Old Missoula

 

In her book Prelude to Leadership: The Post-War Diary of John F. Kennedy, author Deidre Henderson followed John Kennedy’s early career just as he left the navy and contemplated his political life. A short commentary on Kennedy’s education, dated July 2, 1945, says the following:

 

“JFK’s comments on the ‘movements to the Left’ and the ‘radicals of the Left’ whom he associates with ‘the spirit which builds dictatorships’ prompts consideration of who shaped JFK’s thinking . . .

 

“The education Jack Kennedy received at Harvard was crucial to his intellectual development. His professors knew him well, enjoyed his independence of mind, and gave him detailed advice on his courses.

 

“One of those at Harvard who had a profound influence on Jack Kennedy was his tutor, Professor Bruce Hopper.”

 

An article about Bruce Hopper appeared in The Harvard Crimson, July 10, 1973, five days after he died. Author Andrew Hecht noted that Hopper taught three of the four Kennedy brothers – Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in 1938, John F. Kennedy in 1940, and Edward M. Kennedy in 1954. “He served as advisor for the late president’s thesis, later published as “Why England Slept.”[1]

 

Bruce Hopper at U of M

 

One of the most interesting students to ever attend the University of Montana, Bruce Campbell Hopper, found himself, like many others, a leaf in the winds of a war. He entered the University of Montana just as WW 1 began in Europe. He would subsequently fight in France; nearly lose his life, then go on to a role in the OSS and to distinction in the academic world.

 

Hopper’s adventures bore a resemblance to two other well-known University of Montana students, Mike Mansfield and Clarence K. Streit, who also joined the service during WW 1 – Mansfield when little more than a child at the age of 14. Each of these three men had esteemed careers and associated with some of the world’s most powerful men. Mansfield’s career was highly public and well documented, Streit’s was also well known, but Bruce Hopper’s career was not.

 

Born in Litchfield, Illinois in 1892, the son of Joseph and Katherine Hopper, Bruce came to Billings, Montana as a youngster, attended grade school and high school in Billings, and then enrolled at the University of Montana in 1913.

 

A brilliant student, he received the University’s Keith Scholarship given annually to one of Montana’s best high school debaters, picked from the statewide debating league. He also won the university’s Buckley prize in the school’s oratorical contest.

 

The 1914 Sentinel Yearbook has a full page photo of a prim, bow-tied Bruce Hopper, elected the University of Montana freshman class president. He is also listed as the circulation manager of the student newspaper, The Kaimin, and as a member of the Gamma Phi chapter of the 1915 Sigma Nu fraternity. It seemed that Hopper’s career at the University of Montana was firmly established.

 

Yet, a curious article appeared in the Great Falls Tribune early the following year demonstrating that his thoughts were not entirely focused on his academic career. WW1 was raging in Europe and, as the name implies, it would soon engulf the whole world.

 

Jan. 11, 1915 Great Falls Tribune:

 

MISSOULA – A combination of wanderlust and worthy purpose is instrumental in the resolve made by two students of the University of Montana to enter the service of the Red Cross corps in Europe. Bruce Hopper of Billings and Verne Robinson of Great Falls, both sophomores in the University of Montana, have completed arrangements whereby they may be members of some European hospital corps within the next two months.

 

Hopper waited two years before leaving for Europe.

 

In 1916 he again won the Buckley Oratorical prize and he also won 1^st prize in the Montana state oratorical contest. He was selected as editor of the Sentinel Yearbook, but then he suddenly left school to accept a job at the Star/Bulletin in Honolulu. Wanderlust may have gotten the best of him, yet he was a journalism student and it was an opportunity to travel and practice his craft. Next he was employed as a reporter for the Anaconda Standard in Butte, Mt. He did not stay there long either. Soon he left Montana again but this time he would see a fair amount of the world before he returned.

 

A 1916 Billings Gazette article noted that he had just won a scholarship to attend Harvard University, courtesy of the recently established ‘Montana Harvard Club’.[2]

 

By the academic year 1916 – 1917, Hopper attended Harvard University under auspices of the Price Greenleaf Scholarship Fund, and, like many young students of his generation, he began to prepare himself for war. His name is shown under the Harvard infantry battalion (provisional), company B, on Oct. 16, 1916.

 

America did not officially join in WW 1 until April, 1917, but many adventuresome Americans had already enlisted their services under the American Field Service program (AFS). While this program’s mission originally involved driving ambulances for the wounded to the American Hospital in Paris, its scope broadened as the war progressed. By 1917, working with the Red Cross and some other organizations, AFS ambulance drivers were operating in France, Italy, Greece, Albania, and Serbia.[3]

 

Many American AFS volunteers came from elite academic institutions such as Harvard University and other Ivy League schools. Remarkably, the most famous AFS volunteer of all, Ernest Hemingway, had no college affiliation, yet had already gained experience as a reporter for local newspapers. As with Hemingway, several of them seemed to have a literary bent and would eventually write about their experiences. The list included the American writers John Dos Passos, Malcom Cowley, Dashiell Hammett E. E. Cummings, Robert Service, William Seabrook, and many others.

 

Bruce Hopper to WW1 in France

 

Although he was a Harvard student, Bruce Hopper’s WW 1 experience closely mirrored that of several other young men who volunteered for AFS through a program started at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, known as the Andover Ambulance Unit. This Yale prep school, founded during the American Revolution, was well known for its fervent patriotism. A group of Phillips Academy patrons had already furnished money to purchase an ambulance for the American Hospital in Paris in December, 1914.

 

Over the next few months members of the Phillips Academy were busy raising funds for relief efforts in France, and the Academy soon offered military training in lieu of ‘prescribed athletics’, where more than 400 students registered. They formed a Phillips Academy Cadet Corps, adopted a “beautiful stand of colors,” and took a student pledge “to receive and obey all commands and orders for the benefit of the organization.”[4] In 1917 Mr. Alfred I. DuPont provided a “completely equipped ambulance, at a cost of $1,600” to this organization.

 

Hopper found himself beside the men of the Phillips Andover unit leaving the United States on April 28, 1917 bound for France aboard the Touraine, a French liner, “along with a few hundred other young fellows fresh from the classroom.”[5] On their way to Europe three of these Andover students, Jack Morris Wright, Bill Taylor, and Jack Sawhill befriended Bruce Hopper and they each followed virtually the same path to the war in France. Later, they roomed together, trained together, and flew over French skies together.

 

In a letter to Wright’s mother written by Hopper in 1918[6], he noted that although they came from different backgrounds, he and Jack Wright had one unique thing in common, their love of education. Wright was raised in France as a youngster and attended French schools prior to moving to New York. His knowledge of all things French delighted Hopper and his Andover friends. Hopper later referred to their group as the 4 Musketeers.

 

Arriving in France at Bordeaux, they made their way to the headquarters of the American Field Service in Paris and pledged their services to the French army. Along with almost a thousand other volunteers they served under Captain Mallet of the Reserve, headquartered at 21 Rue Raynouard in Paris. Typically, volunteers were either assigned as ambulance drivers or camion drivers. Here, Hopper and his friends became drivers in the camion service, where they hauled military equipment, ammunition, and personnel for the French Army. Hopper served in the Motor Transport Unit 526 (Reserve Mallet) from April to October, with the French Army on Soissons and Reims fronts.[7]

 

Their lives again changed dramatically when, in 1917, each of these four men enlisted in the United States Army, Aviation Corps 1^st Division, A. E. F.[8], in France, as privates – Hopper in October. This corps, sometimes referred to as the ASSC (Aviation Section Signal Corps), was the military aviation service of the United States Army and would eventually evolve into the United States Air Force. It was created in July of 1914.

 

They received their initial training at the 2^nd Aviation Instruction Center at Tours Aerodrome which was run by the French Air Force. From there they were sent to Issoudun Aerodrome for advanced training in the fall of 1917. They qualified as Reserve Military Aviators that fall – Hopper in November – and were next commissioned 1^st Lieutenants in the Aviation Section, Signal Corp. – Hopper in January, 1918. They were now proud American pilots.

 

Two of these men would not live to see the end of the war and two of them were seriously hurt. Hopper and Sawhill were both involved in flying incidents that required them to undergo hospital treatment, but they lived. Jack Morris Wright and William H. Taylor were killed in the line of duty. Casualties from the Andover Unit amounted to five out of twenty-two who went to Europe; one of these was Alexander Bruce who was a faculty member at Phillips Academy.

 

Hopper’s friend Jack Wright was the first one lost from the Andover group. Reaction to his death leaves no doubt it was a profound loss to his comrades and friends. Wright’s mother published her son’s letters posthumously, under the title A Poet of the Air.[9] Hopper memorialized Jack Wright in a very moving personal letter that provides unusual insight into the life of these young WW1 pilots.

 

The classic letter from Bruce Hopper to Morris’s mother appears below:

 

LETTER OF LIEUTENANT BRUCE C. HOPPER

 

American Air Service, France

 

February 27, 1918

 

MY DEAR MADAME WISE: —

 

Writing you has been a duty which I have long realized, and yet postponed indefinitely, thinking that a joint expression from all of Jack’s friends would be more fitting, and perhaps more representative of the feeling caused here by his death. A letter has come from Mr. Wise, however, which prompts me to write you personally, to assure you his effects will be taken care of, and his grave well marked. I had been transferred to another camp a few days before Jack’s accident. My purpose is to fly back the first day I have free, and bring all his things to Paris. I shall write you at once upon so doing, and also tell you of Jack’s resting-place in the little camp cemetery, and the provisions I will have made for its upkeep.

 

If words of a comrade can bring any sweetness to the sorrow of a mother, I offer mine freely. “Who would not sing of Lycidas — Lycidas who is dead ere his prime.” Jack was my soul comrade in life, and in death he is Lycidas; when I visualize the panorama of the last dramatic months I see all my experiences of war and war’s preparation colored by a soft and mellow light, the light of a personality which enveloped me like a cloak. That light was Jack. And in memory let me praise him, just as in life I revered his talents and noble character.

 

I first met Jack on board the Touraine, along with a few hundred other young fellows fresh from the classroom, coming to France for a share in the big fight. Jack was different from the rest of us in that he experienced a home-coming feeling when we sighted the banks of the Gironde. It was his France that welcomed him, the France he had learned to love intimately. We were first drawn together by discussions on poetry — Jack defending free verse of the modern school against my attacks in favor of the sonnet and older forms. Many times the battle of the books waged high with no decisive results, for we were each confirmed believers in our respective poetical faiths. In Paris he went wild with the ecstasy of reminiscence. He would point out place after place where he had done some particular thing, from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Montmartre. We visited his former residence, and even picked out another near Boulevard Saint-Michel, where we intended to seclude ourselves for six months after the war, there to write and work together.

 

Much against our inclinations we went into the camion service instead of the ambulance. The work in munition convoi was always distasteful to Jack. The dust of the roads irritated him, and the humdrum work of handling the cases of shells bored him terribly. He was given a special trailer for a studio, and relieved as much as possible of such work as greasing the trucks. All the time at the front he seemed in a semi-trance, a sort of nostalgia, and found vent only in long walks. I can remember so well trying to find him at times, and learned to go to his favorite hill overlooking the Aisne. There he would be walking aimlessly and a solitary figure in the background of glorious poppies and bluets. He lived within himself those days, entering but seldom in the camp sports, and certainly far from happy. On one occasion he brightened — his birthday. The camp artist (a French decorator), Jack Sawhill, and I helped him celebrate the day with a little supper in the trailer. Soon after that he left on permission, enlisted in aviation as you well know, and after his first difficulty was settled became happy again in his progress in mastery of the air.

 

We came to Tours together, and learned to fly. Jack realized more than most of us the larger significance of flying. He came down from his second flight convinced in his mind that he never would become a pilot. Flying was so tremendous in reality, so supernatural, so akin to some divine privilege. The immensity of space appalled him. He told me he, always felt as though invisible hands of a cosmic giant were supporting the frail wings of linen and wood, as on he rushed with the gripping power of the propeller. He was always a keen psychologist, and reflected on his mental flux while in the air. His naive curiosity prompted him again and again to “stunt” with his plane, long before he was master of the controls. A rivalry sprang up between him and Jack Sawhill, as to who would make the most rapid progress in winning the much coveted French brevet. One day Jack circled the field counter-traffic, that is he turned to the right on the take-off when the two balls at the pilotage indicated compulsory turning to the left. For that error he was taken off the flying list for two or three days, much to Jack Sawhill’s delight. Jack Sawhill, however, landed cross-wind the next day, and was given a similar punishment. This friendly rivalry continued till Jack Sawhill fell in a Nieuport, and was taken to the hospital with a broken arm.

 

At Tours we were four in one large room — calling ourselves the “Four Musketeers” — Big Bill Taylor was Porthos; Jack Sawhill, the fiery enthusiast, was d’Artagnan; I, because of my few additional years and gravity, was Athos; and Jack was Aramis. Jack was Aramis without Aramis’s later religious hypocrisy. Jack the polished and refined, the master of délicatesse, the carefully dressed, the quiet-mannered — yes, Jack was Aramis. We chided him a good deal upon his vanity, which pleased rather than annoyed him. He was ever conscious of being observed, and wished to appear at his best, be it his hair, of which he was justly proud, or the rubber boots issued to us by a paternal Government. We had a wonderful time in that room, one of the jeux where dice were défendu, and cards seldom seen. Jack had no time for the vulgarities of barrack life, a characteristic well understood by visitors who dropped in to get warm and smoke.

