PLAIN PEOPLE: A for Effort

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish munitions king who endowed the prizes that bear his name, directed that they be given “to those who had most contributed to the benefit of mankind during the preceding year.” But in times as touchy as these, for awards as political as Peace and Literature, the Scandinavian selectors prefer to play much safer than that. Last week they chose for Peace two Americans who were more active during World War I than after World War II—and for Literature a German who left his native land not under Hitler but under the Kaiser.

The two Americans were John Raleigh Mott, 81, and Emily Greene Balch, 79; the German was Hermann Hesse, 69, who became a naturalized Swiss in 1912.

Methodist Layman Mott is the grand old man of Protestant world unity, has been a leader in international religious movements since he helped organize the World’s Student Christian Federation in 1895. In World War I he headed the Y.M.C.A.’s canteen and prisoner-of-war work. Last week, in retirement at Orlando, Fla., he was “mildly astonished.” Scandinavia’s left-wing newspapers were not only astonished but angry: they had hoped the prize would go to Madame Alexandra Kollontay, 74, ex-Soviet Ambassador to Stockholm, who helped arrange the 1944 peace between Russia and Finland.

Quaker Economist Balch helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at The Hague in 1915, served on Henry Ford’s abortive peace mission in 1916, later lost her Wellesley professorship for pacifism. As the WILPF’s honorary president, she still crusades for its principles. She explains her vigor by a quotation: “My grandfather used to say that an old woman is as tough as a boiled owl.” Recovering from bronchial asthma in a Wellesley hospital last week, she was delighted at the “genuine honor—my friends have been trying to get it for me for a long time.”

Religious humanist Hesse is a novelist and poet whom few Americans have read; Stockholm’s Aftontidningen found his selection “inscrutable.” The secretary of the Swedish Academy gave a clue to the enigma by praising him as “one of those who first eluded German suppression of a free opinion.” The gist of Hesse’s opinion: mankind, though weak and imperfect, must meet the challenge of 20th Century chaos and by undiscouraged effort try to create whatever areas of meaningful existence it can.

All three winners had certainly tried to do that. Now they had their A for effort.