Civilization Comes to Green Mansions
Feigenbaum, William M.
By William M. Feigenbaum Civilization Comes to Green Mansions IN W. H. HUDSON'S beauti1 book, "Green Mansions," w« get a lovely picture of the jungle wilderness In the upper reachei of the...
...Mayor Cermak set the spirit of tho occasion in an appeal mada shortly Were he boarded tho train for tho sunny heaohoo of Florida...
...The people of Colombia were alow in realising that the honor of their great country was at stake, but once aroused .. .1 It is a quaint thing, this "honor" of a nation...
...Brazil haa no claim to Laeticia, but the Amazon runs through a large part of that republic, and possibly the statesmen at Rio do Janeiro believe that the blood that may be shed if there is a war will pollute waters running through Brazilian territory...
...And that would have settled the matter if it had not been that what is humorously known as a nation's lienor" had become Involved re the meanwhile...
...Don't we know it...
...Argentina's educational budget for 1938 compares "favorably" with those of 1988 and 1981...
...But it was once an Important rubber region, and once there were camps in which Englishmen exploited and sweated the natives in the rubber trade...
...Then tho atrocities will begin...
...Peruvian bark will become Liberty Wood and Brazil nuts will he reehristoned Ecuador Tit-bits...
...Oh, we forgot...
...Education Is at present seeing the fulfillment of a big...
...and the Party Conference of the C. P. O., tho German Bolsheviks will undertake with redoubled energy the task of putting into operation t he decisions of tho XII Plenum of the E. C. C. I. and tho Party Conference, and will guarantee within a short period to prepare tho German proletariat for the decisive revolutionary battle...
...The Canadian Federal Office of Education, for example, reported that "School attendance is increasing and educational expansion has been slowed down but not halted...
...Details wore given as to school attendance, number ml schools, size of classes, number of teachers, building program, etc...
...Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Haiti havo made no special shanges to school budgets...
...Panama haa increased hers...
...The flags began to wave and the Colombian equivalent of "God Save the King" began to be played in the movie theatres of Bogota and Bucaramanga, Call and Cucuta and the other great eitiaa of that republic...
...The "maneuver" in question is an attempt to win unity of action between tho Socialists and the Communist masses...
...And if you think we made alt thia up as a rather crude satire, you're crazy...
...Laeticia Laeticia Is a town in the region of the Green Mansions...
...Why not get into the scrapT So there aha is...
...A treaty at one time awarded the spot to Colombia in preference to Peru...
...Tho present national policy is one of economic self-development and of improved social services...
...In that tangled jungle land there have been few surveys, and white men have had difficulty in even penetrating there...
...A Peruvian will fail to rise with sufficient alacrity when "Gott orhalte uns den Colombia," or "Die Wacht am Putumayo" is played, and he will be set upon by an angry mob of patriots...
...In Mexico the school expenditures from the national treasury "have steadily increased since 1927" in apito of severe depression...
...Political disturbances in Brazil and Cuba, more than tho economic depression, have injured education...
...It la hard to imagine any spot on earth less important than that, and except for one accidental fact it would never have bean more than a fly speck on the larger maps of South America...
...Over the past five years, answers to the questionnaire disclose, school expenditures by fifteen Latin-American countries, fourteen European, three Asiatic, three African countries, Newfoundland, tho nine Canadian provinces, Now Zealand and tho six states of Australia wore reduced lass than were school budgets in the United States...
...Someone has said that a man who talks much about his patriotism Is like a woman incessantly prating of her honor...
...So has everybody else...
...Meanwhile Hitler and Hugenberg rule with an iron hand, blood is flowing, and tho Socialists are making every effort to secure unity of action with tho Communist mssset and this is the response...
...Just one mora touch is needed...
...but soma Ecuadorean Walter Llppmann will find out and tell them in plenty of time...
...Laeticia Is on the mighty Amazon, two thousand miles and more from the month of the groat river, In the eastern slopes of the Andes...
...Estonia has cut its school expenditures, but they are a larger proportion of the total budget than before tho collapse...
...Since this was written hostilities hsve actually begun.] Ready...
