Education: Youth Congress

Into New York City’s sports stadium on Randall’s Island one night last week marched some 550 young men and women from the earth’s six continents. They tramped across the field bearing red torches and the flags of 58 nations. The crowd of 23,000 cheered their foreign songs, their folk dances, their gymnastics, a collegiate shag performed by U. S. students. But it roared loudest when the spotlight fell on 13 delegates from Spain, jumped to its feet to chant the ‘Loyalist anthem. For this was no Olympic sports festival but a pacifists’ rally, the opening of the second World Youth Congress.

The Congress is a lusty two-year-old offspring of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies. Its pur poses: to exchange youths’ ideas, educate them for international cooperation, rally them to united action for preventing war. To carry out this ambitious program the first World Youth Congress in 1936 opened a one-room office in Geneva, installed there as international secretary a 23-year-old British delegate, small, brown-eyed, comely Elizabeth Shields-Collins, daughter of an East Indian trader. Miss Collins and her collaborator. Michael Wallace, son of the late British Author Edgar Wal lace, did their work so well that to the second congress last week came youths from almost every important country, nearly every major church, every shade of political opinion. It claimed to represent 40,000,000 of the world’s youth.

Boycotting the Congress on the ground that it was Red were Fascist Germany and Italy, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America. And in Washington, where the Dies committee was investigating “unAmerican activities,” onetime Red J. B. Matthews testified that Communists were exploiting innocent bigwigs as “fronts” for the Congress. Thereupon Vassar College’s President Henry Noble MacCracken, chair man of the U. S. sponsoring committee, snorted: “I think I have sufficient intelligence to know when I am being exploited.”

When, after the opening rally on Randall’s Island, the Congress delegates went to Vassar for their deliberations, Poughkeepsie’s Acting Mayor William B. Duggan refused them the city’s welcome. But Dr. MacCracken greeted them warmly, as did New York’s Mayor Fiorello H. La-Guardia and three New Deal officials, led by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr. From nearby Hyde Park Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt came to address the delegates, became so interested that she returned to crochet and listen at two more sessions.

Red, black or yellow, the delegates (average age: about 25) set about saving the world with enthusiasm and organized cheering. Japan’s delegates argued amiably with China’s, the Socialists, not so amiably, with the Communists. A lone pro-fascist delegate from Eire. Seumas Ua hEamhthaigh (pronounced: Shamus O’Heavey), soon made himself at home. Youngest delegate was Spain’s Margarita Robles, 14, oldest was East Africa’s Ernest Kalibala, 38, born a bushman and now a school principal.

With dark-haired, spectacled Joseph Cadden, 25, leader of the U. S. National Student Federation when he was at Brown, and now a Providence newspaperman, as chairman, youth ran its own show in grownup style. From a big pressroom a dozen telegraph tickers sent correspondents’ reports to the world press. At plenary sessions delegates had earphones (such as the League of Nations uses) through which they heard English, French or Spanish translations of speeches. Highlight: India’s Yusuf Meherally shrilling: “181 years of British rule have reduced India to appalling poverty, mass illiteracy, malnutrition and disease.”

After eight days’ discussion, the delegates called on the democracies to unite against “aggressor” (fascist) nations, European Socialists splitting from their young U. S. comrades to support collective security. The Congress decided it had not lost faith in the League of Nations, urged the League to recognize Germany and Italy as the aggressors in Spain, proposed to end war in the Far East by boycotts of Japan. As the second World Youth Congress adjourned, some of the delegates, who had only one-way tickets, turned to lecturing and hitchhiking to get home.