Education: Eloquent Hoosier

For Wabash College (Crawfordsville, Ind.)—triumph. A fortnight ago, her pride, her young Demosthenes, her handsome Maurice (“Red”) Robinson journeyed to Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.) with his elocution coach, Professor W. N. Brigance, for the National Contest of the Interstate Oratorical Association, for which he had qualified by winning the Indiana state contest (TIME, March 1). Other doughty state champions were there at Evanston: a forceful South Dakotan with an oration on prohibition; a West Virginian propounding that “Science Has a Rendez-vous”; an lowan primed to deliver “Cat and Cattle.” But none was so shrewd, none so compelling as Hoosier “Red” Robinson (his home is in Anderson, Ind.), who, when he found Illinois humming with talkabout that week’s triple murder, scrapped his prepared speech and got up another one overnight called “The Eleventh Commandment.” The seven judges were his to all but one man when he declaimed, among other ringing sentences: “Do you blame our youth for turning to a criminal career when, in those formative years before character is made or habits fixed, they see handed down to them, from a modern Mt. Sinai of sentimentality, a new and Eleventh Commandment which says, ‘Thou shalt get by with it’?”

His nearest competitors were Carl W. Forsythe, Ypsilanti State Normal (Mich.), and Edson Smith of Monmouth College (Ill.).

Orator “Red” Robinson is slender and dapper. Dullards who judge by appearances alone might take him for a dancing man, a talkative “cake-eater.”* Than which nothing could be more misguided. He is a state champion pole-vaulter, a college basketball captain of all-Western calibre. When they heard he had won the oratorical title, his college mates rushed to prepare a demonstration at the railroad station. He had joined the distinguished roster of national intercollegiate eloquence champions, a roster including an author, a bishop, a governor, senators (including the late LaFollette, the retired Beveridge), six college presidents and many another Who of Who’s Who. Incidentally, he had won for Wabash her fourth national championship in seven years, her second in succession. “If,” said Elocution Professor Brigance with pardonable pride, “if there be such a thing as a crown of American oratory, certainly there could be no disputant of Wabash’s claim to it.”

* Species of young human male to be found in mixed company from noon to midnight and after. He is lavish in his attention to dress, complexion, repartee, new dance steps, light refreshment. The name which newspaper readers have sickened of seeing for several years, without fully understanding it, is thought to have originated in Washington or farther south, deriving from the species’ propensity for tea, cakes and soda-fountain goodies.