Glorying in the furor aroused by his social-science textbooks (TIME, March 3), Professor Harold Ordway Rugg this week seized the opportunity to publish another book — not a text this time but the story of his clashes with the Rugg-beaters who denounce his texts as subversive. Its title: That Men May Understand (Doubleday, Doran; $2.75).
No pushover is Harold Rugg. An indefatigable talker, he stumped the nation, confronting his enemies at school-board hearings, Rotary luncheons, parent-teacher meetings. He found people everywhere, he says, talking about Rugg. Professor Rugg reports off-the-record tete-a-tetes with his critics (whom he usually managed to mollify), names his chief foes — New York State Economic Council's Merwin K. Hart, Elizabeth Dilling (The Red Network), Hearst Columnist B. C. Forbes, American Legionnaire 0. K. Armstrong, Journalist George E. Sokolsky. He quotes Hart: "If you find any organization containing the word 'democracy,' it is probably . . . affiliated with the Communist Party." More intriguing than the textbook battle is Professor Rugg's account of the rise of U. S. "frontier thinkers." A descendant of a Minute Man who fought at Lexington and Concord, Harold Rugg studied civil engineering at Dartmouth, spiked rails in the Middle West, taught at University of Illinois and University of Chicago, classified Army personnel in World War I. All this, he says, left him an intellectual pauper, ignorant of "the creative revolution even then rolling up in America" His awakening began on Jan.1, 1920, when he went to Teachers College's new, progressive Lincoln School.
Post-war liberals will find in Harold Rugg's awakening a nostalgic flavor. Greenwich Village, Walter Lippmann's New Republic and Sinclair Lewis were in their heyday, corsets were coming off and speakeasies coming in. Rugg discovered Isadora Duncan, the Fabian Society, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, the "new historians," notably Charles A. Beard. Aroused by such "frontier thinkers," Rugg decided that education needed frontier thinking too, helped launch the famed Teachers College group. For some ten years this group—Professors Rugg, William H. Kilpatrick, George S. Counts, Jesse H. NewIon, Goodwin Watson, et al.—held bimonthly discussions on "reconstructing" U. S. education, taught teachers a new jargon. In his book, Rugg proudly claims co-authorship of the phrase "child-centred school." Sample Rugg jawbreaker: "The American problem is to bring forth on this continent that civilization of economic abundance, democratic behavior and integrity of expression which is now potentially available." Aided by 16 researchers, Harold Rugg has turned out 20 social-study texts under the title of Man and His Changing Society, claims that they have been used by 5,000,000 youngsters. He had to stop writing the 21st to devote himself to defending the first 20. But Dr. Rugg believes that the present wave of U. S. jitters will pass, as did four other waves of "witch-hunting" in what he calls "the long armistice" between World War I and II.