...It is a city fifteen hundred miles up the Amazon, once a thriving, bustling metropolis of rubber...
...or a shepherd from tho foothills of the Andes will seek to quench his thirst with s drink purchased with Peruvian money...
...And Laeticia...
...Did otie ever hear of Laeticia...
...The very zenith of patrotic fervor was reached when a Colombian statesmen introduced a bill in Congress to appropriate money to build a tomb for the heroic Unknown Colombian Soldier—who is not yet dead because he has not yet begun to fight and possibly is not yet in the army...
...It is the serpent of what Is quaintly known as modern civilisation...
...And so today four nations stand armed, ready to leap at each others' throats, to give an object lesson to the brothers and sisters of the gentle Riolama of tho merits and glories of the civilisation thay will not accept How they must admire the brainy white man I Any minute now it will begin...
...Wo thought you'd want to know why it is that tho Socialists are tho betrayers end Fascists, while tho Communists are the only ones entitled to utter the slogan, Workors, Unitol NOTE ON MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT The Chicago Tribune, self-styled "World's Greatest Newspaper* ran the following item, Feb...
...Or, for that matter, had one ever heard of Sarajevo In Bosnia before June 28th, 1814...
...English teachers' salaries havo bean cut 10 per cent, and other reductions in the cost of public education have been forced, but the Tory government declares that for the past year education haa "hold ¦p well" considering the circumstances...
...It is not a very important town, and the 500 men and women who live there probably are among the least important people anywhere in the world...
...What is hereinbefore written is literally true...
...Mora than a half a million people dwelt there...
...Those who are receiving substantial aid from ta» ation should bo willing to help In this emergency.*" By Lawrence Todd American Education Suffers Most WASHINGTON...
...Pisarro will be then claimed aa tho founder of Colombia, and Peru will be charged with hie foul murder...
...Manaoa And here wa have still another cosmic jest For what is Manaos...
...Hence, a fleet of ton gunboats has been mobilised, and bombing and scouting planes are assembled at Manaos* just to be ready in ease, in case...
...But in recent months they have been getting more publicity than even the most ardent' Laeticia Chamber of Commerce booster could ask for even in his most intoxicated moments...
...hence Its nam* Laetieia, so incongruous In those parts...
...It givesyour a rough idea of the sort of world we live in today—this best and most intelligent of all possible civilizations...
...And Colombia has seemed a little comical In her outburst of "honor...
...it was a real tropical metropolis, sn aquatorial Paris...
...Finland is ono of tho countries in which public education has "suffered unduly" along with other social services...
...One of the camps becama a permanent, though a tiny town, and It was named by a now-forgotten Englishman after a sweetheart or a mother or a light o' love...
...That seemed to dispose of the matter, especially since the whole affair was of something leu than world-shaking Importance...
...Let's see if the city can g«t this snow cleaned away for nothing,' bo said...
...And it has come...
...It's a beautifully written book, and although on* knows that the region is alive with ferocious beasts, swarming with deadly snakes, peopled with savages, a region of steaming heat and tangled, poisonous vegetation, one comes away from reading it with a feeling (doubting wholly erroneous) that here is the garden of the world, the Eden of the West But a serpent has entered this Eden—and it Is not one of the pythons and coral-snakes that abound there...
...President Olaya Herrera himself stood in line at the1 National Bank with his wife in a long queu, to turn in their wedding rings to the government so that bulleta might be bought to slay the degenerate Peruvians . . . and undoubtedly government securities are now known as "Liberty" bonds...
...Bo far," the Irish Free Itato reports, "educational expenditure remains unaffected...
...reform program begun by tho Irish government in 1928 and now nearing completion...
...trolley cars clanged their way down the palm-shaded though crowded streets, there was a superb opera house and great singers and violinists begged for engagements there, for the people were rich and generous and fees were good...
...both are under suspicion...
...What a cosmic jest it would be if the legislator were himself to be drafted and thrown into the army to be mangled in the bloody Amazonian slime, and later to be borne reverently (in pieces) to the tomb in Bogota 1 But meanwhile two more countries have been busy...
