus at that time were Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and Apartheid in South Africa (specifically, a move to divest American corporate interests in South Africa, the very corporations that were funding MIT research and for which MIT students would work when they graduated). I got interested in both, and along the way I came to realize that I was much more interested in the politics of science and technology than I was in actually doing physics. So I took some courses in the field of science and technology studies (STS), and decided to attend graduate school in the history and sociology of science and technology.
I had also always had a morbid fascination with nuclear weapons. I'd read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction when I was a teenager. All of these things came together for me in graduate school. I first hoped to study the history of Soviet nuclear weapons but quickly realized that would be impossible for all kinds of reasons. I ended up studying French nuclear power after I realized that nobody had researched it in the ways that interested me. I had lived in France in the 1970s, when the nuclear power program was undergoing rapid expansion. So it was a good fit. After I was done with that project, I became interested in rethinking the so-called nuclear age from a colonial and post-colonial perspective.
What would a student need to become a specialist in global studies or understand the world in a global way?
Travel, learn languages. Remain attentive to—and critical of—the political work done by claims to 'global' purview. Learn history—you won't understand international relations in any depth at all if you remain rooted in the present.
Then, for those want to start exploring the global politics of science and technology, two books come immediately to mind. Timothy Mitchell's (Theory Talk #59) Carbon Democracy, on the global technopolitics of fossil fuels. And Paul Edwards's A Vast Machine, on the relationship between data and models in the production of knowledge about climate change. Both are must-reads.
The world is permeated with technological artifacts and systems—in what ways is this relevant for approaches to global politics? Where is the conceptual place for technologies within IR?
First, I should make clear that I am not an IR specialist.
That said, I think it does not make sense to think about international relations (lower case) without thinking about the technologies, systems, and infrastructures that make any kind of global movement possible. The flows of people, of products, of culture, political exchanges—these are all mediated through and practiced in the technological systems that permeate our globe. So are the interruptions and absences in such 'flows'. I draw attention to the specific political practices that are enacted through technological systems with the notion of technopolitics. I initially used this concept in my work on nuclear power in France to capture the ways in which hybrid forms of power are enacted in technological artifacts, systems and practices. There I used the term in a rather narrow sense to talk about the strategic practices of designing technologies to enact political goals. My paramount example was that of the French atomic weapons program. In the early 1950s, France's political leaders insisted that France would never build atomic weapons. But engineers and other leaders in the nascent nuclear program were designing reactors in a way that optimized the production of weapons-grade plutonium rather than electricity. When politicians finally signed on, the technology was ready to go. This example problematizes the very notion of a 'political decision'. Instead of a single, discursive decision, we see a complex process whereby political choices are inscribed into technologies, which subsequently favor certain political outcomes over others.
In this example, both engineers and politicians consciously engaged in technopolitics. By contrast, Timothy Mitchell has used the hyphenated term 'techno-politics' to emphasize the unpredictable and unintended effects of technological assemblages. Over the last fifteen years, I have also developed a broader notion of the term, particularly in its adjectival form, 'technopolitical'. I find this to be a useful shorthand for describing both how politics can be strategically enacted through technological systems, and also how technological systems can be re-appropriated for political ends in ways that were unintended by their designers. The point, really, is to highlight the myriad politics of materiality.
Do the particular characteristics of nuclear technologies and related research programs make it impossible to apply the lenses of 'high politics'?
I think a high-politics approach to understanding nuclear weapons decision-making is extremely impoverished. It's not that there aren't high politics, of course there are. But they cannot offer a sufficient or straightforward explanation for how or why any one particular country develops a nuclear program. A focus on high politics implies a focus decision makers and moments. But that's really misleading. In pretty much every case, the apparent 'moment' of decision is in fact a long process involving a tremendous amount of technopolitical, cultural, and institutional work, rife with conflicts and contingencies of all kinds. I think a more productive approach is to try to understand nuclear capacity-building.
Itty Abraham has done some fantastic work on India's nuclear program, which helps us think about other cases as well. For example, he analyzes the symbolic importance of the nuclear test, noting that IR uses 'the test' as kind of 'aha!' moment, the moment in which one knows that a country has nuclear weapons. Instead, Abraham sees the test as a process for the cultural production of meaning: a process in which certain meanings get fixed, but by no means the most important moment for understanding the actual technology and politics behind the production of nuclear weapons.
Your book Entangled Geographies (2011) explores a plethora of places, people, and technical networks that sustained the US and Soviet empires. Here, as in Being Nuclear (2012), you insist on investigating the Cold War as transnational history. What difference does this move make?
In Entangled Geographies, my colleagues and I build on the work of Odd Arne Westad, whose book The Global Cold War was an argument for understanding the non-superpower, non-European dimensions of the Cold War. We give that a technopolitical spin, which offers a de-provincializing of the Cold War that's complementary to Westad's. By focusing on places like Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, or Brazil, or South Africa, we show how even the central struggles of the Cold War were intimately bound up in 'northern' relationships to colonial and post-colonial worlds, and in the imaginaries that characterized those relationships.
In Being Nuclear I focus on uranium from Africa—more specifically South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger. Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but it has been almost completely absent from accounts of the nuclear age, whether scholarly or popular. This changed in 2002, when the US and British governments claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein 'sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' (later specified as the infamous 'yellowcake from Niger'). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium. But that did not admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states. Nor did it mean that uranium itself counted as a nuclear thing. My book explores what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be 'nuclear'. I show that such questions lie at the heart of today's global order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear powers'.
Being Nuclear argues that 'nuclearity' is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. In the first part of the book, I follow uranium's path out of Africa and analyze the invention of the global uranium market. In the second part, I enter African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. In both parts, I show that nuclearity requires instruments and data, technological systems and infrastructures, national agencies and international organizations, experts and conferences, and journals and media exposure. When (and where) nuclearity is densely distributed among these elements, it can offer a means of claiming expertise, compensation, or citizenship. It can serve as a framework for making sense of history, experience, and memory. When (and where) network elements are absent, weak, or poorly connected, nuclearity falters, fades, or disappears altogether, failing to provide a resource for people claiming remediation or treatment. Nuclearity in one register doesn't easily transpose to another: geopolitical nuclearity doesn't automatically translate into occupational nuclearity. Yet these domains remain connected. African uranium miners depend on the transnational movement of nuclear things, but that movement also depends on African miners. Ultimately, I conclude, nuclear security must be considered in tandem with other forms of human security—food and health and environmental and political security. By placing Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa, the book seeks to remake our understanding of the nuclear age.
I should note that it's not only uranium production that connects the colonial and postcolonial spaces with nuclear things. (Also: African countries weren't the only such places where uranium was produced. Much of the rest of the world's uranium came from the Navajo nation in the United States, Aboriginal territories in Australia, First Nation territories in Canada, colonized spaces in the Soviet Empire, etc.) French nuclear weapons were tested in the Algerian desert and French Polynesia; the United States tested its weapons on the Bikini Islands; Britain tested its weapons in Maralinga, in Aboriginal Australia; the Soviet Union tested its weapons on the planes of Kazakhstan. And so on.
So, understanding the history of the Cold War—even its most iconic technology, nuclear weapons—as a form of transnational history really calls attention to spaces that have previously been considered marginal, even perhaps not fully nuclear. Ultimately, it should provoke us to problematize 'the Cold War' as a frame for global or transnational history (and social science).
Looking at those colonized and semi-colonized spaces of mining, testing and monitoring infrastructures gives us not necessarily an answer to the question of why the Cold War ended, but it does enable you to ask different and possibly more interesting questions. It can lead you, for example, to place the Cold War within the framework of imperialism (rather than the other way around). A longer historical view questions whether the Cold War really represents historical rupture. What political work is done by such claims to rupture? How does that work differ in different places? What are its material consequences?
Why are science and technology hardly ever studied in the postcolonial world from a STS perspective?
I think there are a number of reasons why STS has paid relatively little attention to the postcolonial world. One is that in STS—like many disciplines—the prestige of the subject matter maps onto the prestige of the researcher. So STS researchers who study cutting-edge science or large-scale technological systems seem somehow to be getting at 'harder' topics, ones that that focus on active creation. Engineering and other acts of creation appear more prestigious than acts of maintenance, or acts of dismantling. Even studying small-scale creation seems to confer more prestige than studying mundane practices. This brings us back to the theme of rupture vs. continuity: studying or proclaiming rupture seems somehow sexier—and certainly more radical—than studying continuity.
Another, more trivial answer is just that most STS researchers so far have come from Europe and North America, and they tend not to be trained in area studies.
Does the constant ontological insecurity of nuclear things mean that the 'nuclear' is purely a matter of social and political construction?
No, definitely not. But I think to explain what I mean by all this we should take a few steps back and start with what I like to call nuclear exceptionalism. This is a technopolitical claim—emerging immediately after the end of World War II—that there was something radically unique about nuclear things. From 1945 onward, both cold warriors and their activist opponents cultivated this nuclear exceptionalism. Atomic weapons were portrayed as fundamentally different from any other human creation. The bomb was the ultimate geopolitical trump card, and it was imagined as replacing empire in one fell swoop. You see nuclear scientists and engineers gaining prestige, power, and funding far beyond their colleagues in conventional research. In the meantime, anti-nuclear groups make their own claims to exceptionalism by talking about the unprecedented dangers posed by nuclear things. Everywhere you see nuclearity and morality intertwined. Nuclear things either represent salvation or moral depravity… or the apocalyptic end of mankind. But regardless of where you stood politically, this notion of nuclear exceptionalism rested on the sense that the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear things was transparent---ultimately a clear-cut, physical matter of radioactivity.
The nuclear thus emerges not just as a category, but also as a universal and universalizing ontology, one that seems to apply in the same way all over the globe. And frankly, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists have reproduced that nuclear exceptionalism. (I did it myself in my first book, The Radiance of France.)
All of which has made it hard to see that what I call nuclearity—the process by which something comes to count as a "nuclear" thing – has a history, a politics, and a geography. Things that count as nuclear in one time and place might not count as nuclear at another. Rendering something as nuclear and exceptional is a form of technopolitical claims-making. It follows that insisting that certain things are not especially nuclear, or that they are banal, is also a form of technopolitical claims-making.
You can see this in the response of the nuclear industry to activist opponents. In the late 1960s and over the course of the 1970s, the nuclear industry began to represent nuclear power not as a life-saving technology for the human race, but as simply another way to boil water. Radiation was just another industrial risk. Such representations seek to banalize nuclear things.
Nuclearity could thus get made, unmade and remade. My favorite example comes from a 1995 US government report on nuclear proliferation. The appendix has a table that summarizes the nuclear activities of 172 nations. Neither Gabon, nor Niger, nor Namibia are listed as having any nuclear activities, despite the fact that those nations together, during that very year, produced something like 25% of the world's uranium. So when does uranium count as a nuclear thing? When does it lose its nuclearity? And what does Africa have to do with it?
The argument is not that radioactivity doesn't have to do anything with nuclearity, or that nuclearity has nothing to do with the technologies and physical processes we typically associate with the word. Rather, I argue that nuclearity is one thing, and radioactivity and fission are another; sometimes they are co-terminus, but not always and not necessarily. Understanding where (and why) they don't map onto each other is politically revealing.
Which kind of interdisciplinary exchanges do we need between your discipline and IR to deepen our understanding of global technopolitics?
Science and technology studies (STS) is really good at exploring practice, and especially at calling attention to the differences between principles and practice—for example, between regulation on the one hand, and the actual practices that regulations are meant to control (without ever entirely succeeding). STS can bring to IR an understanding of how the intimate details of practice matter politically—of how everyday technopolitical and techno-scientific exchanges can be more important loci for politics than treaties, diplomacy, and other forms of what you called high politics.
I can also answer this question wearing my historian's hat. The IR scholarship on nuclear weapons that I'm familiar with (and again, I'm not an expert!) seems to be quite focused on producing models—on using history to produce predictive models that will in turn serve to shape international policy on nuclear weapons regulation. But if history tells us one thing, it is that models are basically useless for understanding how countries develop nuclear weapons. Instead, history and STS both teach us about which questions to ask (in this instance, about nuclear development). Identifying the important questions—rather than prescribing the applicable model—leaves open the list of possible answers. It also leaves open solutions and policies, letting us be more attentive to the specificities and uniqueness of individual cases.
Final question. Let's take the example of Iran's nuclear program. What alternative question about the issue would lenses of nuclear exceptionalism bring us?
Nuclear technology has played an important role in shaping modern Iranian national identity. This began in the 1970s under the Shah, who – with the support of the US – developed a grandiose plan to build a fleet of nuclear reactors. It took a different turn after the 1979 Iranian revolution. For a while, the new regime sidelined the nuclear program as an unwelcome manifestation of western corruption. But after a few years leaders reappropriated nuclear development and sought to invest it with Iranian-ness. The dynamics of nuclear exceptionalism have operated in Iran much the same way they did in France and in South Africa. Nuclear exceptionalism has served to give material form to national identity. And materialized national identity is most emphatically not something that you can negotiate away in the P5+1 talks.
Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and serves as associate director of the African Studies Center. She recently published Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012), which has received awards from the American Historical Association and the American Sociological Association, as well as the 2013 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association's 2013 Herskovits Award. She is also the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press 1998 & 2009) and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, editor (MIT Press, 2011). Hecht is embarking on a new book project on technology and power in Africa, as well as new research on transnational toxic trash. She has held visiting positions at universities in Australia, France, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.
Related links
Hecht's faculty profile at the University of Michigan Read Hecht's Introduction to Entangled Geographies (MIT Press 2011) here (pdf) Read Hecht's The Power of Nuclear Things (Technology & Culture 2010) here (pdf) Read Hecht's Nuclear Ontologies (Constellations 2006) here (pdf) Read Hecht's Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age (Social Studies of Science 2002) here (pdf)
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
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Barbehenn THE EACLE HOTEL > ■ i :: Main and Washington Sts. ia-XoX.= -=O*.*; _XcXs : _XrX^ : _=c«i; _5c^f o =»: :**: :**: *A; :**r fc^-J U-PI-DEE. jj{? ■; A new Co-ed lias alighted in town, lT-pi-dee, U-pi-da! •'b'*' In an up-to-daicst tailor-made gowr.,(J-pi-de-i-da ! *y -* The hoys are wild, and prex is, too. You never saw such a hulla-ba-loo. CHORUS. — U-pi-uee-i-dee-i-da ! etc. Her voice is clear as a soaring lark's, And her wit is li/cc those trolley-car sparks t When 'cross a imiddy s:reet she flits, The boy.-, ad have conniption tits: The turn of her head turns all ours, too. There's always a Strife to sit in her pew; Tis enough to make a parson drunk, mm m:■-nn m 5(?n and NEW WORD; k To hear her sing old co-ca-che-lunk! rsesto ma The above, and three otherNEWverses to U-PI-DEF and NEW WORDS, catchy, uo-to-date, to many in/ others of the popular OLD FAMILIAR TUNES; be- ff *T ft? «- ■ tr" 1 m w mm sides OLD FAVORITES ; and also many NEW SONGS. IfWi SONGS OF ALL THE COLLEGES. W:i Copyright Price. $r.50, postpaid. 110,1 *W,- tf"ff WINDS k NOBLE, Publishers, New York City. XX nnr.i Schoolbooks of all p7tblishers at ove store. •m iaa» -ty- =w= *c =5*.=\*=**=xx =**= *t=**= mr.\ I In .4 PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. Of Novelties for the Fall Season, including Latest Suiting, Coating, Trousering and Vesting. Our Prices are Eight. SPECIAL CARE TAKEN TO MAKE WORK STYLISH AND EXACTLY TO YOUR ORDER. Ulill CCl. Seligman, WHO*. 7 Chambersburg St., Gettysburg, Pa. R. A. WONDERS Corner Cigar Parlors. A full line of Cigars, Tobacco, Pipes, etc. Scott's Corner, opp. Eagle Hotel GETTYSBURG, PA. Pool Parlors in Connection. D. J. Swartz Country Produce in Groceries Cigars and Tooacco GETTYSBURG. Established 1867 by Allen Walton. Allen K. Walton, Pres. and Treas. Root. J. Walton, Superintendent. Dummelstown Brown Stone Company QTT_A_:e,:R,-H-:i^E!iT and Manufacturers of BUILDING STONE, SAWED FLAGGING, and TILE, WALTOPILLE, " PENNA. Contractors for all kinds of cut stone work. Telegraph and Express Address, BROWNSTONE, PA. Parties visiting quarries will leave cars at Brownstone Station, on the P. & R. R. R. 'A I PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. ■mm WeaVep Pianos and Organs Essentially the instruments for critical and discriminating buyers. Superior in every detail of construction and superb' instruments for the production of a great variety of musical effects and the finest shades of expression. Close Prices. Easy Terms. Oil Instruments Exchanged. I WEAVER ORGAN AND PIANO CO., MANUFACTURERS, YORK, PA., U. S. A. \ \ Ec\ert Latest Styles in HATS, SHOES AND GENT'S FURNISHING .Our specialty. WALK-OVER SHOE M. K. ECKERT Prices always right The Lutheran puhli^ing jlonge., No. 1424 Arch Street PHILADELPHIA, PA. Acknowledged Headquarters for anything and everything in the way of Books for Churches, Col-leges, Families and Schools, and literature for Sunday Schools. PLEASE REMEMBER That by sending your orders to us you help build up and devel-op one of the church institutions with pecuniary advantage to yourself. Address H. S. BONER, Supt. m The diereary. The Literary Journal of Gettysburg College. VOL. XIII. GETTYSBURG, PA., APRIL, 1905. No. 2 CONTENTS "THE TOILER'S SONG."—Poem, 30 F. W. M. '07. "ARE OUR ISLAND COLONIES A SOURCE OF "—Essay. . HERBERT S. DORNBERGER, '06. STRENGTH?"—' 31 POEM. 34 "THE UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE,"—Story, . 34 "SENIOR SWAN SONG,"—Poem, 39 "A HABIT OF ECONOMY,"—Essay, . 40 GEO. W. GULDEN, '06. "THOUGHTS OF THE 'PROFS,'"—Poem, . 42 "KEEPING A DIARY,"-Essay, 45 5. B. '07. "AWAY,"—Poem . 47 '06. "THE DREAM MAIDEN,"—Story, . . 48 EDITORIALS, . • 54 "Salve, Tempus Vernum." The Bulletin Board." " The Critique." ■"UNDER THE CRACKER," 57 30 THE MERCURY. THE TOILER'S SONG. F. W. M. '07 /V CROSS the corn and cotton ■* "^ Rings out the toiler's song ; And all earth's countless voices Bear its plaintive strains along. Singing in the sunshine, Bind the long sheaves fast, Song and labor blending, For rest will come at last. Its melody is lasting ; Brings the tears to many eyes ; Those sweet-voiced singers' anthem Goes like incense to the skies. Singing in the sunshine, Speed the task with might; Rest comes after labor, And labor ends with night. Across the starlight pealing Goes the echo of that song, And thousands humbly kneeling Its mellow tones prolong. Singing in the sunshine, Crown the earth with light ; Evening brings the homeland. For labor ends with night. -HL* THE MERCURY. 3 I ARE OUR ISLAND COLONIES A SOURCE OF STRENGTH? Essay, by HERBERT S. DORNBERGER, '06. b4* VER since the close of our war with Spain much dis- "* cussion has taken place concerning our new possessions. These discussions have considered the Philippine Islands and Hawaii from various standpoints. What advantages will these semi-civilized islands bring the United States? has often been asked. Are they a source of strength or are they, on the con-trary, a source of weakness? is another of the points, which has caused much debate and contention. And thus a number of similar questions, too many to enumerate here, have likewise been asked. From this great number of standpoints it is the purpose of the present discussion to consider the foreign ag-grandizement question in respect to whether or not our new island colonies are a source of strength. This, likewise, gives rise to a large number of intermediate points, which are directly concerned with the above mentioned question. Owing to lim-ited space we will only take up the more important points and confine ourselves to the effect these islands have or may have on the United States %s a nation and on the people of the United States. The first part of the discussion, the effect these colonies have on the United States as a power or nation, will be divided, for convenience, into four topics : These islands in times of peace ; in times of war with a foreign power; in times of internal re-bellion or insurrection ; and their value to the government as coaling stations. The first topic, as before stated, will be the effect upon the United States in times of peace. Now that we are in posses-sion of these islands, it, of course, becomes necessary to make them capable of protecting themselves against either foreign or domestic strife or war. This means that a force of troops, a squadron of war-vessels and modern defences and fortifications be established there. To do this properly requires the expendi-ture of large sums of money. But this fortifying and station- 32 THE MERCURY. ing of military and naval forces there is not all the expense in-curred by holding these islands. Other modern institutions must also be introduced. An educational system must be founded, roads must be built and improved, a postal system must be established and men must be employed to fill these different positions. Thus, from the aspect of the effect of these colonies on the government, nothing but expense is seen. Now that we have hurriedly scanned the situation in times of peace, it will logically follow to examine briefly the situation in times of war with a foreign power. These islands are at a great distance from the Ignited States and are accessible only from the Pacific coast, besides requiring a large force to be sta-tioned there in the event of a hostile attack. Then, how easy it would be for some strong power to lay siege to one of the numerous harbors and thus weaken the Pacific coast defense and lay it open to attack by causing reinforcements to be sent to the besieged colonies. Of course, it is not probable that anything like this will occur at the present time, but who can tell what the future is destined to bring us ? If the United States had had these islands during the Spanish war, it would not have been so easy to overcome Spain, for it would have necessitated the keeping of a large enough force stationed at these different places to insure protection for them and thereby weakened our attacking force considerably. Now take Spain. Had she had only Spain proper to protect, she would have been enabled to use the fleets, which were protecting her various island possessions, to harrass the Atlantic and Pacific coast. England will serve as another instance of this, as will also France. Considered in this light these islands are undoubtedly an element of weakness to our otherwise strong nation. Next, we will discuss the third topic, the effect these islands have on the United States as a nation, or these possessions in times of insurrection. Their inhabitants are for the most part very poorly educated and have a tendency toward rebellion. Such a rebellion means the loss of a large number of lives and the destruction of a vast amount of property, for a rebellion there would be waged in a guerrilla fashion, which is a form of THE MERCURY. 33 insurrection that is extremely difficult to suppress. Here we again have another great disadvantage to the nation holding such possessions as the Philippins Islands and Hawaii. As ex-amples of this we cite the Philippines under Spain's dominion and the long list of insurrections and rebellions Great Britain has been obliged to meet and crush. Now that we "have considered the disadvantages these col-onies afford the United States, it is only proper that we also turn our attention to the advantages they offer us as a nation. These islands are principally valuable as coaling stations. Their location for this purpose is one of their best qualities. Situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean they are most valuable as •coaling stations. They also form an extremely fine base of supplies for operations against China and the Far East. What ■makes them all the more valuable is that they, as islands, are subject only to an attack by water. Thus one can see at a glance the vast importance they are to the United States as ■coaling stations and a base of supplies for operations in the East, which will be the field of battle in the near future. Now that we have considered the more important points both for and against our keeping possession of these island colonies of ours, from the aspect of their effect upon the United States as a nation, it naturally follows that we also devote some time to the effect they will have on the people of the United States. As before, we would divide this part of the discussion into topics which are also four in number: Their value to our commerce ; their value to our industries and manufactures; their value as sources of raw materials and the like; and their value as affording a field for the investment of American capital. 34 THE MERCURY. "'i "HE Spaniards had a fleet of ships, * The greatest to be found ; They started on a conquest trip And cruised the world around. They thought they could do wondrous things And conquer every land ; But lo, they struck a windy time And now rest in the sand. They never thought that such a thing Could ever come their way ; But said that they could make King " Hen" Do 'xactly as they say. The elements were opposed to it, And now "Hen " holds full sway They only had a few ships left, Those Uncle Sam blew 'way. THE UNCERTANTY OF LIFE. TODAY we are, to-morrow we are not. When the hand of fate falls then is our time at hand. We may wander longr brave many perils ; in an unguarded, yet appointed moment we are lost. But it is not a tale of daring and courage, nor a tale of man and the city, but a plain, unvarnished tale of the mountains and streams which we would tell. Among the mountains of Pennsylvania, in a hollow, like to a giant's cup, lies a sparkling, little pond kept full by three trout streams. All around the mountains rise a sheer half-mile, and the heads of those grim, old ranges almost converge in a point. The almost in this case allows this story to be written. Now there, in days past, had stood a mill, beneath whose whirling saw the giants of the forest were transformed into prosaic lum-ber. Early in my boyhood we went through that hollow for berries; first in season raspberries, then huckleberries, then those long, sweet, black fellows, whose delicious taste well re- THE MERCURY. 35 pays a seven-mile tramp. To this spot we always came, for here there were many diverging roads and here we rested and drank of spring water, ice-cold and crystal-clear. The mill stood silent and deserted, for the flood which had wiped out the city of Johnstown also ruined the skidways and tramroads. All over the hills the only sign of man to be found were the blacked stumps, left a grim reminder oi the destructive force of man. The tramroad on which they had hauled the logs to the mill was now rotted away and over the sides of the moun-tains was a new growth which had almost reached a commer-cial size. In the valley, which was mentioned before, lived an old couple in a log cabin. We boast of being up-to-date in Penn-sylvania, yet there are spots where civilization is not all-power-ful. This was one. On the-right hand side of the cabin (go-ing up the mountain,) was the most beautiful stream I ever ex-pect to see. Great, flat slate stones scattered all over the bed of the brook were covered with moss, which, when the leaping water threw its spray, glistened like one grand robe of emeralds. An archway of trees made it an ideal retreat, cool in the hot-test summer day. Many times while berrying did we sit there, a merry crowd of boys and girls to eat our lunch. Above the cabin, circling like a gigantic serpent, runs the railroad, the P. & N. W. Railroad. Back of the cabin it makes the grandest horseshoe of any railroad in the East. Often in the hard times of '94-'97 did I ride around Point Lookout with its magnificent view for miles down the valley, where the morn-ing fog hung low over the stream and field, where the moun-tains rose grandly with their tops bathed in sunlight, except where here and there a little cloudlet of fog rose like some specter along the mountain side. Below us would be seen probably four or five coal trains creeping one after another like a procession of snails. On the first train were probably 125 men, who, idle, picked berries in preference to doing nothing in town. Below sparkling like a diamond, set on a background of velvet, lay the mill-dam in the very centre of the valley. As the train shot grandly around Point Lookout the coal cars roll- 36 THE MERCURY. ling and rocking, it made one shiver to think of the half-mile plunge we would take if they should ever leave the track. In the valley on the mountain road the berrypickers, looked like little black and red ants, and the trout stream wound about like a band of silver. But we are forgetting our cabin in the valley. The old man > who lived there, was one-half Indian, Jimmy Sutton by name. He had no trade, no occupation but that of a hunter. A small patch of ground across the road from the cabin grew all the potatoes and other vegetables he needed, and the fish and game he caught made a welcome addition to his table. He had served in the war of '61-'65 and drew a pension, which was sufficient for their simple mode of life. All day long he would sit patiently and fish or watch for wild turkey and rabbit. His patience was untiring, his time unlimited. His wife was his opposite, a childlike, primitive sort of a woman, obeying his commands with doglike devotion, looking up to him as her lord and master. He, as a rule, exacted no demands which were unreasonable or impossible. But, well I remember one summer, when the old man re-ceived his back pension. He went to the nearest saloon and drank hard from middle summer until early fall. Then the grief of his wife was almost unbearable ; her faith was touching. It transformed her from a simple, ignorant woman into a woman of strength and character. Long would she look every day for. her man's return. Often, while at her work, she would run to the door and look up the mountain road, eagerly await-ing him. And her disappointment was bitter; it moved the women of the berry pickers to tears. She never gave up hope that he would come back ; she would always answer, when asked if she expected him to return, " He'll come back some day, my Jim will." And she was right. When after a sum-mer of wondering and debauchery, the old man came home broken and penitent, her joy was beyond the reach of pen to describe. This strange couple had a son at this time, a boy of about seven years. He had never seen a trolley or a book, yet he THE MERCURY. 37 was a keen little fellow, to whom the secrets of the woods were known by instinct. With his dog, on the long, summer days, he would play through the valley, going miles from home, undisturbed by fear of rattlers and copperheads, for he was a free child of nature, reveling in the glory of mountains streams and forest. Often have I met him, calling as he ran along, exulting in the mere fact of living. He loved the moun-tains. They were school and home for him, and, though un-spoken, his passion was none the less real. The people of the lowlands can never feel, never understand, the affection a man, raised in the highlands, has for his native hills. To him they are dear; to be near them is enough ; to walk over them by day all alone with his thoughts, to camp high on their summits and watch in the summer-dusk the stars appear one by one, is glorious, it is wonderful. Standing in a valley looking up the rockstrewn steep a man's conceit is struck from him by the con-trast with his own littleness; God made the mountains, to teach man his own unworthnessand instability and to shelter the busy cities from the unbroken sweep of snowladtn winds. The summer went by. The strange family in the giant's cup lived on. More work had made fewer berrypickefs, yet they were all welcome. A belated party caught by the rain was always gladly taken in at the cabin, and when the old wo-man would spread us bread and butter after a long day's tramp, it tasted sweeter than honey, more satisfying than any dinner we have ever eaten. Well do I remember one sultry, hot day when, as the evening approached, the sky was one somber mass of black and the wind moaned through the trees like a player sadly running over the strings of his violin. Three of us sat in the cabin door and waited for the storm to break. Across the valley loomed the slide, a great yellow splotch on the hill-side, where hundreds of tons of earth had broken loose and dashed to the foot of the mountain. Around this summit the lightning played strange freaks, cutting the trees, rending them as with a giant's axe. The old man told us stories of catamounts, bears and snakes, 38 THE MERCURY. I , until, in our boyish fear, we could almost hear the unearthly cry of the wild cat and the rattle of the snake. The years went by and a time of adversity came to the family, who lived in the shadow of the mountains. Their cabin was burned one summer night" and they were left homeless. But there was some compensation for them, too. Those, who have little and lose all, regain their former standing with greater ease than those blessed with many worldly goods. A tew days later a new cabin stood on the site of the old one and what little furniture they had lost was replaced by the exercise of a little ingenuity. The fall came on and the mountain sides were clothed in a a garment of red and gold. The dying leaves put on their gayest colors ere they fell, making one grand kaleidscope of beauty. The half-wild cow, which the family owned, did not return for clays and they spent their time in searching for her. One evening the boy now thought he heard the tinkle of a bell, and, asking his mother's permission, he ran down the road in search of the lost animal. At his heels followed his dog Jack, the best ground hog dog in all that country. We can only imagine him as he went down the road so light-hearted and free, little knowing he was going to meet death. We can imagine the dog stopping shortly with a quick, sharp bark as he scented the ground-hog sitting before his hole in the evening sunlight. With a short, shrill "yelp the dog springs from the road up the hill followed by the no-less eager boy. The dog soon holes the hog and then follows it through its crooked path under the rock. Brought to bay in his home, the game fought back so fiercely that, old and experienced as the dog was, he was com-pelled to retreat to the open air. Then the boy crawls forward on his stomach with a short club to dislodge the animal. The hog had builded wiser than he knew. Underneath a rough stone wall above which ran the deserted tramroad he had dug far into the ground. The boy in his eagerness thought not of the danger and striking the keystone of the wall the whole weight of rock fell upon him. His life was crushed out in an instant and all was still except for the echo of the falling stones. ■■■■ ■i I i I/ II I i tit i «I>M ./. THE MEKCURV. 39 Dusk came and then the night and not until the night was far advanced did his people begin to wonder or worry. At last alarmed, they hastened to find him. The dog faithful unto 'death sat on the ledge of rock howling morunfully and guided them to him. In a glance they understood. We cannot know the feelings of these two old people whin at last they uncovered their boy mutilated and cold. The old man, with the stoicism of his Indian father, said not a word, but his mother wailed and moaned, out there on the mountain side. They buried him in the valley where he had lived and died and now every one, who stops there, listens with sympathy and pity to the story of his untimely death. SENIOR SWAN SONG. E^~"AREWELL, when "exams " hold you in their power, And keep you awake in the wee stilly hour, Then think of what " profs " will sure do to you And how you will feel when they all get through. Your troubles are many, not one hope will remain Of the few that have passed through your fear-leaden brain. But you ne'er will forget the small note that you threw, To your class-mate o'er yonder, who signaled to you. And yet in the evening when songs you strike up, With joy and with pleasure you fill up each cup. Whate'er's in the future, be it gloomy or bright, You'll always remember the joys of that night. You will join in the jokes, the tricks, and the wiles, And return to your pillow to dream there with smiles ; For something it tells you that this happy day Will soon pass far from you forever and aye. Then live while you can in this gay college life, For soon will your path be a journey of strife. Your friends will be few and still less of them tried ; With courage and calmness you must stem the tide. Your troubles will come, they will fall thick and fast; Yet memory will hold these glad days till the last. For no matter how low you may sink in the strife, You will look back with pleasure to gay college life. 40 THE MERCURY. ' A HABIT OF ECONOMY. GULDEN, '06. kHE meaning of the words " habit" and " economy," as used in this subject, needs but little exposition. Every-one of average intelligence understands them in a general sense ; but their application in the details of affairs demands our atten-tion. A habit is an involuntary tendency to perform a certain act,, which tendency is acquired by a frequent repetition of that act. A habit determines how we walk ; another, how we sit; an-other, how we eat, and so on indefinitely, until we can truly say-that habits determine our actions. • Economy, as defined by one writer, is : " The management,, regulation or supervision of means or resources, especially the management of pecuniary or other concerns of a household;. hence, a frugal use of money, material and time ; the avoidance of, or freedom from, waste or extravagance in the management or use of anything; frugality in the expenditure of money and material." This definition, though clear, yet, it seems to me, can be crystallized into this one idea of the proper manage-ment of one's concerns. In short, then, a habit of economy is an involuntary tendency to'manage one's concerns properly. Illustrative examples we have in plenty of men, who have sadly failed on account of the lack of a habit of economy ; and of others, who have been eminently successful because they possessed it. In the care of important matters, both public and private, the largest safety is to be assured by placing con-fidence in those who have formed this habit. Observe the ex-amples of some of our great men, with what scrupulous care they managed their affairs. Washington, even in camp, with the cares of the campaign devolved upon him, looked after the details of his mess and his personal expenditures. This habit also manifested itselt in his careful account of household expen-ditures while he was President. Jefferson, too, planned the af-fairs of his house, his garden, his farm, everything to the last detail. He was reared to avoid waste. The habit of enforcing; 1 J kt ■ *l THE MERCURY. . 4I reasonable frugality was formed in his youth, and was exercised throughout his entire life. These were the highest types of the class of men in whom others put confidence, but they were not the only men who possessed this habit. We know that the majority of our an-cestors, the sturdy men and women of earlier days, possessed,- in a much larger measure, this habit than we, their descertdents^ do today. They were workers, honest, frugal and saving.- They acquired for themselves comfortable homes and taught their children to work, to save, to insure increase from a habit of wholesome economy. Often do we hear those, still living, tell how they were brought up under the discipline of economy. Work was ap-pointed for them, and they had to do it. Idleness was not tol-erated. And now it actually pains them to witness the waste and idleness practiced by the growing generation. The main question with which they were concerned, in regard to personal affairs, was, "How much can be saved?" They were satisfied to work for small wages, if out of thesf wages they could save a portion during the year. The great question today seems to be, "How much can be made?" With this deceptive guide as their leader, our young men from the country are flocking into the cities, searching for situations, which will afford them an easier living, with the hope of rapid accumulation of wealth. Many of them do not believe that labor is the producing power, but think that by some easy road they can obtain success and fortune. They have never realized that "You can't get something for nothing ;" and to them "misfortune," as they call it, speedily comes. Others have never formed the habit of economy, and, although they are successful in securing positions which pay large salaries, yet they save no money. They spend each month's wages as they earn it, and often before it is earned. They are the men who later demand higher wages, not that they may save money and make their homes more comfortable, but that they may spend more on the luxuries of life, luxuries that the wealthy enjoy. Too many of our people today are not satisfied to live com- f'fB^—l'.'»«««flHBTaMTmlfiffiff KMitmm 42 THE MEKCORV. fortably and add a little to their material possessions by prac-ticing frugality. Feeling confident that the future will bring large returns, they branch out into large expenditures, and run into debt for purchases altogether unnecessary. They try to match or surpass, in house-hold equipment or other showy material, those of larger and more abundant means. Their false pride impels them to follow the leadership of fashion which ruins them with debt, changes wholesome taste to pernicious •excesses, and invites demoralizing perils. All this from a lack of the habit of economy, which comes from saving here and there, and holding on to the small things, which go to make up the larger; a habit which should be enforced by every pa-rent, and formed by every child, because the practice of econo-my is among the most useful and valued of life's duties. THOUGHTS OF THE PROFS. ^| VHE " Prof " lies down to rest, ^ His working day is o'er ;. His dreams are filled with zest, He plots and schemes yet more. Now there's the Senior grave— Yes, I'll go after him ; He looked so bold and brave But, oh, his bluff is thin ! I call him up the very first, I torture him with fire ; And in my rage I'll almost burst The bonds of god-like ire. I'll hurl the question in his face, I'll make him quake and moan ; He surely will another place Wish he had for his happy home. But let him writhe in grief and pain, Until I find another, Who can his place as well supply, Oh, yes, his Junior brother. THE MERCURY'. 43 A Junior is a mighty man, A man of power aiid skill ; Indeed, if it were not for him The schools would go downhill. That's what he thinks about himself, But oh what a foolish notion ; Could"he see himself as others see, He might change in his devotion. To '• Profs " arrayed in learning deep He looks quite small indeed ; Pop says he sees them come and go, And when Pop speaks we heed. To them the brain of man is clear As crystal-sparkling water; In logic they are gifted one's In Greek they wisely mutter. But the ■' Prof " dreams on ; His ghoulish glee is not one whit abated, For tomorrow come exams, you know, And his wrath can not be sated. Philosophy, History, Poetry, Art, Psychology and Mathematics— A very demon seems to start As he gazes on Poppy Statics. But we leave the Junior now anon, For the Sophomore, wisest of wise, Who, haughtily smiling, gazes on With his wide-open owl-like eyes. To him the heavens are an open book ; For botany specimens he roams the plain, On athletic teams for him you look ; At midnight knowledge he strives to gain. He hustles and bustles around, Like a hen on a griddle hot; Undying fame he would win at a bound, He would even question the wife of Lot. . . I ■ >tl.'J ! 44 THE MERCURY. But the professor has a job for him, That will turn his joy to woe ; Ich bin, du bist, like a funeral hymn The Dutchman mutters sweet and slow. An essay I make him hand to me, The Essay Doctor says in his sleep ; Four-hundred-thousand words at least And busy at his work he'll keep. Goodbye, Sophomore, here's my meat, The Proffy grins in fiendish glee, For the verdant grass beneath the feet Is pale indeed near a Freshman wee. This world struggled on for ages Ere the Freshman here arrived, And now he scribbles countless pages, To solve the riddle he often tries. He's in for reform the day he starts— Politic's, Fraternities, curriculum, too ; He'll assign to the " profs " their speaking parts ', And tell the Seniors what to do. There's not a thing on this old sphere, Of which he cannot all things tell; He's always in place to see and hear ; He has guided all he attempted well. But o'er him does the Proffy gloat, And rolls in his bed with joy ; For he's going to set this young mind afloat; He'll surely teach this Freshman boy ! He'll make him dig the whole day long, Till his tired hands can scarcely move ; No more will he burst into song ; Sad, sick he misses mamma's love ; " For I'll be his mother dear," The kindly Proffy said ; " I put his bottle of milk quite near I dress him for his little bed. • 1/ IJ * / f THE MERCURY. 45 ^^»M*.IM,IH,t. aiH.^nY.fal.fc., 1,1 l.t/-.Jl L.IM11M 48 1 THE MERCURY. The rose looked up at the maiden And opened its petals white ; The twilight of life is passing, How swiftly falls the night, But into the city of sorrow The maiden sent the rose, That bloomed on a brighter morrow For only a few of those, Who, burdened with strife of living, Yet yearned for one happy day, And 'twas thus, through the maiden,s giving, That the rose found out " A Way." THE DREAM MAIDEN. WHEN Bill Heller came to college as an unsophisticated rustic, he little dreamed of the adventures which des-tiny had mapped out for him. Up to this time Bill had been accustomed only to follow his father's great horses as they toiled in the heat of the mid-day sun, to listen to the liquid warbling of the nightingale as she sang in the silvery moonlight, to rise in the early dawn as the sun came majestically sweep-ing above the horizon, kissing the tender buttercups as they gladly turned their golden cheek toward him. Bill had read the lives of men who had left their foot-prints on the sands of time and often in the solitude of his daily toil he had longed for the time when he should lift his deep sounding voice against the evils which threatened the destruction of his native land. Bill's first month's experience as a verdant Freshman was not exactly (a direct) parallel to his expectations. Beaten and bruised in the class rushes, the laughing stock of the upper classmen, his hopes and ambitions suffered a severe shock. To be or not to be. Should he stay and endure it all or go back to the huckleberry bushes ? was the question, which constantly puzzled Bill's mind as the days went by and trouble threw her black cloak around him like the pall of darkest night. The last spark of hope had almost died away and homesickness, that most unrelenting of all afflictions, held Bill in its iron grip. ) I I * I a < 11 THE MERCURY. 49 'One night, overwhelmed with the deepest dispair, he angrily 'dashed his books to the floor and rushed forth into the night, -some unconscious attraction, the will of some higher power, •drew him on. Over field and meadow he plodded, weary of the world, of sorrow and care. Unmindful of the flight of time and whither-soever, he walked, he finally came to a stream glittering in the moonlight. Sitting on a fallen giant of the forest and hurrying his face in his hands, he burst into tears, ibitter and unconsoling. The tears dropping like rain on the placid bosm of the stream rippled as though it, too, sympathized •with him in his hour of trouble. Gently as the professor steals upon the unsuspecting cribber, lie heard a faint melody steal upon him. Was it his fervid imagination or was it the murmur of the rippling brook ? Like the balm of Gilead, the sound came to his troubled soul and, forgetting all woes, he sat, enraptured by the wild beauty of the music; nearer and nearer it came, louder and louder it grew and Bill felt himself wafted into the seventh heaven of delight. Like a meteor bursting from its home in the heavens, a vision came from the depths of the forest and then Bill knew from whence those angelic notes had come. He sat spellbound and speech-less as the fair creature swept by him. His ayes had never before beheld such beauty, so intoxicating, so wonderful that Bill's excited brain could scarce believe her human. Some where in this rushing old world of ours there is a man for every woman, a woman for every man. Sometimes they never meet and two lives are blasted. When they do meet some law, un-known in its principles, draws them together, until two hearts beat as one. She was gone, but a new hope beat in Bill's breast. Who the fair maiden was Bill pondered in vain. Was she human or divine? If he could only see her once again, what would he not do or give to hold the fair (creature) in his arms and whisper, soft words of love in those (dainty) ears ! Bill's ambition came back like the tide and he held his head proudly up to the starry heavens. The clock just struck three, when Bill reached the college gate, and soon he was in Ded. Sleep came to him, a dream in which a lovely maiden gently MM.LV.W tLMMUJ'M.Ul.lr, jl.L.At.l.l.t.MHHiamHimmaUilMMI 50 THE MERCURY. brushed his tawny locks from off his fevered brow. The Chapel Bell was ringing when Bill awoke, and, hastily dressing, he was just 5 1-2 minutes late in getting to Latin class. Three times the Latin professor called upon him to recite, and three times Bill heard him not. The fourth summons broke the spell of his reverie and the gigling of his classmates caused Bill to blush to the roots of his hair. Bill's head swam. The room seemed to* be going round and he toppled over in a faint. For two months he lay in bed with brain fever. His life was despaired of and only his magnificent constitution and will sustained life. One night, while the tired nurse slept, Bill silently stole from his bed and instinctively sought again the spot where the vision of love-liness had first appeared to him. She was an over-grown country girl, a brunette, with wide-open, brown eyes. She came to college to realize her highest ideals, wilful, pretulent, brilliant, in her classes, always singled out in a crowd, a veritible queen, envied by women, loved by the men. Born in an atmosphere of literary culture and re-finement, she was at the time we write as yet undeveloped by the moulding flame of love. Nature was to her an open book. She loved to roam the fields and forests drinking with delight from the sparkling springs which sprang up in the forests. She came to college to live, to enjoy, to do, to be. Never failing in her set purpose, she went overcoming all obstacles. Her voice, bell-like and clear, sounded through the forest like the chime of a silver bell. She never knew the joy of love, the wild abandon, the joy that was almost pain. Bill had escaped his nurse and sat again at the tree in the forest beside the brook. He listened, longing with all the unreasonableness of a sick man for the voice of his charmer. Hark, listen, through the stillness of the night, it came and Bill's heart threatened to leap from his mouth. The voice came no nearer and Bill arose walking silently on the fallen leaves. He had walked only a few hundred feet when coming out into an open glade he saw the object of his search. Parting the bushes, Bill stood there open-eyed, drinking in the music as the hot sand of the desert drinks up the falling dew. There was the disturber of his -
