The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Life of an Unusual American This is not a review of a book. It is a review of a life. At one time or another, George N. Shuster has practiced almost all...
...To have seen through both and have fought them together was the mark of an elite group of combatants...
...His descriptions of what goes on in the various countries is often both amusing and instructive...
...Looking back, the period 1930-40 in New York City seems impossible...
...In The Ground I Walked On, Shuster tells of a meeting of students addressed by Mrs...
...There was an immense crowd in the great hall at Hunter College, and he was presiding...
...And this brings me to Shuster's fight against Communism...
...After he resigned, he wrote The Ground I Walked On (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 256 pp., $4.50), which is advertised as "Reflections of a College President...
...President Shuster is really an amalgam of Europe and America...
...To this group George N. Shuster conspicuously belonged...
...Yet deep down, too, he is European...
...Wherever you would go—in schools, colleges, even in the streets and public halls—you would run into the noisy Communist crowd bent on preventing anyone but themselves from being heard...
...Perhaps it was especially at this time that he learned to think of himself as a Catholic who constantly felt the necessity of logically explaining his religion...
...taking life seriously, taking art, science and philosophy seriously...
...At this time Communism and Nazism fought side by side...
...I sat down to await the outcome with some anxiety," Shuster writes, "but in a few moments Mrs...
...This is an unusual book, but then George Shuster is an unusual man...
...It was here, more than 25 years ago, that I first met him...
...Our whole system of education comes in for some enlightening remarks...
...At one time or another, George N. Shuster has practiced almost all the trades of intellectual life—writer, editor, professor, college president and, finally, odd-job man in the State Department...
...For many years he was the editor of Commonweal, the distinguished Catholic weekly...
...On that afternoon the Student Union, the Communist outfit, was unmasked on our campus...
...It would be useful if this book, through one sort of miracle or another, were to secure a large sale among college presidents and regents...
...He is intimately acquainted with college and university life both here and in Europe...
...He wants us to think well of it...
...But it seems to me that the great worth of George Shuster's life and of his new book lies in other fields as well...
...In addition, there are occasional juicy personal comments on celebrities, beginning with Nicholas Murray Butler and Robert M. Hutchins...
...In any case, he is very consciously a member of the Roman Church...
...Deep down the man is American...
...Roosevelt said emphatically again and again, 'is a question phrased by the Communist party.' In every case she went into the matter carefully and deliberately, explaining why the party line was devious and fatuous...
...Not even football is overlooked...
...Whenever George Shuster speaks, acts or takes a stand, he does it both as an American and as a member of his Church...
...That,' Mrs...
...In between, he has produced a shelf of books...
...He gives the impression that every waking minute the Church is in his mind...
...democratic in the freeand-easy American way...
...For 20 years Shuster served with real distinction as President of Hunter College...
...It wilted visibly before our eyes...
...Not every college president, I suspect, would have stood up and allowed himself to serve as a mark for what figured to be a rowdy time...
...moreover, he wants his own actions to advance that good opinion...
...I cannot think of anyone else in whom the combination of the two continents has been so completely realized...
...Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt was spreading light if not sweetness, while the hush of expectancy which at first lay over the audience changed to a mood of excited participation...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 10
