The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

2 Big Man on Campus

24 2 Big Man on Campus some aspects of the University of Wyoming’s “definite philosophy” did not please Alan Swallow after he reached the campus. In an unpublished essay written during his first days at the university, he began, “A student goes to college. He is burning with the desire to study literature, to take journalism and to practice writing. But he is just a freshman—and freshmen aren’t allowed to take those courses.” ROTC, on the other hand, was required. By Swallow’s account, the commander at the initial class told the students, “If you are a pacifist, you do not belong here . . . You students are too immature to know what you want, to pick out a course, so you need military training. Military training will give you ‘guts.’” After taking an equally dim view of fraternity rush week, where the “condescending collegiates from the old hometown soon snatched him up,” Swallow turned to a straw vote in his political science class. Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate for president, garnered 28 votes, to 26 for his Democratic rival, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and seven for Socialist Norman Thomas. The narrative went on to say that “the student has one interesting class. It is an informal class in argumentation and debate.” One day the unnamed instructor was Big Man on Campus | 25 preparing to give a talk at a teachers’ institute, and tried his ideas out on his class. “Most college students,” the instructor said, “have little more interest in learning than in knowing the brand of gum they chew.” Their graduation , he said, was a joke. “As for the teachers, some are good—but the trouble is the remainder.” The instructor then admitted that it wouldn’t be practical to say these things to the teachers at the institute, but he was able to get them off his chest in class.1 Swallow’s other classes as a freshman included chemistry , French, and physical education. He had thought of journalism, but announced his decision to major in English , with minors in sociology and philosophy. He was to win the “President’s Book” for outstanding work in all three. Looking back years later, he found life on the Laramie campus “hardly intellectual at all” in a decade “of ferment, of awakened social consciousness, debate over political parties and philosophies.”2 Despite the onset of the Depression, Laramie, a town founded during the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, had grown from the 8,609 people counted in the 1930 census to an estimated 11,000 in 1932. The university boasted an enrollment of 1,500 and advertised, “No Where Can You Go to College at Less Cost.”3 The three freshmen from Powell found a home several blocks from the campus that would take them in for room and board. One night Swallow helped their landlady , laborer’s wife Cora Sliger, write a letter of consolation to the husband of a friend who had died. When he came home from school the next day, he heard the radio playing and remembered Mrs. Sliger telling him that she 26 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow played the radio when she had the “blues” or felt lonely. “It is odd, this feeling of loneliness,” he thought. “One feels it so often himself that he awakes with a start when he finds that others feel it too.”4 One of the roommates would not last long. Ross Jamieson had far outshone Alan Swallow on the Powell football team, and his high school coach thought he was material for the Wyoming Cowboys. His parents did not have the money to send him to the university, but the coach figured he would get “a scholarship or at least some help.” Jamieson easily made the university’s freshman team, which at that time was used for the varsity to practice against, but received no financial help. He was ready to quit and go home, but Alan loaned him the money to get him through the first quarter. The young Swallow was financially independent enough to write his friend a check for $200 on the Powell bank, apparently without consulting his parents. Jamieson then went home, owing his roommate $200, and went on to a career in business. Alan soon moved also, but only to an apartment closer to the campus.5 His political views were already at odds with those...