Chugging by way of Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent Metropolis was ferrying building gear and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to help in repairing the severely broken naval base after the Japanese assault. A younger ensign—“actual desirous to get off that ship and get into motion,” within the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his youthful brother, who in the future can be my father.
Philip Alvan Shribman, a latest graduate of Dartmouth and only a month away from his twenty second birthday, was not worldly however understood that he had been thrust right into a world battle that was greater than a contest of arms. At stake have been the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet younger man, taciturn within the previous New England approach, however he had a lot to say on this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of maturity. His scrawl consumed 5 pages of Navy stationery.
“It’s rising on me with rising rapidity that you simply’re about set to go to school,” he wrote to his brother, Dick, then residing with my grandparents in Salem, Massachusetts, “and tho I’m one hell of a man to speak—and tho I hate preaching—let me simply write this & we’ll name it quits.”
He acknowledged from the beginning that “this letter received’t do a lot good”—a letter that, within the eight many years because it was written, has been learn by three generations of my household. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast have been transitioning into coaching grounds for America’s armed forces.
“What you’ll be taught in school received’t be value a God-damned,” Phil instructed Dick. “However you’ll be taught a lifestyle maybe—a method to get on with folks—an appreciation maybe for only one factor: music, artwork, a ebook—all of that is sure to be unconscious studying—it’s a part of a liberal schooling within the broad sense of the time period.”
However that wasn’t the top of it, removed from it. “In the event you went to a commerce college you’d have one factor you can do & know—& you’d miss the entire world of magnificence,” he went on. “In a liberal college you understand ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ if you get out. But you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for folks & magnificence that cash received’t purchase—You possibly can all the time be taught to be a mechanic or a tablet mixer and so on.,” but it surely’s solely if you’re of school age “you can be taught that life has magnificence & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “battle, warfare: financial if not precise—Don’t hand over the thought & beliefs of a liberal college—they’re too treasured—too uncommon—too essential.”
Roughly a month after Phil wrote this letter, the Crescent Metropolis noticed its first motion, off Efate, in New Hebrides, and earlier than lengthy the assault transport set off for Guadalcanal and the preliminary assault landings in August, on an insect-infected island that was destined to be the location of a brutal six-month jungle battle in unforgiving warmth towards decided Japanese fighters.
In September 1942, throughout the Guadalcanal marketing campaign, Phil wrote one other letter, this one to his favourite Dartmouth professor, the sociologist George F. Theriault. “I’ve had plenty of time to assume out right here,” he instructed Theriault, earlier than including, “An honest liberal arts schooling based mostly on the Social Sciences is all a variety of us have left—and increasingly turns into the one attainable background on which to view all this”—the “all this” referring to the warfare and what it was about. He instructed Theriault, who was keen about preserving the place of literature and the social sciences in Dartmouth’s wartime curriculum, that “no larger mistake might be made than to shunt all of the fellows off into ‘warfare programs’ and neglect the superb, first rate, actually essential issues we had an opportunity to come back to know.”
A bit of greater than 4 months later, Phil was useless. He was on a PT boat by then, and on an evening in early February, his boat—PT-111—bumped into the searchlight of a Japanese destroyer off the northwest tip of Guadalcanal. Phil was gunned down. However earlier than he died, he had made it clear that the battle that will declare his life was a battle for the values he’d realized in school—and, simply as essential, a battle for the wonder and fineness he had found throughout his undergraduate years.
“And if on the finish of school: if there are nonetheless folks on the planet, round, who’d prefer to deny experiences prefer it to others,” he instructed my father, who would be a part of the Navy earlier than his personal school years have been accomplished, “why I hope that you simply—like me—assume it’s all value whereas to get in & battle for. One all the time has to guard the precious on this world earlier than he can get pleasure from it.”
Philip Alvan Shribman: the person who died for the liberal arts.
I’ve been preoccupied with Uncle Phil’s life and loss of life for 5 many years. The recommendation he gave to my father from the Pacific has offered the buoys of my very own life. The values he prized have turn out to be my values. His steering has formed the passage of my two daughters by way of life. And his phrases tackle urgency at a time when liberal schooling and American democracy are underneath menace.