Transcript of an oral history interview with W. Russell Todd conducted by Joseph Cates at the Sullivan Museum and History Center on May 16 and May 19, 2016, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project. W. Russell Todd graduated from Norwich University in 1950 and was president of the university from 1982 to 1992. In his interview, he discusses his thirty-two years of active duty in the U.S. Army as well as his experiences at Norwich University. ; 1 W. Russell Todd, NU '50, Oral History Interview Interviewed on May 16, 2016 and May 19, 2016 At Sullivan Museum and History Center Interviewed by Joseph Cates JOSEPH CATES: This is Joseph Cates. Today is May 16th, 2016. I'm interviewing General Russell Todd. This interview is taking place at the Sullivan Museum and History Center. This interview is sponsored by the Sullivan Museum and History Center and is part of the Norwich Voices Oral History Project. OK, first tell me your full name. RUSSELL TODD: William Russell Todd. JC: When were you born? RT: I was born on the first day of May, 1928, in Seattle, Washington. JC: What Norwich class are you? RT: Class of 1950. My father was 26. My son was -- I'll think about that. JC: Well, we'll get back to that. Tell me about where you grew up and your childhood. RT: For the first year of my life we lived in Seattle, Washington. Dad had a job with a lumber company out there, getting experience to come back to work for his father, who ran a lumber company just outside Milton, Massachusetts. So I grew up for the first nine or ten years in Milton, Massachusetts, a very nice place, right on the edge of where Mattapan and Milton come together. There was a lot of traffic. Well, just for an example, during that period of time I came up with my dad to his fifteenth reunion, and the difference in traffic between where we lived and what we found up here was considerable. When I got back to school on Monday the teacher said, "Russell had a day off. He's now going to tell us what he saw." Well, nothing came to mind, and I stood and told them that I had seen something they had never seen, miles and miles and miles of dirt roads. Now I live on one. (laughs) JC: Was that the first time you were ever at Norwich? RT: Yeah. JC: What was your impression of it when you first saw it? RT: It was a very interesting period of time. It was just before World War II affected the United States, and many, many people were sending their sons to Norwich -- rather than perhaps better prepared schools -- because they could get a commission. They assumed that everyone was going to go to war, and the opportunity of getting an education and a commission together at the same time really appealed to a lot of people. Our football team got everybody we wanted of great quality. We won all the games in that time 2 frame. And we had some very, very fine people who came back in 1946, the year I entered the university, and they made a big impression on my life. JC: I'm sure. I assume the buildings were the same. There weren't any new buildings between the time that you went and -- RT: As a matter of fact it was 1941 I believe, and two buildings on the main parade ground were being dedicated. One wasn't quite finished, and the other was, and two new dormitories shows you an example of what I was saying, how it was a golden period in Norwich's history. But saying that, the opposite is true when the war ends. You remember that we had, what, 15 cadets come up here after the Civil War. They all got off the train, (laughs) yeah, we don't think much about that. It's happened each time there's been a war. The incentive, or the idea, or the concept of perhaps having to serve didn't appeal to a lot of people at the end of wars. JC: Right. You kind of have a boom before the war and a bust after the war. RT: Yeah. JC: What made you decide to come to Norwich? RT: I think probably that trip did, that and the fact my dad was always talking about it. He would make us on Saturday nights -- eating beans and franks -- to sing Norwich songs around the table. (laughs) JC: Do you remember any of those Norwich songs? RT: There's a good one. What is it? "Oh, My First Sergeant" "Oh, my first sergeant, he is the worst of them all. He gets us up in the morning before first call. It's fours right, fours left, and left foot into line. And then the dirty son of a buck, he gives us double time. Oh, it's home, boys, home. It's home we ought to be. Home, boys, home, in the land of liberty. And we'll all be back to Norwich when the sergeant calls the roll." JC: That's wonderful. (laughter) I've heard in some of the oral histories "On the Steps of Old Jackman," but I haven't heard that one before. (Todd laughs) So when you came here with your father, was that during homecoming? RT: Well, homecoming and graduation were the same period of time. It was fascinating to me. It was a cavalry school. They had all kinds of drills that we went to and watched, and prizes were awarded. People loading up the water-cooled submachine guns on horseback and racing around, then taking them down, and putting in ammunition blanks, and firing -- you know, first, second, and third prizes kind of thing. Oh, yeah, that impressed me. Then, of course, the parades were fun to see. But it took about three days to get through graduation and homecoming as a single entity. JC: When you came to Norwich what did you major in? 3 RT: That's an interesting story. As I said, Norwich was having trouble at that time recruiting people, and I got recruited by the president of the university. We met in Boston, and he asked me all the things I was interested in, and to him it looked like I should be an engineer, and he wanted me to take an exam that would carry that forward. Well, I took the exam, and I became an engineer, and about the first part of the second semester I discovered you really had to do the homework. I really didn't like that much, and I wasn't doing very well, so I changed my major to history and economics. I really found that fascinating. JC: Well, tell me about what it was like being a rook here. RT: Yeah, another interesting thing. I was sold on the rook system, and my dad had always talked about it. When he brought me up here, people would drop off their suitcases, and go right out onto the parade ground, and start being ordered around by the corporal. I thought that was great. I never seemed super. But I didn't have many followers on that. I was very anxious that my father leave, and get out of there, and go home, and I convinced him to do that. But after, oh, maybe a month the class, who had elected class officers by that time, called a class meeting, and we all got together -- I've forgotten where now. "We got to stop this. We got to tell these guys we're not going to put up with this nonsense. We've got to show our power." I stood up and said, "Gentlemen, this isn't what we want to do. We want to put up. We want to show him we can do it," and I got booed right off the stage. However, they eventually made me class secretary, so I didn't lose all my friends that day. (laughs) JC: Now let's talk about post-war Norwich, because you did say there's kind of a bust. There isn't as many people. RT: Yeah, I think we had 200 in our class, and there was no really classes of Bubbas. Norwich toward the end of the war, when they were really desperate to get money to pay salaries to the faculty, had a high-school level. I think it was two years, the high-school level, and many people went into that and came up here, and that toward the end made some income for the university. But what it did for us, as an incoming class of freshmen, we had our officers, lieutenants, who were younger than we were, but they'd been here two years. You know, that didn't sit over very well either. That was difficult. JC: And the cavalry was still here at that time. RT: It was, yeah, for the first two years of my term and tenure at Norwich, at that point. JC: What do you remember about the horse cavalry? RT: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Well, let's just put it this way. The first person I visited in Northfield when I came back as president was my old sergeant [Kenoyer?], who we hated. He was tough. But on the other hand, we really liked him, and I felt very, very sorry for him, and I really wanted to see him. His son had won entry into West Point, and 4 about two nights before he was to report in he and a bunch of his buddies were in an automobile accident. I think they were hit by a train and killed. Sergeant [Kenoyer?] was never the same after that. He continued to ride horses in the parades in Northfield and that kind of thing. But he was a character. His education was perhaps at the level he was working, taking care of the horses, and taking care of the riding. He was a good man, but, for example, I had a roommate named George Pappas who was scared to death of the horses, and some of the horses knew it. They knew when you were afraid. And old George would step into the stable area, ready to put on the harness, and that old horse would just back him into the wall and lean on him -- oh, you win. Then, of course, [Kenoyer?] would come by and say, "Kick him in the neb with your knee!" Well, no one was going to do that, trapped in there. So George, he decided that he would skip equitation classes, and instead he took 10 demerits for every single class that he was supposed to be at, and he spent his first semester walking around the parade ground on Saturdays carrying a rifle, doing tours. Many things can be said about George. That's a whole other story of absolute wonder. But it was difficult. We only went down once a week actually to use them, but there really wasn't a hell of lot you can learn in one-hour time once a week. But toward the end of the freshman year we were out trotting around in the neighborhoods, etc. I remember one time one of the captains in the Army ROTC program there, officers, Army officers, lead us on a parade, and we went out across the railroad tracks and up into the hills. And on the way back the horses got the idea they themselves would like to jog back to the stables, and we came charging down that hill totally out of control. Some of the horses and men went all the way to downtown before they came under it. I went through the football practice. (laughs) It wasn't everything it was cracked up to be. Now there were some people here, including a classmate by the name of Bob [Bacharat?] [00:13:18] who really was a polo player. He came from Switzerland. I think that's the reason he came to Norwich was to be able to play polo, and we played polo in that time frame with people like Miami who flew their horses up here. Now, I never saw the plane, but we were told all this and a few years earlier, before the war, that Norwich was playing the big colleges and winning. Toward the end of the first year we played something called broom polo, which they'd throw out a basketball on the floor, and then you'd have to hit it with a broom to get it to go to the goal. Those kinds of things were fun to watch. I remember one time George, my roommate, in skipping class went up into the stands, which are on the south end of the hall, but up above in a balcony, and he opened the window and got a snowball, several of them, and put them up there. When somebody would go by, the stove down on the floor -- there were four stoves in that place -- they'd get red hot, but they really didn't make a hell of a lot of difference when the temperature was 30 below or whatever it might have been outside. And the horses, when you'd take them from the stable to the riding hall, would fight you all the way; they didn't want to go out in that cold. But George, on one occasion, dropped snowballs on those red-hot stoves, and you can imagine, they hissed. As the horse went by, this great hiss came out, and the horse would throw the guy, or run for the far -- I went hell bent for election to the far wall. And when he stopped, I went right up onto his neck and was hanging on. Sergeant [Kenoyer?] came over and gave me hell, you know, "You didn't take control of that horse." (inaudible) [00:15:36] There are people lying down all 5 around, and the horses are running around. Well, there's a certain romance in having the horses, so long as you're sitting in the stands watching a polo game. (laughs) JC: Had you ever ridden a horse before? RT: No, never. JC: So you didn't have any experience with horses. RT: Neither did anybody else. Yeah, yeah. They were wonderful animals though, for the most part. JC: Now you said a lot of the people that were there before the war came back after the war to finish up. RT: Mm-hmm. A lot may be too much of an adjective to use, but Alumni Hall was essentially filled with non-married veterans, or veterans who hadn't brought their wives back. Civilian clothes and having nothing to do with the military. The rest of the dormitories were filled with 200 and whatever it was cadets, and the very few upperclassmen like the one I mentioned who came up through the high school route. We didn't have a lot to do with them, and they were very serious about their studies in the classrooms, very serious about their studies. The fraternization took place after the first of the year when we could go into a fraternity house, and I remember the older veterans -- older, 22 maybe -- who were in Theta Chi, where I was, were a remarkable bunch of people and very, very much appreciated. They didn't always come to dinner with us, but they were in the house and participated with it. They ranged all the way from a parachutist in Europe to a lieutenant colonel in the air force. So that's a big gap. But they were great guys who made fraternity life reasonable. JC: Well, tell me about Theta Chi. Why did you choose that one? RT: Oh, yeah, the same old story, the same reason I came here. My dad was a Theta Chi. Why, of course that's what I'd do. This is my father's fraternity, you know. JC: So what were the fraternities like? RT: They weren't too bad. When General Harmon eliminated them, I thought it was the right thing to do, because there weren't fraternities at other military colleges. And when they were started I really believe they were very useful. They were much more an eating club, and since there wasn't a mess in the university in the 1850s. If you look into some of the old records you'll see at graduation time they invited the alumni back to have dinner, and they had dances. They had inter-fraternity baseball and football, etc. We were trying at my time, in my fraternity, to replicate that. It wasn't perhaps as successful as it might have been. It was great fun to beat SigEp in baseball or something. But it was a different part of the university. I remember one time when I was a corporal, and one of the men in the rank under me, in the barracks, was in the fraternity. We get down to the fraternity, 6 and he would give me a hard time for giving him a hard time. It wasn't what I thought it should be, but it was a good time. I mean, don't misunderstand me. Well, it was a fraternity. (laughs) The girls came in by train, if they were away. Carol came up several times on a train to spring break, or a winter carnival, and that kind of thing. That was good sport to have a place where we could party. There was no drinking - baloney, there wasn't. (Coates laughs) I remember one time we were having lunch, and one of the seniors, one of the veterans that had come back, was the president of the house, and he said, "Our Theta Chi member on the faculty, old Professor Woodbury, is going to be our chaperone for the party. Does anybody know Professor Woodbury?" "I know Professor Woodbury. My father told me about him. I've met him once." He said, "Good. You and your date will sit in the living room with the Woodburys while we're down in the basement drinking." (laughter) It wasn't much fun that night. We had the bars hidden behind sliding doors, or doors that pulled down, and all this kind of stuff, so if we got word that there was someone from the faculty coming we could close it up and all sit down, smile, and look like there was no alcohol in the place. JC: Can you tell me a little bit about winter carnival and some of the dances that you all had? RT: They were good sport. Much of the fun though centered around the fraternity at that time. Yes, of course we went to the dance, etc., but before going to the dance we probably went to the fraternity, and certainly after the dance we went to the fraternity, and that was really good sport. In my senior year my roommate, Rollin S. Reiter, from Ohio decided that in his fraternity they were going to have a special Christmas party. Now, it didn't make an awful lot of sense, because it was right at exam time. We took exams right in that time frame, so he really had to work to get these guys. They were going to do it in tuxedoes, not in our uniforms, so that slowed it down a little, too. But one of the guys, Chubby Jordan, who has since passed away, he was a brigadier general in the Massachusetts National Guard later on, an ex-marine. He didn't want to go do it, so they convinced him that he had to do it, and they would get him a date. When he went to the fraternity house, he was introduced to the worst looking girl in the place, and he immediately started drinking beer and avoiding her and all this. It wasn't even the girl they were going to match him up with, and they just were teasing him something awful. When he got very sleepy they put him on the pool table, laid out flat like in a mortuary and put two lit candles, one at either end of him on the pool table. It was a sight for sore eyes. (laughs) JC: I bet it was. Now you were on the rook committee while you were there? RT: Yeah. In my sophomore year I was the head of the rook committee, elected by the class. During the summer period of time I had to get together with the printers and the university and go through this business. There were big posters that said "Beware, Rook, Beware," and then they listed all the things down. We'd get them printed up here by John Mazuzan down in the Northfield Press, and then we'd sell them to the rooks at $1 apiece. I don't know what we did with the money, in the class coffers I guess. Yeah. I remember that President Dodge, who had no military experience previous, but was a very, very well known scientist and had been the dean of one of the big Midwestern schools in that area, 7 he was brought in by some hefty people on the board of trustees. He didn't fit. He didn't understand us. He was a great academic and did some very fine things for the university. But he called me in one day, as head of the rook committee, and said, "When will this period end?" This was right after supper. I said to him, "Sir, it's very clear. It's right on the chart." He said, "I want it to end at Thanksgiving." I said, "Sir, I don't think you're talking to the right guy. You should really be talking to the commandant of cadets, your left-hand man." He said, "Well, I don't know if I can convince him," and I thought, oh, my God, what have we got here, you know. (laughter) He was a fine gentleman, but the minute it was possible for the alumni to discover that General Harmon might be available, in May of my senior year, Dodge was gone. The alumni just -- it wasn't working the way they wanted to see it work. JC: So Harmon was not president any of the time that you were here? RT: His inauguration was held at the same time as my graduation. It was one thing. He had been here for maybe a month, and I remember that we had a football banquet, and they invited General Harmon to come. And he stood up and told us all that he had been here as a cadet, and he had come back in 1935 as the commandant of cadets, and he loved and understood this university, and he was going to make it famous, you know, kind of, "Yeah!" Just the kind of story we needed. Then he told us a story that just curdled me. It was a dirty story. I'd never heard some guy stand up in a dinner and tell a dirty story. It sort of surprised me. He had that reputation. As a matter of fact, one time later in my career, when I was in the army, I was asked by my boss if I would go back to Hamilton, Massachusetts, where I had lived at one time and see Mrs. George Patton, and tell her that her son-in-law -- as a brigadier general -- was about to be sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky. He was married to one of Patton's daughters, and he is now a bachelor. I was to go with three sets of quarters' plans and say, "Which of these, General, would you choose, because we at Fort Knox can now get the house painted up and ready for you, and all this kind of stuff ahead of time?" Well, Mrs. Patton agreed. When the time actually came general orders was late in his itinerary and couldn't be there, so she said, "Why don't you and Carol just come to dinner, and we'll talk about this? I will pass your message to Johnny when he comes through next week, and your leave is over." So that was just fine. But we had a quiet period in that Mrs. Patton was at one end of a long table, and I was at the other end, and Carol was in the middle, and there was a little old maid with a bonnet on her head, and an apron moving around quietly around the room. Everything went silent, and I said, "I can handle this." I said to Mrs. Patton, "Mrs. Patton, do you happen to know General Harmon?" And she said, "Indeed, I do, Russell, and he's a very disgusting man." (laughter) Now as it turns out, she gave an award right after that, she gave an award at Norwich of a similar pistol of General Patton's famous (inaudible) [00:29:38] to the leading cadet. But she was clear. (laughter) JC: Yeah, I've heard stories about General Harmon. RT: He did a great job. He stayed too long, but he did a great job. 8 JC: Well, what clubs were you in when you were here at Norwich? RT: Yeah, I went out for football. I'd come from a little school in Wenham, Massachusetts, where we played six-man football, and if one guy was sick, it didn't look like we were going to play, you know, kind of thing. I went out for football in Beverly High School, and that was danger. I mean, I wasn't up to that. When we got to Norwich I said, "I'm going back out for football. This looks like --" They were mostly freshmen. There were some veterans that came back, and there were some very good veteran players who came back but weren't interested in playing football. They wanted to study and have a family life. So Norwich had a terrible football team during that period of time. About the second day of practice Joe Garrity, who'd been a friend of my dad's who I had known, put his arm on my shoulder as we walked back to the locker room and said, "I've got a job for you." And I thought to myself, I'm going to be quarterback for the freshman team. And he said, "You're my manager, how about that?" and I said, "Oh, OK." Later in life, when I became president, the alumni director here, Dave Whaley, took me out to visit various alumni clubs. In Chicago a fellow named Hale Lait, who played football and was co-captain in his senior year, started to walk up to us, and Dave says, "Mr. Lait, do you know General Todd?" Hale Lait says, "Shit, he used to wash my jock." (laughter) And it was true! We had a big laundry over there. JC: Were you in any other clubs while you were here? RT: Yeah, I'd have to think upon it. We had an international relations club that I became president of at some point of time under -- oh, come on, his name is skipping me. I'll come back to it. But we brought I people to speak on the issues, and then Norwich formed an alliance with the other colleges where we were all working together, and that was sort of fun working that out. Oh, incidentally, when I was manager for the freshman team I had to write all the letters to the other schools and make all the arrangements, all that kind of thing. It sort of surprised me that the university wasn't doing that; the athletic department wasn't doing that. JC: Did you have a favorite professor when you were here? RT: Yeah, and I just told you I couldn't remember his name. (laughter) Sidney Morse. JC: Oh, OK. RT: Old Sidney Morse was a terrible lecturer, but he was a genius, you know. He understood American history, and that was his forte, and he also was a wonderful human being and understood us. He really got me to dig in and start getting decent grades. He would lecture, but he would have side comments on this thing, and there we are taking notes left and right. I never wanted to miss a class under any circumstances. He invited some of us -- one of them being me -- over to dinner, and he was just a great sport. He was not a big man in stature, but a big man in intellect. JC: Was there a professor you particularly didn't like? 9 RT: Oh, there were some who I'd rather not name who I didn't appreciate or think that they were at the level they should be. JC: What was the favorite class you ever took here? RT: I guess it was history. That's what I worked at. Let me go back to what I didn't like. We lost -- somehow, I don't know how -- one of the economics professors, and President Dodge brought in somebody in mid-semester, and this guy had written many books and was well appreciated around the world, but he was terrible. He couldn't remember any names, he refused to take any attendance, so people didn't come. You could answer him back and forth. I was told, I can't vouch for this, I was told by the people that say they did it. They invited him out the night before his final exam to join them for dinner in Montpelier, and when the time came, they picked up the tip, and went down to the railroad station, and put him on a train going to Montreal. (laughter) I believe it was true. But he just wasn't accustomed to teaching at our level in that circumstance. He was someone that should have continued writing his books. He was essentially a sociologist, but that was a while. I got called in by the dean for skipping class, and the dean was a great guy at that time. I was a little embarrassed by it, but the class was mostly veterans in this particular -- in economics. You know, they had their way. They weren't required to come to class. If they didn't come to class it chalked up one of a series you could have freer, but cadets didn't have that, so I just played like I was a veteran to old Mumbles [McLeod?]. That's what they called him, Mumbles. When the dean called me in, I got right back on it. JC: Decided you'd rather go back to class. RT: Yeah. JC: Did you ever get in much trouble when you were here? RT: Not really. I came close a number of times. Well, let me go back and talk about Carol. Carol and I met one time when we were in about the ninth grade. She was in Beverly, Massachusetts, and we were living in Hamilton, Massachusetts, at the time, and the Congregation youth groups met at a third place, Essex, Massachusetts. There were lots of people of our ages. You know, these groups didn't know each other. And I spotted her. She was -- wow! Wow, yeah. But I never got to speak to her before we broke up and went back. A couple of years later in Beverly High School -- we'd moved to Wenham, and Wenham didn't have a high school, so I went to Beverly High School. Todd with a T and Wyeth with W happened to have lockers opposite each other on the wall, and I said, "My God, there's that girl." I went over and spoke to her, and she invited me to her birthday party, and that'll show it all started with us. But it came to a point in our sophomore year when I had changed from engineering into history and economics. I had to make up some subject material that I didn't get in the first part, and I went to the University of New Hampshire trying to make it up. I went down on the weekend to her house in Beverly, and I stayed with her aunt 10 who lived next door. She was on my team. But Carol when we were -- she said, "Let's stop this tennis game for a minute. I want to talk to you." We walked up to the net, and she said, "You know, I'm through with this relationship. You're never going to be serious about anything you do in your life; you're going to be a perennial sophomore. I want to do more with my life than you are going to do, and this isn't going to work out." OK, I'll show you. I came back and studied like hell for the last two years I was here and sort of caught up. But it was interesting, when I was invited back at graduation time to be the officer who commissions everybody, and at that time the university ordered a master's or a PhD, you know, honorary to the speaker. Loring Hart didn't tell me whether I was supposed to say anything or not, so I had in my pocket a little thing I would say. It went something like this. It is indeed an honor to be here. I represent my classmates in this ceremony, and I'm very proud of the way Norwich is moving. But I would like you to know that 25 years ago, this very day, I received a letter from the committee on academic degrees and standings that read to this effect: "Dear Cadet Todd, The committee has met and has agreed to allow you to graduate (laughs) based on the circumstances that were not your fault." (laughter) So, you know, that's the way life went for me. I dug in and did relatively well. But another interesting thing about that. I don't know about anybody else, but I had a picture in my mind of VMI, and the Citadel, and all these places as being superior to Norwich in their military training, etc. But when I got in the army I discovered that 50% of them were duds, and it just changed my life around and my feelings about my institution. Yeah, it was strange. JC: When you graduated from Norwich what was the first -- you went into the army. RT: Yeah. JC: Did you go straightaway into the army, or was there a period? RT: Well, some of us -- I think it was 12, maybe as many as 15 -- received an opportunity to go into the regular army, not into the reserve army. I was one of those. About half of my classmates who were given that ability to do that chose not to do it, so there were a number of us that went. Upon graduation we received our commission in the United States Army Reserve, and then two weeks later I was brought into the regular army with another commissioning thing, which happened to be by my father's Norwich roommate, Colonel [Rice?] in Boston. He was running something in Boston for the army at the time. That was sort of fun. Then I went immediately off. We graduated about 15 or 17 May or something, June rather. On the second day of July, I reported in to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment Light at Fort Meade, Maryland, as one of these people you had a regular army commission. So there wasn't any time -- there was time enough in between that the family all went down to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation, but I graduated and went into the army. JC: Now did you get married before you were in the army? 11 RT: No, no. No, no. I was still trying to get back in Carol's good graces. Before I left -- well, I went, as I said, to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Now the army was doing something really stupid at that time. They had been told to reduce the army's personnel requirements, and rather than reducing in any reasonable way, they chose to take one-third of every squad, one-third of every company, one-third of every battalion, one-third of every regiment. It was a paper army. It couldn't really operate well at all. But when the war broke out in Korea they took from those drawn-down forces and sent them over as individual replacements, supposedly to go into units that also had the same kind of vacancy that was created now. So we had almost no reasonable training while I was in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment before going to Korea, and these people went into units for which they were not trained. The army was really messed up, really messed up. General Abrams one time in discussing this with a group of officers, after he'd become chief of staff of the army, had tears running down his face. "No army should ever do that to its people. There is no excuse for it, and as long as I'm chief of staff I guarantee you that our units will be ready to fight, if we have to fight." You know, oh. It was a terrible mess over there. So before leaving that unit in which I had a miserable career for that short period of time. For example, it wasn't two weeks later that the post's military police battalion left Fort Meade and went to Korea. Company A of my organization, of which I was a lieutenant, became the post's military policemen. Now, we know nothing about being the post's military policemen, not a thing. There wasn't anything in ROTC, there wasn't anything that lead us to believe. What I knew about policing was I'd seen in movies, and I hid behind the "Welcome to Fort Meade" sign in my sedan, and chased down someone that was speeding, and discovered it was the chief of staff of the post. At midnight I went over and had a bed check in the post's prison, to see that there weren't any knives in there. But I got called in and said, "Hey, come on, get off it. You can go to jail for what you're doing," you know. (laughs) It was crazy. I was trying to do my job as I knew it, but no one was there to supervise me in any way. JC: And how long were you doing that? RT: I left there in September. I went in in July, left in September, and got to Korea in late November, first having leave and then going to the West Coast, going through the checks and balances of travel over there. Just about that time MacArthur announced that the war would be over by Christmas, and as a result the army slowed down the number of replacements they were sending over. This was just about the time that the marines invaded Inchon, and it was followed up with the 7th Division behind them, and trapped the North Vietnamese soldiers below us. It was really a magnificent maneuver. So we were just sitting around in California waiting to get orders. Every weekend we'd go into town, and we'd go into some bar and then talk out loud about how we've got to go, and waiting to go to war, this kind of thing. Somebody would pick up the bar tab. (laughs) Then we crossed the Pacific during a hurricane, and that was something most unusual, as you might imagine. The piano broke loose in the lounge. It had been a troop transport in World War II, and they converted it to be a troop ship but for families to go to Japan or other places. At that time these ships were the property of the army, it wasn't the navy. 12 I remember distinctly there was a captain on board, mostly lieutenants, but this captain on board was a ranger, and he'd a big, puffed-up chest, and walked among us, and told us to stand up straight, and "Take your hands out of your pockets." When he'd get tired of doing that he decided we should have bayonet drill, and issued the bayonets, put them on our rifles, and went up on the deck. Oh, God. I said, "I'm not playing this game." There was a ladder still going up the funnel, in wartime where they had a station to look for submarines, OK. I went up there while everybody else was screaming and hollering down below and got away with it. It's a wonder I ever went anywhere in the army. (laughs) JC: So what was Korea like? RT: Well, let me describe it. We arrived the day before Thanksgiving in Inchon, got off the boat. There was a long, long tidal process; the ship couldn't get close to the docks or anything else. So they threw the nets over the side, and we were to go over the side of the ship and climb down into a small boat to go in. But we had all our personal gear with us. We were carrying great bags of stuff. I had two bottles of whiskey in my bag, and some damn fool says, "Drop your bag into the boat." I did. (laughs) But as a matter of fact, they took our uniforms away from us at that time and said, "We will hold them here, because if everybody goes home at Christmas it won't affect you for a while, and you'll be in a regular army uniform." But we got on the boats and went on the shore. They fed us what was left over from the Thanksgiving dinner, and a lot of canned fruits, put us on a train, and sent us up to North Korea. Each of us, each lieutenant, was on an open freight car, you know, enclosed but with doors on both sides, and each one of them had a little stove in it. It was cold, and we headed north, and every time the hospital train came south on that one track we would pull over maybe an hour before it came by, and then stick around and get back onto the thing. In my one car I had 27 people. Those cars were small. They were Japanese-style freight cars, and they were small. We had nothing but straw on the floor and a sleeping bag, but it was a summer sleeping bag, not a winter sleeping bag, and the stove didn't really heat the thing at all. There were slots in the side of the thing. Anyway. We didn't have any ammunition, and we would get shot at on the train. Now, nobody I know of got hit, but it made quite an impression. But still they didn't issue us any ammunition. There was a major in charge, and he was in the last car, which was a caboose kind of car, tight, a good stove, etc., etc. So whenever the train stopped we as lieutenants would run back and sit in his car with him and then take off again. Many of the soldiers would get off and run in to find somebody in the little town we stopped in and buy rot-gut whiskey. Boy, they were in trouble. One of the people in the car behind me, I was told, went blind on the spot. Maybe he was cured later, but it made an impression. We finally got to the capital of Pyongyang, and they put us on trucks and took us to what used to be a hospital. We went on about the fourth floor and were on cots, or on the floor, kind of thing, and at midnight that night some captain in the army came in and said, "OK, everybody out. Get down on the truck below. Let's go. Get your gear together." Well, we all didn't get there first, and the last of us were turned around and sent back. That batch was never heard from again. The next morning we were loaded on trucks and sent up. But before going they fed us a good breakfast. We went down into 13 the basement of this place -- it was steaming and dark down there -- and we had breakfast on some slate or granite tables. Steam is pouring out of the coffee pots, etc., and I filled my cup with coffee and took a big drink to discover that it was maple syrup. I went forward that day sick as a dog, sitting at the end, at the tail of that truck yurking all the way. I'm sure all those men I was traveling with, "Look hey there, look at that lieutenant. He's so scared he's puking," you know. We went on and eventually we came to a stop, and the captain who was leading this convoy came back and told us to get off the trucks and go into these schoolhouses that were available, right immediately, I mean, just saw them and said, "Take them." We went into the schoolhouse, and he turned around and went back to get "another load," quote, unquote. We never saw him again; he never came back. Here we are with no ammunition, carrying guns, living in a schoolhouse, and the Chinese are moving in on us. They were moving down the mountains on both sides of this thing, and then there was a tremendous, tremendous loss of life up the mountain further, coming toward us. The 38th Regiment that I joined after we got out -- I get the men out, and then I jumped on a mess truck headed south, all trying to find where the headquarters for the 38th Regiment was. The 38th Regiment was part of the 2nd Division, and it lost in about two days, coming through a real tight trap -- there was a river, there was a road that wasn't wide enough for two tanks to pass, and then there was a mountain again on the other side, and the Chinese are up on both sides just raking the convoy. One truck stops, you know, they've got to push it off the edge to get the convoy going again. Now I wasn't a part of that, but I joined the company that did, and when I finally caught up with my unit, it was because I had stopped in from the schoolhouse when I saw the 1st Cavalry Division people pull on in close to us, so I went over and inquired. I walked into the TOC, the tactical operation center, and there was a major sitting in front of a map, on a stool, making little marks on it. I waited a while, and he didn't notice me, and finally I said, "Sir, could you tell me where the 38th Regiment is?" and he turned around and said, "No, but where's the division? Where is the 2nd Division?" I said, "Sir, I have no idea. We're trying to find it. We were left off down here." He said, "I don't know where they are. If you --" It was that confusing. They lost something like 4,000 men coming out of that gap. Now, I wasn't affected, not at all, in any way. I was scared to death at times, but then after that I joined the 38th Regiment. When I went in to meet Colonel Pappal -- yeah, something like that -- he shook hands with one, and passed me a bottle of whiskey with the other one, and said, "Son, you're going to need this." I reported in to the battalion commander, and he at the time was meeting with his staff in a little hutch where the Vietnamese -- the Vietnamese -- the Koreans built their houses of mud and mud brick, and they would cook in an open room attached to the house, and the smoke would go under the floors and heat the house. We were sitting on one of those floors, warm and toasty, and they were passing the bottle of whiskey around this circle as we talked about (inaudible) [00:59:47]. By that time the bottle of whiskey got pretty hot. (laughs) It was a very strange circumstance. When he finally got to it, the battalion commander said to me, he said, "Todd, you're going down to A Company." I said, "Sir, and who commands A Company?" He said, "You do." I had about as much opportunity to learn infantry tactics and lead a rifle 14 company as nobody at all. My buddy who I was traveling with who had some experience in World War II in combat in Europe, came back and went to the University of Illinois, and then came into the army the same as I did, through the (inaudible) [01:00:34], he was sent down to a company that already had an experienced commander. You know. Nobody was thinking. I sent the first sergeant back to division headquarters, he got commissioned, and he came back, and essentially he told me what we ought to be doing. Then we did it. Until MacArthur issued an order, that probably came to him to do it, that said all armored officers that had been assigned to infantry units are to be returned to armored units. So I went down to the regimental tank company of the regiment where my company commander, before coming over there, was an infantry officer who was aide to camp to the commanding general who gave him the tank company in the 38th regiment who didn't know a damn thing about tanks. It was really screwed up everywhere. At a point when I was running the rifle company, I was told that a replacement was on the way, flying in, and he would replace me as company commander. Oh, great, that's good news. The guy showed up, and during World War II he had been in the air force as a bombardier. He had absolutely no infantry experience. He had joined the nearest reserve unit to his home when he was discharged. It really wasn't working out. Where we got replacements, the adjutant would go down and say, "Has anybody been through armored training?" Nobody. Nobody. So there wasn't anybody to send to the armored company except the people that came in (inaudible) [01:02:41]. So we were training these guys, but we weren't -- there were some old sergeants that really knew what they were doing, and that's we made. We eventually had a pretty good tank company. I remember my sergeant was a gruff, old son of a bitch. I walked up to a formation he was holding one day, and his back was to me, and I was walking toward the platoon. And I heard him say "The kid says we got to --" I said uh-oh. "Sergeant [Beach?], come with me," and we went in to see the company commander. I told the company commander that I couldn't resolve this one. He said, oh, very well, I'll assign someone else." Sergeant [Beach?] remained behind. Wow, I've done it. Sergeant Beach comes out. I said, "What happening Sergeant?" and he said, "I'm going to be the lieutenant in charge of the other platoon." Ahhh, God, you know. (laughs) It just wasn't the army I knew later on. Yeah. It was a very sad arrangement. It really wasn't until General Walker was killed in a jeep accident, and he was the 8th Army commander, and they sent General Van Fleet over to run it, and we by that time had moved 125 miles to the rear. We were running as an army. Word got out very quickly that General Van Fleet's orders were "I don't want to see your plans of defense, I want to see your plans of attack." And everyone says, "Sure, sure, General. You look at them, and you'll be all alone up there." Well, by God, he took that army and straightened it out and moved it forward and stopped the Chinese, without much additional support. It was amazing to see that happen. I'll never forget that, that one man deciding that he's going to turn the army around and you'd better fall in line. I did have one experience before that happened when I was with the tank company, and I was in a jeep riding down a road, and the division commander had decided that since we had all these losses, and we're all screwed up, that he had a way to make us all feel proud of ourselves and identify. The methodology he used was that one regiment would have a mustache, another regiment would have sideburns, and another 15 would have goatees. Crazy, just crazy. But I'm driving down the road, and an assistant division commander, a one star, is coming this way, and he went right by, and I saluted, and then he stopped and hollered back at me. I jumped out and ran down to his jeep. He said, "You're not obeying the division commander's orders." I said, "Sir, what do you mean?" He said, "You shaved." I said, "No, sir, I've never shaved." (laughter) God. Yeah. But General Van Fleet really pulled that into order, and he relieved a lot of people. He relieved my brigade commander, gave us a lieutenant to be the colonel's slot in the brigade, who turned out to wind up with four stars in the end. They made the mechanism work. JC: Amazing. Now, you were awarded the Medal for Valor in Korea, weren't you? RT: Yeah. I got a Bronze Star for Valor and a Silver Star for Valor, neither of which I really want to talk about much. I think somebody else would have done better to have them than me. I mean, I was pleased, happy to receive it, proud to wear it on my uniform kind of thing, but there was a lot of that going on to bolster up morale of everybody. JC: Is there anything else you want to say about Korea? RT: I don't know. At the end it was a pretty good experience. When we had gone into a stalemate, we started a rotation system back to the United States, and it was a point system. If you came within a certain period of time, then you could go back at a date specific, so we all knew when we'd be going back. There were points for the kind of job you had and all this kind of thing. It was interesting, I went back to Japan, spent a few days in Japan. When we got on the boat I was assigned -- as I had on the way over -- to a large stateroom, and I think there were 12 of us in it, and up and down cots. It was the same gang I went over with. You know, the timeline of where you engaged in combat were the same for all of us, in different units, and that was really pretty special. Two of them, only two of them, didn't come back, and they were both infantry officers. To the best of my knowledge, from the 38th Regiment that I was familiar with, the lieutenants didn't go back whole. The majority of them were killed. Those that were wounded were wounded seriously enough that they didn't come back to the unit. So it was us armored guys that, essentially, came back together, went over together and came back together. Stopped in Hawaii on the way back, pulled into the port, and there's all these hula girls down on the thing, people with big signs, "Welcome Home, Veteran." I said, "Hell, I'm not a veteran. That's a guy that sits outside the post office trying to sell pencils." (laughs) That came as a bit of a shock to us. But, yeah. JC: Well, once you got back to the United States where were you stationed? RT: Before I got back to the United States, on R&R in Japan, I knew of my rotation date. I called Carol, who by that time had finished her year after Smith at Radcliffe, taking the first year of the Harvard Business School program at Radcliffe -- business school faculty, business school-devised location, Radcliffe. I called her and said, "How about meeting me in New York City on such and such a date at the Biltmore Hotel? We'll meet under the clock." Now, meeting under the clock, there'd been a movie about that whole 16 business. So she did, and we went to my family's house. They'd moved to Scarsdale, New York, at that point. I asked her to marry me. She said, "Give me a couple of weeks." So I went back to visit my family. They're not my immediate family, my grandparents in Quincy, Massachusetts, and my other grandparents in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I went to -- my uncle, my mother's brother, ran a hardware store that had originally been his father's, and he said, "What are you going to do about a car?" I said, "I got to get one." I sold my car before I went over. He said, "Well, I've got a good friend who's honest, and I think we can get a good car." So I went over that afternoon and bought a car and called Carol, and I said, "I bought a car today." She said, "A convertible?" and I said, "Yes," and turned it in the next day and got a convertible. (laughter) I'd do anything to make sure she's sweet. She said yes, we were married on the nineteenth of June of that year, and she obviously had to quit her job to become an army wife. JC: So where did you all go after that? RT: The first station when we returned, and I'm talking now about the same group of army officers that went over and came back together, also went to Fort Knox, and we lived in newly-built quarters that were built by a civilian contractor on the edge of there, which were great for a newly-married couple, but they certainly weren't anything special. George and Joanne Patton lived next door to us, a small world, yeah. I've lost my train of thought here now. (break in audio) JC: And we'll get back started. All right, so we were talking about Fort Knox. RT: Fort Knox being a first assignment together in the army was really great. So different. I mean, Fort Knox was organized. Everything was working well. People were happy. Not that we weren't working hard, because we really were. My first assignment was to a training division. It took the number of the division, the third, and replicated it and then trained, basic training. I was in the 2nd Brigade headquarters working on the planning and that kind of thing. I really was disappointed that I wasn't one of the company commanders, but it turns out that that was a tough job. In the tank company, the guy that headed the tank company had more tanks than a tank division, and it was a mess to keep them all straightened out and going around. So one day I went back home for lunch, and Mrs. George Patton, Sr., was sitting in the living room of our house talking to Carol. She had come down to Fort Knox because George and Joanne had just been married, and Joanne got some kind of disease when they were on the honeymoon in the Caribbean. And I reintroduced myself to Mrs. Patton, and we sat down and talked. She asked me what my job was, and I told her. I said, "But I've got to go. I've got an appointment this afternoon to see the commanding general. They're looking for an aide to camp to the commanding general, and I really don't want that job. I really would prefer to get an opportunity to command a company in the division here." She said, "Russell, General Collier is a very, very fine man. He has a 17 fine family life. He is a very, very successful soldier who commanded the 2nd Armored Division at the end of the war in Berlin. You could learn an awful lot working for him." So I went over, and I got the job, and for the next two years I was the junior aide to the commanding general. I did such things as travel with him when he went to different places for different purposes. My buddies all got a hold of me when they found out I was going to do this job, and all had things they wanted changed at Fort Knox, and I was to be their agent in telling the commanding general how he could change the place. Very early on we went out of the headquarters, down the steps, into the car, went past the post theater. I thought, well, here goes. I said, "Sir, do you realize that on this post now an officer must be in his full dress uniform in order to go to the movies?" He said, "Yes, I know that, and it will remain that way." I didn't have many new ideas for him after that. (laughs) He'd go over to the armor school, and the people that are teaching in the combat kinds of business would say, "This is what we're doing now, General, and what do you think? We'd like your approval of it," and I'd sit in the back of the room and listen to what was going on, and understand it. I would hear the people that had served in combat talk about what you ought to do, and I got a great education. Also, every year there was something called the Armor Warfighting Conference. Twice I was there for that. They bring in all the people that belong to the Armor Association, or were serving in an armored position, all the senior people, and they'd talk about what the army ought to be doing in armor. One of my jobs was to go into the airport in the general's big sedan and his chauffer and pick these guys up and drive them back to the post, and I'd chat with these guys, and it was really fun. I got to know an awful lot of people, army commanders, army staff members, and all this. I really felt pretty special that I'd had this kind of an opportunity. Then we also had at Fort Knox in that time frame an armor board. This armor board, when General I. D. White was the commander at Fort Knox -- before General Collier -- that the chief of staff of the army was not pleased with the way the chief of ordnance was managing the tank program and gave the responsibility to the commanding general at Fort Knox. All the bigwigs gathered at Fort Knox to make decisions about what the next tank would look like, what the next armored personnel carrier would look like, etc., etc. Again, I sat in the back of the room, and young captains and majors, most of them West Point graduates who'd gone off to graduate school and were coming back and using their talents. It was a great, great opportunity for me. We were always invited to the house when the Colliers were having a party, and people would say, "Oh, you're going over there and pass the cigarette butts around with them, aren't you?" "No, we don't do that. We're part of that group." Mike Popowski here in town, his dad was one of those colonels on the post at that time. I really got to know all those people. Not that it was doing me any good, but I learned from them, you know. I learned how to act, I learned when to shut up. It was very useful, and it was a great time. The Colliers were magnificent to us. We had a child while we were living there -- it was Tom, and Tom got burnt badly in an accident at our house. He was crawling across the floor, and there was a coffee pot that started percolating, and he looked up and pulled on the cord, and it came over and broke open on his back. The Colliers came over and relieved us of our 24-hour duty, and they took it over; they sat with that baby. We were their family. It was amazing; it was wonderful. 