"Taking Stock of the Future": Donald H. McGibeny

              TAKING STOCK OF THE FUTURE

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DONALD H. McGIBENY


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Redpath





DONALD H. McGIBENY 
TAKING STOCK. OF THE FUTURE



D
ONALD H. McGIBENY had already achieved distinction as a Redpath lecturer when in August, 1917, he entered the American army.  Because of his knowledge of French and German he was able to render invaluable service as an officer in the U. S. Intelligence Department overseas.




W
HEN DONALD McGIBENY first spoke to Redpath audiences he was recounting the thrilling story of his work as a Red Cross Ambulance lieutenant on the French front.  Forced by the Turks to leave his work as a teacher in the Protestant college at Beirut, Syria, when the war storm broke upon the world, he went to Paris and soon was at the front.




He returned to his native America just before this country entered the world conflict and his lecture was a vivid, vital, magnetic, eloquent effort.  He made a profound impression upon his audiences everywhere and his lecture tour was an extraordinary success.




B
OOTH TARKINGTON, the well-known author, was one of the many who heard the 1917 McGibeny lecture and concerning it he wrote most appreciatively, taking care to call attention emphatically to the lecturer's striking ability to make his hearers feel and see as he had felt and seen.






H
IS NEW ADDRESS, 
Taking Stock of the Future,
 is most decidedly not a war lecture.  It is a discussion of national and international problems and is based upon the lecturer's broad, first-hand knowledge of conditions in Europe, Asia and America.




M
R. McGIBENY'S work overseas carried him into the smoky interiors of the huts of the French peasants as well as into the grand chateaux of France.  He talked to Englishmen of every class and he knows conditions in Germany.  He heard discussed and talked over from the European standpoint the vital topics which had been left by the war.  He brings to his new lecture the same earnest sincerity and eloquence which so won the hearers of his former addresses.  He is a cultured, vital American and his is a genuine American message.




B
ESIDES BEING a lecturer of unusual ability, Mr. McGibeny has also received marked recognition as a writer.  The Ladies' Home Journal has just accepted an article from him entitled 
By the Side of the Road,
 and Bobbs-Merrill Co. is now publishing a new McGibeny novel.




He has also contributed many special articles to metropolitan newspapers.






DONALD McGIBENY
Were the French Ungrateful to Americans?

From an Article by Donald H. McGibeny in the Indianapolis News


Nobody wants to hear about the war, that's certain.  Therefore, this is not going to be a diatribe on what I did or what I saw.  This is written merely to try to correct a mistaken impression that seems prevalent in this country that the French were blood-suckers who took every opportunity to rob the Americans, and that the Americans having finished the little job over there received no credit for it.  The first six Americans with whom I talked seemed to have come to the opinion that our boys got all the worst of it and disregarding the danger of being called unpatriotic I am going to try to explain the French side of it.



The Americans, as a whole, had money.




Americans never bargained, never counted their change, never looked for bad money and in a hundred ways made the French think that they were all millionaires.



And tipping!  In France a waiter expects ten per cent of the bill as his tip and he gets it.  If the bill comes to one franc he gets a two cent tip and is thankful for it, but with the Americans the old order changed.



Vain Warnings About Tipping



This tipping became so extraordinary that the French remonstrated time and again.




In every French town that I have been in the municipal authorities requested the commander of the American troops to report any cases where Americans were compelled to pay higher prices than the French so that such shopkeepers might be punished.  The procedure was simple.  If an American thought that he was charged too high a price for any article he merely had to ask for a receipt and present it to the mayor of the town.  If it was found that the price was too high the American was reimbursed the entire purchase price and the shopkeeper was fined up to $200.  The French authorities also gave 
carte blanche
 to American commanders to close any shop, hotel or cafe where they thought the prices too high.  Yet these measures were very seldom used by us, usually out of sheer laziness.





Due to Three Things



So much for the charges of robbing soldiers.  If we were robbed it was due to three things—our love to display money, thus giving the French the idea that we were all millionaires; the fact that we never questioned the price of an article before we bought it nor bargained for any article, but accepted the first price that was asked, and our failure to use the safeguards which the French provided for us against unscrupulous shopkeepers.




Now as to who won the war.  In every public utterance that I have heard in the last seven months in France the place of the American army as the determining factor in winning the world war has been unquestioned.  There has never been any attempt to detract from the glory won by our soldiers—from the simplest poilu to the greatest general, there has come nothing but praise for the energy and valor displayed by the Americans in France.  Indeed, the gratitude of France to the people of the United States has been so marked that I have frequently felt that it would have looked better if we had put forward the claims of others as strongly as we have put forward our own.




After all, they went through four and a half years of the same kind of warfare that we fought for two years.  Where we lost 50,000 killed, they lost more than 1,000,000 and that 1,000,000 out of a population about one-third as large as ours.  Even when it comes to the money end of it we win, for although we spent more than France, we will not have to pay six per cent of our national wealth each year to pay the interest on our national debt, the way France must.





French Appreciation



You, who compare unfavorably your silent departure from Brest with the rapturous welcome you received in New York at home and draw the erroneous conclusion that your deeds in France are not appreciated stand with me in the little French village that I have just left, listen to the municipal band play the 
Star-Spangled Banner
 every time they play the 
Marseillaise
 listen to the old, gray-haired Madame Binoit as she talks about the young American soldier who has done so much to fill the place left vacant by four French sons who were Milled in the war; even listen to that little group of French kids lustily singing, 
Hel!  Hel!  ze genks all 'ere and you will listen to the throbbing of the big heart of France over her new found freedom and the part you took in helping her to gain it.