 

Our next experience was at the camp where Jack was killed. He and Jack Sawhill came down after three happy days in Paris. I had missed the two Jacks and was tickled to have them with me again, even as fellow-sufferers in the hardships of a newly constructed school. Flying was slowed up by the continuous rain; we all had colds and sore throats. I went to the camp hospital late in December, and was about starved. Jack tried to see me, but could not, but he saved a lot of delicacies and good cigarettes from his Christmas box, and showered me with such good things when I got back to the barracks.

 

The first one killed at our camp was a Lieutenant Paul, who went into a vrille [spin] on his first “tour-de-piste” in the smallest type of plane. We were all greatly depressed by the accident, and Jack more than most of us. He said to me: “Strange to think of life as complete when a fellow is killed like Paul was … yet everything laid out for him to do has been done … he finished his work … his turn had come.” Jack’s own turn was not far away, even though his fatalistic tendency had not prepared him fully to meet it.

 

Jack and I attended all classes together at the last camp. We were ready for spirals when I received orders to go back to Tours to fly—observers for a while. That was January 16. I bade him good-bye, saying I should meet him in Paris, or at the front, or maybe behind the moon. He reminded me of our Latin Quarter prospect “après la guerre” and promised to keep the rendezvous. His rendezvous was not with me, but with Death.

 

The news, a few days later, of his last spiral returned me. I could not believe it, a blackness came over me, and I asked: Could it be that our Jack, our Jack was gone? — my heart burned with thoughts of him, my comrade and your son. It seems that he spiralled down from a thousand metres with a cold motor, found he was gliding short of the field, and tried to lengthen his landing angle. He flattened out at fifty metres altitude, the plane stalled, then wing-slipped to the ground.

 

It is not for me to say it could have been averted. Jack had formed the habit of jerking off his goggles to land, saying he did so to protect his eyes should he smash. The wind would always bring water to his eyes, and he always appeared to have been rubbing them after landing. I think the dizziness caused by a spiral, heightened by water-blindness of the eyes, made him misjudge his altitude. But he is gone. He was a man in a man’s war. He had in abundance the qualities of a master pilot. He was a camarade jusqu’au bout [comrade to the end/finish].

 

My own mother has been dead for thirteen years. Roaming and university study accustomed me to a motherless life, so that before coming to France, I had lived with no consideration for that link with God — a mother. War and social isolation changes one, and I was soon to long for the tie I had never known, save as an unthinking boy. Comrades would receive letters from home, full of kind thoughts and little anxieties, full to the seals with the love only a mother can give, that brave and wonderful affection, which strains between fear and pride, and sends the loved one to the battle-line to fight and die—like a soldier. What a triumph for a mother to give a son. What a stimulant to ‘carry on’ a mother’s tenderness. I listened with intense loneliness when friends would tell of good news from ‘home and mother.’ I tell you this because it was Jack who understood my feeling, and it was Jack who shared his mother’s messages with me. What beautiful letters they were. What an appeal to a home-hungry boy. They revealed to me a magnificent fellowship between mother and son, an identity of spirit to which my heart of emptiness could aspire, but never attain. Once you mentioned your pleasant task of copying all his letters on a typewriter. What treasures they must be to you now —living companions in the dark hours of memory, so full of Jack, his eagerness, his hopes mounting high, and his visualized goal as a pilot and artist.

 

“Music, when soft voices die,

 

Vibrates in the memory;

 

. . . . . . . . . .

 

. . . . . . . . . .

 

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

 

Love itself shall slumber on.”

 

Not an ordinary rôle has been yours in giving a son to a noble cause. Mothers have offered their sons, and heroically too, since time’s evolution of nations first revealed to the necessity of war. But you have been the mother of an aviator. Jack belonged to the race of aerial cavaliers. To them earth is a place of bondage, for they have tasted the thrills of the heavens. To their ears comes the music of the universe, and to their eyes the vistas of other worlds denied to the earth-bound. Only those who have heard the upper winds whistle through the struts, only those who have invaded the vast and vacant chambers of unexplored atmosphere, only those who have roamed through the cloudy lanes of the great above can claim kinship in that race of men. The tremendous thrust of the motors, the gentle pressure on the “manche à balai,” the delicate adjustment of the essence manettes, all these are factors in the balanced life of a pilot. They represent laws and powers which should not be abused. They are a, b, c’s in the aviator’s manual, and mark the boundary-line between the earthly and sky dominions. They are the secrets of the aerial race, and secrets Jack knew.

 

Like the rest of us Jack early adopted the care-free swing to life in the air. One cannot worry and fly. He had a song on his lips to the last, a smile for every difficulty, and a shrug for unpleasant situations. As he often explained to me, his emotions in line of flight ranged from supreme ecstasy in the sheer fantasy of a long glide to the panicky fear which comes to a pilot when a collision with some other sky-pilgrim seems inevitable. Every day a pilot runs the gauntlet of human psychology, as much as a terrestrial experiences in months. To one as temperamentally contracted as Jack all this marvelous phenomenon of the sixth sense, the “feel” of flying, was an endless study. He loved it all, and made others understand it better because of his finer perceptions. Other than his beautiful personality I think this, the appreciation of the powers of the air, was Jack’s greatest contribution to the pioneers of American aviation in France. As the dreamer of real castles in the air, Jack shall long be remembered. As the comrade of my first Year of the War, he shall be enshrined in my memory.

 

Accept, mother of Jack, the sympathy of one who loved him, and cannot forget.

 

Sincerely

 

BRUCE C. HOPPER

 

1st Lt., A.S., S.C., A.E.F.

 

 

First American Bombers in WW1

 

In the spring of 1918 Lieutenant Hopper also suffered an accident but it didn’t prevent him from returning to duty by the summer.[10] He joined the 96^th Aero Squadron in July of 1918. That summer the 96th became the first American Squadron to drop bombs on German targets. Promoted to Captain before the end of the war, Hopper received the following medals for his service: the French Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre, Silver Star Citation, and the Pershing Citation.

 

An online paper entitled ‘96^th Aero Squadron’[11] gives a 13 page historical description of the overall role played by the 96^th Squadron in WW 1. Although the document is not attributed to him, Hopper was the squadron’s historian.

 

“When the 96th Aero Squadron was formed at Kelly Field, San Antonio, Texas, August 20, 1917, it was just like all other infant organizations of the rapidly growing army; it had no definite conception of what lay in store . . . Not one of the successive Commanding Officers, not any of the enlisted men, who had come in a body to Fort Slocum, could have prophesied the particular work laid out for the Squadron in the war, the coveted honor of being the first Squadron of the American Air Service to carry bombs over the lines, and for months the only Squadron in active operations against the enemy.”[12]

 

The 96^th Squadron was ordered to sail to England in late October, 1917 and arrived in Liverpool, November, 1917. From there it went to France, arriving at Amanty Field, near Gondrecourt, in May of 1918, where they “became established as a bombing unit in active service against the enemy.”

 

Plagued with worn out equipment, the mechanics struggled to put usable planes in the air. In some cases it required unusual methods.

 

“This was accomplished . . . by robbing parts from old worn out farm machinery, discarded by French peasants in the vicinity of the airdrome. Part of a weather beaten harvester was used for tail skids, and pieces of the oxcart tongue were employed to reinforce the wing spars of several planes. One of the planes carried brace wires which had once served on the telephone line of communications . . .

 

“As a pioneer squadron in the new school of bombardment instruction, the 96^th was given complete control of the hangars, transportation and armament, and assisted in organizing the systems of management still in force.”

 

By May 17 they had a complement of 10 two-man bombing teams in place.

 

“The 96^th Aero Squadron was ordered to Amanty Field, near Gondrecourt, May 18^th, 1918, and became established as a bombing unit in active service against the enemy. The flying equipment of the Squadron consisted of ten old type instruction bombing planes, type Breguet 14 B 2, with 300 Horsepower type 12 F.E.V. Renault motors, which had been transferred by the 7^th Aviation Instruction Center. The planes were in very poor condition, having been used for instruction since December, 1917, and were in need of constant repairs even before used as bomb carriers. At Amanty ten more teams, who had come there a month before, were assigned to the squadron to complete its organization.”

 

The following weeks were spent training the squadron in practice flights using specific formations.

 

By June 12, the 96^th Squadron accomplished what the writer claimed was “the first American bombing raid” of the war. It involved eight planes loaded with 640 kilos of bombs that were dropped on a rail station and warehouses. The planes received anti-aircraft fire and were attacked by enemy planes, but the mission was hailed a success. The unit performed several more bombing runs in June, but tragedy struck in July when two pilots were killed in a test flight, and on July 10 six planes went down in enemy territory and the pilots were captured. One of the captured pilots was Major Harry M. Brown, the commanding officer of their Squadron.

 

Hopper arrived at the 96^th Squadron in July, 1918. The Squadron, which was severely short of planes, received eleven new Breguets during the third week of July. Two of these new planes had photographic equipment for the first time. The Squadron now had 16 two-man teams available for duty.

 

On August 1^st, the 96^th was back in action when eight planes again bombed rail and warehouse targets at Conflans. Unable to fly because of adverse weather for over a week, the Squadron then resumed bombing on August 11^th when they again bombed a rail facility. The following day they obtained photographs of a bombing run for the first time, when they bombed the rail yard at Conflans again.

 

On August 15th their first experience with close combat came at Longuyon, where they were attacked by surprisingly agile enemy planes. The following day they were attacked after dropping bombs again at Conflans and, while suffering no loss of life, they learned the value of maintaining a tight formation while their planes were suffering an “increasing number of bullet holes.”

 

From then on they would bomb almost daily if the weather permitted it.

 

“During the 14 flying days of August, the 96^th carried out 20 successful raids, dropping 19,480 kilos of bombs. Precision bombing attained a high efficiency among the leading observers so that perfect hits were the rule. The average number of planes available was ten; the loss of planes was two. Tunnel guns were installed for the observer to use in case of an attack from under the tail. Apparatus was installed with which bombs could be released by the pilot, and thus enable the observer to give his attention to reconnaissance or fighting off the enemy air planes. The end of the month found the squadron well supplied with the latest equipment and prepared to continue the record setting pace in number of raids per flying days.”

 

Battles of Saint Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne

 

In the fall of 1918 the unit operated in two of the war’s most famous battles.

 

September marked the opening of the St. Mihiel campaign, and would prove costly to the 96^th Squadron. Known as the greatest air battle of the war it involved close to 2,000 planes, approximately 1,500 of these allied planes.[13] On the ground General John J. Pershing was in command of over half a million AEF soldiers who caught German forces in the “process of retreating.” [14] This battle lasted only four days. The aggressive tank commander, Colonel George S. Patton, and famed pilot, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, also participated in this battle.

 

“September 12, which opened the great St. Mihiel offensive, was, on all counts the worst flying day in many months. A terrific southwest wind made formation flying extremely dangerous . . .

 

“The end of the first day found the squadron badly crippled having lost three of the personnel, killed, and eight planes wrecked or put out of commission.”[15]

 

Wind and weather caused accidents and men were getting hurt without even flying in combat. They lost four more men on the second day of this battle. While they continued to bomb in the following days, they lost more men and planes. Four planes and eight men were lost on September 16^th alone.

 

“During the entire St. Mihiel offensive the squadron was operating under the most discouraging conditions of adverse weather and shortage of planes and flying personnel. The losses in four days were 16 fliers . . . and 14 planes, destroyed in combats with many of Germany’s ace squadrons, which had been moved to this sector . . .”[16]

 

The St. Mihiel Battle was the first one of the war planned by American General John Pershing and his staff. It also launched the career of Colonel George S. Patton who drew attention for the performance of his men.

 

“Yet, the hallmark of the battle was Colonel Patton’s employment of unsupported tank platoons in a ‘cavalry-styled attack outside the [small village] of Jonville. On the 13^th of September, the 326^th Battalion was southwest of St. Benoit where they were going to link with the enveloping units of General Samuel D. Rockenbach. However, an impatient Colonel Patton did not wait for the meeting. Instead, he sent a patrol of three tanks and five dismounted soldiers toward the [hamlet] of Woel to keep contact with the enemy. ‘Thirty minutes later the patrol was attacked by a force estimated to be at least a battalion of infantry accompanied by a battery of 77mm guns.’ Colonel Patton reacted to the fluid situation by sending the defenders a platoon of five tanks. The tanks joined into the fray, and without infantry support, drove the Germans about six miles to the outskirts of Jonville. ‘During the running battle the tankers killed or put into flight at least a dozen machine-gun crews and captured four 77mm cannon.’ Thus, Colonel Patton responded to the fluid situation by aggressively committing his ‘unsupported’ tanks. Further, the tanks ‘cavalry-styled’ attack caught the German infantry off-guard and gave the initiative back to the ‘outnumbered’ Americans.”[17]

 

On September 12, 1918 Bruce Hopper’s 96^th Squadron became part of the 1^st Day Bombardment Group and was then combined with several other squadrons. They would next move to Maulan airdrome where they would prepare for the Argonne-Meuse campaign.

 

Argonne-Meuse

 

The Argonne-Meuse offensive was the largest of the war, involving 1.2 million American soldiers and lasted the final 47 days of the war. U. S. war dead in this battle numbered more than 26,000.

 

“The 96^th had plenty of planes, but was short pilots and observers to carry out the operation orders on a large scale. Accordingly flying personnel was borrowed from the 11^th and 20^th Squadrons. The formations would leave the ground numbering 17 to 20 planes, and allowing for motor trouble and other difficulties due to difference in range of speed, there generally would be a tight formation of 12 to 14 planes when the objective was reached. The success of the big formations was best, did more to raise the spirits and courage of the squadron than any incident in its history [18]. . .

