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University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1965
Fred Ellsworth
IN THE DEATH of Fred Ellsworth the University of Kansas Jost the best friend it ever had.
It is perhaps a tribute to his long years of service in the interests of the university that he became known, affectionately, as "Mr. KU."
Mr. Ellsworth's contributions to the university are legion and in many ways unique. He served as executive secretary of the KU Alumni Association from 1924 to 1963, a span of 39 years and four chancellors. Though his principal job was with the Alumni Association he found time to serve in other capacities. During World War II he directed the activities of the KU news bureau and at one time was the head of the Men's Student Employment Bureau.
THE PRESENT-DAY KU campus is adorned by landmarks that are the result of Mr. Ellsworth's hard work and inspiration. He was singlehandedly responsible for collecting funds for the World War I memorials, the World War II Memorial Campanile and Drive, the Kansas Union, and Memorial Stadium.
Mr. Ellsworth's great loves were the alumni and university-alumni relations. His knowledge of KU and its past students is legendary; he could greet many of them by name, even after
years of long absence. At the time of his death he was busy transferring much of his vast knowledge about the history of KU to tape, as well as writing
Fred Ellsworth
several historical works on the University.
His days since his retirement as executive secretary were filled with advising and preparing material for the Centenary Committee which is in charge of KU's 100th anniversary celebration to be held in 1966.
MR. ELLSWORTH BUILT the
Alumni Magazine into a slick, award-winning publication and played a significant role in the development of the American Alumni Council. In recognition of his contributions the Alumni Federation of Columbia University awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Service to Education for his "Eminent leadership in the field of alumni relations." He was one of two recipients from institutions west of the Mississippi River among the 23 men and women honored.
Two qualities of the man will be long remembered—his devotion to KU, which was without equal, and his warm, human interest in the people he came in contact with. That interest and generosity was felt by everyone —from the highest to the lowliest Daily Kansan reporter wanting an interview.
THE MEMORIES OF HIM are many and warm; the monuments to his work are equally impressive. KU recognizes the debt it owes this man and feels humble.
THE MAN'S SHADOW, far bigger than that of the Campanile which he labored so hard to build, is gone from the campus—and some of the sunshine and warmth are gone from the hearts of those who knew him.
Rick Mabbutt
Gompers: Labor Union Giant
SAMUEL GOMPERS, an English immigrant, helped organize and lead one of the first powerful national labor unions of the United States for more than 30 years. That labor union was the American Federation of Labor (AF of L).
He was one of the first successful pioneers in making a large labor union sufficiently powerful to win concessions from management and later to gain recognition from the federal government as representing the wage-earner. Before Gompers and his leadership of the AF of L, large unions, such as the Knights of Labor and the railroad unions, had caused only confusion for the organized wage-earner, had greatly instilled fear into the workers and had obtained few concessions from management. Gompers rose to power in the AF of L while the union was still in its organizing stage. With his leadership, the AF of L bypassed many of the pitfalls suffered by the Knights of Labor.
GOMPERS LED THE AF OF L to power by what is sometimes called the Theodore Roosevelt philosophy, that of "walk softly and carry a big stick." The story and importance of Gompers is interwoven with the early history and importance of the AF of L union because the success of that union was his sole goal in life. Gompers spent more than half of his 70 years in pursuit of his union's goals. It was during those years of service to the AF of L that he made a perceivable impact on history. He was a dedicated and resourceful national labor union leader.
Gompers made his union fit into a working pattern that can claim many successes during American history when laissez-
faire was the dominant theme in business and government.
TODAY'S LABOR UNIONS advocate many liberal or sometimes socialistic legislation in the government. Gompers opposed socialism in almost any form, such as federal health insurance, government intervention between labor and management, and social insurance. With his staunch conservative doctrines and leader ship,the AF of L thrived and grew to be one of the biggest unions in the United States, then and now.
Gompers had a reason for his conservative beliefs, and it all stemmed from two men he met soon after arriving in America.
