Chugging via Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent Metropolis was ferrying development tools 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 desperate 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.
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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 have been the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet younger man, taciturn within the outdated New England approach, however he had a lot to say on this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of maturity.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 growing rapidity that you just’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 have been transitioning into coaching grounds for America’s armed forces.
“What you’ll be taught in faculty received’t be price a God-damned,” Phil advised 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 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. “If you happen to went to a commerce college you’d have one factor you could possibly do & know—& you’d miss the entire world of magnificence,” he went on. “In a liberal college ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ whenever you get out. But you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for folks & magnificence that cash received’t purchase—You may all the time be taught to be a mechanic or a tablet mixer and so forth.,” but it surely’s solely whenever you’re of school age “that you could be taught that life has magnificence & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “battle, conflict: financial if not precise—Don’t surrender the thought & 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 positioning of a brutal six-month jungle battle in unforgiving warmth towards decided Japanese fighters.
In September 1942, in the course of the Guadalcanal marketing campaign, Phil wrote one other letter, this one to his favourite Dartmouth professor, the sociologist George F. Theriault. “I’ve had numerous time to suppose out right here,” he advised Theriault, earlier than including, “A good liberal arts training primarily based on the Social Sciences is all a variety of us have left—and increasingly turns into the one doable background on which to view all this”—the “all this” referring to the conflict and what it was about. He advised Theriault, who was obsessed with 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 ‘conflict programs’ and neglect the nice, respectable, actually vital issues we had an opportunity to return to know.”
Somewhat 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 battle for the values he’d discovered in faculty—and, simply as vital, a battle for the sweetness 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 advised my father, who would be a part of the Navy earlier than his personal faculty years have been accomplished, “why I hope that you just—like me—suppose it’s all price whereas to get in & battle for. One all the time 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 dying for 5 a long time. 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 into my values. His steerage has formed the passage of my two daughters via 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 via letters and paperwork in my father’s file cupboard, and looking 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 house 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 into 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 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 concerning 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 seashore at Tulagi via his binoculars. Throughout 100 yards of water, they waved to one another and, by sign lamp, agreed to fulfill as quickly as doable. 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 pupil, who had died 29 years earlier, have a toddler, the freshman at his door? “No, you could possibly 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, carried out over lunches and dinners, on campus and off, and infrequently at his house, presided over by his spouse, Ray Grant Theriault, who advised me that in the future, 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 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 as we speak 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 provides, for the possibility 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 occasions, and every of these reminiscences was concerning the outdated days, when his two boys have been in faculty. 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 “an excellent, throughout boy, vibrant, alert and a nice character.” His formal faculty utility was a easy affair. He mentioned he considered turning into a chemist or a health care provider and was excited by present affairs and scientific issues. The shape contained this sentence, in his personal handwriting: “I’m of Hebrew descent.”
The faculty 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, a bit of greater than half the present dimension. Freshmen wore beanies. The yr Phil arrived, the soccer crew 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 basic philosophy of school males by the way taking part in soccer as towards soccer gamers by the way going to varsity, a lot of the evils of intercollegiate competitors can be averted.” 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 faculty is, what its goals are, what its beliefs are, why its procedures exist.” That day, sitting together 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 an even 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 finally turned his main). His grades have been assorted: C’s in freshman English, numerous 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 all the time performed in Boston. He was one of many Dartmouth boys who in October 1940 toppled the picket goalposts after Earl “Crimson” Blaik’s final Dartmouth crew prevailed towards Harvard, 7–6. (Blaik would decamp to West Level the subsequent yr, an indication of impending conflict.) The shard of wooden Phil snared after the ultimate whistle now could be nailed on my wall, simply ft from the place I’m scripting this.
The younger man who on his utility 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.
