Heading for Hell?

In 1933, sparked by Guest Speaker Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad,* a bearded, posturing professional pundit, the famed old Oxford Union voted 275 to 153 "that under no circumstances will we fight for King and Country." When graduate members, led by Winston Churchill's choleric son Randolph, tried to expunge this from the record, they were swamped 750 to 138. In his history of World War II, Winston Churchill somberly wrote: "It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations."

Last week ex-Pacifist Joad and Randolph Churchill squared off over another provocative union resolution: "That this House regrets the influence exercised by the U.S. as the dominant power among the democratic nations."

"Money is the sole American standard of value," said Joad. "The nations are heading for hell and it is America which is leading us there . . . [American influence] corrupts, infects and pollutes whatever it touches." Angry shouts of "Shame!" greeted Joad's remark, "What a genius the Americans have for coming into a war late, on the winning side."

Other shouts drowned out Randolph when he said, "Back the professor comes after 17 years, with his rotten advice, trying to lure yet another generation along the wrong path." Union President Robin Day rang the bell for silence, but Randolph soon brought another uproar by saying, "It may be just a joke for the professor, this third-class Socrates,* [but he] is corrupting, infecting and polluting the good relations between Britain and the U.S."

The undergraduate debaters were also vituperative. Said young Socialist Dick Taverne: "American culture is a cheapening and degrading force . . . American politics are a poor advertisement for democracy; [and the] economic influence exercised by America is a disturbing force in the world ... I see in [America] no spiritual resources to raise her civilization above the level of the common business man."

Howard E. Sherman, the only American undergraduate who took part in the debate, asked, "Since money for money's sake is an old-established Puritan principle of English origin, is not the honorable member from Balliol [Joad] regretting an influence which England gave America and which England is now getting back?"

But when the shouting died down and the vote was taken, Joad won again, 227 to 179.

* Since 1930 Joad, professor of philosophy at London University, has publicly advocated agnosticism, polygamy, suicide, Manichaeanism, Christianity, rationalism, dualism, pacifism, appeasement, intervention, Oswald Mosley, Socialism, anti-Zionism, gambling, Jane Russell's bosom and better British cooking.

*A thrust at Joad's third-class travel on a British train without buying a ticket, which brought him a court conviction in 1948.

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