WHATEVER WOULD I DO WITHOUT MYSELF?

A FRIEND OF mine tells a story about his little daughter. Getting ready to go to kindergarten one morning, she was sent upstairs to dress herself, because her wise mother believed it was good for a child to learn as early as possible to do things for herself—to have certain definite chores each day for which she was entirely re- sponsible. After a long wait the mother heard a childish voice call, in petulance and petition, “Mother! will you please hurry up here and button my dress?”

“No, darling. Mother is too busy. You must do it yourself.” “My gosh!” that little girl exclaimed loud enough to be heard by her parents, “whatever would I do without myself?”

The mother and father chuckled to themselves, for that sentence told them that their philosophy about making the child independ- ent was working. And the father said to the mother: “Betty is right. Whatever would she do without herself? ... It works, Mother!”

I doubt very much if that child knew, or her mother and father either, that Betty was expressing a philosophy which our great New England philosopher once called the typical American pioneer philosophy, engendered by a nation which subdued a wilderness. Here is the way Emerson put it: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string!” Even as recently as the publication of The World of Washington Irving, by Van Wyck Brooks, we see that philosophy once again set forth. In the chapter on Thomas Jefferson, Brooks says: “Thus one found in Jefferson the earliest crystallization of what might be called the American prophetic tradition, of Whitman’s Pioneers, the “Trust thyself’ of Emerson and Lincoln’s mystical faith in the wisdom of the people.”

“Whatever would I do without myself?” is good American pioneering philosophy. And it is the very thing which made our American boys valiant, courageous, and ingenious in wartime. One soldier with whom I talked said to me: “One night in New Guinea they sent me out on a scouting expedition to discover how strong the Japs were beyond a hill back of us. I asked my captain what instructions he had to give me, how long I was to take, when I should report, and if I was to go alone.

I wanted a partner to go with me, for, frankly, I was afraid to go by myself. “My captain said to me: ‘Jim, you’re on your own. Use your wits and tell us how much of a Japanese force is back of that hill. It may mean victory for us to know.’

“‘O.K., sir, I understand. I’m on my own!’ “‘That’s it, son. You can do it.

You have guts and good sense. Just think of yourself as a Daniel Boone in the Kentucky woods again!’ ”’ That is a good way to train a soldier or to raise a child—to de- pend on his own ingenuity, his own strength and good sense. It was the old pioneering philosophy. It was good enough for our ancestors, and it is good enough for most of us today.

“Whatever would I do without myself?”