ENTHUSIASTIC expressions of approbation have followed in the wake of the announcement a fortnight ago of the Phoenix Project, the University's living peace memorial to its war dead.
The vast scope and significance of the proposed center for cooperative research in all branches of science has fired the imaginations of thousands who have read and heard of the project and its aims.
Students, individually and collectively, hailed the project upon the first announcement and immediately took preliminary steps toward mobilizing their forces in support of the memorial. An initial wave of telegrams and letters of congratulations and personal pledges of support poured in to the War Memorial Committee last week. And many figures of international renown have already applauded the University's proposed project.
Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan, in a telegram to the Committee, stated:
"I have just learned that the University of Michigan is establishing as a War Memorial, a center of research and thinking on peacetime uses of atomic energy.
"I wish to congratulate the Committee and extend best wishes for successful accomplishment of the Project."
John Hersey, noted author who wrote "Hiroshima," the famous description of atomic destruction, made this statement:
"Never before in his history has man possessed such an ambiguous power as he now does: power, that is, for infinite good or—the choice, too, is his—for definitive evil. That power lies in a phenomenon so complex that only a handful of men, a group of perhaps one thousand scientists in a world containing two and a half billion people, understands everything about it. The Phoenix Project, it seems to me, symbolizes the hopeful aspects of man's power and man's choice."
Many student organizations followed the announcement of the memorial project with prompt and concrete backing. The Daily published a four-page extra containing detailed accounts of the proposed plan, its inception and progress, valuable back-ground material, and a complete roster of the University's war dead. The students were advised that they could assume an effective preliminary role in the project's success, prior to the formation of a formal organization for fund-raising activities, by helping to spread the news and generate enthusiasm over the Project itself.
Within 48 hours it was announced by Eliot Charlip, '51, of Detroit, that special editions of the Daily had been distributed to every resident of Lloyd House in the West Quadrangle, and that 157 letters publicizing the Phoenix Project had been written and mailed with the Daily to home town newspapers all over the nation.
Other organizations were quick to follow with similar action. Alpha Tau Omega fraternity made an immediate contribution of $100 to the Project, and announced that it is requesting the 100 other chapters of ATO to publicize it on their campuses. The coeds at Jordan Hall, followed closely by those at Stockwell and Mosher Halls, sent letters and material to their home town newspapers, then went a step farther by including radio stations, theater managers, and church representatives on their mailing lists. Sigma Chi was among the first to follow through in like manner, and the University chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, national service fraternity, resolved to aid by sending copies of the Daily extra to the next-of-kin of the war dead and in spreading news of the Project.
The Campus chapter of the American Veterans Committee initiated a movement to gain support for the University's memorial project among the nation's 150,000 AVC members, and Gellert A. Seel, of Detroit, the University delegate to the National Students' Association, promised that full descriptive material would be presented before the 750 delegates to that organization's convention in Madison, Wisconsin, this summer. The delegates represent nearly 400 universities and colleges from all over the country, and it is hoped to spread news of the Project, through the delegates, to as many as a million and a half students.
THE MICHIGAN ALUMNUS
June 5 1948, page 407
