Cyrus Eaton's Hideaway for Brains by Ian Sclanders in Maclean's, Caanada's National Magazine, October 27, 1956
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CYRUS EATON’S HIDEAWAY FOR BRAINS
Cyrus Eaton’s hideaway for brains
Each summer this Canadian millionaire brings famous brains to Pugwash, N.S., to relax and talk about the world's problems. This year's seminar included a Russian, an Englishman, an Arab, a Jew,an ex-German chancellor.Here's what they decided about the Middle East
By IAN SCLANDERS
I'M DONE READING
CYRUS EATON’S HIDEAWAY FOR BRAINS
Cyrus Eaton’s hideaway for brains
IAN SCLANDERSOCTOBER 271956
MaClean’s Magazine
The little white boats of the Pugwash fleet were loaded high with slat-and-twine traps baited with herring. As they nosed out of port for the fishing grounds, the day the lobster season opened on Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait shore, the sun threw a cloak of gold over the blue-green water and the salt breeze was soft and warm.
It was August 10. Just two weeks earlier the Egyptian president, Nasser, had seized the Suez Canal, giving new dimensions to old fears, hatreds, suspicions and prejudices.
But at Pugwash, where intellectuals from hostile lands, representing conflicting ideologies, had been brought together for a strange gathering by Cyrus Eaton—a multimillionaire who collects thinkers the way other multimillionaires collect yachts, race horses or rare postage stamps—the fears, hatreds, suspicions and prejudices seemed remote and unreal, like half-remembered nightmares.
Paradoxically, this was true even though these intellectuals had come to Pugwash to consider the dangerous and urgent problems of the Middle East and to speak for opposing points of view.
As the lobster boats departed, an Israeli and an Iraqi stood watching from the village wharf, arm in arm, the ancient bitterness between Jew' and Arab forgotten at least for the moment. “In Venice,” said the Israeli, “the first boat would carry musicians and it would be followed by boats with singers. But these Nova Scotians — silent Scots!”
The Iraqi chuckled.
At the same time on the same wharf an officer of the U. S. State Department w'as exchanging restrained pleasantries with a member of the national assembly of Red China, which the U. S vehemently refuses to recognize diplomatically.
Cyrus Eaton, of Cleveland, in Ohio, and Pugwash and Deep Cove, in Nova Scotia, w'as chatting with a Russian Communist. He glanced over his shoulder at the Israeli and the Iraqi, the State Department officer and the C hinese, and his blue eyes twinkled with satisfaction. Eaton, who once worked as a waterboy in a Nova Scotia railroad construction gang and now controls a railroad— the billion-dollar Chesapeake and Ohio—as well as steel mills, iron and coal mines and a multiplicity of other enterprises, was born at Pugwash in IScS3. The curious international gathering in his native village was organized and paid for by him.
It was held in Pineo Lodge, a fifteen-room white clapboard house on a grassy tree-shaded brow overlooking Northumberland Strait, the arm of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from the mainland. While the details are slightly vague, as far as Eaton has been able to ascertain this house was built by ship-owning forebears of his around 1800.
The Eaton family lost possession of it a century ago when Cyrus Eaton's great uncle emigrated to New Zealand and his grandfather venturned lucklessly to California’s gold fields and returned to Pugwash broke.
As a lad. Cyrus Eaton admired the rambling house. As a wealthy man, he bought it. As an individualist who reads poetry, studies philosophy and dreams the sort of dreams not ordinarily associated with financiers and industrialists, he decided that the old house and the peaceful atmosphere of Pugwash might be used to advance human knowledge and understanding. So Pineo Lodge became the scene of an experiment at the loftiest level of education, a thinkers’ retreat, a spot to which men with brilliant minds could travel at Eaton's expense and where, also at his expense, they could relax, breathe sea air. swim, eat lobsters, drink vintage wines and stimulate one another with scintillating conversation.
Last year-—the first year of the experiment— the Pugwash thinkers included Dr. Julian Huxley, the English biologist and philosopher: Dr. Henry Steele Commager. Columbia University's noted historian: Dr. Julian Boyd, of Princeton, editor of the Jefferson Papers, and Dr. F. Cyril James, principal of McGill University. 1 he\ wandered, with their heads in the clouds, through a variety of academic pastures.