18 Yeah. I began to really understand what the army was about, that it could be a good army. JC: Well, after Fort Knox where did you go? RT: Let's see. Oh, yeah. When General Collier left, he was to be promoted and going to go to Korea, and he offered me the opportunity to go with him, and I told him that I would much prefer to have a tank company in Europe. While I loved the guy and his family, I wanted a tank company in Europe. He said, "We'll take care of that," and he called up the commanding general of the 2nd Armored Division in Europe, the one that they call Chubby Doan, and told him the situation and that I would be on orders to go over to the 2nd Armored Division and a tank company. He said, "I'll give him a tank company." So, wow! You know, we made it, and off we go to Europe. We pull into Bremerhaven, which is the northern port in Germany, and they send forth a little craft to meet the boat. A sergeant first class climbs up the rope ladder and comes over and starts telling people what their orders are going to be, and I was ordered to something called the 13th Military Intelligence Group. I thought, oh, my God, something's wrong here. The colonel who was in charge of us all on the boat, for the boat trip, he got his orders, and he opened it up, and it's the 13th MIG. He said, "What's an MIG?" I said, "The best I know it's a Russian airplane." (laughs) It turned out that he thought he was going to the 1st Infantry Division for a regiment. Well, we got off the boat, and both of us went down to this intelligence group, went through two different fences, guards posted in towers and all the rest of it, and slept in an open bay area over the officers' club. There were a number of other offices there, and they said, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I don't know. I'm here by mistake. I'm headed to the 2nd Armored Division." They said, "No, no, you aren't. We're all in the same business, fellow. Tell us where you're going." And I said, "No, no. I'm an officer, and I'm going to --" They said, "We understood an armored officer was coming, and he was going to go underground and behind the Iron Curtain, and report on the Russian movements." Holy Crow! That's not for me. So the next morning I went down and asked authority to see the commanding officer of the 513th [sic] MIG. He spoke with me, and he said, "No, you're going down. You're not going to do that; that's rumor. You're going down to the headquarters in Heidelberg, and you're going to be an intelligence officer in that headquarters." I said, "I'm not an intelligence officer." He said, "That's your orders." OK. So I went down to Heidelberg. General Jim Phillips was the G2 at the time, and I asked to see him, and I went right up to his office and told him my sad story, that I was going to go to the 2nd Armored Division -- and he was an armored officer -- "Now here I am an untrained specialist in your department." He said, "What were you going to do?" I said, "Well, General Doan in the 2nd Armored Division had accepted me to come and be in tank company." He says, "I'll talk to him about that," and he reached over -- they had a red phone system that red phones went to the different generals in different locations -- he picked it up and dialed 27 or whatever it was, and General Doan answers the phone, and I'm sitting there. He said, "I got a young captain sitting here that tells me he's supposed to be in the division. Tell me about him, what are you going to do with him?" Well, poor old General Doan hadn't remembered much about the phone conversation a couple of 19 months before or something, and said, "Well, I'm going to make him my aide." And he said, "Like hell you are. I'm keeping him here for that." (laughs) I did it all over again for another two years in the headquarters at [Usera?]. [01:26:32] It was a great experience. General and Mrs. Phillips were a mother and dad to us; they'd invite us to Sunday dinner, and little Tom would crawl around the floor or under the table, and General Collier would feed him peanuts or something. It was a wonderful time, and when the Colliers would take a trip and borrow the commander in chief's train, we went with them. It was marvelous. I saw all of Europe. I knew most everything that was going on in the intelligence field, and it was a great experience with wonderful people. But when he got assigned to go back to the United States, I took the Colliers up to the port to put them on. When I came back, this again on the commander in chief's train, I had the train stop in Mannheim, and I got off in Mannheim. I wasn't going to be stopped again and reported in to the 57th Tank Battalion and for the last year there had a tank company. That was probably the greatest experience of my life. It really was a good experience. We were hard training, we were well trained, good people. In the beginning we had a wonderful commander who was a major, and the division commander, General Doan, didn't want to put a lieutenant colonel in that slot. He wanted this man to get that experience, but eventually they had to pull him and let -- the lieutenant colonels were backing up. So we were out maneuvering and we came to the last day of the maneuvers, and the new battalion commander arrives, and we have this party in a beer hall. The new commander arrives, and one of the company commanders in Charlie Company walked up to the head table with two boots of beer. You know what that is? Glass things that replicate a boot. Big. He puts one in front of each of the two commanders and says, "Let's see who's the better man." This poor guy that has just got off the train coming down from Bremerhaven and crossed the ocean picks up his boot and starts to drink. The battalion commander we love drinks it down and wins the contest, and the new battalion commander was so tight from drinking that beer too fast his feet slipped out from under him as he sat at that table and went right down under the table. (laughter) That was his first day of duty, and he didn't improve much after that. We were all pretty cocky, the company commanders; we were doing a lot of good things. But he knew nothing about it. We told him -- we were told that he had served in a tank battalion in World War II, and that's all we knew about him. It sounded great to us, a guy with some real experience. Well, it turns out that he reported in to a replacement company, and they said, "Take this truckload of men and go forward to point A. There will be a sign on the road at so many miles or kilometers. Turn left in there, and that's where your unit will be." Well, he got down there and made the turn, then went up, and three Germans come out and say, "Achtung! Put him in the compound!" and he went directly to the prisoner-of-war camp. He never had any experience. He'd been a public information officer before, and he was terrible. He was so bad that in a morning meeting every time, when he would suggest something the other three company commanders, we'd sort of nod or shake no. And "Well, what's the matter?" You know why? We didn't get any leadership out of him at all. When it came time to leave there, I had probably the most frightening experience in my life. He stood up in front of the entire battalion officer group and said, "Well, now that Captain Todd is leaving maybe I can take command of this battalion." Oh, my God. 20 Oh, my God. He gave me an efficiency report that would sink anybody, but it just turned out that in that moment of time the army changed the efficiency report system whereby your commander rates you, and his boss rates you, and then a third person rates what they did. Well, the third person turns out to have been the fellow that had been recently the brigade commander, and he knew me, he knew my performance, etc., and he sent back the efficiency report to be redone. Ho. (laughs) Yeah. Those were good times though, good times. Scary times, but testing, really testing you. JC: Because you were right there in Germany during really the height of the Cold War. RT: Yeah. As a matter of fact, one time we were out on maneuvers, 200 miles from our base, when the French and British moved into Suez, because the Egyptians said they were taking over the canal. There we are sitting out in the woods saying, "Oh, my God," because the president had said, "Oh, no, you don't." Eisenhower said, "No, you don't. You can't do that. We give you a lot of money to bring your economies back from the war, and we'll stop it tomorrow unless you withdraw." But we didn't know all that, and my guys are saying "We're going to gyro to Cairo," you know, that (laughter) kind of stuff. We finally came back. But if we'd had to go, I haven't seen a unit that would be any more ready than we were. Yeah. It was really a great exper-- In a company command, everybody doesn't have to bypass the battalion commander who's a dud. But when you do have to do that, then you're really thinking on your feet. It was great. JC: What was your next assignment after that? RT: Would you believe back to Fort Knox? JC: Oh, really? RT: Yeah. I went back there to go to the Armor Officer Advanced Course, which was a nine-month course in there, in which they were teaching you at the next level. Now the course we took before at Fort Knox was a course we should have had before we went to Korea. I came away with a great impression of how good that was. It was excellence. When I saw General Collier working with the instructors and telling them how to handle this kind of thing. When I came back three years later, it was a well-organized organization. In fact, General Abrams had been there as the head of the command department. It was a first class education. I really and truly look back upon my Norwich experience as not up to that standard that the army was producing there. At the end of that course I had talked my way into becoming one of the instructors in the command department, and I was thrilled to death about that. On graduation day I'm sitting in my chair on the aisle, and as the assistant commandant went by my seat he stopped and said, "You're going to be working in my office." (laughs) So I then worked for Colonel Chandler, who was a first-rate soldier. He had been horse cavalry, in the Philippines, and was on the Bataan death march. He was really very much a gentleman, very much strong willed, and very much of a tutor, and I worked out of his office. My job was to arrange the schedules of the classes, and we had all kinds of classes -- enlisted classes, officer classes -- so that they would mesh how 21 many people, how many classrooms do we need, how many instructors do we need, on what day are we going to do it? I was bringing home page after page of long paper, and on the kitchen floor working out the details of making this thing work. It was great, but, again, there was an intermediary. There was a lieutenant colonel who was my immediate supervisor who, again, I thought to be a dud. On my first day of working there he said, "That's your desk right over there." And I'm, "Yes, sir." I went over to my desk. Now what do I do? Here I am, I found my desk. There was a major sitting at a desk facing me who never looked up. He was just scribbling away, scared to death of this guy evidently. A few minutes later he came over and said, "Well, here's the first project I want you to do. This is it. I want you to study this, and then rewrite it, and we'll discuss it." Fine. It wasn't five minutes later, he came over and said, "No, I want you to do this one instead." I went through about six of those before I understood what I was doing. I was hopeless that anything was really going to happen. That same day he came over and looked over my shoulder, and I looked up, and he said, "What are you writing there?" I said, "Well, sir, I'm writing myself a note so that I will be able to put these things in the appropriate order." He said, "Well, you're not saying it very well." (laughter) It was awful. My out was Colonel Chandler, and a major got assigned to the office, and he very quickly understood what was going on here and went in and talked to Colonel Chandler, and Colonel Chandler moved him out. Again, we got a very, very fine operating organization going. It was good; it was very successful. But, you know, every time there's some kind of a roadblock in your career, you've got to stop and figure out how the hell you're going to get around it. JC: What was after Fort Knox? RT: Twenty more years of -- let's see. I graduated from Fort Knox. I was selected below the zone for a promotion. Do you know what that means? JC: Uh-uh. RT: When you're considered for promotion a board meets in Washington, and everybody whose career appears between this date and this date is considered. Isn't that right? Well, what they started, and I don't know if they're still doing it or not -- I think they are -- they would go below this zone and choose certain people to be examined with this group, and I was lucky enough to do that and really jumped ahead. In the headquarters there was Major Howard from Norwich University. Major Howard didn't graduate from here, but he was an instructor when I was a student here. He was in another department, or I didn't see much of him. But when I came out on the below-the-zone list, there were two of us at Fort Knox that came out on it, and he called me on the phone, and he said, "Well, I thought Frank would make it, but I never thought you would." (laughter) So things are weird, but Leavenworth was an exciting time. I was a captain. The majority of people were majors and lieutenant colonels. A real shock of my life in the first day was seated at tables, and there's a blank card in front of you, and the instructor said, "Now write your name on it, not your rank. Write your name on that card." Well, the guy sitting opposite me was a lieutenant colonel, and I was a captain, and I don't know his rank. What do I call him? We were all calling each other by their first names 22 rather than you find in a unit. That (inaudible) [01:41:04] like that, I'm up against it here. So I worked hard, harder than I've ever worked, and at the end of the halfway mark in the course they gave us standings of where you stand in the course, and I was number five or something. I said, "I'm working too hard." Yeah, that was good, a good period in our life. We had Saturdays and Sundays off. I had a little golf group I played with on Saturdays, and Michelob beer was local out there. We'd buy a pitcher -- the loser would buy a pitcher of beer, and that was a big deal. That was a big deal. JC: So when did you go to graduate school at the University of Alabama? RT: Strange you should ask that. When I came to the end of the course at Leavenworth a general officer, a brigadier general, came out to the course to announce to the armor officers, to the infantry officers, etc., what your next assignment would be. About the third name he read was a good friend of mine, and when he read off where he was to go this guy went "Ooohhh." The general looked down at him and said, "What's the problem?" He said, "Sir, I don't think anybody in your office ever read my request." "Oh." He said, "Major so-and-so, come out here." The guy comes out from behind the curtain with a big notebook, and the guy flaps through it, and he looks down, and he says, "I don't know what you're complaining about. It says right here, 'Anywhere in the world but Fort Knox.' And you're going to Fort Knox, your second choice." (laughter) Then he got to my name, and he said, "I want to see you right after this." I thought, oh, God, what now? So I went in, and he was in his office. There was a temporary office. And he said, "We've got a problem here," and I said, "Sir, what is it?" He said, "Well, they've got you going to graduate school, and as the chief armor officer I want you to go to an armored unit." I said, "I have a choice?" He said yes. I said, "Where will I go if I go to an armored unit?" He thought for a minute, and he said, "You'll go to the tank battalion in Hawaii." I said, "Can I discuss this with my wife at lunch?" and he said, "Sure," and I came back and said, "We have decided that we're going to go to graduate school," and that's how that worked out. JC: So you went to Tuscaloosa instead of Hawaii. RT: Yeah. (laughs) JC: Now, what degree did you get at Alabama? RT: MBA. It was a good tough course, but it was in the process of changing the curriculum of business schools, and some of it was very tough. Part of it was very simple, but some of it was very tough. I established a schedule where I went in very early in the morning, got in there before 7:00 every morning, went down to the basement of the library where I had an assigned carrel and started working until it was time for a class to begin. I'd go up to the class and go back to the basement, eat my lunch in the basement, go home at 5:00, and hardly ever did any midnight work at home. We lived a good, wonderful family life in Tuscaloosa. Now, it wasn't all easy. There had been the problems of the colleges not admitting blacks, and the president of the United States pushing hard to make them do it. 23 Then there were the riots at Ole Miss, right at that time. The army sent down its chief person who determines whether the applicants will go to college -- army applicants -- and to which college they will go to. So we all gathered, and there were people taking nuclear physics, and [we have to?] discuss with him, and he talked it back and forth, etc. Finally one young captain in the back said, "Sir, this is all very interesting, but the army's practically at war with our citizens. What the hell happen-- What do we do? What are our orders, and what are our instructions here at the University of Alabama, if the same kind of thing breaks out on this campus?" This poor old duffer who'd been the president of some college someplace sort of shook his head and said, "Well, I hope you'd be on the side of the government." (laughter) That hit right in the heart of soldiers. But it was a good program. When I left I was going to be assigned to the headquarters in US Army Europe in the comptroller's office, and you're required to stay in that position for three years to make up for your being chosen for that job. They want to use your knowledge and experience. Just before I left they changed it, and I went to the US Army Support Command in France, which had 57 separate organizations that it commanded, to include a pipeline that came in at St. Nazaire and went out to all of the air bases and army refueling, etc., and repair of tanks, repair of everything. We took German factories over, used Germans. It was a very, very exciting assignment in terms of technology, but I got assigned to the comptroller's office in that damn headquarters, and I was one of three soldiers. The rest were all civilian employees, or French. One of the people that worked for me was from Yugoslavia; he'd escaped Yugoslavia. So it was a mixed up kind of place. We lived at a French house down by the railroad station. We didn't want to live in the government quarters, we'd done enough of that. We wanted to have an experience in France. From that point of view, it was wonderful. The job was terrible, just terrible. They expected me to know everything that they did in their routine because I'd been to this business program. Well, I had to really move fast to catch up with them. My boss was a man by the name of [Birossi?]. He'd been an Italian-American soldier in World War II who married an Italian and never went home, and when they created the support command then he stayed on in Europe and became a very important man in the headquarters as the budget manager of this very vast organization. I worked like hell to try and get it straightened out. They first gave me the responsibility of working the budget of a couple of the major organizations, one the tank rebuild plant, which was -- God, it looked like General Motors out there. I finally got frustrated with it all. We'd all sit in a room, roll out our papers, and bring in the guy, the comptroller, from that organization, and you'd sit facing each other with Mr. [Birossi?] looking over your shoulder, and you'd work out a budget for them. How the hell did I know? I didn't have any basis for doing it, but we'd discuss it to get it. When this was all over and calmed down I said, "This is stupid as hell," to [Birossi?]. He said, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "We've got the world's best information technology program right in this headquarters, those guys that are working the plants do it all by technical means, punch cards, and here we are sitting around trying to argue about a number on a sheet of paper that doesn't mean a damn thing." He said, "What do you suggest?" I said, "I suggest we go to talk to them, get onto their system somehow, and work this thing out that we can make a reasonable stab at it." He said, "OK, wise guy, do it." 24 Now, there was a lieutenant colonel in this overall office who was Birossi's boss, and I went to see him and told him, I said, "Now, I'm not competent to do this. There's no question about it. However, if you give me two of those young captains of finance that work down the hall from me, I can get this thing started and going." So he assigned these two guys to me, and we changed the whole system of how we did the budgeting of US Army Europe. I got some kind of an award for that. Then they put me in another job where I had all kinds of stupid responsibilities. I had a responsibility for efficiency of each of these many, many organizations, and I got permission to send people -- Frenchmen -- back to the United States to be trained in each of those depots to do it. Then we pulled all of this together right as the secretary of defense had initiated a program to improve work force relationships, his program, and they sent it out and said, "Everybody in the army, navy, and the air force will use these procedures." And my two-star boss said, "No, we won't. We're not doing that. We got a god system, we just got it started, and, well, that's the way it will be." OK, you're the boss. So six weeks later, maybe two months later, there's a message sent to the commanding general that said "We're sending over someone from the Department of Defense to look at your program." I got called in to the CG's office, and he said, "You got two weeks to put this program in place." Well, you know, I was put into a position where I got attention, and I could do what I wanted to do, and I could get help to do it, and everything just sort of worked together. It was a great experience. But, again, it's a case of speaking up and saying what you think is wrong and finding a way to do it. I went in on the train from Orleans into Paris to the IBM plant with boxes of punch cards in my (inaudible) [01:53:43] and brought them into IBM, and we worked it out with them to do it at first before we turned it over to our own organization. That's because if we screwed it up, we'd screw them up badly. But those two finance captains did all the work. I just plowed ahead. Another time, in that same job -- I really thought -- when I got there I said, "My career is ruined. My career is ruined. Who's going to believe that I was in a damn headquarters for a support group? No, uh. I'm an armored guy. No." But anyway, they came up with another program, again, out of the Department of Defense. This time it was to work specifically with -- I can't remember the name of it, but, again, it came out of the secretary of defense's office, and again I got the job to do it. But this time I had an opportunity to start from the beginning with it. It was a matter of saving money, and we were supposed to put out programs, out to our subordinate units, and help them find money and other ways of doing business (inaudible) [01:55:09]. We started with the laundries, a simple thing, and went into the laundries with the people we trained, and they would say to the laundress, "How can you do your job better?" They'd say, "Well, I've been working at this for six years. If we did this, and that, and the other thing," and all of a sudden we weren't doing anything but saying "How do you do it?" and then helping them do it, and getting their boss to agree to it. Well, then you had to take all this information and turn it over to another agency who would check your figures, and numbers, and back and forth, and everything. That all seemed to work out, and things were going along rather well when they put me in for an award as the civilian of the year for product improvement. I was called (laughs) into Heidelberg, and they put on a parade, and the commanding general and I are -- there were other people, for other reasons, being recognized that day. I'm standing 25 beside the commanding general when the troops are passing in review, and he said, "What the hell are you doing here? This is a civilian award." I said, "Sir, you signed it." (laughter) And off we went. I just kept working. Living there was great sport, except the French are crazy. We lived in a neighborhood, as I said, on Rue de la Gale, and the house was an old one. It was rent controlled, and we had to slip the landlord money on certain days, and you'd walk up to his house with a paper bag full of money. A door would open, a hand would come out and grab the paper bag out of your thing, the extra money for the -- crazy. In the neighborhood we never made close friends except in one instance. Our youngest daughter, Ellen, went to French school. The other two kids refused; they were smart enough not to do it. Ellen and her friend [Pascale?] (inaudible) [01:57:36] walked to school with her mother and Carol, over to school. The ladies walked back from school. After lunch, walked over, back to get, march them over, again, at the end of the school day. And they talked, and they talked, and they talked. Not a single word of English was ever spoken for three years between these two women. We get back to the United States and got a very nice letter from her, in English, and she said, "You never would have improved your French the way you did if you knew I had been a nanny in Great Britain and speak English." (Cates laughs) Now, that's the dirtiest, rottenest trick I can ever imagine happening. (laughter) When we had a problem with the house, you'd try and go out and find someone that would fix the faucet. Now, there are four sizes of pipe, and there are 12 sizes of faucets, and there are 14 sizes -- and they ask you which one do you want? You don't know. So somebody has to come and measure it and go back, and two days later you've got water running again. When it came time to buy coal, we went down to the place you buy coal, and it was a storefront on the main road, right in the main store, and he's got little glass canisters with different kinds of coal in the window. You don't buy coal that way anywhere else in the world. We went in, and he wanted to know how many radiators we had in the house, and how many veins each radiator had, and how many sections were in the stove, and then he could figure out how many tons it would take to heat the house. He didn't ask if there was any broken windows, or open doors, or boards off on the roof. They did it totally unscientific. Then when you come to that decision, then they say, "Now do you want it from Belgium? Do you want it from --" you know, down the list. We want anthracite from Belgium, OK. Then they come and dump it in the house with buckets in the window of the cellar, and the whole house is covered with coal dust everywhere. And it was expensive. Living there was not easy, but we made a pact that we were going to go once a month with the kids to Paris, every time, every month, and we did, and we traveled a lot. Not any great distances, but we loved parts of France. But the French were very difficult to live with. JC: Oh, I'm sure. I've been there once. (laughs) RT: The worst one was my father had a cousin who was, in relationship to Dad, it was about six up from him in the corporation, and he was the chairman of the board. We got a call that he was coming to visit the French company that was owned by the American company, and they were going to come down and see us in this hovel (laughs). And just about the time we knew that they were coming but not exactly when they were coming, 26 the French left us with a bit of a problem. When they put in the sewer system, they left the septic tank in the house, in the basement, made of clay, and it began to leak. Do you have any idea what living in that house was like? You couldn't flush a toilet. When I'd go off to work and leave Carol, they had a deal with these crazy guys coming in, and eventually they came in. One guy came in, and he took off the top of this thing, and then he went away. She chased him down, and he said, "Oh, you've got to hire somebody else. The union won't allow me to put the hose down in here and suck out what's left. You've got to find that guy." And it went on, and on, and on, and trying to live in that house. Fortunately we got it cleaned up before Uncle George showed up for lunch. (laughter) JC: Sounds like it was quite difficult living in that house. RT: It was very difficult. Every single day one of us crossed the street to the bakery that was directly across the street from us, and we'd order a demi pan, and bring it back for breakfast, or something else. And every single day that one of us went, my own experience was I'd walk in the door -- "Bonjour, Madame." (laughter) The only guy that spoke to us lived next door, and the reason he spoke to us was that nobody else in the neighborhood, or the town, or the city would speak to him, because he had been a butcher during the Nazi occupation and gave the Nazis all the best cuts of meat. We had no phones. It took three years to get a phone, and it was a three-year tour. If you got a phone, you had nobody to call; they'd all gone home. They're crazy, just crazy. (laughs) JC: So what was the next assignment after France? RT: Well, while in France the Vietnam War broke out, and people lieutenant colonel level in Europe were being pulled back to the United States and given a command in Vietnam. So I applied to get a command in Vietnam, and they said, "Oh, no, no, no, no, you haven't finished your tour for having gone to graduate school. You can't possibly go." This is talking to somebody back in Washington. Then another job opened up, and they needed a lieutenant colonel in an armored battalion, and I called them back again. I said, "I'll come back to this job after that. How about that?" "Nope, we can't do that. We can't do that." Eventually they said, "OK, when you come home from --" I put enough pressure on them. "When you come home from France, we'll send you to Vietnam." And when we came home from France, they said, "No, you're going to go to the Armed Forces Staff College. You've been selected among the army, navy, and air force to go to the Armed Forces Staff College, for six months. After that, we'll get you a job that will get you to Vietnam." Well, you know, it's frustrating, just terribly frustrating. After the Armed Forces Staff College they told me I would go to Vietnam, but first I would go to pick up 57 tanks that had just been manufactured of a new design, and I was to form the tank battalion in the United States, train it in the United States, and take it to Vietnam. When that day came, ready to go, we had three rounds blow up in the chamber back at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and they said, "Hold it. You're no longer on the list to go. But you are going to go to the Naval War College." I couldn't get to Vietnam! It was very difficult. 27 JC: What was the Naval War College like? RT: Terrible. The Naval War College, well, we called it the sleeping room. They had two major speakers every day, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. That was fine. I mean, I loved to hear them, and they did have a message, but it wasn't work. It was sitting there like you're turning on the television. There was no challenge to this thing at all. Now you could go and get a master's degree along with it from George Washington, but I couldn't, because I had a master's degree, so they weren't going to let me take that program. So they hired somebody the University of Massachusetts had fired from their Economics Department, an old man, to be my mentor and take me through a separate program -- nothing comes out of it other than a dissertation at the end. OK, I'll put up with it, but he was awful, and it was a waste of my time. You never had time between these people to really go to the library and do something. It was 20 minutes. What can you do in the library in 20 minutes? No, you don't. Everyone went and get good coffee, sat around and talked, etc. Oop, time to go back into the bedroom. There was nothing going on in terms of substance in the place. When I had my first time as directing my little group, I worked long and hard on the assignments, and came in the next morning and said, "OK, let's see. Now we had readings in this one, and then we had a differing opinion from this requirement, and then this one, and another one. Commander Jones, what do you think about this?" "Oh, shit," he said, "You don't think I pay any attention to that, do you? I'm in the George Washington program. I'm not going to do any of this." That was a general attitude. There wasn't any depth to what we were doing. One day the admiral in charge, who'd married a British lady and had just come back from another tour in London, said, "How would you like to have lunch at my house with a guest speaker, Todd?" I said, "Gee, that would be very nice, sir." I got up there to discover there were 12 or 13 of us at separate tables and he and the speaker was at another table. What did we do? We sat around and chatted, and ate his food, and left. He said, "How'd you like that?" I said, "What are you referring to, sir?" He said, "Well, the opportunity to be with the speaker." I said, "We weren't with the speaker. You were with the speaker." "Well, how would you handle that?" "I'd put in a round table, and we'd all sit around and talk." "What a great idea." Really, really bad stuff. So he did, and then he invited me to come, and I went, and he said, "How did that go?" I said, "Sir, that was wonderful. But if you did that in the classrooms it might help, too." "We don't have round tables in the classrooms?" He'd never been in a classroom. We didn't have one single naval officer who was nuclear qualified come to the course. They sent them to the National War College. We didn't have one single graduate of a senior college who was on the faculty. I could go on, and on, and on about how bad it was. But one day, in Vietnam, I was sitting at my desk outside General Abrams's office, and I got a call from the naval head in Vietnam. I'm trying to think of his name. I know it as well as I know my own. But anyway, he called me and said, "Russ, I got to see General Abrams." I said, "Well, he's tied up at the moment. Come on up and sit down, and I'll get you in just the minute I can break into it." He said, "Good," and he came up. We sat there, and he said, "I got to talk to General Abrams. They're going to announce this afternoon that I'm the new chief of naval operations, and I don't want him to hear it from anybody else but me." I said, "Oh, have I been waiting for this." He said, 28 "What are you talking about?" I said, "You can do something about the Naval War College that I couldn't," and I laid it out for him, and he fired the guy when he got back there. This is Zumwalt, Admiral Zumwalt. He fired the guy and changed all the programs. I mean, they were tough on him, and they've got a good school there now, or at least the last I knew of it, a very good school that has been accredited. But it was awful. JC: Did you finally get to Vietnam after the Naval War College? RT: Yeah, that's why I was sitting in General Abrams's office. I was to be sent over to be on the command list, which meant this list of people the army feels are capable of doing a job as colonel in a combat unit. They sent my name over, and then they called me back and said, "We've withdrawn your name." (sighs deeply) I said, "Come on, guys. This isn't fair." He's "Hold it, hold it, hold it. They're looking for an assistant to General Abrams, and we've sent your name in." I said, "Look, I've met General Abrams a few times. I don't think he was very impressed with me. I don't think he'll select me off of any list of yours." He said, "There is no list. We only sent your name." (laughter) So I went over there, and I sat for, oh, eight months I guess in General Cao Van Vien's office, who was the head of the Vietnamese armed forces, and I acted as a liaison between General Abrams and General Cao Van Vien, of which there was no requirement. Those guys talked to each other whenever they wanted to. But I represented General Abrams when General Cao Van Vien called the other -- the Koreans, the Australians, the New Zealanders, etc., etc. -- together on a Monday morning to have a meeting, and that was interesting, and I learned a lot, and I met a lot of people. Eventually the secretary of the staff rotated home, and I took his slot. You actually work for the chief of staff, but I read and decided which messages that came in that night would go into General Abrams the next morning, so I got to work very, very early and stayed very, very late, day after day after day, seven days a week. But I really loved working for the guy. Every Saturday morning we would meet with the commanders of the army, navy, air force, etc., the CIA, in the basement of our building, and it was general so-and-so, admiral so-and-so, etc., and Colonel Todd. And Colonel Todd sat in the back of the room and checked -- again, a great learning experience. Watching the interrelationship between these very, very senior commanders was a great experience. Then I went with General Abrams every Monday morning down to brief the ambassador. We'd drive down in his sedan. On Sunday I'd prepare a book for him that he'd go over, and then he'd have that in front of him. He never read it. He never sat in front of the ambassador and read it. I'd be on pins and needles all the time that he'd turn to me and say, "What the hell's this?" (laughs) But he was great. Then I got a command. I left the headquarters and went out and joined the 24th Division as a brigade commander, and I'd been there about eight days when it was announced that the brigade was to go home. (laughs) The next day I got a call on the radio, out flying around in my helicopter -- I had seven battalions in the brigade at the time -- from the corps commander, General Davidson, and General Davidson said, "Meet me at coordinates so-and-so," and we both flew into a point. He said, "I'm pulling you out of this. I've got a problem with the Royal Thai Army. The officer we have working 29 with them is not acceptable any longer to the Royal Thai Army. I need somebody tomorrow, and you're it." That was the craziest thing I've ever been involved in. Wonderful, wonderful Thai commander, who began his military experience at age five in a military academy run by the government. He finished his education in France. The French owned Indonesia. Thailand (inaudible) [02:16:30]. So there we were. Day in and day out, he and I would receive the same briefing. He'd get it in Thai, and his aide-de-camp would give it to me in English. We never ever, ever came to the same solution. We were generations in thought apart. For example, in World War II Thailand never declared war on anybody, but went to war against the Allied forces when they thought Japan was winning. This fellow was a captain in the Thai Army, and he did something very spectacular -- whatever it was, I don't know, very heroic. He was called back to the capital, and he was given the Royal Order of the White Elephant or something. They'd give out five for every war. This was something very, very special, parades, the whole business. He went back to his unit, and then the Thais decided that the Japanese weren't winning the war, and they changed and became our allies. Now you're not going to believe this. They called him back and took the medal because he was fighting on the wrong side. (laughs) I could go on forever on this. My brain couldn't absorb it. When I'd left that and gone back to the United States, I guess when this happened -- I don't remember where I was, but anyway, I wrote him a letter, and I said, "What in the world is going on in Bangkok? You were the commander of the 1st Division, responsible for the security of Bangkok. Your father-in-law is the dictator. They're rioting in the streets, and, to the best I know, nothing's happening." He wrote back to me, after some (inaudible) [02:19:06] time, and said, "Well, you just don't understand our way of thinking. The soldiers had killed some civilians who were rioting, so I went back to my BOQ and stayed there two weeks, and when I came back my father-in-law had been deposed, and the fighting was over." Huh? (laughs) And it wasn't that he wasn't a good soldier, and it wasn't that he was afraid of anything. No, we'd fly around in his damn helicopter and take it places I never would have gone. On the other hand, he had some VIPs coming over, and he said, "We can't take the helicopter today. I'm going to use it tomorrow for some Thai VIPs, and I don't want any fingerprints on it, I don't want to make sure there's no bullet holes in the thing. We'll just take this other thing." What? We couldn't come together. At one point, the real one that almost got me in trouble -- I think it was on Thanksgiving -- our base camp also had three units in it from the 1st Cavalry Division, and the Thais, and the Thais who were responsible for the security, and I was responsible to the US headquarters. Well, on the big army base, maybe 15 miles away, on Thanksgiving night everything went up in the air, flares, and shooting, and machine guns, and all the Thais thought this was great, and they all did it. He called me in the next morning, and he laid me out. He said, "No Thai would ever do that. Your Americans did this." Well, OK, I'll suck it up. "I assure you it won't happen again, sir." So come New Year's time, I put out to my staff with each of his units, where they normally served, to stay with them all night and record everything that happened in that TOC. Next morning he got me again when I went in there. I said, "Sir, before we say anything else, I suggest you talk to your TOC officer." He went down there, and those 30 guys, we made them record everything, and he discovered that it was his units that were doing it. What do you suppose his answer to that one was? JC: I don't know. RT: He called in his senior officers and said, "I'm resigning from the army. You've let me down." And he went back into his hooch and stayed there for about three days. I woke up at the end of three days early in the morning, and the whole goddamn Thai Army that was posted in Vietnam was out there in a formation. I walked out to see what was going on and stood behind him -- he was up on a platform -- and they all apologized, etc., and he forgave them, and they went back into the woods to their positions. They'd left their fighting positions to come back and apologize to the commanding general. JC: Oh, wow. RT: (laughs) You can find one worse than that, I'll bet. My goodness. JC: Want to stop again? (break in audio) JC: Let's stop here, because we've done about another hour and 10 minutes. (break in audio) RT: Let's -- (break in audio) [02:23:15] JC: All right, this is Joseph Cates. Today is May 19, 2016. This is my second interview with Major General Russell Todd. This interview is taking place at the Sullivan Museum and History Center. This interview is sponsored by the Sullivan Museum and History Center and is part of the Norwich Voices Oral History Project. So when we left off last time we had gone through Vietnam, and you're ready for your next assignment. What was that? RT: OK. When the Royal Thai Army left Vietnam I moved out to a brigade, as I said earlier. But the time with the brigade was very unsatisfactory to me as a professional. It was a little more than a month, and that's not what I considered to be a command. So thinking about what would happen when I got home, I called to the Pentagon, talked to the people in armor branch. A lieutenant colonel sits on a desk and shuffles the papers for colonels and helps make the decisions. I told him I wanted to have a particular command at Fort Lewis, Washington, that I knew the command was about to change. And they said, "Oh, we've already appointed somebody to that port. But you are coming back to go to the Pentagon." 