America 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 attentive to any wants the 2 providers expressed. Within the spring of 1941, a pupil wrote an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Now we’ve waited lengthy sufficient …”) that was revealed on the entrance web page of the campus newspaper. It was learn into the Congressional Report. America 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 crew, who turned a member of the fabled tenth Mountain Division earlier than returning to Dartmouth as a professor—delivered the Tackle to the Faculty (an task that 35 years later would come to me). He mentioned that “the energy and assurance of democracy” lies in his classmates’ “with the ability to consider in and being prepared to battle for” the “uncomplicated issues we all know and consider in as we speak.” 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 can decide, not in center life however tomorrow, subsequent yr, or on the newest inside a couple of temporary 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 broad 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 faculty now has a transparent responsibility to do all it may possibly to assist 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 College had opened on campus with a employees of about 100, and headquarters in Faculty Corridor. Alumni Gymnasium turned the positioning 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 steadiness between making ready males for conflict and preserving the liberal arts that Phil sought to defend.
Dying got here to my uncle with suddenness however not with shock. His Dartmouth modern 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 as we speak—tall & slender, with reddish brown hair and a few freckles, a smile all the time, irreverent conduct,” his shipmate William Trippet, who would turn into 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 mother and father in September, a month into the combating, to guarantee them that he was doing nice. He was, after all, thinner, and but he had grown. He recalled that he was reminded frequently of a letter printed within the newspaper over the past conflict from a serviceman to his household; it had been sitting round someplace at house, again in Salem. “Little then,” he wrote, “did I feel I’d ever sit down within the midst of a conflict and … put down a bit of of what an individual thinks.” His personal letter was spare, meant solely as a “private type 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 proper 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 will likely be made,” he wrote. “As to what the end result on my half will likely be I must go away that to another person and till it’s over.”
On January 5, 1943, he was transferred to the PT-boat squadron, an task 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 factor of the American naval pressure—normally a mere 80 ft lengthy, outfitted with machine weapons and 4 21-inch-diameter torpedoes, and able to zipping via 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 turned 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 all spiders, and two of ants—“companionable,” he wrote, “so we allow them to be.” Little else is understood of his life on Tulagi in these previous couple of months. A single {photograph} survives, displaying 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 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. Finally 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 subsequent 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 cross 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 pressure of that loss.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. despatched a notice saluting Phil for having “gone to hitch the heroes who’ve constructed America.” That will have been a kind letter, however the notice from Phil’s Crescent Metropolis shipmate Zalmon Garfield, later the chief assistant to Milton Shapp, Pennsylvania’s first Jewish governor, was not. Garfield wrote on behalf of his shipmates concerning 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 reside, watching the gods toss their best works right into a chasm of their very own constructing. We are able to solely surprise, mourn briefly and work very arduous 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 one of the brave males I’ve ever seen in motion,” the commander advised the congressman.
With the information of Phil’s dying, 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. 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 Battle II. He was by then an English professor at Middlebury Faculty. “Today are useless,” he wrote in an creator’s notice. “We hated them then, we might not have them come once more; however after fifteen years might we not look again at them for a couple of 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 via the “conflict goals” of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. In faculty and graduate college, and in a lifetime of studying, I’ve examined a lot of that scholarship. However for People, the conflict was additionally about greater than fastidiously acknowledged goals—it was about far less complicated 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 might need added that it was additionally about the proper to really feel pleasure flattening a goalpost in a dreaded rival’s house stadium; the proper to battle with explaining in what respects Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert have been realists; the proper 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 person’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 concerning 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 basic liberal-arts route that Phil would have endorsed—psychology, meteorology, music—and as we speak 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 Legal Justice. You might say that Phil received World Battle II in spite of everything.
I’ve been delving into Uncle Phil’s life for years. A number 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 nicely. So has my religion. And so, too, has my perception that, as Uncle Phil put it from the Pacific Battle 80 years in the past, “ really it’s the issues I (and everybody else) all the time took without any consideration which can be the issues the nation is now combating to maintain—and it’s going to be arduous to do.”
This text seems within the Might 2024 print version with the headline “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts.”