But this year's Pugwash thinkers—one of them the last chancellor of Germany before Hitler and another leading architect of the mighty steel mills behind the Russian Urals—stuck closely to one subject, the Middle East. While their deliberations were in no way official they could, conceivably. have some bearing on political policies. It they were essentially scholars, the eleven men from nine countries at Pugwash were the type of scholars from whom governments seek advice.
They talked in private so they would not be inhibited by the prospect of being publicly quoted. Nobody took down what they said and reports they may make to their governments will be confidential. They passed no resolutions. But. meeting tw'o hours each morning and two hours each evening from August 3 to 11 under the cathedral ceiling of the big book-lined study in Pineo Lodge, the majority of them came to certain general conclusions:
1. That few if any Middle Eastern countries have the social or economic requirements necessary for a successful liberal democracy—requirements like a high per-capita income, a high percapita mileage of railways and a high per-capita distribution of newspapers.
2. That it is a mistake for Western countries to say that Middle Eastern countries, if they arc not ready or able to be liberal democracies, must be kept under tutelage.
3. That no country can turn into a liberal democracy overnight and all countries that have reached this status have done so by first achieving national unity, then by passing laws guaranteeing constitutional liberties, then by gradually extending these liberties to the mass population.
4. That countries with liberal traditions, having learned how to settle their own disputes at the conference table, can easily put too much faith in the proposition that no issue anywhere (notably in the Middle East) is so tough or intractable that it can't be resolved by debate.
If not all the thinkers concurred in all these opinions, most concurred in most of them. I heir sessions were as quiet, as orderly, as those in a college classroom—were, in fact, much like college classes. H. N. Fieldhouse, the tall broadshouldered Oxford-educated dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at McGill, acted as moderator and there was a different lecturer daily. Whoever was lecturing referred to himself as "the teacher.” The German ex-chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Bruening, started this.
continued on page 59
“What a cast of characters for a mystery novel!” remarked the hostess. It was an understatement
"Thank you, no,” he said one afternoon early in the gathering, declining a challenge at croquet from a French diplomat. “1 must go and prepare what 1 have to say; 1 am tomorrow's teacher.” The others picked up the term.
Mrs. Fieldhouse, an attractive woman who is the mother of a fifteen-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, was at Pugwash with Dean Fieldhouse. Cyrus Eaton had asked her to be hostess. One night, pouring tea in the living room as Pineo Lodge creaked gently in the wind, she remarked of her guests: "What a cast of characters for a mystery novel!” This was an understatement. The paths that brought these men io Pugwash, a Nova Scotia fishing village with fewer than eight hundred residents, had wound through hundreds of adventures from remote corners of the earth.
There was Brigadier Stephen Longrigg. a sandy-haired blue-eyed Englishman who studied at Oxford. The First World War took him to the Middle East as a soldier and afterward he stayed, first as an administrative officer for the government of Iraq, then on the staff of an oil company. Dressed as an Arab, speaking Arabic like a native, he traveled the desert negotiating oil concessions. Meanwhile he wrote dozens of children's stories and three scholarly volumes of Middle Eastern history.
There was Dr. Leo Kohn, since 1948 counselor for political affairs of the Ministry of External Affairs in Israel. Short, plump and amiable, he was born and educated in Germany, lived long in England, once wrote a book on the constitution of the Irish Free State.
There was Alexander Samarin of Moscow, a rugged freckled man who looked much like the laborer he once was. Born in a Russian village, he worked before the Revolution of 1917 in a factory and for a railway. After the revolution he went to high school, won a scholarship, became a metallurgist. He was one of those who had most to do with the construction of the Russian steel mills behind the Urals and now directs a graduate school in Moscow that trains five hundred metallurgists a year.
There was Majid Khadduri, lean, dark, astute, born and educated in Iraq, once a government official of Iraq, now director of research at the Middle East Institute of the United States and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
There was James Basier, an Englishman who formerly taught economics at Exeter, spent four years in the Middle East as economist to the United Nations’ relief agency and is now doing Middle Eastern economic studies with the UN in New York.
There was Dr. Paid Geren, officer in charge of Egypt-Sudan affairs for the U. S. State Department. Geren, Harvardeducated, was teaching economics at the University of Rangoon the day of Pearl Harbor. He became a volunteer ambulance driver, escaped from Burma with General Stilwell, joined the U. S. foreign service after the war.
