"Economic Truths"

When General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan Jr. created the $10.000,000 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation last year to disseminate "economic truths,'' cynics sneered that he was "incorporating General Motors' publicity department." His brother, Harold Sloan, made director of the foundation, proceeded to purify one of the ten millions by turning over its income to University of Chicago (TIME, Jan. 17). He startled the cynics still further by giving the income from another million to Stephens College (Columbia, Mo.) for consumer education. Conservatives and radicals began to rub their eyes incredulously when they learned three weeks ago what Harold Sloan had done with the third outlay of good capitalist profits.

The third allotment was $9,100 to the Lincoln School, a laboratory for the progressive theories of Columbia University's Teachers College. Purpose of the gift was to finance educational trips for Lincoln students. Fortnight ago the delighted school, which likes nothing better than to bring its students face to face with Life, loaded its entire senior (high school) class of 47 boys and girls on a train and shipped them south, with Principal G. Derwood Baker and six teachers, to study Government planning and Government ownership.

First stop was at Norris, Tenn., where the youngsters spent three days marveling at Norris Dam and affiliated housing projects, hearing about TYA from Director David Eli Lilienthal and his aides. Later, the party saw the New Deal's rural electrification projects in Virginia, its Greenbelt resettlement development in Maryland. In the meantime. Lincoln's students had also spent a day looking over a Georgia Power Co. plant at Tallulah Falls, Ga.. listening to the private power companies' side of the Government-v.-private power story.

Lincoln's boys and girls had fun going to dances, hearing Negro choirs, fighting a forest fire, chatting with a Georgia chain gang that dug a path for their busses through a landslide. Most fun, however, was a two-taste of farm life in Georgia's Habersham County. After a hearty breakfast of grits, bacon & eggs and biscuits covered with ham gravy and corn syrup, the boys and girls went forth into the fields to string barbed wire fences, lime the ground, scrape roads, chop trees, split logs, ride mules, barbecue a pair of pigs, drive a tractor (until Student Katy Sprackling broke it). They astonished a Georgia farm family by rebuilding its shack, whitewashing the walls, cutting new windows, building a porch. At dusk they had enough energy left to chase across the Georgia hills hunting 'possum.

As the tired, happy party rode back to Manhattan from Washington on the train, a newsman observed a by-product of the trip. Sitting locked in the arms of several Lincoln boys were several Lincoln girls. "We started out with two couples of lovers," nonchalantly explained Principal Baker, ''but now there are at least seven more."

When the expedition arrived in Manhattan last week, eleven days and 2,000 miles after it had started, Lincoln School began to reckon the results. The editors of the student paper, impressed with the co-operative stores they had seen at Norris, prepared to campaign for a co-operative lunchroom. But when Lincoln's teachers tallied up the scores on attitude tests given the students before and after the trip, one thing that $9,100 of Sloan money had bought amazed them. Most of the class had been in favor of Government planning when they set out, and were more confirmed in that view when they returned. But no longer was a majority of the class in favor of Government ownership of utilities. Learning for the first time that there were two sides to the question, enough pro-Government-ownership students had switched to an undecided or opposite position to make the median score of the class neutral.

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