If Joe Schmoe told you that somebody positively isn't an anti-semite because this somebody just said that "some of his best friends are Jews," you would probably think Joe was kidding. That happened to me last winter, only it wasn't Joe Schmoe, it was the president of the Free Enterprise Society, and he wasn't kidding. In other words, he meant it. That is to say, the fact that someone pronounced this anti-semite cliche of cliches was proof positive, to the President, that the chap was not an anti-semite. Or, to put it differently, the President was a little on the simple side.

He was so simple that it was hard to believe. So when the Free Enterprise Society had an open meeting last week to recruit new members, I went over to hear its officers talk and see if maybe the President's remarks last winter had been brought on, like lots of other comas, by overwork and cold weather. My quest was not in vain. Towards the end of the meeting, the new President, having warmed up with a lot of purely preliminary inanities, cleared his throat and revealed to the assembled multitude that "government is here to stay, to some extent," which is a perfectly-tooled, neatly-cut, sparkling little jewel of simplicity if there ever was one. It was clear that last winter's business wasn't any accident.

Now you may be wondering what all this proves. At least, you ought to be. The Free Enterprise Society is small, it is not highly organized, it loves our "American system" and hates any kind of totalitarianism, fascistic, communistic, or otherwise, and even if it were fascistic, as a few people seem to think it is, it doesn't have enough influence to matter. So why bother with it, you say.

And maybe you're right. But when it came out at their meeting that the Society at Harvard had a lot to do with getting one started at Princeton, and that another one has popped up at Yale, and that the boys are now trying to get Free Enterprise Societies set up in other colleges all over the country, and that once they've done that, they think maybe they'll organize the whole works into a unified movement--when all this came out, and when I saw the industry they were putting into the different projects, getting out booklets and newsletters and so on, I began to view with alarm a little. Not that they can do any harm by themselves. But when you get a large organization, full of pep and eager to do something with social significance, and without a single thought in its collective head that has anything to do with what is going on in the world except that it likes "our American way of life," you have the perfect set-up for any effective demagogue to take over so long as he seems to be for the "American system."

It is curious to find some of this sort of putty in the middle of a university. Your education may confuse you, it may mislead you, it may shake up your ideas and turn them upside down, but one thing it wouldn't be expected to do is leave you blank and malleable.

And having got that off my chest, I'm practically rolling on my way to West Point, blank in spite of my education at Cornell, malleable in spite of my education at Virginia, a push-over for the first demagogue who comes along and says "Army schmarmy! We'll murder the bums."