There was Dr. Chien Tuan-sheng, also Harvard-educated, who is president of the Peking Institute of Politics and l aw and represents the intellectuals of Red China in the national assembly. 'There was,while he remained only a few days at Pugwash, John Marshall, of New York, the associate director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the best-known humanists in the U. S.
There was Jean Lapierre, who spent many years in the Middle East, directed courses on Middle Eastern affairs at the Sorbonne in Paris and is now French consul at Halifax—a tall man who likes to wear a beret.
And there was the German, Dr. Bruening, tall too. and the last chancellor before Hitler. Educated in law, history and economics, he was identified after the First World War with the Christian Trade Unions of Germany, and in 1930. when he was forty-four, he gained the chancellorship. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Bruening wandered to Holland, England, Switzerland, and then to the United States, where he is on the staff of the Harvard graduate school of public administration.
Cyrus Eaton had stipulated that the Pugwash thinkers were to regard their Nova Scotia stay primarily as a vacation, but they skipped no lectures, virtually ignored a well-stockpd bar to which they had access, and seldom let their minds stray far from the Middle East.
In hours set aside for recreation, the British brigadier cavorted happily in the warm Northumberland Strait surf. The German and the Frenchman, hands behind backs and heads bowed in concentration, strolled through the leafy lanes of Pugwash. The Russian metallurgist, like many a passing tourist, poked an inquisitive nose into the village blacksmith shop. He discovered a kindred soul in Walter Simmonds, the tall lean elderly man who is the smithy of Pugwash. They spoke of steel, of iron, of alloys, of methods of tempering, and the Russian watched, fascinated, as the blacksmith forged that handy old-fashioned tool, a crooked knife, from a broken file, cooling the blade slowly so it would retain the hardness of the file. They argued—the village smithy and the great Russian metallurgist—about whether one piece of metal was steel or pig iron. The blacksmith said steel and the metallurgist said pig iron, but after a series of tests the metallurgist said he had been wrong and the blacksmith had been right.
The Israeli, the Iraqi and the Chinese were captivated in their leisure hours by a game as old-fashioned as a crooked knife—croquet. Raymond Bourque had found an ancient croquet set in the attic of Pineo Lodge and had transferred it to the broad green lawn and filled the thinkers in on the rules of play.
Bourque, a kindly pleasant Acadian from Yarmouth County, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, is a minor celebrity in his province—a parlor-car conductor who is one of the ablest and most popular members of the Nova Scotia legislature. He has been major domo of the two annual thinkers’ gatherings thus far held at Pugwash and has also been the thinkers’ friend and confidant. He has been their trouble-shooter, too. When Dr. Kohn absent-mindedly mailed a letter addressed in Hebraic script, it was Bourque who had it re-addressed in English, thus averting a crisis at the Pugwash post office.
Bourque, with a true Blucnose’s pride in everything connected with his province, lost no opportunity to tell the visitors about Nova Scotia. In this he was outdone only by that other incurable Bluenose, Cyrus Eaton. Eaton, white-haired, sun-bronzed, still with a spring of youth in his step, bustled around in baggy grey flannels, a blue sport shirt, a blue sweater and scuffed brown brogues, striving to make sure his thinkers were having fun.
Here, against his boyhood background, he was utterly unlike the Cyrus Eaton pictured by newspaper readers—the wily nerveless financier who amassed a great fortune by cold-bloodedly outwitting his opponents in several of the most famous financial struggles of this century. Here, he was a simple, gracious, extremely courteous Nova Scotian, who insisted on shoving garden chairs around for his younger guests so they would be in the cool shade instead of the hot sun.
Here he talked, like a proud farmer, about the prize-winning shorthorn cattle he raises at Deep Cove, south of Halifax, where he has a farm. Working with the provincial department of agriculture, he is trying to encourage the raising of beef cattle in Nova Scotia, and his own is the finest shorthorn herd in the province. While the thinkers were at Pugwash, messages trickled in constantly about the victories of Eaton cattle at half a dozen livestock shows in the eastern United States. The Middle Eastern experts, caught up in their host’s enthusiasm, found themselves following the news from the cattle rings almost as breathlessly as they followed the news from Egypt.
