Small Seed

Washington's last student conference --the leftist American Youth Congress, sponsored, like many another, by Eleanor Roosevelt -- met two years ago on the White House lawn to boo a speech by the President. It applauded John L. Lewis and the Russian invasion of Finland.

Relatively restrained by comparison, the International Student Assembly convened last week in Washington with 365 delegates from 56 countries. Like most student conferences, this one was noteworthy for: 1) the vagueness of its talk; 2) the large number of students in their 30s. Unlike the others, it included a group of delegates with a dramatic record in action. Among them: Chinese Cinemactress Yung Wang, who escaped the Japs at Hong Kong by feigning feeblemindedness; Wing Commander Scott Maiden, who shot down a Nazi bomber at Dieppe; Lieut. Johannes Woltjer, veteran fighter in Holland and The Netherlands East Indies. Above all, there was blushing Liudmila Pavlichenko, 26-year-old Soviet sniperess (in field uniform and boots), whose rifle has ticked off 309 Nazis (TIME, Sept. 7).

No previous U.S. student conference has been treated to so many big-name speakers. Besides the President (who promised them post-war peace & plenty, on a national hookup), the students heard Mrs. Roosevelt ("lecturer and writer"), Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, WPB's Bill Batt, retiring Chinese Ambassador Dr. Hu Shih. In the Department of Labor's magnificent auditorium, delegates applauded speech after speech of unimpeachable commencement prose, rallying them to a United Nations victory and a just People's Peace. What they missed was a specific program.

Declared one delegate, who had escaped from Germany in 1933, fought with the French in 1940, again escaped from a Nazi concentration camp: "You cannot have just a youth organization. You need older people to guide it. Politics is a strange thing, but it is practical. Here there is too much vagueness. I do not mean this Assembly is not worth while. It may, and I think will, sow a seed. But it will be a small seed."

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