31 I had fought off the Pentagon earlier in my tour. When I was working for General Abrams I got a call from the Pentagon that said "We're bringing you back to the United States because a new position has opened up, and it calls for a brigadier general, and although you're only a colonel, we want you to fill that position." And I said, "Tell me about it." They said, "Well, you're going to be the army's first drug-and-alcohol-abuse officer." I said, "You've been watching what I'm drinking." He said, "No, this is what we've got in mind for you." And I said, "That isn't going to work. It just isn't going to work. I'm over here on a two-year tour, and if you want me to leave here, I'll give you General Abrams's telephone number, and you can call him and ask him to release me." Well, no, they didn't think they would do that. (laughs) So when I went back I went to the Pentagon, and there I went to work for a four-star general who I had met several times, because he traveled to Vietnam back and forth, General Kerwin, a wonderful, wonderful soldier. And when I reported in he told me that I was going to be the head of the department that he supervised for the Modern Volunteer Army. My job would be to coordinate all of the programs that were going on both at posts, camps, and stations around the country and around the world, and also within the Pentagon, to evaluate where we ought to be going. Well, OK. It wasn't my first choice. I had about, oh, 10 lieutenant colonels working for me in a very small office that didn't have any windows, and there was a lieutenant general working in the chief of staff's office whose title was the chief of modern volunteer army. So I was torn between two very senior officers who didn't agree with each other very often, and the job went on, and back and forth, and up and down, but a lot of answering letters from the Congress and this kind of thing, and then evaluating things that came from the field. Well, one day I was up in the next level in the Pentagon, because I'd been called by that lieutenant general, and he started chewing me out just something awful for reasons I couldn't explain. Finally he said, "I'm going down and see General Kerwin." My boss. What the hell's this about? So I was standing alone in his office. He went out a side door, and I said, "I've got to get to General Kerwin quick." So I picked up -- they have red phones that go between the very senior officers. I picked it up and dialed General Kerwin's office, and he has to answer that, no matter what's going on. And I said, "Sir, we got trouble," and told him what was going on. I saw him later in the day. He said, "Thanks. That really made a difference." From that moment on, he treated me like I was one of his best friends and had faith in what I was doing. Now, they did bring back in a major general who had just stopped commanding the 82nd Airborne Division, and he came in, and he was my immediate supervisor. But General Kerwin made a proposal -- not a proposal -- instructions to everybody about that time that said "Everybody that works for me in the deputy chief of staff personnel office is going to spend four years in this job." I could see my chances of getting a second shot at a brigade just going out the window. Carol and I had bought a house in Washington, the first home we ever owned. In France it was a rental, and everything else was army quarters. So this was special. She loved that house. She took a job in Washington, DC, in the personnel department, and then she had done a lot of that before, and that was sort of a big part of what she had done at Radcliffe after Smith, and she loved that job. In fact, everywhere we went she tried to find a job that would keep her busy and active. 32 So there we were, balancing back and forth. Now what do I do? Well, I'll go back to my old trick and call the people in my branch on the phone, and I called this young man early one morning before anybody else was in the office, and he happened to be there. I told him my plight, that I'd been really cheated in that one month I'd had in the thing, and General Davidson had said I was coming to Europe with him to command a brigade, and that didn't work out once he found out I'd never been in the Pentagon. "So I want a command, and I want to lay it out right now. I want you to start working on it." He said, "Sir, I'm not sure I can do that." I said, "Well, what time do you come to work?" He said, "Well, I'm in here by 8:00 every morning." I said, "Get in at 7:30 on Monday, because I'm going to call you every goddamn Monday I'm sitting at this desk," and I did. Eventually he said, "I've made an appointment with you with my boss, Colonel [Touche?], who oversees all the branches for colonels." I walked over, and it was my old friend from Fort Knox who had been the senior aide when I was the junior aide to General Collier. He had talked it over with the committee that makes these kinds of decisions, and they were going to put my name in nomination to go back onto the brigade commanders list. Great. A few weeks later I get a phone call that says "We put your name before the committee, and you are on the list, and you're number two." Uh-oh. I'm supposed to spend four years working for General Kerwin? (laughs) So a little later they call back and said, "Whoa. Wait. In the 2nd Armored Division the brigade commander has moved up to be chief of staff, and that brigade is open." I said, "OK. Now you guys call General Kerwin and tell him that you're pulling me out." They said, "Like hell we will." (laughter) So I went to see General Kerwin, and he sort of grimaced and (inaudible) [02:32:24]. He said, "You know my policy." I said, "Yes, I do, sir, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me." And he said, "I'll tell you tomorrow." So the next day he called me, and he said, "Against my better judgment I'm going to let you go to that command. But let me tell you this. The day that's over you're coming back to work for me." I said, "Yes, sir. Thank you." I ran home. (laughs) A little later, in time, the moving truck was in front of the house. I'd gone home, checked out of the office, done everything appropriately, and gone back, and there was a phone call waiting for me at home. General Kerwin. He went on to say what he really wanted me to do, wouldn't I know, is that -- "Sir, we've made our deal," and he says, "OK, but remember, I'm going to get you when you get (inaudible) [02:33:21]." And that was very pleasing to me. I loved the idea of working for him. But, again, it was a matter of just working your way through the system. It was terribly important to my career and to me. People were telling me that "You don't have to do this" kind of thing. You know, "You've done all those kinds of things." But no, that wasn't the career I wanted. So I went to the 2nd Armored Division and took over the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas, and that was a real fun thing. I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of good people working for me. Some of them went on to become general officers later on. The first thing that happened was they told me that the brigade in one month is going to move to Germany on Operation [Forger?]. Does that mean anything to you? Well, in the Cold War we had built all kinds of home hutches and places to store tanks and materials that take a lot of time to get into the theater. If they said, "OK, the balloon went up. Come over here," you wouldn't have had any -- you'd have to wait for your 33 tanks for a month. So they had all those vehicles and stuff over there, and every year we went over and exercised the idea of flying over -- not me, the army did. It was my brigade's turn, and it was just great. I had planned that thing for every possible contingency, in my mind, and we laid it out with the staff. I said, "Now if this happens, or that happens, or this happens, this is what we'll do. Plan A, B, C, and D." And damn, I figured everything except it was going to snow at Fort Hood, and the air force wouldn't show up. (laughter) So we were about two days late getting there, and it slowed things up. But we went out on maneuvers for about a month and a half, and that was a great experience. I'd done it as a company commander when I was stationed in Europe, but as a brigade -- when I went over I've been detached from the 2nd Armored Division of the United States and attached to the 1st Infantry Division, when I got over to Europe. There for the first time I met a fellow named (laughs) -- I met someone, a senior officer, a brigadier general who, because my brigade wasn't part of his division, I had to go through the ropes of him looking over my shoulder for the first three weeks of what we were doing. It wasn't easy. Eventually he and I had a good reputation among each other, and then we're good. It worked out pretty well. Well, his name is Fuller, Fred Fuller. Just to move that part of the story a little further forward, when I went to Forces Command he was the DESOPS, and I was the assistant -- correction, he was the DESPER, personnel, and I was the assistant DESOPS. And again, good friends, you know. No, sir. I had to prove myself all over again to him. That was tough. That was tough. Then when I became division commander at Fort Hood, would you believe they made him the corps commander, and my boss again? And again, I went through the process. I called it rook training, he wanted to test me on everything that was going on, and then eventually he agreed, and we got along. That was a very difficult relationship I had with that individual. So we came back from Germany after the Reforger, and it was time to change division commanders. A general officer that I had met once or twice but didn't know came in as the two-star commanding the (inaudible) [02:38:26]. This was a fight for my life. He, in my opinion, didn't represent a good soldier. He would drive in his jeep with the two stars on the front, down the street, and the men in the division would say, "Hi, General," and he'd wave back, "Hi." No saluting, none of this. He would come around in my battalion and ask the company commander and the battalion commander to see their operational reports, and particularly the readiness reports, whether or not this tank would go or that one. He required them, not required them, but pushed hard for them to like take something off this tank and put it on that tank, and now we've created another tank that this one isn't working, this one if you take the parts and put it on this one, that's one less tank, but will look that much better. It was everything how you looked. Eventually he was promoted to lieutenant general and shipped to Europe, and his chief of staff caught on to his way of life, reported it. He got thrown out of the army, reduced to major general, and was retired. But that was a tough fight, that was a tough fight. In town now there's a major general, retired, John Greenway. Maybe you've met Phyllis. JC: I have. RT: Well, John Greenway was my chief of staff in the brigade, and I don't know how many times he saved my life. He'd say, "No, no, no, don't go up there and tell that general off. 34 Don't do it. Stop here." One time I actually said, "The hell with you, John, I'm going up there." I was really mad. Again, he had ordered my people to do something that was not proper. So John called up the division chief of staff, who was a good friend, and said, "Russ is on the way. Stop him." (laughs) So I never got in to see him, and I calmed down, and the chief of staff discussed it with me in a way. But it was a difficult, difficult system to live with, but I had wonderful people working for me. JC: Well, that's good. RT: Yeah. JC: What year is this? RT: Oh, my God. (inaudible) [02:41:04] I can't remember my birthday. (laughter) It was about '60 something, yeah. I came back to the United States, and I was assigned to forces command, where General Kerwin was, the man that said, "You're going to go work for me," and I went to work for General Kerwin just as I'd been promoted by the system to be brigadier general. I worked for him for two years and then another year with General Rogers, who went on to be the chief of staff of the army, and it was great. Real professionals who understood various ways of handling people beautifully. I must admit, he had a chief of staff who wasn't quite up to speed in my opinion, and as a result I found myself bypassing the chief of staff, which really isn't a very good idea. But both General Kerwin and General Rogers, when I was there, would call me on the phone directly and ask me to do something. As the junior brigadier general at Fort McPherson, Georgia, they immediately appointed me to be club officer, and to be the president of the Association of the United States Army chapter at Fort McPherson. I was really the junior guy in that headquarters as far as a general officer is concerned. The biggest thing that happened to me really there was that that's when we had the baby lift out of Vietnam, and then we had the evacuation of Vietnam. In the operations business at forces command, we had the responsibility of preparing those units in the United States, wherever they might be involved, to prepare them for the influx of people. I was up a lot of nights and really mad at the air force sometimes. They would bring in planes early, before we could finish taking people off the previous planes and get them, kind of thing. They finally came around. But it was a real wonderful experience as far as I'm concerned. I had the thrill of getting a thank you letter from the president and being called in by the State Department, who had the responsibility of taking these people once they arrived in the United States -- when they arrived in the United States the army was responsible for them. We took old barracks and tried to fix them up to be for families and all the rest of it. And the next step was to put them out into the population in America, and that was done by the State Department. At the end of this, the State Department gave me an award and invited me over to Foggy Bottom, and it was carried out in the formal part of that. It's a very ordinary-looking building, but inside, on the top floor, they have collected and put in there all the furnishing and antiques of America. They would go to somebody that had something that the State Department wanted, and they would say "We would like to have it, and we will replicate it exactly, and give you back the replication." They built -- it's a museum, it's a wonderful, wonderful museum of 35 American furniture through time. I was really impressed with it being there. I wasn't that impressed with the State Dept- people in Vietnam. (laughs) It was very interesting. JC: Yes, sir. So this was around 1975, that would be (crosstalk; inaudible) [02:45:47]. RT: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I did one or two year. JC: Where were you from Fort McPherson? RT: From Fort McPherson, when my immediate boss left General Rogers called me in and said, "I want you to be my full-time top guy and deputy chief of staff operations." I said, "No, General, that isn't right." "What are you talking about, it isn't right?" I said, "You want someone that's been a division commander to be in that job. I mean, you're dealing with all those division commanders, and if the guy that's passing the instructions hasn't had the experience of being a division commander, it doesn't come through right." And he said, "All right. All right." About a year later I was on a board in Washington. You're sent in to do a lot of those things. Interestingly enough, on this particular one I was the head of the board for captains being promoted to major, and I got in trouble with General Rogers. The instructions we had were "These are the formulas, etc., that you follow when you're looking at the history of their being in the service. You can add to this other things, if you, as a board, want to do it." The first thing we added to it was that any captain who had served a normal period of time as a captain in the combat arms branches and had not had a company wasn't to be promoted on this occasion to major. Passing up a captain, you pass up the real army and the real understanding of the army, and, oh, boy. It turns out that we eliminated from being promoted five captains at West Point, instructors, and that reverberated around the world. (laughs) General Rogers finally calmed down. Then on another occasion when I was away in Washington he called me on the phone and said, "The major generals promotion list has just come out." I said, "Oh, good. Who's on it?" and they said, "You are." Oh, wow. After I went back he called me in his office and said, "Now, I'm going to send you to Fort Hood to command a division." Previous discussion, you got to have a command. I said, "Oh, my. Where's George going?" And he looked at me with this great strain on his face and said, "George who?" I said, "George Patton, 2nd Armored Division." I had been in the 2nd Armored Division twice. Four men have commanded the 2nd Armored Division, three of them during World War II. I knew that was my place in life. Well, he said, "You're going to the 1st Cav." Of course, when I'd been there as a brigade commander the 1st Cav was the enemy. (laughter) It was a little difficult to change my mindset that I was now the head of the 1st Cavalry Division, but it turned out to be a good assignment, too. We were immediately assigned a mission of working on something that was called Division '86, and this was the '76-'77 time frame. What we would do is to experiment with different organizational concepts, try them out, and another R&D organization would evaluate whether this was a good idea, or whether it wasn't a good idea. But, man, was that a lot of work. We had soldiers picking up their mattresses and marching over two streets, and then joining another company, because now we were trying -- we were going to have tank platoons with only four tanks rather than five tanks, 36 and these guys had to fill in for the -- you know, back and forth, and up and down. It was a crazy time, but it was very, very rewarding. We lived next door to George Patton and Joanne Patton, and as a matter of fact we had become very close friends over the time we were in the army. We went home on vacations sometimes by accident at the same time, back in New England, and other times purposefully. But we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary together, both divisions, at the club, and it was officers. It was really good sport. JC: Was that your last command? RT: No. They sent me to -- at one Fort Hood, after two years of commanding the division, I went down and commanded something called [Tecada?] [02:51:38], which was a research and development experimental station kind of thing. I was doing to the rest of the world what they'd been doing to me, for two years I guess, at which point I was shipped over to Europe to be the deputy chief of staff for operations under General Kroesen. He was one of the most magnificent soldiers I'd ever met. I worked for him once before for a short time, but he was first class. Then I got a call from Loring Hart, president of Norwich University, who I'd gotten to know -- over his 10-year span as president -- pretty well. In my traveling around at various times, I was the head of the Norwich Club of Georgia, the Norwich Club of Fort Hood, the Norwich Club in Europe. They'd come over to visit, and we became close. I had come home on leave to see my dad, who was in bad trouble health wise, and I got a call from Loring Hart to my dad's home down in New Hampshire. He said, "I need you to come up here. I need to talk to you; it's important." And I said, "Gee, I don't know. Dad is not well, I don't know how long he's going to live, and I can't be here very long, so I really and truly want to see as much of him as I can." He said, "Well, afterward, after this weekend" -- it was a big alumni weekend -- "I'll stop in to see you." I said OK. Well, Mother got a hold of me, and Dad got a hold of me and said, "Go on up there." Dad said, "Get a hold of my classmates and tell them I'll be there next year." Well, I knew most of his classmates. When I arrived I found them at lunch in the Armory, and I walked down to the table, the half where they were, and started saying this lie about my father, he's going to be getting well, and he'll see you next year when he comes. All of a sudden the most unusual thing happened. There was this great noise in the Armory, and it kept getting louder and louder and louder. As this individual coming into the room got closer to our table, I discovered that it was General Harmon coming back, and all of these people were saying, "Ernie, Ernie, Ernie, Ernie." I couldn't believe it, you know, really and truly. It showed me just exactly how much he was loved by this institution. That doesn't mean he didn't make a lot of mistakes at times, but he really pulled us out of the woods. So Loring Hart stops in at the house and says, "The board at Norwich University has told me that 10 years is enough, and I'm going to retire. I want you to put your name on the list to be considered." I said, "You're a PhD, you taught English, you became the dean of the university. I don't have any of that." He said, "And you don't need it either, because I'm absolutely certain they're going to choose a soldier." I said, "What do you know, I'm qualified." I went back to Europe, told my boss, and then came back. I made a couple of trips back and forth. I told my boss, which was General Kroesen, what was 37 going on, and then went to see the chief of staff of the army to tell him that I was putting in my papers. You know, after you've been division commander you owe the army something, because of the experience they've given you. So I went to see General "Shy" Meyer, who I'd known in Vietnam, and I was a little dubious here. What will he say? So I told him, and he jumped up from behind his chair, rushed around to my side of his desk, shook my hand, and said, "Boy, that's just exactly what I want to do when I get out." (laughter) Then, unfortunately, and this doesn't have to be spread around, he told me that my name had been submitted to be promoted to Lieutenant General, and it is now before the Congress. Had I not put this in and had I been selected, I was going to go to one of two different jobs, and neither one of them sounded as much fun to me as coming home. Not that I could change my mind. Once you've told the army you're retiring, you're retiring. You don't change your mind. So that's how I got here. JC: What were the other two choices? RT: To be the chief of staff of USEUCOM, which was for the European theater of all of the activities there, and the other one was on the joint staff, doing the DES-OPS kind of work, which is called the J5. JC: So you come to Norwich. Talk a little bit about the application process, because I know Phil Marsilius says in his oral history that they gave you an eight-point plan that they wanted implemented. RT: Yeah. Very unusual I thought, and very useful. Before I get to that (laughs), Carol and I came. We went to New York City and joined a committee of the board who were involved in the selection process. The plane was late, the taxis weren't running, and we were late getting to this thing. Carol was a little nervous that that showed that maybe we weren't working hard enough to get there. They said to me, "We've just finished lunch. Do you want something to eat?" and I said, "Oh, yeah. How about a bowl of onion soup?" Carol said to me afterward, "You could have chosen anything but that cheese dangling out of your mouth." (laughter) But, to me, we had a wonderful conversation, and quite frankly I left in the cab going back to the airport with a member of the board who sat there and congratulated us, because they were certain that the board was now going to select us. Yeah, interesting. Where were we in our discussion? JC: The eight-point plan. RT: Yeah. I can't tell you what the eight-points are right now, but they were all reasonable, one of which was to make Vermont College work, the system of the two institutions together, and that's interesting, too. On that point I tried very hard -- they put a lot of pressure on Loring to go up to Vermont College at least twice a week. He'd go home, changed out of his uniform into civilian clothes, go up to Vermont College, and I don't know what he did, presumably he did good things, and came back again. I got into that routine with him, and I found that Vermont College was in deep trouble, I mean, in my opinion. Over time Vermont College had reduced the quality of their education in order 38 to sustain the number of students they needed, and they had all kinds of programs going that didn't make a lot of sense. They had a nursing program that was excellent. Excellent. They had just bought some programs from -- oh, what's the name of it? JC: Goddard? RT: Goddard College, and they were difficult to mesh into the family. For example, I hadn't been here very long, and I got a call from Mrs. Lippincott, who was the chief officer of Vermont College and had previously been Loring's assistant. I got a call that said, "There's going to be a graduation on Friday" -- this was about Wednesday -- "and it's going to be outside at Vermont College. It's going to be one of the Goddard programs that's graduating at this time. They would like to invite you to be part of their graduation." So I said, "Fine, I'll be there." But before I went I hadn't heard anything more, so I called up to find out, and I said, "Now, what's my role in this? Do I hand out the diplomas? Do I make a speech, do I congratulate them from the platform? What do I do?" They said, "Oh, no, they just want you to sit there and be present. They do all this themselves." OK. I can live with that, and we'll see what happens. The first student to graduate came up, gave a little speech, each one of them, and then took their diploma and put it from their left hand to their right hand, and went back to their chair. The institution wasn't involved. This happened seven or eight times before I really said this is something we've got to look at. Then they decided, or they didn't then decide, the next thing was to have a musical rendition. They had a fellow with a fife and a piano player, and they pushed the piano out toward the group, and the front leg broke off pushing it through the grass. They somehow got it jacked up and started, and the flute player -- well, it was awful, just awful. The next day I said to my vice president, Jim Galloway, major general, retired, I told Jim what had happened, and he said, "You know, you weren't the first. I was the first. The same sort of thing went on, but it was crazier when I was up there." I said, "Tell me." He said, "The flute player was in a tree." (laughter) So we spent some time trying to bring it into the focus. Quite frankly they had some fine professors. They just didn't have a system involved. JC: I've always heard Goddard is a little strange. RT: Well, put it this way. One time Carol and I invited the president of -- oh, in Burlington. JC: UVM? RT: N
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R.R. mm 46 THE MERCURY. A PHANTASY. CHARI.ES WELSEY WEISER, '01. ; 5 WO spirits floating through the air Leave their mark of passing there. The spirit of the scentless spring, And summer's scented spirit bring Their breath of life and breath of love, And wave ethereal wings above The weary brow. With soothing hand They stir to life the waiting land. The azure sky, the sun and flowers, The bursting bud of woodland bowers, The tender grass, the songsters' strain Compose for life love's sweet refrain Of fellowship. (lI 'Tis evening and the twilight gray Creeps o'er the half-forgotten way, As passing on in pensive mood, Through the ancient hemlock wood, I see beneath the massive trees, Fanned by the evening breeze, A stalwart man reposing lay Beside the lonely grassy way. Tall and brawny, noble., fair, With beaming eyes and wavy hair, He forms a picture good to see— Nature's perfect mastery Commanding all. He speaks—the tones in clarion notes Upward through the branches float. He smiles—and wins with glances bright, Fellowship's most welcome light. "Nature," says he, "perfect, strong, Note and strive for ; and prolong Your days ; and usefulness, and peace, And love, from life shall ne'er cease." I fain would speak, but wake to see 'Tis only a bright phantasy Wrought by Spring-tide on the mind, That seeks in life and love to find The perfect whole. I V* . THE MERCURY 47 "RABBI BEN EZRA." ABDEL R. WENTZ, '04. [Graeff Prize Essay.] ROBERT Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra is a transcript from the natural experience of a human soul. The struggle between lower and higher ideals has already been fought on the battleground within the soul. The conflict between faith and doubt is over. Faith stands victorious. We have here por-trayed a picture not of action but of a soul in intellectual fer-mentation, the concomitant of action. The poet speaks from emotional imagination in expressing the wish of his soul to be in touch with the infinite. And the passion here described is one that is universal to mankind and one that is deepest and most widely felt in loving human nature. Other poets have attained the same depth of thought, a number have expressed somewhat the same ideas as are here set forth, but probably no poem stands in exactly the same relations as Rabbi Ben Ezra. We propose, therefore, to inquire briefly concerning the Rabbi and his part in the poem, to examine in a general way Brown-ing's philosophy of life as unfolded in the body of his religious poetry, to analyze the thought of this poem and see how the philosophy of life is here set forth, to ascertain what relation the poem sustains to the teachings of Christianity, and to make some observations concerning its rhetorical composition. Abraham ben Meir ben Ezra is the full name of the Rabbi to whom Browning assigns this monologue, but he is more commonly known as Ibn Ezra. Born in Toledo, Spain, about 1088, he started to travel early in life and visited all parts of western and southern Europe and northern Africa. His last days were spent in Rome and here he died in 1167. He was an earnest student of astronomy and won much fame not only as an astronomer but also as an astrologer and physician. In him the Platonic philosophy had an able advocate. Wherever he went he became distinguished for his great learning and his varied accomplishments, but his chief renown seems to have I im 48 THE MERCURY. been as grammarian, biblical commentator, and poet. But great as was the scholarship of the Rabbi, his piety was even greater. From all his writings and from the account of his life we gather that he was a man of extraordinary spiritual rectitude under the complete guidance of the word of God. Such was the man to whom Browning here attributes the philosophy of life. So thoroughly is Ibn Ezra adapted to the expression of such a philosophy and so well do the sentiments here expressed ac-cord with the writings of the Rabbi that the question has been raised whether Browning meant Rabbi Ben Ezra to serve as a statement of his own philosophy or that of Ibn Ezra. There are, indeed, a number of Jewish elements contained in the poem ; as, for instance, the abiding trust in a central righteous-ness. But Browning was specially fond of weaving such ele-ments into the woof of his thought; in fact, in his own nature, both spiritual and intellectual, he was not entirely free from cer-tain Jewish characteristics. Moreover, a great many of his il-lustrations and traditions are taken from among the Jews and no other English poet, with the single exception of Shakespeare, commands for the Jew the same admiration and compassion that Browning does. It seems only reasonable therefore that the poet in presenting his own views concerning life should draw some of his less important ideas from the writings of the Rabbi and thus weave into the poem sufficient coloring to ac-count for the idiosyncrasies of the individual whom he has chosen to give expression to those views. But the strongest proof that Rabbi Ben Ezra expresses Browning's own theory of life, lies in the fact that it is prac-tically a recapitulation of the very sentiments expressed in many of his other poems, as witness Sordello, Abt Vogeler, Saul, The Pope, A Death in the Desert, Reverie, and quite a number of others, all of which develop the same life-philosophy as Rabbi Ben Ezra does. Just as Cicero made use of the venerable Cato as his lay figure in setting forth his views on "Old Age," so Browning has used different personages to develop his philoso-phy, in each case adapting some of the incidentals to the indi- » ■ > THE MERCURY. 49 * * vidual personage. In Jochanan Hakkadosh we have another instance where Browning uses a Jew as his mouthpiece to give utterance to his theory of life. And in the poem under con-sideration he has placed this theory in the mouth of the Rabbi for no other purpose than merely to furnish it with a back-ground; for Browning himself explained of Sordello: "My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." Being assured then that Rabbi Ben Ezra is merely a restate-ment of Browning's theory of life, it may be well before pro-ceeding to the thought analysis of the poem to try to gain some idea concerning his philosophy of life as developed in the rest of his religious poetry. This philosophy begins in his very first publication, Pauline, where its crude outlines are to be seen; it is more carefully developed and at much greater length in his next production, Paracelsus, and then re-appears from time to time among his productions, and receives its final utterance in his very last poem, Reverie. It is a noteworthy fact that Browning formed this view of lite in his youth, and that no-thing in his life experiences gave him occasion to change it, so that traces and reiterations of it are to be seen in poems cover-ing a period of sixty years of his life. The whole trend of his philosophy might be summarized in the statement that the aspiration towards divine Power and Love is the most exalted ideal for the human soul. The intensity of the universal passion of human love reaching out towards some object which shall satisfy aspiration gives him the conception of God as infinite Love and of the future life as one in which Love incarnate shall have a place. This earthly life is merely a period of probation; man here is in constant pre-paration for another life. Past influences constitute the cri-terion by which to judge of the future, and our development here is determinative of our hereafter, either for growth or de-cay. But in this life we are surrounded by innumerable lim-itations and conditions. All our attainments are bounded by the finite. The divinity at the root of man's nature is too great for the sphere which contains him, arid yet it is this very di-vinity which gives rise to aspiration. Aspiration in turn causes ' ill i. 111 , ,., ,.j,i;iMl8M ■ 50 THE MERCURY. discontent, difficulties, and failures, and these point to infinite success and goodness. Thus we are made to realize the limi-tations and imperfections of our finite existence and to strive ever onward and upward to infinite freedom and perfection. It is precisely this imperfect nature in man which gives him the susceptibility to infinite growth and development; and this is "Man's distinctive mark alone," that which raises him higher in the scale than the brute and places him "a little lower than the angels." Only by our temporal failures are we led to see the possibility of eternal success. Internal dissatisfaction with our attainments on earth induces aspiration towards the divine. Man is "a living personality linked to the principle of restless-ness;" he must recognize his limitations and work within them, never losing sight of the infinite beyond nor ever ceasing to as-pire toward that perfection of freedom. To become content with even the highest attainable per-fection in this earthly life would mean to renounce all noble de-sires and to deny the inner light. This present state must not be regarded as an end in itself and submission to the conditions which it imposes would only result in fatal loss. To fail to recognize our imperfect nature would be to deny the possibility of spiritual growth. No, we must never be satisfied with this earth and its meagre successes; we must never rest content with this stage of imperfection. We must recognize the possi-bility of higher results than any attainable on earth and must aspire to something beyond the limits of time and space. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" It is this very quality—this constant discontent with earthly attainments, this endless aspiration for something higher—that makes life a struggle and the earth a bivouac of strife. Man must be actuated by a constant and conscious impetuosity to-wards the divine, drawing new impulses out of each failure, ever realizing with Tennyson, that, "Men may rise on stepping-stones From their dead selves to higher things." THE MERCURY. Si Each failure should give rise to greater effort and higher aspira-tion. According to Abt Vogeler, the musician accepts the pro-longed pause as an earnest of sweet music, and the discords as an evidence of more highly-prized harmony to follow. The limitations of this life are only suggestions of the infinitude of the life beyond. These. temporal barriers shall become the doors opening to the eternal life of infinite beauty, happiness, knowledge and love. The little mountain rill, as it flows down, has many rough places to cross, many obstacles to encounter, many rocks and precipices to pass, but continually receiving new life from other streams it grows deeper and stronger until at last it becomes a great, deep river, and, undisturbed now by the huge boulders beneath its surface, it flows calmly on to join the peaceful, powerful ocean. So the soul, weak at first and prone to despair, must work within its limitations and by an endless succession of aspirations and failures, each failure stimu-lating stronger endeavor, make its way to God and to the real-ization of perfect Power and Love. Having thus gotten a view of the philosophy of life as Brown-ing held it, we will be better able to follow in analysis the thought of Rabbi Ben Ezra, where this philosophy is stated with greater conciseness, perhaps, than anywhere else in Brown-ing. But -first it must be said, by way of explanation, that Rabbi Ben Ezra is not argumentative in its character; it is merely the statement of facts of positive knowledge. Its view is intuitive and it states conclusions without employing courses of reasoning. We shall not expect, therefore, that the thought of the different stanzas will in every instance be arranged in strict logical sequence. Mellowed with years, the venerable Rabbi gives to the young man the cheerful assurance, " The best is yet to be," and in the quietude of life's evening hour proposes a retrospect of the day and a prospect to the tomorrow. Bidding us to trust in God te reveal His whole plan, he first considers youth. This is a period of hesitation and ambition, of "hopes and fears." All of youth's brief years are passed in doubt and indecision. But for this the Rabbi has no remonstrances, for this very doubt is S2 THE MERCURY. the actuating influence—the "troubling spark"—which distin-guishes us from the brute creation; brutes have their end of living in self-satisfaction, and in the gratification of sense are free from care and doubt. But man's greatest glory and that which attests his affinity with the great Provider lies in his noble desires and lofty aspirations which can never be satisfied on earth; this is the disturbing spark that proves his spiritual nature. We should therefore endure with good cheer the lim-itations that are here placed upon us, and, despite life's difficul-ties and discomforts, ever strive and learn and dare. For the seeming failures of this earthly life simply prove our suscepti-bility to the achievement of eternal success. Our aspiration to the unattainable raises us higher in the scale than the unpro-gressive brute, and he, who hopes to succeed in his flesh and to that end subordinates soul to body, can scarcely deserve the noble name of man. And yet the body is not without its use; all past experi-ences in the flesh serve to teach valuable lessons in this train-ing- school for eternity, and the heart of the Rabbi beats in sin-cere gratitude for the opportunity of living as a man, a part in the one great plan of perfect Power and Love. He trusts him-self implicitly to the will of his Creator and hopes thus to gain the victory over low ideals and ignoble desires. For the soul is prone to yield to its rosy garment of flesh in the desire for rewards commeasurable with bodily endowments and physical attainments. But we should not measure ourselves by the ground gained in spite of flesh; we should realize that while flesh and soul are both subject to limitations here on earth, yet neither is to be despised as all is for the best. Youth must have its struggles and disappointments but old age reaps rich fruit in consequence. For here if is that the complete man is produced and that the tendency to God be-gins. The Rabbi, ripe with age, awaits the fight with death, the only struggle now before him. "Fearless and unperplexed" he contemplates the battle with perfect serenity of soul, for his experiences have taught him what weapons and what armor to employ. Now that his youth is ended he is in a position to L4fc THE MERCURY. 53 pass sentence on that period of life. The fires of'youth have culled out the gold from the dross and the life-struggle can now at length be estimated at its true value. In youth all was un-certainty ; with age comes knowledge absolute. Each sunset brings its certain moment which suddenly calling the glory from the gray announces the death of the day and invites esti-mation of its worth. So the period of old age, tinted with glory and free from the strife of youth, affords the opportunity to prove the past, pronounce judgment on its errors and pro-prieties, and thereby "sustained and soothed" to face the future. And more than this is not possible for man ; his highest duty is to practice tomorrow the lessons of today, to follow intently "the great Artificer of all that moves" and thus catch hints of real handicraft, of true workmanship. Youth is the proper time for growth and aspiration, the proper time to "strive to-ward making," and though the efforts to make be uncouth and seeming failures, nevertheless they are eminently successful in that they secure for old age exemption from strife and the blessed privilege of knowledge. Death can then be awaited without fear. Here the mind is not harassed by arguments of "Doctor and Saint"'as in youth, but the knowledge of the Right and Good and Infinite is as absolute as the knowledge of the possession of one's own hand. Age vindicates youth by defining and separating "great minds from small" and by determining whether the principles of Right were properly ap-plied in youth. Thctruth is revealed and peace of soul secured. But who shall act as judge to pass the sentence? It is no easy task, for men of very similar traits and qualities hold widely different views. Who shall decide? The answer: each man must be his own arbiter; he alone understands the circum-stances of his own life struggle. For life is not to be judged by its deeds and attainments, else others could pass the sentence. "Men appraise the outward product," but this vulgar mass, so easily recognized and valued by the low world, is not the proper standard to use in making up the main account. True, our "work" is pleasing in the eyes of our fellow-men and quickly plumbed and tested by the world's coarse thumb and finger, but 54 THE MERCURY. the true reckoning of man's worth takes into account all our undeveloped instincts tor good, all our unfulfilled purposes. These no one can know but ourselves and these God weighs and considers. He finds value in our thoughts which we were not able to express in a mere act and His records contain even our fleeting fancies :— "All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God. whose wheel the pitcher shaped." These lines contain the one great lesson of the poem, the very-theme of its thought, namely, the manifestation of God's love in his dealings with man. Our doubts He overrules for faith; our failures He overrules for success. Our aspirations to the impossible become the essentials of our spiritual growth. It is on the wings of God's love that the spirit of man mounts from earth to heaven. This thought pervades the entire poem. The thought that man is the pitcher shaped by the wheel of God leads to the expanding of that beautiful metaphor of the potter and the clay, and this occupies the concluding verses of the poem. We are invited to examine the metaphor and learn why time passes away so rapidly while our souls lie passive. Hugest folly is the proposition that nothing endures and that the past has no bearing on the present or the future. All that has ever really existed, lasts forever. The wheel indeed may vary as it turns, but potter and clay endure. So life fleets and earth changes, but God and Soul remain forever. We are not mere shadowy existences destined to pass into nothingness; we are eternal realities. But the changing motion of the wheel is needful to give the clay its proper form and make it useful; no less are the buffetings and evanescent influences of this life's dance intended by the all-wise Creator to give our souls their proper bent and temper and fit them for their highest useful-ness. What matters it, so far as the usefulness of the cup is concerned, if the potter in the course of his work ceases to adorn it with the beautiful figures wrought around its base and fashions stern, grim scull-things about the rim? And what I THE MERCURY. 55 matters it if our Maker diminish our pleasures and make this temporal life less attractive? Not in the decorations however beautiful is to be found the proper use of a cup; no more is the highest usefulness of the soul to be found in the pleasures and ornaments of life. Heaven's consummate cup has no need therefore of earth's wheel; his only need is the Potter, to amend the lurking flaws and use His work. The Rabbi declares that never once in the whole dizzy course of his lite with all its im-perfections and failures—never once did he lose sight of his end as a vessel to slake his Maker's thirst. Just as in the opening stanza he expressed his firm assurance of a better life to come, aud his abiding confidence in God's goodness, "Our times are in His hand," so after maintaining this sentiment through the entire poem, he reiterates it once more in his eloquent closing prayer: "So, take and use Thy work : Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned ! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same[" These noble sentiments, though expressed by a Jewish Rabbi, are entirely in accord with the teachings of Christianity. An eminent writer on ethics has pronounced Rabbi Ben Ezra to be "one of the completest descriptions of the ethical life in English literature." But it is even more than that; it is a statement of pure theism and a description of sublime religious faith. It abounds in Christian sentiment and contains numer-ous allusions to Scripture of both the Old and New Testament. If Rabbi Ben Ezra were a part ot the Bible, every sentence in the entire poem would long since have been quoted in substan-tiation of some Christian teaching. One of the salient teach-ings of the poem is that of absolute submission to the Divine will. This, one of the great teachings of our New Testament, is forcibly set forth in the poem. Moreover, Christ's mission on earth was to reveal the Father not only as Power but more specifically as Love. In the light of this fact, the sentiment 56 THE MERCURY. which the Rabbi expresses becomes quite striking, especially when he says, "I, who saw power, see now Love perfect too." L^fc, The Christian religion is preeminently a religion of love, and Rabbi Ben Ezra has its very basis on God's love for man. Then, too, Christianity is essentially a romantic religion. Literature furnishes numerous instances of Christian romance. And what can be more romantic than this idea of a future life with earthly hopes and aspirations realized and Love perfected, as developed in the poem ? This hope of future existence gives to the Chris-tian religion the very source of its life. And in Holy-Cross Day we have another instance where Browning represents this same Ben Ezra as a direct advocate of Christ and Christianity. When Rabbi Ben Ezra was first published (1864), the world stood in great need of just such a message of hope and faith as the poem conveys. That was a time when skepticism and des-pondency were rapidly growing. Matthew Arnold was busy promulgating his own unbelief. Fitzgerald had just published his'beautiful translation of Omar Khayyam, and this message o doubt was being very widely read. Epicureanism and sensualism were spreading. To all these Rabbi Ben Ezra was a check. It inculcated cheerfulness and hope, destroying doubt and set-ting up faith preeminent. Some readers of Browning find in him nothing more than what is purely humanitarian and ethical, while others narrow their vision to the romantic and Christian. In reality, Brown-ing includes both. His message is twofold : he treats both the Here and the Hereafter. An so Rabbi Ben Ezta combines the humanitarian and the ethical, on the one hand, with the roman-tic and Christian on the other, and sets forth a lofty type of Christian faith as held by a man of God. In rhetorical composition Rabbi Ben Ezra is typical of Brown-ing's religious poetry. Browning is noted for his great com-prehensiveness of meaning. Few writers have used single words with such great effect. In fact, so great is his conscise- THE MERCURY. 57 ness that he is often charged with being obscure, and the num-ber of his readers is comparatively small because not many peo-ple will take the trouble to disengage the poet's real thought irom the close-plaited web of his expression. Rabbi Ben Ezra is no exception to the rule. True, it is one of the most widely known of Browning's poems and has been considered one of the easiest, but its apparent simplicity disappears before any serious effort to drain it of its meaning. The poet thinks at lightning speed and records his thoughts as they occur to him, and nothing short of an alert mind and an open spirit will suf-fice to draw from the poem its full meaning. It is recondite almost to the extreme, in places even bordering on the verge of solecism. And yet it is only natural that such" sublime, weighty thought should receive striking expression. Every sentence is pregnant with vigorous meaning. And while the poem shows in its structure no regard whatever for symmetry or proportion and no view to clearness, beauty, or nobleness of form, yet it presents the greatest consistency of teaching from first to last. This poem will be read as long as the human race endures, because it has to do with a passion that is common to all man-kind. It deals with man's growth to the infinite in a spirit of the most healthful optimism, and inspires men everywhere to high and noble thinking. Browning himself gives an estimate of the loftiness of the theme when he says in a letter to a friend: "It is a great thing—the greatest—that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experi-ence in a witness to the power and love of God." What Long-fellow contributes to literature in his "Psalm of Life," what Ten-nyson contributes in his "In Memoriam"-—this and more Brown-ing epitomizes in his Rabbi Ben Ezra. And the late Professor Everett of Harvard pronounces it "one of the most exalted of the poems of Browning * * * * one of the most exalted in the whole range of literature." 5« THE MERCURY. RUSSIAN AGGRESSION. [Second Prize in the Inter-Collegiate Oratorical Contest] W. W. BARKXEY, '04. PASSING events in the Far East draw the eyes of the world once more toward those parts which have engaged more or less constant attention for many years. The Asiatic question with its many difficulties and complications presents the unsolved international problem of the twentieth century. How shall the equilibrium of the East and the- integrity of China be maintained? How shall the commercial powers of the world preserve the equality of trading privileges along China's inviting coast? How shall the threatening advance of Russia upon Asia be checked? Shall Anglo-Saxon civiliza-tion or the civilization of the Muscovite stamp itself upon east-ern peoples ? The last two inquiries are primary and essential, it will be admitted, in dealing with the first two. Statesmen prophets have prophesied, but struggle is no longer a thing of the future. The foretold contest is on. and it is critical. Potent energies are now at work in the Orient. Asia is evidently un-dergoing transition. Pressing circumstances must soon force a solution of the grave problem of the East and provide answers to our questions. While grim-visaged war is raging between the little island empire of the Pacific and that gigantic nation of the north, it will not be untimely to follow the course of that ceaseless, un-tiring advance which has brought Russia all the way across the Eurasian continent from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and Port Arthur. The declaration of open hostilities between these two con-flicting nations was no surprise, but rather was expected. War was inevitable in the face of Russian aggression and dogged-ness. The current strife is only one of a series of events which have been shaping themselves for years, yes for centuries, in the history of Russia. It is the natural, logical outcome of a policy of greed and grasp which has been at the bottom of THE MERCURY. 