How to Make a Map

U.S. citizens last week beheld a preview of what the peace table may be like. The actors were scholars and pundits; but their show had plenty of unacademic gusto. It raised a question considerably more immediate than the peace itself: were the American people well enough educated to know a just peace when they saw one?

The debate opened last month when a geography professor named George T. Renner, of Columbia University's Teachers College, published in Collier's a map of a post-war world drawn to "democratic specifications" (TIME, June 15). A disciple of the small but respectable school of American geopoliticos which includes Yale's Professor Nicholas John Spykman (America's Strategy in World Politics- TIME, April 20), Professor Renner believes that scholars, not "amateurs," are best able to write the peace.

Rushing in where more eminent scholars had feared to tread, Renner undertook to translate the Atlantic Charter and other "noble statements" by amateurs (i.e., statesmen and political thinkers)-into a map. Amateurs were astounded at the result. His geopolitical Europe was divided into nine big nations, with Axis Germany and Italy left apparently as strong as the victorious United Nations themselves.

First "amateur" to pound the table and point was Columnist Dorothy Thompson. Cried Dorothy: "If the Axis settled tomorrow for anything resembling Professor Renner's new maps of the world, it would have won an overwhelming victory." A group of University of Minnesota professors petitioned President Roosevelt to remove Professor Renner from his job as adviser to the Civil Aeronautics Administration. When Professor Renner arrived at Minnesota soon afterward to lecture on geography teaching, Stratosphere Scholar Jean Picard rose to demand what Professor Renner meant by proposing to partition his native republic of Switzerland. Professor Renner haughtily ignored him.

Paper Dolls. Last week a more formidable heckler, Pundit Walter Lippmann, entered the debate. Mr. Lippmann devoted three columns to probing "The Case of Professor R" and concluded that there was reason to be alarmed by the U.S. educational system. Said Lippmann:

"In those maps we behold a mind unconsciously conceiving a series of atrocious and irreparable crimes in order to make a more perfect world. He believes, for example, that 'to meet democratic specifications,' we should exterminate the Swiss republic. The reader must bear with me; I know this is revolting.

"Professor R's vice was the habit of regarding other men as inanimate objects. He thought of the Swiss as so many paper dolls. Since the world of Professor R was composed entirely of paper dolls, he cut them up and pasted them together with no sense of reality, and therefore with no feeling of responsibility, and therefore with no consciousness of guilt. How is it possible for our educational system to produce such a case?

"The almost certain answer is that he is the product of an academic system in which the study of moral wisdom has been abandoned. It turns out reformers without moral restraint, humanitarians without human respect, philanthropists without philosophy, and enthusiasts without religion."

The Case. But Professor Renner had a case, and Mr. Lippmann's barbs goaded him into stating it. Renner is a tenth-generation American who was an artilleryman in World War I. Calling Lippmann an amateur with little geography, he explained that his maps were primarily based on human factors-on culture, language and the desire for national security. Said he:

"To one who has not studied geographical theory and principles (as most Americans have not) most lines on a map may look roughly alike. A geographer, however, knows that to shift a line a few miles or to change its course minutely may mean the difference between a fair and an unfair peace, between peace and future war. My map of Europe would meet all the valid arguments advanced by the Axis countries, and thereby deprive them of propaganda weapons, without yielding them anything which would render them materially stronger than they were in 1939."

Whatever the merits of Professor Renner's maps, many U.S. scholars agreed with him that they had at least brought discussion of the post-war world down to earth. In the race to write the peace, or even to teach the American people how to write it, the only maps of a future world in existence were those of the geopoliticos; the men of moral wisdom had not yet drawn theirs.

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