The Talented Mind

THE TALENTED MIND - AN OPPORTUNITY AND AN OBLIGATION

As I look at the bright faces of the young men and women whose achievement we have come here to honor, I am impressed with the thought: How fortunate are these young people! Fortunate, in that God has blessed you with a priceless endowment. What has been given all of you is the most lasting, the most persistently satisfying, the most all-around useful of natural endowments - a really good mind.

I trust that you will not let yourselves be proud of this gift. It reflects no particular credit on you. Nor is it a guarantee of success in life. Rather does it resemble a vein of precious metal imbedded in rock - valuable only when it has been mined intelligently and laboriously. But with it, an unusual opportunity is granted you to develop yourselves into successful human beings in fields of activity where success must always be rare and difficult.

You are here because you have already taken the first step towards making use of your good fortune. You have given that good mind of yours what it most needs - exercise in meeting an intellectual challenge. In doing this you have shown yourselves worthy of the endowment with which you have been blessed. You have demonstrated that you can marshall the ambition and stick-to-itiveness which a good mind demands. You have taken the first step towards success in your chosen fields, but only the first.

Like most of today's youth, you must at times have felt you missed something exciting and important because you were born in the 20th century, at a time when almost all frontier areas of this country had disappeared and with them the adventure formerly enjoyed by many a young man and woman, of hewing out their destiny, dependent on no power on earth but their own will and ability. Today there is hardly a spot on this globe which has not been discovered and mapped. For most people, life, while doubtless more comfortable, lacks the spice of discovery and adventure so dear to young spirits.

Yet it is precisely in this respect that your good fortune manifests itself most dramatically, for you carry in your own minds potentialities for adventure and discovery not shared by most of your contemporaries. You have as many opportunities for exciting living as people born a hundred or more years ago; different in kind, perhaps, but opportunities not one whit less exciting and rewarding than those which vanished at the turn of this century.

Capable and ambitious young people could once fashion their lives by their own efforts in wild and unmapped areas of the physical world; you can be pioneers today in the wild and unmapped world of the arts and the sciences. In the short span of three centuries, since man first learned to think and experiment scientifically, enormous advances have been made. But enough remains to be discovered and mapped to guarantee excitement and adventure to more young men and women than we are likely to have for many years to come.

I recommend that you make your life an adventure of the mind. This will at times be hard, but always deeply rewarding. When you reap the fruits of your own intellectual labor you will experience the satisfaction of having proved yourselves good cultivators of the talents given you by Providence. Over and above all this, you will know that yours is a kind of pioneering which yields not alone personal gain and satisfaction, but also contributes significantly to the cultural and economic and hence the political strength and security of our country. This you will find the greatest reward of all.

There never has been a time in the history of our country when it so greatly needed the services of its talented youth. One hundred and eighty-four years ago, this nation was born on a new continent, sparsely populated by four million people. Seldom has a new nation started life under such favorable circumstances. Not the least of these was the political inheritance which enabled the founding fathers to devise a form of government marvelously suited to a vast land with fabulous natural resources which had to be developed by a small population. The Constitution insured fullest scope for each individual's abilities. Moreover, our continuing scarcity of labor helped us to hold fast to that basic respect of the individual which the first settlers brought with them from England, and which is the foundation of our democratic way of life.

The open frontier kept us socially mobile and therefore checked any tendency towards the class barriers so apt to accompany advances in civilization, and which are characteristic of most highly civilized but static societies. Respect for the individual, full opportunities for all, abundance of land and natural resources, and a government eminently suited to our particular needs built this nation into the formidable giant it is today.

In recent years some of the foundations upon which we built in the past have begun to crumble or have vanished altogether. Instead of four million people, lost in a vast wilderness hardly touched by man, we now have 180 million, increasing annually by three million, or almost as many new Americans as lived here on the eve of the Revolution.

In fact, we may soon reach a density of population close to that of the old countries of Europe. Virtually no good free land is left; much of the wilderness which nurtured the free spirit of earlier Americans has all but been buried under factories, cities, and suburban developments. And, where even as recently as 50 years ago, we exported 15% of our raw materials, we now depend on the rest of the world for 10% of our raw material needs.

The turning point occurred only a few years ago. Today our consumption of raw materials grows at a compound rate. If we continued to expand our consumption at this same pace for the next 25 years, our needs would reach a fantastic 80% of total world production, leaving only 20% for all other countries. Let me illustrate with a few figures what this momentous change in our raw materials position, from a resources-exporting to a resources-importing country, portends for our economic health and political strength.

Advances in medicine and public sanitation have quadrupled the world's population since the middle of the 18th century, and population is increasing at a geometrical rate. Our own country has the highest percentage of natural increase in population of the large industrial nations of the world - an increase higher even than that in Japan and Italy. Scientific calculations give us the astonishing estimate that one out of every 20 human beings who have ever trod this earth is alive today.

This enormous and ever-growing population must now be fed, clothed, and housed by cultivating land which over vast areas has become depleted through erosion and faulty agriculture; by harvesting the products of the sea and of inland waters which likewise have become depleted by unintelligent overfishing and by pollution; and by consuming irreplaceable mineral and fuel resources. The United States alone, for example, has consumed as much in irreplaceable mineral and fuel resources since 1914 as had then been used by all the world in all of the 5,000 years of history since man first discovered bronze. And much of this priceless heritage has been and is being squandered in an appallingly wasteful manner.

From a scarcely populated, fabulously resources-rich country 184 years ago we have changed to a densely populated, resources-poor country today. We are, of course, not as poor in resources nor as heavily populated as most of the industrial powers of the world. We are still rich compared to such countries as Britain or Italy. In fact, with but 10% of the population of the free world and 8% of its land area, we consume close to half the free world's volume of materials. These figures are frequently used to illustrate that we have the highest standard of living in the world. What seems more significant to me is that these figures also indicate our increasing dependence on foreign countries for vitally needed minerals and fuels. When measured with our wealth of but a few short years ago, we are therefore poor, and we are poorer still when measured against our future needs.

The shrinking of the once broad materials base of our industrial civilization makes us for the first time in our history dependent on foreign countries for materials basic to our technical organization. So far we have had no difficulty buying what we need abroad. But it would not be wise to count on this. We shall not remain truly free and powerful unless we compensate, to the fullest possible extent, for lack of materials resources within our own borders. There is one way, and only one way, that this can be done. It is by using far more effectively than heretofore our natural resources in brain power; we must substitute intellectual resources for diminishing materials resources.

Applied to this problem, brain power can devise ways of extracting at reasonable cost the considerable store of low-grade minerals and fuels still remaining to us which we are not utilizing today because of excessive cost in time and labor - thus taconite and shale oil may in time make up for the threatened deficit in high-grade ores and oil. It can discover ways of replacing scarce materials with plentiful materials heretofore considered unusable, as aluminum is replacing scarcer copper. Trained minds may be able to relieve shortages of natural minerals and fuels by creating man-made substitutes as plastics and synthetic rubber have reduced our dependence on imported tin and natural rubber, or as atomic power may replace coal and oil. Similarly, synthetic products made from renewable resources may serve as substitutes for irreplaceable materials.