"Pretty Thoroughly Browned Off"

We've posted in the past about the 1945 controversy over Dartmouth President Ernest Hopkins' comments regarding Jewish quotas in college admissions. This week we ran into the thoughts of one alum in particular. John Martin Mecklin, Class of 1939, became a war correspondent in Europe in the last years of World War II, and his letters make for some pretty stupendous reading. Not one to mince words, Mecklin says that Hopkins' words have him "pretty thoroughly browned off":

"I had been aware, of course, that there was such a policy, but to say so for publication showed incredibly bad taste. In thinking about the thing it has occurred to me that Dartmouth never has made its position very clear on exactly what it represents. I'm tempted to reply to the next appeal for donations to the alumni fund simply by mailing them a clipping of the president's remarks. As a matter of fact this clinches something I've been considering for a long time---that if I ever have a son I won't send him to Dartmouth. 

There's no place in the world today for an educational institution unwilling to face the fact that an entire new philosophy of life has been born in this war. I don't know what Dartmouth is doing about the war and revisions in its curriculum---nothing has been said about that in any of the alumni communications I've seen---but I'm skeptical that it will be big enough to face the challenge. This war and its terrible climax in the atomic bomb has put before us the simple choice of making the values we say we represent stand up or of suicide. I didn't learn about values in Dartmouth, not the ones that count and I'm beginning to suspect the learning simply wasn't available there.

I didn't understand freedom of speech, for instance, until I came over here and saw what happens when it doesn't exist. I learned about equality of opportunity in Germany, not in Dartmouth. I learned about economics in starving Berlin, not in Hanover. Perhaps it's impossible to understand such things as a student, but I don't think you have to be as dismally ignorant as I was. Of this I'm certain: the war caught Dartmouth 100% unprepared either for it or its repercussions. Will Dartmouth be caught unprepared for the peace in the same way? Hopkins' latest pronouncement certainly indicates that the answer is yes."

This is in a letter to his parents, by the way. The updates Mecklin sends home during his time as a war correspondent are filled with thoughts along these lines, a combination of sharp observations about other people alongside seemingly unaware references to his own prejudices. After all, to him the quotas weren't an issue until acknowledged publicly.

To read this and other letters, ask for ML-28 Box 2 Folder 24.