Knitting Warrior

In 1936 and 1937 the U. S. War Department coaxed $1,517,850 from Congress to establish new R. O. T. C. units in high schools and colleges. Concentrating on high schools, it has made the greatest headway in Chicago, which today has some 30 junior units in public schools. But in a score of other places the War Department has been rebuffed. Last week it was smartly slapped by an 82-year-old woman in Kenosha, Wis.

Kenosha is a picturesque manufacturing town (pop. 50,262) with many churches, and sufficiently labor-minded to support a weekly, Kenosha Labor, edited by Socialist Paul Porter. Last December its American

Legion post petitioned the Board of Education to start a junior R. O. T. C. unit in Kenosha High School. A group of ministers quickly objected. Soon mass meetings and fierce arguments were in full swing. Advocates of R. O. T. C. claimed it developed character and physical fitness, its opponents that it bred militarism. The Legion and some civic & fraternal organizations lined up behind R. O. T. C., labor unions and churches lined up against it. The Board of Education lined up on the fence, finally asked the City Council to hold a city-wide referendum.

Leader of the anti-R. O. T. C. group was Mrs. Mary Davison Bradford, 82, daughter of a Wisconsin pioneer and onetime superintendent of Kenosha's schools. Mrs. Bradford has written a salty, widely-read autobiography,* is equally famed in Kenosha for her knitting. Clicking her knitting needles faster & faster, Mrs. Bradford marshaled her troops. When Legionnaires got 275 high-school students to sign a petition asking for R. O. T. C., Mrs. Bradford's group got a larger number to petition the Board of Education for a course in hog-calling. One day, to the astonishment of Kenosha's labor leaders, the Legionnaires quoted A. F. of L.'s William Green in favor of R. O. T. C. Labormen immediately made wires to Washington hum. Next day William Green reversed himself.

Last week Kenosha's voters went to the polls, figuratively carrying Mrs. Bradford on their shoulders, swamped R. O. T. C. 9,085-to-4,685.

* Memoirs of Mary D. Bradford,

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