A Journey into the World: Reflections of an Itinerant Professor

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

BY THE AUTHOR

Preface

At an early age various aspects of my family life, education, interests and activities brought home to me certain moral or ethical contradictions inherent in my environment, but unquestioned by family, teachers, church or peers. It was the questioning of these contradictions, and my reaction to world events, which would lead me to search for meaning and relevance.

My active life has probably encompassed the most violent, destructive, innovative, promising and challenging era of human history, an era beginning with the events leading to World War II and including the rise and collapse of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, the displacement of colonial empires and the rise of nationalism, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Vietnam and Korean wars, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the American invasion of Iraq, the challenge to American hegemony in the Americas, the growth of Islamic-based forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the challenge of a new world economic order, and space exploration with its profound philosophical and theological implications. In some way, directly or indirectly, my life as a student, and teacher, and more recently, as a businessman and consultant, has been influenced by salient aspects of all of those events, as both contributors and victims of numerous cultures, religions, political persuasions, have entered, molded or altered my own world view.

Primarily, however, it was my decision to follow a teaching career that led me into the larger world. As time has passed, I have recognized more clearly that it was the stimulation and challenges of various teachers and librarians, beginning in elementary school and continuing through university, which brought me to appreciate the meaning and richness of diversity in all its forms.

In large part, I have been an active spectator of major world events, but, in other situations, a minor player. Through it all, however, I have been blessed with friendship and love which has transcended those barriers which, for so many people, have created insuperable obstacles to the knowledge of their fellow human beings. It has been the awareness that universal greed, now threatening at an accelerating rate the very extinction of life on our fragile planet, plus major impediments to understanding based on race, religion, culture, ethnicity, sex, orientation, class or political affiliation, must either be replaced by genuine recognition of the Creator’s universal and creative love or we shall remain as the catalysts of our own universal destruction.

In attempting to reflect upon my own evolution both as a world citizen and as a proud but more humbled American, I must also focus upon the lives and heritages of those who have most affected my perceptions and life choices. Many business persons, ministers of government, ambassadors – the children of illiterate parents isolated from world events – are today the formulators of policies, for better and for worse, affecting not only their own people but the international community. Having met them and shared their journeys has challenged and enriched my life.

Chapter I

What Was the Beginning?

Childhood and Family

The world beyond, as I remember it, began in 1939. I was born, however, on June 16, 1931 of humble, middle class parents of English, Scots-Irish, German extraction in New Castle, Pennsylvania in a house built through my father’s superior bricklayer handiwork. But as a child of eight I was already attuned to the fact that there was something beyond Arthur McGill Elementary School and my immediate family concerns. That challenging first grade reader, Dick and Jane, which carried such gems as See Jane run and See Dick and Jane run also had an intriguing picture, in color, of Dick’s uncle riding a camel, wearing Arab headgear, in a desert region sprinkled with palm trees. How I envied that Dick. If only I had been given an uncle who would take me on a camel into a far away desert region. But I really knew of only one uncle at the time and he did not seem to be the traveling type.

My early education was supplemented by such radio program favorites as Tom Mix and the Ralston Straight Shooters, Flash Gordon, and Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy. The story of Little Black Sambo, a marvel of stereotypes, in bright color, and an occasional viewing of Tarzan in a Saturday movie matinee – provided my introduction to the Dark Continent. Custer’s Last Stand brought no real love for Chief Sitting Bull but I admired his courage in defense of the tribe. For some time my favorite hat was an imitation Indian war bonnet with colored chicken feathers. At play with my older brother Ed I was always the Indian while he the cowboy.

Fortunately, however, there was another and more dominant aspect in my developing world view. It came every evening when I sat down with my father, George W. Stevens (he never wrote it out as George Washington Stevens, son of Abraham Lincoln Stevens) as he tuned to KDKA of Pittsburgh, America’s pioneer radio station, and listened to the evening news. All was quiet as father absorbed and commented upon the news which focused upon President Roosevelt, his programs, and growing threats from Hitler and Russia. My father’s total support was for the President’s proposals, the WPA, and opposition to the failed Republican Party of Hoover, the former president. Commentaries by Walter Winchell in Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and All Ships at Sea informed us of secret Communists in Washington and Fr. Coughlin’s commentary from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Detroit fleshed out our weekly listening diet. I was perplexed by the fact that father never disagreed with that priest since he was not a Catholic and for some years had been quite antagonistic towards the Church. But of the threat of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin there was no doubt. My father’s views, although formulated in terms of an educational background which ended at grade eight, seemed to be grounded in common sense and based on real-life experience.