Throughout these 5 many years, I’ve looked for particulars of his life, sifting by way of letters and paperwork in my father’s file cupboard, and searching for out his classmates and shipmates. In the midst of all this, I met James MacPherson, a retired New York Metropolis transit employee who encountered Phil on Tulagi, a tiny island within the Solomons that served as residence to a squadron of PT boats, and who remembered him as “an affectionate man, like a Henry Fonda or a Gary Cooper.” At a brewpub in Lawrence, Kansas, I purchased lunch for Bertha Lou (Logan) Summers, who seemingly would have turn out to be Phil’s spouse in the event that they’d had world sufficient and time.
I spoke with Robert R. Dockson, later the dean of the enterprise college on the College of Southern California, who was Phil’s roommate on the Crescent Metropolis and his tentmate on Tulagi. “We have been children then,” he instructed me, describing how the 2 of them would sit on the shore and watch sea battles from afar, all of the whereas complaining in regards to the mud that encircled them. “These have been fairly lonely days.” I corresponded with John C. Everett, who went on to run a textile firm and who glimpsed his Dartmouth classmate on the seaside at Tulagi by way of his binoculars. Throughout 100 yards of water, they waved to one another and, by sign lamp, agreed to satisfy as quickly as attainable. Inside days, Phil was useless.
And in my very first hours on the Dartmouth campus as a freshman myself—this was 52 years in the past—I knocked on the door of GeorgeF. Theriault. It was answered by a lanky man with lengthy grey hair and an emphysemic cough.
“Professor Theriault,” I mentioned. “My title is David Shribman.” He appeared astonished, for the way might his former scholar, who had died 29 years earlier, have a toddler, the freshman at his door? “No, you can not be.”
He’d had no concept that Phil’s brother had a son. Now the son was standing within the very constructing, Silsby Corridor, the place Phil, as an undergraduate, would have taken programs. And so started a outstanding friendship, scholar and professor, carried out over lunches and dinners, on campus and off, and sometimes at his residence, presided over by his spouse, Ray Grant Theriault, who instructed me that in the future, on a ski expedition, a scholar named Phil Shribman, unaware that the lady within the fetching ski outfit was his professor’s spouse, had requested her out on a date.
That freshman yr, I typed out among the phrases from Phil’s letters, fixed them to a chunk of cardboard with a squirt of Elmer’s glue, and positioned the primitive commemorative plaque on the bulletin board of my room. I stored it in sight till the day I graduated, and I’ve held on to it ever since.
Phil’s father—my grandfather Max Shribman—was a mild Russian immigrant in Salem, the place the household had washed ashore in 1896. He made a modest, small-city success for himself in actual property and insurance coverage, snug sufficient to buy the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics that in the present day sit on my bookshelves. To his sons he handed on his reverence—a pure, harmless love—for the thought of school, for the self-discipline and the leisure that campus life affords, for the prospect to take a quiet breath of contemporary air earlier than becoming a member of life’s struggles.
Within the dozen years I knew my grandfather, I heard him speak of the previous only some instances, and every of these reminiscences was in regards to the previous days, when his two boys have been in school. He liked these years, and I got here to like what they meant to him.
The three Dartmouth alumni who interviewed Phil within the winter of 1937 instructed the admissions workplace that he was “a superb, throughout boy, brilliant, alert and a nice character.” His formal school software was a easy affair. He mentioned he thought of turning into a chemist or a health care provider and was taken with present affairs and scientific issues. The shape contained this sentence, in his personal handwriting: “I’m of Hebrew descent.”
The school the place he matriculated within the fall of 1937 had no foreign-study packages, no battery of psychologists, no course-evaluation types—simply lecture rooms with chairs bolted to the ground and, in winter, duckboards fixed to the steps of classroom buildings to fend off the snow and ice. The freshman class had 680 college students, a bit greater than half the present dimension. Freshmen wore beanies. The yr Phil arrived, the soccer group completed the season with an unbeaten document and was invited to play within the Rose Bowl—however declined the supply as a result of, as President Ernest Martin Hopkins would clarify, “if one held to the basic philosophy of school males by the way taking part in soccer as towards soccer gamers by the way going to school, many of the evils of intercollegiate competitors can be averted.” This was a very long time in the past.
The theme of the convocation tackle that Hopkins delivered at first of Phil’s freshman yr handled the goals of a liberal-arts schooling; he spoke of “what a liberal school is, what its aims are, what its beliefs are, why its procedures exist.” That day, sitting along with his new classmates in Webster Corridor, Phil heard Hopkins say that the aim of a liberal-arts schooling was to not make somebody a greater banker or lawyer however reasonably to foster a “psychological enlargement which shall allow you to be an even bigger man, wherever the trail of life leads you.”