59 every national move which Russia has made since the days of her first note-worthy monarch, "Ivan the Terrible." The real cause of the war waging today can be clearly traced to this governing policy. Insatiate Russia is not satisfied with her tight grip on Manchuria which she now practically owns and controls, but looks with a covetous eye on the independent but small empire of Korea over which Japanese influence should justly extend. In fact it was reported, previous to the outbreak with Japan, that she already had obtained large interests in the important timber regions of the Yalu Valley, and that her rep-resentative stood over the weak and pliable Emperor at Seoul with almost dictatorial power. Such is her impudence and boldness. Will Russia recede from the prominent position she has taken in northeastern China ? Never, voluntarily ! She may make clever pretensions and employ shrewd diplomatic schemes, as is her custom, but she will never withdraw from an acquisi-tion which has been the object of her ambition for three cen-turies and more, until Japan or some other power drives her back into the north from whence she came. And then she will not remain there; onward, advance, conquer and expand have been the watchwords of this aggressor of nations since the close of the Middle Ages when the terrible autocrat of the six-teenth century assumed the ambitious title of Czar and began to push the lines of his government out in all directions. When Ivan came to the throne Russia was "a semi-savage, semi-Asiatic power, so hemmed in by barbarian lands and hos-tile races as to be almost entirely cut off from intercourse with the civilized world." Since then her growth in territory and power has been marvelous and amazing. From the compara-tively small and insignificant state in Central Europe, she has gradually extended her boundaries until now she dominates about one-half of the land area of Eurasia. The Tartars were attacked and driven beyond the Ural river, and thus the entire Volga and Caspian regions were acquired. An advance was started toward the Ural mountains and the Euxine. Under the powerful and energetic despot, Petet the Qreat, the Black and Baltic sea regions were both gained; Siberia was explored and 6o THE MERCURY. conquered from the Ural mountains to Kamtschatka, and afterwards colonized; far-reaching reforms were brought about, and Russia was lifted to a place among the first-class powers of Europe. Today her dominion extends from the borders of Per-sia, Afghanistan, and India on the south to Sweden and the Arctic ocean on the north ; and from the Chinese Empire and the Pacific on the east to Germany and Austria-Hungary on the west. What giant strides she has taken in territorial devel-opment ! What a magnificent stretch of country she has been able to consolidate into one sovereign State! No other nation in the history of the world has been able to secure such abso-lute control over so large an empire and that in the compara-tively short period of four centuries. Russia's advance is steady and never ceases. Her policy is well-outlined and the goal of her ambition is clearly defined., Her real governing purpose may be deduced from her actions. Russia needs some warm water harbors on the Pacific. She proposes first to secure, if possible, these advantageous outlets without which she can never develop her almost limitless na-tural resources. Secondly, Russia evidently aims to become the arbiter and controller of the East; and, therefore, she en-deavors to stamp her order of civilization on Asia, and obtain for herself the preponderance of power in the Far East. Back of these exalted aims and ambitions is a thorough conviction among her people that the day of Russian supremacy is near at hand. "Her students everywhere claim that the world had bee?i under the Romance type of civilization and that gave way in time to the Anglo- Teutonic type under which the world is now developing and this is about to give way to Slavonic civilization to which the future belongs." Surely, if written history and current actions count for anything in judging a nation, no other than these stupenduous designs and hopes, we have briefly stated, are the basis of her aggressive spirit. Surely no other than these form the main-spring of Russia's late historical movements. Russia's political,-.commercial and industrial interests demand a more extensive seacoast, and more and better harbors. Tur-r_* r THE MERCURY. 61 key and the Powers control the Bosphorus and deny her ingress to Mediterranean waters. The Baltic is ice-bound part of the year and that seriously hinders navigation there. Port Arthur and Vladivostok also present serious obstacles to successful commerce. Where shall Russia turn, if not southward along China's coast and toward the Persian gulf, in which directions the high wave of her influence and sovereignty has been roll-ing, now slowly, now rapidly, but ever rolling for almost four hundred years ? What does the construction of her great trans-Siberian railroad mean, which now stretches across an en-tire continent, if not easier access to the Pacific ? What does a similar trunk line mean, which is now being planned to extend from the Baltic to the Arabian sea, if not a freer outlet to the world's waters ? What does her sly seizure of Manchuria, her pretended foothold on Korea, signify ? What does a war with Japan signify, if not a fixed determination to extend her power along the Chinese seaboard and gain possession of China's warm water harbors? Russia aspires to be a great sea power, but as yet she is comparatively weak along that line, as was evinced too plainly by her recent defeats at the hands of Japanese sea-warriors. In order to be prepared in time of war she must have a stronger navy, and safer inlets to harbor it. That she may develop her boundless natural resources properly, both in Europe and Siberia, and thereby increase her wealth, she must be given an opportunity to open up her industries and enlarge her trade. To hold and maintain her place among the nations, she must establish herself on the sea. Russia's prophet states-men are shrewd and wide-awake to these facts. They look far ahead, see in Russia the nation of the future, and may be ex-pected to plan their every action in accordance with their in-tense ambition to make her glorious and paramount. There is no more room for doubt. The spread of Slavonic domination in Asia is truly alarming. No observer who has followed the course of current affairs in the East will have failed to notice that glacier-like movement of Russian power over Chinese territory. England sees it; Japan resents it. It is too evident, notwithstanding her cunning diplomacy, her insincere 62 THE MERCURY. promises and agreements, and her round-about manoeuvers at times, that Russia means to retain every foot of ground she possesses and that she will never cease to advance until she has conquered and absorbed and assimilated the whole of the Chi-nese Empire, Persia, and Afghanistan; stands triumphant on the summits of the lofty Himalyas, and looks with a threaten-ing eye down upon the rich and splendid empire of India, un-less, perchance, the Anglo-Saxon shall not delay longer, but come forth to contest such wholesale occupation of Asia. Some years ago, when it was proposed to retreat from the mouth of the Amur river, Emperor Nicholas said, "Where Russia's flag is carried once, there it shall remain forever." That shows the spirit of the nation. Russia is active; Russia is greedy; Rus-sia is strong and persistent. Give her the chance she seeks to relieve her latent energies and develop her dormant resources, and she will become the most influential, the wealthiest of world powers. Give her the opportunity she covets and she will scatter broadcast over the Orient her despotic principles of autocracy with its brutality, ignorance, and oppression; force her Greek Catholicism with its error and intolerance upon the unfortunate subjects of her conquest, and carry with her a spirit of exclusiveness and selfishness deadly to the advance of pure Christian civilization everywhere ig the world. Give her the right of way and she will attain the strategic points she desires and crush out of existence the Anglo-Saxon order of civiliza-tion, which means constitutional government, the Protestant religion, liberty, equality, and education characteristic of all Anglo Saxon peoples. Stand aside, and Holy Russia will rule the world. But will the rest of the world stand aside, passive and indif ferent, and let the great Czar forward his schemes of encroach-ment and aggrandizement unhindered? Japan says No! Japan acts promptly and firmly, and all hail! to the bravp little nation who with courage stout and strong goes out to battle with this giant aggressor of the north. We admit her claims be-cause we know they are just; we glory in her victories because we know she is right; deservedly do we give her our sympathies THE MERCURY. 63 because she has put herself in line with twentieth century progress and civilization and with dignity faces an avaricious foe still moved by the customs and principles of the sixteenth century. But can she stand against such might in the ultimate contest ? Can Japan alone hold Russia in check and stop the perilous ad-vance ? It is not to be expected. If not, what will England do, England who has check-mated Russia so often in Europe, and who now has such vast commercial interests on the coast and in the heart of China, and stands guardian over such a mighty empire as India, will she allow China to be Russianized and India to be menaced ? It would seem that the final struggle must be between Russia and England. Two great orders of modern civilization have met and are ready to clash, yes they have clashed, for Japan's prototype is England, and her civil-ization is Anglo-Saxon. On the one hand, Russia, who be-lieves thoroughly that the future lies with the Slav. On the other hand, the English-speaking nations, who contend that the future rests with the Anglo-Saxon. Both stand ready to fight, if need be, for the world's supremacy. One is a supremacy of personal absolutism and oppression; the other, a supremacy of democracy with its liberty and justice. Which shall it be? Should the struggle come now, Russia would likely be crushed ;• later, after she has had time to grow and strengthen to her full proportions, who shall prophesy the end and declare which shall rule the world, Anglo-Saxon or Slav ? THE PASSION FOR SCHOLARSHIP. PROF. OSCAR G. KXINGER. THE mental attitude of a man towards his vocation is all important. Tell me this and I will tell you the degree of success which he has won or will win. Where there is a lively interest there will be also the enthusiasm and tireless energy so necessary to the perfect performance of a task. A lackadaisical spirit defeats any enterprize. The captains of in- 64 THE MERCURY. dustry have always been men with a genius for hard work. The same is true of those who have won eminence in any of the learned professions. They have mounted high because they have been in love with their vocation. To the student who aims at some notable achievement in the domain of knowledge, an absorbing passion for scholarship is the first essential. By such a passion, I mean an insatiable desire to know the truth of things at first hand. Others may be satisfied to take their information on faith. He must get at the heart of reality ; he must know things in themselves and in their relations; and to attain this he must be willing to sacrifice everything— "To scorn delights and live laborious days." Unless this passion dominate him there will be lacking the fire and enthusiasm which are necessary to prolonged effort. To think is the most difficult task a man can ever set himself. It means absorption, critical acumen, a nice balancing of facts and unerring inference; in a word, it means the analysis of a fact or truth to its ultimates and a synthesis of these ultimates into a positive thought. The process prolonged wears out the brain and exhausts the nerves. To keep it up until the end demands a will which is animated by a passion for knowledge as burning as the desire to live. Then and then only can the mind come to its full stature and utter truth which men must hear whether they will or not. This longing to know is often inborn, but may be acquired in some degree by even the dullest. The main trouble with the latter sort of student is that his mind has never been a-wakened. About his intellect a dense haze has gathered and he cannot see his way nor does he know precisely where he is. A dull ambition stirs in his heart but he cannot discover its meaning. Intelligent study is to him unknown. He tries to go through his tasks but what he gets means little to him. Often it happens that young men of naturally capable minds almost finish their course before they acquire the mental aware-ness which is the first condition of successful study. When THE MERCURY. 65 they do wake up their progress is phenomenal. Perhaps therefore, the highest function of the teacher is to awaken mind and by his helpfulness keep it awake. ' No higher reward can come to him than the consciousness that he has set one intel-lect on fire with the passion to know. Before this is possible, however, a serious obstacle must be removed. It is a motion wellnigh unusual among students and grows out of a mistaken conception of education. The student finds the college equipped with a faculty of men more or less learned who are to be his teachers in the various subjects which the curriculum offers. He expects them to set him tasks for each day's performance. In the recitations they question him on the lessons and make the necessary explanations or pffer additional information. Consequently the idea is general and perhaps inevitable that the professors educate the pupil. How-ever natural, this notion is pernicious and works incalculable harm. In the sense that the teacher acts as guide and makes easier the road to intellectual development, it is true that he is an educator ; in any other sense it is misleading. The men-tal development zvhich any man gets is always the lesult of his own specific effort. A teacher helps, stimulates, guides, "but achieves nothing without the earnest response of the pupil.' This erroneous view is largely responsible for a wrong use of the textbook. The student imagines that doing his task-work in memoriter fashion is genuine study. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even a parrot is capable of such exercise of memory and the world has no use for human "Pollys!" A memory stored with knowledge is a great boon, but will not go far in promoting a' man's interests. Some of the greatest failures have been walking encyclopedias of facts and theories. A bookworm always has a hard time to find enough to eat. The world demands men who can think and plan and execute,—practical men who can use their knowledge to meet and solve the intricate problems of business and poli-tics. "What new truth have you to offer?" is the question asked of every graduate and on his answer depends his sta-tion. A well written article which reproduces only the •ii% 66 THE MERCURY. thoughts of other men finds its way into the editor's waste bas-ket or into the pages of the cheapest magazine. The pulpit ■which is no longer a teaching platform will face empty pews. The "dead-line" in any profession is drawn where invention dies; years have nothing to do with it. The man who keeps pace with progress and is able to interpret to others the heart of the movement will never want a hearing. Such a man is never the product of a mere textbook. For a text in any sub ject is the resume of one man's interpretation of a body of facts. Its value depends wholly on the authority of its author. At best it is only an outline. Any student, therefore, who ac-cepts the teaching without examining the facts and bringing the theory to the test of facts, is doing two things—-depriving himself of the pleasure which comes with reasoned conviction, and missing the power which such additional research confers. Either is a great mistake. The worship of the textbook induces another grievous habit which when acquired blights original work in a literary way. When a theme has been adopted as the subject of an essay the student at once searches through the library for material which when found constitutes the subject matter of his essay. Of testing, of meditation, there is little or 'none. What he says is not what the subject means to him but to another. He is like a phonograph endowed with the power of changing the form of expression without altering the thought. It were well if the saying of Isocrates were written in letters of light above every alcove: "What has been said by one is not of equal value to him who repeats it; but he seems to be the most skillful who finds in a subject topics which have escaped the notice of others." Here is the truth in a nut-shell. Let a young man determine at the outset that he will not repeat what has once been uttered except as a quotation, but will give to the world his own thought tested and tried by an appeal to things, and what he has to say on any subject will command the attention of men. Servile devotion to the textbook; re-producing the thought of others; failure to experience the truth that is presented; these are the fatal rocks on which THE MERCURY. 67 many a promising career has been wrecked. There is, too, an ethical aspect of the case which must not be overlooked. No one has the moral right to ask another to spend time in read-ing or hearing what to him is old. Truth which concerns man is so illimitable in every direction and our knowledge of it so infinitesimal that he who repeats what is common to all is guilty of a grave wrong to his reader or hearer. This passion to know fully and at first hand, if it could be-come the dominant element in the college atmosphere, would transform college life. It would quickly bring men face to face with the mystery of things and take away the indolence, the trifling, the present tendency to follow the line of least resis-tance. The four years of effort would produce scholars whom the world would welcome and of whom the college could be proud. The spirit of the scholar can be acquired and cultivated and its possession means success, as its absence means failure, in all that is highest in life. COURTESY TO STRANGERS. H. S. DORNBERGKR, '06. A stranger,'no matter where he goes, is bound to receive a certain amount of courtesy. I will attempt to show in this essay that this amount of courtesy is increasing rather than decreasing. During all ages and especially the feudal age, every stranger was sure of receiving food and shelter if he stopped at any house or castle. This was due chiefly to the fact that hotels were not very common until our own age, nor did every village or hamlet have its hotel or inn as is now the case. Then as there were no newspapers until quite recently, a stranger was also received for the news he might bring. It might also be added that the number of travelers at that time cannot be com-pared with the number of the present time. At present this hospitality to strangers is not nearly so evi- '• J Uii. 68 THE MERCURY. dent as it was in former times. The chief cause of this is our modern hotel system. Everywhere one goes he will find some kind of a hotel, no matter what be the size of the place. It may also be stated here that travelers, in most cases, would much rather pay their hotel bills than trouble some one else with entertaining them during their sojourn in the locality. Even among friends one sees this. Very often a friend will come to your vicinity and, rather than bother you, will go to a hotel. Now let us consider whether a stranger would be welcomed did he ask for our hospitality. The ordinary beggar will serve as a good example of this. It is very difficult, indeed, for one to find a home where a beggar will not receive a good meal if he goes and asks for it. Who is so cold hearted that he would refuse anyone shelter from the'cold in winter or the rain in summer? Who would not offer his bed to a sick or wounded person at his door and strive to comfort the unfortu-nate being? In some countries a stranger was always regarded as an enemy unless he could prove himself a friend. In some in-stances it even went so far as to cause the person's death, could he not do this. As we come to more modern times this feel-ing of hostility toward strangers gradually diminished until it has passed entirely out of existence, except among semi-civi-lized peoples. Another example of the growth of courtesy toward strangers is the downfall of absolute monarchism and the rise of more democratic forms of government. This last example may be regarded as not exactly on the subject by some but as it con-sists of the regard of man for man, in my opinion it is after all nothing but courtesy. A still better example is the increase of the value of human life. At the dawn of history the life of a man was held less sacred than a mere dog's life is today. This brings up still another point. In former ages, capital punishment was the mode of exacting justice. Since that time the inflicting of capital punishment has been gradually modi- THE MERCURY. 69 fied from unspeakable tortures to the entire abandonment of this form of justice except in some few cases. The modern rules of etiquette require us to be courteous to strangers. We exert ourselves in every way to please them and try our best to make them feel at home. We even go so far as to deny ourselves comforts for their pleasure. We do not allow them to spend their money. We introduce them to our friends who try to outdo us in their courtesy toward these strangers. Take for example the visit of a noted person to a city or town. Arrangements for his reception are begun al-most as soon as the the news of his intended visit becomes known. Banquets and receptions are given in his honor. He is met at the railroad station by a committee and escorted to his stopping-place. He is cheered by the crowds that gather merely to get a glimpse of him. I believe that courtesy toward strangers is increasing rather than decreasing for we of the present day are just as hospitable toward strangers as were our brethern of former times; and I believe therefore that as the world becomes more civilized, mankind will become more courteous. da I In an up-to-datest tailor-made gown,U-pi-de-i-da The boys arc wild, and prex is, too, You never saw such a hulla-ba-loo. CHORUS. — U-pi-dee-i-dee-i-da 1 etc. Her voice is clear as a soaring lark's, And her wit Is like those trolley-car sparks I When 'cross a muddy street she flits. The boys all have conniption fits I The turn of her head turns all ours, too. There's always a strife to sit in her pew; 'Tis enough to make a parson drunk, To hear her sing old co-ca-che-lunk! The above, and three other NEW verses to U-PI-DEIi, '.'. and NEW WORDS, catchy, up-to-date, to manv fp others of the popular OLD FAMILIAR TUNES; be- ■■ ' JfflHf sides OLD FAVORITES ; and also many NEW SONGS. J*W uull S0NGS OF ALL THE COLLEGES. JjWJ Copyright, Pricei $rjo, postpaid. fa mm if IJLU HINDS & NOBLE, Publishers, New York City. ^ ft ft Schoolbooks of all publishers at one store. ff1' ■> Rupp Building, YORK, PENN'A. Watch for his Representative when he visits the College PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. Geo. E. Sparkler, PIANOS, ORGANS, MUSICAL MERCHANDISE MusiC Rooms, - York St. Telephone 181 GETTYSBURG C. B. KITZMILLE,R. DEALER IN HATS, CAPS, BOOTS AND DOUGLAS SHOE.S. McKnight Building, Baltimore St. Gettysburg, Pa. k M. AMrEMAN, Manufacturer's Agent and Jobber of Hardware, Oils, paints and (jueensware Gettysburg, Pa. THE ONLY JOBBING HOUSE IN ADAMS COUNTY W.F.Odori, ^DEALER IN^k- SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS. mm* York Street, Gettysburg:, Pa. 1
' % JUNE, 1900 ooThe0o Qettysbiir Mercury CONTENTS The Evolution of the Thinker, 103 In the Storm, . 110 The Dawn of Idealism, . . Ill The Voice of the Sea, . . 117 A Critique of the Doctrines of Heraclitus, . . . 118 The Noble Hero, . Women as Teachers, Spring, . Editor's Desk Otsego Lake, The Turk in Religion, 121 124 126 127 129 133 \sW-G'BURG C. US, DUPLICATE FAVOR THOSE WHO FAVOR US. For Fine. Printing go to Tk Jo Co Wile Frigiiii Howe CARLISLE ST. GETTYSBURG, PA. C. B. KitzmMer Dealer in Hats, Caps, Boots and . Douglas Shoes GETTYSBURG, PA. B. Dealer in Hats, Caps, Shoes and. Gents' Furnishing Goods Corner Center Square and Carlisle Street GETTYSBURG, PA. EDGAR S. MARTIN, ^CIGARS AND SMOKERS' ARTICLES. Q£T" t^T* t^* Chambersburg St., Gettysburg. Like to learn Spanish? An easy Jan guage to learn. A JlimfuhVs Spanish Method. Self-teaching. SiianUh-ICiKiHx^Engllsh-SpanUh Diction'y, Hossfeld's Italian Method. Self-teaching. I/nlian-ICinjlixh, English-Italian Dictionary, Hossfeld's German Method. SelJ'-teaehlng. . Qerman-English,Engli8h-German Dictionary, $2.00 lloxsfeld's French Method. Sell-teaching. $1.00 French-Fnr/iish, Enalish-Frenck Dictionary. $2.00 lirooks" 1st Latin Jiook. 50 eta. Latin-English, English-Latin Dictionary. $2.00 Jlrooks' \st Greek Lessons. 50 ct3. Greek-English, English-Greek Dictionary. $2.00 Literal Translations of the Classics—Latin, Greek, Germun, French. Eighty-flvc volumes, sold separately, 50 eta. each. Sendfor list. HINDS & HOBLE, Publishers 4-5-1S-14 Cooper Institute N. Y. City Schoolbooks ofall pub-lishers at one store. orsome other v////////// language? .THE. GETTYSBURG MERCURY. VOL. IX. GETTYSBURG, PA., JUNE, 1900. No. 4 THE EVOLUTION OP THE THINKER. PROF. OSCAR G. KLINGEK. (Address on Education before the Susciuehanna Synod, May 9,1900.) TT is my privilege to engage your attention for a little while in A some phase of the general subject of education. It is a sub-ject in which you are profoundly interested, and of the import-ance of which you have a keen appreciation. I take it for granted that you are accustomed to give this hour, not that you may be entertained by an elaborate discourse filled with educa-tional truisms and platitudes, but to hear from some member of your body the newest and best thought of which he is capable. I conceive, therefore, that from me you desire to hear this even-ing what ideal I have of education—what, in my judgment, should be the aim of every system of intellectual discipline. Without hesitation, and asking no favors of adverse criticism, I present for your consideration " The Evolution of the Thinker." Whatever is true in my presentation, I ask you to accept ; what-ever does not appeal to your judgment, I ask you to believe to be the honest expression of a growing conviction. The first voice of the Aryan race to utter its thought was the poet of the Vedic Hymns. In that remote past, when the migra-tion of nations from the old Iudo-Germanic home was peopling Europe and the western part of Asia, the Aryans that settled In-dia were resting for a brief spell in the mountains which form the northwestern boundary of that country. Their eye swept the valley of the Ganges and the valley of the Indus, and as that magnificent landscape lay before them like another Promised L,and, their bards sang of the future. I mention this because in this first voice there is the recognition of the three-fold mystery of existence which is yet but partly solved—the mystery of self, the mystery of the universe, and the mystery of God. It has been 104 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. peculiarly the problem of the Indo-Germanic peoples. They only, believing in the authority of the Reason, and being free from the paralysis of fatalism, have dared to pry into things to get, if possible, their inmost secrets. The effort to explain the mystery of self has resulted in all that is known as logic, psychology and ethics; the effort to solve the mystery of the universe has resulted in all that is known as science; and the effort to solve the mys-tery of God has resulted in metaphysics. I have said that the mystery of existence is peculiarly the problem of the Aryan mind, and this finds its proof in the fact that in all other races mythology takes the place of thinking. The nations listen to the voice of fancy, and accept her dreams as the explanation of reality. Hence the lack of progress in the non-Aryan races. One glance at the history of thought among Aryan peoples reveals the business of the thinker. It is to explain the universe as he experiences it. It is to construe in thought the facts as they are presented to his consciousness. In doing this he must be alive to the authority of the Reason; he must inexorably follow her leadings; he must accept her conclusions. Not only this, but his thinking must bear the marks of his own individuality. In process and conclusion it must be distinctly his own. To master another man's thought, to adopt it as his own, is a valuable ex-ercise; but at best it can be only a propaedeutic to his own think-ing. What I wish to emphasize is this, that a man's thought is always an abstract of his own psychic being. A brief survey of the philosophy of knowledge will show the truth of this assertion. Objective cognition involves, first, a world of reality, which can act upon the sensory nerves and furnish the materials of knowledge; secondly, a human mind which is capable of reacting upon the stimulus, and interpreting the presentation; thirdly, the postulate that the principles which are constitutive of intelligence shall at the same time be the principles of cosmic being. i. B3' sense-perception we recognize reality as actually exist-ing and objective, not on the testimony of one sense alone but of all the senses. Even if we mistrust the report of the senses, we still have an invincible proof of the reality of a thing in its power to resist our will. Our whole conscious life, too, is the proof that this world of reality does act continuously upon all the senses, whether we attend to all of them at the same time or not; THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 105 and a single moment of reflection will discover to us that all the data of objective knowledge come in through the sensory nerves. Whatever truth there may be in idealism of the type of Berkeley, we are nevertheless certain that an external world does exist, and does act upon the nerves of sense. The first condition of ob-jective cognition, therefore, is met. 2. Again, self-consciousness reveals the existence of a human mind, which is our own true being. This mind exists as states of consciousness, each of which is a complex, and linked by laws of association with what goes before and what follows after. Every moment of our lives is a conscious reaction of this mind against the stimuli which reach it through the nerves of sense. In this reaction the presentation is interpreted by means of the principles which are constitutive of intelligence. Phenomena are brought under the category of substance; uniformities under that of law; persistence amid variety under that of identity; so in the interpretation of every single, definite presentation are used all the categories or ideas of the Reason, and used in the same way by every human intelligence the world over. For the Reason is not individualized but universal, the same for all intelligence. So far, then, all men must think alike. But the ideas of the Reason do not fill up the measure of the reacting mind. Beyond these primary elements which are univer-sal, the objective universe is a variable quantity, being for each mind the creation of its own endowment. As the endowment differs with the individual, it follows that no two persons can have precisely the same universe. Now, since all thinking is the explanation of experience, and as all experience is particularized, it follows that all thinking must be the abstract of the psychic being of the thinker. To this point we shall return a little later. 3. Our warrant for accepting the postulate that the principles constitutive of intelligence itself are also the principles of cosmic being, may find its illustration in the mathematical theory of the universe. Pure mathematics is a deduction from the Reason it-self, and wholly subjective. Its principles belong to the essence of spirit. And yet these mathematical principles are used in the interpretation of phenomena, and so precisely do they fit the sys-tem of things that prediction based upon calculation has become the mark of science. Knowledge is never scientific until it be-comes mathematical. io6 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. It was said above that a man's thought must be an abstract of his psychic being. This psychic being must be studied in order that all the elements which it supplies in the act of cognition may be definitely understood. It is never a chance product. What any man is at any moment is always the resultant of his reaction upon external stimulus under the bias of his inheritance and en-vironment. This statement recognizes three facts of human life —the fact of heredity, the fact of environment, and the fact of personality. Let us study their meaning as it relates to the thinker. i. By the term heredity we name that law according to which an organism tends to reproduce its kind. Its action in the biology of plants and animals is an every day fact, and needs no illustra-tion. Its action, too, in the human physical organism is well un-derstood. In the realm of psychology and ethics its meaning is only beginning to dawn even upon scholarship. There its sig-nificance is truly startling. For in human life it means that all life is an unbroken continuity; that each new life is but the last edition of a long line; that the babe which comes to you with all the appearance of sweet innocence—" fresh from the hand of God," as we are fond of saying—that your babe is but you and your ancestors making a new start in the old life—you and your ancestors, With sufficient marks of difference to constitute a distinct individuality." "He is a new product just because he represents a new combination of ancestral influences." Perhaps you are ready to doubt this teaching, and call for some higher authority than your speaker's. Listen, then, to Prof. Sully, one of England's most conservative and most prominent psycholo-gists : "The normal human brain, with its correlated psychical capacities, is, like the human organism as a whole, the result of the hereditary transmission of specific or typical characters from progenitor to offspring." "The child brings with it into the world an outfit of instinctive tendencies or dispositions constituting the natural basis of the civilized or uncivilized man." "In this way we all bring into the world, wrought into the very texture of our brain-centers, the physical basis ot our future individual charac-ter, mental and moral." " The child inherits from its series of ancestors, woven into the texture of its nervous system, a number of dispositions representing ages of ancestral experience." And Dr. G. Stanley Hall: " Heredity has freighted it (the THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 107 body) with all the results of parental well and ill-doing, and filled it with reverberations from the past more vast than science can explore." You cannot fail to see the truly awful significance of this un-doubted law. It means that the whole life of the offspring is largely, though, thank God, not wholly, conditioned by the men-tal and moral character of its progenitors. The thoughts which the child thinks, the feelings which it loves best to entertain, the bias and disposition which manifest themselves at such a tender age, and generally continue throughout life, are not original with it, but have their roots back in the lives from which its life sprang. It is not what it would be, and for what it is it is not responsible. Its bias and tendencies, its instincts and impulses, are such as its ancestors have transmitted to it in brain and nerve substance. 2. "Men start out, then, in existence with a vital capital sup-plied by their ancestry, which is modified more or less by the law of diversity." But from the very moment when that individual life begins, another fact becomes of supreme importance—the fact of environment. By this term we designate "the sum of the influences and agencies which affect an organism from with-out." Soil and climate, food and work, and, above all, hu-man comradeship, constitute a man's environment. And all of this is individualized. A babe opens its eyes upon a specific set of visual phenomena; its ears are responsive to a particular set of sounds; its other senses are in due time recipient of definite sets of appropriate impressions. Its mind at first is but potential; but at once it reacts upon the incoming currents, at first feebly, but then with growing strength. Its only content at first is the bundle of dispositions and biases, mainly neural, which are ances-tral in their origin ; and the entire furnishing of its mind is that which comes to it through sense-perception. In other words, each individual mind depends for the character of its ideas upon the environment in which it lives. But the mere physical facts that lie about do not constitute its true environment. A selective process is carried on. Out of the whole number of actual pre-sentations to consciousness, it selects such only as are most con-genial to its native disposition. This process continues with the development of the psychic being of every man, his objects of io8 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. knowledge being mainly those phenomena which are most to his taste. 3. Heredity and environment form a large part of every human life, but they do not constitute the whole of it. Their binding power is great, but not entirely irresistible. Men do make choices which are in direct antagonism to both. Many a man whose heredity was all evil has conquered his bias, and lived a true life. This power to choose in opposition to all pre-natal and post-natal influences we call the Will. It is the essence of personality. It is not wholly free, can hardly be said to be free at all at the start; but it is every man's privilege to grow into freedom, and this, in the last analysis, is his chief business in the world. To grow into freedom, to develop into a perfect ethical being, this is his birthright from God—it is the mark of God upon his forehead. The psychic being of every man, then, contains elements which are ancestral in their origin, elements which belong to his early environment, and elements which belong to the constitu-tion of the mind itself. And this is the problem of the educator: Given a human mind, which must react upon and explain the external world, but is itself under the biasing power of ancestral and environmental influences, how shall it construe facts in har-mony with their actual nature ? how shall its thought be a true transcript of reality ? If I have made clear what has been said, then one great prin-ciple has become patent, viz.: Every system of intellectual discipline must have as its supreme aim the mental emancipation of the studejit. All other objects must be subordinated to this. The mind must be so developed that it can cognize a fact in its bleak objectivity. Every prejudice must be laid aside and set at naught. The power of opinion must be broken. The colored lights must be dissipated by the white light of reason. For the true thinker can state his problem only thus : Given the fact, how am I to con-strue it in strict accord with its occurrence ? Now, this freedom of mind is a possible achievement. On its physical side, education is a process of brain-building. It is the creation of new brain-cells. It is a deepening of the convolu-tions . It is no longer doubted by psychologists that thought power depends upon the number and integrity of the brain-cells. Mind and brain are exactly correlated, and every psychic function is accompanied by a corresponding neural process. Since education THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 109 is thus on its one side the creation of new cells, may we not sup-pose that such cells lack, in large measure, at least, the bias which dominates the brain of the undisciplined man ? They will, I am sure, if the master-hand who guides the process be a true educator. But on its psychical side, too, education may lead to freedom. Whatever may be the elements of determinism, the will is yet free in the most of its choices. L,et a youth, dominated by the passion for pure thought, determine to conquer all the bias of his nature —determine to think the universe of his experience for himself— determine that facts shall be construed in harmony with their oc-currence, and then let him persevere in this determination, and the day will dawn which will mark his victory. The universe he thinks must still be his universe ; the facts he seeks to construe must be the facts which he experiences and as he experiences them. His thought, therefore, even when uncolored by sub-jective lights and shadows, must still be his own—must bear the marks of his own individuality. This, then, is the first step in the development of the thinker. The discipline through which he passes must have as its supreme aim his emancipation from every form of bias, gift or prejudice under which at the start he lies bound. This is the first step ; but there is a second of equal import-ance. If a man is to think truly he must have the privilege of thinking freely. His environment must be conducive to freedom of thought. I know of nothing which so paralyzes effort as the expectation of being misunderstood and persecuted. No scholar can object to his thought being brought to the test of reality. That is what he craves. Theories are worthless unless they ex-plain facts. All thinking, therefore, must at every point be brought to the test of things. And no true thinker ever shrinks from this test. What he must fear is that his thought will be brought to the test of opinion. Appeal in philosophy is so often an appeal to authority. Now, in some spheres of human interests authority may have its place, but the sphere of thought is not one of them. Each man's thought is valuable in the degree in which it is a true transcript of the cosmic processes, but upon you and me it can have no possible binding power whatever. From the beginnings of European thought to the present time the objective facts have been pretty much the same. Theories iib THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY have been offered for their explanation. The finest minds of each generation have grappled anew with the problem. Much has been achieved, but more still remains to be made rational. Never in its history has the world needed thinkers as in these days of ours. The world's necessity is the educator's opportunity, and more is being done than ever before to enable the student to de-velop into the thinker. But when his thought is laid before the world, and she sees upon it the stamp of his own personality, let her not scream "sceptic," and " infidel" and " atheist;" but let her humbly and gratefully sift his thought, and save the wheat for her granary. For the time has come when of the thinker we may demand that he accept facts as facts, and that he construe them in thought in harmony with the mind's own laws ; but not that he conform his thought to authority, either ancient or mod-ern. Opinion has no place in the test of thought. IN THE STO'RM. I Fast to the anchor on the shore The boat was rocking upon the deep, A cradle for the sleeping' child. The quick storm rose ; the old sea roar Riyalled the thunder ; jerk and sweep Of wave broke loose the boat, ere, wild, The father came. Though all was black, By the trembling- flash that split the east, He saw the child. Mad with alarms He neared the shore. The sea fell back To its vast heap—then rushing fast Swept safe his child into his arms. II Oh, Father, if the storms of sin Break my hold on the anchor of hope And cast me on the wild life sea, When on that shore the waves roll in, Thy everlasting arms then ope And save and clasp and pity me. I THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. til THE DAWN OF IDEALISM. LDIHES A. WEIGLE, '00. A STUDY in the earlier history of our race, or of some phase **■ of its multiform life and belief, is a task of great difficulty, but which possesses, at the same time, a singular charm. For though that distant world of beginnings is but imperfectly recorded in those of its products which have reached succeeding genera-tions ; though it costs the greatest effort to make real for us the conditions of life and modes of thought of its remote people; thoughstep afterstep in their development can be but conjectured— in these very facts, it seems, there lies a delight which the student alone can attain. There is something intensely attractive about his work as he gropes among the dim shadows of the past, catching here a gleam and here a glimpse of light, which become, to his sensitive soul, a realization, however imperfect, of the dawn of society, of religion, of reason. Among these beginnings, then, that which perhaps appeals most strongly to the mind of the scholar is the dawn of reason, the genesis of real thought. Not without justice, too, for the pre-eminence of humanity lies in the reason, and so may the first steps in the true development of its nascent capabilities be most fit objects of study. There is a peculiar fitness as well as a delight iu looking back at the pioneers of thought approaching the problems with which their successors have grappled likewise; in watching the unfolding of intellect as their conceptions ad-vanced. The proper study of mankind is man ; may we not say with equal truth that the proper study of a rational being is reason. It is significant that this awaking of thought did not take place till so late a date in history as 600 B. C.