Town Hall

Outsiders frequently wonder why Cleveland is more international-minded than most Midwest cities. Clevelanders know the answer--the educational influence of their city's Foreign Affairs Council. Last fortnight it formally changed its name to Council on World Affairs.

Godfather of the Foreign Affairs Council was Cleveland's famed adopted son, Newton Diehl Baker. In 1923 he helped launch it as the Council for the Prevention of War, watched it lead a haphazard existence until 1934. Then, to an earnest, handsome young man of 34 who was teaching foreign affairs at Yale, he wrote: "The problem we are interested in is . . . that form of adult education about foreign and national affairs which will be so consecutive, continuous and disinterested as to make the whole people . . . conscious at the same time of the same set of facts. . . . Instead of having the life of our nation imperiled by the possibility of emotional response to inflammatory impulses, we would have that ideal of democracy, an informed public opinion. . . ."

Young Man from Yale. Baker's letter was the catalyst that changed the limping, directionless Council into the powerful educational instrument it is today. To Cleveland came the young instructor from Yale--Brooks Emeny, the Council's present director. Graduated from Princeton in 1924, Emeny selected diplomacy as a career, studied abroad for three years as a Carnegie Fellow in international law.

When Emeny took over the Council in 1935 it had 350 members, 90% of whom were women. Its activities consisted of four luncheon meetings a year, with an average attendance of 100. Today's figures: more than 3,500 members (about half of them men), weekly meetings, an average attendance of from 500 to 1,000. Speakers who have addressed the Council and answered open-forum questions resemble a walking Who's Who of international affairs --China's Dr. Hu Shih, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, former Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, Peru's Dr. Alberto Arca-Parro, a host of others.

Slender, dark-haired Brooks Emeny's restrained manner conceals a burning intensity of purpose. Married to the former Winifred Rockefeller (granddaughter of William Rockefeller, brother of John D.), he lives unostentatiously in swankily suburban Shaker Heights, firmly believes that 40 councils like Cleveland's could knock isolationism into a cocked hat.

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