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University Daily Kansan Thursday. May 11, 1961
Shame of the Cape
For awhile, Americans may sit back and enjoy a glow of satisfaction over the latest rockymetry successes at Cape Canaveral and the recent flight of silver-suited Astronaut Shepard. But at the same time they cannot permit themselves to be distracted from recent depressing evaluations of our space program.
Some months ago, the United States Senate permanent investigations committee began a probe into labor conditions at the nation's missile bases. The results have been shocking. The McClellan committee has found that labor and other problems have set the entire space program back six months. What this means is that the United States could have beaten the Russians in sending a man into space—if space workers had not conducted strikes and slowdowns to get exorbitant overtime pay.
MUCH OF THE COMMITTEE'S INFORMATION on the subject of labor slowdowns came from the base manager of Cape Canaveral last Friday, minutes after Cmdr. Shepard made his historic flight. According to his testimony, featherbedding and hiring two or even three men to do the work of one is common at the Cape. Actual refusal to do work on regular hours or doing work in such a shoddy manner that it must be done over again in the form of overtime are other labor tactics, he testified.
The man, B. G. MacNabb of the Convair Corp., calls productivity at the base 40 per cent of what it should be. He called it the worst he
has seen in 25 years in industry. He testified that everyone seems to be trying to slow down the work to make it last twice as long. As he expresses it, patriotism has taken a back seat to greed for the dollar. National interest in the space program is being forgotten by those who mimic it while picking Uncle Sam's pocket.
IN ALL FAIRNESS TO LABOR, HOWEVER, the slowdown in productivity is not the entire fault of the working force. MacNabb testified that sub-contractors are often guilty of dallying on jobs. Then too, there must be some truth to the statement of the president of the AFL-CIO Building Trades Department that inefficient management and multiple changes in construction plans are responsible for lag in missile base construction. Only yesterday, the labor leader revealed that 10 major changes in missile installations on a large Air Force base were ordered in a period of only two months.
IN ANY EVENT, IT IS GOOD TO HEAR that the Administration is considering making the Cape and other missile bases part of the New Frontier, too. The Soviet Union is saying that its superiority in space is proof of the superiority of its system. Secretary Goldberg's announcement yesterday that the President might move into the Cape will enable the United States to throw down the gauntlet of challenge with a vigorous gesture.
Dan Felger
Castro No
The U. S, probably has never handled the Cuban problem with fairness or foresight. However, Fidel Castro, to the dismay of his surviving apologists, seems determined to demonstrate the basically totalitarian nature of his dictatorship, and to save the U. S in spite of itself.
BEING A DEMOCRATIC socialist and a citizen of a small country—the Irish Republic—constantly oppressed by a large nation—Great Britain—my sympathies were naturally with the Cuban revolutionaries. Nevertheless, no greater record of broken pledges within the space of two years, has ever been seen, than that presented by the Castro regime. These broken pledges have been hidden by the Amercian press, which has generally been concerned with silly trivialities like the Save the War Criminals campaign (Batistians); the statement that the Castros and Guevara
... Letters ...
were members of the Communist party—almost certainly untrue; or an over-eager concern for a private enterprise system in Cuba, which had hopefully failed to provide the people with minimum living conditions.
HOWEVER, TO RETURN to the res geste. In the mountains Castro spoke romantically of the Constitution of 1940 (parliamentary and a very good one); of free elections; and of the independence of the judiciary. Since his coming into power the first has ceased to be observed (it contains a bill of rights). Free elections have been renounced for all time. Forty-five judges whom Castro had himself appointed were fired for being insufficiently subservient. The non-government press has been abolished. The trade unions are not free. The University of Havana is not autonomous.
THE 26TH OF JULY revolutionary who based his legal defense when in jail, under Batista.
on the inalienable right of revolution whenever no constitutional means of protest exist, threatens to shoot 900 prisoners of war for trying to exercise the same inalienable right. The popular hero who was too modest to take power himself in 1958, is now no longer willing to share it with anyone else. The orator who proclaimed that Cuba was socialist—but if the Cubans wanted Communism they were entitled to it—has made it counterrevolutionary to express anti-Communist opinions. Hubert Matos, a commandante and a very loyal revolutionary, received the savage sentence of 20 years for writing letters to Fidel expressing concern about Communism. What hypocrisy this all is!
WHAT EXISTS now in Cuba is the lowest form of government: circus democracy. The consent that is given to a dictator by his cohorts marching obediently in the streets for 17 hours.
When the workers demonstrated before Dortico's palace to defend their right to elect a non-Communist slate of trade union leaders, under Salvador, no attention was paid to the will of the people.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"HEY. BURWELL - I GOT A TUTOR WITH MY CORRESPONDENCE COURSE!"
CERTAINLY Cuba has suffered the misfortune of being an American protectorate: Now it is instead an instrument of Soviet imperialism.
Castroism is the greatest enemy to democracy in the whole of the American hemisphere since the Confederates surrendered in 1865. Denis Kennedy
Dublin, Ireland, graduate student
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
All politicians find it necessary "to get right with Lincoln," David Donald says. These may be politicians of Lincoln's own party, who deliver Lincoln Day exhortations each year, or politicians of the opposition, like John F. Kennedy, who seemed about to annex Lincoln for the Democrats in the 1960 campaign.
WELL, THERE PROBABLY was much of the folk hero in Lincoln, and whether he studied by firelight or walked miles to return a penny or ingeniously figured out how to get across a fence in the Black Hawk War or loved Ann Rutledge no longer may be important. Debunkers or no, we're not likely to accept Lincoln the crafty politician in place of Lincoln the 9-foot-tall president from the prairies.
LINCOLN RECONSIDERED, by David Donald. Vintage, $1.25.
We all need to get right with Lincoln. He is a folk hero who has the attributes almost of a Davy Crockett or a Mike Fink. Sometimes we wonder what the real Lincoln was like.
But truth is needed, if anybody anymore knows what truth is. David Donald, in this reprint, suggests a few truths, and in suggesting them certainly does not demolish our beloved Rail Splitter. He takes the no-compromise abolitionists and gives us a new slant on them, calling abolitionism "the anguished protest of an aggrieved class against a world they never made."
WILLIAM HERNDON WAS the great myth-maker, a storyteller who compounded tales out of his love for Lincoln and his hate for Mary Todd. So the Ann Rutledge story, one that goes on and on in our tradition. Donald deals here with Lincoln the politician, an Illinois Whig, a true representative of pragmatism who cannot rightfully be claimed by either the right or the left.
In this volume the radicals also come off better than in most works. To Donald it is clear that Lincoln was able to work well with these Republicans who have been the bete noire of so many recent historians.
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Worth Repeating
When I first went to study in the United States, after having studied in European and Canadian universities, the principal contrast which struck me was how much harder I had to work than ever before. Reading lists were gargantuan, assignments plethoric. I found the work for four courses per semester overwhelming, and considered that two courses would be a more reasonable load for a student who devoted all his time to his studies. My immediate reaction was to feel that the criticisms of American educational standards were sadly misplaced. But then I began to realize that in all my busy round of reading, lectures and paper-preparing I was failing to find time for the only really important activity I had gone there to do: thinking. Shockingly little of what I was reading was I making my own in any lasting or significant way. There was never time for reflection upon my reading afterwards; there was always another assignment waiting to be hurried through.—Paul Nash