The new Pugwash salt mill also intruded occasionally into the cerebrations of the thinkers. Eaton is not connected with this modest mill but, because he’s an old Pugwashian, it delights him.
It started, really, when his friend Joshua Allen, owner of the Pugwash lobster factory, attempted to drill an artesian well. Allen sank five holes and struck brine five times, so Canadian Industries Limited, which processes salt, came and uncovered a salt bed hundreds of feet thick. The company has erected a plant that will provide badly needed jobs in Pugwash, which, while picturesque and charming, has neither grown nor prospered since the days of wooden shipbuilding.
“That plant," Eaton told the Russian metallurgist, Alexander Samarin, “will do wonders for the culture of Pugwash. As you know and 1 know, and as the Greeks knew in their golden age, a man must have three daily meals and a suit of clothes for his hack before he can appreciate the arts." Samarin nodded vigorously. Considering the fact that they were from such vastly different worlds, Eaton from the gilded towers of U. S. free enterprise and high finance and Samarin from the grey halls of Soviet communism, the two men hit it off well. Samarin, who declined Eaton’s offer to pay his air passage from Russia, arrived in Pugwash with three gifts—a huge silver samovar, a tub of the finest Russian black caviar, and a bottle of vodka.
I asked Cyrus Eaton, jokingly, if it wasn’t slightly unorthodox for a man of his standing in conservative financial circles to be entertaining a Russian. He gave me a serious answer.
"I make steel,” he said. “The people of Russia have an idea that many industrialists in the United States are interested in war to create an outlet for steel and munitions. Now 1 have had an outstanding Russian here with me and he has seen a United States industrialist who hates war and doesn’t believe that war ever settles anything. Mr. Samarin knows 1 have thirteen grandchildren. He knows a man with thirteen grandchildren couldn't want a war.”
Eaton was stretched out comfortably on a sun cot on the patio of Pineo Lodge. Now, warming to his subject, he propped himself up on an elbow. "Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the First World War to make the world safe for democracy and to end all wars. After that war to make the world safe for democracy, we saw the rise of Mussolini. Hitler, Stalin. After that war to end all wars, we had a Second World War to end Germany's military might—so now we are arming Germany again, at our expense.” Men, he added with conviction, had to learn how to rule themselves more with their minds and less with their passions, how to exercise more patience. There were 600,000,000 people in China and 215,000,000 in Russia.
“Prudence,” said Cyrus Eaton quietly, “indicates that we should get along together if we don’t want to see Ottawa and Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland. Boston and New York all in rubble. The price of war today is too big a price to pay for an argument.”
It was this strong feeling of his, that the nations of the earth must discover how to dwell in peace, that set the pattern for this year’s Pugwash gathering and prompted him to invite not only the Russian but the Red Chinese. Like the Russian. the Chinese paid his own fare to Pugwash and brought a gilt—an exquisite Chinese water color.
Since Red China has no diplomatic relations with the U. S., Eaton wrote the Red Chinese ambassador at Moscow to ask that a representative be sent to Pugwash. Dr. Chien, chosen for the mission, traveled via Paris and had to obtain two visas, one from France and one from Canada. He entered Canada subject to the condition that he would issue no political statements.
Did the Pugwash meeting, as Cyrus Eaton hoped, do something to further international understanding?
Dean Fieldhouse, the moderator, thought it did. "Nobody who has taken part, however briefly, in Mr. Eaton’s experiment can have any doubts about its value,” he said. "None of us can talk today about Middle Eastern affairs in quite the same way we would have done before we met.”
Dr. Geren, the man from the U. S. State Department, was more cautious. The sessions, he said, had been well worth attending but it was "very easy to overestimate the impact of individual contacts.”
The Israeli and the Iraqi, friendly personally, both said, the day the Pugwash gathering closed, that their basic views on Jcwish-Arab relations were unchanged, although each professed more insight into the outlook of the other.
The scholarly British brigadier, Stephen I.ongrigg, summed up Pugwash with good-natured cynicism. "We have had a delightful time,” he said, "but this is a millionaire’s hobby. Nobody could say it is economically viable. From the political standpoint, it's a drop in the Atlantic, but a good drop.”
Could there ever be enough drops in the Atlantic like Pugwash to change his tory?
