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Schutz, Robert R., July 11, 1948.
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JUL 14 RECD
441 Fairmount Ave Oakland 11, Calif. July 11, 1948
Professor Albert Einstein Chairman of Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists
Princeton, New Jersey
My dear Professor Einstein:
Upon the reading of Mrs. Lieber's charming "Mite, Wits and Logic", I send you a contribution, of course. I am sorry it is but a token of what I would like to do. However, a student at the University of California studying for a PhD in Economics, I can hardly do more at the present time in terms of money. May I briefly sum up to you what a number of us have been doing along this line on other ways: It strikes me that you may be very much interested.
We feel, as you seem to, that it is the people who must be educated, and educated fast. We have too little time.
How can this best be done? Surely not through the public schools; this is obvious. Probably not by pamphleteering, although this contains some promise with a few people, mainly those who are already convinced. I have seen one put out by the anti-conscription people which bore your name. I was looking for such material, however, and found it tucked away in a divisional section of our tremendous U. C. library.
We feel that the only way to reach "people" is through our most common media of mass education. These are the radio, the comics and the movies. A poor fourth would be slick magazines. We are trying the first of these at present. On a purely volunteer basis, beginning in the middle of the spring semester, we got together upwards of 100 people, mostly graduate students and professors, who put in something like 700 hours on research and writing, and turned out a script for a half-hour program. This is an attempt to be entertaining as well as informational, and proceeds on the basis of script-controlled but life-like argument on public policy, identifying the arguments with the people in public life who use them.
I have submitted the script to a number of radio people, who have criticized it, of course, but have all expressed keen interest in the idea. It is at present in the hands of Mr. James Day, Public Relations Director of station K N B C in San Francisco. He has become sufficiently interested to send it to New York, which, he informs me, practically never happens. Perhaps little or nothing will come of this out here due to our non-existent financial basis, although we hope to carry on with some tentatively donated facilities.