World War II

It was the news of September 1st 1939 that Hitler had invaded Poland, and the immediate declaration of war against Germany by Britain and France, which caught and held my attention. Subsequent news of the Finns valiantly resisting Stalin’s forces earned my father’s special praise. Finland, he said, was alone among those countries owing the United States which had paid its war debts and deserved to be helped. We followed news of German advances and of the British and French retreats. I applauded with my father news of the Allied escape from Dunkirk in early June 1940 and shared his fears on June 22nd of what the surrender of France would mean. We discussed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 and the failure of the League of Nations to listen to the appeal of Emperor Haile Selassie for assistance. All of the war news became more vivid as we listened attentively, through crackling static, as Edward R. Morrow’s compelling voice, following the tolling of Big Ben in London, brought us to the frightening scene, sometimes amid air raid sirens, and the distant sound of bombs. The war was real and there was no mistake that the United States must help Britain. We strongly opposed secret Nazi and Communist collaborators in the United States and sought their exposure. These were my father’s views and these were my views.

December 7, 1941: Reaction

A new chapter in my relationship with the world began on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Thereafter I no longer needed or relied upon my father as news provider or analyst. On that fateful Sunday I was seated on the couch reading the comics. Father, as usual, sat in his corner chair, reading the Pittsburgh Gazette while paying slight attention to the radio. Suddenly there was a program interruption – the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The following day, December 8, and the next day, became the focus of my attention as President Roosevelt announced that a state of war existed between the United States and the Empire of Japan and thereafter between the United States, on the one hand, and Germany and its allies on the other. Together with my mother and father I pondered the future and wondered how it would affect our family.

Now almost ten and a half years old, and in grade 5, I took the war immediately to heart. Within a few weeks I secured colored maps of Europe, Africa and the Far East and pinned them to the bedroom wall, a bedroom shared with my thirteen year old brother, Edwin. I found small paper flags of all the combatants, and with the insertion of straight pins moved the flags on my wall maps according to the evening news or reports in the New Castle News which I daily perused.

The war in Europe, Africa and the Pacific, however, was not simply an abstraction. Previously, in 1940, my oldest sister, Gertrude, had married her high school sweetheart, Stanley Paul, a railroad engineer of Polish extraction. Stanley, or Stan, had enlisted expecting to return to civilian life within a short period of time. With war declared, however, Stan was sent to Iran to facilitate rail supply traffic to Russia, by then an American ally. As the war progressed Stan would go on to Egypt, Libya and by war’s end, Italy.

In addition to Stan, whom I liked very much, the war caught up my sister Norma’s husband, Richard Doyle, also a railroad worker, of Irish extraction, who enlisted in the Navy. My oldest brother, George, married to Betty Evans of Welsh extraction, also joined the Navy, as did my young cousin, Walter Harper. Eventually even my brother Edwin left high school with parental permission and joined the Navy. All would serve in the Pacific theater. News that my cousin, Walter, my Aunt Caroline’s only son, was lost at sea shortly after enlistment at age 16 stirred our anger and fueled our support of the war effort.

Over the next few years, 1942 into early 1945, my sisters and mother, seated nightly at the dining room table, sometimes with flowing tears, unfailingly wrote their letters. The war was real for me and my family and I did not hesitate to speak my mind among classmates at school. I was not at all reluctant to express the view that, yes, we might even be bombed. These observations had what I considered to be a good effect – some girls were sufficiently stirred to cry – which brought a private reprimand from my teacher asking that I not frighten the children. While I obliged my teacher I certainly was not sorry. On the contrary, I felt that these stupid girls deserved to cry for being so ignorant of what was happening in the world.