...and that great country la in the throes of a patriotic orgy, too.' Nobody knows yet why...
...Knter the Serpent But a few monts ago an unauthorized band of patriotic Peruvians seized the town in the name of Peru Irridtnta, or something like that Peru—which has trouble enough of its own as It is—returned the spit of land and the town to Colombia with an apology...
...To make it all clear so that even tho simplest German peasant cafl understand, tho article concludes* "Taking as a basis the leading political directives of the XII Plenum of the E. C. CI...
...THIS MAKES IT CLEAR PROM the New York Times r of February 11th: "Hitler proclaims war on Democracy at huge Nazi rally (headline...
...8, which deserves to be preserved forever:— "Chicago, victorious in its efforts to dig its traffic lanes out of eleven inches of drifted show, is to suffer early today in temperatures near 10 degrees below zero, according to tho official forecaster, C. A. Donnel...
...A Wave of Patriotism A patriotic fervor awept the country from the Spanish Main to the Andes, and it became fashionable for Colombians to turn in their personal jewelry so that the government might have gold to wage war...
...That accidental fact Is that Laetieia is on a spit of land in a fork of the Amazon River, at a point where several of the South American republics coma together...
...Radicals began to be damned as pro-Peruvians and demands by the workers for living conditions wsra denounced aa intrigues by secret paid agents of Peru...
...Lithuania gives 14 per cent of its budget to education...
...F. Abel, chief of its foreign school systems division...
...or a Colombian editor will reflect upon the chastity of Peruvian women, and it will be off...
...and that makes it a Brazilian issue...
...was snarled at puling pacifists who did not arise with the necessary alacrity...
...A town in Austria that manufactures munitions reports prosperity...
...The traders left, and the sad city is falling Into disrepair, and its population has been cut in two and is dwindling fast The pave menta are cracked, grass is growing in the streets, the Irresistible Jungle is creeping In on the oncepopulous streets and strangling the city, the squawks of macaws, the chattering of monkeys, the yelps of jaguars are heard in the night Soon Manaos will bo like Angkor-Vet, a dead and deserted city, through which scurry and scamper the Bandar-log, they whose tails hang down behind...
...A region of dense tropical vegetation, a region peopled by a primitive race of aborigines, in which the alluring Riolama—the Riroa of the famous Epstein sculptures in London—stays the venomous snake about to strike the white man with the purring sound of her voice...
...Therefore the prompt and rapid defeat of tho now ma* neuven of tho Social Democracy l( tho taok of tho moment...
...Italy and Albania report that schools have escaped the depression...
...Everybody is working, orders are coming in, and pacifists are denounced aa enemioa of God...
...In the body of the story: "There is to be either the German nation or Marxism 1" On the same day, in the official Communist organ of New York: "The task of tho Communist Party of Germany remains, as before—to dirtet tho 4hi$f blow, at the present stage, againot Social Democracy...
...Ecuador suddenly recalled that her boundaries are not dearly denned In the Jungles through which no surveyor haa as yet bean able to penetrate...
...Stand np, you...
...Education has been made to suffer worse setbacks in the United States than in the schools of forty other nations, during the worldwide economic depression...
...But there is still another country...
...Budget increases under these heads are offset by economies in other directions and by increased taxation...
...The streets were wellpaved, beautiful marble homes lined the thoroughfares, fine shops displayed Parisian finery...
...By William M. Feigenbaum Civilization Comes to Green Mansions IN W. H. HUDSON'S beauti1 book, "Green Mansions," w« get a lovely picture of the jungle wilderness In the upper reachei of the Amaxon...
...But the Brazilian rubber trade died, and the city lost its primacy...
...It Is to this city that the great and progressive government of Brazil sends its ten modern gunboats, with all tho devices of modern science for destroying life, has sent the cloud of planes, with bombs and gas . . . just to bo on hand to see that when tho fight starts Brazil will not be left out in tho steaming, equatorial rain...
...This evidence of the leadership of America in the retreat from modern standards of public duty in the schooling of children has been gathered by the U. S. Office of Education, in a survey made by Dr...
Vol. 15 • February 1933 • No. 7
