Newlon's Confession

Last month Archibald MacLeish penitently claimed that he and other writers of his generation (Ernest Hemingway, et al.) by their debunking of old slogans had "disarmed" the U. S., rendered it cynical and "defenseless before an aggressor" (TIME, June 3). Last week a famed educator got up and beat a rival breast. Before 1,000 visiting teachers at the summer session of Columbia University's Teachers College, Professor Jesse Homer Newlon made an extraordinary confession.

Jesse Newlon, 58, is a great, rumbling tub of a man, a longtime spokesman for the left wing of U. S. teachers. Onetime president of the National Education Association, he helped found the now extinct leftish magazine Social Frontier, was a crony of famed Leftist Professor George Sylvester Counts. An inveterate signer of manifestoes for a new social order, Dr. Newlon has always called himself a liberal, still does. Last week he presented his colleagues with a large dish of crow.

"We have taught," he began, "many fallacies.

"We have taught that war never settles anything. Look at the Revolutionary War and tell me that war never settled anything. . . . Try to tell a native of Norway that war never settles anything, or a native of Denmark or the Baltic countries.

"We have taught that the last war was caused by the munitions makers. I think only simple people can find things that simple.

"Another fallacy is all this propaganda about propaganda. . . . I believe in propaganda analysis, but there is such a thing as carrying it too far. We've been bringing up a group of young people who don't believe in anything any more. . . . Some day someone will cry 'Wolf when there is a wolf, and we'll say it's propaganda, and we'll be destroyed.

"We have been teaching a sentimental program of peace education. There'll be no peace in the world . . . until we solve world problems. . . .

"We must teach loyalty to American democracy directly and deliberately--loyalty to our institutions so that youth will . . . fight for them if necessary."

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