Duxbury High School - Partridge Yearbook (Duxbury, MA)

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of news, and the sperm was an undevelopd force. Thus opinion was of first importance, news ol' secondary. Opinions were based upon tnviron- ment and training as well as upon personal experiences and slower forms of communication such as cor. espondcnce, magazines, and books. But today-because we must mak-e decisions in the light of what we read and hear, rather than in the light of personal experiences as was gen- erally the case before the turn of the century, it is important that we help in evaluating what we hear and what we read especially in the of economics, politics, and war. The fact that propaganda is in the newspapers should not raise t ' question of th-e failings or fo.ly of il particular owner. It is not a matter of personalities or particular peoples or groups, but of certain human forces acted upon in an advantageous way. Since this is the case, cnly we, our- selves, can learn to react sensibly. The solution of reacting in s 'ch ri way is to take time to collect and sort pertinent facts, consider them, and finally come to a decision of our own. Then we would have our own solution and others would cease to affect us if we were strong enough to disr-egard them. get field MARY A N N PETERSON U81

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American editors and publishers may or may not be aware of the propaganda they are printing. They imagine that they are simply present- ing facts, and they are proud of their own thoroughness. To be sure it can be easi.y admitted in this connection that American newspapers are, on the whole, far superior to and much more honest and conscientious than those in any European country. And yet our papers are intentional propa- gandists when they print sensational stories and items which accord with public taste in order to boost their circulation and at the same time in- crease the revenue obtained from advertisers. Many of the alien-minded people who still cling to Old World alle- giances are important advertisers. Instead of looking upon the hospitalities and opportunities of America as the means of a new, free life, these people continue here their partisan ties of quarreling and confiict. Some of them try to get America involved in their foreign quarrels. 'io gather support for this minority aim they are conducting a tremendous publicity campaign to create American hatred of nations they want us to light. The newspapers anu advertisers do not see any wrong in this pub- licity, and since they depend on advertising revenue, the editors unknowing- ly run hate campaigns against thos-e nations which the alien-minded adver- tisers do not like. By doing this they have deceived many sincere loyal Americans. Since a great deal of war news is propaganda, it is often questioned, when war threatens, should the whole press bellow for war on the basis of such news. Some think it should drift with popular passion, sound the bugle, and beat the drum when mil ions of readers want to hear them. Nat- urally this is a.so the profitable thing to do, and that is what the majority of the newspapers finally do. A paper which during the World War refrained from printing doubt- ful German cruelty stories could not hope to do so well as one which ap- peared with alluring tales of German corpse factories. Thus in the compet- itive process, a steady circle of competition is established. Public taste calls for the corpse factory stories from the clever editor, these stories, inflaming the temper of the public, render that public less able to hear patiently or to give any consideration to the facts which might offset these exaggerated stories in their minds. The editor finds himself obliged to be very much one-sided. It is not a matter of expressing editorial opinons, but of select- ing the news which the reader shall know. So you see the Press does not create evils-an example of which is race- hatred. What it does is to emphasize and fix more firmly the type of charac- ter and state of mind out of which these evils grow and become so danger- ous. If a public has been captured by a given folley or passion-race-hatred, or religious enthusiasm-the paper which hopes to win or keep its large circulation must shape its selection and presentation of news so as to ap- pear to confirm the preconceived opinion or judgement. For it is a char- acteristic that even the wisest of us like to read just those facts which con- firm an existing opinion. It is uncomfortable, disturbing, unsettling, to have to read just opinions about such things as, for instance, the wickedness of all Germans, and the goodness of all Allies. It may be true that, given time, most of us can verify an existing opinion or prejudice in the light of new facts or facts which were not considered much before now. But the process of reasoning about facts is slow and rather diflicult, while the re- action to some excitement is quick and easy. The press has always been a fighting organization and in the early part of the century, it had very serious difficulties to contend with. Until com- paratively recent times there was no telegraph, and therefore no abundance l17l

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HONOR ESSAY Youth in a New Age What opportunities lie open to us graduating tonight? Is the future to be sunny or cloudy, hopeful or discouraging? What can I, or any of us, do after we graduate? We are youth. The spectacie held up before youth is marching men in uniforms equipped with deadly weapons-terrible looking children in gas masks: fearful youth being rushed into bomb proof cellarsg youth, afraid, hysterical, timidg ogres and monsters only seen in fairy tales but now be- coming real. But this is a dynamic world. It is as never before a challenging world, not a world of defeatism. Although it is believed that youth is cowardly, cynical, and selfish, it is not so. Youth is an adventurer going into a changing world of magic, of triumph, and of adventure. Youth is thought to be soft . How can it be when it was found that of 50,000 recent graduates from thirty-one colleges in twenty states two-thirds of the men and almost half of the women had earned part of their way? Is youth afraid of work? A placement director of one of the state colleges says that young people of today beg for work. In one college a student c.ass-president worked nights in a garage, Qreasing and washing cars. One girl could not find workg so she lived on stale bread from the bakery. She said that she could eat on ten cents a week. It is not a diet for a young girl, nor is it a diet for softies. But what can we do after we graduate? For what shall we train our- selves? Plato, the great Athenian philosopher, said, No two persons are born alike, but each differs from the other in individual endowments, one being suited for one thing and another for another, and all things in superior quality and quantity and with greatest ease. when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts. So it was about 400 B. C.. and it is still true. In that one respect, youth is not different. Today every young man and woman is different and has different natural abilities. If one is an artist, he should not become a plumber. This new and mobile world! There are many opportunities open to us today, which were not open several years ago. In the early 1930?s building construction was the weak sister of the big industry family. Today, the upsurge in private and national defense building has made this field-hiring more than a million workers-one of the nation's mightiest industries! To a young man who wants to break into construction, the pr-esent building boom means that his chances of getting job training are probably better right now than they have been for a long time. It takes dozens of different types of workers to turn planks of lumber, heaps of bricks, and tons of iron and cement into finished buildings of every description. This work today requires brick-layers, carpenters, cement finishers, electricians, painters, plasterers. plumbers and gas fitters, sheet- l19l