Chugging by 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 wanting 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 at some point can be my father.
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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 had been the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet younger man, taciturn within the previous New England method, 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 growing rapidity that you simply’re about set to go to varsity,” 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 a long time 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 had been transitioning into coaching grounds for America’s armed forces.
“What you’ll be taught in school received’t be price a God-damned,” Phil advised Dick. “However you’ll be taught a lifestyle maybe—a option to get on with individuals—an appreciation maybe for only one factor: music, artwork, a ebook—all of that is certain to be unconscious studying—it’s a part of a liberal training within the broad sense of the time period.”
However that wasn’t the tip of it, removed from it. “In the event you went to a commerce college you’d have one factor you may do & know—& you’d miss the entire world of magnificence,” he went on. “In a liberal college ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ if you get out. But you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for individuals & magnificence that cash received’t purchase—You possibly can at all times be taught to be a mechanic or a tablet mixer and so forth.,” but it surely’s solely if you’re of school age “that you would be able to be taught that life has magnificence & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “wrestle, conflict: financial if not precise—Don’t hand over the concept & beliefs of a liberal college—they’re too valuable—too uncommon—too vital.”
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 wrestle in unforgiving warmth in opposition to 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 suppose out right here,” he advised Theriault, earlier than including, “An honest liberal arts training primarily based on the Social Sciences is all a variety of us have left—and increasingly more turns into the one attainable background on which to view all this”—the “all this” referring to the conflict and what it was about. He advised Theriault, who was enthusiastic about preserving the place of literature and the social sciences in Dartmouth’s wartime curriculum, that “no better mistake might be made than to shunt all of the fellows off into ‘conflict programs’ and neglect the tremendous, respectable, actually vital issues we had an opportunity to come back to know.”
A little bit 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 might declare his life was a wrestle for the values he’d realized in school—and, simply as vital, a wrestle for the wonder and fineness he had found throughout his undergraduate years.
“And if on the finish of school: if there are nonetheless individuals on the planet, round, who’d prefer to deny experiences prefer it to others,” he advised my father, who would be part of the Navy earlier than his personal school years had been accomplished, “why I hope that you simply—like me—suppose it’s all price whereas to get in & combat for. One at all times has to guard the dear on this world earlier than he can take pleasure in 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 a long time. The recommendation he gave to my father from the Pacific has supplied 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 life. And his phrases tackle urgency at a time when liberal training and American democracy are beneath risk.
Throughout these 5 a long time, I’ve looked for particulars of his life, sifting by letters and paperwork in my father’s file cupboard, and looking for out his classmates and shipmates. In the middle 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 dwelling 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 doubtless 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 had been youngsters then,” he advised 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 had 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 his binoculars. Throughout 100 yards of water, they waved to one another and, by sign lamp, agreed to fulfill 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 a way might his former pupil, who had died 29 years earlier, have a toddler, the freshman at his door? “No, you may 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 exceptional friendship, pupil and professor, performed over lunches and dinners, on campus and off, and infrequently at his dwelling, presided over by his spouse, Ray Grant Theriault, who advised me that at some point, on a ski expedition, a pupil 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 a number of the phrases from Phil’s letters, fixed them to a bit of cardboard with a squirt of Elmer’s glue, and positioned the primitive commemorative plaque on the bulletin board of my room. I saved 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 delicate 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, comfy sufficient to buy the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics that right now sit on my bookshelves. To his sons he handed on his reverence—a pure, harmless love—for the concept of school, for the self-discipline and the leisure that campus life presents, for the possibility to take a quiet breath of recent 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 occasions, and every of these reminiscences was in regards to the previous days, when his two boys had been in school. He cherished 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 advised the admissions workplace that he was “a superb, throughout boy, vivid, alert and a pleasing persona.” His formal school software was a easy affair. He mentioned he thought of turning into a chemist or a health care provider and was fascinated about 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 applications, 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, slightly greater than half the present measurement. Freshmen wore beanies. The yr Phil arrived, the soccer staff completed the season with an unbeaten file and was invited to play within the Rose Bowl—however declined the provide as a result of, as President Ernest Martin Hopkins would clarify, “if one held to the elemental philosophy of school males by the way taking part in soccer as in opposition to soccer gamers by the way going to varsity, a lot of the evils of intercollegiate competitors can be prevented.” This was a very long time in the past.
The theme of the convocation handle that Hopkins delivered firstly of Phil’s freshman yr handled the goals of a liberal-arts training; he spoke of “what a liberal school is, what its targets 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 training was to not make somebody a greater banker or lawyer however somewhat to foster a “psychological enlargement which shall allow you to be a much bigger man, wherever the trail of life leads you.”