 

“One of the first successes with a large formation was the bombing of Banthville, October 1^st, with 13 planes in ‘vol du canard’ [duck formation], Lt. Hopper, Flight leader, Lt. Kelly, leading observer. 1240 kilos of bombs made great havoc in the town, starting three fires with incendiaries. On October 2^nd, 14 planes dropped 1220 kilos of bombs on Cornay with good results. Eight enemy planes attacked before the lines were recrossed; one of our planes went down, but reached allied territory, bring[ing] down one enemy in the descent. October 3^rd, 1530 kilos were dropped on Grandpre. Eight enemy planes attacked but were driven off, by the fire of observers. Eight big bursts were observed in the town, four in the railroad yards; three fires were started by the incendiaries . . . All our planes were badly shot up. In the fight over Landres St. Georges, against 30 enemy scouts, the 96^th did not lose a single plane but brought down two of the enemy. When the fight was at its height, a group of American pursuit planes arrived and mixed with the enemy in what is popularly called a ‘dog fight.’ The spads claimed eleven of the enemy. Bombing during the early days of the Argonne drive was extremely precarious because of low clouds . . .

 

“October 18^th is a record date in the annals of the Squadron. A formation of 14 planes, led by Lt. Hopper, and Lt. Kelly, reaching its objective, Sivry, with all its planes, and trailed bombs through the center of the town and to the roads beyond. Lt. Col. Thomas S. Bowen, commander of the Group, was on this raid as an observer, and joined in the fight which ensued. 1600 kilos of bombs, including 40 of the new incendiaries were dropped. According to intelligence reports from French sources, 250 men were killed, and 700 wounded on this raid.”[19]

 

“During the Aargonne-Meuse operations the 1^st Day Bombardment Group was distinguished for its precision bombing. Enemy troops were attacked, material was destroyed, and the morale of the enemy so shaken that formations of bombers became a source of constant dread.”[20]

 

In his book “Hostile Skies: A Combat History of the American Air Service in World War 1”[21], author James J. Hudson, paid Hopper unusual credit:

 

“Bruce C. Hopper, a pilot with the 96^th Aero Squadron throughout its war operations, probably rolled up more bombing missions than any other American pilot.”

 

Hudson also quoted Hopper as he gave credit to others and to the aircraft that the squadron flew:

 

“Although scheduled to receive its advanced bombardment training in southern England, plans were changed, and the unit was sent immediately to France . . . Here the squadron trained, for the most part, in the popular Breguet – the aircraft they would use later in combat . . . the mechanics of the squadron, in the words of Bruce C. Hopper, ‘“acquired a complete knowledge of the Breguet day bombardment plane and of the Renault motor by daily visits to the nearby Michelin factory where the planes were assembled. The experience thus gained by assisting in the construction of the planes and assembling the Renault motors in the factory proved of immense value when the squadron was sent to the Zone of Advance.’”

 

Armistice and Wanderlust – November 11, 1918

 

The armistice ending the conflict went into effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918.

 

Hopper remained in France the following year as did many of his comrades. After a stint at the G.H.Q in Chaumont as an historian, he enrolled in the Army Education program offered to servicemen who wanted to study abroad in France, studying at Sorbonne University. Many American soldiers took advantage of this opportunity to study in Europe – at taxpayer expense.

 

“Those soldiers selected received a subsistence allowance of $2.00 per day for food and up to $1.00 per day for lodging . . . Over eight thousand students participated in this program, 6,300 attending French universities . . . Seventy-five percent of those studying in France enrolled at either the Sorbonne in Paris or at Toulouse in southwestern France . . .”[22]

 

Hopper also studied briefly at Oxford in England. Even after he attended these famous schools, Hopper’s wanderlust again found him traveling around the world and writing about it. Settling on a career in academia seemed unlikely, but another brush with death may have changed his mind.

 

An article in The Fourth Estate from August 26, 1922 found Hopper briefly back in Montana. He had just returned from a trip to China that almost killed him:[23] [24]

 

“Bruce C. Hopper, former reporter on the Great Falls, Mont., Leader, war veteran and explorer, is visiting his parents at Billings, Mont., from whom he had been separated for six years. Mr. Bruce [Hopper] won the Harvard scholarship for Montana during the time he was working on the Leader, and later went to that college. The war broke out and he wanted to join in but as the United States was not yet engaged and the allies would not enlist him, he left for France through engaging with a shipment of mules for the French army.

 

“Arriving in France he endeavored to enlist in the army but at that time was refused and engaged as an ambulance driver. Later he was transferred to the French flying service, and when the American army came over Mr. Hopper was called back as an instructor to his countrymen. Soon after he secured his discharge to enlist in the American army flying service, where he had a spectacular career, being shot down, and was so badly wounded that he was put out of commission for the rest of the war.

 

“With the close of the war, Mr. Bruce [Hopper] traveled through Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and India, concluding his travels by a boat and caravan trip far into China, seeking the headquarters of the Yangtsze river. Fever contracted on the journey kept him a patient in a Shanghai hospital for ten months. . .

 

“Following his recovery he worked as a newspaper correspondent in China and the Orient. At present he is working on a book of travel which he calls ‘Through China’s Back Door’.”

 

While publishing articles and traveling all over the world, Hopper was accruing experience that would provide the basis for his future career.

 

Harvard Graduate and Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs / Charles Crane / Bolshevism & Russia

 

He next returned to his studies at Harvard, graduating in 1924, and then completed his M.A. there in 1925. In 1926 he joined the Institute of Current World Affairs, an organization that exists to this day. It provides fellowships to candidates who show “promise of enriching public life in the U.S. by enhancing understanding of foreign countries, cultures, and trends.” While the candidates do not have to be U.S. citizens, they must show “strong and credible ties to the U.S.”[25]

 

The Institute was founded in 1925 by the fascinating Charles R. Crane who was a wealthy businessman from Chicago. Funded by an even wealthier father, Crane became a world traveler well before the turn of the century. One observer described him in grandiose terms: “Charles Crane was arguably the first true American globalist.”[26] He was also an inveterate investor/businessman who represented American interests in many countries, including China, Russia, and the Middle East where he eventually helped secure American investments in Saudi oil fields in the 1930’s.

 

The Institute he founded no doubt produced its share of ‘fellows’ capable of pointing Americans of all stripes, whether government or private, in directions they might not otherwise follow. The formation of two other well-known American institutions, the OSS, and the CIA did not occur until later. American experience in foreign matters paled in comparison to the Europeans. While President Wilson had fervently advocated joining the League of Nations, congressional impudence continued to prevent it. In spite of Charles Crane, America still did not see itself as a global power.

 

In 1909 the ‘globalist’ Crane was appointed minister of China by President Taft, but he was recalled and forced to resign allegedly because of controversial articles that appeared in Chicago newspapers which criticized recent treaties with Japan and China.[27] President Wilson, his friend, then again appointed Crane the U.S. Minister to China in 1921. President Wilson had earlier assigned him to a commission relating to the makeup of post WW1 Middle Eastern countries. As a member of the King – Crane Commission, Crane advocated independence for the former Ottoman Arab possessions, but not the creation of a Jewish state carved from Palestine.

 

Crane was also regarded as an expert in Russian affairs, and had traveled widely and invested in Russia for years. President Wilson appointed him a member of the Root commission to Russia in 1917, hoping the new Russian Provisional Government would accept American advice in return for American support, but it was too late. The timing of the Root commission to Russia prevented its success. The Bolshevik revolution was already at hand and President Wilson had no use for Bolshevism, refusing any action that might be interpreted as supporting it. Crane was one of Wilson’s closest advisors and had supported Wilson’s campaign generously, but he could not change the course of Russian history.

 

Bruce Hopper’s training in journalism and his interest in overseas travel made him a perfect candidate for the Institute of Current World Affairs. He spent almost three years as one of their fellows, observing Bolshevism first hand from Moscow, beginning in 1926. Much of what he learned he would use in his Ph. D. dissertation at Harvard University in 1930. Hopper left the Institute for World Affairs in 1929.

 

In his book Charles R. Crane: The Man Who Bet on People, author David Hapgood analyzed the Institute of Current World Affairs and its mission:

 

“In Charles Crane’s lifetime ICWA was not conceived of as merely a training ground. The men John Crane and Walter Rogers would choose and if necessary train were supposed to do their work for the institute, not simply learn there and then move on to do their real work for someone else . . . the aims of the Institute are 1) the gradual buildup of a corps of twelve to fifteen men, each man to be an authority on the current affairs of a major area of the world, and the men, taken together, to include within their purview the entire world; and 2) the making of the fullest possible effectual use of their knowledge and personal services. . . Rogers added: ‘Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is, namely, that of interpreting a people, or a group, to itself and to others. Such a task requires something beyond the gleanings of a Cook’s tour, something beyond hard work and good intentions, something even beyond knowledge; sympathy, and insight, the mellowness of time, the gift of expression are indispensable’ . . . By the end of the 1920’s, with only three men in the field, Rogers concluded that the kind of person he wanted was only rarely available. . .

 

“Crane strongly objected to the idea that ICWA should train people to work for somebody else – anyone else. When Bruce Hopper left in 1929 for an appointment at Harvard, Crane bitterly said the Institute had ‘wasted its time on him.’”[28]

 

Hopper then returned to Harvard University where he earned his Ph. D. in 1930. His time in Russia resulted in a dissertation focused on the new government in the Soviet Union titled, “Soviet Economic Statecraft.” He was then hired at Harvard as an assistant professor of government and began a series of eight lectures in 1931 at the Lowell Institute of Boston. These lectures resulted in his book, Pan Sovietism, The Issue before America and the World.

 

Beginning in 1929 Hopper lectured widely on the Soviet government and the nature of communism. He was one of the first western observers to call attention to the starvation of millions of Soviet people in 1932. He was quoted with the following observation in July of 1932 by Robert Kelley of the State Department: “Professor Bruce Hopper who was in Moscow in July of 1932, reported the following, ‘In Ukraine, there is a definite famine. Peasants come [to the cities] and sell old rags to buy a piece of bread. They will likely die after the food is finished.’”[29]

 

A good deal of controversy exists regarding the reporting of this famine and its effects on the Soviet Union during this period. Several western journalists were later accused of hedging their reports on the severity of the conditions that existed in the regions affected, and Soviet officials downplayed it to the point of hypocrisy. Some modern estimates of the severity of the famine put the number of deaths related to it in the 5 to 8 million range. The term Holodomor [death by hunger] is used today to portray the severity of the tragedy, especially in the Ukraine, where the term genocide is also sometimes applied to the effects of Stalin’s effort to eliminate Ukrainian independence. Hopper is sometimes credited with the origin of the phrase, “Starve itself great,” to spotlight the effects of collectivism under the brutal Stalin regime.[30]

 

In his book, Modernization from the Other Shore, author David C. Engerman examines this Soviet famine in great detail: “Many Western observers, ranging from fellow-travelers to anticommunists, summed up their balance sheets on the Soviet Five-Year Plans with the frequently repeated canard that the USSR was “starving itself great”- a phrase that appeared well before the devastating 1932-1933 famine. In Europe’s colonies, political leaders as well as intellectuals enthusiastically endorsed the Soviet goal of rapid industrialization as a shortcut to economic modernity.”

 

Engerman describes Hopper’s career from his initial days in Moscow:

 

“Well integrated in the social whirl of expatriate Moscow, Hopper frequented the home of William Henry and Sonya Chamberlin, as well as the bachelor apartments of Walter Duranty (Moscow) and H. R. Knickerbocker (Berlin). Even before George Frost Kennan made his first trip to Moscow in 1933, he and other diplomats had been in close touch with Hopper, who sent confidential and informative missives to the State Department officials Kennan, John Wiley, and Loy Henderson. When [Robert F.] Kelley, the chief of the Eastern European Division, convened an ‘expert roundtable,’ Hopper was among those featured. In addition, Hopper maintained close contacts with wide-ranging journalists like Armstrong, who asked him to vet manuscripts on Russia for Foreign Affairs, and Lippman. These contacts did not spare Hopper from criticism of his scholarly work; indeed, one scholar called his work ‘frivolous.’ Most members of the expert cult, however, were more generous.

 

“Perhaps this wide network of acquaintances distracted Hopper from serious scholarly work. In any case, his principal book derived not from his research in Moscow but from a series of lectures given in 1930. That book, along with articles in Foreign Affairs (edited by Armstrong after [Archibald Cary] Coolidge’s death in 1928), emphasized the problems of industrialization among a ‘backward people’ such as the Russians. Very much like Coolidge’s argument that Peter the Great replaced centuries of ‘Asiatic despotism’ with a modern state, Hopper argued that the Bolsheviks were bringing European modernity to backward Asia. But whereas Coolidge had argued that Peter had ‘Europeanized’ a small stratum of elites, Hopper noted the Bolsheviks’ efforts to bring European ways to the entire population of the Soviet Union.

 

“Although the category of Asia ostensibly implied fixed racial categories, Hopper employed a far less rigid cognitive geography, one in which the classifications related to development and not just geography. Coolidge had used Asia to stand for a political system; his student used it to mean an economic one. Soviet Russia, to Hopper, represented the ‘halfway station between the advanced West and the backward East’ – though it was moving, through a continental shift of sorts, in a westerly direction. Russia, situated between the industrial nations of the west and the backward nations and colonies of the east, was especially well suited to bring industrialism to backward peoples. With Soviet-led industrialization, Hopper continued, ‘the old East becomes the new West.’ Nations once part of Asia could enter the west by industrializing.

