Riots for Learning
RIOTS FOR LEARNING THE grandest story in many weeks emanates not from Antarctica, nor any place more remote than New York, where the police reserves were called upon to quell a riot which had...
...Of course there is a chance that the ex-President may look upon the crowds that rioted before the Museum as the "camp followers" of civilization...
...One thousand invitations had been issued, and we should say that ordinarily a response of 2 percent might have been expected...
...He finds that we are a select people, sound of heart, limitless in spiritual power, and that one of the "immediate causes of our material progress" is the superiority of our character...
...And thus it may be that the men who stormed the Einstein movie are but a fragment of the hosts who have lately walked in the mansions of philosophy, or done valiant service in the art of thinking...
...They may be examples of the "idle, vicious, boisterous wastrels" to whom he referred...
...Coolidge forgot to praise us is our desire for improvement...
...Perhaps we can find a clew to all this in Mr...
...Or it may be that the whole incident is a page from another day-such a day as when the Florentines carried Cimabue's Madonna in triumph through the streets, or the students of Salamanca swarmed from the town to welcome a returning sage...
...One thing for which Mr...
...There have been no riots at the art exhibitions...
...Tex Rickard in his greatest days had no such problem as this: to accommodate four times as many spectators as he could seat, and 75 percent of them gate-crashers, the largest percentage ever of uninvited guests...
...This has not been a winter in which such a demonstration of enthusiasm might go unnoticed...
...RIOTS FOR LEARNING THE grandest story in many weeks emanates not from Antarctica, nor any place more remote than New York, where the police reserves were called upon to quell a riot which had broken out in a crowd unable to gain admittance into the Museum of National History, which was showing a movie illustrating the Einstein Theory...
...Coolidge's observations on the American character...
...The key mood of the city has been indifference to anything but the stock market, and even that has of late become a bore...
...Einstein has succeeded where the best singers, excitingest painters, and most glamorous personalities of the stage have failed...
...Such a people might be expected to pass by the artificialities of the theatre for the realities of learning...
...New York has not been fighting to see its favorites...
...Blows are struck and blood is shed over the one man whose ideas should be counted upon to put an audience most rapidly and effectively to sleep...
...the Opera House and the theatres have not yet called desperately for the reserves...
...instead some forty-five hundred assembled at the appointed hour...
...Surely this is a commendable trait, even if it is sometimes manifested in startling ways, and we do not always follow the avenues which may reasonably lead to its satisfaction...
...For it is well known that when the love of knowledge invades a man, he will swim the widest river, and attack on the other shore...
...Clubs and swords will not prevent him, and there are no walls he will not batter down...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 12
