Commencement

Four years ago, Morton Bauman, son of an unemployed bathing suit salesman, set out from Philadelphia for New York with $40 and the determination to get a college education. He got into New York University by turning over his last $34 as a down payment. He ate at Bernarr Macfadden's 1-c--a-dish cafeteria and slept in Bowery flophouses. When a bed became a luxury, he slept for four months on park benches. Eventually he found a job as secretary in a settlement house, only to learn that he had contracted tuberculosis. Even then he did not quit college. Teachers and fellow students gave a benefit dance, sent him to the Country Sanatorium of the Montefiore Hospital in Bedford Hills, N. Y., where he went on with his studies. Last week, a little unsteadily but wearing a broad smile, Morton Bauman rose, with 4,000 other candidates for degrees on New York University's Ohio Field in The Bronx, clutched his diploma, became a Bachelor of Arts.

Throughout the U. S. this month some 1,420,000 other persevering young men and women (better than one of every 100 citizens) are being graduated from high school or college, reminding the nation that education is its biggest and most bullish activity, engaging one-fourth of the population as students and teachers, taking $2,000,000,000 a year of its income.

Other graduates:

On the same field a Ph.D. was granted to the man with the greatest pair of running legs in the U. S., Glenn Cunningham; a Master of Business Administration degree to his onetime arch-rival in the mile, William Bonthron.

At University of Oklahoma, Frances Huff received a degree as graduate nurse, became the eighth member of the Huff family to hold a degree from that university.

In the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, 18-year-old Herbert Niccolls, who as a barefoot boy of 12 was sentenced to life for murdering a sheriff, stood erect in a white shirt to take a diploma of graduation from Walla Walla High school, prepared to continue his prison studies in Washington State College extension courses.

Kudos. In Macon, Ga., Negro Robert Lee Battle, 78, college dining hall chef who cannot read or write but can remember the name, class, home town, fraternity and room number of every man he has seen at Mercer University in the last 40 years, was elected by the Mercer Alumni Association the first Negro alumnus of the university. Said Alumnus Battle: "This is the noblest day of my life."

Doubly honored by the grateful academic world was the creator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. From University of Southern California, Walter Disney, who never finished high school, received the honorary degree of Master of Science, and Harvard was reported to be preparing to make him next week a Master of Arts. Others reported slated for Harvard kudos: Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada, and Gustaf Adolf, Crown Prince of Sweden.

Not unusual is the conferring of honorary degrees on Government bigwigs. Last week's crop included Michigan's Governor Frank Murphy (St. John's University, Brooklyn), New York's Governor Herbert H. Lehman (Syracuse), Wisconsin's U. S. Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. (University of Wisconsin), Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. (Temple). But this year's commencements produced a remarkable political echo. Honorary degrees went to no fewer than three of President Roosevelt's opponents in last year's battle over the Supreme Court--Michigan's Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (Union College), Montana's Senator Burton K. Wheeler (American University, Washington, D. C.) and Wyoming's Senator Joseph Christopher O'Mahoney (Columbia). Most outspoken was Columbia, braintrusters' hothouse but still run by G. O. Pundit Nicholas Murray Butler, which declared Senator O'Mahoney had "made his name memorable through an influential and guiding part in framing one of the now classic documents in the constitutional history of the U. S.-- the adverse report of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the bill for the re-organization of the Federal judiciary." Meanwhile, University of Chicago gave an honorary doctorate of laws to liberal Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.

"Demagoguery." Surrounded by guards, a big, benign, mustached man slipped into the Great Hall of Cooper Union in Manhattan, modestly took his place on the platform before an audience of 1,000, smiled and applauded graduates' speeches. At length Trustee J. Pierpont Morgan rose, picked up a pile of diplomas, handed one to each of the 128 graduates, gave him a quick handshake, a smile and a bow. When President Gano Dunn asked him to speak, Banker Morgan bowed to the applause, smiled, shook his head.

At Swarthmore, Albert Einstein marched in the procession bareheaded, his great white mane gleaming in the sun. Reading without emotion from a six-page manuscript, Scientist Einstein told Swarthmore's graduates that failure of the modern world to develop a new morality to replace the declining influence of religion had resulted in "a serious weakening of moral thought and sentiment," in "the barbarization of political ways." The surrender of some European nations to "primitive animal instincts," said he, "if persisted in, will destroy civilization, religion and morality."

Meanwhile, many another commencement speaker, aware that for some 500,000 of this year's graduates there are no jobs, drew a dismal picture of the world. Said New York University's Class Orator Paul H. Kahan: "The boys are prepared to lay down their caps and gowns and accept the pick and shovel of the WPA, if necessary. . . ." At all this Scripps-Howard Columnist Hugh S. Johnson stormed: "The present fashion of going around this nation telling people how miserable they are, how rotten their country is, what little opportunity they have to better themselves, and therefore what their government ought to do and is going to do for them is ... a contemptible kind of demagoguery. . . . The plain hard truth is that these kids and our whole population now demand many times more of everything than [the older generation] did and are not willing to work as hard or suffer as much for it."

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