Junior Defense Army: Response to War

In addition to following the war through the newspapers and radio I decided to make a personal contribution to the war effort. Imitating the decision of Annie, in the comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, who formed the Junior Commandos, I determined to form the Junior Defense Army, the JDA. I requested time of my social science teacher, Miss Smith, to hold an after school meeting in which I explained to all interested students that we could work on Saturdays in a systematic way to collect all sorts of things needed in the war effort. Scrap iron, steel, copper, and bronze could be turned into weapons. Books and games could be gathered for the nearby veteran’s hospital in Butler. Used clothing could be collected for Bundles for Britain. Blankets could be made from patches of used clothing, and even milk weed pods could be turned into some sort of wartime substitute. Miss Smith’s encouragement followed by that of Miss Wallace, were crucial in providing me with the self-confidence needed to move beyond ordinary 5th and 6th grade interests.

My classmates responded enthusiastically to my proposal and mother agreed to make us distinctive armbands. Using old white bed sheets and red piping material, she turned out about sixty armbands with bold JDA stitching. My sisters, Gertrude and Norma, both then working in the purchasing department of the Standard Steel Spring plant, where they had replaced conscripted males; Gertrude as assistant purchasing agent and Norma as her secretary, were of special help. In a company converted from the making of car and train springs into bombs, they lent themselves and their new Buick and Pontiac cars to many of our weekend efforts. From all streets of our northern section of New Castle, and according to my plan and assignments, kids emerged from houses and backyards lugging every imaginable type of contribution. Everyone was asked to bring a wagon and these, loaded to capacity, descended upon the backyard of my house at 520 Hillcrest Avenue. Even such large items as water tanks were attached to the bumpers of my sisters’ cars. Abandoned oil barrels were rolled by several boys and girls working as a team. The pile in my backyard grew into a miniature mountain until taken away by trucks volunteered for government use.

As the fame and accomplishments of the Junior Defense Army grew I was invited for interview by our local radio station, WKST. While much was accomplished through these efforts over the course of the school year, a sad lesson was also learned. I was approached by a woman organizer, apparently of some influence, who suggested that our Junior Defense Army merge into the Junior Commandos, which she, General something or other, had organized with financial support. In return for our cooperation I would become a Colonel, have some lovely stripes and a uniform. Each JDA member would receive a beautiful Junior Commando peaked hat in purple, white, and red piping. Our group considered and accepted the offer but in reality that ended the wartime effort. Our General had no army but she had achieved publicity. A lesson was learned about the wiles of adults in search of fame!

Sometime during the early war period I was puzzled by another contradiction, never clearly articulated, but one which led me to commit a crude action. In December 1942 the President had authorized the internment of all Japanese on the west coast. Knowing nothing of the issue, that these were American citizens or legal residents, I simply could not understand why Japanese were being locked up and not Germans or Italians. Surely Mr. and Mrs. Seiler, our German-born next-door neighbors were just as likely to be harboring spies or doing worse things than the Japanese. After all, I sometimes heard them speaking German. Finding a German postage stamp with a Nazi surcharge in my stamp collection, I wrote a note to the Seilers purportedly from a fictitious Nazi agent, a note which might lead to some incriminating response. I addressed it, affixed the stamp, and surreptitiously placed the letter in their mailbox and awaited the reaction. The reaction was quite different from what I had expected. It took only a few minutes after opening the letter for Mrs. Seiler to conclude that the perpetrator of this crude hoax could only be the young rascal next door. She delivered it immediately to my father and an appropriate punishment followed! So why were all the Japanese and not the Germans and Italians the enemy? They all had the same monstrous portrayal in the comic books; some even had fang-like teeth. I recalled no satisfactory answer.

If the war awakened me to the threats of aggression it also led to greater intellectual interest. I became knowledgeable not only in the war as it unfolded in battles won and lost, but in the background of the participants. Allied to the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan were Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The neutrals, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Turkey, led me to deeper study of their policies and governments. There were also governments in exile with embassies or legations in Washington, DC to be discovered.

In English class we learned to write business letters. Rather than turn to make-believe contacts I wrote mine to the Department of State for their publications and to other government agencies. I also wrote to every embassy and legation in Washington. I discovered that while the United States was an ally of the Soviet Union we had never recognized the Soviet incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia and that their respective legations and consulate-general were considered the legal representatives of those governments. I found the Imperial Legation of Ethiopia, the Royal Legation of Egypt, and a number of other embassies of special interest. From each I requested all of their publications, political, economic, cultural, and a flag. My files grew – pamphlets and booklets became a virtual library totaling well over a thousand by the time the war had ended in 1945 and I was in grade 8. Much of my free time was spent devouring these publications.