 

“As for nations, so for individuals. To Hopper, the transformation of backward Asia was social as well as economic. He offered a variation on Counts’s view that Russia’s psychological revolution would accompany its economic one, but he did so in geographic terms. The Russians were poorly suited for industrial life, Hopper wrote, because of the eastern dispositions. To make Russia western and modern, then, was tantamount to changing ‘the spirit of the people of the East.’ Hopper never confronted the paradox in his own thinking. Like Huntington, he attributed national character to climate and topography – and yet he expected it to change with economic circumstances.

 

“The spread of industrialization came with its own dangers for the United States. Like Bryce Hoover, Hopper both predicted and feared the rise of Soviet economic power, seeing it as a threat to American political and economic interests in Asia. He nevertheless predicted boldly that Soviet industrialization would succeed, eventually making Asia the battleground between economic systems.”

 

Another author has described Hopper in a more negative light. In his book Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, author Ido Oren examines Hopper’s views as they changed during the 1930’s. Oren’s book focused on what he called the ‘accomodationist’ thinking of some leading American scholars of the time. Several Harvard scholars were among this group of intellectuals who were prone to “portray Stalin’s Russia in positive terms and to recommend that America learn certain lessons from the Soviet Union.”[31]

 

Oren argues that Hopper initially saw the Soviet system as a “model of state-guided industrial rationalization and intelligent economic planning,” especially in light of “America’s sagging economic output.” Oren also states that Hopper was one of a group of political scientists whose views changed from a pro-Soviet attitude to one that condemned it. “For example, Bruce Hopper, Harvard’s senior Soviet expert, frequently spoke favorably about the Soviet experiment until a visit to Moscow in 1938 turned him against Stalinism.”

 

Oren’s book, in fact, focuses a large section of one chapter on Harvard University scholars and their accommodationist views. Two of Hopper’s Harvard contemporaries are mentioned in connection with Harvard University’s predominance in the field of Soviet studies. He also mentions their connection with the U.S. military.

 

“The two arguably most important books on totalitarianism to have come out of this military-philanthropic-academic complex were written by Harvard University political scientists: How Russia Is Ruled, by Merle Fainsod, and Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

 

“Fainsod was a principal member of Harvard’s Russian Research Center and was involved in establishing close ties between the center and the U.S. military. At the time he wrote How Russia Is Ruled, Fainsod participated in a classified government-sponsored project on Soviet vulnerability to covert political warfare. The book, like other publications produced at the Russian Research Center, drew significantly on interviews with Soviet escapees, facilitated and funded by the Air Force (whose interest in the interviews stemmed from the need for improved target selection and psychological warfare capabilities) . . . How Russia Is Ruled was a model of erudition; it was thorough, well-written, and meticulously footnoted. Published shortly after Stalin’s death [1953], the book remained the leading college and graduate school text on Soviet politics for at least two decades.”

 

Oren’s book then examined Hopper in some detail.

 

“Merle Fainsod was not the only Sovietologist at Harvard’s government department. In fact, in the 1930’s Fainsod devoted much of his energy to the study of American government, allowing Bruce Campbell Hopper (1892 – 1973) to establish himself as Harvard’s senior authority on the Soviet Union. Although Hopper is largely forgotten today, in the 1930’s he appears to have been better known than Fainsod on the strength of his popularity as a speaker, author, and government consultant on Soviet affairs.

 

“From his days as an undergraduate student at Harvard during World War 1, Hopper’s career straddled the line between academic and national security work (thus suggesting that the intimate relationship between the U. S. government and Soviet studies during the Cold War was new in scope more than in principle). Hopper received officer training at Harvard before going to France to serve as a flight leader in the 96^th Day Bombardment Squadron. In the early 1920’s Hopper traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and in 1926 he was appointed an instructor at his alma mater. Hopper spent 1927 – 29 in Moscow as a fellow of the Institute of World Affairs, established by Charles R. Crane, a Russophile industrialist from Chicago (who also supported Samuel Harper). Hopper wrote his doctoral dissertation on ‘Soviet Economic Statecraft’ and in 1930 was promoted by Harvard to assistant professor of government.

 

“Hopper enjoyed a close relationship with Harvard’s president, political scientist A. Lawrence Lowell, who encouraged him to engage in public speaking. In 1931 Hopper laid out his ideas on contemporary Russia in a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. A book based on the lectures was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States.

 

“The lectures indicated that Hopper had traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union, reaching such remote areas as ‘the Khirgiz Steppe’ and the ‘Kola Peninsula along the artic.’ His view of the Russians was at once patronizingly racialist and amorally realistic. As a self-styled adherent of the ‘new [realist] school of international relations,’ Hopper believed that rational political analysis need not be hampered by ‘passing judgments, based on outraged ethics’; rather, he understood the world in terms of a great power struggle. He admired the great strides Russia was making in its industrialization program, but he was also fearful of it, for ‘the arena [of great power competition] is shifting to the new economic centers of the Pacific . . . [where] capitalism and socialism, America and Pan-Sovietism, will meet in conflict.’

 

“To Hopper, the explanation of Russia’s rapid industrialization was rooted in the Russian national character, shaped by racial, linguistic, geographic, and historical circumstances. The Slavs were of Aryan stock, but in Russia they had ‘mixed freely,’ first with the ‘Asiatic’ [read: inferior] Finns, and then with the Tartars, who were ‘Mongols in the upper crust, and Turks in the rank and file . . . The high cheek bones and flat faces, seen so often [in Russia], are attributed to the Finnish mixture.’ The Russian language was ‘closest to the soul. And Russian poetry is a primitive yearning which takes us right back to morning of the race.’ Geography, specifically Russia’s ‘unity and immensity explain much about the Tsarist autocracy and the centralized control of the Communist Party.’ The long winter nights, ‘probably account for Russian loquacity. No people in the world talk so much as the Russians . . . Russian friends have kept me up all night to convince me on some point in metaphysics, and when I, in weariness, would be convinced, they would switch positions and attack me with the very arguments I had used ten hours before. This is why so many Russians are political prisoners on the island of Solovetsky in the White Sea. They just must talk’.

 

“The extremes of cold and hot weather, Hopper continued in his discussion of the Russian character, ‘bring on lassitude and passivity of body and spirit.’ The ‘oppression of climate has prepared the Russian for the oppression of man’ and material deprivation: ‘Foreigners are surprised at the number of Russians who can live in one room. They do not share our views of privacy. There has always been a kind of primitive communism among peasants. Russians, huddling together in the midst of a cold immensity, have long been accustomed to doing things collectively, as groups rather than as individuals. That is one reason why they may accept a socialism which would be rejected elsewhere.’

 

“The harsh effect of the climate on the Russian character was reinforced by the weight of Russian history. The Russian people ‘have no real tradition of self-government. They know neither freedom nor the intoxication of liberty . . . They are peasants, or ex-peasants with their roots in the village, until recently dark in their illiteracy.’

 

“Paradoxically, it was the racial inferiority and cultural backwardness of the Russian people that accounted for the Soviet Union’s impressive modernization. Scenes of ‘liquidation’ and ‘starvation’ might be ‘too harrowing to the Anglo-Saxon mind,’ but the Russian people ‘have long been accustomed to the sacrifice of their welfare without even the promise of earthly paradise.’ So passive and malleable were the Russian masses that they were ‘unaware of the historical significance of what is happening to them. It means that a whole people . . . are being repoured into a collective mold . . . The result seems to be an athletic, healthy, energetic, creative, but unromantic, moral but utilitarian and Godless, new creature in the social cosmos of man. Human kind has never produced a creature like this impersonal man, the synthetic beehive, destined to rule Russia in the years immediately to come.’

 

“How was America to cope with this ‘new creature’? How was it to compete with Russia in the emergent Pacific arena? At this point the accomodationist dimension of Hopper’s thinking comes through most clearly. Hopper argued that although collectivism ‘destroys many of the things that we hold dear,’ Americans ignored collectivism’s impressive ‘economic results’ at their own peril. Americans must ‘learn from Russia’ without emulating its collectivist excesses. They must install ‘sufficient state planning, based on private property, to permit co-ordination of production and consumption, the lack of which has produced the present world crisis . . . Americans must have some measure of planning to overcome the technological unemployment, and to give the highest possible wage to labor, along with the security of employment and provision for retirement. The ruthless competition of Laissez Faire must be curbed.’

 

“In sum, Hopper’s shaken confidence in America’s economic vitality combined with his admiration and fear of Russia’s rapid economic growth to produce an accommodatonist desire to ‘learn’ from Russia. Hopper’s case suggests that one did not have to be a left-leaning, pro-masses, progressive to rationalize Stalinism. Elitist, patronizing attitudes toward the ‘Asiatic’ Russian masses, coupled with a ‘romance of economic development,’ were also important sources of uncritical views of Stalin’s dictatorship.

 

“Hopper paid six visits to the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1938, and after each visit he reported his observations to the Russian desk of the State Department, with which he developed close ties. After each visit Hopper also, in his words, ‘spill[ed] the beans to the war colleges, which would reproduce the lectures as classified.’[[32]] In his numerous classified briefings and public lectures Hopper continued to display a sympathetic attitude toward Stalin’s industrialization efforts. In March 1933, for example, he told the brass of the Naval War College that the Bolsheviks had made great progress in raising the cultural level of the Russian masses, and that although Russia’s first five-year plan had failed to improve the welfare of Soviet citizens, it had been ‘eminently successful’ in transforming a backward country into an industrial power. In a 1937 lecture Hopper contended that the ‘Soviet solution of capitalist evils offers eventually greater freedom to the individual than any other successor to democracy.’ Not until his last visit to Moscow, in 1938, did Hopper conclude that ‘virtue [had] departed from the leaders of Russia.’

 

“In 1942 Hopper was posted in Sweden to monitor the Baltic area for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor of the CIA). Subsequently he served as chief historian of the U.S. Strategic Air Force, established a friendship with General Carl Spaatz, and became special consultant to Spaatz when the general was appointed Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. When Hopper retuned to Cambridge in 1947, he found himself passed over for promotion by junior colleagues, who had returned to their faculty posts immediately after the war. The fact that much of Hopper’s research output was classified, hence unpublished, also hurt his case for promotion. Hopper hatched a plan whereby General Spaatz would use political connections to influence the Harvard authorities to establish a new professorship in air power politics, but the plan must have failed, for Hopper remained an associate professor until his retirement in 1961. Hopper’s teaching interests shifted in the direction of his old passion, air power, and he did not become significantly involved in the work of the new Russian Research Center.

 

“In a book review published in 1949, Hopper applauded the author’s claim that the reconciliation between political liberty and economic democracy would depend on the readiness of the Soviets to ‘revise some of their most important ideological conceptions.’ Hopper thus clearly reversed his earlier position that the United States must revise its ideology of laissez-faire and move toward the Soviet collectivist model. But he does not seem to have reversed his low opinion of the political capacities of ‘Asiatic’ people. In a lecture delivered after his retirement, Hopper claimed that ‘in spite of all the nonsense about colonialism in the increasing virulent propaganda of our [communist] enemies, the truth is that colonial government and training throughout the ages has civilized the world . . . There never was a more dedicated or splendid lot of men than those of the British civil service who went to all parts of the world bringing justice, mercy, and enlightenment to primitive people.”

 

While Ido Oren’s book spotlights pieces of Hopper commentary that seemed to support his – Oren’s -‘accomodationalist’ analysis, it also appears to ignore commentary that runs counter to this theory. If Hopper’s lectures supported Stalinist economic policies, as Oren posits, it is certainly not clear in Hopper’s 1930 essay, The Soviet Touchstone: Industrialization,[33] which appeared in the April 1930 issue of Foreign Affairs. Here Hopper asked the question, “How do 2 percent convince 98 percent that they must suffer for the sake of the Five Year Plan?” Earlier, he noted, “The 98 percent majority, however, who are not sustained by discipline and faith and do not enjoy the sweets of power, are more concerned with the problems of subsistence.” In his attempt to answer the power question, Hopper gave some short and precise answers that do not appear to endorse the Soviet process, even as they attempt to explain it.

 

“Several answers can be given. Armed rebellion is virtually impossible. Open resistance is kept within local bounds, and is quickly punished. The 125 million peasants, constituting four-fifths of the total population, lack energy and organization, even though (as the unquestionably severe food crises in 1929 shows) they may indulge in a kind of sabotage, a sullen resistance to the Government’s policy of fixing agricultural prices. In the urban centers persons who do not approve of the party’s program must co-operate or starve.”

 

The entire tone of Hopper’s essay examined the Soviet model using this type of language and dialectic and it does not seem to present “uncritical views of Stalin’s dictatorship.” While Oren’s book hardly focuses on the American Depression and its effects on the American economy, it seizes the opportunity to brand as ‘accomodationist’ any thinking that problems in the two economies might share common solutions. Nowhere does Oren seem to address the political solutions that FDR installed. Some of Roosevelt’s New Deal solutions seemed to have been prescribed by Hopper in his lectures and were, and still are, described as ‘socialistic’.

 

Hopper – Member of Council on Foreign Relations

 

Not long after leaving the Institute of Current World Affairs, Hopper joined another influential organization. Beginning in January, 1930, Hopper’s name is listed as a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, headquartered in NYC. Like the Institute of World Affairs, the Council On Foreign Relations exists even today.