Gompers immigrated to the United States at the age of 13 from London. He came with his father and mother. In America he joined a cigarmakers union and was inactive in the union until several years after his marriage in his early 20s. While working in the cigar shop of a German-Jewish exile, he met a discouraged socialist, Karl Ferdinand Laurrell. Laurrell had been part of a socialistic movement in Europe and had suffered many hardships in the practice of socialism. Laurrell taught Gompers many tactics of socialists and the pitfalls in the arguments of socialists. With the aid of Laurrell's teachings and the leadership training of the immigrant Austrian-Jew. Adolph Strasser, Gompers went directly to the top of the labor movement as the leader of the AF of L.
GOMPERS WAS A QUIET man who fitted the old Roosevelt saying of "walk softly and carry a big stick" because he minimized any publicity for his union
and reverted to a strike only as a last recourse. He did not collect any huge gains for the union each week, but rather, he kept working for the betterment of wages and hours over a long period of time. His gains were gradual and reasonable.
Because Gompers accomplished his union's goals slowly, but ever so steadily, he did not make as flashy a character for history books as did John L. Lewis and George Meany. Gompers stayed out of politics for the most part and kept his union out of politics, too. He fought management on the economic front and not through legislation by the federal government. It is hard to think of any national labor union leader today without considering the political involvement of that union. Such political involvement has come about since the death of Gompers.
Gompers was an accomplished debater who could put down a socialist heckler at a union meeting or convince management that certain labor gains were necessary.
GOMPERS SHOULD BE Remembered as an anti-socialist conservative who helped organize and lead one of the first and most successful national labor unions in the United States. Gompers was a man of his times; his conservative philosophies would be somewhat out of the mainstream of today's ideas of the New Frontier and the Great Society. His philosophies for his union were in the mainstream of thought during most of the 30 years that he led the AF of L Union. Gompers was a man who was in tune with the concert of dominant ideas of his time.
—T. S. Moore
"I'm Not Feeling So Good Myself"
Literary Revolutionary
THE GRAY POET who revolutionized English-language poetry died last Monday, leaving behind him a great literary heritage.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, best known for his 1922 poem "The Wastelands," was honored in Britain, where he spent most of his productive career, and in the United States, the country he left behind. Like Henry James, 19th Century American writer, Eliot favored the quiet British way of life. He was, however, selected by President Johnson to be honored as an American making a worthy contribution to the field of American literature; however, he declined to come to the United States to accept the honor.
Eliot, received nearly every high honor the literary world can confer on its contributors—the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1948; the Goethe Prize, 1954; and the Dante Gold Medal of Florence, Italy, 1959.
Truly this poet and critic reflected the feelings of the world in the period immediately following World War I. In his unorthodox, free and easy poetic style, he told society that "the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper."
HE BECAME A STANDARD BEARER of the "lost generation" in the 1920's when he said mankind and the world was dying of spiritual drought. He expressed the pessimistic optimism of a man who was trying to find his beliefs, but once he found them, he couldn't believe them. He couldn't find enough evidence in the world around him to justify his beliefs in the spirituality of mankind.
T. S. Eliot came a long way from St. Louis, the town of his birth in 1888. At the age of 70, he told friends that he "was just beginning to grow up."
In this growing up process, he found his way through Harvard University in the class with Walter Lippmann, Stuart Chase, and Heywood Brown. He tried teaching, although he disliked teaching poetry—a seeming paradox for one so gifted author with poetic devices. "A teacher must enjoy poetry to stimulate interest in his students," he is quoted.
HE LIKED HIS TYPE and style of poetry, and tended to ignore the Romantics like Wordsworth and Burns. Yet, this man who shunned the verses of the Romantics, was himself sad and melancholy. His humor, especially in his later works reflected this sad quality.
After teaching he turned to banking and finance, and finally became an independently sufficient poet and critic.
His productiveness declined during the final years of his life, but not before he made such literary contributions as "Murder in the Cathedral," "Four Quartets," and his collected poems.
His free style, his use of foreign phrases, and his yearning moods will mark him as a true literary great—a quiet, gray man, who made a revolutionary change in the art of poetry.
— Bobbetta Bartelt
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EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Jim Langford and Rick Mabbutt ... Co-Editorial Editors