What was considered work in history, social science or geography classes became my daily food. Government leaders, kings, presidents, prime ministers, capitals, boundary matters, revolutions, what could be more enticing reading!! Such was the level of my interest that my social science teachers in grades seven and eight gave me research topics or articles to further stimulate my interest. Miss Spencer, my seventh grade teacher, in George Washington Junior High School, assigned me a special article on The Red Bogey in Colombia and South America which I was asked to explain before the class. From that article I became aware that complaints of poverty were dismissed by the ruling Latin American oligarchies, supported generally by large land owners, militaries and high Catholic Church leaders, as Communist plotting and propaganda.

First Employment: Public Library and New Awakening

At age fourteen I successfully sought employment in the New Castle Public Library as a page at the fabulous salary of 20 cents an hour. Labor regulations were such that I was permitted to work approximately 15 hours per week, after school, and on Saturday. I loved my work and labored faithfully under the direction of five dedicated librarians. Each of these women helped to open new vistas for me. Not only did I easily learn to shelve books according to the Dewey Decimal Classification System, but I was permitted to do desk duty and carry out research for patrons using the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, the New York Times Index, and the Social Science Index.

Within a few months I began assisting Westminster College students, illiterate in the use of these research tools, in finding materials for their term papers. Once or twice a month I was encouraged to sit in for a Great Books discussion sponsored by the library. Here my mind was opened to the stirring words of Vincent Benet’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body and T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland. Although the enchanting lines of Once more oh ye laurels and once more ye lilies brown, I come to pluck your berries, harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude …. left me at a loss to comprehend the meaning of their Greek author, I realized from the animated discussion which followed that there was still another world out there for me to understand.

During two years of library work, which lasted into tenth grade, I became keenly aware of how much I did not know. Reading stimulated a desire for travel and I envied those with such experience. If I had one boyhood hero it was Richard Halliburton whose book, The Royal Road to Romance, published in 1925, detailed his travels from Princeton, through Europe and Asia to Japan and home. The frontispiece photo of Halliburton, standing in front of the Taj Mahal wearing an Indian turban was the model to which I aspired. The picture was later duplicated and retained as a souvenir of early reading.

Richard Halliburton world traveler and my early role model

I also became an avid reader of historical and political biographies and autobiographies. While interested in some American leaders it was primarily those of other countries which captured and held my interest. The history and politics of a few countries were of special interest. Thus, I was intrigued by the existence of small countries such as Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican State and Luxembourg, and a variety of colonial territories and protectorates. Basutoland, a British protectorate and High Commission Territory, surrounded by the Union of South Africa – a country based on race, intrigued me as an island, so to speak, within South Africa. Ethiopia, Haiti, Mexico, Peru and Egypt – each for some unusual reason, stirred greater interest.

I felt especially connected to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. A picture which I found of the Emperor’s coronation on the cover of a 1930 issue of National Geographic was a source of fascination and for many years it remained a treasured possession. I was also stirred by newsreel coverage of the Emperor’s speech to the League of Nations in 1936. At that time he accurately predicted that failure to act upon Mussolini’s aggression would bring catastrophe upon the world. The fact that the imperial chinaware had been made in the Shenango Pottery of my hometown, and which the Emperor was obliged to sell in London, struck a special chord of association. The fascinating history of Ethiopia, the Solomonic tradition, Emperor Menelik, the Battle of Adawa in which an African army had defeated Italy, an emerging European power, led me into deeper reading on that country.

That Haiti, a country led by slaves from Africa, could defeat Napoleon and give rise to a monarchy, was a marvel of great fascination. Nothing in my personal experience or study had prepared me for such a possibility of black leadership. There was scarcely a volume on Haiti’s leaders such as King Christophe, Toussaint L’Overture, Dessalines, or its history, which I did not read. I also became aware that from its earliest days a class cleavage had developed along the lines of color pigmentation, very light to dark black, based on former usage of slaves by their French owners. This cleavage was largely duplicated in the more light colored occupants of Petionville and its more sophisticated houses overlooking the squalor below of the capital, Port- au-Prince.