 

It was founded in 1921 as a ‘think tank’ on foreign policy matters of that period. It had its origins in the turmoil that followed WW1, focusing not only on government matters, but on the business sector as well. It started publication of a magazine called Foreign Affairs in 1922 which was funded by donations that had been solicited by letter to “the thousand richest Americans.”[34]

 

Membership in this organization over the years reads like a Who’s Who of wealthy and powerful American citizens. Today’s board of directors includes people like former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Its Corporate Membership in 2013 included IBM, G.E., Chevron, Bank of America, Walmart and many other powerful American businesses.

 

“The Council on Foreign Relations’ David Rockefeller Studies Program – CFR’s “think tank” – is home to more than seventy full – time, adjunct, and visiting scholars and practitioners (called “fellows”). Their expertise covers the world’s major regions as well as the critical issues shaping today’s global agenda.”[35]

 

In the 1930’s Hopper frequently published articles in Foreign Affairs. He was a sought-after guest speaker and he took advantage of it, speaking at events all over the country.

 

In May of 1940 he gave an interestingly prescient speech at a symposium called “Expanding Our Horizons,” at the Metropolitan Opera House in NYC.[36] America had not entered WW2 at that point.

 

In his typically vivid style, Hopper stated that the peace settlement at the close of WW1 resulted in the conflict that became WW2.

 

“Guided by American idealism, and self-determination based on race and language, the peace-makers in 1919 sprayed small states on the map of Eastern Europe, hoping thereby to achieve solid support for the peace settlements. In the League of Nations they built a roof without substructure. Balkanization collapsed that roof. Instead of serving as buffers between the Teuton and the Slav, the small states of Eastern Europe became an international vacuum, a low pressure area between two barometric plateaux. They became the means for the two revolutions to flow together, the political fact which precipitated this war. . . In the last twenty-six months thirteen small states have been erased from the map.”

 

He then stated his case for supporting the Allied cause in Europe:

 

“But freedom will become increasingly difficult to manage . . .

 

“There are some Americans, some unconsciously, others quite aware, who are preparing that fate for us all. But not our people as a whole. We are a friendly people. We have a profound sympathy for other democratic peoples whose form of government we inspired. But our own people must be taught that through fear of war all democracies dig their own graves; that non-aggression is not a life-insurance for any nation, that, in the future, our two oceans will no longer assure us of security but will provide the silent approach for air power. . .

 

“We must make our people understand that we are a great nation, and no longer an infant republic with hideaway privileges of the child; that spoiling the Egyptians is an ancient custom vastly improved in speed and thoroughness.”

 

By the same token Hopper‘s vision of victory came with an obligation to help the vanquished. His foresight was strangely correct.

 

“Finally, we may say: no military intervention; no dictate as to politics or boundaries in Europe. But, taking the long view, we know that we have had the economic power to save the cause of evolution in Europe against this demoniac revolutionary nihilism. Let us accept responsibility to that cause, our moral and economic cause, in Europe and in the Pacific, lest the scepter of economic power itself fall from our seemingly nerveless grasp. If it comes to that, let us be wise this time – not war debts but subsidies.

 

“At the end of this war Europe will be disciplined, largely socialized, and hard. Let us, then, aid that regional bloc which is least likely to unite Europe against us, and most likely to cooperate with us in world demobilization, in the transfer of energy from the making of armaments to civil production. In that way, and only in that way, lies peace.

 

“And in the reconstruction let us use our power to attain that enduring security of international division of labor and a relatively free world market, and not be content again with the security of the cemetery where the children and ghosts of the vanquished will one day unite to renew the struggle.”

 

 

Hopper – OSS

 

Hopper was already a government consultant prior to WW2 and his knowledge and resources had proved to be valuable to the U.S. government. His role in the OSS during WW2 found him in Sweden in charge of the American OSS operation in Stockholm. His stop there was of a short duration. Blair Bolles, a nationally syndicated columnist who visited Sweden, reported in July of 1943 that Hopper no longer worked there.[37]

 

“In London and Stockholm, two capitals recently visited by this correspondent, there is a refreshing identity of interest among the various agencies concerned with overseas business – the foreign service, the Office of War Information, the board of Economic Warfare, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Army and Navy intelligence services.

 

“The men work as a team. The lone wolf departs. The OSS was represented in Stockholm by the brilliant Harvard historian, Bruce C. Hopper. He did not see eye to eye with the other foreign policy men there and he left Stockholm. Now he is in London, the historian of the U. S. Army’s Eighth Air Force.”

 

However, this does not square with a description by a fellow OSS officer who wrote about his own experiences during that time, Richard Helms. Helms later became a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In his book “A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency”, Helms gave the following account of Hopper’s assignment in Sweden.

 

“Neutral Sweden also offered access to Germany and the occupied area in Scandinavia, and along the Baltic. Bruce Hopper, the first OSS officer, arrived in Stockholm in March 1942. He came from London, skirting enemy-occupied territory in a fast-flying RAF light bomber. By December that year, the station – three men strong – was established. Although the State Department had reluctantly agreed to accept the OSS representatives as members of the legation, the minister in charge was less than welcoming. Within days of his arrival, the chief of station was informed that if anything resembling espionage was undertaken, the minister would insist that the State Department recall the OSS representatives. No matter that the most devastating conflict in history was raging – and that Sweden, like Switzerland, offered a unique location from which to collect information on the Third Reich and some of the Nazi-occupied areas – espionage was too naughty an activity to be sheltered on American diplomatic premises. It is much to Hopper’s credit that within a year the OSS station had begun to function effectively.”

 

While a detailed description of Hopper’s activities in the OSS in Sweden is not easily available even in today’s climate of exposure of government records, there are brief passages that mention him using internet search engines. Below are excerpts from two sources that mention Hopper and the OSS:

 

Below is an excerpt from Honorable Treachery: A History of U. S. Intelligence . . . (2014) by G. J. A. O’Toole:

 

“OSS stations in neutral European capitals – Stockholm, Madrid, and Bern – produced significant intelligence. A large amount of intelligence on German scientific and technological progress was collected by the SI station in Stockholm, which ran agent networks into German-occupied Norway and Denmark and also into Finland and Germany, itself. The station, which was headed by the Harvard government professor Bruce C. Hopper in 1942 – 43, collected evidence proving that Sweden began supplying vital ball bearings to the Nazi war machine after the allied air raids of August 1943 destroyed Germany’s ball-bearing industry; the intelligence was instrumental in American diplomatic moves halting the Swedish sales.”[38]

 

Also, below is an excerpt from OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (2005). Richard H. Smith:

 

“Besides helping the Norwegians (and occasionally sparring with the British), OSS Stockholm had another more difficult responsibility: to provide Allied entrée to the major espionage target of Europe, Nazi Germany.

 

“The joint British-OSS operation that sent Swedish businessman (and secret Allied agent) Eric Ericson on a guided tour of Nazi oil facilities in Germany has been well-publicized by Hollywood. But other German operations of OSS Sweden, those of greater diplomatic sensitivity, remain obscured. In December 1942, Carl Langbehn, a Nazi lawyer from Berlin and an intimate of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, contacted Bruce Hopper in Stockholm. With the acquiescence of Himmler’s foreign intelligence service, Langbehn told OSS that Himmler might be willing to stage a coup against the Fuehrer as a prelude to peace negotiations with Britain and the United States. Hopper politely showed Langbehn to the door.”[39]

 

 

Hopper Air Force Historian

 

A newspaper article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hal Boyle that appeared in the Troy, New York, The Times Record on December 11, 1943 discussed Hopper’s past career and his plans for the future:

 

 

PROFESSOR WRITES WAR HISTORY AS FIGHTING GOES ON

 

An American Air Base in Italy

 

The American Army for the first time is taking steps to gather the history of a war while it is still happening.

 

Most active in this enterprise is the airforce, and the most earnest advocate of recording war history while the war is being fought is a 51-year-old Harvard professor who has more than a scholar’s knowledge of battle.

 

Bruce Hopper is an educator now – he teaches international politics under the elms of Cambridge in peacetime – but back in World War 1 days he was strictly a fighting man. He piloted a plane in the 96^th Squadron, the “daddy” bombers of the A. E. F., and his commander was Carl Spaatz, now a lieutenant general.

 

“It was all sort of fun – we had Paris then,” recalled the tall, robust, whitehaired professor, leaning back in his chair in the villa of Maj. Gen. James Doolittle. “Then our French Brequet bombers just carried a pilot and a gunner and a bomb load of about 500 pounds.

 

“We sat on a helmet filled with sand as protection but we didn’t have to worry much about flak. It was just grapefruit stuff. But we had to look out for trees and German fighters, and we didn’t have to know as much as the flyers do now. I preferred that war. It wasn’t any picnic – we had 120 per cent casualties – but it just wasn’t as technical.

 

“It was a nice war compared to this. We had Paris, we enjoyed ourselves, we didn’t want to go home in the last war.”

 

The professor flew 29 combat missions. When the St. Mihiel offensive opened his outfit had 24 planes on the alert; four days later there were three. His was one.

 

Since the last war Hopper has traveled and adventured widely. He is a specialist in the history and politics of Russia and the Far East. He once hiked 1,000 miles in West China and is still active enough to enjoy a recent trip to the Italian battlefront.

 

Doctor Hopper was on a government mission in Sweden when Lieut. Gen. Ira C. Eaker called him to England last May to become historian of the Eighth Air Force. He came to this theater on the invitation of General Spaatz to make recommendations for the writing of the history of the newly-born, powerful 15^th Air Force.

 

Remarking that there was “a history drive on in Washington,” the professor said:

 

“After the last war there was a sudden scramble by outfits that wanted a history of their efforts. The record had been very inadequately kept with the result there was not sufficient scientifically prepared material for historians to work on. There were not enough documented records to tell properly America’s share in the war.

 

“I wrote the history of the old 96^th Squadron. It was a pathetically small manuscript because there was just one log book as a record.

 

“Now there is an historical consciousness in high places and an effort is being made to get and preserve important documents written during the heat of battle and to obtain the living testimony of organization commanders and combat crews while the fighting is still going on.

 

“Only this way can we capture history on the wing and present in readable form the dramatic story of the delivery of America’s power to the war effort. This material is much more vulnerable than battle memoires and other material written in retrospect.”

 

Doctor Hopper believes that a careful record of air force activities is important because of the incalculable impact which he feels that airpower will have on the future world economic and governmental setup. He feels that a faithful history of the organization, administration and combat operation of the air force will furnish data of great value in estimating the function of airpower in future world policy.

 

He sees airmen as leaders in this world of tomorrow and thinks it is vital that they “follow through.” By this he means they should educate themselves to world problems and the strong influence airpower will have on the world situation.

 

“They are technically proficient,” he said, “and if we can make them politically wise it would be a factor toward world betterment.”

 

The professor was optimistic on one point that has caused concern to many ground and air soldiers. That is, how long will Japan stand up after Germany goes bust?

 

“I don’t think Japan can withstand this long when we turn our combined navies and air fleets loose upon her,” he said. “Japan alone will not be able to make a prolonged war.”

 

“How Long?”

 

“I can’t set a certain time,” Doctor Hopper said smiling. “Now, don’t make me look ridiculous. Remember, I am a serious man and a professor of Harvard.”

 

Even so he’s no scholar in an ivory tower. He can see what’s in the wind being stirred up by all those propellers.[40]

 

 

Bruce Hopper’s role as historian for the Eighth Air Force and General Carl Spaatz, Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force, came about in the spring of 1943. The post of official Historian had been subject to changes in personnel and was still not filled in 1943. Entries from material found in The Library of Congress, Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions from May 1949[41] – General Spaatz collection – explained Bruce Hoppers transition from OSS officer to historian.

 

“In March of 1943, General Eaker learned of the possible availability of Bruce C. Hopper, Professor of Government at Harvard, who for more than a year had been working in Sweden as political observer for the Office of Strategic Services and who was then in London on a visit. Professor Hopper, whose field of interest was international affairs, in which he had had 20 years of experience as a teacher, writer, and world traveler, was an old flier from the Ninety-sixth Bombardment Squadron, U. S. Air Service, who had lived through the days of St. Mihiel and the Argonne when American air power, under the leadership of Billy Mitchell, first subjected it concepts of air warfare to the test of battle. Moreover, Professor – then Captain – Hopper had been the official historian of United States day bombardment in World War 1; after the war, the work he had done in that capacity found its way into the tactical manuals of the Air Service, in which form some of the early lessons of combat were saved from oblivion. With this background, Professor Hopper seemed a happy choice, and General Eaker invited him to accept the post of Historian of the Eighth Air Force. Early in April, with the kind permission, firm support, and continuing interest of his then chief, Major General William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, head of the O.S.S., Professor Hopper consented.”

 

Here a footnote reads as follows:

 

“Professor Hopper had been in Sweden as the personal representative of General Donovan. It was General Donovan’s conviction as to the necessity for correct assessment of our national war experiences, including the unprecedented use of air power, that led him to release Professor Hopper on loan from the O.S.S., first to General Eaker and the Eighth Air Force and then to General Spaatz after the establishment of the U. S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe in January 1944.”[42]

 

The Library of Congress article details the process that was engaged in to gather and record material for the History project that Hopper was put in charge of. Still engaged in the war, the personnel of the Eighth Air Force were now tasked to provide detailed records of their activity in addition to fighting the war. The result in many instances could not have been a happy one.

 

Hopper had the advantage of a close relationship with General Carl Spaatz who served with Hopper in France during WW1. Both were pilots in the Army Air Force. Spaatz had served as Officer in charge of the American Aviation School at Issodun, where Hopper was an instructor.

