Swing (Feb-Dec 1952)

THE CREAM OF CROSBY 81 or a social worker, people of all kinds who have nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty will talk out loud about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives." And that's what they do on the five minute program (heard only in five cities on C.B.S. stations) — people like C. Jared Ingersoll, a member of the board of direc tors of the Pennsylvania Railroad; Eleanor Roosevelt, General Lucius D. Clay, Helen Keller, Quentin Reynolds, Prof. Harry A. Overstreet, the philosopher, and a lot of other oddly assorted people. The program grew out of a conversation held in 1949 by four businessmen who felt that spiri' tual values were being drowned in a sea of material values. A year was spent in planning the series and six months in setting an editorial policy. It wasn't, Mr. Murrow explained in his opening broadcast, entirely easy. "Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice . . . people don't speak their beliefs easily or publicly. In a way, our project has been an invasion of privacy, like demanding a man to let a stranger read his mail. Gen. Lucius Clay remarked it would hardly be less embarrassing for I "Remember, don't jump up to go home i the minute they start yawning. They ;r never do when they're visiting usi" an individual to be forced to disrobe in public than to unveil his private philosophy." Nevertheless, more than 1 50 men and women have disrobed their philosophies publicly for this program. Naturally, any program which is interested in searching into spiritual values has a certain religious tone to it. But "This I Believe" is not essentially a religious program and, while reverence for God is expressed by some (but not all) speakers, the thread that runs consistently through all of them is a rather more difficult article of faith — faith in that cussed, often misled, frequently cruel mankind, faith in his enormous creative powers and spiritual growth, faith in his abilities to cope with the most hopeless tasks, and a sort of astonished wonder at his infinite capacity for survival. Mr. Murrow, who avoids cliche skillfully in his own utterances, has not entirely succeeded in eliminating it in his guests but the program does succeed in keeping it to the irreducible minimum. These articles of faith, these credes of hope in man, are expressed in different ways. I like Gen. Clay's: "I think the troubled world we live in should not dismay us. I believe the world today is a historically better world than the world of the past. Though ruthless men still maintain power through force and would extend it through conquest, people everywhere are becoming more tolerant and understanding than ever before." I think that statement indisputable and it's well to be reminded of it. Professor Overstreet, who wrote that remarkable book "The Mature Mind," said that his mission was to expand the areas of his awareness. "The great principle of love depends on this. He who loves another tries truly to understand the other . . . Socrates gave no finished catalogue of the truths of the world. He gave, rather, the impulse to search. This is far better I feel than dogmatic certainty. When we are aware that there are glories of life still hidden from us, we walk humbly before the great unknown." Here Prof. Overstreet states two themes that run constantly through these little talks, namely that man's mission is twofold— to love his fellow man by under