—the time that men have thought of the great problems of the universe has been centuries less than the former period of mental apathy. But perhaps we should not term it so; it was the period of prepara-tion. The time was ripe for thought; the intellect was keyed to the strain that was to be put upon it; for from Thales, with his turning from mythology to philosophy, but with his poor princi-ple of moisture as the ultimate cause, to Plato, with his turning philosophy into the direction it has since kept, with his doctrines almost Christ-like, and with his idealistic philosophy which has 112 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. only lately reached its fullest development, was a period of only two hundred years—absurdly small as compared with the centuries that had gone before and those that have followed. A study of any period of those two hundred years, in many respects the most fruitful in the history of thought, must necessarily be of the richest character. Our subject is concerned with the close of this period, with the laying down, by one man, of the foundation of true philosophy. For Plato, with his idealism, however imperfect, turned thought in the direction it has since followed, and to him must be ascribed our gratitude for the first overthrowal of sensationalism. True, Socrates was the master, the real pioneer ; but all the best that we have of Socrates is through Plato; and he went far beyond Socrates. He caught up the scattered threads of his master's thought; he carried each precious suggestion to its logical end, and added his own crystalline reasoning; and then he wove it all together into a clear system of philosophy which must yet command our respect. Not to say that Plato embodied his thought formally and logically as a system, for it is widely scattered throughout his dialogues, and nowhere arranged with that intent; but it stands clearly and boldly distinct amid the multitude of chaff, so that a student of his writings gains a definite understanding of his thought-concep-tion of the universe. Most of his teaching is put in the mouth of Socrates, a fact which leaves open much for discussion. Many have conceived this Platonic Socrates as a purely dramatic invention. "Plato himself," says Walter Pater, "but presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a kind of stage disguise." Just how far this is true, or, on the other hand, how far Plato recorded dialogues that really took place, and the true utterances of his master, we shall possibly never know. But there is no doubt that Plato was an independent thinker, and not a mere scribe, a Boswell before his time. Socrates prepared and suggested; Plato finished that work, and the" enlarged suggestion from its logical completion made it possible for him to transcend the task his master had set him. And Plato's task was by no means easy. From the time of his entering the field of philosophy he was plunged into a combat with the Sophists, who had firm possession of the public mind. Their brilliant show of rhetoric and self-satisfied claim of wisdom THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 113 and ability to educate appealed to the minds of the Athenians, just awaking to their intellectual capabilities, far more trrau the modest claims of Socrates and his pupils, and their confessed search after truth. What the Athenian wanted was ability to help himself in the life of his day, and to defend himself before his numerous courts; and the quickest way to such an education was what he sought. There was a strong basis of fact in the Sophists' claim of superiority to Socrates and Plato—in point of popularity at least. There was no such glamour in the sincere quest of reality as in the Sophists7 wisdom—pyrites is sometimes more beautiful than gold. And it was not only in the common mind of the people that Plato had to overcome a presumption in favor of the Sophists. Their doctrines were dominant among the thinkers of the day, among those few pioneer minds who busied themselves with matters deeper than those called for by the exigencies of every day life. They taught what has been revived again and again by men after them, the doctrine of sensationalism ; and it is a mode of thought which appeals most strongly to our first reflection, an error into which it is the easiest thing in the world to fall. "Sensationalism," says Prof. Ferrier, "is supported by the natural sentiments of mankind; it is the scheme which suggests itself most readily to the untutored understanding; it is a product of ordinary thinking. When left to ourselves we are naturally of opinion that all our knowledge comes to us through the senses; that the senses are the main, indeed, the sole means and instru-ments ot cognition, and this opinion is nothing but the doctrine of sensationalism." When we remember, then, that this vulgar, natural error of common thought was supported and systematized by the Sophists, and upheld by their brilliant logic and showy pretensions, which appealed so strongly to the Athenian mind, we can understand in some degree what a force Plato was com-bating— the picture of Socrates drinking the hemlock "for cor-rupting the youth" is perhaps not so inexplicable. "Man is the measure of all things," said the Sophists, This reference of the universe to the individual not only relegated all knowledge to the realm of sense-perception, neglecting wholly the higher processes of thought, but wrought far greater mischief in the realm of ethics. Individual responsibility and individual judgment of the good without any abiding principle is nothing ii4 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. but moral chaos. Socrates saw this, and he brought all his magnificent powers of thought and speech to bear against it. He called vice, ignorance, and virtue, knowledge; the true life, to his mind, was the rational life. He taught the independent objective existence of the eternal principles, and that morality lay in the more or less perfect knowledge of these fundamentals. His first endeavor, therefore, was to find a correct theory of knowledge; his most particular aim was a logical definition of the concept. "At the basis of all thought, as Kant has clearly demonstrated, must be a critique of the mind's power to know." Such was the task, then, that Socrates gave over to Plato, and we can only understand Plato's work if we remember this as his aim. "His inquiry was—How to think the universe as given in experience." Plato did not undertake his work blindly, but with a full con-ception of all that it demanded of him. He has been called the creator of philosophy, and, indeed, his thought marks more than a mere step in the line of progress; but he did not make the mistake of attempting total originality. His thought bears the unmistakable marks of careful and thorough study in all that had gone before. Plato was a master of Pre-Platonism. His work was the outcome of a consideration of prior thought; he carefully weighed the previous systems, and took from each its principle of truth. From Heracleitus he derived the doctrine of the perpetual flux—itavra /kc ; from the Eleatics, the permanence of Being; from Pythagoras, the principle of number. For the realm of sense-perception the view of Heracleitus is correct. The senses present a succession of ever-changing phenomena. But Plato saw where Heracleitus failed—in affirming that there is no Being, but Becoming; that "the one thing permanent in a world of change is the law which governs the change." If this were true, knowledge would be impossible-—man would be no better than the brute. Consciousness recognizes-something other than this, for it reacts upon and interprets the phenomena of presenta-tion— there is interaction. And therefore, Plato rejected Becom-ing as the absolute principle of the universe, and adopted the Elea-tic notion of Being. There is Reality, he affirmed; but here again he modified the older doctrine, for the changing phenomena of the universe demand something other than the Eleatic Being, changeless, fixed, " a stony stare." And here came the last of the three prior systems to his help—the Pythagorean number; tafe THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. "5 mathematical relation mediates between pure being and the changing world. "Pythagoras brought back to Plato's recog-nition," says Walter Pater, "all that multiplicity in men's experience to which Heracleitus had borne such emphatic witness; but as rhythm and melody now, in movement truly, but moving as disciplined sound and with the reasonable soul of music in it." Thus was posited the foundation, not only of Platonic philosophy, but of future thought, in a blending of the guesses of those gropers in the shadows who had gone before. There is change, but not change alone; there is Being, but not changeless Being; there is the union of the two in an interaction of harmony and design. Why that, we say, is modern! Plato is not an ancient philosopher! But Plato's philosophy did not stop here; the most distinctive doctrine of his thought was yet to be developed from this. Socrates had recognized the reaction of the soul in interpreting the phe-nomena of sense; he had seen how the mind abstracts the resem-blances and recombines them in a class-notion, a concept, and, as has been said, one of his most particular aims was the logical definition of this universal. This general concept Plato received from Socrates, and from it he reached his doctrine of ideas, which, more than any other, gives distinction to his thought. In some points almost fantastic, as we now see it, it was a tremendous stride toward the apprehension of reality, and was the starting point of idealistic philosophy. Every human being in the simplest act of knowledge makes use of these concepts or ideas, but he is unconscious of their nature, even of their presence as such; he does not apprehend them as the necessary and essential instruments of thought. Plato saw this, and his conception of ideas became far different from that of Socrates. For Socrates they had been serviceable creations of the reason, essentially subjective in their existence. But Plato detached them from concrete things and gave them objective existence by themselves as real things, independent of the individual mind. Knowledge, he said, is in some sense not active, but passive; these ideas are not the instruments by which we think our experience, but the cause of our thought. Walter Pater puts it clearly : '' They are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience to the 'absolute.' In proportion as they blend n6 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him." These ideas are necessary, then; and hence it easily follows that they are universal and co-extensive with reality. Plato also conceived them as innate, not conflicting in this sense with their objectivity and reality; but innate in that they are not the products of experience, but lend themselves to the mind, ready to be called forth by the sense-impressions of experience. In this lay the principle that the seeds of knowledge have a pre-existence in the mind and may be brought forth by growth and development from within, but not imparted to the mind from without. And herein was another point of difference from the Sophists, for they looked on the mind as a waxen tablet on which nothing was originally inscribed, and boasted that'they could impart any knowledge to the pupil; whereas Plato judged with Socrates that true educa-tion lay in drawing from the child's own mind the principles there innate by stimulating the reflective powers. These ideas were conceived also, not as the creative agency, but as prototypes for its use and patterns for reality as we gain it in experience. There is a world of ideas immeasurably higher and purer than this world of sense—our earth compares with it as the shadow with the substance. Plato himself draws this analogy in the "Republic." He supposes a cavern which opens to the day by a long passage before whose mouth is a great fire. Within the cavern are men bound in such manner that they can look only toward the inner wall of the cave, on which are the shadows of the men and animals passing in the outer world between the fire and the mouth of the cave. "These captives exactly represent the condition of us men who see nothing but the shadows of realities. And these captives in talking with one another would give names to the shadows as if they were realities. And if, further, this prison-house had an echo opposite to it, so that when the passers-by spoke the sound was reflected (from the same wall on which the shadows were seen) they would, of course, think that the shadows spoke. And, in short, in every way they would be led to think there were no realities except these shadows." He then imagines that one of these captives is loosed and dragged up into the outer world, and pictures first his pain and blindness in the presence of the true light and his disbelief in the reality of his impressions ; then how he is gradually enabled to see and to THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 117 know the truth, and his unwillingness to take up again his former condition. "We must liken the visible world to the dark cavern and the fire which makes objects visible to the sun. The ascent upwards and the vision of the objects there is the advance of the mind into the intelligible world; at least such is my faith and hope. . . . God knows if my faith is well-founded. And, ac-cording to my view, the idea of the Supreme Good is seen last of all and with the greatest difficulty, and when seen is apprehended as the cause of all that is right and excellent. This idea produces in the visible world light and the sun the cause of light; in the intellectual world it is the cause of truth and the intuition of truth." And so these ideas are not co-ordinate, but at the head of all is the notion of the Good. Plato's philosophy has led us to the conception of the Infinite, as must every rational system. And so dawned idealistic philosophy, with its roots far back in the very first of the thinkers, and its plain development in the thought of one man. There is much that is chaff in the pages of Plato, but there is more that is truth. Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero—"he died pen in hand ;" and his work has lived ever after him. For we cannot get away from Plato; his thought is an anticipation of all that has followed. He is ever new and fresh ; his thought is always modern. THE VOICE OF THE SEA. C. M. A. STINE, '01. I sat by the shore of the heaving- sea As the darkness of night grew deeper, And the limitless ocean seemed to me Ivike the lace of a dreaming sleeper. So I listened to the deep-toned murmur, ' Watching the fog wreaths creep Slowly, treacherously nearer To the pallid sands at my feet. I questioned the gray old ocean Who is ever, yet never, the same, "Whereunto hath God created us ? Is't but to sorrow and pain ?" But the all knowing, fathomless sea, As it rolled vast, foam crested and dim, To the paling light of the horizon, Was gray, relentless and grim. n8 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. The billows sighed for the mystery And the sorrow of this mortal span ; For man's short life and the losses That come in "three score and ten." "Is this all of your fabled knowledge ?" Broke from me then in my pain, For I sought to find comfort and soothing In the voice of the tossing main. In agony of soul I gazed seaward, When softly over the deep Stole an imperceptible radiance, As the dawn lights on the mountains creep. The mystery of the tossing billows Was hushed, and the thunderous murmur One cadence breathed on the night wind,— "Forget not the love of the Father." Ah, the peace that then came stealing As deep called afar unto deep; The assurance "Thy Father loves thee" Soothed my spirit to dreamless sleep. A CRITIQUE OF THE DOCTRINES OF MERACLITUS. WILLIAM W. FREY, '00. T TERACLITUS. the last representative of the Ionian school of * *■ Greek philosophy, lived, according to Laertius, in Ephesus, about 500 B. C. He belonged to one of the first families of Ephesus, and this is very manifest in the tone of his writings, in his contempt for the masses. In character he was of a melancholy temperament, without political ambition, disliking social inter-course, but greatly inclined towards philosophical speculation. His style of writing, as revealed to us in fragments, was concise, abrupt and very obscure; this obscurity has been attributed to dif-ferent causes by the historians. Ritter supposes it to have been due to the early infancy of prose philosophical writing and to the inadequacy of words to express accurately the thoughts of the lofty range of speculation in which he indulged. Mallet, Descartes and others ascribe it to an intention of the author not to make his meaning accessible to the common people. As to the contents of his work, there is also much controversy. Some regard it as ethical, others political, others solely metaphysical. It seems THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 119 likely, as Mallet says, that Heraclitus gave a wider range to phi-losophy in that he included physical, political, moral and mythical questions within his discussion. The problem he sought to solve—common to the Ionian school—was to discover the physical ground of all phenomena ; the principle which pervades and lies back of all natural phenom-ena. It was the "end of wisdom," Heraclitus held, to find this principle. He differed from the others, however, in assuming the position that Reality has necessarily its ground and principle in an "absolute, universal, illimitable, living, perfect essence," en-dued with vital energy or force, and, disregarding the hypothesis of the independent existence of individuals, he endeavored to grasp this notion. Furthermore, he attempted, too, to find out the law of development,—how all things came from this first principle. Let us now view more closely his philosophy, noting the falsity of some of his doctrines as we do so. The principle which seemed to him the most powerful, subtle and pervading of all elements was ''fire;" so he founded his system, according to Draper, upon the simple axiom "that all is convertible into fire and fire into all." By this fire, however, he means not a flame but a sort of dry vapor, using it symbolically to represent the principle of universal vital-ity,— something more than the "arche" of previous philosophy— a life pervading all. He held that from this one principle, all things proceed, and are again resolved into it by a perpetual flux. Nature resembles a river flowing incessantly. There is no Being but Becoming; the common character of all phenomena is a perpetual strife, but still a strife according to necessary, irresistible laws. By opposi-tion wehave harmony ; by rarefaction and condensation, all things, by contraries, all movement. So fire in producing all things; passes through a series of transformations—this is strife; and again, by assimilation all things die out—this is peace. Testing this thought by actual life experiences, one cannot help but notice how true it is. Life is a struggle; death is rest. In his adaptation of fire as a symbol, again we seethe appropriateness, for fire is rest-less, striving, longing to pass into other forms, continually active until extinguished. But when we consider further that he denies existence to everything except the Law of Change, fallacies are very apparent. I 120 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. For motion always implies something that moves; change sug-gests materials which are transformed. There can be no "real" phenomena thought of, except in connection with something ex-isting. One attribute is necessary to every substance, viz. Being; and, of course, we must have substance in order to conceive of any attribute at all, such as capability of motion, which is essen-tial to the phenomena of motion or change. Though there is con-tinual change, nevertheless we see more than the process, we see also the things themselves changing. At this place, we must con-sider another false doctrine of Heraclitus—shared later by other philosophers. His teaching that our senses are unreliable and practice deception when they give us certain impressions, is found in different forms and under various guises in the writings of Hamilton, J. S. Mill, Bain, Spencer and others. To discuss this subject,—"the relativity of knowledge," would require a greater expansion of our topic than would be proper. Suffice it to say, in Dr. Valentine's words, that "this theory in whatever form, would do away with the possibility of attaining truth of any kind." The best philosophy of centuries affirms the truth that the ''ratio cognoscendi is grounded in the ratio essendi.'' Of course, Heraclitus, not accepting the senses as giving us truth, and start-ing with the assumed basis of eternal motion, could easily deny Being. Another doctrine, palpably false, which reappeared again many years later, was the "universality of belief as the criterion of truth." He maintained that the universal or divine reason, that medium which surrounds us, which is common to all, only could be relied upon ; but the conceptions of the individual reason were not to be trusted. He says, "to think is common to all; and he that would speak rationally must abide by that which is main-tained by all in common." It must be borne in mind that all his doctrines concerning things both subjective and objective are wholly speculative, not empirical. In pursuing his "vital principle" he lost sight so entirely of the individual that he considered it only as purely phenomenal and delusive. "The only proper starting point is the individual.'' Having begun, as he did with the assumption of the reality only of the universal energy, and then, too, considering this as pure transition alone, it is no wonder that the individual drops out en-tirely as such, and is merged into the universal. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 121 As to his theory regarding the physical universe little need be said. If one bears in mind that it was all theory and not observa-tion, all a priori speculation and not science, his hypotheses will not appear so very unreasonable after all. He supposed the heavens to be basins or bowls, the concave part turned towards us; the stars and sun, flames from earthly evaporations; the size of the sun is just twelve inches ; it is kindled every morning and goes out every night; eclipses are caused by the turning around of the basins. His moral system is based upon the physical, the fundamental doctrine being the excellence of fire. Thus he accounted for a drunkard's acts, by his having a moist soul, and drew the infer-ence that a warm or dry soul is best. His doctrine of the soul of man was that it is a ray from the great fire that is in every phe-nomenon and throughout all nature. He did not approach the idea of a soul as we conceive it to-day,—it was not spiritual at all; in fact some of his writings seem so near later materialistic theories, that Cousin calls them, "Materialism in its infancy." Fatalism is very evident in Heraclitus ; movement is the essential. In Heraclitus as in almost all the better Greek writers, we can easily trace the strong national feeling. Political considerations enter frequently. Note the maxim : "A people ought to fight for their laws as for their walls." With such a system and viewing the conditions of his native country at that time, one is not surprised at his deprecatory esti-mation of humanity which finds expression in this : "The very birth of a man is a calamity—a birth unto death." THE NOBLE HERO. S. W. AHALT, '02. ABOUT two miles south-west of Keedysville, and a mile and a half from Sharpsburg there is a beautiful little cottage sur-rounded by a magnificent grove. In front of the house there is a small porch which is covered with ivy. Directly in front of the porch is a fountain, around which there is a gravel drive. For many years this place was owned by an old man named Hastings. He was a very rich old fellow, yet he spent his yearly income on his only daughter, Naomi. Naomi was a beautiful, fair-cheeked girl with golden hair and dark blue eyes. She was very fond of 122 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. fine clothes (as most girls are), and her father tried his utmost to please her in every way possible. Mr. Hastings gave many re-ceptions and dances for his daughter and her numerous friends. At these balls Naomi was looked upon more as a queen than an ordinary girl. Unlike most girls of her age, she did not have any particular gentleman friend, but she was of the opinion that all men are born equal and she treated them as such. One day a young man named Roberts, from N. Y., who was stopping at the Ross hotel in Sharpsburg, called to see Mr. Hastings. It being near the middle of the day, he was asked to stay and take dinner with them, which he did willingly. Mr. Hastings was very much pleased with the appearance and the manners of the gentleman, so he invited him to attend a dance to be given the following evening. Mr. Roberts thanked him very kindly for the invitation and promised him to be present. In the evening, Mr. Roberts was among the first to drive up to the house. He, being a stranger to all the guests, asked for Mr. Hastings, who introduced him to all present. It was a very short time until Roberts became acquainted with all. He was quite a graceful dancer, and of course all the girls were very anxious to dance with the fine-looking stranger. All the time he was dancing you could see that he kept his eye on Naomi and would give her a pleasant smile whenever a chance was given. He had asked her several times to be his partner, but it seemed that she always had an engagement. The dance continued far into the night and it was now time for the friends to say, "Au Re-voir." Roberts was slow in taking his departure, as he desired to speak a few words with Naomi before leaving. One by one the carriages passed through the gate of the yard, until but one re-mained. Naomi and Roberts stepped out on the porch and as soon as Naomi heard the trickling of the water from the fountain the thought struck her that she must have a drink, and in a few moments the two stood beside the beautiful fountain drinking the water from a silver cup. The moon shone brightly and the stars twinkled like diamonds in the azure sky. A few snow-white clouds were floating in the heavens, and a slight breeze, made fra-grant by the rose-buds and peach-blossoms, was moving the leaves of the trees. They watched the little fish swim in the moonlight, and talked about the enjoyable evening they had spent, and Roberts told her THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 123 how anxious he had been to dance with her. Roberts now took his departure, but not until Naomi had invited him to call again to see her. After this his visits were very numerous, and at last they became engaged to be married. About this time the famous battle of Antietam was fought and on the 16th of July, '62, Roberts decided to go into the battle and fight for his country. He spent that evening at Hastings', and Naomi tried every way possible to induce him to stay out of the battle, but he was determined to help his struggling country and he did so. When he departed that night Naomi left these words with him: "Farewell! The sun no longer shines, The skies no more are blue Above this lonely life of mine ; The sunlight goes with you. But oh, whatever lot I see Thro' sunshine or thro' rain, My L,ove, I will be true to thee Until we meet again." Yes, the battle was fought and the victory won. The noble hero had done his part, although it cost his life. Naomi watched both day and night for her lover's return, but alas ! she watched in vain. He was among the many hundreds of soldiers who were lying dead upon the battlefield, covered with blood and dust. There was a letter in his pocket from Naomi, which was the only thing that kept him from being buried among the unknown. A few days afterwards, Naomi was walking past the graves of the soldiers and she saw her lover's name (A.M. Roberts) in her own hand-writing tacked upon a slab at the head of a grave. She burst into tears, but consoled herself by thanking God that she knew where he was buried. For many years Naomi kept flowers upon the hero's grave, and you can now see his name upon the headstone on the western slope of the National Cemetery at Sharpsburg. I24 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. WOMEN AS TEACHERS. GERTRUDE FREY, '00. HPHE higher education of women is a problem which has been * agitated for many years. Formerly woman's subjection to man was very nearly complete in all respects, whether considered from a social, a political or an intellectual point of view. But from being the property of man, she emerged, under civilization, from the sphere of drudgery to that of social power, and conse-quently to the liberty of cultivating her mental faculties. Some people profess to believe that the development of woman's mind is undesirable, because there is a tendency toward what is called "strong-minded" women. But the higher education, rightly pursued, does not make women cold, hard and semi-mas-culine, as many claim it does. Indeed, the more a woman knows of life, the better she understands the past and present of the world, and the experiences and conclusions of its greatest thinkers, the less likely she will be to confuse the masculine and feminine ideals, or to underrate the latter in comparison with the former. Experience has proved to us that women are capable of just as high intellectual development as men ; and many have taken ad-vantage of the opportunity given for the higher education, whether they expect to enter a profession or not. A study of the census statistics leads to the broad statement that there are but few lines of remunerative employment not now open to woman. She is found in nearly all departments of pro-fessional life—ministry, medicine, literature, art, music, the drama, education and science. Of the 128 occupations classified in the census of 1890, only one—military pursuits—had no femi-nine representative. There are some professions which I think are not desirable for women to enter. Generally when the college woman thinks of doing something as a means of livelihood, she thinks of teaching. There have been many objections made to this, because it cannot be assumed that 50 per cent, of all college women have special gifts in the same direction. Experience shows that the special gift for teaching is as rare as other talents, and as valuable when it finds its true expression. Kate Claghorn writes that the evil results to the teacher her-self of this overcrowding of her profession are many. First, ' 'she THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 125 must accept a low rate of pay for her work ; next, she must be content with an inferior position; furthermore, she must lengthen her period of preparation, not always with advantage to the work that she wants to do." She also says, that the remedy for this is plain : That women who graduate from college with the inten-tion of earning a living, should look about for other occupations than that of teaching. " With lowered competition, not only would salaries be raised, but quality of service also." While it is admitted that there are many teachers who perhaps would do better work in other professions, yet it cannot be denied that teaching is one of the best and most suited professions for women. There are many more female teachers than male, yet there are many discriminations made against them. There is no longer a discrimination of position, because women hold just as high posi-tions as men. Women are holding the positions of State, City and County Superintendents. These are principally in the West. But there is a discrimination in salaries, except in the higher positions, where they are the same for all. Let me give a few of Mr. Wright's reasons why women receive less than men. First, "stepping out of industrial subjection, woman comes into the in-dustrial system as an entirely new economic factor. Secondly, woman occupies a lower standard, both in physical features and in mental demands. Thirdly, she receives low wages through an insufficient equipment for life's work, which is not the result of incapacity or lack of skill, but is due largely to the hope that the permanence of work will be interrupted by matrimony." This is in some cases true, and it has a tendency to lower the wages, so that those who do intend to make it a life-work, and do it because they feel that they can do better along this line, cannot receive the salary that they should have. There are many other reasons given why women are paid less than men; but it seems to me that there should be no discrimina-tion made in the payment of salaries if the work is equally well done. Agues Wright says : " The growing importance of woman's labor, her general equipment through technical education, her more positive dedication to the life-work she chooses—all these combined will place her on an equality with man. As she ap-proaches this equality her remuneration will be increased and her economic importance acknowledged." 126 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. While I am in favor of the higher education of woman which places her on an equal basis with man, I think she should net be given the right of suffrage. This would not elevate her. It would take her out of her proper sphere, and tend to destroy all the characteristic traits which are especially desirable in a true womanly character. SPRING. C. R. SHDLTZ, '03. As I hear the bluebird's song And the robin's sweet refrain, I know that Spring- has come again, With pleasures for weak and strong. O, the beautiful days of Spring, Of all the days the best! When Nature, renewed by rest, Again the flowers doth bring. The Earth has been quickened by rain, And hath donned her cloak of green; And leafless trees, by a hand unseen, Have been brought to life again. Hail, then, thou glorious Spring ! For we greet thee with good cheer; Hail, blessed season of the year! Thy praise we do gladly sing. _-L .'THE. GETTYSBURG MERCURY Entered at the Postoffice at Gettysburg as second-class matter. Voi,. IX. GETTYSBURG, PA., JUNE, 1900. No. 4 Editor-in- Chief, S. A. VAN ORMEH, '01. Assistant Editors, W. H. HETRICK, W. A. KOHLSE. Business Manager, H. C. HOFFMAN. Alumni Editor, REV. P. D. GARLAND. Assistant Business Manager, "WILLIAM C. NEY. Advisory Boards PROF. J. A. HIMES, LIT. D. PROF. G. D. STAHLEY, M.D. PROF. J. W. RICHARD, D. D. Published monthly by the students of Pennsylvania (Gettysburg-) College. Subscription price, One Dollar a year in advance; single copies Ten Cents. Notice to discontinue sending1 the MERCURY to any address must be accompanied by all arrearages. Students, Professors, and Alumni are cordially invited to contribute. All subscriptions and business matter should be addressed to the Business Manager. Articles for publication should be addressed to the Editor. Address THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY, GETTYSBURG, PA. EDITORS' DESK. ^~\N Saturday evening, May 12th, the Y. M. C. A. entertain- ^-"^ ment course was completed with a lecture on Literature as a Personal Resource, by Hamilton Wright Mabil, editor of The Outlook. None but words of appreciation were heard from those who are interested along the line of Mr. Mabil's lecture. The lecture was delivered in a conversational rather than in an oratorical manner. His smooth flow of plain language, to-gether with his great breadth and unusual discrimination, are the characteristics that captivate his audiences. He gave us the best thoughts that have accumulated from his broad experience in the field of literature. Mr. Mabil seems to have felt the pulsations of the hearts of the masters, and received their vitalizing in-fluences. ! 128 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURlt \V7E gratefully acknowledge the receipt of Commencement pro- ** grams and invitations from State College and Dickinson. J> 'THE cause advocated by the following letter merits recognition *■ in THE MERCURY, hence we publish it in full, hoping that by so doing we may lend some assistance to a worthy cause. The tireless efforts of President Passmore will, we hope, be rewarded in this meeting. ■To TEACHERS, DIRECTORS AND FRIENDS OF EDUCATION IN PENNSYL-VANIA : I desire to call your special attention to the next meeting of the Pennsylvania State Teachers' Association, which will be held this year in the city of Williamsport, Pa., July 3rd to 6th, inclusive. Every enrolled member of this Association will receive a copy of the addresses and other proceeding's, not only of the State Teachers' Association, but of the City, Borough and Township Superintendents' Association, and also of the State School Directors' Convention, thus getting1 the very best thought along these different lines in the State. I appeal to the friends of education in Pennsylvania to enroll in large numbers. There are over 26,000 teachers in the State in the pub-lic schools alone, and the number of superintendents, teachers, direc-tors and other friends of education enrolled should not be less than 10,000. The trip to Williamsport is a pleasant one. It is an ideal place to meet—fine hotels, its citizens noted for their hospitality, elegant drives; and the excursion to Eaglesmere will be a great attraction. The pro-gram is excellent. Turn out in large numbers, and show your interest in the great educational Association of your State. If you find it utterly impossible to attend the meeting, send your enrollment fee of $1.00 to Prof. David S. Keck, Treasurer, Kutztown, Pa., who will promptly send you a certificate of membership. Let me not plead in vain for our dear old Commonwealth to make this meeting a record-breaker. JOHN A. M. PASSMORE, President. A S this is the last issue of THE MERCURY this college year, it ■**■ seems in place to express our appreciation of the courtesies of the Student body and Alumni who have so generously fur-nished us the material with which to fill our pages. The primary object of the journal is to encourage writing on the part of the students, both in prose and verse; and it seems to be accomplish-ing this end. Not all the articles that appear are of the first or-der, nor can this be expected; for, if only the best were accepted, THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 129 we should want for material, and again that needed stimulus would not be furnished to the students in general—which is THE MERCURY'S mission. The present number—and such is the case with most issues—contains articles above the average, articles worthy of study. \V7E are glad to acknowledge the receipt of the May numbers " of The Washington Jefferso7iian and The Western JJyiiver-sity Courant, two journals that have not been reaching us. OTSEGO LAKE. WM. M. ROBENOLT, '02. f~\F the many little sheets of water found in the mountainous ^-' districts of central and eastern New York there is none which surpasses Lake Otsego either in the beauty and variety of its surrounding scenery or in the number and interest of the historical events connected therewith. "Peerless among- these mountain gems, Unmatched 'mong nature's diadems, Is Lake Otsego, 'Glimmerglass,' Whose grandeur rare naught can surpass." This body of water, forming a basin ten miles in length and one in width, is located on the hills forming the watershed between the Mohawk and Susquehanna rivers, its elevation above the sea level being about 1,300 feet. At its outlet is where the Susque-hanna enters upon its long and winding and troubled course toward the ocean. It lies within the territory formerly occupied by the Mohawks, and this region was their favorite fishing and hunting ground. Along its western bank was the trail of these Indians in their journeys toward the south. From this region, undoubtedly, furs and skins were sent to Ft. Orange to be bartered with the early Dutch traders, for the hills abounded in fur-bearing animals of different species. This lake furnished a means for Gen. James Clinton, after making his expedition up the Hudson and the Mohawk, to convey his army southward to meet Gen. Sullivan who was to yAn him from the south and then march into the country of the Cayugas and Senecas. On the first of July, after carrying his boats over-land from the Mohawk, he embarked at the head of the lake with 130 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. over two hundred boats and began his journey over its placid waters toward the Susquebanna—a larger fleet, doubtless, than shall ever again float on these waters. After landingat the outlet they encamped on ground now occupied by the village and waited for orders to move southward. During the stay here of nearly six weeks he and his men amused themselves by hunting the deer on the hills and fishing in the lake. This beautiful sheet of water is the first on which James Fenimore Cooper's eyes fell with a conscious look, and be-ing reared along its shores, it was always a charming spot to him. It has been made famous by his classic pen, for in and about this lake are laid some of the most interesting scenes found in his "Leather Stocking Tales.'' In this vicinity is where Natty spent his time in hunting with the Indians, and now may be seen on the eastern shore near the foot of the lake a fine marble statue of him, standing erect on a small monumental column ; the tall white figure of the old hunter stands gleaming among the higher branches of a grove of young pines, looking over lake and valley. The one who visits this lake to-day does not see the unbroken sylvan surroundings that were here in the days of Clinton and Cooper. When Clinton encamped here there were no permanent dwellings and very few in Cooper's younger days. Now may be seen a village at either end and cottages and beautiful farm houses around its shores. To one who has an eye for the beauties of Nature, the views about this lake are an unceasing source of delight. Hills, inter-spersed with woods and meadows, abounding in springs whose water trickles down their banks finding its way to the basin of the lake, rise from either side, those to the east being for the most part steep and rugged, while those to the west have a more gentle slope. Thousands of visitors seek this spot every summer, and the entire length of its beach is dotted with tents and camping houses. A roadway parallels the whole lake and pleasure seekers often take a drive, making the complete circuit, a distance of twenty-five miles. The village lying at its southern shore is called Cooperstown, from the name of its founder. Here are the summer residences of some of the most prominent people of this country. From the pier at this place one can get a view of nearly the whole lake. To the right of the pier and not far from the outlet THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 131 may be seen the rock which formed the place of meeting for Deer-slayer and Chingachgook, with the limpid waves rippling about as they did at the time of this meeting. It is now known as Otsego or Council Rock. The river for the first few rods, after receiving the water from the lake, flows so smoothly that scarcely a ripple may be seen. Its terraced banks are covered with scenery which may well challenge a rival. It has been termed the "Lover's Lane." To the eastward of the outlet and beyond the village, rising in terraces, is the "Lakewood" cemetery, one of the most beautiful in the country, among whose marble columns, one erected to the memory of Cooper towers above the rest. On its base are sculptured emblems of the author's thought, and on the top, with dog and gun, is Leather Stocking—Fiction's son. The body of Cooper, however, was laid to rest in the village churchyard nearby. At the east from the cemetery one of the slopes rising above the others is known as Mt. Vision. From this height where the whole lake is visible it appears like an opal enclosed in an emerald. To the north of the cemetery, a little distance up the hillside from the beach, is found the Fairy Spring. Chaliced in a solid rock, its waters form a mirror here in the hillside. Every summer many little parties picnic here for a day and many interesting little stories are connected with the consecrated spot. Farther up along the eastern coast and not far from the shore has been erected a tower which commands the view of the lake. The name "Kingfisher Tower" has been given this. A short distance to the north and up on the hillsides, which here are so steep they can scarcely be climbed, may be found a rocky glen, the famous "Leather Stocking Cave." "Sulphur Spring" is the next point of interest, whose waters are valuable for medicinal purposes. A short distance from here two streams side by side glide down the mountain with a narrow ridge between them in the form of a roof, called the "Hog-back." When viewed from the lake the deep ravines which form the bed of these streams appear like a large "W." Farther on the hills take a gentle slope and through them flows a stream which is one of the most beautiful places about the whole lake. Its banks are lined with trees whose images are reflected in the water. It is termed the "Shadow Brook," the northern "Lover's Lane." Nearby lies a promontory whose f 132 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. gentle slopes have been cleared of their forest growth. This viewed at a distance assumes the form of some monster crouching for his prey, and from this resemblance has been called the "Sleeping Ivion." Tradition tells us that in Cooper's day an island lay off the coast of this promontory. (On this island was Hutter's cottage.) It, however, has since been submerged and lies but a few feet below the surface. An interesting story is connected with this and the "Sleeping L,ion." It is said that the lion outstretched his paws, struck the island and caused it to sink beneath the water, and to-day we have the "Sunken Island." This brings us near the head of the lake where the village of Springfield is situated. The points of interest along the western shore are not so numerous, though the views gained from this side are much more beautiful than those gained from the east side. Two points of interest, however, command our attention, Three Mile and Five Mile Points, situated, respectively, three and five miles from the village of Cooperstown. It is scarcely possible to imagine a spot more charming than the one first mentioned. Jutting out into the limpid waters of the lake at the foot of a height, lined with a pebbly beach, covered with trees and a grassy carpet, it seems to possess every charm to render it a favored spot. A limpid spring, remarkable for the coolness and sweetness of its waters, rises from the gravel of the beach at the very root of ancient trees. A wild brawling brook coming down from the hills has torn for itself a rude channel, adding variety to the ground, and often blending the troubled murmur of its waters with the gentle play of the ripple on the beach. The views in every direction are unsurpassed. In the rear, rise hills which seem to touch the sky in the distance. The eye, having wandered over a beautiful expanse of water, sees hills on the opposite side covered with woods and meadows from the strand to their crest. To the northward is the isolated height before mentioned as the "Sleeping Lion." To the southward lies the village of Cooperstown and the valley of the Susquehanna with a background of low mountains in the distance. This was one of the places selected by Cooper for several of his most impressive scenes. On this point the "Mingoes" are encamped when Natty's daring rescues Hist; and here he sends the canoe with the Indian lovers adrift and remains himself a THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. 133 prisoner. And here is where Deerslayer was captured by the Indians. Ever since the days of Cooper this spot has been sacred. During the summer several boats make daily trips from one village to the other, stopping at the intermediate points of interest. Who, after enjoying a ride on the Natty Bumpo, can forget the beautiful scenery gained from her deck ? Smaller crafts may be seen floating on the glassy surface for its entire length. This lake will always be held dear in the memory of one who has visited it. All whose paternal homes lie on or near a fine lake shore can readily say with Natty, "My eyes never a-weary looking at it." Irving waters are the very soul of a landscape. There is certainly no other natural object, however fine, whether imposing like a grand mountain or winning like a smiling valley, which carries with it so much of the spirit of companionship through all the successive years of a human life, as a lake, and one of a limited size awakens more of this feeling than a larger body of water. THE TURK IN RELIGION. A. H. MERDINYAN, '01 (KONIA, ASIA MINOR). 'THE Mohammedan world is proud of her children, who have intense loyalty to their religion, and are active for its wel-fare. Although the nation is a prey to the misteaching of the Koran, still feeling it j»o be the best pioneer of truth, they live under its obscure banner and the misery of misleading religion. The Turk is intensely religious in his belief, and endeavors to accomplish all the rites and duties of his religion. He is held within the limits of his false religion, and his freedom of thought and private judgment is crushed, and he cannot find an occasion to develop for better. He has no freedom to accept the other re-ligion, which is far better than his. The Turk in religion is what he is, and remains what he is, because his religion is Moham-medan. There is no leaven in it. Elements of kindness, politeness, hospitality and religious fer-vor are their good qualities ; but they show anger, hatred and bitter cruelty when occasion offers. In the highest attitude of his religious inspiration he often gets too wild, and is not less than a beast. He is a cold-blooded murderer and butcher to carry on the false mission of the Koran, as he believes it to be his reli-gious duty. In his religious inspiration he cries out, "O Eord of 134 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. all creatures ! O Allah ! Destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion ! 0 Allah ! make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip; give them and their families, their households, their women, children, possessions and race and their wealth and lands as booty to the Moslems, O God of all creatures !" The Turks are missionaries as well as Christians. They press steadily forward to convert the world. They labor under a mis-erable delusion and misconception that Mohammedanism is an elect, and paves the way for a purer faith, which leads to the life eternal. The sword of Mohammed and the Koran are the most stubborn enemies of civilization and truth the world has yet known; and every believer in the Koran is in the same propor-tion anxious to bring many under the bloody and shameful banner of his religion. They have the great honor (?) of being the most destructive and cruel nation of the world. To-day the largest religious university in the world belongs to the Mohammedans— " Ayhar," the university in Cairo, where nearly ten thousand young men are preparing themselves for the priesthood, to spread and proclaim the doctrines of Mohammed to the wide world. Al-most every town and city of the country is provided with theo-logical schools, graduating every year scores of young priests for the mission of Mohammed. Iconium, with its sixty thousand population, has thirty-five Mohammedan theological schools. Mohammedanism is an aggressive religion, and is anxious to bring "kafirs" Infidels (as they call the Christians or non-Mo-hammedans) within its pale. We cannot overlook the fact that in late years they have written pages of history with their sword dipped in Armenian blood. Their extreme civil and religious measures were more than an Armenian nation could bear, and the result has been cold-blooded murder throughout the land. The blame is on Christian nations, who, being unconcerned, tol-erated their brothers and sisters to suffer unto the death under the paw of a wild and cruel nation, which every day strives to exter-minate all those who are outside of their religious sphere, as well as on the Moslems. So long as the political power and supremacy rests in the Turk, there can be no real civil and religious liberty in that country. There are 200,000,000 Mohammedans in the world—nearly one-eighth of the human race—who live and die under the stub- THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 135 born doctrines and statutes of the Koran; under its sway the radi-cal evils of polygamy and divorce are fully practiced among them. Islams can legally and religiously take as many as four wives, but the number of concubines is not limited. The Turk not only looks upon polygamy as right and proper, but he considers it a religious duty. The practical duties of a Mohammedan are pro-fession of faith, " L,a ilahe illallah Mohammed er-resoul-oallah" (There is no God but one God, and Mohammed is the Apostle of God); ablution with prayer; giving alms to the poor; and going to Mecca. Kach faithful believer ought to pray five times a day —at dawn, at noon, in the afternoon at three o'clock, at six o'clock, and in the evening at eight o'clock. Before each prayer ablution, washing of hands, feet, mouth, ears and face is impera-tive. "While doing this certain prayers are offered for the for-giveness of the sins which are committed with these several mem-bers. The form of worship consists of kneeling down, rising, bowing down, kneeling again, and putting face against the floor, and each time whispering certain prayers; then clasping the hands over the face, passing them down and off as if driving the devil away. The mosques are open at all hours during the day. The external part of the mosque is most gorgeous and mag-nificent, but internally it is very plain. The floor is covered with beautiful rugs or carpets. No chairs are in the mosque. Here and there some texts from the Koran are written in large letters. Mosques have no bells. "Magin," with loud voice, yell from the top of minarets, " There is no God but one God, Mohammed is the Apostle of God;" "Come to prayer, come to the temple of life." That is the echo which comes from the hundreds of mina-rets each day five times. Friday is their Sabbath. After ablution each believer enters into the mosque, after taking off his shoes at the vestibule or door, and takes his place beside his fellow-be-lievers. An ultimate reverence and respect prevails during the prayer—no talking, no laughing, no sleeping ; even coughing is checked by each believer, in intense reverence to prayer. In perfect harmony the immense body of believers worship in such a solemn manner as can hardly be seen in any other place of wor-ship. The preacher is at the altar. He is without any special garment. He leads the prayer, and each of his movements or prostrations are observed and imitated by hundreds and thousands of worshipers. After prayer they may hear some exhortations from the Koran on their practical duties of religion, and then they are dismissed. 1 PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. C F. SOLT MERCHANT TAILOR Masonic Bldg., GETTYSBURG Our collection of Woolens for the coming Fall and Winter season cannot be surpassed for variety, attractive designs and general completeness. The latest styles of fashionable novelties in the most approved shades. Staples of exceptional merit, value and wearing durability. Also altering, repairing, dyeing and scouring at moderate prices. .FOR UP-TO-DATE. Clothing, Hats, Shoes, And Men's Furnishing Goods, go to I. 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SCOTT PAPER COMPANY MAKERS OF FINE TOILET PAPER 7th and Greenwood Ave. PHILADELPHIA PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. The Century Double-Feed Fountain Pen. Fully Warranted 16 Kt. Gold Pen, Indium Pointed. GEO. EVELER, Agent for Gettysburg College PRICE LIST. No. 1. Chased, long- or short $2 00 No. 1. Gold Mounted 3 00 No. 3. Chased 3 00 Spiral, Black or Mottled $2 50 Twist, " " 2 SO Hexagon, Black or Mottled 2 50 No. 3. Gold Mounted 4 00 Pearl Holder, Gold Mounted 5 00 THE CENTURY PEN CO., WHITEWATER, WIS Askyour Stationer or our Agent to show them to you. Agood local agent wanted in every school mmmv,-,_.,u. sammmmmmwmwmmmmmmmmmmwwwgg Printingand Binding We Print This Book THE MT. HOLLY STATIONERY AND PRINTING CO. does all classes of Printing- and Binding-, and can furnish you any Book, Bill Head, Letter Head, Envelope, Card, Blank, or anything- pertain-ing- to their business in just as good style and at less cost than you can obtain same elsewhere. 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These are the words of Goethe, the great German poet, and are as true in our day as when uttered. In these times of defective vision it is good to know something about eyes. A great deal has been learned about the value of glasses and their application since Goethe lived. Spectacle wearers have increased by thousands, while at the same time, persons losing their eyesight, have been greatly diminished. If your eyes trouble you in any way let me tell you the cause. Examination free and prices reasonable. We grind all our own lenses and fit the best lenses (no matter what anyone else has charged you) for $2.50 per pair and as cheap as SO cents per pair, or duplicate a broken lens if we have one-half or more of the old one, at a reasonable charge, returning same day received. .E. L. EGOLP. 807 and 809 North Third Street, MARRISBURG, PA. r PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. (^entFal [lotel, ELIAS FISSEL, Prop. (Formerly of Globe Hotel) Baltimore Street, Gettysburg, Pa. Two doors from Court House. MODERN IMPROVEMENTS. Steam Heat, Electric Light and Call Bells all through the House. Closets and Bath Rooms on Every Floor. Sefton & Fleui-mrng's Ijivery is connected with this Hotel. Good Teams and Competent Guides for the Battlefield. Charges Moderate, Satisfaction Guaranteed. Rates $1.50 Per Day. GET A SKATE ON And send all your Soiled L,inen to the Gettysburg Steam Laundry R. R. LONQ, Prop. R. A. WONDERS, Corner Cigar Parlors. A full line of Cigars, Tobacco, Pipes, Etc. Scott's Corner, Opp. Eagle Hotel. GETTYSBURG, PA. J^ Try My Choice Eine of A t. High-Grade Chocolates 3 L p y. J. V. at 40c per lb. Always fresh at ,\ £ CHAS. H. McCLEARY j £ Carlisle St., Opposite W. M. R. R. j) l. Also Foreign and Domestic Fruits A j" Always on Hand. ** JOHN M. MINNIQH, Confectionery, lee, • andIee Creams. Oysters Stewed and Fried. No. 17 BALTIMORE ST. HARRq f}. 3EFTON The Leading Berber v>f)op (Successor to C. O. Sefton) Having- thoroughly remodeled the place is now ready to accommodate the public Barber Supplies a Specialty. .Baltimore Street. GETT*l5§UR(i, PA. ESTABLISHED 1876 PENROSE MYERS, Watchmaker and Jeweler Gettysburg Souvenir Spoons, Col-lege Souvenir Spoons. NO. 10 BALTIMORE ST., GETTYSBURG, PENNA. L. (\. klltW Manufacturers' Agent and Jobber of Hardware, Oils, Paints and Queensware. GETTYSBURG, PA. The Only Jobbing House in Adams County.