Phil’s personal liberal-arts training was demanding, and broad. He took programs in English, French, philosophy, astronomy, economics, psychology, music, and sociology (which ultimately turned his main). His grades had been diversified: 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 simply 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 at all times performed in Boston. He was one of many Dartmouth boys who in October 1940 toppled the wood goalposts after Earl “Purple” Blaik’s final Dartmouth staff prevailed in opposition to Harvard, 7–6. (Blaik would decamp to West Level the following yr, an indication of impending conflict.) The shard of wooden Phil snared after the ultimate whistle now’s nailed on my wall, simply toes 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 US 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 conscious of any wants the 2 providers expressed. Within the spring of 1941, a pupil 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 Document. The US wasn’t but at conflict, however the campus nearly 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 staff, who turned a member of the fabled tenth Mountain Division earlier than returning to Dartmouth as a professor—delivered the Deal with to the Faculty (an project that 35 years later would come to me). He mentioned that “the energy and assurance of democracy” lies in his classmates’ “having the ability to imagine in and being prepared to combat for” the “uncomplicated issues we all know and imagine in right now.” That weekend, Hopkins delivered his graduation handle:
Males of 1941, sons of this fostering mom of the north-country which we name Dartmouth, it’s your era that may decide, not in center life however tomorrow, subsequent yr, or on the newest inside a number of temporary years, whether or not the preconceptions you impose upon information, 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 huge 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 may to help in nationwide protection; on the similar time it might be derelict in its most vital obligation if it overlooked 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 turned the location of instruction in seamanship, ordnance, and navigation. Dartmouth ultimately added to its curriculum such programs as nautical astronomy, naval historical past and elementary technique, and naval group.
It was that precarious steadiness between getting ready males for conflict and preserving the liberal arts that Phil sought to defend.
Demise got here to my uncle with suddenness however not with shock. His Dartmouth up to date John Manley as soon as advised 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 right now—tall & slender, with reddish brown hair and a few freckles, a smile at all times, 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 combating, to guarantee them that he was doing tremendous. He was, after all, thinner, and but he had grown. He recalled that he was reminded regularly of a letter printed within the newspaper over the past conflict from a serviceman to his household; it had been sitting round someplace at dwelling, again in Salem. “Little then,” he wrote, “did I believe I’d ever sit down within the midst of a conflict and … put down slightly of what an individual thinks.” His personal letter was spare, meant solely as a “private kind of factor, like I used to be again in our lounge telling it to you.” He spoke of being in shut quarters for 60 days; of seeing males die; of settling down sometime with the precise lady. Right here was a boy who had grown up.
“They are saying that the Navy, esp. in wartime, both makes a person or reveals that no man shall be made,” he wrote. “As to what the end result on my half shall 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 had been maybe the flimsiest aspect of the American naval drive—often a mere 80 toes lengthy, outfitted with machine weapons and 4 21-inch-diameter torpedoes, and able to zipping by the ocean at greater than 40 knots. The Navy’s roughly 600 PT boats had been designed to be the seaborne equal of guerrilla warriors, in a position to ambush and scoot away shortly. However they had been no match for what turned referred to as 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 toes and sitting some 4 toes off the bottom. “Sweat rolls freely in January,” he reported in a letter to Theriault. Amongst his neighbors within the shack had been a nest of hornets, certainly one 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, exhibiting Phil standing tall amongst a bunch 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 night time, 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. Finally he discovered a goal, a Japanese destroyer shifting 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, doubtless 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 Highway. “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 go the monument and see the inscription on one facet: TIME WILL NOT DIM. I take into consideration that legend consistently. Time didn’t dim the drive of that loss.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. despatched a word saluting Phil for having “gone to hitch the heroes who’ve constructed America.” Which will have been a kind letter, however the word 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 they’d 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 during which we dwell, watching the gods toss their most interesting works right into a chasm of their very own constructing. We are able to solely marvel, mourn briefly and work very onerous to exchange 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 exceptional coincidence, encountered John Clagett, Phil’s commander on PT-111, recuperating from his accidents. “Inform Philip’s father that his son was probably the most brave males I’ve ever seen in motion,” the commander advised 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 put up workplaces. Finally 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 lady 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 advised me once I met her in Kansas a long time later.
In 1958, John Clagett wrote a novel titled The Slot about life aboard a PT boat throughout World Struggle II. He was by then an English professor at Middlebury Faculty. “As of late are useless,” he wrote in an writer’s word. “We hated them then, we’d not have them come once more; however after fifteen years could we not look again at them for a number of hours and say—These had been days that counted in our lives.” And, another way, in mine.
For 3-quarters of a century, historians have sorted by the “conflict 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 Individuals, the conflict 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 combating for my proper to boo the Dodgers.” Phil may need added that it was additionally about the precise to really feel pleasure knocking down a goalpost in a dreaded rival’s dwelling stadium; the precise to wrestle with explaining in what respects Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert had been realists; the precise to get a C in English and a D in French.
“Go searching you—maintain your eyes open—attempt to see what’s what—maintain onto the issues that 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 suppose are proper—That’s good—& a part of training—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 assist a pupil from the Salem space. The scholarship continues, and yearly the household receives a letter in regards to the particular person awarded the scholarship. I’ve a pile of them.
One of many recipients of that scholarship was Paul Andrews. He took the traditional liberal-arts route that Phil would have endorsed—psychology, meteorology, music—and right now 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 Felony Justice. You might say that Phil received World Struggle II in spite of everything.
I’ve been delving into Uncle Phil’s life for years. A few of 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 properly. So has my religion. And so, too, has my perception that, as Uncle Phil put it from the Pacific Struggle 80 years in the past, “ really it’s the issues I (and everybody else) at all times took with no consideration which might be the issues the nation is now combating 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.”