 

General Spaatz may be the most famous WW2 General you’ve never heard of. He was steadily promoted during the progress of WW2 and by January of 1944 he was named commander of the U. S. Strategic Air Force and had planned for the invasion of Europe. He then became Commander of the United States Strategic Air Force in the Pacific in August of 1945 with headquarters in Guam. Under his command the United States Army Air Force dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. He was present at the surrender of the Japanese aboard the battleship Missouri. He thus became the only American General to be present at all three major Axis surrender ceremonies. He was noted for his low key manner and a steadfast ability to stay out of the limelight.[43] He was appointed the first Air Force Chief of Staff in September of 1947. He resigned from the Air Force the following year.

 

Two quotes from an article by Dr. Richard G. Davis in Airpower Journal – Winter 1997 – attest to the level of success that General Carl Spaatz reached during his career.

 

“His chief lieutenant, Jimmy Doolittle, in an oral-history interview with Ronald R. Fogleman, then a major, stated, ‘I idolize General Spaatz. He is perhaps the only man that I have ever been closely associated with whom I have never known to make a bad decision.’”

 

A second quote from Dr. Davis’s article:

 

“In February 1945, Eisenhower ranked Omar Bradley and Spaatz equally, calling them the two American officers who contributed most to the Allied victory in Europe.”

 

One incident recently brought to light by historian, Richard Overy, illustrates the variety of Hopper’s duties as General Spaatz’s historian. General Spaatz was assigned the job of interviewing Hermann Goering shortly after the defeat of Germany. Hopper served as the recorder of the interview. A link to the Overy article appears below.[44]

 

Friend Archie W. Bray – Missoula Boxcar – Hopper Speech

 

Hopper participated in a Sigma Xi conference in 1941 titled “A Revaluation of Our Civilization.” The Sigma Xi organization, a scientific research society, yearly sponsored a series of meetings under the guidance of Professor Archie Wilmot Bray who was a Professor of Biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Bray had attended graduate school at the University of Montana and became a friend of Hopper’s while they attended the University of Montana together. He should not be confused with another Archie Bray, the Helena brick maker and art patron, who started the Bray Foundation for ceramic arts in Helena, Montana. Archie Wilmot Bray was a noted speaker and was widely admired for his teaching skills. He died in November of 1942.

 

A published account of this forum was published by Argus Press, Albany, N. Y., in 1944. Billed as ‘A Forum on Civilization’, it featured several speakers, the last of which was Bruce Hopper, whose topic was ‘What of the Future’. Leading into his speech Archie Bray remarked on his introduction to Missoula and his friendship with Hopper during his early days at the University of Montana.

 

Doctor G. Howard Carragan made some opening remarks:

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the last of our meetings of this forum on ‘A Revaluation of Our Civilization.’ We have felt that the time has long since passed when we should take stock of our civilization; when we should form an opinion of those things which we can dispense with, and of those things which we must preserve at all costs . . .

 

“Some few years ago, a small group of men got together in a western university for the purpose of talking until they had settled the affairs of the universe. The chief mentor of the group, the chief disturber of the peace, the Socratic gadfly, if you wish, was none other than Professor Archie Bray, now head of the Department of Biology of the Institute. I trust you will not be dismayed when I say that another member of that group is to be speaker of the evening. And so it is most fitting that Professor Bray should introduce him to you.

 

“Before Professor Bray takes the floor, however, I would like to say that it has been my pleasure for the last two years to act as chairman of these meetings, and during that period, Professor Bray has been my program chairman and I would like to thank him. This forum for this year was his idea and I am sure all of us have felt that it has been most valuable and that it ought to be the order of the day here at the Institute. . .

 

“Professor Bray: Thank you, Dr. Carragan. I know that when a man begins to talk about the good old days it is a sign of his aging; but I would like to regress a little this evening and relate a personal experience that would be one of the highlights, I think, in any man’s life.

 

“It is said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. But what young man wants to gather moss and become a mossback? At least that’s the way I felt about life when I was younger. I felt that I could fairly well extract what nourishment for the soul there was in any one place in a year or two at most, and then I felt the urge to seek new pastures.

 

“There came a day, many years ago now, when the urge to move came upon me. I packed up all my belongings in a cigar box and shipped them to a friend in San Francisco, and then meandered down to the freight yards in the great city of Seattle, and sought a convenient boxcar attached to an outgoing train. Success! We began to move! After several experiences of being thrown out on my head and having to wait for the next freight, I finally secured a hand-and-foot hold on the bars under a good boxcar and held on for dear life. About five o’clock the next morning, the train stopped at a little place in Montana. I didn’t know where we were, and didn’t intend to get off, but the brakeman spotted my feet sticking out beyond the bars and pulled me out. In language I wouldn’t like to repeat in this company, he told me to ‘vamoose’ – and I ‘vamoosed’! I strolled into the railroad station and washed up a bit. You know one gets rather dirty traveling underneath a boxcar and one’s clothes get soiled, but that is not very important. Then I strolled up the main street and found a little hole in the wall which Bruce and I remember well. I went in there and had a ‘stack o’ wheats,’ a great big high stack of piping high hot wheat cakes with butter and syrup, or what was supposed to be syrup, and a cup of coffee, all for a dime. That was good. Then I wandered up town, feeling at peace with the world and ready to absorb what of life the place offered. I found myself in Missoula, and learned that there was a university there. I had never heard of the town before but it was pleasant and the weather bright and warm, so I decided to stay a while.

 

“I had to get a job, so I went to the President of the University and asked him for a job. He looked me up and down in my ‘traveling suit’ and rather shook his head. After a little conversation he sent me to the great dean – the Dean of Education. Perhaps he thought I needed one. After some questioning I got a job. It was a job in the library. Ladies and gentlemen, it was not looking at books! It was a job that demanded a strong back and a weak head. But I took it. I also enrolled in the summer school – I worked in the library at night. I took some courses – one was Economics. I don’t know why I took that. One was on delinquent children; that seemed more apropos; also some biology. They were interesting enough, but not my main diet.

 

“During the summer I met one or two young men who inspired me and I decided to stay on as Instructor of Biology. I never regretted the decision, for during the next three years there gathered together in that little university a coterie of young men – of such talent, such diversified interest and such a consuming desire to know – that has, I think, rarely been duplicated anywhere. For some reason or other they honored me with their company. We decided to form a little society, to discuss all sorts of questions, to present papers and to expound any ideas relevant or irrelevant that happened to possess us. We called our little group the Authentic Society, held our meetings in the Biological Laboratory, roasted hot dogs or steaks and rambled on into the wee small hours of the morning.

 

“Among these young men, out of eighteen that I can clearly recall, twelve are today nationally and internationally eminent. One is Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Prize man, who spoke to our chapter of Sigma Xi a short time ago. I remember well a paper presented by Urey as a sophomore, a paper which would have done any Ph. D. credit. Others are Dr. Raleigh Gilchrist, Dr. G. Wells, George H. Johnson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Montana, Dr. Bober, Clarence Streit, author of Union Now, and others whom you all know. Amongst them was our speaker this evening, Dr. Bruce Campbell Hopper. I remember well his first paper. He was a sophomore, and discussed with deep philosophical insight the question of the origin of our idea of God.

 

“Dr. Hopper was born in Litchfield, Illinois, and came to Montana seeking an education rather than a diploma. You all know the story of the young man who went to the University and got into trouble with the Dean. The Dean said to him, ‘Young man, you’ll never be educated.’ But ultimately the young man scraped through and received a diploma. He then went to the Dean and flourishing his diploma remarked, ‘Look at that, big boy. Educated, by God!’

 

“’No,’ said the Dean, ‘graduated.’ Hopper didn’t care about diplomas and he told me tonight something I didn’t know, that he did not take his first degree for eight years after he left Montana. But he was not idle in the meantime. He studied at Oxford University and traveled in practically every part of the world. He has been a reporter on the Great Falls Leader, the Honolulu Star Bulletin and the China Free Press and was editorial writer on the last mentioned. Then he went to Russia, where he stayed three years. He knows Russia and the Russian people. During the last great war he was in the Aeronautical Service of France, and has been recuperating from innumerable forced landings and gassings that he experienced during that trying period.

 

“I am not going to burden you with a list of all his activities. He is a Trustee of the World Peace Foundation and Chairman of the Program Committee of the Foreign Policy Association. His publications and papers are numerous. He has written monographs on Siberia’s population capacity, and the Potentials of Soviet Foreign Policy. He was honored to deliver the Lowell Lectures, which have been published under the title of Pan-Sovietism, and which have been translated into Croatian. His travels and contacts and study have given him a clear insight and comprehension into world affairs.

 

“I can be forgiven perhaps for feeling that this is one of the greatest pleasures of my life – to introduce to the Rensselaer Chapter of Sigma Xi one who is held in high esteem as a scholar and a gentleman, and one of a young band of scholars with whom I had the good fortune to be associated in the long ago, and which remains a unitary group in the spirit to this day. However far dispersed, we hear from one another once in a while. Only a year or so ago, Dr. Hopper tells me, he was working among the library shelves in the great Weidener Library at Harvard, when someone nudged him and said, ‘Do you remember the old Authentic Society?’ He didn’t know who the stranger was at first, as he had not seen him for years, but soon they fell to reminiscing on the good old days.

 

“It gives me more pleasure than I can express to present to this audience, Dr. Bruce Campbell Hopper, Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, who will speak to us on ‘What of the Future?’

 

“Dr. Hopper: Dr. Carragan, Professor Bray, Ladies and Gentlmen: I am very much moved by the remarks of my old friend, Professor Bray. We used to call him Major, using the term in its comparative sense. He was a Socrates, drifted into a virgin field in Montana. We did cluster about him because, although he was a man of higher education, he was utterly unspoiled by education. And so, we drank coffee late into the night, discussed all manner of relevant and irrelevant subjects and built the world, in our imaginations, more to the heart’s desire. As I was saying to Professor Carragan tonight, ‘Professor Bray is a type of man one doesn’t forget in after years.’

 

“The subject that I have been asked to discuss with you – What of the Future? – is opportune at this time of tragedy in world affairs. We live in a time of lengthening shadows, when even the stout in heart quail; when the shallow in mind emulate Scarlett O’Hara and say, ‘We won’t think on it today; we will think on it tomorrow’; a time when only those with a deep and abiding faith in the resilience of the common man can see, beyond the shadows, the streaks of dawn of a new day. I should like to speak for that faith, a faith in man and a faith in God. And I am happy to speak to scientists; the scientists have the keys to the future; but as a historian I feel that they will make a great mistake if they neglect history entirely.

 

“Consider the situation of Britain today. I think to find a parallel in historic significance to this struggle between Nazi-Prussianism and ‘Britainism’ we must go back in history to the duel between Rome and Carthage. Rome was intolerant of a rival. The Carthaginians were the true seafaring folk. Had they continued to exist it is likely that America would have been discovered and opened up a thousand years earlier. There would have ensued less unevenness in the development of nations, which is the major cause of all great wars. Roman institutions would have matured in a sounder economy, with less reliance on gold and slaves for currency. But, given the shortsighted momentum of a militant people, the Romans insisted on the annihilation of Carthage. In 202 B. C., five hundred Carthaginian ships were taken off shore at Carthage, and burned to the water by the Romans. That deed was celebrated in Newbolt’s poem, Vae Victis: ‘What of the ships, O Carthage, Carthage, what of the ships?’ What was Carthage without ships? Half a century later the site of Carthage was sown down to salt. What would Britain be without ships? In the end, what was Rome without Carthage? Rome became an empire doomed to fall to the barbarians, and bring on a millennium of Dark Ages. I believe as a historian, that the fall of Britain in this war would repeat that cycle; the new Rome, in the momentum of militarism, would conquer and go on conquering for a time, but inevitably it would crumble and time would be lost, because modern man has learned how to fight his way out of slavery to freedom.

 

“But how long it would take, that we do not know. It would just be time lost to civilization. Now in such times of peril, it seems to me, the function of education changes. As historians we know that in a long period of prosperity, man softens in moral fiber and thus brings on his years of adversity; and that adversity means suffering, through which man turns to the spiritual values necessary for rebuilding. This cycle can be traced throughout history. We also know that emphasis on technique and utility (and I realize I am speaking to engineers) in education in a materialistic age shifts the focus from character to skill, which eventually produces a reaction among educators, because they are confronted with the rebellion of youth and that is what we are confronting here in America. To defend this democracy of ours we must revert to some of the abandoned disciplines which emphasized character and the moral overtones of man; we must revert to breadth of culture so that our youth will have strong nerves for the blitz era. It is more important to make alert citizens than to make pundits. In the words of Epictetus: The ruler has said, only the free shall be educated; but God has said, only the educated shall be free.

 

“If we are to recapture that identity of education and freedom, we must broaden the base, discourage premature specialization and focus on character, – make men before we make scholars, or engineers, or scientists, or whatever word you choose.

 

“That is the overwhelming lesson of the disaster in Europe, – the bankruptcy of the educated classes and their inability to retain the loyalty of youth against the snares of revolution. The scientist stayed in his laboratory and the lawyer in his office, each unaware that his world was crashing down. Meanwhile, European youth was captured by revolutionary leaders who promised them the world. Without youth, Stalin and Hitler would be nothing. Youth is blind power, to be directed. If we fail to understand our youth in America, then it not only can, but will, happen here. If we are to recapture our youth we must offer them something more attractive as a future than that offered by revolution. They must be given a credo, something to believe. They know the world is changing fast. Why keep on telling them that what is, ought to be, and that it is the best man can do? To counter the doctrine of change by revolution, we must perfect a doctrine of change by evolution. That is the issue roaring around us in the world today.