Mexico – from the conquest by Cortez of the Aztecs and the subsequent murder of Montezuma, revolutionary leaders such as Frs. Hidalgo and Morelos, Iturbide, Emperor Maximilian, Juarez, Diaz, Cardenas, Madero, Pancho Villa, Zapata, Cardenas, the evolution of the PRI, all carried me on to an understanding of colonialism, racism, imperialism, nationalism and anti-clericalism.

Pizarro in Peru and the brutal conquest of the Inca, in the name of Christianity and civilization, left me amazed that such as these conquistadors could be the heroes of the New World discovery. Everywhere the contradictions; an incredible tale of virtue, vice, valor and betrayal! The forced baptism of the Inca Atahualpa followed by his garroting, together with the establishment of the Inquisition in Lima challenged the meaning of my Catholic faith. While the image of Bishop las Casas in opposition to the African slave trade gave something of redemption to the accompanying evils of the discovery, the burden which went essentially unchallenged by missionaries and the Church of the virtual enslavement of the indigenous population left me adrift in my seeking after justice. The fact that even religious orders such as the Franciscans received encomiendas from the Crown, which included the indigenous population on the sequestered land, appeared as an additional betrayal of the Christian message.

While most of my classmates were concerned with the ordinary interests of junior high school I thirsted to know the world and to become involved. Of one thing I was certain, New Castle was not the world and I would one day leave it in pursuit of new interests. Thanks to the invitation of my Aunt Nadyne Gulnac, and her husband, Stanley, a US Army Pentagon photographer, both attuned more to life beyond New Castle, I made my first solo train trip away from home at age thirteen. Not only did my aunt and uncle enable me to visit the major government departments and museums, sometimes alone, but the experience set the stage for my trip, at the conclusion of 8th grade, alone and based on my library savings, to explore the capital in depth. The heart of that expedition, which my parents, confident of my ability so wisely permitted, was a visit to virtually every embassy and legation in Washington. From Massachusetts Avenue to the far northern reaches of 16th Street I walked. I returned home a week later with a suitcase of new materials and was thrilled with the knowledge that I had experienced a taste of so many exotic countries, including those of Haiti, Egypt and Ethiopia, simply by entering their embassies or legations.

I also returned home from Washington wiser in the knowledge of the contradictions of my own country. For I brought with me the first experience of segregation, the result of crossing from the District of Columbia into Virginia and being obliged to sit in the front of a bus while Colored passengers went to the back. It was a very unsettling experience and one which I could not reconcile with my strong belief in American democracy. How could this injustice be accepted by those of us who daily pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America with liberty and justice for all without being hypocrites if not worse?

Publishing

In fact, my visit to Washington, which came as I was about to enter the last year of junior high school, also led to a new adventure as a writer-publisher? Previously, in 7th grade, using a child’s printing press with moveable rubber type, the Christmas gift of my sister Gertrude, I put out the first edition of The News, to cater to classmate interest, at 2 cents a copy. Although the newspaper came to an untimely demise after the publication of three less than flattering poems, written by our most brainy student, Judiah Higgins, about our spelling, English and music teachers, I had not lost the desire to reach out with the printed word. Utilizing all of the materials I had collected in Washington from the Department of State and the embassies I decided to write and publish The Directory of Foreign Governments and Foreign Services.

But how was a kid of fifteen to author and sell anything? The solution was to invent a cover. The work was to be published by the Foreign Services Institute of New Castle, Pennsylvania, an institute born in my bedroom and unknown to the outside world. But with my library earnings I commissioned a talented classmate, an occasional girl friend movie date, Jean McLean, to design a plate for a cover. She advanced a picture of the world with the title running around it, and was paid the handsome commission of $20.00 from my savings. The Directory, duly copyrighted with the Library of Congress, was envisaged as a quarterly publication comprising three sections. The first section contained a list of all accredited American ambassadors and heads of missions to foreign countries, and conversely, of all heads of foreign missions in Washington. The second section was a list of all rulers and heads of government with their respective cabinets. The third section contained brief descriptions of recent foreign government changes, where due note was taken in the first issue of the unexpected change in Bhutan under King Jig Mi Wang Chuck.

Upon completion of the work, which totaled some 40 pages, I proceeded to type and duplicate a one page flier with a tear-off subscription portion, and mailed the same to every embassy and all major libraries. Thus began the two issue, short-lived publication of the Foreign