1933, was "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The debate was often interpreted as illustrating both the attitude of Oxford undergraduates and the state of Europe at the time; Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany just ten days prior to the debate. Joad was the principal speaker in favour of the proposition, which passed by a vote of 275 to 153. Joad's speech was described as “well-organized and well-received, and probably the single most important reason for the outcome of the debate.” Joad's part in the debate caused him to gain a public reputation as an absolute pacifist. Joad was also involved in the National Peace Council, which he chaired, 1937–38. Joad was an outspoken controversialist; he declared his main intellectual influences were George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. He was strongly critical of contemporary philosophical trends such as Marxism, Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis. He was also repeatedly referred to as "the Mencken of England", although, as Kunitz and Haycraft pointed out, Joad and Mencken "would be at sword's point on most issues". On aesthetics he was incurably platonic: on listening to the "lowering effect" of Debussy's music, he felt his "vitality and zest for life draining away"; jazz and swing music are "sounds which do not strictly belong to the class of music at all"; Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" was partly "meaningless... some of the allusions baffle the intellect"; symbolism in art is "often used as a device... for disguising the fact that there is nothing to communicate", citing Denton Welch's "Narcissus Bay" as an example; and in her "persistent refusal to grade, to give moral marks or to assign values", he found Virginia Woolf's work leaving him feeling that "nothing seems to be very much worth while". Joad's autobiography, Under the Fifth Rib included "The dominating interest of my University career, an interest which has largely shaped my subsequent outlook on life, was Socialism. And my Socialism was by no means the mere undergraduate pose which what I have said hitherto may have suggested. Admittedly I and my Socialist contemporaries talked a good deal of inflated nonsense; admittedly we played with theories as a child plays with toys from sheer intellectual exuberance. But we also did a considerable amount of hard thinking." Joad crusaded to preserve the English countryside