North Andover High School - Knight Yearbook (North Andover, MA)

Page 22 text:

JOHNSON HIGH SCHOOL SALUTATORY is due in a great measure to you, our parents, friends, and teachers, who, during the past four years, have so well trained us for our part in the world. Youth Will Speak for Itself This is the season of baccaulaureates, in which the adult reaches into his years of worldly experience to advise youth and to inspire youthful hopes. We seem to have arrived at a period in the progress of civilization when youth would be well advised to form some conclusions of its own. Only in a very limited sense does the younger generation stand today, diploma in hand, before the door of opportunity. Eight years of economic unbalance and experimentation have not only closed the door to youth, but have left him the legacy of failure, together with the bill. Specifically tonight, I want to express a viewpoint of youth, about to com¬ plete what is for many the end of a school career. I want to express a most vigorous opposition to—even a rebellion against—what are known as youth movements. It seems to have become the passion of leaders of the past futile decade to attempt to perpetuate their errors by developing a generation blindly obed¬ ient to regimentation and willing to place upon their necks the yoke of intel¬ lectual slavery and civilized decay. We have in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the Young Communist movement, in which the rising generation is influenced by every form of mental coercion and social ostracism to dedi¬ cate itself to the materialistic conception of history, to collectivist economics., and an animalistic social order. We have in the German Nazi government the enslavement of youth behind the fictional and fanciful primitive economics of autarchy, the paganism of race spirituality and the social doctrines of rancor and hate. We have in Fascist Italy’s corporate state the drilling and regimenting of youth in preparation for war’s baptism of blood, a social con¬ trol moulded by ancient historical romance and ignoring realities and an economic concept in harmony with such a program. In each of these forms of government, the first creed is that the individual is wholly the creature of the state. Under each of these forms of government learning and information, history itself, is censored to support their dictator¬ ial concept. Under each of these forms of government, the first energies of the state are directed to stultifying youth. No one of them has proven its right to perpetuity as a form of government. No one of them has endured long enough to prove its capacity to solve the riddle of political and economic life today. No one of them has solved even a primary problem of its own on a permanent basis. Yet, in each, youth is taught that the goal is reached, the millenium is at hand, the individual is dead, society is a vast, colorless, mono¬ tonous, workaday mass, mentally and spiritually sublimited and suppressed. The United States of America has its National Youth Administration. It has its C. C. C. camps, which the President desired to make permanent, an idea which Congress fortunately rejected a few weeks ago. It has its advo¬ cates of Marxian youth policy, naively cloaked like Little Riding Hood’s wolf in the innocent dress of the Child Labor Amendment. It has its spokesmen on every hand, addressing themselves to the problem of youth as to a mass of 18 © E of the class of 1937 wish to extend to all of you who are here tonight a most cordial welcome to our graduation exercises, the termination of our high school career. Any success which we may have in the future

Page 21 text:

1937 YEAR BOOK HAROLD R. WEST Baseball 2, 3, 4 Glee Club 2 Football 2, 3, 4 All Suburban Football Capt. 4 Westy, one of Johnson’s star athletes, held the unbounded approval of the high schools’ sport fans for three consecutive years and topped it as the loyal captiin of his squad. Here’s wishing luck to you, Westy, and may you lead your boys with the voice that resounded throughout the Glee Club. MARY G. WILCOX Glee Club 2 Orchestra 1, 2, 3, 4 Sub-Deb Club 4 Year Book 4 One of the sleepiest they say, but Mary is sure wide awake when it comes to playing the trumpet. We wonder what the orchestra will be like without her. MILDRED I. DILL Practical Arts Club 3 Sub-Deb Club 4 Mildred is a shy and quie girl but she will find success it whatever she undertakes. JAMES E. WILLIAMS Chef’s Club 3 Dramatic Club 4 Journal Staff 4 Year Book 4 Jim may be regarded as quiet and shy, but he knows how to get the advertisements. EVERETT R. WOODHOUSE “Ev” Year Book 4 Ev is an ardent sports fan, and an accomplished dancer. He is an artist and because of his humor is the life of the school. 17

Page 23 text:

1937 YEAR BOOK clay, capable only of being moulded into the warped and makeshift forms of confused, chaotic, and desperate paternalism. Those who today would think for the youth of our time, who would dictate their routine and solve their problems have left us a heritage of three hundred billions of dollars in public and private debts in the United States of America. Our federal public debt has been increased in the past four years by sixteen billions of dollars, in tax-exempt, interest-bearing bonds which will double the payoff — and the net result is that today there are, by generally accepted statistics, the same number of unemployed that there were four years ago, in spite of some employment pickup. ' The reason is that in the past four years over two millions of youth have been graduated into the futility of economic wishful thinking on the one hand and capatalistic avarice on the other. National youth administrators, C.C.C. camp enthusiasts, and Youth advis¬ ers stand ever ready to cooperate with political leaders in the vast expenditure of money to keep rebellious youth in check, but nobody stands ready to strike at the root of a diseased and dying system which has deprived youth of the God-given heritage to make its own destiny. The United States of America is following in the way of the dictatorial governments. Our leaders are coming to us, the youth, saying nothing of our inherent rights as the men and women of the future, nor apologizing for the heritage of disaster out of which we must make some sense in our time, or all civilization will collapse into barbarism. Instead they come offering truce, bidding us to join this and join that, to sublimate the zeal of our years and consecrate our strength to helping keep aloft the pillars of a structure built on quicksand. Twenty years ago, this same leadership led its youth by the millions into a world war. The sacrifice would have been well spent had it formed the foun¬ dations of a new order, but the same rulers who started it survived it and multiplied its causes a hundredfold- Twenty years from now not a shred of the civilization which existed in 1914 will remain if the military egomaniacs, the materialists, the devitalized social and economic collectivists, and the political squanderers can confine, as they now attempt, the energies of the coming generation to the sterile pro¬ gram of justifying failure. Not a major government today rests upon a footing of security. Not a world leader can look with equanimity and satisfaction upon the scene about him. Youth, deprived of its natural outlet of ambition and energy has puzzled its adults by turning in shocking numbers to crime, which is a step fully as false as the example it has been set by world leadership. Conscience alone can control the spiritual destiny of man. The will to ven¬ ture, to challenge, to change, which is the will of youth, alone can bring 1 a- tionalism into the’economic structure. Self responsibility alone and not group responsibility can develop a civilized social order. We repudiate the arrogation of such leadership to shackle us to the defens¬ ive defeatism of youth movements. The youth of today intends to build a new structure of national and inter¬ national society, of national and international morality. The failures of the past twenty years cannot and shall not be perpetuated. Unhampered by the fetters of fretful falsehoods which surround us today, we shall arm ourselves with the weapons of truth and reason and march for the victory of a new order ‘ THOMAS D. McKIERNAN 19