Transcript of an oral history interview with Robert G. Minnis, conducted by Jennifer Payne on 4 October 2013, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project of the Sullivan Museum and History Center. Robert Minnis graduated from Norwich University in 1963; the bulk of his interview focuses on Minnis' military career in the U.S. Army as well as his later employment and family life. ; Robert Minnis, NU 1963, Oral History Interview October 4th, 2013 Sullivan Museum and History Center Interviewed by Jennifer Payne JENNIFER PAYNE: We can start. This is Jennifer Payne with the Norwich Voices Oral History Project and today's date is October 4th, 2013. I am here with Robert Bob Minnis, Class of '63. Thank you very much for doing this. ROBERT MINNIS: You're welcome. JP: So, did you have a nickname? RM: The yearbook said it was Minnie but I don't remember that. JP: You don't remember. RM: I was called probably other things but Minnie was the name that's in the book. So, I'll go by that. JP: How did you choose Norwich? RM: Senior year in high school, I was ill for the whole month of January and basically almost the day before I graduated class, I was still taking final exams and everything. I got accepted to Northeastern as a conditional student provided I went to summer school. I decided I just busted my gut for four months. I wasn't going to do that. Arrangements were made through my father and I think it was the high school football coach. Anyway, they got me convinced to go to Bridgeton Academy, which was a prep school in Bridgeton, Maine, for a year. I did that. While I was there, I think it was one of the dorm counselors suggested Norwich University maybe as a place to go. I came up here and visited and like it and applied and got accepted. Started in 1959, September, August, September class. JP: Where are you from? RM: I grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts on South Shore, just south of Boston. JP: When were you born? RM: 1940, but that's classified. JP: Oh. Okay. RM: I tell people I was born before World War II and they kind of look at me. JP: When you came to Norwich, what was your rook experience like? RM: Really, I don't remember a whole lot of it. I was in the I Company, in Alumni Hall, on the second floor. I remember the squad leader, Corporal Zagars, who had quite a reputation, I guess. He was kind of different, not like a lot of the other squad leaders and sometimes he was very nice and other times, he was just mean. At least, we thought he was. Other than that, I don't - other things we used to as freshman, running here and there, squaring corners and that type stuff, I guess. Hasn't probably changed a whole lot but I don't have any specific memories of freshman year, other than the fact that the academic schedule that I had was pre-engineering. I had had in high school and prep school and by the time I got here, I didn't have to spend a whole lot of time studying, so I could go out to the movies two times a week. I was out to the movies two times a week. Basically, I was involved in the rifle team, the drill team, and any extracurricular activity I could get involved in just to help pass time and keep the upper classmen out of my life. JP: Wow. Drill team is a challenge. RM: We had a lot of fun. In fact, probably the best part was, my sophomore year, we got to march in President Kennedy's inauguration parade. JP: You're in that photo. RM: I'm in that photo, front rank or second rank anyway. We had to get dress blues for that. That's the first time dress blues came to Norwich. Originally, it was just going to be the drill team, which was maybe twenty-four members and, I guess, some other people said, "Hey. Why can't I go?" Anybody that had a set of dress blues and wasn't on academic probation, I guess, got to go. We went down there. Took a bus trip down. It was Greyhound, Vermont Transit Bus Line, which I think was a subsidiary of Greyhound. We ended up going down there. We got to D.C. and it was snowing. The bus drivers had no problem with the snow because they drove in it all the time. There were cars all over the place. We stayed at Fort Meade in the barracks that didn't have any heat. You want to talk about, Harry Chebookjian, I think, could probably tell you a few stories about that. But anyway, they finally got the heat going. The next day we went into D.C. and stood in some back street same place for hours it seems in the freezing cold waiting to go on. During the night, apparently they, the Army took all the engineers and anybody around there. They just swept the street clean. Pennsylvania Avenue was bone dry and no snow. Around the capital, I stepped in a puddle of water and it never wet my sock because it was so cold, it froze before I got there. And after that, the parade, we went back, turned our rifles in, and they turned us loose for, I forget, a couple hours. They told us we had to meet the buses at nine o'clock or whatever it was to take us back to Fort Meade. Stayed there overnight and the next day, headed back to school. JP: Do you remember what you did in D.C.? Where you went? RM: Basically walked around, looking at sites. Of course, we had the dress blue uniforms that had the gold stripe on the hat, so we used to see how many West Pointers we could get to salute us. Because they had the funny uniform. To them, a gold stripe was a salute so we obliged. JP: That's great. RM: I don't how long. We walked around D.C. for a couple hours and I don't remember where we went. Just kind of around the parks and the Mall and that type stuff. The dress blues, I still have. When I graduated, they converted them over to the Army. I still can get in them. JP: That's amazing. RM: A little tight, button-wise. I wouldn't want to do any rifle drill with them on but they do fit. JP: That's great. What else do you remember about your Norwich experience? RM: Well, my sophomore year, I was a squad leader in, I think it was A Company. Yeah. Bobby Blake was my roommate and a couple weeks after that, I was transferred over to the military police section. I roomed with Tom Dillard. Basically, any time there was a function on post that they needed a student traffic directions and escort and this and that, I did that for the whole year. We went to Middlebury or Vermont? One of the football games we went to, the captain was in charge of the MPs. We get up there. As soon as the game was over, he says, "Get rid of your whites," which was a hat cover and a scarf. He says, "Get out of here because you don't want to be known as…" We all bounced in the car. There was a bunch of us. I forget what transportation it was and left very quickly because there was a little bit of rivalry between us. JP: Was that the game where Middlebury won by the fifth down? RM: I don't remember the details. It may have been. Maybe that's what caused the commotion afterwards. I don't know. I don't remember. It's just too long. It was fifty-two years ago, or three years ago, over fifty. JP: You talked about General Harmon's car. What was the story? RM: Was the football game. It was sophomore year. I was in the MPs and we stood around the, the press box and Harmon, General Harmon and General I.D. White was sitting there. They were usually raising hell, like they always did, telling stories and swearing at this and that. We had male cheerleaders at the time. They were pointing out the various problems and things that they weren't doing right. So anyway, they're getting ready, I think it was for the opening ceremony. The tank [Unintelligible] came up. It was on the left side of the bleachers, facing the field. The General's car was in the way. So he said, "Move my, Corporal, come. Move my car." Okay. So, I get in it and I couldn't find the starter. It was one of those cars. It was buried underneath the pedal and I didn't know better. My roommate, Tom Dillard, was aware of this and I said, "Tom." He told me where it was so I got the car started. I moved it out of the way. Then, the tank came and fired the round. It did what it had to do. I was there for a couple minutes looking all over the place for the starter button. It didn't work with the key or anything. I remember, he used to come to the mess hall and occasionally tell a story or two. Probably can't be repeated in most company. Freshmen week, Parents' Weekend, they'd always serve steak. We never got it but they always had it on Parents' Weekend. He'd come in and he'd talk to them. Basically, he'd say, "If you don't like this place, you can get the hell out of it." He was a good old guy. He was a lot of fun to be with. He always stuck up for the Corps. If there was a problem in Northfield or Montpelier or wherever it was, I guess the story was where he'd send the tanks or the Corps or somebody in to rescue the people that go in trouble. He didn't take any B.S. from the townies. I guess he's got his own legacy and story. I also read his book afterwards, "Battle Commander," I think. He was a colorful guy. In fact, when we were going through, looking for picture for the reunion, there's a picture of me and General Harmon onstage that I guess is [Unintelligible] the Army. I couldn't remember what the thing was. So I sent it into Nate Palmer, who was the secretary of the reunion committee. He says, "That was graduation and you." Okay. There was nothing written on the back of the photo. I just had a mental blank as to what the picture was. Other than that, Harmon was a colorful character. I can't remember any other stories. I'm sure there's several. JP: So, your major was? RM: I started off mechanical engineer and changed over to sophomore year to engineering management and that was my degree, engineering management. I don't think they have it here now or maybe they call it something different but for a long time, it dropped out of the curriculum. Basically it was the basic engineering courses, Chemistry, Physics, Math, and then, Economics and English added on to it. It was kind of a mix. JP: Business and engineering. RM: Yeah. Right. It was kind of the happy road between the two of them. It worked well because I liked the construction part of it. When I was active duty, that's what I did. JP: What did you do after graduation? RM: I got immediate commission and I reported ninety days after commissioning. I had a summer job for ten weeks and a week on either end of it. I worked for a neighbor's dad basically just to kill time because I knew I was going to the Service. Then, the day came, I reported in to Fort Belvoir, went to the Basic Officer's Course. The day we signed out, President Kennedy was assassinated. JP: Oh my. RM: So, I ultimately decided, "Get out of D.C. because you don't want to get stuck down here." I went home. I watched all the proceedings on television. I got to Europe a couple weeks after that, was the middle of December. The people over in France in the bars were still buying free drinks. You couldn't buy a drink, in honor of President Kennedy. I got to march in his parade. After graduation from college here, my roommate, Jim Andrews, his dad had a place in the Cape, Camp Edwards, which was an Air Force base. His dad had a house there. When Kennedy flew in to Hyannis, the airplane was parked at Edwards Air Force Base. When I went to Jim's cottage that day, there was a bunch of people there. They were introducing me. They were the crew that flew on Air Force One. So we're getting ready to leave. They say, "Hey. You want to see Air Force One?" I got an escorted tour of Air Force One. We drove up and the guard was saying, recognized the driver of the jeep. "Nah," he said, walked up. There was one guard, I think, one or two guards out there. Walked up. Got a tour of the plane for, went all the way to the back. JP: Wow. RM: I sat in the, picked up the telephone, called my folks and said, "Hey! Guess where I am?" JP: Did you really? RM: Got a package of cigarettes and a book of matches and I forget what else they gave you. Yeah, so I got the tour of Kennedy's airplane. It was a 707. A couple weeks later, I was down at Fort Belvoir. JP: Doing? RM: It was a Basic Officer's Course. JP: Where did you go from there? RM: I had orders to France as a bachelor. I was supposed to be in for two years. People are trying to woo you with all this, "Sign up for three years. You can go take your family to it." I wasn't married, so I didn't care. I liked France. It sounded good to me, so I was going. I did have a little French in high school which was, I figure, maybe some help. We went, landed, we took off from Dix, no, McGuire Air Force Base in Canadian airplane. When I walked out of the airplane, the tail was open. That's how they're putting in the luggage. I go flying across the Atlantic Ocean and pray that the tail won't open up. We landed in France, in Paris, and I was supposed to get off there. There was two other people in the airplane going to the same outfit I was. The Air Force saw that I was supposed to be assigned to Phalsbourg, France, which was up on the German border. They said, "No. You stay on the airplane." I was one of the last people off because I was sitting in the back. They said, "No." [Unintelligible] "Already taken care of. We put it back on the airplane. Just go back and sit down." I said, "What do I do when I get to Germany?" They said, "Well, go to the tower and they'll get you a ride and take you in to France." About a couple hours later, it was dark by this time. Landed at Rhine-Main and they got this poor E-1 airman out of bed some place. He'd look as though he'd been ridden hard. He was awake enough to drive us and he drove down, went into France. Crossed the border. They waved us on through because it was a military vehicle. They dropped me off at the orderly room where the company, it was already eight or nine o'clock at night, and everybody says, "Where were you? They've been looking all over for you." Because they thought I was coming in to Paris. They made a few telephone calls and told the battalion commander that I had arrived. They recalled all the vehicles. The next morning I got up, put on a set of fatigues and went to work. JP: Your job was? RM: I was a platoon leader in the construction battalion. I had my own little mini-construction company. I had five dump trucks, a crane, air compressor, trailers, forty people including carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators. I often thought if I could retire from the army, I wouldn't need to retire with pay. Just give me the construction platoon that I had. And all kinds of tools, you know. You need tools and it came in a box I had probably. JP: What did you build? RM: First thing I had to build was four pre-fab metal buildings for ammunition storage for the Air Force. That was at Phalsbourg, where I was stationed. After that, they got sent to Reims Air Force Base in France. They were doing an asphalt project there and I was told to go study it because I was going to do an asphalt project in Chateraux in the Loire Valley. So, I went down there a few weeks ahead of time and designed an asphalt mix and got all the pieces and parts I needed. I ordered the amount of gravel and the right quantities and sizes. Then they sent me an asphalt plant from like a twenty truck convoy. They assembled it, put it together, we started making asphalt, and we repaired the runways and the shattered roof of the C141 aircraft that was coming in to the inventory. Had to replace some concrete and over pave it. JP: Wow. RM: There was also a French aircraft repair company there. They were repairing Air Force 101s and 100 jets. Those guys used to take off all the time and buzz my equipment operators that were driving on the field. After I was there for eight, nine months, the battalion commander called an officer's call for New Year's Eve. Because we were stationed all over the place at separate places, we had to get, we collected TDY to go to the battalion commander's officer's call. So, I went to the Etain Air Force Base, where the battalion commander was. Platoon sergeant took my platoon and the rest of the equipment and went back to Phalsbourg. We married up, I think it was the Second or Third of January, when I got back. After that, summer in the Loire Valley was beautiful, wine country, gorgeous weather, all the chateaus. Then, I went back to Germany, back to France. That time, de Gaulle threw the American forces out. I went PCS to Germany with the unit but because I had two year obligation, I had to extend for a year to go with the unit. When I extended, I was able to go France. Otherwise, they would have sent me back and given me TDY or stuck me someplace for two or three months. We got to Phalsbourg, I mean, to [Unintelligible] and set up shop there. We were there for almost a whole year. A couple projects, we had to build ammunition storage facilities and the great, big, huge butler buildings for the pre-fab equipment that the Army had stationed over there. They'd fly the people over, put them in the new trucks and tanks and stuff if they ever had a problem with the Russians. Then, in, was it June or July of '66, I got orders to Vietnam as a captain. I was still a First Lieutenant so I got promoted. On the way back, they sent me to Fort Belvoir to a Facility Management course. When I got to Vietnam, the typical story was engineer lieutenants, you don't stay in the repo depot very long. You get hauled off to someplace else. I was in the replacement company for six or seven days. One day, a lieutenant colonel and an Army major, WAC, showed up in a fancy black sedan and said, "Come with us." And I went to Saigon, where I was in the facility of engineers, planned a construction order of materials, coordinate, and all of that stuff. Making sure the painters didn't go in and paint the wall before the carpenters went in, tore a hole, and put a doorway in. I was getting ready to come home and I had one last time as duty officer, which was on the 28th, that was the night of TET, '68. I was the duty officer on Headquarters Area Command, not very far from Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base. JP: Oh my. What was that like? RM: Busy. JP: Really? RM: Yeah. There was a sergeant there. He, about midnight, come in and woke me up, got me out of the chair. I was sitting in the back office and said, "Sir, I think you better come out there and see what's going on." He was so nervous because he only had three days left in country. He couldn't hear me, telephone shaking so bad, he had to set it on the table. So I spent the rest of the night, answering telephone calls, trying to coordinate this and that, writing the duty officer's log. The biggest thing, the relief called, was trying to get into the embassy, was getting shot at by the MPs that were in there. I finally get a hold of them. I said, "You guys are asking for ammunition." I said, "There's a truck outside with ammunition. Just don't keep shooting at it." I guess they got their ammunition all right. The rest of the staff showed up fairly early in the morning. By eleven o'clock, I'd finished writing all the stuff that I remembered on the report. They said, "Okay. You can go. So, I left. Went and got my jeep. Went across the street and got something to eat. Then, headed back to the compound because facility was on the other side of Saigon in the Cholon section. I was going over there and there was actually nobody in the street. The Vietnam, Saigon was never, never deserted. Even at midnight, there was thousands of people. Anyway, I'm in convoy with three APCs and I crossed each other at thirty-five miles an hour. Neither one of us slowed down or anything. I just went back to the compound, turned in my jeep, turned in my weapon, and then went back to BOQ and got a couple hours sleep because I hadn't gotten much that night. Then, went back to the office and started doing facilities work again, taking fuel for the generators and all the BOQs and water to the mess halls and fixing what we could. The thousand-member workforce that we had disappeared. It was something like three or four officers and, I don't know, ten to twelve NCOs that did the work for that week, did emergency repairs, not routine stuff. Then, about three weeks after that, I went home. JP: Wow. Heck of a note to go out on. RM: Yeah. It was nice to leave. From there, I went back to the Advanced Course at Fort Belvoir. When I graduated from that, there was supposed to be a very short turnaround for engineers, for any officer going back to Vietnam. To kill time, I taught Demolition Mine Warfare, down at the engineer school for a few months. And then, one day, I got a call to report to the headquarters, personnel section. They told me I was going to become the post-chemical officer. Because the day before, the chemical officer that was there was getting out of the service and they didn't have a replacement. The fact that I'd been to a chemical school in Germany three years, four years before that, I was the most qualified guy on post. I went, over my objection, but they said, "Forget that." I took the job and I went in there and just basically sat back and let the NCOs run the place. I ran cover for them. A year later, I was on orders to go back to Vietnam and all I had to do was pick up my 201 file and my personnel records, finance records. I got a call from my mother saying, "People at assignments branch are looking for you," because they thought I was home on leave. I call them and they said, "Guess what, Captain? You're not going to Vietnam!" Oh, ho, ho. Yeah. You date the President's daughter, you might get a chance to get out of it. Anyway, I went over. I told my boss, [Unintelligible] I said, "Hey. Guess what? Somebody's playing a joke on me. Yeah. I'm not going to Vietnam." He made a few phone calls. He says, "That's right. You're not going to Vietnam." I got to stay another whole year at Fort Bellvoir. JP: Wow. RM: When I eventually did go back to Vietnam, in Christmas of '70, Christmas of '70, New Year's Eve '71, I got sent to a place called Phan Thiet [??], the construction battalion. I was the company commander there for three months and then I was the, we built roads, bridges, that type stuff. Ran our own asphalt plant. Then, I became the operations officer for the unit there. I stayed there until December, early December '71, when they had already started letting people out of Vietnam. I got an early drop by a week and they let me come home early. JP: By a week. RM: By a week. From there, I was supposed to be assigned to, what was it, Army Materiel? No. I was supposed to be assigned to Fort Belvoir. I went into Fort Belvoir and this snotty little attendant, basically Army Readiness Region 1. He says, "When you get here, we'll take care of it." I says, "What am I going to be doing?" He says, "I don't know. Worry about that when you get here." I go over to assignment and say, "I don't want to go there. You got anything else?" They sent me to Army Materiel Command as a project officer. I was there for three years almost. Yeah. That's where I was when we got married. Three years and after I got married, I was going to buy a house. I couldn't find an apartment for my dog. So, we ended up buying a house. They told me I was going to be, "You have to call me to get out of this place." Six months later, they send me orders to [Unintelligible] region, up at Fort Devens. I said, "Hey. You told me." "Well. Sorry. Priority is the Army." I rented the house out and ten years later, when I retired, we went back to it. After I went to Devens for three years, I went to Fort Richardson, Alaska for three years. Then, Fort Leavenworth for three years. That's where I ended my career. JP: How many years were you in, total? RM: Twenty years, one month, and twenty-three days. JP: But who's counting? RM: Yeah, but who's counting? JP: That's amazing. RM: Yeah. The day I signed in the Advanced Course was the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. JP: Wow. RM: We didn't go to downtown D.C. for several weeks. JP: No. RM: That was basically it. After I retired, I got a job with the United Services Automobile Association as a facilities specialist working at their office in Reston, Virginia. About a year and a half to two years later, my boss was offered a retirement under accelerated retirement package, which he took. I got promoted into his job. Moved the office from Merrifield, Virginia to Reston, Virginia. Built a second building and ultimately, retired as the Director of Facilities and Services. JP: Wow. RM: In fact, I was in charge of mail room, mess hall, security, facilities. There was probably something else. That was the person that worked in the Aramark office under the Aramark contract as the bookkeeper. JP: And that is your wife, who's here? RM: Yes. For three years, we ate lunch together. JP: That's sweet. RM: U.S.A.A. moved the officer from Reston, Virginia. They closed it. They offered me a job in Norfolk, Virginia. I said, "No. I don't want that." The kids told me I could go if I want to but they were going to stay behind. They had a place that they could stay, the neighbor across the street. I said, "No. I'll take an early retirement, a retirement." The day I moved into the building, it snowed and the day I left, it snowed. I kicked around for a little bit of time, working on a job. In fact, I went at work. After I left U.S.A.A., I went back at work for Aramark as an hourly employee, washing dishes, serving food, preparing food, cash register. I did anything and everything they needed. I worked there for about three months. When they closed the building, we had a farewell party. I was third from last out of the building. I was one of the first people in. Fourteen years of time was first and last. Then, I kicked around for a few months, working for Home Depot and places like that. I got a call from a friend of mine that was in the facility management business. He said, "George Washington University is looking for a facilities person. You might want to do down and talk to them. I went down and talked to them, Monday or Tuesday. Was hired that week. Went to work the following week. They sent me out to Loudoun, Virginia where the campus was. PSINet had owned the building. Had gone bankrupt. GW had bought it and had leased it back to PSINet. PSINet wasn't clearing the building like they were supposed to. So, they sent me out. They said, "Throw them out." I threw them out. Locked the door. Changed the locks and they never came back. I was out there for eight years before they told me my job was going to be transferred from Virginia down to district. I told my boss, I said, "I'll come down here for meeting but I'm not coming down here every day to work." I said, "I'll just tell you right now. Sometime this year, I'm going to retire and I'll tell you two weeks before the day I walk out." That's exactly what I did. We knew we were coming down to Virginia. Both my girls went to UVA. They were both working at UVA and both living in the Charlottesville area. We decided, "Let's go down there where they are." We bought the house. I retired. We moved the stuff down from the house in Virginia. We've been in Charlottesville for three and a half years. JP: Wow. This is the house you bought for the dog? RM: Yes. [MRS. ROBERT MINNIS]: No. RM: Wait. No. [MM]: That was when we first married. The dog was a Labrador retriever, seventy five pounds. Most apartments only let twenty to thirty pounds so we had to buy a house. RM: And the dog went with us the whole time we were in the service and even moved down to Virginia with us when we retired. He ended up with hip dysplasia, cancer problems and we had to – [MM]: He was fifteen. The house we first bought when we were married, we rented it out for ten years. We came back when he retired from the Army and we occupied it for three years, but then we sold it when his company moved out to Reston, Virginia. RM: I got tired of commuting. [MM]: We had twenty four years in that house before we moved down to Charlottesville, Virginia area. UVA is the University of Virginia, which you're always saying all these spots that you were stationed in, but if you're not in the military, you wouldn't know necessarily [Unintelligible]. Not everybody would know. JP: This class, I'll tell you. I know places in Vietnam I didn't a week ago. RM: Phan Thiet, that's where I was stationed in 1971, just a little village town on the coast. Had gorgeous white beaches. You'd die for a white beach like that, white beach sand. It was supposedly the nuc mong capital of the world. Do you know what nuc mong is? JP: No. RM: They take fish and they boil the fish all in crocs and they let it rot. They drain off the fluid and that's like vitamins, fish oil, vitamin stuff. It stinks. There was a story about one guy, came back from Vietnam. He was Special Forces. He had a bottle of this stuff. The customs agent said, "Open it." He said, "No. You don't want me to do that." The guy insisted so he opened the thing up and they almost had to evacuate the terminal. I was there a whole year, building roads, bridges, ran a construction project, asphalt plant, rock quarry, fleets of dump trucks, and everything else. It was basically a little construction company. Whisky Mountain was the site that we stayed at. Gorgeous sunsets. [Unintelligible] you could watch the sun go down over the hills. It was beautiful. Anyway, that was it. JP: Wow. What advice would you give to a rook today on how to survive and thrive the way you have? RM: Oh boy. Hundreds of people have done it before you. You're not the only one that thought about leaving or getting out or whatever the case may be. Just stick with it. Rely on your classmates and hang in there. It all usually works out. JP: What would your life had been like if you hadn't gone to Norwich? RM: Don't know. JP: You don't know. RM: I haven't the foggiest idea what it would be. I don't even know what I would have done for a job. When I got into the Army, I liked it. They take pretty good care of you. I got to travel a lot of places around the world, England, Austria. Every trip to Vietnam was four airplane rides. It was a different route. I got to Hawaii one time for forty-five minute refueling stop. I hit the Philippines, Guam, Wake, Taiwan, Japan. If there was a landing field in the Pacific, I was probably on it for some period of time. The last trip, coming back, I went through Alaska in December in a short sleeve, khaki shirt. It was something like twenty below zero. JP: Oh my. RM: It was a quick trip from the airplane to the terminal. I greeted the polar bear that was there and went back and saw him three years later. They have a great big, huge, Alaskan Kodiak bear stuffed in the lobby of the airport lobby. It was one of the biggest ones on record that somebody killed. We went back to Alaska, the station up there for three years. Saw the airport. The bear was there. [MM]: The Aleutian Islands. RM: I made it to Attu, which is the end of the Aleutian Islands. [Unintelligible] a little bit of travelling. JP: A little bit. [MM]: Salmon fishing. Gold panning. RM: That was in Alaska. Drove almost every kind of military vehicle that was in the inventory up to the time I retired, including a lot of construction equipment. JP: Oh, wow. Cranes, everything. Wow. RM: Yep. I had a paver, ran one of those, rollers. I had a crane operator who was a Native American. He could do things to that crane that most people can't even do with their hands. He'd pick something up. He'd drop exactly, you'd tell him you want it right here. That's exactly where it went. It was all just smooth, fluid motion. The guy, it was unbelievable. JP: Wow. RM: Anyway, that's my story. JP: Is there anything else you'd like to add? Any – RM: Nothing that I can think of right now. [MM]: Come back in ten years. (Laughs.) JP: Thank you. RM: You're welcome. Glad I could. Hopefully, it will benefit somebody and they'll get some history out of it. While I was in the Corp, we never did cover that too much, my sophomore year, I went to the MPs and that's where General Harmon and I met. In the meantime, I was in drill team and I was on the rifle team. The rifle team travelled all over New England. They didn't have vans in those days so we got to drive our own cars, so we got paid mileage for it. We'd put three or four guys in a car. The drill team, where did we go? Other than the inauguration parade, Lexington, Concord, and several other places around here. There's also a plaque up in Jackman from the Lexington/Concord parade, commemorating thirty-five years of participation. I didn't realize they'd done it that often. [Unintelligible] I don't think I'll tell the story about the panty raid. JP: Do you have a story about the panty raid? RM: No. I didn't. After the – [MM]: I wouldn't give names. RM: After the dinner, I left and came back here. JP: After the – RM: After the party, yeah. JP: General Burchhar [??] RM: I don't remember what the general's name was. He was a lieutenant general. I know that. He had a few too many, from what I remember. Anyway, I come back here and I started hearing all these things and people started drifting in. The TAC officers were running around here, trying to figure out what's going on and catch people. I basically tried to keep them away from the people that were coming in. It was an interesting night. There was a lot of people that ended up with a few tours and a few demerits because of that. While I was here, I only walked one tour. JP: Really? RM: Only one. JP: One tour. RM: Yep. My squad leader, freshman year, I get almost to, it was in spring time, he said, "Minnis, I don't think you've had too many demerits and tours." I said, "No. I haven't, sir." He said, "Well, you get one now." I had to march one. JP: Because you didn't have one? RM: Well, I think twelve was the cutoff. He gave me a couple to make it thirteen for some stupid reason. I don't even remember what it is. Yeah. I walked one. Other than that, I can't think of anything else, unless you got something specific. JP: I heard a story about General Harmon and somebody and a honey wagon, a manure spreader. Did you hear about that story? RM: No. It may have been before my time. I don't recall that. No. Maybe just ask around. It sounds interesting. JP: Yes. Apparently, somebody took manure spreader where his car normally parked and – RM: Nobody owned up to it. JP: Nobody knew what to do, but he knew what to do. He walked through it and then stamped his feet clean and said, "Sir, gentlemen, I expect you to follow me." RM: That sounds like Ernie. He used to stand up, I don't know what, I think it was in the mess hall [Unintelligible]. There used to be a raised platform that the cadet officers sat on. He'd come in there periodically and tell you, you'd see about this much of him over the platform edge. He was kind of short. Well-respected, but anyway, that's all I got. JP: Oh. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. RM: Yeah. [MM]: [Unintelligible] to talk about? RM: The National Model Railroad Association, it took me almost fifteen years to get the certificate, from the time I started to the time I finished. Even when I was in the service, I used to build models and put them in boxes and store them in trunks and stuff. It wasn't until, when I was in Alaska, we met, there was a modular group up there. I got to know them and several people. In fact, there's an adjacent story to that. There was several people in the military that used to participate in it. We decided we'd form a club between the Air Force and the Army up there in Alaska. We built some modules. We were just getting ready to put scenic and track and stuff on them and everybody got orders. They all left. I was the last one to leave so I ended up with all the modules. I took them to Fort Leonard Wood and packed them away in a shed for three years. Then when I retired, I moved here and the president of the division in D.C., Potomac division, asked me one day. He says, "I hear you've got modules." I said, "Yeah. I do." I told him what I had. He said, "Would you be interested in showing them at the Children's Museum in D.C.?" I said, "Sure." We got together. There was six of us. We took the modules and put scenery and track on them. We went down to the Children's Museum in D.C. and displayed there before Christmas. Then, a little later on after the first of the year, I got a call from Fairfax Station Train Museum. It's the actual station that the Southern Railroad had and they've got pictures of that station in use in the Civil War. It was used as for wounded, both North and South. Clara Barton started the Red Cross in that vicinity. She was one of the people that worked the wounded there, helped them. This guy calls me up and says, "In December, we want to have a train show, as a fundraiser. Are you interested in participating?" I said, "Yes." I've already done twenty-three of them. [MM]: In the same location. RM: Same location. The Southern Railroad sold the station to a group of interested people for a buck, but the provision was that they had to move it. They disassembled it, moved it up, acquired a piece of land, had the high school, trade school in Fairfax County rebuild it, board for board, put it all back together again. Replaced the bad stuff and that type of thing. Every single December, first weekend of December since, I don't know, twenty-four years' worth this year, they have a train show. They set up and they show the display inside, a Lionel display, a Gauge One which is bigger than Lionel. Then, there's an S Scale rail. They have a caboose outside that the N Scale people set up in. The people with the G Gauge, which are the garden stuff, the stuff that runs outside set up underneath around [Unintelligible] A couple years, it snowed. They put snow plows on the engines and cleared the track. JP: Really? RM: Yeah. After I retired and moved down here, I gave up the membership. [MM]: Down here means to central Virginia. You're up in Vermont right now. RM: When I retired from D.C. and moved to Virginia, Charlottesville, I said, "I want" – because I basically started this group – "I want the right to come back every Christmas show for as long as I want to do it. I reserve three spaces in the set up." They said, "Okay." The first week in December, Saturday morning, I pack up and drive up, two and half, three hours and set up. Come back Sunday afternoon. In fact, one year, the public was there and the display – The power went out. This guy, Clem Clemmons, who was basically retired Air Force, said, "What are you running?" I said, "Six volt D.C." He says, "I got a battery in my Packard outside that's six volt D.C." He ran an extension cord out, wrapped some wires around the terminals and wires around the other end and we ran trains in the darkened room with only the red light and the caboose. JP: That must have been magical. RM: He even wrote an article in a national magazine about it. JP: Wow. RM: It's three o'clock. I think that's it for now. JP: Thank you. RM: You're welcome. JP: That was amazing. [End of interview.]
According to a many publications and discussions, fast reactors hold promises to improve safety, non-proliferation, economic aspects, and reduce the nuclear waste problems. Consequently, several reactor designs advocated by the Generation IV Forum are fast reactors. In reality, however, after decades of research and development and billions of dollars investment worldwide, there are only two fast breeders currently operational on a commercial basis: the Russian reactors BN-600 and BN-800. Energy generation alone is apparently not a sufficient selling point for fast breeder reactors. Therefore, other possible applications for fast nuclear reactors are advocated. Three relevant examples are investigated in this thesis. The first one is the disposition of excess weapon-grade plutonium. Unlike for high enriched uranium that can be downblended for use in light water reactors, there exists no scientifically accepted solution for the disposition of weapon-grade plutonium. One option is the use in fast reactors that are operated for energy production. In the course of burn-up, the plutonium is irradiated which intends to fulfill two objectives: the resulting isotopic composition of the plutonium is less suitable for nuclear weapons, while at the same time the build-up of fission products results in a radiation barrier. Appropriate reprocessing technology is in order to extract the plutonium from the spent fuel. The second application is the use as so-called nuclear batteries, a special type of small modular reactors (SMRs). Nuclear batteries offer very long core lifetimes and have a very small energy output of sometimes only 10 MWe. They can supposedly be placed (almost) everywhere and supply energy without the need for refueling or shuffling of fuel elements for long periods. Since their cores remain sealed for several decades, nuclear batteries are claimed to have a higher proliferation resistance. The small output and the reduced maintenance and operating requirements should make them attractive for remote areas or electrical grids that are not large enough to support a standard-sized nuclear power plant. The last application of fast reactors this thesis investigates promises a solution to the problem of the radioactive waste from nuclear energy production. The separation of the spent fuel in different material streams (partitioning) and the irradiation of minor actinides in a fast neutron spectrum (transmutation) is claimed to solve this problem. Implementation of partitioning and transmutation (P&T) would require centuries of dedicated efforts, since several irradiation cycles and repeated reprocessing of the spent fuel elements between the irradiation cycles would be necessary. For all three applications, computer models of exemplary reactor systems were set up to perform criticality, depletion, and dose rate calculations. Based on the results, a specific critique on the viability of these fast reactor applications was conducted. Possible risks associated with their deployment were investigated. A Super-Safe, Small and Simple reactor promises to meet the energy demand of remote, small energy grids. The discussion of the proliferation risks associated with the spread of this kind of reactors often addresses the sealed core. The fissile material produced in the core and the possibility of breaking a seal and extracting the fuel is neglected. To address these questions, the Toshiba 4S reactor was modeled as an example of a fast small reactor with a core lifetime of 30 years and an energy output of 10 MW. The fast SMR core is said to have a high level of proliferation resistance. Depletion calculations, however, show a production rate of more than 5 kg plutonium per year. Furthermore, the plutonium-239 fraction in the fuel is higher than 90% even at planned discharge from the reactor, resulting in very attractive material for a possible proliferator. Several SMR characteristics complicate the unauthorized removal: the refueling intervals are extraordinary long and in-between the core does not have to be opened for reshuffling of fuel elements. It supposedly remains sealed for the whole time. Also, the machines needed to remove the spent fuel elements are not kept at the reactor side but will be transported there only for refueling. Still, the fissile material produced in the core poses a proliferation risk. The dose rates emitted from fuel elements 30 years after discharge are higher than 1 Sv/hr. They fulfill what is currently considered to be an important part of the spent fuel standard. Yet, there is only a one year on-site cooling period planned before the spent fuel elements are transported back to a central facility. At this point, the spent fuel elements emit about 100 Sv/hr. This of course impedes diversion of the spent fuel from the reactor site, but also complicated transportation to the reprocessing facility. Especially if these nuclear reactors are to be deployed on a global scale, the proliferation risks imposed by the material production in the core have to be addressed. The likely detection of unauthorized fissile material diversion might discourage some actors from this pathway. But for a state determined to acquire nuclear weapons and thus most likely willing to break its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and as a consequence to face corresponding reactions from the international community, the detection might not be a prohibiting factor. In the case of an open break-out, at nearly any point of the SMR operation cycle, the state has access to significant quantities of weapon-grade plutonium. After only two years of reactor operation already more than one significant quantity (8 kg) of weapon-grade plutonium has been produced in the core. For a state opting for this type of nuclear batteries to power its remote small grid locations, the bottleneck for acquiring nuclear weapons is not the access to fissile material but reprocessing. Due to the modularity of small reactors, deployment of several of them in one country would not raise suspicions while the latent option of becoming a nuclear weapon state would emerge. The first generation of deployed SMRs would most likely be operated in a once-through fuel cycle and their number would be limited. In such a scenario, the concept of having only central facilities for (re)fueling might be realistic and the access to sensitive technology would be limited. But it is not yet clear by whom these facilities would be owned and how safe transportation to and from reactor sites can be ensured. For the second generation of the SMRs, a closed fuel cycle is foreseen. With the projected possible high number of deployed SMRs, several reprocessing and fuel fabrication facilities would be needed. To reduce transportation efforts, those facilities might be decentralized as well. In these scenarios, the number of states that have access to key technologies needed to acquire fissile material and build nuclear weapons increases and the obstacles for non-state actors are reduced. SMRs can only play their economic advantage caused by their modularity if they are produced and deployed in high numbers. Thus, for the proliferation risk assessment, this should be also taken into account. Even though providing enhanced features regarding the possible proliferation of nuclear material, the overall security case is not as easily made as suggested by its proponents. The BN-800 breeder reactor was awarded Top Plant 2016 in the nuclear generation category by the POWER Magazine, the oldest American journal for the global power generation industry. This award is given to what are considered to be the most advanced and innovative projects. Among the winning attributes are the possibility to use the reactor for various purposes, including plutonium consumption. The BN-800 is essential for Russia's efforts to dispose of its excess weapon-grade plutonium as agreed-upon in the recently suspended Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) signed between Russia and the United States. Depletion calculations for the BN-800 verify the viability of this disposition method, according to the requirements set by the PMDA. The ratio of plutonium-240 to plutonium-239 is 0.17 in the spent fuel, thus fulfilling the agreed-upon fraction of 0.1 or higher. Yet, depending on its position in the core, the plutonium content in the spent fuel amounts to 82%-88% and is very close to what is generally labeled weapon-grade (more than 93% plutonium-239). After a cooling period of 30 years, the spent BN-800 fuel elements emit more than 1Sv/hr and can therefore be considered to be self-protecting. According to IAEA regulation, they require less strict safeguards. At the same time, in the blanket elements of the reactor attractive nuclear material is bred even when the reactor is operated with a breeding ratio below one. Not only is the plutonium produced in the blankets of weapon-grade quality with a plutonium-239 fraction significantly higher than 93%, the radiation barrier also deteriorates quickly. The elements cannot be considered to be self-protecting after a cooling period of 30 years. Currently, no separation and reprocessing of blanket material is planned, but it is not clear why the blankets are necessary at all. In particular for the purpose of plutonium disposition, it would be preferable if no new weapon-grade material be bred. Further research should be done to assess the possibility of operating the BN-800 without blankets. Additionally, the introduction of inert matrix fuel could further increase the rate of achievable plutonium reduction in the reactors. Unfortunately, with the PMDA suspended in September 2016, the issue lost its urgency. The BN-800 is planned to play a key role in Russia's efforts to establish a closed nuclear fuel cycle in the future. A closed nuclear fuel cycle always implies reprocessing of spent fuel. In the case of the breeding blankets, weapon-grade plutonium will be separated at a certain stage in the fuel cycle, which contradicts the current efforts to dispose of such material. Once the BN-800 is exported to other countries for energy production, the possible proliferation of nuclear materials becomes of even greater concern. It is widely accepted that fast reactors are more suitable for the production of nuclear weapons material. Especially for newcomers to nuclear energy, the possible advantages of fast reactors, namely the option to close the nuclear fuel cycle, seem to be a distant option. On the other hand, the operating history and economic viability of fast reactors is far worse than for light water reactors, but they offer the option of access to nuclear weapons material. Several measures could reduce the proliferation risk of the BN-800 in the case of export. The most obvious are of course IAEA safeguards, preferably including an Additional Protocol. Until now, only China showed interest in the BN-800. It would be advisable to achieve transparency during all steps of building the nuclear power plant, operation, and decommissioning. Comprehensive monitoring and inspection mechanisms would increase trust among the different parties and could also act as an example for other countries. As a demonstration, the precise and continuous monitoring of the reactor power output and irradiation times would provide the basis for a reliable assessment of the amount of plutonium and fission products produced in the core and blanket. The case of the BN-800 shows that especially in the light of several newcomer countries interested in buying nuclear technology the proliferation risk has to be assessed more comprehensively. Limiting the focus to the reactor itself and the country originally developing it is not sufficient. Disadvantages of fast reactors, such as the high costs and the proliferation and safety risks, have long been known. They should not be forgotten with the new reactor generation of reactors, even though some enhanced safety and security technologies are in place. Under current economic circumstances, the implementation of a transmutation fuel cycle is not competitive compared to other means of energy production. The use of plutonium in MOX fuel alone brings an economic penalty compared to the once-trough fuel cycle and is motivated by other reasons such as a better resource utilization, which is necessary if nuclear power is to be used on a global scale. An objective of introducing a double-strata partitioning and transmutation fuel cycle using accelerator-driven systems for the transmutation of minor actinides is the treatment of high-level waste. The implementation of such a fuel cycles requires long-term dedication to the use of nuclear energy and the deployment of all facilities that make up a closed nuclear fuel cycle. Before taking such far reaching decisions, it should be ensured that the promised benefits will hold true in reality. To date, even the proof of concept of an accelerator-driven system is pending. An analysis of the existing literature shows that some crucial points regarding a P&T scenario are not dealt with in sufficient detail. In this thesis, a closer look was taken at some of these issues. Burn-up calculations were performed based on computer models of the European proof-of-concept reactor MYRRHA and the facility explicitly designed to be used for transmutation of minor actinides (EFIT). Both are accelerator-driven systems (ADS). They consists of a sub-critical reactor core, a spallation target to provide extra source neutrons, and a particle accelerator to provide high-energy protons for the spallation reaction. Besides some general characteristics, such as the possible transmutation rate in those reactor systems, three key issues that might affect the implementation were investigated in detail: the change in the fuel composition, the characteristics of the spent fuel elements, and the concentration of long-lived fission products in the spent fuel. The minor actinides have to be irradiated in the ADS for several cycles. For efficient transmutation, plutonium and minor actinides must be mixed in the fuel according to fixed fractions. After each cycle, the fuel has to be reprocessed and fresh fuel elements must be fabricated. It is noteworthy, that even today's nuclear reactor fuel is only reprocessed once and its use as MOX fuel is limited to a second cycle. Calculations of the effective neutron multiplication factor keff for various fuel compositions that depend on the number of previous cycles show the influence of the changing isotope vector. The claim that one initial load of plutonium is sufficient for several irradiation cycles can not be confirmed. Moreover, criticality calculations show that using fuel compositions as published for European implementation scenarios (PATEROS) result in keff = 1.6. This is a much too high figure, suggesting that P&T scenarios published so far are not feasible. Calculations were done with the EFIT reactor, the reference reactor in the PATEROS study. As a consequence, major adjustments of the fissile material content in the fuel are necessary to resolve the overall reactivity problematic. This in turn might lead to performance losses regarding the intended reduction of minor actinides within one reactor cycle. The claimed benefits of a P&T scenario are the reduction of the minor actinide inventory in the deep geological repository. After each irradiation cycle, the spent fuel elements must be cooled and reprocessed before new fuel elements can be fabricated. Since transmutation requires several cycles, the necessary cooling periods before reprocessing of the spent fuel play an important role to assess P&T scenarios. The calculations show that due to the increased residual heat of the spent P&T-fuel elements, longer cooling periods than currently assumed would be necessary. The decay heat from the spent P&T-fuel elements after a 40 year cooling period is still higher than the decay heat from spent MOX and fast reactor fuel elements, although these contain significantly more fuel. Also, the dose rates and the activity of the spent fuel would pose challenges for the overall reprocessing and fuel fabrication scheme. The build-up of curium-242 with its high spontaneous fission rate causes a strong neutron background. Thus, heavy shielding would be necessary for the processing of the spent fuel elements. The high specific power makes permanent cooling of the tools and material unavoidable during all phases. Finally, it is questions in this thesis that the benefit of minor actinide transmutation is as significant as claimed by the proponents of P&T. With regard to the risks emerging from a deep geological repository, several long-lived fission products dominate the dose rate released to the biosphere. The production of the relevant nuclides zirconium-93, technetium-99, and iodine-129 in an ADS is mostly comparable to their generation in light water reactors. However, the fraction of cesium-135 increases four-fold. For a German P&T scenario, the cesium-135 inventory in the deep geological repository would more than double as compared to the agreed-upon phase-out scenario in which the spent fuel elements are directly disposed. The overall inventory of long-lived fission products in a German deep geological repository would increase by more than 50% in a P&T scenario. It can be stated that the reduction of the minor actinide inventory would be bought in exchange for an increase of the inventory of long-lived fission products. These results question the benefits of the currently researched P&T strategy that claims to reduce the nuclear waste burden. At the current stage of P&T research and development, there are several open questions that need to be answered before actual implementation. This includes not only technical challenges as the ones already discussed. Other crucial issues are the endurance of the cladding material in the core and the partitioning efficiency realistically achievable on industrial scale. Even with all these issues resolvable, the benefit of the technology remains uncertain. Over the years, the number of targeted isotopes published in P&T schemes has declined: while in the beginning the plan was to transmute long-lived fission products as well, it now seems that even curium must be left out of the minor actinide composition because of the challenges it poses to reprocessing and fuel fabrication. Even though fast reactor research and development has a long history, operational experience of fast reactors is quite small. Since more suitable solutions exist for energy generation, in recent years additional applications have been discussed for new and emerging fast reactor designs. The examples above show that the use of fast reactors is not as straight forward and beneficial as the advocates of this technology would argue. When looking at specific applications, fast reactors seem to offer solutions for various tasks, such as plutonium disposition, safe and secure energy supply in remote areas, and the treatment of radioactive waste. In a more comprehensive view, promises are fading and it turns out that suggested applications bear risks. Critical fast reactors cause the spread of nuclear weapons material and, even more importantly, the technology and facilities to handle it. This is also true for fast sub-critical ADS, which would be deployed in a P&T fuel cycle. It is not yet clear in how far P&T technology can actually help to solve the nuclear waste problem. The argument in favor of nuclear waste treatment in an ADS is based on one simple index value: the radiotoxicity based on the total ingestion by humans. Besides, the development risks regarding P&T are high and it is not clear whether a P&T fuel cycle could actually be implemented in the near future. Several crucial technologies do not yet exist. Moreover, nuclear reactors are first of all designed for energy production. Still, the vast majority of the current nuclear fleet are light water reactors and not fast breeder reactors. This might always be attributed to soft factors, such as political considerations and the public opinion. But maybe the reasons are intrinsic to the technology: fast reactors might just not be competitive for energy production. And it has not yet been proven that they are competitive in regard to emerging applications beyond power supply. In general, the new applications will lead to higher costs and risks and it sometimes seems puzzling why they are promoted by academia, industry, and policy. It also seems somehow contradictory to solve a problem, namely the excess plutonium stockpiles and the radioactive waste, by using the same technology that originally produced it. Research efforts in this field have been going on for decades, and they have been substantially sponsored. Apart from the fact that this money is lost for other means, it could be argued that if even huge investments do not result in the desired outcome, other approaches should be tried. Critical assessment of the technology, however, is difficult as long as research is almost exclusively conducted by institutions that would benefit from a future implementation. Especially when official entities, such as the European Union, allocate funds for research and design efforts, they should take care that at least a fraction of the money also goes to independent researchers. This is the only way to guarantee that transparent and comprehensive data information and assessment is available. And only then, can society come to informed decisions on whether it supports fast reactor technologies - or not.
