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Summer Session Kansan Friday, July 7, 1961
Dollars in Space
Now that man is embarking on a program destined to take him on the centuries-old dream trip to the moon, or to one of the planets, people are beginning to wonder if the cost of the trip is worth the realization of the dream.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY HAS CHALLENGed the Russians to a space race to the moon which may cost the American tax payer as much as 40 billion dollars in the next nine or ten years. The Senate Space Committee has backed up the President's challenge with the approval of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget of 1.7 billion dollars for this fiscal year. This amount will be increased yearly in sort of a geometric progression until the project reaches its climax with the landing of an American on the moon. As an index of comparison the 40 billion which might be spent is about one-half the total revenue taken in by the federal government this year.
WITH THE POSSIBLE EXPENDITURE of such a large amount of money we can see why some people have doubted the need for such a project. The charges of some scientists that the rocketing of a man to the moon is of no practical scientific value has added considerable weight to these doubts. President Kennedy's plan has been labeled by some as an enormously expensive propaganda device designed to give the United States a victory in the cold war.
There is no doubt that Russian competition
in outer space has added to the urgency of the advance of American space technology. But according to James E. Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the project holds more than just the prospect of a propaganda victory in the cold war.
In fact, Webb warns that if American scientific growth is not pushed as rapidly as our resources will allow in the area of space the United States could find itself falling much further behind the Russians in space technology. So the moon shot project also has great military value.
There is also the possibility of benefits to Americans other than the preservation of the prestige and the protection of the safety of the United States. Other military projects have resulted in improvement in the American standard of living. The commercial use of jet aircraft is a good example. Only the government could afford to finance the research which was necessary to develop jet aircraft for military and commercial purposes.
Kennedy's space program would, no doubt, uncover solutions to many of the meteorological and communications problems that now baffle scientists. Many other scientific discoveries probably would have civilian applications.
Although Kennedy's space plan carries possibly the highest price tag ever attached to a single project, the United States must progress in this vital area of technology.
Ron Gallagher
Daily Crossword Puzzle
ACROSS
1 Refuse from sugar cane.
8 Pedlars.
15 Drive.
16 Geometric curve.
17 Muscle that turns,
18 F. D. R.'s family.
19 Eastern time.
20 Spring flower.
22 Quarrels: Colloq.
23 New Englanders' characteristics.
26 Sinclair Lewis hero.
28 Inserted as something additional.
29 __ victis (woe to the conquered) : Lat.
32 What satellites move in.
35 Impassivity.
37 Hollywood landmarks.
39 Landward.
40 Notre Dame's Brennan, et al.
42 Obtained by craft.
43 Algebra: Abbr.
44 Lunch up: Dial.
47 Gear for telephone operators.
50 Clara Bow: 2 words.
53 Danube tributary.
54 Sand bank off a mainland.
57 Cellar storage space.
59 Certain railroad cars.
61 Yellowish-green silicate.
62 Musical term.
63 Eased up.
64 Fatter.
**DOWN**
1 Dull conversationalist.
2 G. I's overseas addresses.
3 An Eisenhower address.
4 Constellation.
5 Dress material.
6 Symbolic bird.
7 More ghostly.
8 Child: Comb, form.
9 Dislikes.
10 He has a by-line.
11 Hooded unions.
12 Paul of Broadway
13 Buttonless jacket.
14 Condition: Suffix.
15 Bodies of water.
16 Notwithstanding.
25 Preposition used in division.
26 ___ Rica.
27 Russian co-operative.
28 Shading off to a bluish-purple.
29 ___ as a beet: 2 words.
31 Remove errors.
33 Excitable person.
34 One of the upper crust.
35 Odd job.
36 Transmit.
37 Septembers: Abbr.
38 Cowboy gear, south of the border.
37 Character in "The Master Builder."
38 Incident.
39 Slangy promise of action: 2 words.
50 Chiller.
51 Drink.
52 Short for Abigail.
55 Skill of an Italian painter.
56 River into the North Sea.
58 Man's nickname.
58 Daughter: Abbr.
(Answer on page 4)
Russians Have Tax Troubles
By Fred T. Ferguson
GLEN COVE, N.Y.—(UPI) The Soviet United Nations Delegation has apparently found the time convenient to fight another battle in its long "little cold war" with Glen Cove.
The delegation permitted its plush 36-acre estate here to be put on tax lien sale by failing to pay $19,602 in city and school taxes.
Tax liens on the estate for which the Soviets paid $125,000 in 1952, were sold before—in 1955 for $15,-605.
But the Russians found it convenient shortly afterward to retain possession of the "great house" and grounds that cost millionaire George D. Pratt $1.2 million to build. They paid the $15,605 shortly after the sale.
The "little cold war" reached a crisis again a year ago when the delegation, through its lawyers, petitioned for a refund of the $200,000 they had shelled out, often belatedly, for taxes on the English Tudor manse.
But the delegation stopped pressing the case, before Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to New York for the United Nations General Assembly Session last fall.
In those days such Soviet leaders as former Premier Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko stopped over at Killenworth when in this country.
In the current tax fight, the Russians have contended, as they have in the past, that their diplomatic immunity exempts them from tax payment.
