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Durant Forecasts Cultural Rebirth

April 30, 1934
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Cultural rejuvenation was expounded by Will Durant, philosopher and author, in an address at Free Synagogue services yesterday on “Is Our Civilization Dying?”

Painting a gloomy picture of an American culture politically corrupt, philosophically effete, biologically degenerated, and morally perverted, Durant issued a ray of hope by analyzing the situation as the result of a too speedy development rather than a total collapse which, he said, was coming in European countries.

“By 1964,” Durant prophesied “the dominant nations of the world will be the United States, Japan and Russia.”

In a ten point program for rejuvenation, Durant would have an intelligence and character test for immigrants, sterilization of the unfit and discouragement of breeding in the relatively incompetent, enlargement of the Civil Conservation Corps with compulsory one year service in the Corps for all youths, erection of special movies for children and their exclusion from the adults’ cinema.

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