 

“Now the forces behind change are, as yet, largely unknown. But if we do not discover them, we shall not recapture the loyalty of youth. That, to my mind, is the dilemma of education.

 

“Well, how to go about it? One approach might be by way of the Hegelian dialectic. There is the thesis (the positive, the thing, being, institution, the status quo) which creates its opposite (the negative, the element of assault). Change assaults status quo; they destroy each other and there emerges in time something new which hasn’t existed before, a synthesis. The synthesis in turn becomes a new thesis, only to create a new antithesis, then assault and destruction again, followed by a new synthesis. And so, down the cycles of time, man has created institutions and destroyed institutions in obedience to some mysterious law of progress. In that way we might explain the evolution of human society from the cave man cultures through ancient empire, through feudalism, mercantilism to modern industrial society, and the present era of destruction.

 

“In all this historical change there are one or two items I shall select to speak about, because I think they have a bearing on any idea of the future. In any pattern we are going to form of the future we must know the elements we are carrying over from the past. In all these changes, property has had a mysterious function. The cave man faced a twofold problem, how to conquer the forces of nature round about him, which is after all, to produce, and how to conquer himself in society, which is, generally speaking, how to distribute products. Production – distribution; that twofold problem has come down to us from the morning mists of time. It is the riddle of accelerated production in contrast to retarded distribution, the eternal problem of the One and the Many, which is the basis of political science.

 

“The contention between state authority and the individual for control of property is what makes history. Astonishing parallels come to mind. Contraction of property ownership in Republican Rome, through slave labor, created the proletariat, or propertyless class, which supported Caesar to destroy democracy, and eventually Rome itself. Today, in industrial democracy, contraction of title to property is likewise the preliminary stage for the state to assume more and more control over property, providing bread and circuses for the propertyless mass, with the prospect of planning and regimentation.

 

“Now, we must make youth see that this problem was not invented by Karl Marx. Nor was the answer provided by Marx. The problem has existed throughout historical time, and has only been given a new twist in the machine age. We must make youth see that social ownership, collectivism, does make a military machine, but without widespread ownership of property there can be no democracy, no freedom for man to move and develop his talent. We must prove to youth that the socialized system of Russia and Germany must eventually return to private property, however modified, in order to prevent being smothered by their huge bureaucracies. In other words, the problem here is to convince the young that property has been mismanaged and that private property has developed great evils. But revolutions abandon private property only for the emergency. And man returns, as he has in the past, to private property even though reduced in scope. This property question is central to all politics, national and international. It must be understood, as we move onward to the social service state.

 

“Another dictator of change is science, which accelerates production. But there is a time lag between science and politics, which controls distribution. Science, being free and dynamic, leaps ahead. Politics, being harnessed to institutions, tends to remain static; thus the retardation of distribution between classes and between nations. The distribution apparatus gradually falls more and more behind, unable to fulfill its function. When the tension gets too great there is revolution and war, resulting in a general leveling between classes and between nations, so that distribution catches up again, politics catches up with science, only to fall behind once more. The only ultimate solution would be the transformation of human nature, to make man something only less than the angels.

 

The historical significance is that applied science made the first industrial revolution, founded on coal and iron, of which the political mode was liberalism. We are now, although unaware, on the threshold of a second industrial revolution, founded perhaps on electricity and aluminum alloys, etc., with the political mode very much in doubt. Of one thing I am sure, that is that politics will be dictated by science at the court of society. Political institutions are on the surface, and what we have as wars and revolution, etc., is simply taking up the time of making the political adaptation to science. Our present world has been built through physical chemistry, the minerals, but the new world will be patterned by the enormous potentials of organic chemistry, the plastics, the products of cellulose. Air power dictates political integration. If science were given free reign the world would be paradise for all living creatures. The failure is man’s failure to understand his own nature, the failure of politics, of distribution. Between the dictates of science and adaptation in politics there is the time lag, during which war intervenes to hasten the process.

 

“That is one time lag. Another is the time lag between civilization and barbarism. Throughout history a civilized “have” people have settled down to static existence with good laws, and in relative abundance. They then become sleek in their own luxuriance; their cattle are fat and their meadows are lush, as in ancient Egypt. They lose their primitive virtues; they forget the use of arms; they lower their birth rate. Their appetites for luxury increase as their manners soften. That is civilization gone decadent.

 

“Then come the barbarians who are not static but dynamic. They learn the new science and the new weapons. Being a “want” people, in relative poverty, they have greater vitality and elan. They charge the barricades of civilization and smash the law. Society becomes fluid again. Their historic role is to revivify the race, to set a new political fashion. Eventually they must be taken into partnership. It is the marriage of their primitive energy with a decadent culture which produces a new bloom on the face of mankind. And civilization begins again on a higher plane.

 

“The modern barbarians are the Germans, the Russians and the Japanese; the peoples of the great time lag. The Germans lost a thousand years through not being Romanized and Christianized along with the Gauls. The Russians lost, oh, five hundred years at least, to the Byzantines and the Tartars. Neither the Germans nor the Russians have ever known true self-government as nations. And the Japanese, opened to western civilization for less than a century have yet to reach self-government, which is the badge of civilization. It is the impact of these barbarians on everything that is succulent and lush and ripe for plunder that forces the industrial democracies to revert to the primitive virtues through which they were created, to slough off the accretions of fat living, and to find the solution for distribution in the machine age. It takes an overwhelming crisis to compel man to master his innate selfishness. When selfishness is knocked out of him by enormous suffering, then is he ready to go forward again in the name of God, as he always has. That we see happening in Britain now.

 

“There is no limit to this type of presentation, to show man’s continuous search for a peace system, from the formula of unity – Pax Romana – to the balance of power doctrine from 1648 on to collective security of 1919. We could explain the shift in the class incidence of power, how domination of the aristocracy gave way to domination of the middle class after the French Revolution, and how increasing domination of the mass began in 1919, a process which is at the base of modern totalitarian dictatorship. Changes are inevitable. History is a dynamic process. The issue is whether change shall be by evolution of by revolution. Our youth have been lured away from evolution because of their impatience with adults, who fail to see that changes must be made in time. Our first problem is to give youth a faith in the future, a faith in the new era, new fields of labor, new frontiers in science, here in America.

 

“If we are to meet the present crisis adequately, we must understand our period as one of the great transitions of western civilization. A transition is marked by the breakdown of the old order and the emergence of the new. There has been only one actual collapse in the west, the fall of Rome, which was the end of unity, leading to chaos. In time, out of this chaos, law and order slowly emerged in the system known as feudalism, which retained the idea of unity in the Holy Roman Empire and in the Church dating, let us say, from the crowning of Charlemagne about 800 A.D. This period lasted, let us say, 600 to 700 years. The second transition came to a head in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. It had these characteristics. There was a breakdown in the central authority of the Church and Empire; there was an emergence of parcellated authority, the nation-states, which were the political outcome of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Europe took on a new pattern after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the modern states system, with the notion of sovereignty, the rules called international law and other paraphernalia. Economically, there was a breakdown of feudal and town economy and the emergence of the money economy of an incipient capitalism. The advance of science produced the first industrial revolution. There was breakdown and disintegration of the old feudal families of the Plantagenet type, and the emergence of new commercial groups, and growth of the middle class. In religion the unity of Christendom was broken. The Greek Orthodox Church had drifted away after the schism of 1054. Then in the 16^th century the Latin church divided into Catholic and Protestant, which was a movement away from the blind faith of Middle Ages to new inquiry. The religious wars broke the unity of Europe. In general, the second transition was from the universal to the particular; it created small states; it developed government in the interest of the individual, hence individual enterprises of private capitalism, the growth of liberal thought and eventually modern democracy. For 300 years that system, organized by the middle class in its own image, set the fashion – the producing and consuming civilization of the dominant trading class. It achieved marvels in modern science. But it also achieved self-destruction in the materialism which prevented a solution for distribution in machine society. For the middle class, concentrating on producing and consuming, failed to work out the predicate. Increased production demanded increased consumption, hence increased population, which aggravated the problem of distribution. But the middle class still clung to political modes it had evolved during the agrarian era, before communications and the need for raw materials had made the world an economic unity. Eventually the system strangled itself.

 

“The third transition of western civilization is the one roaring around us now. It actually has been under way since the 1870’s; since the invention of dynamite and the ironclad warship; since the tariff wars and the scramble for raw materials, etc.; the international competition propelled by machine production for which the nation-states system is unsuited. That competition stepped up the armaments race, burst into explosion in 1914, then slowed up through exhaustion, but revived in tempo after 1932, and burst into war again in 1939 before the last war had been paid for. The essence of the crisis has been the failure of the dominant middle class to solve the problem of distribution of machine production, as between classes, and as between nations. The main characteristics of this third transition are, in the political realm, the breakdown of the small states system, and the emergence of large political units or combines. It involves a weakening of the notion of national sovereignty in practical politics, the failure of international law and of most of the paraphernalia that encrusted the middle class states system. Economically, a breakdown of the old type of private capitalism, the end of plutocracy and the emergence in some form of the social service state. The collectivism of Russia and the semi-collectivism of Germany are almost straight military and cannot endure longer than the crisis itself. They provide no solution for distribution without a war objective. Man cannot make war forever. And as the second transition, 400 years ago, was marked by the increased use of coal and iron which produced the first industrial revolution, so this third transition seems to be marked by electricity and alloys, giving a new fuel-metal base for production, which will change society at the core. Plastics, synthetic products, organic chemistry, etc., are still in their infancy. In time they will make all current isms obsolete as we sweep onward into the second industrial revolution. Socially the loss of middle class domination and an emergence of the mass, mark this transition period. In strict political terms the aristocracy set the tone until 1789; the middle class from then until 1919; and the mass has exercised increasing control from 1919 until now, not only in Russia, Germany and Italy, but in Britain and America as well. In the new era new classes will form, based, at first, on talent and merit. In general, this third transition is from the particular to the universal; from individual man back to central authority; from the small state pattern to large regions or custom blocs – a general recentralization reversing the process of second transition 400 years ago. During the previous centuries man had worked out myths and legends for a parcellated world, when economic barriers were not so dangerous. But with the tremendous acceleration of machine production either the barriers would have to go, or there would be recurrent large scale wars. Because of the myth of sovereign independence the various states refused to pull down their barriers; and now the nemesis overtakes the whole states system.

 

“We have seen that there are tremendous forces at work in societal evolution, forces beyond the control of statesmen. Vast changes, it seems to me, are inevitable in the present fluid period. What was not inevitable was the violence. The issue of the war in Europe today is to decide whether the changes shall be by planned revolution or by evolution. By planned revolution say the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis. That is the military way. The technique of change by planned revolution includes the militarization of all life; the absorption of the individual into the state; the secret police method of killing off dissent; and the solution of pressing economic problems through conquest by a streamlined, efficient military machine.

 

“Politically, it means that boundaries will be determined not by race or language, or cultural ties, but by economics, military strategy and air power. It will be the end of small states, and a redivision of the earth into large zones of power; Pan-Europa and Africa; Pan-Slavism and the Middle East; Pan-Nipponism and Eastern Asia; Pan-America and the northern part of South America. The rest of the world will be open to exploitation by a new type of imperialism. The Pax Hitlerica would probably be made at Muenster, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, 1648, disrupting the first Reich. We learn that the old Friedenhalle has been refurbished for the new dispensation to mankind.

 

“Socially, it would be the end of the egalitarian period in history, which began with the American and French revolutions. The prevailing doctrine would be the cleavage between the herren volk, the sklaven folk, the masters and the slaves, the warrior ants and the worker ants, already put into practice by the Nazis in their conquered areas of eastern Europe. The herren volk would be educated, the sklaven volk deprived of education beyond the level of trade skills. The key to the program is the Gestapo, and the killings off or liquidation of the native intelligentsia so that the peasants and workers will not have leaders. The peasants would be given good prices, and the workers good wages, to reconcile them to the master race. The desired condition would then ensue; a master German race surrounded by lesser breeds of peasants and workers. The Nazi would then be ready to conquer the remaining part of the world.

 

“In religion the new dispensation would be very interesting. It seems that Hitler has reserved his third seven years to formulate a new religion. His model is said to be Mohammed. We don’t know yet what he has in mind, but probably a combination of mysticism of the old Germanic gods, and a new credo for a Chosen People, – self-worship, with some cribbing from the Christian Bible after the manner of Mohammed, to make a new Islam. There is an interesting passage in Heine’s essay on Religion and Philosophy, written a century ago, in which he suggests that Christianity has not eradicated ‘that brutal lust of battle, such as we find it among the ancient Germanic races, who fought not to destroy nor yet to conquer, but merely from a fierce, demoniac love of battle itself. And when once that restraining talisman, the cross, is broken, then the smoldering ferocity of those ancient warriors will again blaze up; then will be heard again the deadly clang of that frantic berserker wrath, of which the Norse poets say and sing so much. The talisman is rotten with decay, and the day will surely come when it will crumble and fall. Then the ancient stone gods will arise from out the ashes of dismantled ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and finally Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals.’ That was Heine, a hundred years ago. Today we are told that history will begin anew with a year I, the year of Hitler’s Muenster Peace, and the Hitlerian era will succeed the Christian era. At least this is what the Nazi say. We say, when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again. The Nazis have performed military miracles; they have not yet been able to turn their stones into bread. Well, such a system as here outlined, if victorious in the field, would refashion the world in its own image through contagion.