Phil’s personal liberal-arts schooling was demanding, and broad. He took programs in English, French, philosophy, astronomy, economics, psychology, music, and sociology (which finally grew to become his main). His grades have been assorted: C’s in freshman English, plenty of A’s in sociology, on one event a D in French.
He was a member of Pi Lambda Phi, the primary fraternity at Dartmouth to just accept Jewish college students. He was within the debate membership. He went to soccer video games, becoming a member of the annual migration to the Dartmouth-Harvard contest, which in these days was all the time performed in Boston. He was one of many Dartmouth boys who in October 1940 toppled the picket goalposts after Earl “Purple” Blaik’s final Dartmouth group prevailed towards Harvard, 7–6. (Blaik would decamp to West Level the following yr, an indication of impending warfare.) The shard of wooden Phil snared after the ultimate whistle now could be nailed on my wall, simply ft from the place I’m penning this.
The younger man who on his software mentioned he was “of Hebrew descent” took as his honors thesis matter “American anti-Semitism.” The thesis was submitted in January 1941, because the Nazi regime pursued the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities and refined the methods of murdering Europe’s Jews. Later that yr, the aviator Charles Lindbergh would ship his notorious anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa.
The USA issued a draft-registration order in September 1940, solely days earlier than courses commenced in Phil’s senior yr; a month earlier, Phil had enlisted as an apprentice seaman within the Naval Reserve. President Hopkins had assured the Military and Navy that Dartmouth can be aware of any wants the 2 companies expressed. Within the spring of 1941, a scholar wrote an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Now we now have waited lengthy sufficient …”) that was revealed on the entrance web page of the campus newspaper. It was learn into the Congressional File. The USA wasn’t but at warfare, however the campus virtually was.
Dartmouth’s Class Day, which takes place in a sylvan amphitheater simply earlier than graduation, ordinarily is a joyous event. Class Day 1941 was in contrast to any earlier than or since. Charles B. McLane—the captain of the ski group, who grew to become a member of the fabled tenth Mountain Division earlier than returning to Dartmouth as a professor—delivered the Handle to the Faculty (an project that 35 years later would come to me). He mentioned that “the power and assurance of democracy” lies in his classmates’ “having the ability to imagine in and being prepared to battle for” the “uncomplicated issues we all know and imagine in in the present day.” That weekend, Hopkins delivered his graduation tackle:
Males of 1941, sons of this fostering mom of the north-country which we name Dartmouth, it’s your era that can decide, not in center life however tomorrow, subsequent yr, or on the newest inside just a few transient years, whether or not the preconceptions you impose upon details, the faults you visualize in democracy, and the ruthlessness you ignore in totalitarianism shall paralyze your will to defend the one and to defeat the opposite or whether or not with eyes large open to actuality, you settle for freedom as an obligation in addition to a privilege and settle for the position for your self of defenders of the religion.
Shortly after the category of 1941 dispersed, Hopkins would write that “the liberal arts school now has a transparent responsibility to do all it could possibly to assist in nationwide protection; on the identical time it will be derelict in its most essential obligation if it overpassed the needs for which it primarily exists and the approaching era’s want for college-trained males.”
By the point Phil died, a Naval Coaching Faculty had opened on campus with a employees of about 100, and headquarters in Faculty Corridor. Alumni Gymnasium grew to become the location of instruction in seamanship, ordnance, and navigation. Dartmouth finally added to its curriculum such programs as nautical astronomy, naval historical past and elementary technique, and naval group.
It was that precarious stability between making ready males for warfare and preserving the liberal arts that Phil sought to defend.
Loss of life got here to my uncle with suddenness however not with shock. His Dartmouth up to date John Manley as soon as instructed me that Phil had had a premonition that he would die within the battle.
After commencement, Phil was assigned to the Crescent Metropolis and appointed lieutenant (junior grade). “I can see him in the present day—tall & slender, with reddish brown hair and a few freckles, a smile all the time, irreverent habits,” his shipmate William Trippet, who would turn out to be a real-estate agent in Sacramento, California, wrote me 30 years in the past.