"Well,” shrugged Brigadier Longrigwith a smile, “there might be if we could find enough idealistic millionaires like Mr. Eaton. But 1 don’t think there are that many of them.” ★
Cyrus Eaton’s hideaway for brains
Each summer this Canadian millionaire brings famous brains to Pugwash, N.S., to relax and talk about the world's problems. This year's seminar included a Russian, an Englishman, an Arab, a Jew,an ex-German chancellor.Here's what they decided about the Middle East
By IAN SCLANDERS
I'M DONE READING
CYRUS EATON’S HIDEAWAY FOR BRAINS
Cyrus Eaton’s hideaway for brains
IAN SCLANDERSOCTOBER 271956
MaClean’s Magazine
The little white boats of the Pugwash fleet were loaded high with slat-and-twine traps baited with herring. As they nosed out of port for the fishing grounds, the day the lobster season opened on Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait shore, the sun threw a cloak of gold over the blue-green water and the salt breeze was soft and warm.
It was August 10. Just two weeks earlier the Egyptian president, Nasser, had seized the Suez Canal, giving new dimensions to old fears, hatreds, suspicions and prejudices.
But at Pugwash, where intellectuals from hostile lands, representing conflicting ideologies, had been brought together for a strange gathering by Cyrus Eaton—a multimillionaire who collects thinkers the way other multimillionaires collect yachts, race horses or rare postage stamps—the fears, hatreds, suspicions and prejudices seemed remote and unreal, like half-remembered nightmares.
Paradoxically, this was true even though these intellectuals had come to Pugwash to consider the dangerous and urgent problems of the Middle East and to speak for opposing points of view.
As the lobster boats departed, an Israeli and an Iraqi stood watching from the village wharf, arm in arm, the ancient bitterness between Jew' and Arab forgotten at least for the moment. “In Venice,” said the Israeli, “the first boat would carry musicians and it would be followed by boats with singers. But these Nova Scotians — silent Scots!”
The Iraqi chuckled.
At the same time on the same wharf an officer of the U. S. State Department w'as exchanging restrained pleasantries with a member of the national assembly of Red China, which the U. S vehemently refuses to recognize diplomatically.
Cyrus Eaton, of Cleveland, in Ohio, and Pugwash and Deep Cove, in Nova Scotia, w'as chatting with a Russian Communist. He glanced over his shoulder at the Israeli and the Iraqi, the State Department officer and the C hinese, and his blue eyes twinkled with satisfaction. Eaton, who once worked as a waterboy in a Nova Scotia railroad construction gang and now controls a railroad— the billion-dollar Chesapeake and Ohio—as well as steel mills, iron and coal mines and a multiplicity of other enterprises, was born at Pugwash in IScS3. The curious international gathering in his native village was organized and paid for by him.
It was held in Pineo Lodge, a fifteen-room white clapboard house on a grassy tree-shaded brow overlooking Northumberland Strait, the arm of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from the mainland. While the details are slightly vague, as far as Eaton has been able to ascertain this house was built by ship-owning forebears of his around 1800.
The Eaton family lost possession of it a century ago when Cyrus Eaton's great uncle emigrated to New Zealand and his grandfather venturned lucklessly to California’s gold fields and returned to Pugwash broke.
As a lad. Cyrus Eaton admired the rambling house. As a wealthy man, he bought it. As an individualist who reads poetry, studies philosophy and dreams the sort of dreams not ordinarily associated with financiers and industrialists, he decided that the old house and the peaceful atmosphere of Pugwash might be used to advance human knowledge and understanding. So Pineo Lodge became the scene of an experiment at the loftiest level of education, a thinkers’ retreat, a spot to which men with brilliant minds could travel at Eaton's expense and where, also at his expense, they could relax, breathe sea air. swim, eat lobsters, drink vintage wines and stimulate one another with scintillating conversation.
Last year-—the first year of the experiment— the Pugwash thinkers included Dr. Julian Huxley, the English biologist and philosopher: Dr. Henry Steele Commager. Columbia University's noted historian: Dr. Julian Boyd, of Princeton, editor of the Jefferson Papers, and Dr. F. Cyril James, principal of McGill University. 1 he\ wandered, with their heads in the clouds, through a variety of academic pastures.