 

“Opposed to this is the British and American solution, the Athenian, non-military way of evolution. The war aim of Britain and America is to preserve the right to evolve into a new era by the normal evolutionary process. The technique is slow but democracies are long on endurance. What may we expect if Britain wins the war? One outcome it seems to me would be the political reorganization of Europe into larger areas, on a federal pattern, with small peoples retaining their cultural autonomy, and a general peace system assuring actual disarmament. Economically we may expect a reorganization to eliminate trade barriers, to allow natural development of different areas and the encouragement of the skill advantages of different peoples. The British doctrine is still the right one in my opinion, namely, international division of labor and a free world market. Socially there must be no tampering with egalitarianism, the badge of free peoples in a liquid society. The division into master and slave races leads to self-devourment. In religion a revival of Christianity is in store, through suffering, but a Christianity in its old purity and selflessness as was approached before materialism of the modern era destroyed man’s capacity for exaltation. On this platform America can fight a war.

 

“I think that by some type of reasoning such as this, we can convince youth that we, too, are change-conscious; that we are in a tremendous transition period; that the issue is not change or no change, but whether change shall be by planned revolution or evolution. In this way we close the gap between the age levels, and convince them that there is no short cut, that there is no unbroken line in history, and that we cannot escape from our planet in space, nor from our period in time. Then they will understand why we cannot abandon Britain. They will understand that if Hitler smashes Britain there will result a Eurasian bloc, from the North Sea to the Pacific, a common front of world revolution, with all Asia as its field of exploitation, and with one commanding objective; to smash America. Then for the first time in history, America will know real fear.

 

“What is Americanism? ‘Our way of life’ is a pleasant phrase. What does it mean? Is it too vague to defend? We need a unifying cause. America is riddled with vague fears. But we cannot get unity until all fear the same thing. Some fear for their property. Others fear the coming of dictatorship. My own fear is the nightmare of a Eurasian bloc, a common front of world revolution, of Germany, Russia and Japan, involving the marriage of German technique and energy with Russian space, resources and labor power, directed against America. If Britain were to fall suddenly, we should be isolated. We should take over the British possessions in the Caribbean and some in the Pacific. M Day would set in, without our being engaged in open hostilities. That would mean a constant state of mobilization for war. In the process much will happen internally, such as increase in executive power and increase of the police power. Must we have a witch hunt this time?

 

“My own belief is that Britain will not fall, with American aid in bombing planes and American naval escort for supplies on the way. In the long attrition the Nazis will be forced to go to the Ukraine and the Volga for oil and fats, and the war will settle down to a contest between Russian supplies to Germany and American supplies to Britain. Of the outcome, I have no doubt.

 

“But no moment in history has been so tense as these summer months of 1941 promise to be, when we shall watch unfold the drama of survival or death of the British Empire. By September we shall know who wins the war. We didn’t choose to live in this age. It now becomes a new Homeric Age, when the warrior breed takes command. The pace is set by the German Luftwaffe. Unless we produce the same caliber of warriors, then as a nation we, too, shall fall into the place assigned to us in Hitler’s new dispensation.

 

“Now, I have been speaking out of my own profession – university teaching. The problem is much vaster; it is education of all our people. But the university remains the Pierian spring. The whole world is sick, a malaise resulting from the drift away from religion and moral standards during the liberal era, and the worship of money success, which led to disintegration of the old family. The worst victims of this world disease with its brutalization, its self-devourment, and coarsening of manners, is not the present generation of students. There is sunlight ahead for them, at the end of the tunnel. Nor are the worst victims the generation of the last war. We at least had a crowded hour which compensated for the years between in hospitals, the years that the locusts devoured. But in between us, in time, is the lost generation, les enfants perdus. They were too young for the last war, and just ripe for the economic depression. They are the ones who were swept from their moral moorings. They were in a hurry, with no solution in sight. They became bitter. When they found a leader who capitalized their wrongs they put on a devastating revolution, – that is Nazi Germany today. They are to be pitied because they will be broken on the wheel of events in Germany, in Britain and here. The New Order will be worked out by a combination of the elders, who are not embittered, and the bright-eyed new youth, who did not know the frustrations of the 20’s and 30’s. These are closer to the line of march of man in history. I should like to close with a word about them.

 

“The Student. Of course a certain percentage of the present generation of students is, by the laws of average, destined for frustration. Others, through ability, effort or luck will have the full life. We cannot tell now which ones will still be flies in the bottle in twenty-five years’ time, and which ones will be running the country. Each one has a different identity; their wings untried. Like their elders they are driven by the four main desires of existence: distinction, economic security, adventure and sex – the order of importance depending on the individual. Some feel that fifth propulsion, the quest for the unattainable, the Carcassonne of the poem, never to be reached, the ever fleeting object of desire – a platonic idea, like the music of the spheres. They are one and all eager for careers, for assured places in the new era. They instinctively fear that with so much substance shot away on the battlefield their generation will be forced to concentrate only on repairs, hard and long labor, with no chance for creative life. Thus they try to ignore the corpse in the cargo of civilization – war. And they refuse to be lulled by stock arguments. Only by the long and tedious historical build-up, such as we are indulging in now, can they be convinced that there is no escape. Some are religious, some not. But intellectually they know that Bolshevik atheism is a vacuum; that Nazi paganism is but a political instrument; that materialism is a brassy interlude; and that with the rebirth of western society man will again go forward in the name of God.

 

“Youth is the natural custodian of ideals, which pass down in time, from generation to generation of youth, from the very morning of the race. If it weren’t for youth ideals and nobility of mind would perish in these recurrent cycles of realpolitique and materialism. Youth is likewise the ageless time of life; to students, the surroundings are a blur of human beings. Only after forty do we become aware of the significance of age-level in all human transactions – the old men of Munich; the vacuum in the middle age level in Britain now; the men in Flanders Field who by the wisdom acquired through suffering could have prevented the Second World War. Youth is not aware of these things. Their past is still ahead of them. There is no way to transmit that understanding to them. What we can do is to repeat a phrase from Theodore Roosevelt; At 50 a man is responsible for his face. At 50 a man’s face tells what kind of race he has run. If God gives him grace, he will have achieved harmony with himself; with ambition geared to ability – no more, no less, as either deviation leads to frustration and heartache, which become chiseled into the lines of his face. This, students can grasp, but dimly, as through a glass darkly.

 

“The teacher. Teaching is an old art, developed by experience with students. Teaching and research are the two horses that pull the chariot of education. In political science, economics, etc., research must be constant to keep abreast of the forces of change which make last year’s gospel this year’s heresy. These changes require historical explanations.

 

“What makes a good teacher? We don’t know. We do know there are two types of leader, the man of intellect and the man of action. It is Moses who views the Promised Land from the top of Mount Pisgah; it is Joshua who circles the walls of Jericho with the trumpets. A good teacher must try to be both intellect and action.

 

“As a man of intellect he should have the technique of the scientist to pioneer an adventure of his own along the horizon of knowledge, thus to add his own paragraph of achievement to the long record of man’s conquest over nature (in the physical sciences), or to man’s conquest over himself (in the social sciences). That adventure is the teacher’s identity in terms of subject. It is often lonely and baffling work, on the horizon. But, if he fails in his quest, if he brings no tales of new gold on the frontier of the mind, then he falls short of being a good teacher. Again, as a man of action, he should have the feeling of the poet. For he has power to affect the lives of young people who respond so eagerly to compassionate justice and who are bewildered by intellectual arrogance in their elders. The University entrusts the teacher with the sanction of grades – his judgement on student performance in terms of effort and ability. With that sanction goes an unwritten moral obligation, a Hippocratic Oath of teaching, to assume before society a responsibility for turning out from his classes, year after year, public-minded citizens, equipped with tools to cope with a changing world, and a nobility of mind to meet unforeseen disaster. If the teacher evades this obligation to society, if he promotes class hatred, if he neglects to correlate his teaching to the problems of the world outside the walls, then he fails to attain fruitful identity with youth, with growth. In times of historical peril the teacher is troubled by choice: to bear the torch, or to wave the flag. He should not indoctrinate, but should present a balance between idealism and realism, between what ought to be and what actually is. To that end he must guard his academic status, and accept the same caveat placed on students, which is: Enter to Grow in Wisdom, but do not bring unfavorable repute on the University.

 

“To lure fresh minds into unraveling new riddles which stem from old riddles in society, to awaken in students aspirations to deeds he himself may never perform, the teacher must gladly teach, must radiate the adventure and elan of his subject. He must wear his scholar’s hood with infectious good humor. Scholarship and presentation, plus vitality and good humor – these we know help make a good teacher.

 

“But there is something more. Great teachers are called into being by the alert, frank and quick response of appreciative students. Men privileged to live long with students seem to reflect back the optimism of youth. In time they arrive at wisdom and nobility of mind. Some even attain to beauty of mind, that beauty of mind suggested in a New England epitaph: ‘He walked among men, and wist not that his face shone.’

 

“The University. In a period of breakdown, the right education of youth is more important than building monuments and roads. The University is the guardian of the essentials of civilization along with the Church. In periods of historical decline man has regained his path through reformation of education. It was too late when darkness came down on Rome, for faith in the old gods was destroyed before the new faith, Christianity, had conquered the educated classes. But in subsequent cycles of decline the universities kept the torch aflame. In this period, it may be that America is destined by history and geography to be the custodian of the liberalism now vanishing from other lands; it may be that the universities of America will serve as did the monasteries in the Dark Ages, custodians of that European culture which descends from the brilliant city-life of ancient Athens.

 

“With that high mission in mind, it is useful to recall the words of George Washington, that he proclaimed neutrality in 1793 to gain time for our country to mature its yet recent institutions and to progress to the command of our own fortunes. We attained such command in 1919, but threw it away to the locusts in the years between. Now we march up to the gun again.

 

“It is a moment to steady the nerves; to prepare America for the high gear of war; to gain time for unifying our people in our national cause; a time to support Britain where her salient and life lines are most threatened, and by so doing increase our own fire power to such an extent that we progress once more to the command of our own fortunes on our own time table.

 

“The ability of America to rise to that high mission depends on our youth. I, for one, have supreme confidence in our youth. Against the Brahma state, which trains its subjects to die like horses in battle, they will oppose the dignity, the identity and the personality of the individual in America. By knowing the long past they know that periods of freedom are the exception, not the rule, on the pages of history. They know that history, with its long swing changes, is in the words of Voltaire, the tread of sabots going up the stair and the patter of satin slippers coming down. It is that faith in the resilience of mankind that makes teaching a privilege – the contact with the contagious elan of youth, to hear from them the song of the race renewing itself in each generation. To be close to youth is to be kept close to hope, and to see, beyond the ice jam of the old world, cracking up and washing down stream and out to the historical sea, a new world coming in at the head of the river, unlike anything that ever existed before. That will be the new era and a brighter day.

 

“To me the second half of the 20^th century stretches away in a vista of industrialization of Asia; of new frontiers in South America; of the second industrial revolution, swinging into its stride, changing for the better the lives of all. But today is the moment of historical peril; a time when only poetry can express the surcharged feelings of men. It is a moment when soldiers, spared in bygone battles feel their old wounds burning again. Men in the last war learned that the impossible is possible. In the elation of being spared, from day to day, when others were dropping out of line, they learned the laws of history, the laws of the rise and fall of nations. They know that great danger calls out great courage. They would agree with Anthony Eden, in speaking to the Greeks: ‘It was said in ancient Athens, 2300 years ago, that the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.’ And from their hearts they would agree with General Simovich: ‘Men die in fighting; nations only die in yielding.’

 

“These men from the last war knew how to fight without hate. They would have made a soldier’s peace. And they know now that this is not the end of civilization. It is not the beginning of a new Dark Age. It is the prelude to a new Renaissance, a new era during which the secretions of political and economic blunders will be washed away; and man himself, with his muscles naked and his primitive virtues restored, will march into the future with a buoyant confidence – a confidence which comes from having looked upon the head of Medusa. The British people have looked upon the head of Medusa; they have refused to turn to stone. Such people cannot be conquered. They have conquered fear as a whole people. Their confidence inspires us with awe and wonder and encourages us to emulate and to hope.

 

“As one of the errant stars roaming between two worlds, the last war and this, I believe that the American people, too, will conquer fear; that America will find her soul, and see with new eyes her destiny.”

 

“Dr. Carragan: We could have done no better than to have had Dr. Hopper for our final meeting this year. It is good to hear someone in this hall speak out of his heart. Now, we have a map on the board, put there for a purpose. We’ll have a discussion period if you wish it.”

 

“(Pause) . . .

 

“I think we all feel that after Dr. Hopper’s heartening words and his splendid exhortation there is little that can be added. Let us show our appreciation for his coming here this evening by giving him a rising vote of thanks.”

 

 

Below are links to 4 Bruce Hopper lectures given at the U. S. Naval War College:

 

Role of Soviet Russia in the European War, lecture delivered Friday, 20 October 1939.

 

http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll7/id/625/rec/23

 

Soviet Russia and German Mittel Europa, lecture delivered Friday, 21 October, 1938.

 

http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll7/id/627/rec/55

 

Soviet Russia in the new era politics: West and East delivered March 21, 1938

 

http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll7/id/628/rec/35

 

Russia in Asia, lecture delivered Friday, 3 November 1939.

 

http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll7/id/626/rec/34

 

Professor Archie Bray’s conference – A Revaluation of Our Civilization:

 

https://archive.org/stream/revaluationofour00soci/revaluationofour00soci_djvu.txt