Education: The Eyes of a Schoolboy

One evening early in 1942 Harris Wofford Jr., 15, was doing his Latin homework and simultaneously listening to his favorite radio program, Mr. District Attorney. When the program ended he did not switch off the radio, because by then he was in the tub. Thus it was that he shortly heard a speaker advancing the merits of Clarence (Union Now) Streit’s plan for a federal union of the world’s democracies.

Young Mr. Wofford Jr. arose from his bath a convert. Bicycling around suburban Scarsdale, N.Y., he swiftly enlisted a number of his friends at Scarsdale High School in the first student chapter of Streit’s Federal Union, Inc.

Last week Harris Wofford Jr., 18, was an Army Air Forces trainee at Alabama’s Craig Field. On Armistice Day, his Student Federalists, now several thousand strong in schools and colleges throughout the U.S., celebrated its first anniversary as a national organization.

Student Federalists would be distinguished, if for nothing else, by the fact that it is one of the few U.S. youth move ments of recent years that did not spring from left-wing yearnings or promptings.

But the Student Federalists are also distinguished by their enterprise and zeal.

From their Washington office they distribute a monthly newspaper, the Student Federalist, which reaches nearly 40,000 readers. They are currently concentrating on a sales campaign for LIFE Editor David Cort’s newly published The Great Union, a brief, eloquent, brilliantly illustrated restatement of Streit’s thesis. Convinced that their cause has no more than a half-century in which to save mankind from a third world war, they have set their sights for these goals by 1950: 1) 100,000 student members; 2) 30,000 teacher members; 3) 25,000 student leaders trained in summer camps annually.

As a group, the Student Federalists tend to be as well-bred as Harris Wofford Jr.’s first recruits in wealthy Westchester County. But few have had the chance to become as well-traveled as Founder Wofford. Son of an executive of huge Prudential Insurance Co., he circled the globe with his grandmother at eleven, spent a Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, was in Rome when Mussolini was ranting out of the League of Nations. He remembers Shanghai as it looked after it was bombed by the Japanese in 1937.

Explaining his conversion to world federalism, he wrote soon afterward: “The eyes of a schoolboy often wander from a seemingly insignificant lesson on a black board to something bigger, perhaps more important. … So, too, do the thoughts of a schoolboy, for sometimes his thoughts move from sports and petty quarrels and homework to the bigger things . . . like war and peace. -It is that way with me.”