But this year's Pugwash thinkers—one of them the last chancellor of Germany before Hitler and another leading architect of the mighty steel mills behind the Russian Urals—stuck closely to one subject, the Middle East. While their deliberations were in no way official they could, conceivably. have some bearing on political policies. It they were essentially scholars, the eleven men from nine countries at Pugwash were the type of scholars from whom governments seek advice.
They talked in private so they would not be inhibited by the prospect of being publicly quoted. Nobody took down what they said and reports they may make to their governments will be confidential. They passed no resolutions. But. meeting tw'o hours each morning and two hours each evening from August 3 to 11 under the cathedral ceiling of the big book-lined study in Pineo Lodge, the majority of them came to certain general conclusions:
1. That few if any Middle Eastern countries have the social or economic requirements necessary for a successful liberal democracy—requirements like a high per-capita income, a high percapita mileage of railways and a high per-capita distribution of newspapers.
2. That it is a mistake for Western countries to say that Middle Eastern countries, if they arc not ready or able to be liberal democracies, must be kept under tutelage.
3. That no country can turn into a liberal democracy overnight and all countries that have reached this status have done so by first achieving national unity, then by passing laws guaranteeing constitutional liberties, then by gradually extending these liberties to the mass population.
4. That countries with liberal traditions, having learned how to settle their own disputes at the conference table, can easily put too much faith in the proposition that no issue anywhere (notably in the Middle East) is so tough or intractable that it can't be resolved by debate.
If not all the thinkers concurred in all these opinions, most concurred in most of them. I heir sessions were as quiet, as orderly, as those in a college classroom—were, in fact, much like college classes. H. N. Fieldhouse, the tall broadshouldered Oxford-educated dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at McGill, acted as moderator and there was a different lecturer daily. Whoever was lecturing referred to himself as "the teacher.” The German ex-chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Bruening, started this.
continued on page 59
“What a cast of characters for a mystery novel!” remarked the hostess. It was an understatement
"Thank you, no,” he said one afternoon early in the gathering, declining a challenge at croquet from a French diplomat. “1 must go and prepare what 1 have to say; 1 am tomorrow's teacher.” The others picked up the term.
Mrs. Fieldhouse, an attractive woman who is the mother of a fifteen-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, was at Pugwash with Dean Fieldhouse. Cyrus Eaton had asked her to be hostess. One night, pouring tea in the living room as Pineo Lodge creaked gently in the wind, she remarked of her guests: "What a cast of characters for a mystery novel!” This was an understatement. The paths that brought these men io Pugwash, a Nova Scotia fishing village with fewer than eight hundred residents, had wound through hundreds of adventures from remote corners of the earth.
There was Brigadier Stephen Longrigg. a sandy-haired blue-eyed Englishman who studied at Oxford. The First World War took him to the Middle East as a soldier and afterward he stayed, first as an administrative officer for the government of Iraq, then on the staff of an oil company. Dressed as an Arab, speaking Arabic like a native, he traveled the desert negotiating oil concessions. Meanwhile he wrote dozens of children's stories and three scholarly volumes of Middle Eastern history.
There was Dr. Leo Kohn, since 1948 counselor for political affairs of the Ministry of External Affairs in Israel. Short, plump and amiable, he was born and educated in Germany, lived long in England, once wrote a book on the constitution of the Irish Free State.
There was Alexander Samarin of Moscow, a rugged freckled man who looked much like the laborer he once was. Born in a Russian village, he worked before the Revolution of 1917 in a factory and for a railway. After the revolution he went to high school, won a scholarship, became a metallurgist. He was one of those who had most to do with the construction of the Russian steel mills behind the Urals and now directs a graduate school in Moscow that trains five hundred metallurgists a year.
There was Majid Khadduri, lean, dark, astute, born and educated in Iraq, once a government official of Iraq, now director of research at the Middle East Institute of the United States and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
There was James Basier, an Englishman who formerly taught economics at Exeter, spent four years in the Middle East as economist to the United Nations’ relief agency and is now doing Middle Eastern economic studies with the UN in New York.
There was Dr. Paid Geren, officer in charge of Egypt-Sudan affairs for the U. S. State Department. Geren, Harvardeducated, was teaching economics at the University of Rangoon the day of Pearl Harbor. He became a volunteer ambulance driver, escaped from Burma with General Stilwell, joined the U. S. foreign service after the war.
