Greenfield High School - Evergreen / Exponent Yearbook (Greenfield, MA)

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THE EXPONENT 9 ordinary sense of the word he was not a champion of conservation. But let’s see what he did. He estab¬ lished equality among men by eman¬ cipating the slaves. By his strength of character and tenacity to right principles he formed a precedent for succeeding presidents. By emanci¬ pating he was conserving for he was saving the south from itself. Eco¬ nomically the south is better today with compensated labor than it was before 1865 with slavery. That in itself is partly a return from the three billion dollars expended on the Civil war. Now I come to the greatest of our conservation champions, Roose¬ velt. Altho, to many people, he was not great yet he was preeminently a man of the people, with a mind virile and active to all great prob¬ lems. He knew what internal im¬ provements would mean, he carefully guided bills through congress. All of us have heard of the Roosevelt Dam and the Elephant Butte Dam, both products of Roosevelt’s active imagination put into material form. By means of these great reservoirs billions of gallons of water are stored up to be used on a land that heretofore had produced nothing but cactus and sage grass, now destined to become one of our most produc¬ tive sections. Irrigation accom¬ plished conservation. Furthermore, Roosevelt caused money to be appro¬ priated in order to buy land so that our domestic forests could be saved, thereby conserving our timber sup¬ ply. It is due to Roosevelt’s great planning and unceasing activity that we now have national forests equiva¬ lent iji area to France and Bel¬ gium combined. In saving our tim¬ ber lands, which border our streams, we are also sure of a continuous sup ply of water power. China is an example of a country which has not regarded her timber lands as a val¬ uable asset. Her hills are constantly erroding. Yearly great floods sweep thru her valleys, carrying away and drowning thousands of inhabitants. The world is looking today for in¬ creased production. America has great natural power stored in its hills. The damming of countless streams in the west has brought about a great, new source of cheap power; hydraulic-electricity. This is a crowning example of Roosevelt’s conservation policy. Finally I came to that form of con¬ servation which more directly con¬ cerns each one of us. We are con¬ stantly reminded that young Amer¬ ica is the hope of the world. Now it is up to us to show the world that we are not hopeless. Most of young America is in school now or at least should be. During the war increased demand for manufactured products and scarcity of labor, caused many young people to leave school for what appeared to them to be great op¬ portunity. They were temporarily blinded by what seemed to be high wages. We shall have to admit that in some cases leaving school would be excusable because of the financial aid which the family might need. Let us hope that young America will con¬ tinue to go to school and learn the three R’s as well as other things. Let us not forget that governments do not hanpen; but that they are born of a spirit, and a desire for something better. With these thoughts in our minds let our fervent prayers always be that this shall continue to be a government of, by and for the peo¬ ple. J. Norman Alberti. IVY ORATION Why Go To College The question of “Why Go to Col¬ lege?” is not so sharply contested as formerly, for the people of the pres¬ ent age see more clearly the neces¬ sity of trained men and women, and young people, understand, if they ob¬ serve carefully, that in order to com¬ pete for honors in the game of life, they must specialize or train them¬ selves highly along some particular line of work. In spite of this general change in sentiment, there are many who are too content to drift along into a mere job instead of striving to do something worth while. I have not quite made up my mind whether these people are just plain lazy or whether they do not understand the advantage of higher education and so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they do not appre-

