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Thus, in 1934, Cleveland's late Newton Diehl Baker, World War I Secretary of War and famed Wilsonian, wrote to Brooks Emeny, a young (then 33), Princeton-trained instructor in foreign affairs at Yale University. It was an offer of a hard job: to put vigor and educational purpose into Cleveland's limping Foreign Affairs Council. Slender, earnest Brooks Emeny took it on. He found a membership of 300 women, 50 men holding only four meetings a year.
"A Report from the World" is a notable milestone of the Cleveland Council as a community influence. Per man, woman & child, the nation's sixth city has become its most international-minded. Cleveland's Council now has almost 4,000 members, of whom half are men. The year-round program of the Council includes speakers who are a small "Who's Who" of U.S. and foreign authorities. Council topics are then carried by the members into dozens of neighborhood and other small group forums. In 450 of these meetings last year foreign affairs played to audiences totaling more than 65,000.
The Council also conducts forums and study groups in 22 high schools, reaches thousands of other young Clevelanders through radio and Public Library activities. Sample high-school subjects: "Can U.N. Work?"; "How to Live with the Atoms." Council helpers are no longer surprised to find dozens of youngsters boning over clippings and books in its research library.
During the decade when the U.S. moved to a pre-eminent position in world affairs, community-minded Cleveland began to discuss foreign relations as avidly as it had discussed neighborhood playgrounds, transit regulations and bond issues.
The climax of the Council's work is its annual Institute. TIME gladly became a co-sponsor of the 1946-47 Institute because its editors believed that Clevelanders' efforts to inform themselves on world affairs paralleled TIME'S own effort to bring world news to its readers.* No forum can reflect every color of thought on every nation's problems and policies; nor can it give every shade of U.S. opinion. (The Cleveland Institute, for instance, omits specific treatment of such important, complex problems as Palestine and India.) The program:
FAR EAST AND PACIFIC
From China: In almost every major international conference since Versailles, the world's diplomats have known Wellington Koo, now China's calm, clearheaded Ambassador to the U.S. Few statesmen are more at home amid the intricacies of world politics and economics (he was China's Foreign Minister six times and has been its ambassador to most of the major capitals of the western world). A staunch champion of world organization, Dr. Koo was China's man at the League of Nations, the pleader for its action to halt Japanese aggression. At San Francisco he was the first to sign the U.N. Charter (he used a brush to write the Chinese characters of his name: Ku Wei-chun). Yale-trained Dr. Koo is the man TIME'S Editor Henry R. Luce will introduce in opening discussion of the Far East and Pacific.