Through the Guadalcanal marketing campaign, the Crescent Metropolis made 14 journeys bringing males and provides to the island. Phil wrote to his dad and mom in September, a month into the preventing, to guarantee them that he was doing superb. He was, in fact, thinner, and but he had grown. He recalled that he was reminded regularly of a letter printed within the newspaper over the last warfare from a serviceman to his household; it had been sitting round someplace at residence, again in Salem. “Little then,” he wrote, “did I believe I’d ever sit down within the midst of a warfare and … put down a bit of what an individual thinks.” His personal letter was spare, meant solely as a “private form of factor, like I used to be again in our front room telling it to you.” He spoke of being in shut quarters for 60 days; of seeing males die; of settling down sometime with the correct woman. Right here was a boy who had grown up.
“They are saying that the Navy, esp. in wartime, both makes a person or exhibits that no man will probably be made,” he wrote. “As to what the result on my half will probably be I should depart that to another person and till it’s over.”
On January 5, 1943, he was transferred to the PT-boat squadron, an project he had wished. PT boats have an audacious aura due to the expertise of John F. Kennedy, who commanded one—PT-109. They have been maybe the flimsiest component of the American naval power—normally a mere 80 ft lengthy, outfitted with machine weapons and 4 21-inch-diameter torpedoes, and able to zipping by way of the ocean at greater than 40 knots. The Navy’s roughly 600 PT boats have been designed to be the seaborne equal of guerrilla warriors, in a position to ambush and scoot away rapidly. However they have been no match for what grew to become often called the Tokyo Categorical, the Japanese warships that bore down on Guadalcanal.
On the island of Tulagi, an American staging space for the Guadalcanal battle, Phil lived in a bamboo-and-banana-leaf shack measuring about 12 by 15 ft and sitting some 4 ft off the bottom. “Sweat rolls freely in January,” he reported in a letter to Theriault. Amongst his neighbors within the shack have been a nest of hornets, one in every of spiders, and two of ants—“companionable,” he wrote, “so we allow them to be.” Little else is thought of his life on Tulagi in these previous few months. A single {photograph} survives, displaying Phil standing tall amongst a gaggle of Solomon Islanders.
On February 1, 1943, an Allied coast watcher reported seeing as many as 20 Japanese destroyers within the Slot, the title given to the maritime route utilized by the Japanese for the resupply of Guadalcanal. That evening, American PT boats set out as half of a bigger effort to intercept the destroyers. PT-111 was amongst them. John Clagett, the commander, steered his craft away from the bottom. The boat was jarred by an exploding bomb close by. Ultimately he discovered a goal, a Japanese destroyer transferring on a southeasterly course, three miles east of Cape Esperance. PT-111 fired all 4 of its torpedoes from shut quarters after which maneuvered away. Whether or not the torpedoes did any harm is unknown. However shellfire from a destroyer hit Clagett’s boat, which exploded in flames. Ten members of the 12-man crew survived, some rescued the following morning after 9 hours within the water. One member, legs damaged, seemingly was taken by sharks. Phil himself appears to have been killed outright within the assault. PT-111 sank into Iron Backside Sound.
Again in Salem, a telegram arrived at 5 Savoy Street. “The Navy Division deeply regrets to tell you that your son Lieutenant Junior Grade Philip Alvan Shribman United States Naval Reserve is lacking following motion within the efficiency of his responsibility within the service of his nation.”
I can solely think about the scene when this message arrived. Did the Western Union man drive down the road, cease on the white home on the left, climb the concrete stairs, and ship the telegram? Did somebody from the Navy go to? My father was away, at Dartmouth. I do know solely this: That second was the hinge of my grandparents’ lives.
A couple of blocks away from their home, an obelisk erected to honor the two,105 veterans from St. Joseph’s Parish who served within the two world wars stands on a median between Washington and Lafayette Streets. After I was a cub reporter for the Salem Night Information, I’d cross the monument and see the inscription on one aspect: TIME WILL NOT DIM. I take into consideration that legend continually. Time didn’t dim the power of that loss.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. despatched a observe saluting Phil for having “gone to affix the heroes who’ve constructed America.” That will have been a type letter, however the observe from Phil’s Crescent Metropolis shipmate Zalmon Garfield, later the manager assistant to Milton Shapp, Pennsylvania’s first Jewish governor, was not. Garfield wrote on behalf of his shipmates in regards to the respect and admiration that they had for Phil:
A few of these males are ignorant, a few of them callous; en masse, nevertheless, their judgment of their officers is uncannily unerring … It’s a unusual day wherein we stay, watching the gods toss their best works right into a chasm of their very own constructing. We are able to solely marvel, mourn briefly and work very onerous to switch the loss.