There was Dr. Chien Tuan-sheng, also Harvard-educated, who is president of the Peking Institute of Politics and l aw and represents the intellectuals of Red China in the national assembly. 'There was,while he remained only a few days at Pugwash, John Marshall, of New York, the associate director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the best-known humanists in the U. S.
There was Jean Lapierre, who spent many years in the Middle East, directed courses on Middle Eastern affairs at the Sorbonne in Paris and is now French consul at Halifax—a tall man who likes to wear a beret.
And there was the German, Dr. Bruening, tall too. and the last chancellor before Hitler. Educated in law, history and economics, he was identified after the First World War with the Christian Trade Unions of Germany, and in 1930. when he was forty-four, he gained the chancellorship. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Bruening wandered to Holland, England, Switzerland, and then to the United States, where he is on the staff of the Harvard graduate school of public administration.
Cyrus Eaton had stipulated that the Pugwash thinkers were to regard their Nova Scotia stay primarily as a vacation, but they skipped no lectures, virtually ignored a well-stockpd bar to which they had access, and seldom let their minds stray far from the Middle East.
In hours set aside for recreation, the British brigadier cavorted happily in the warm Northumberland Strait surf. The German and the Frenchman, hands behind backs and heads bowed in concentration, strolled through the leafy lanes of Pugwash. The Russian metallurgist, like many a passing tourist, poked an inquisitive nose into the village blacksmith shop. He discovered a kindred soul in Walter Simmonds, the tall lean elderly man who is the smithy of Pugwash. They spoke of steel, of iron, of alloys, of methods of tempering, and the Russian watched, fascinated, as the blacksmith forged that handy old-fashioned tool, a crooked knife, from a broken file, cooling the blade slowly so it would retain the hardness of the file. They argued—the village smithy and the great Russian metallurgist—about whether one piece of metal was steel or pig iron. The blacksmith said steel and the metallurgist said pig iron, but after a series of tests the metallurgist said he had been wrong and the blacksmith had been right.
The Israeli, the Iraqi and the Chinese were captivated in their leisure hours by a game as old-fashioned as a crooked knife—croquet. Raymond Bourque had found an ancient croquet set in the attic of Pineo Lodge and had transferred it to the broad green lawn and filled the thinkers in on the rules of play.
Bourque, a kindly pleasant Acadian from Yarmouth County, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, is a minor celebrity in his province—a parlor-car conductor who is one of the ablest and most popular members of the Nova Scotia legislature. He has been major domo of the two annual thinkers’ gatherings thus far held at Pugwash and has also been the thinkers’ friend and confidant. He has been their trouble-shooter, too. When Dr. Kohn absent-mindedly mailed a letter addressed in Hebraic script, it was Bourque who had it re-addressed in English, thus averting a crisis at the Pugwash post office.
Bourque, with a true Blucnose’s pride in everything connected with his province, lost no opportunity to tell the visitors about Nova Scotia. In this he was outdone only by that other incurable Bluenose, Cyrus Eaton. Eaton, white-haired, sun-bronzed, still with a spring of youth in his step, bustled around in baggy grey flannels, a blue sport shirt, a blue sweater and scuffed brown brogues, striving to make sure his thinkers were having fun.
Here, against his boyhood background, he was utterly unlike the Cyrus Eaton pictured by newspaper readers—the wily nerveless financier who amassed a great fortune by cold-bloodedly outwitting his opponents in several of the most famous financial struggles of this century. Here, he was a simple, gracious, extremely courteous Nova Scotian, who insisted on shoving garden chairs around for his younger guests so they would be in the cool shade instead of the hot sun.
Here he talked, like a proud farmer, about the prize-winning shorthorn cattle he raises at Deep Cove, south of Halifax, where he has a farm. Working with the provincial department of agriculture, he is trying to encourage the raising of beef cattle in Nova Scotia, and his own is the finest shorthorn herd in the province. While the thinkers were at Pugwash, messages trickled in constantly about the victories of Eaton cattle at half a dozen livestock shows in the eastern United States. The Middle Eastern experts, caught up in their host’s enthusiasm, found themselves following the news from the cattle rings almost as breathlessly as they followed the news from Egypt.
The new Pugwash salt mill also intruded occasionally into the cerebrations of the thinkers. Eaton is not connected with this modest mill but, because he’s an old Pugwashian, it delights him.
