American Radical

In his chapel speech yesterday morning, Mr. Conant stated that America's chief hope for development as a free nation rests on the "number and influence" of its "tough-minded idealists." Recalling the glib complacency of those who, a year ago, oblivious of "the ominous consequences of the technical transformation of the art of war," foresaw the fulfillment of all the slick magazine ads picturing the happy, unruffled post-war world, he asked, "Should we have really expected a totally different post-war era?" But for Mr. Conant, realization of the hard cold facts of the atomic age is only half the battle, for he believes that America cannot develop as a free nation either by subscribing to the pious faith in the lasting effects of revolution, or escaping into the enervating and oftentimes reactionary cynicism. Rather than the sentimentalist or the cynic, he calls for a hard-boiled idealist "whose mode of action is in terms of the calculated risk and who, in order to calculate that risk, prefers to talk in terms of concrete and limited objectives."

What manner of man is Mr. Conant's tough-minded idealist, on whom he pins so much hope? Seemingly, he must walk the razor's edge between cynicism and sentimentalism, a man of faith, but yet one who constantly submits that faith to rigorous analysis and criticism. A man determined not to confine his ideals to noble platitudes, but to afford them real meaning by comparison of various concrete approximations of those ideals. And, finally, not a revolutionist, yet something more than a gradualist--a believer in "rapid evolution."

In an otherwise wide-eyed feature article in "Time" magazine last week, Mr. Conant was by implication charged with retreating from his previous liberal position under pressure from the alumni and the Corporation. If that liberal position was once defined in his now-famous essay "Wanted: American Radicals," then Mr. Conant's chapel talk represents a reaffirmation of that position and a logical extension of it in terms of the specific issues of 1946. Mr. Conant has not retreated. He remains in the forefront of those who believe that the American promise can only be realized through faith in a dynamic liberalism.