CALL FOR VOLUNTEER

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Each year since 1948 the Winant Volunteers have sent over a carefully chosen group of college and preparatory school students to help with the work of boys' clubs in the East End of London. A workingman's family in the East End exists on a fraction of the amount spent by a comparable group in the United States; and in this area living conditions as still austere as well as crowded. The people are therefore a favorite target for demagoguery of the hate-America type; and the East Ender's memory of the bitz is not overlooked by politicians with a neutralist plank, inveighing against the United States as a warmonger. The Winant Volunteers, assisting in the leadership of clubs, taking groups of children to camp on the Channel Islands and helping with relief work for the sick, seek to demonstrate the good will of the people of our country toward the people of Britain, and especially to demonstrate it to the group not linked to America by direct cultural or business ties, the group no invited to dinners of the English Speaking Union and the Pilgrim Society.

This is a job which cannot be done through high pressure efforts by governments bureaus; indeed the strength of the Winants derives largely from the circumstance that they are not in government, that they have no axe to grind, that they are just Americans who have paid their own way over to make a personal contribution to friendship between the two peoples.

The Winants cannot and do not make a mass appeal. This program can exist only through the support of special groups which, like the Harvard student body, can appraise its unique importance and supply it with the funds and manpower which it needs. Robert P. Well, Jr. '57