Khrushchev used the estate for three weekends of relaxing and "politicking" with other Russian delegations and leaders of Red satellite countries and African nations.
Khrushchev has said he might attend the next UN General Assembly Session and if he did, might very well want to again stay at the manor.
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Church Morlock and
Rom C.
Shark Workbook and Ron Gallagher Co-Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Chuck Martinech Business Mgr.
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
TELL IT TO SWEENEY, by John Chapman. Doubleday. $4.95
I have got so I react immediately when I see that a history of a newspaper has been written by a prominent member of the staff. Such histories, even when they are labeled "an informal history," are full of rationale and apologies. They get bogged down in details that can't conceivably interest the casual reader.
This is too bad, especially when the history concerns the New York Daily News. The Daily News, in my opinion, is not one of the great American newspapers, even though it does have a daily circulation of more than 2 million. But it is gaudy enough and flamboyant enough to have intrinsic appeal—like, say, the old Brooklyn Dodgers or Frank Sinatra.
It's a show business newspaper, and a show business man has written this brief history. The Daily News was launched out of a conference on a French manure pile. The conferees were cousins, Robert R. McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, who had had an uneasy relationship putting out the family paper, the Chicago Tribune. Their idea was an illustrated daily paper comparable to papers published in London.
The Daily News started after World War I. It came along at the right time, for the Daily News fitted well the 1920s. Lindy crossing the Atlantic, Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes, and Ruth Snyder in the electric chair—these were among the big stories for the Daily News. The controversial picture of Ruth's execution, one of the most famous of all news pictures, added to the fame and notoriety of Captain Patterson's paper.
The comics helped, too. Patterson played an individual role in each of the now-famous comics—The Gumps, with the bumbling Andy shouting "Oh, Min!"; Little Orphan Annie, that celebrated commentator for the far right; Gasoline Alley, which defied convention and let its characters age normally; Harold Teen, sodaslurping teen-agers of the 1920s; Moon Mullins, the American slob (and Daily News reader) personified.
Patterson was a creative man, not creative like a Greeley or a Pulitzer but still creative. He was a Socialist in his youth, and he really appeared to love the common man (something which couldn't be said about his cousin Bertie in Chicago). He went out among the people of the metropolis, learning their likes and dislikes and translating these into grist for the Daily News mill.
He was a liberal, of sorts, and an early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the two broke over internationalism and the beginnings of World War II, and the Daily News became archy isolationist. Since Patterson's death in 1946 it has continued its right-wing swing—a defender of McCarthy, a powerful defender of MacArthur, a spokesman for the class that possibly looks down its nose at the big, trashy, noisy, sensationally successful New York Daily News.
THE MAUVE DECADE, by Thomas Beer. Vintage. $1.10.
It would be misleading to regard this paperback reprint as a depiction of the Gay Nineties—at least as we think of the Gay Nineties today. Nor is it a social history in the fashion of Frederick Lewis Allen's "Only Yesterday." Rather it is a brittle examination of artistic and literary circles in the period.
NOT THAT FRANKIE and Johnnie are omitted, or the Pat and Mike jokes that began to appear in that era. The Dalton brothers moved in on Coffeyville, Kan., in the 1890s, and Thomas Beer retells that story. But generally the descriptions are of figures from the world of art.
There is a pattern in this volume, that of a nation slowly moving from Victorianism to realism and naturalism, yet retaining vestiges of the past. It was a paradoxical time, one when Rosa Bonheur's horses adorned parlors and Zola's novels were being read under cover, when Godkin of the Evening Post, staid and respectable, was one force and Hearst of the Journal, wild and flamboyant, was another.
Beer begins with Bronson Alcott, he of the Orphic Sayings, the improvident father who dreamed in a Transcendental world and was treated tenderly by Emerson and let his daughter support him with her successful novels. He tells of that daughter, Louisa May, who died in her mid-fifties after a career of keeping her lightweight father in the circles of the great.
HE TELLS OF THE Chicago fair and of Ambrose Bierce, the writer of the violent and bizarre who later disappeared in Mexico. He tells of Bryan and the Populists, of the Pullman strike and Eugene Debs, of the Southern Pacific railroad that became "The Octopus" for Frank Norris, of McKinley and Mark Hanna.
The nineties were the decade of the Spanish-American war and the Hearst-Pulitzer circulation battle, the decade of the playwright Dion Boucicault and of the increasingly embittered Mark Twain, of parodies on the vastly popular Rubaiyat, of Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis" and the beginning of McClure's and the Davis family—Rebecca Harding and her amazingly popular son Richard.
Beer writes most vividly of popular and artistic tastes, and of Comstockism. Anthony Comstock embarked upon a crusade to drape all nude statues, except for the ennobling and chaste "Greek slaves" that still were found in many respectable parlors.
THE NEW NATURALISTS were another target—Crane learned that with "Maggie" and Dreiser with "Sister Carrie." Oscar Wilde was a name to be railed against from hundreds of pulpits. "Trilby" was scandalous. "Way Down East" was art, and Frances Willard was a national idol.
"The Mauve Decade" is an ever-bright pageant, one that can give us many insights into the storied era of John L. Sullivan and Diamond Jim.
Fro T