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The end of the year saw a radical shift in Ukraine's European integration. On November 8 the European Commission proposed opening EU accession talks with Kyiv, an important step for Ukraine; the European Council subsequently approved this decision. As a further step on the path to Europeanization, Ukraine completed synchronizing its power system with the European system, and the country's transmission system operator became a member of the European network, ENTSO-E.Despite heavy combat, the front line did not move. There was some concern about future military aid, the availability of which would affect war developments and Ukraine's abilities to hold off Russian forces on the battlefield and thwart Russian air strikes on civilian targets. The concern mostly arose from the position of the United States, which has been driven by internal U.S. politicking, and the corresponding delay in providing new aid packages. The lack of weapons supplies, Kyiv claimed, slowed the counteroffensive operation, which, despite expectations, did not result in rapid and wide-scale advances. Nonetheless, there were positive achievements of the counteroffensive, particularly in taking out Russia's naval vessels and port supplies.1. ROLLOUT OF THE WARGeneral Developments during October–DecemberThe last quarter of 2023 was another period of heavy, intense fighting without tangible territorial advances on either side. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (AFRF) kept up pressure along the entire front, with key battles taking place in the vicinity of Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Kupiansk, Lyman, Mariinka, and Robotyno. The battle for Avdiivka, in Donetsk oblast, a city Russian forces have tried to capture since early October, was perhaps the costliest of the war for the AFRF, with little achieved there. At the same time, delays in supplies of military aid from Ukraine's Western allies affected military operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), which had to curtail some operations because of ammunition shortages.Despite high expectations, the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the last quarter of the year did not result in rapid and wide-scale advances. Nonetheless, there were some critical developments. In mid-November the AFU took back some positions of the left bank of the Dnipro river in occupied Kherson oblast. Establishing bridgeheads there is a step toward being able to move forces and supplies across the river, thence to the south on a land route to Crimea. It also allows the AFU to better protect the residents of Kherson, who have been under relentless attack.Ukrainian forces also continued their successful attacks on Russian vessels in the Black Sea: 20 percent of the Russian Black Sea fleet was destroyed during the last four months of 2023, an important achievement for a country that is not a major naval power. On land, the Ukrainian army continued successful attacks on Russian military facilities in Crimea and other occupied territories, often using unmanned drones and missiles.President Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials have attributed the lack of more impressive results from the counteroffensive to slow weapons deliveries, which gave the Russians time to build more fortifications and to mine territories densely. This was the opinion of Western military experts as well. Ultimately, the situation pushed the army chiefs to change tactics and emphasize building defense fortifications. At the same time, the AFU did not retreat, despite unprecedented pressure from Russian forces along the front line. Overall, the counteroffensive was successful in many respects: Russian casualties mounted, and the AFRF failed to advance, despite strenuous efforts. According to the AFU General Staff, from the start of the invasion to the end of 2023, the Russian army lost over 360,000 soldiers, thousands of tanks and combat vehicles, and hundreds of aircraft and helicopters. The figure on human losses is close to the UK's intelligence bureau's assessment. Spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence agency Andrii Yusov said in mid-December that around 450,000 Russian troops were deployed in Ukraine, many fewer than the 617,000 that Vladimir Putin claimed.Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, warned about the risk of a positional war, "where both sides are dug in and not moving much." To avoid such a deadlock and return to a war of maneuvers, he said, Ukraine would need additional weapons.POW ExchangesDuring the last quarter of the year, there was little public information about POW exchanges. In mid-November, Kyiv blamed Moscow for halting the exchanges and blocking negotiations over POWs. The previous exchange had taken place on August 7, when twenty-two Ukrainians returned home. In early December, President Zelensky said exchanges were happening without public announcements, while recognizing that Russia was throwing up barriers to the exchanges. In some cases, POW exchanges were occurring right on the battlefields. As of mid-November, according to official data, 4,337 Ukrainians were imprisoned in Russia, including 3,574 military personnel. The actual number of Ukrainian civilians imprisoned in Russia, according to the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, may reach 25,000.Russian Disinformation Campaigns and CyberattacksRussia's disinformation campaign in Ukraine during the quarter including disseminating deep-fake videos featuring the Ukrainian army's commander-in-chief, fake stories about political and army leaders, and lies about Russian forces' success on the battlefield. Russia has also continued its anti-Ukrainian information campaigns in other countries, especially Poland. These disinformation efforts are designed to spread mistrust of Ukrainians and of Ukraine's reasons for fighting, and to decrease support. On December 12, one of the biggest Ukrainian mobile operators, Kyivstar, which provided cellular connection for 25 million customers and broadband internet connection for one million, came under a cyberattack that resulted in the total suspension of services for a few days. Earlier, in October, a court in Kyiv had seized the corporate rights in Kyivstar of three sanctioned businessmen, including the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman, in part to prevent them from setting up dummy corporations and moving assets there. Kyivstar was part of a larger holding group controlling similar businesses in Russia. The Russian hacking group Solntsepek claimed responsibility for the attack, but the company and Ukrainian officials said the hackers overstated their achievements, and SBU cybersecurity department head Ilya Vitiuk thought it was more likely the work of the Russian military intelligence unit Sandworm. In an interview with Reuters, Vitiuk expressed concern that the hackers had been inside Kyivstar at least since May. A big Ukrainian bank came under cyberattack at the same time as well. More than 4,000 cyberattacks have been reported since the invasion, which is three times the frequency of such attacks before the war began. Russia's Position on the WarThe Kremlin continued denying chances for the Ukrainian peace formula and said there was no basis for bilateral peace negotiations. The Kremlin has not changed its narrative on the targets of the war against Ukraine, which abounds in falsehoods and manipulative statements. Putin continues asserting that Russia did not start the war in Ukraine and expounding on the need to consider how to stop "the tragedy" in Ukraine. Russia has seen more of its armory and vehicles destroyed than it likely anticipated, but it relies on the West's potential fatigue in supporting Ukraine when spreading misinformation about Ukraine in Western countries. Attacks on Critical InfrastructureIn the fourth quarter, Ukraine did not face massive damage to the energy infrastructure. This could have resulted either from an effective air defense or from Russia not yet starting its expected winter assaults on the energy system. Still, there were numerous attacks on the power grid as early as November, and some energy assets were damaged by shelling and air strikes. Among them were power plants, coal mines, oil refineries, and fuel depots. One of the thermal power plants located close to the front was shelled ten times in two months. Some other critical infrastructure facilities also came under attack during the fourth quarter, including river port infrastructure and shipyard and railway facilities. Nonetheless, the scale of the damage was much less than in the fourth quarter of 2022. Crimes against Civilians and Attacks on Civilian InfrastructureAt the end of the year, Russians resumed massive drone and missile strikes on civil and critical infrastructure, hitting a record of such attacks in late December. Kyiv was a key target. Russia continued attacking civil infrastructure, including residential buildings, killing and wounding civilians. Among these were grain storage facilities, postal service infrastructure, kindergarten, the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, river and seaport infrastructure, foreign civil cargo ships, medical institutions, and so on.Numerous civilians have been killed or wounded in these attacks. A particularly heinous attack on a café hosting a funeral reception in Kharkiv oblast that resulted in the deaths of fifty-nine civilians became the biggest crime against civilians in the region. On December 29, Russia launched wide-scale missile and drone attacks that resulted in the largest number of civilians killed and injured in Kyiv since the start of invasion. Russia continued such attacks in the following days, some of which were on the same massive scale. Many residential buildings were damaged during attacks at the end of the year. Kyiv officially confirmed the unlawful deportation of almost 20,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war. Thousands have been taken to Belarus. Fewer than 400 children had been returned as of the end of the year, in some cases through the efforts of parents and family. During the last quarter of the year the media reported fewer than twenty children returned. Analysts assess that over 8,300 Ukrainian children taken to Russia in 2023 had been sent to "reeducation camps."2. INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRSA key issue in foreign affairs in the fourth quarter was the uncertainty of international military aid to Ukraine at the level the country needs to withstand Russia's attacks. The concern arose mostly because of internal U.S. politicking and the corresponding delay in providing new aid packages. Another factor was the rise of populist parties in parliamentary elections in some European states. Most of these populist parties, including those in Slovakia and the Netherlands, are against providing further aid to Ukraine. News that the EU was behind schedule in supplying artillery rounds did not give grounds for optimism. These various factors combined meant a critical drop in aid: between August and October, the amount of newly committed aid to Ukraine decreased by 87 percent compared to the same period in 2022.At the same time, the leaders of some European states and the EU itself declared themselves ready to continue supporting Ukraine. European leaders warned that Ukraine's defeat would mean serious damage to the project of United Europe and that Russia would be on the EU's doorstep and would later move forward with war against other European states, as it has threatened.In the larger picture, Ukraine's inability to defend itself would mean democracy losing to tyranny. A door would open for a global parade of more powerful states annexing less powerful neighbors, and war-oriented Russia would have more resources to conduct war in the future. Prominent Western media have also spoken out on the necessity of providing support to Ukraine. A Financial Times article described the humanitarian disaster that would occur should Russia win, and an editorial in Bloomberg called on Western governments to continue supporting Ukraine.President Zelensky's Diplomatic ToursIn the last quarter of the year, President Zelensky made a few visits to allies and partner countries. In early October, he visited Spainto attend the European Political Community Summit, a forum of more than forty countries established after Russia's invasion to cope with critical challenges and threats, including Russia's war in Ukraine. At the summit, he met with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni to discuss new military aid packages. He met the Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan for the first time ever, as Russia-Armenia relations had cooled after another Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in September 2023. In September, Armenia provided Ukraine with humanitarian aid for the first time since the full-scale invasion, and in late October, Armenia participated in Ukraine's Peace Formula summit for the first time.On October 10, President Zelensky visited Romania to meet his counterpart, Klaus Iohannis, to discuss Black Sea regional security and the transit of Ukrainian grain, an issue that has prompted some harsh tit-for-tat threats in the past. The two presidents signed a joint declaration on bilateral cooperation, including on such matters as security, Ukrainian grain exports, promoting the Ukrainian Peace Formula, and others matters related to Ukraine's defense. The next day Zelensky made an unannounced visit to Brussels to attend a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council and a meeting of NATO defense ministers in the Ramstein Format, a group of more than fifty countries organized to provide collective support to Ukraine. The key topic during the meetings was providing weapons and air defense systems before the winter. The UK and Norway agreed to address strengthening security in the Black Sea region, and France and Germany committed to leading a new ground-based air defense coalition. In December, President Zelensky visitedArgentina to attend the inauguration of the country's president-elect, Javier Milei, who has expressed support for Ukraine in Russia's war. He also met with the leaders of a few other South American states. Following this trip, he visited the United States to meet with President Biden and address U.S. senators to enlist further U.S. support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. Zelensky then made a surprise visit to Germany and later Norway to attend the Nordic States summit. The Nordic leaders committed to supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes."United StatesThe key feature of U.S.-Ukraine relations in the last quarter of the year was uncertainty over future U.S. aid to Ukraine. Internal U.S. politicking has resulted in deferred agreement on the U.S. federal budget for 2024, and the precipitous start of Israel's war with Hamas has confounded any consideration of aid to Ukraine as a stand-alone issue. The Ukraine aid fund was expected to run out by the end of the year.Relations with the EU and European StatesOn November 8 the European Commission adopted the 2023 Enlargement package, which recommended inviting Kyiv to start talks on Ukraine's accession to the EU. The decision was based on an assessment of Ukraine's progress toward reforms in different areas, as detailed in a separate report. According to the report, Ukraine had taken the necessary steps and fulfilled its commitments sufficiently to be ready for negotiations. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called this "excellent progress." On December 14 the European Council agreed to open Ukraine membership talks, even though Hungary and Austria expressed an intent to vote against Ukraine's membership.Most of the European states continued supporting Ukraine. Germany remained among the largest supporters and aid providers, with a few packages of aid provided in the last quarter of the year. Among other articles, Germany supplied some air defense systems that are crucial during the winter to protect critical infrastructure against Russian missile strikes and bombings. Ukraine and Germany agreed on a joint venture to produce armored military vehicles in Ukraine. Berlin made available funds to restore and support the Ukrainian power system before the winter. German chancellor Olaf Scholz called on the country to be prepared to increase its support for Ukraine "when others are faltering."As expected, parliamentary elections in Slovakia were won by Robert Fico, who had promised to end military support for Ukraine should he prevail. Immediately after the elections, Slovakia halted its military aid to Ukraine, and, after being appointed prime minister, Fico confirmed this decision and canceled previously approved aid packages. Fico took the position that the war was a "frozen conflict" and Kyiv and Moscow needed to negotiate. However, he confirmed his intention to continue supplying humanitarian aid.The pro-Russia Fico had held anti-Ukrainian views before the election. The newly appointed country's foreign affairs minister, Juraj Blanár, in the past was known for purveying misinformation about Ukraine and repeating Russia's propaganda narratives. Bilateral relations between Slovakia and Ukraine are likely to become strained in the near future. In October, Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte visited Ukraine, promising to supply extra Patriot missiles before the winter, along with another aid package announced shortly before. Another prominent event happened in early December when the Netherlands finally returned to Ukraine some ancient Scythian artifacts the country had held on to for almost ten years. These items had previously been kept in Crimea before being sent out for exhibition. When Russia annexed Crimea, it also claimed ownership of the artifacts. In June 2023 a Dutch court ruled the gold treasures should go to Ukraine, not Crimea. In late December, the Netherlands started preparing F-16 fighter jets to be delivered to Ukraine.The Netherlands is among Ukraine's most significant military aid providers and is committed to continuing support in 2024. But there is a risk of a Slovakia-style development: in November a far-right politician, Geert Wilders, whose platform included halting support for Ukraine, unexpectedlywon parliamentary elections. Wilders's party, which was anti-Ukrainian ten years ago, will not have a majority, so the future country's policy toward Ukraine may depend on what kind of political coalition gets put together.Relations with Hungary remained strained. There was little progress in solving the agriculture export ban other than a waiver for sugar. Budapest continued creating obstacles within the EU to the vote granting Ukraine support, and the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, personally criticized providing aid to Ukraine. Hungary threatened to block EU accession negotiations with Kyiv and even filed a corresponding claim with the European Commission. Prime Minister Orbán, who has maintained ties with Moscow despite the EU's policy, said Kyiv was not ready to begin EU accession negotiations. Ukraine's EU membership aspirations do not coincide with Hungary's national interests, he said. Orbán might take the desire of most EU member states to support Ukraine as an opportunity to negotiate more for Hungary, both from the EU and from Ukraine. Budapest demands that Ukraine amend its law on education, and Kyiv says it is ready to do so. Kyiv's position is to negotiate with countries whose minorities live in Ukraine, to fulfill the European criteria, but without making special exceptions for any minority.Despite the threats, Hungary did not veto the vote on starting Ukraine-EU membership negotiations, but on the same day it blocked the EU's decision for €50 billion in long-term aid for Ukraine. Romania became a more important partner of Ukraine, and bilateral relations grew thicker in the fourth quarter. President Zelensky visited Bucharest and signed a bilateral memorandum of cooperation with his Romanian counterpart. Romania continued taking steps to expand Ukrainian agricultural transit, which faced a potential blockade by some other neighboring states. The two countries settled the dispute over the construction of a deep-water navigation route, in which Bucharest had accused Kyiv of violating environmental standards. Bucharest welcomed amendments to the Ukrainian law on national minorities and Kyiv's decision not to use the term "Moldovan language."The concept of the "Moldovan language" was established by Moscow when Moldova was one of the Soviet socialist republics; it is not recognized by Bucharest, despite the large number of Moldovan immigrants in Romania. The relationship between Romania and Moldova is long and complicated, and President Zelensky felt the language issue was of less importance in a time of war.After the dispute regarding agricultural exports and transit between Ukraine and Poland, top officials from both countries ratcheted down the tension in their public statements. The presidents of Ukraine and Poland reaffirmed good bilateral relations. Even as the agricultural dispute awaits an adequate resolution, however, a new one has cropped up: some Polish carriers started blocking border-crossing points with Ukraine (described below). The new Polish government, headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, appointed in December, gives hope for better bilateral relations with fewer conflicts. A former president of the European Council and staunchly pro-Ukraine, Tusk has demanded full mobilization of the West to help Ukraine. Poland's new foreign affairs minister, Radosław Sikorski, paid his first official visit to Kyiv on December 22. Developments in Agricultural Exports DisputesThe dispute over agricultural exports with some neighboring countries was only partly solved. In early October, Kyiv suspended its complaints to the World Trade Organization against Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, anticipating that a constructive attitude would work better toward finding a solution. During the dispute, most of the overland grain exports, 60 percent, were rerouted through Romania. Increased deliveries through Moldova also became part of the solution. In mid-October the Romanian government approved an import permit system to protect local farmers. In late November, Ukraine and Bulgaria approved a joint mechanism for agrarian exports that would avoid market distortions in the countries of transit, which feared lower prices for their own products.At the same time, the new Slovak government announced its intention to extend the ban on the transit of Ukrainian agricultural products beyond the time permitted by the EU, which ended September 15. Slovakia also added to the list of agricultural products banned for transit. The Hungarian government amended its own ban to allow sugar imports, as the country intensely depends on imports. These unilateral country bans are against EU regulations, which maintain federated oversight of product transit.Carriers' Strike and Blockade of Border-Crossing PointsIn November, Polish haulers started a protest and a blockade of Ukraine border crossings. Later, some carriers from Slovakia occasionally joined them. Because Ukraine suffers from lack of transportation capabilities through the Black Sea, the blockade created huge lines of thousands of vehicles at the borders and complicated the transportation of goods from and to Ukraine, including military aid. The Polish strikers demanded the restoration of permits for Ukrainian carriers, a ban on the issuance of licenses to non-EU transport companies, and a waiver for empty Polish trucks to register with the Ukrainian electronic queue when returning to Poland from Ukraine. Kyiv argued that restoration of the permits is impossible as in 2022, Ukraine and the EU signed an Agreement on the Carriage of Freight by Road that stipulates bilateral and transit traffic without permits. A representative of the European Commission called the blockade "unacceptable." One of the organizers of the protest is Rafal Mekler, a member of the Polish far-right National Movement Party, also known as the Confederation party, which is skeptical toward the EU and less friendly toward Ukraine. For this reason, some believe the transport blockade was politically inspired. Despite the agreement of representatives of Ukraine and Poland on an action plan to unblock the border and the participation of the European Commission, the dispute had not been resolved as of the end of the year. The next step is agreement at the ministry level.Ukrainian Peace Formula DevelopmentsIn late October, Malta hosted a meeting of representatives of sixty-five states to discuss the implementation of the Ukrainian peace formula. The meeting was focused on nuclear safety, energy, and food security, the liberation of POWs and deported persons, and the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity.3. INTERNAL AFFAIRSThe Economic SituationAccording to the IMF's assessments, in 2023 the Ukrainian economy grew faster than expected. Annual growth is expected to come to 4.5 percent, compared to the 1−3 percent previously forecasted. But high growth rates cannot be guaranteed for the future, as the prospects of export capacities in the next year are unclear. Economic growth will also depend on the continued provision of aid, and that is also obscure. In early October the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) suspended the fixed exchange rate regime and introduced a flexible one. Despite concerns, the national currency rate remained stable, though it started weakening a little toward the end of the year. Naturally, the strength of the national currency in the current circumstances is deeply dependent on international aid. Later, the NBU also lifted all restrictions on sales of foreign currencies to the public. The NBU also decreased a key policy rate twice in the last quarter of 2023 after a two-stage decrease earlier in the year. This was possible because inflation was low—just 5.1 percent in November.At the end of the year, parliament approved the state budget for 2024, which is oriented toward strengthening the army but has a huge deficit: expenditures are expected to be almost double revenues. Likely as a result of this situation, parliament passed some laws stipulating steps that may increase budget incomes or funds to finance the army. These are laws on resuming tax inspections for businesses and on raising the tax rate for banks to 50 percent. A Focus Ukraine (Kennan) piece on Ukraine's budget for 2024 is available here.On December 11, the IMF approved releasing the third tranche of Extended Fund Facility funds, about U.S. $900 million, to Ukraine. Ukraine needs financing, but at the same time, there are risks to deepening the loan burden. The IMF expects Ukraine's public debt to exceed 100 percent of GDP in two years.The Energy SituationDuring the summer, the energy companies undertook major maintenance campaigns to restore capacities before the winter and the anticipated onslaught of Russian air attacks. As of October, available power generation and transmission capacities, together with electricity import capacities, could barely cover peak demand. In November the power system started experiencing a deficit such that Ukraine had to rely on electricity imports, chiefly from Romania and Poland, to meet demand. At the same time, price regulations restricted commercial imports, and the power system had to turn to technical emergency assistance, which is a specific import but usually more expensive, and without predictable availability. Government ReshufflesIn early November, Ukraine's Youth and Sports Minister Vadym Gutzeit submitted his resignation, which parliament later approved. Some civil actors had criticized Gutzeit's efficacy as a minister and were concerned about allegations of his possible involvement in embezzlement of state funds before becoming minister, although his attorney said he was not a suspect and no charges had been brought against him. Gutzeit was succeeded by his vice-deputy as acting minister, while Gutzeit himself continues in his role as head of Ukraine's National Olympic Committee. 4. PROGRESS IN REFORMS AND SUCCESS STORIESImportant Legislative ChangesIn the fourth quarter of 2024, parliament passed some important initiatives. In December the Verkhovna Rada legalized medical cannabis. In addition, parliament amended the law on minorities to be in accord with the Council of Europe's recommendations, which was a part of Ukraine's obligations on its path to European integration. The amendments broaden the use of EU languages, including in an educational context, while requiring the study of Ukrainian as a state language; the minority languages affected are chiefly Romanian and Hungarian. Two other laws that parliament passed as part of the EU integration commitments deal with battling corruption. Both laws expand the capacities of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, and the National Corruption Prevention Agency. The president of the European Commission positively assessed these legislative changes well.Successful Completion of Synchronization of Ukrainian and European Power SystemsOn November 28 the Continental European TSOs (transmission service operators), a regional group of the European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E), said that the Ukrainian transmission system operator, Ukrenergo, had achieved compliance with the key technical requirements necessary to enable a permanent interconnection between the power systems of continental Europe and Ukraine. The process formally started in 2017, when Ukrenergo and ENTSO-E signed a roadmap for integrating the Ukrainian power system into the electricity system of continental Europe. In addition, the continental European TSOs have decided to increase the capacity limit for electricity trade from continental Europe to Ukraine and Moldova to 1,700 megawatts, based on system security and the results of stability simulations, reflecting an increase of 500 MW from the previous limit.Based on this compliance, on December 14, ENTSO-E accepted Ukrenergo as the fortieth member of the association as of January 1, 2024. This means that the Ukrainian power system has become an integral part of the European system, and Ukrenergo will have equal rights with the European TSOs. The next stage is market coupling, which requires full unification of Ukrainian energy market regulation with the European set of regulations. The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.
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The end of the year saw a radical shift in Ukraine's European integration. On November 8 the European Commission proposed opening EU accession talks with Kyiv, an important step for Ukraine; the European Council subsequently approved this decision. As a further step on the path to Europeanization, Ukraine completed synchronizing its power system with the European system, and the country's transmission system operator became a member of the European network, ENTSO-E.Despite heavy combat, the front line did not move. There was some concern about future military aid, the availability of which would affect war developments and Ukraine's abilities to hold off Russian forces on the battlefield and thwart Russian air strikes on civilian targets. The concern mostly arose from the position of the United States, which has been driven by internal U.S. politicking, and the corresponding delay in providing new aid packages. The lack of weapons supplies, Kyiv claimed, slowed the counteroffensive operation, which, despite expectations, did not result in rapid and wide-scale advances. Nonetheless, there were positive achievements of the counteroffensive, particularly in taking out Russia's naval vessels and port supplies.1. ROLLOUT OF THE WARGeneral Developments during October–DecemberThe last quarter of 2023 was another period of heavy, intense fighting without tangible territorial advances on either side. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (AFRF) kept up pressure along the entire front, with key battles taking place in the vicinity of Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Kupiansk, Lyman, Mariinka, and Robotyno. The battle for Avdiivka, in Donetsk oblast, a city Russian forces have tried to capture since early October, was perhaps the costliest of the war for the AFRF, with little achieved there. At the same time, delays in supplies of military aid from Ukraine's Western allies affected military operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), which had to curtail some operations because of ammunition shortages.Despite high expectations, the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the last quarter of the year did not result in rapid and wide-scale advances. Nonetheless, there were some critical developments. In mid-November the AFU took back some positions of the left bank of the Dnipro river in occupied Kherson oblast. Establishing bridgeheads there is a step toward being able to move forces and supplies across the river, thence to the south on a land route to Crimea. It also allows the AFU to better protect the residents of Kherson, who have been under relentless attack.Ukrainian forces also continued their successful attacks on Russian vessels in the Black Sea: 20 percent of the Russian Black Sea fleet was destroyed during the last four months of 2023, an important achievement for a country that is not a major naval power. On land, the Ukrainian army continued successful attacks on Russian military facilities in Crimea and other occupied territories, often using unmanned drones and missiles.President Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials have attributed the lack of more impressive results from the counteroffensive to slow weapons deliveries, which gave the Russians time to build more fortifications and to mine territories densely. This was the opinion of Western military experts as well. Ultimately, the situation pushed the army chiefs to change tactics and emphasize building defense fortifications. At the same time, the AFU did not retreat, despite unprecedented pressure from Russian forces along the front line. Overall, the counteroffensive was successful in many respects: Russian casualties mounted, and the AFRF failed to advance, despite strenuous efforts. According to the AFU General Staff, from the start of the invasion to the end of 2023, the Russian army lost over 360,000 soldiers, thousands of tanks and combat vehicles, and hundreds of aircraft and helicopters. The figure on human losses is close to the UK's intelligence bureau's assessment. Spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence agency Andrii Yusov said in mid-December that around 450,000 Russian troops were deployed in Ukraine, many fewer than the 617,000 that Vladimir Putin claimed.Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, warned about the risk of a positional war, "where both sides are dug in and not moving much." To avoid such a deadlock and return to a war of maneuvers, he said, Ukraine would need additional weapons.POW ExchangesDuring the last quarter of the year, there was little public information about POW exchanges. In mid-November, Kyiv blamed Moscow for halting the exchanges and blocking negotiations over POWs. The previous exchange had taken place on August 7, when twenty-two Ukrainians returned home. In early December, President Zelensky said exchanges were happening without public announcements, while recognizing that Russia was throwing up barriers to the exchanges. In some cases, POW exchanges were occurring right on the battlefields. As of mid-November, according to official data, 4,337 Ukrainians were imprisoned in Russia, including 3,574 military personnel. The actual number of Ukrainian civilians imprisoned in Russia, according to the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, may reach 25,000.Russian Disinformation Campaigns and CyberattacksRussia's disinformation campaign in Ukraine during the quarter including disseminating deep-fake videos featuring the Ukrainian army's commander-in-chief, fake stories about political and army leaders, and lies about Russian forces' success on the battlefield. Russia has also continued its anti-Ukrainian information campaigns in other countries, especially Poland. These disinformation efforts are designed to spread mistrust of Ukrainians and of Ukraine's reasons for fighting, and to decrease support. On December 12, one of the biggest Ukrainian mobile operators, Kyivstar, which provided cellular connection for 25 million customers and broadband internet connection for one million, came under a cyberattack that resulted in the total suspension of services for a few days. Earlier, in October, a court in Kyiv had seized the corporate rights in Kyivstar of three sanctioned businessmen, including the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman, in part to prevent them from setting up dummy corporations and moving assets there. Kyivstar was part of a larger holding group controlling similar businesses in Russia. The Russian hacking group Solntsepek claimed responsibility for the attack, but the company and Ukrainian officials said the hackers overstated their achievements, and SBU cybersecurity department head Ilya Vitiuk thought it was more likely the work of the Russian military intelligence unit Sandworm. In an interview with Reuters, Vitiuk expressed concern that the hackers had been inside Kyivstar at least since May. A big Ukrainian bank came under cyberattack at the same time as well. More than 4,000 cyberattacks have been reported since the invasion, which is three times the frequency of such attacks before the war began. Russia's Position on the WarThe Kremlin continued denying chances for the Ukrainian peace formula and said there was no basis for bilateral peace negotiations. The Kremlin has not changed its narrative on the targets of the war against Ukraine, which abounds in falsehoods and manipulative statements. Putin continues asserting that Russia did not start the war in Ukraine and expounding on the need to consider how to stop "the tragedy" in Ukraine. Russia has seen more of its armory and vehicles destroyed than it likely anticipated, but it relies on the West's potential fatigue in supporting Ukraine when spreading misinformation about Ukraine in Western countries. Attacks on Critical InfrastructureIn the fourth quarter, Ukraine did not face massive damage to the energy infrastructure. This could have resulted either from an effective air defense or from Russia not yet starting its expected winter assaults on the energy system. Still, there were numerous attacks on the power grid as early as November, and some energy assets were damaged by shelling and air strikes. Among them were power plants, coal mines, oil refineries, and fuel depots. One of the thermal power plants located close to the front was shelled ten times in two months. Some other critical infrastructure facilities also came under attack during the fourth quarter, including river port infrastructure and shipyard and railway facilities. Nonetheless, the scale of the damage was much less than in the fourth quarter of 2022. Crimes against Civilians and Attacks on Civilian InfrastructureAt the end of the year, Russians resumed massive drone and missile strikes on civil and critical infrastructure, hitting a record of such attacks in late December. Kyiv was a key target. Russia continued attacking civil infrastructure, including residential buildings, killing and wounding civilians. Among these were grain storage facilities, postal service infrastructure, kindergarten, the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, river and seaport infrastructure, foreign civil cargo ships, medical institutions, and so on.Numerous civilians have been killed or wounded in these attacks. A particularly heinous attack on a café hosting a funeral reception in Kharkiv oblast that resulted in the deaths of fifty-nine civilians became the biggest crime against civilians in the region. On December 29, Russia launched wide-scale missile and drone attacks that resulted in the largest number of civilians killed and injured in Kyiv since the start of invasion. Russia continued such attacks in the following days, some of which were on the same massive scale. Many residential buildings were damaged during attacks at the end of the year. Kyiv officially confirmed the unlawful deportation of almost 20,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war. Thousands have been taken to Belarus. Fewer than 400 children had been returned as of the end of the year, in some cases through the efforts of parents and family. During the last quarter of the year the media reported fewer than twenty children returned. Analysts assess that over 8,300 Ukrainian children taken to Russia in 2023 had been sent to "reeducation camps."2. INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRSA key issue in foreign affairs in the fourth quarter was the uncertainty of international military aid to Ukraine at the level the country needs to withstand Russia's attacks. The concern arose mostly because of internal U.S. politicking and the corresponding delay in providing new aid packages. Another factor was the rise of populist parties in parliamentary elections in some European states. Most of these populist parties, including those in Slovakia and the Netherlands, are against providing further aid to Ukraine. News that the EU was behind schedule in supplying artillery rounds did not give grounds for optimism. These various factors combined meant a critical drop in aid: between August and October, the amount of newly committed aid to Ukraine decreased by 87 percent compared to the same period in 2022.At the same time, the leaders of some European states and the EU itself declared themselves ready to continue supporting Ukraine. European leaders warned that Ukraine's defeat would mean serious damage to the project of United Europe and that Russia would be on the EU's doorstep and would later move forward with war against other European states, as it has threatened.In the larger picture, Ukraine's inability to defend itself would mean democracy losing to tyranny. A door would open for a global parade of more powerful states annexing less powerful neighbors, and war-oriented Russia would have more resources to conduct war in the future. Prominent Western media have also spoken out on the necessity of providing support to Ukraine. A Financial Times article described the humanitarian disaster that would occur should Russia win, and an editorial in Bloomberg called on Western governments to continue supporting Ukraine.President Zelensky's Diplomatic ToursIn the last quarter of the year, President Zelensky made a few visits to allies and partner countries. In early October, he visited Spainto attend the European Political Community Summit, a forum of more than forty countries established after Russia's invasion to cope with critical challenges and threats, including Russia's war in Ukraine. At the summit, he met with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni to discuss new military aid packages. He met the Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan for the first time ever, as Russia-Armenia relations had cooled after another Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in September 2023. In September, Armenia provided Ukraine with humanitarian aid for the first time since the full-scale invasion, and in late October, Armenia participated in Ukraine's Peace Formula summit for the first time.On October 10, President Zelensky visited Romania to meet his counterpart, Klaus Iohannis, to discuss Black Sea regional security and the transit of Ukrainian grain, an issue that has prompted some harsh tit-for-tat threats in the past. The two presidents signed a joint declaration on bilateral cooperation, including on such matters as security, Ukrainian grain exports, promoting the Ukrainian Peace Formula, and others matters related to Ukraine's defense. The next day Zelensky made an unannounced visit to Brussels to attend a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council and a meeting of NATO defense ministers in the Ramstein Format, a group of more than fifty countries organized to provide collective support to Ukraine. The key topic during the meetings was providing weapons and air defense systems before the winter. The UK and Norway agreed to address strengthening security in the Black Sea region, and France and Germany committed to leading a new ground-based air defense coalition. In December, President Zelensky visitedArgentina to attend the inauguration of the country's president-elect, Javier Milei, who has expressed support for Ukraine in Russia's war. He also met with the leaders of a few other South American states. Following this trip, he visited the United States to meet with President Biden and address U.S. senators to enlist further U.S. support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. Zelensky then made a surprise visit to Germany and later Norway to attend the Nordic States summit. The Nordic leaders committed to supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes."United StatesThe key feature of U.S.-Ukraine relations in the last quarter of the year was uncertainty over future U.S. aid to Ukraine. Internal U.S. politicking has resulted in deferred agreement on the U.S. federal budget for 2024, and the precipitous start of Israel's war with Hamas has confounded any consideration of aid to Ukraine as a stand-alone issue. The Ukraine aid fund was expected to run out by the end of the year.Relations with the EU and European StatesOn November 8 the European Commission adopted the 2023 Enlargement package, which recommended inviting Kyiv to start talks on Ukraine's accession to the EU. The decision was based on an assessment of Ukraine's progress toward reforms in different areas, as detailed in a separate report. According to the report, Ukraine had taken the necessary steps and fulfilled its commitments sufficiently to be ready for negotiations. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called this "excellent progress." On December 14 the European Council agreed to open Ukraine membership talks, even though Hungary and Austria expressed an intent to vote against Ukraine's membership.Most of the European states continued supporting Ukraine. Germany remained among the largest supporters and aid providers, with a few packages of aid provided in the last quarter of the year. Among other articles, Germany supplied some air defense systems that are crucial during the winter to protect critical infrastructure against Russian missile strikes and bombings. Ukraine and Germany agreed on a joint venture to produce armored military vehicles in Ukraine. Berlin made available funds to restore and support the Ukrainian power system before the winter. German chancellor Olaf Scholz called on the country to be prepared to increase its support for Ukraine "when others are faltering."As expected, parliamentary elections in Slovakia were won by Robert Fico, who had promised to end military support for Ukraine should he prevail. Immediately after the elections, Slovakia halted its military aid to Ukraine, and, after being appointed prime minister, Fico confirmed this decision and canceled previously approved aid packages. Fico took the position that the war was a "frozen conflict" and Kyiv and Moscow needed to negotiate. However, he confirmed his intention to continue supplying humanitarian aid.The pro-Russia Fico had held anti-Ukrainian views before the election. The newly appointed country's foreign affairs minister, Juraj Blanár, in the past was known for purveying misinformation about Ukraine and repeating Russia's propaganda narratives. Bilateral relations between Slovakia and Ukraine are likely to become strained in the near future. In October, Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte visited Ukraine, promising to supply extra Patriot missiles before the winter, along with another aid package announced shortly before. Another prominent event happened in early December when the Netherlands finally returned to Ukraine some ancient Scythian artifacts the country had held on to for almost ten years. These items had previously been kept in Crimea before being sent out for exhibition. When Russia annexed Crimea, it also claimed ownership of the artifacts. In June 2023 a Dutch court ruled the gold treasures should go to Ukraine, not Crimea. In late December, the Netherlands started preparing F-16 fighter jets to be delivered to Ukraine.The Netherlands is among Ukraine's most significant military aid providers and is committed to continuing support in 2024. But there is a risk of a Slovakia-style development: in November a far-right politician, Geert Wilders, whose platform included halting support for Ukraine, unexpectedlywon parliamentary elections. Wilders's party, which was anti-Ukrainian ten years ago, will not have a majority, so the future country's policy toward Ukraine may depend on what kind of political coalition gets put together.Relations with Hungary remained strained. There was little progress in solving the agriculture export ban other than a waiver for sugar. Budapest continued creating obstacles within the EU to the vote granting Ukraine support, and the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, personally criticized providing aid to Ukraine. Hungary threatened to block EU accession negotiations with Kyiv and even filed a corresponding claim with the European Commission. Prime Minister Orbán, who has maintained ties with Moscow despite the EU's policy, said Kyiv was not ready to begin EU accession negotiations. Ukraine's EU membership aspirations do not coincide with Hungary's national interests, he said. Orbán might take the desire of most EU member states to support Ukraine as an opportunity to negotiate more for Hungary, both from the EU and from Ukraine. Budapest demands that Ukraine amend its law on education, and Kyiv says it is ready to do so. Kyiv's position is to negotiate with countries whose minorities live in Ukraine, to fulfill the European criteria, but without making special exceptions for any minority.Despite the threats, Hungary did not veto the vote on starting Ukraine-EU membership negotiations, but on the same day it blocked the EU's decision for €50 billion in long-term aid for Ukraine. Romania became a more important partner of Ukraine, and bilateral relations grew thicker in the fourth quarter. President Zelensky visited Bucharest and signed a bilateral memorandum of cooperation with his Romanian counterpart. Romania continued taking steps to expand Ukrainian agricultural transit, which faced a potential blockade by some other neighboring states. The two countries settled the dispute over the construction of a deep-water navigation route, in which Bucharest had accused Kyiv of violating environmental standards. Bucharest welcomed amendments to the Ukrainian law on national minorities and Kyiv's decision not to use the term "Moldovan language."The concept of the "Moldovan language" was established by Moscow when Moldova was one of the Soviet socialist republics; it is not recognized by Bucharest, despite the large number of Moldovan immigrants in Romania. The relationship between Romania and Moldova is long and complicated, and President Zelensky felt the language issue was of less importance in a time of war.After the dispute regarding agricultural exports and transit between Ukraine and Poland, top officials from both countries ratcheted down the tension in their public statements. The presidents of Ukraine and Poland reaffirmed good bilateral relations. Even as the agricultural dispute awaits an adequate resolution, however, a new one has cropped up: some Polish carriers started blocking border-crossing points with Ukraine (described below). The new Polish government, headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, appointed in December, gives hope for better bilateral relations with fewer conflicts. A former president of the European Council and staunchly pro-Ukraine, Tusk has demanded full mobilization of the West to help Ukraine. Poland's new foreign affairs minister, Radosław Sikorski, paid his first official visit to Kyiv on December 22. Developments in Agricultural Exports DisputesThe dispute over agricultural exports with some neighboring countries was only partly solved. In early October, Kyiv suspended its complaints to the World Trade Organization against Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, anticipating that a constructive attitude would work better toward finding a solution. During the dispute, most of the overland grain exports, 60 percent, were rerouted through Romania. Increased deliveries through Moldova also became part of the solution. In mid-October the Romanian government approved an import permit system to protect local farmers. In late November, Ukraine and Bulgaria approved a joint mechanism for agrarian exports that would avoid market distortions in the countries of transit, which feared lower prices for their own products.At the same time, the new Slovak government announced its intention to extend the ban on the transit of Ukrainian agricultural products beyond the time permitted by the EU, which ended September 15. Slovakia also added to the list of agricultural products banned for transit. The Hungarian government amended its own ban to allow sugar imports, as the country intensely depends on imports. These unilateral country bans are against EU regulations, which maintain federated oversight of product transit.Carriers' Strike and Blockade of Border-Crossing PointsIn November, Polish haulers started a protest and a blockade of Ukraine border crossings. Later, some carriers from Slovakia occasionally joined them. Because Ukraine suffers from lack of transportation capabilities through the Black Sea, the blockade created huge lines of thousands of vehicles at the borders and complicated the transportation of goods from and to Ukraine, including military aid. The Polish strikers demanded the restoration of permits for Ukrainian carriers, a ban on the issuance of licenses to non-EU transport companies, and a waiver for empty Polish trucks to register with the Ukrainian electronic queue when returning to Poland from Ukraine. Kyiv argued that restoration of the permits is impossible as in 2022, Ukraine and the EU signed an Agreement on the Carriage of Freight by Road that stipulates bilateral and transit traffic without permits. A representative of the European Commission called the blockade "unacceptable." One of the organizers of the protest is Rafal Mekler, a member of the Polish far-right National Movement Party, also known as the Confederation party, which is skeptical toward the EU and less friendly toward Ukraine. For this reason, some believe the transport blockade was politically inspired. Despite the agreement of representatives of Ukraine and Poland on an action plan to unblock the border and the participation of the European Commission, the dispute had not been resolved as of the end of the year. The next step is agreement at the ministry level.Ukrainian Peace Formula DevelopmentsIn late October, Malta hosted a meeting of representatives of sixty-five states to discuss the implementation of the Ukrainian peace formula. The meeting was focused on nuclear safety, energy, and food security, the liberation of POWs and deported persons, and the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity.3. INTERNAL AFFAIRSThe Economic SituationAccording to the IMF's assessments, in 2023 the Ukrainian economy grew faster than expected. Annual growth is expected to come to 4.5 percent, compared to the 1−3 percent previously forecasted. But high growth rates cannot be guaranteed for the future, as the prospects of export capacities in the next year are unclear. Economic growth will also depend on the continued provision of aid, and that is also obscure. In early October the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) suspended the fixed exchange rate regime and introduced a flexible one. Despite concerns, the national currency rate remained stable, though it started weakening a little toward the end of the year. Naturally, the strength of the national currency in the current circumstances is deeply dependent on international aid. Later, the NBU also lifted all restrictions on sales of foreign currencies to the public. The NBU also decreased a key policy rate twice in the last quarter of 2023 after a two-stage decrease earlier in the year. This was possible because inflation was low—just 5.1 percent in November.At the end of the year, parliament approved the state budget for 2024, which is oriented toward strengthening the army but has a huge deficit: expenditures are expected to be almost double revenues. Likely as a result of this situation, parliament passed some laws stipulating steps that may increase budget incomes or funds to finance the army. These are laws on resuming tax inspections for businesses and on raising the tax rate for banks to 50 percent. A Focus Ukraine (Kennan) piece on Ukraine's budget for 2024 is available here.On December 11, the IMF approved releasing the third tranche of Extended Fund Facility funds, about U.S. $900 million, to Ukraine. Ukraine needs financing, but at the same time, there are risks to deepening the loan burden. The IMF expects Ukraine's public debt to exceed 100 percent of GDP in two years.The Energy SituationDuring the summer, the energy companies undertook major maintenance campaigns to restore capacities before the winter and the anticipated onslaught of Russian air attacks. As of October, available power generation and transmission capacities, together with electricity import capacities, could barely cover peak demand. In November the power system started experiencing a deficit such that Ukraine had to rely on electricity imports, chiefly from Romania and Poland, to meet demand. At the same time, price regulations restricted commercial imports, and the power system had to turn to technical emergency assistance, which is a specific import but usually more expensive, and without predictable availability. Government ReshufflesIn early November, Ukraine's Youth and Sports Minister Vadym Gutzeit submitted his resignation, which parliament later approved. Some civil actors had criticized Gutzeit's efficacy as a minister and were concerned about allegations of his possible involvement in embezzlement of state funds before becoming minister, although his attorney said he was not a suspect and no charges had been brought against him. Gutzeit was succeeded by his vice-deputy as acting minister, while Gutzeit himself continues in his role as head of Ukraine's National Olympic Committee. 4. PROGRESS IN REFORMS AND SUCCESS STORIESImportant Legislative ChangesIn the fourth quarter of 2024, parliament passed some important initiatives. In December the Verkhovna Rada legalized medical cannabis. In addition, parliament amended the law on minorities to be in accord with the Council of Europe's recommendations, which was a part of Ukraine's obligations on its path to European integration. The amendments broaden the use of EU languages, including in an educational context, while requiring the study of Ukrainian as a state language; the minority languages affected are chiefly Romanian and Hungarian. Two other laws that parliament passed as part of the EU integration commitments deal with battling corruption. Both laws expand the capacities of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, and the National Corruption Prevention Agency. The president of the European Commission positively assessed these legislative changes well.Successful Completion of Synchronization of Ukrainian and European Power SystemsOn November 28 the Continental European TSOs (transmission service operators), a regional group of the European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E), said that the Ukrainian transmission system operator, Ukrenergo, had achieved compliance with the key technical requirements necessary to enable a permanent interconnection between the power systems of continental Europe and Ukraine. The process formally started in 2017, when Ukrenergo and ENTSO-E signed a roadmap for integrating the Ukrainian power system into the electricity system of continental Europe. In addition, the continental European TSOs have decided to increase the capacity limit for electricity trade from continental Europe to Ukraine and Moldova to 1,700 megawatts, based on system security and the results of stability simulations, reflecting an increase of 500 MW from the previous limit.Based on this compliance, on December 14, ENTSO-E accepted Ukrenergo as the fortieth member of the association as of January 1, 2024. This means that the Ukrainian power system has become an integral part of the European system, and Ukrenergo will have equal rights with the European TSOs. The next stage is market coupling, which requires full unification of Ukrainian energy market regulation with the European set of regulations. The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.