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V 8 THE EXPONENT • CLASS ORATION Conservation From the beginning of the great word war in 1914 to the signing of the armistice, one of the words most often seen in the papers was con¬ servation. Conservation of what? Meat, sugar and wheat. It affected all of us. I know it because I was forced to try to live and expand on less sugar, wheat and meat. Abaut the only unforbidden articles that I remember were fish, fruits, com meal mush and molasses. We all remem¬ ber the time when we were compelled to use peppermint candy in our cof¬ fee. Now peppermint candy is very nice in its place but dissolved in coffee it had the happy faculty of turning the coffee green. But aside from these homely meanings of conservation there is one meaning of greater and deeper significance, a meaning which only a few of our great men have truly known. The man best known to us perhaps is Mr. Hoover. He was re- snonsible in a measure for our lack of wheat, sugar and meat. But he had other plans. He was a world thinker, a man that thought not in terms of town, state or nation but in terms of the world. There are few men who have done this. Mr. Hoover ' s conduct during the war was most praiseworthy. As food admin¬ istrator he saw to it that our broth¬ ers across the sea received as much food as possible. We did not be¬ grudge it for we knew where it was going. We cannot help feeling that a man of Hoover ' s type would look well seated in the presidential chair. What is the thing that most im¬ presses a foreigner on coming to th‘s country? To him America is a land of riches unbounded, a land of free¬ dom and democracy. But when he has been here awhile what faults does he notice in us? Oh, you Americans are a wasteful people, you save nothing. That is a simple sentence in itself but for us it should have a deeper significance. Why is it that we are so wasteful? Because here among unparalled riches we have all that can be de¬ sired. In the family of nations America is the spoiled child who has all that it wants. We are a smart people but we are spoiled children. A spoiled child is cute but wears on one after a time. Let us be ex¬ ceedingly careful that we do not wear on the old nerves of the world. That brings up another point,—po¬ litical economy or political conserva¬ tion, as you wish. The majority of us are not politicians, so perhaps our judgment may be faulty. A group of ring politicians, called Senators, down in Washington have prevented our entrance into one of the most sagacious schemes ever invented to bring about political economy. What does that League mean to us? It means increased international con¬ fidence; and would tear down inter¬ national jealousies. We say we are a democracy and yet we let a bunch of egotistical aristocrats, called Sen¬ ators, run our government without check or caution. Thousands of taxpayers ' money have gone to sup¬ port an idle senate who have done practically nothing in the matter of legislation for the past three years. Oh, yes, I hear someone say, they passed the Volstead act, and re¬ turned the railroads and repealed daylight saving. Isn ' t that a fine lot of legislation? Something seems to be radically wrong with our po¬ litical system. Our old ship ' of state is nearing a very rocky shore. Let us watch and guide it ere it be too late. Now let us take up a few of our great champions of conservation and see what they accomplished. Washington was one of the great champions of political economy. He believed in economic peace and Puritan thrift. In the beginning our governmental plan was termed the Articles of Confederation. Under these articles there was not enough power given to the federal govern¬ ment, and such was the general dis¬ satisfaction that certain events ter¬ minated in a federal convention. At this federal convention an efficient plan of government was drawn up. Washington was president of the convention and Monroe the father of the plan. That plan is our pres¬ ent constitution. We are still using it. The second of our great cham¬ pions of conservation as I look upon them is Lincoln. I suppose in the

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10 THE EXPONENT ciate a college education in its full sense. I do not mean to imply that it is best for everyone of us to go to college. Certainly there are some to whom books are uninteresting and learning is hard. Such I believe will find better advantages thru indus¬ trial training than by striving for mastery of theoretical knowledge. But these individuals, I believe are comparatively few. To the rest of you, especially those who have de¬ cided not to go on to college or those undecided as to their career I wish to make some very brief remarks as to what I believe a college education offers. At various times during the past year our Principal has posted for our benefit, statistics concerning the money value of a college education. Some of us have studied them while more have passed them by as a mere juggling of figures. Of course it is certain that a col¬ lege education is a fine investment in just dollars and cents, if that is what a fellow is after, and it would be unnecessary for me to give you a long list of figures supporting this point; but I will merely mention one fact, Dean Holmes of Penn. State College after much effort in gather¬ ing statistics has discovered the fact, that the money value of a college course of four years is 20,000 dollars on a financial return of 5,000 dol¬ lars per year for every year spent in higher training. Charles M. Schwab the steel mag¬ nate, has often been quoted as not favoring college education, but he de¬ clares now that he is not and never was against such education. He says: “Whatever may have been true in the past, there is no doubt that to¬ day industrial conditions favor the college man. Old crudities are dis- anpearing, science is dethroning chance. Business is conducted on so vast a scale that the broadening ef¬ fects of higher education, gained thru proper application, write a large figure. “But the college man who thinks that his greater knowledge gives him the privilege of working less hard than the man without such an educa¬ tion is going to wake up in disaster. I regret that some college men enter industry with an inflated notion of their own value. They want to cap¬ italize at once their education and the time they spent getting it. neither knowledge of the classics nor mathematical proficiency can be con¬ verted over night into a marketable commodity. “Higher education has its chance later, when the college boy has mas¬ tered all the minor details of the business. Then, if he went to college with serious purpose, and studied hard and systematically, he has the advantage of a thoroly trained mind to tackle larger problems, a mind which should be broader and more flexible because of its greater powers of imagination and logical reason¬ ing. I shall now turn to a report of Clayton S. Cooper an author who has written several books on various sub¬ jects relating to college. Mr. Cooper once asked 100 college graduates from various parts of the country what they considered the most important values received from their college course. Thirty-six re¬ plied “The Influence of the profes¬ sors. ’ Twenty-one replied, “Broader views of life.” Eighteen replied, “Friendships formed,” and seven re¬ plied, “Training and ability to think.” The remaining answers were scat¬ tered. Are not any one of these values great enough to repay the glorious four years spent in higher study? I think that my idea of the worth of a college course is well presented by a student from the schools of Mines in Colorado who says. “The chief value of my college training was the giving me a vision of a life- work instead of a job.” Invariably when one asks a college professor what he considers the most irhportant contribution of a college to a man’s life, he will reply, “Learn¬ ing to think straight.” It is ability to think and think straight that counts in any walk of life today. The American college represents the enlarged and enlarging intellec¬ tual life of the American people. It has trained one-third of all our statesmen and best authors, and one- half of our physicians, lawyers and