Letter, November 23, 1934, Page 2
In an interview with a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter, printed Sunday, November 13, Dean Bildersee contended that most Brooklyn College students are politically "wholsesome." If the Dean means by that the Brooklyn College students will not tolerate the formation of Nazi cells now infesting Columbia University and City College, will not brook any propaganda of race hatred and oppression, then I agree. But if she implies that anyone with liberal or radical opinions is "unwholesome," I plead guilty. I maintain that she has mixed her predictates and that precisely the reverse is true. I maintain that it is wholesome to remove evil or fight to remove it and conversely unwholesome to be aware of its presence and not fight it. Who will deny that mass unemployment, which confronts the graduating student, offering him little or no opportunity to make use of training; of impending imperialist war to wipe out this "lost generation" of incipient Fascism that threatens all civilization, all culture, and seeks to set the student body against the working class; of retrenchment in education threatening the city colleges thus making for a "class" education open only to the children of the rich; of monstrous racial oppression of the Negro best illustrated in the Scottsboro case–who will deny that these things constitute an evil, and as such should be extirpated. Furthermore, if the dean will show me any program–other than that of substituting a cooperative socialist society for the competitive capitalist one, that will permanently alleviate the evils of war and Fascism, unemployment and racial discrimination, then I will subscribe to it and cease to be unwholesome. But I am afraid that what Dean Bildersee would then advocate would be communism.
Yours for a better world,
M. W.
Return to Spotlight Page || Home Page
|