It started, really, when his friend Joshua Allen, owner of the Pugwash lobster factory, attempted to drill an artesian well. Allen sank five holes and struck brine five times, so Canadian Industries Limited, which processes salt, came and uncovered a salt bed hundreds of feet thick. The company has erected a plant that will provide badly needed jobs in Pugwash, which, while picturesque and charming, has neither grown nor prospered since the days of wooden shipbuilding.
“That plant," Eaton told the Russian metallurgist, Alexander Samarin, “will do wonders for the culture of Pugwash. As you know and 1 know, and as the Greeks knew in their golden age, a man must have three daily meals and a suit of clothes for his hack before he can appreciate the arts." Samarin nodded vigorously. Considering the fact that they were from such vastly different worlds, Eaton from the gilded towers of U. S. free enterprise and high finance and Samarin from the grey halls of Soviet communism, the two men hit it off well. Samarin, who declined Eaton’s offer to pay his air passage from Russia, arrived in Pugwash with three gifts—a huge silver samovar, a tub of the finest Russian black caviar, and a bottle of vodka.
I asked Cyrus Eaton, jokingly, if it wasn’t slightly unorthodox for a man of his standing in conservative financial circles to be entertaining a Russian. He gave me a serious answer.
"I make steel,” he said. “The people of Russia have an idea that many industrialists in the United States are interested in war to create an outlet for steel and munitions. Now 1 have had an outstanding Russian here with me and he has seen a United States industrialist who hates war and doesn’t believe that war ever settles anything. Mr. Samarin knows 1 have thirteen grandchildren. He knows a man with thirteen grandchildren couldn't want a war.”
Eaton was stretched out comfortably on a sun cot on the patio of Pineo Lodge. Now, warming to his subject, he propped himself up on an elbow. "Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the First World War to make the world safe for democracy and to end all wars. After that war to make the world safe for democracy, we saw the rise of Mussolini. Hitler, Stalin. After that war to end all wars, we had a Second World War to end Germany's military might—so now we are arming Germany again, at our expense.” Men, he added with conviction, had to learn how to rule themselves more with their minds and less with their passions, how to exercise more patience. There were 600,000,000 people in China and 215,000,000 in Russia.
“Prudence,” said Cyrus Eaton quietly, “indicates that we should get along together if we don’t want to see Ottawa and Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland. Boston and New York all in rubble. The price of war today is too big a price to pay for an argument.”
It was this strong feeling of his, that the nations of the earth must discover how to dwell in peace, that set the pattern for this year’s Pugwash gathering and prompted him to invite not only the Russian but the Red Chinese. Like the Russian. the Chinese paid his own fare to Pugwash and brought a gilt—an exquisite Chinese water color.
Since Red China has no diplomatic relations with the U. S., Eaton wrote the Red Chinese ambassador at Moscow to ask that a representative be sent to Pugwash. Dr. Chien, chosen for the mission, traveled via Paris and had to obtain two visas, one from France and one from Canada. He entered Canada subject to the condition that he would issue no political statements.
Did the Pugwash meeting, as Cyrus Eaton hoped, do something to further international understanding?
Dean Fieldhouse, the moderator, thought it did. "Nobody who has taken part, however briefly, in Mr. Eaton’s experiment can have any doubts about its value,” he said. "None of us can talk today about Middle Eastern affairs in quite the same way we would have done before we met.”
Dr. Geren, the man from the U. S. State Department, was more cautious. The sessions, he said, had been well worth attending but it was "very easy to overestimate the impact of individual contacts.”
The Israeli and the Iraqi, friendly personally, both said, the day the Pugwash gathering closed, that their basic views on Jcwish-Arab relations were unchanged, although each professed more insight into the outlook of the other.
The scholarly British brigadier, Stephen I.ongrigg, summed up Pugwash with good-natured cynicism. "We have had a delightful time,” he said, "but this is a millionaire’s hobby. Nobody could say it is economically viable. From the political standpoint, it's a drop in the Atlantic, but a good drop.”
Could there ever be enough drops in the Atlantic like Pugwash to change his tory?
"Well,” shrugged Brigadier Longrigwith a smile, “there might be if we could find enough idealistic millionaires like Mr. Eaton. But 1 don’t think there are that many of them.” ★