Republican Consultant George J. Bates of Salem was visiting injured American combatants in West Coast hospitals shortly after the supply of that fateful telegram and, in a outstanding coincidence, encountered John Clagett, Phil’s commander on PT-111, recuperating from his accidents. “Inform Philip’s father that his son was one of the crucial brave males I’ve ever seen in motion,” the commander instructed the congressman.
With the information of Phil’s loss of life, Bertha Lou Logan entered my grandparents’ lives. Her father, a soccer coach and high-school principal, had raised her alone after her mom died in childbirth. She had met Phil on the Grand Canyon in July 1939. He was touring with Dartmouth classmates; she was there with household. As the 2 events moved west, Phil and Bertha Lou left notes for one another at submit workplaces. Ultimately Bertha Lou took a waitressing job at Loch Lyme Lodge, close to Dartmouth. Later, in Chicago, when Phil was in midshipmen’s college, he and Bertha Lou would stroll by the lake. She was the woman he wished. He was the boy quickly to be rendered unattainable.
After Phil died, Bertha Lou wrote Max and Anna Shribman, whom she had by no means met. She took the prepare to Salem, and my dad picked her up on the station. She lived in my grandparents’ home for some whereas, the three of them united in a triangle of grief. “It took me a very long time to recover from him,” Bertha Lou instructed me after I met her in Kansas many years later.
In 1958, John Clagett wrote a novel titled The Slot about life aboard a PT boat throughout World Conflict II. He was by then an English professor at Middlebury Faculty. “Lately are useless,” he wrote in an writer’s observe. “We hated them then, we’d not have them come once more; however after fifteen years might we not look again at them for just a few hours and say—These have been days that counted in our lives.” And, differently, in mine.
For 3-quarters of a century, historians have sorted by way of the “warfare goals” of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. In school and graduate college, and in a lifetime of studying, I’ve examined a lot of that scholarship. However for People, the warfare was additionally about greater than rigorously said goals—it was about far easier issues, actually, however no much less grand. Texaco had it proper in a 1942 journal commercial that depicted a person carrying Military gear and saying, “I’m preventing for my proper to boo the Dodgers.” Phil may need added that it was additionally about the correct to really feel pleasure knocking down a goalpost in a dreaded rival’s residence stadium; the correct to battle with explaining in what respects Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert have been realists; the correct to get a C in English and a D in French.
“Go searching you—preserve your eyes open—attempt to see what’s what—maintain onto the issues that you understand to be proper,” Phil wrote to my father in what might be a consumer’s information to the liberal arts. “They’ll shake your religion in a variety of the belongings you now assume are proper—That’s good—& a part of schooling—however go searching & attempt to make up your personal concepts on life & its values.”
In 1947, 5 years after that letter was written, my grandfather despatched some cash to Dartmouth to ascertain a scholarship in his son’s title—particularly, to help a scholar from the Salem space. The scholarship continues, and yearly the household receives a letter in regards to the individual awarded the scholarship. I’ve a pile of them.
One of many recipients of that scholarship was Paul Andrews. He took the basic liberal-arts route that Phil would have endorsed—psychology, meteorology, music—and in the present day is a college superintendent in central Oregon. One other was Matthew Kimble—historical past, faith, biology—who would chair the psychology division at Middlebury. A 3rd is Christine Finn—drama, economics, natural chemistry. She is now a psychiatry professor at Dartmouth’s medical college. One other is Jeffrey Coots—astronomy, mythology, American literature—who focuses on public well being and security on the John Jay Faculty of Prison Justice. You could possibly say that Phil received World Conflict II in spite of everything.
I’ve been delving into Uncle Phil’s life for years. Among the very sentences on this account I wrote greater than half a century in the past, the product of an 18-year-old’s effort to repay a debt to an uncle he by no means knew. These sentences stood up effectively. So has my religion. And so, too, has my perception that, as Uncle Phil put it from the Pacific Conflict 80 years in the past, “you understand really it’s the issues I (and everybody else) all the time took with no consideration which can be the issues the nation is now preventing to maintain—and it’s going to be onerous to do.”
This text seems within the Could 2024 print version with the headline “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts.”
