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University Daily Kansan Monday, March 11, 1963
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
Unions Stifle Progress
The progressive nature of labor unions has faded away since the full impact of automation has hit the United States.
The labor unions began as a progressive movement to bring about long overdue social changes. Around the turn of the century the disparity between technical progress and social progress became a bit too great for the American worker to endure, so he organized into labor unions to help bring social development up to the level of technical development.
THE UNIONS are as intent on keeping this gap closed as they were in closing it in the first place. This is where progressivism faded out of the labor union movement.
In closing the original gap, the unions improved the status of the worker—a positive approach. But in keeping the gap from developing again, the unions are using an entirely negative approach. They are trying to impede the progress of industry.
Through the years most unions have closed the gap between the progress of industry and that of labor. It is a gap that can widen again, however, if the unions allow themselves to fall behind the fast pace set by industry.
No doubt it is much easier for the unions to slow industry down than to move forward faster themselves, but the fact that the negative approach is easier is hardly justification for impeding the progress of industry.
The New York newspaper strike is not the most outstanding but only the most timely example of union action to block progress. The situation in the railroad industry probably is the most blatant example. The U.S. Supreme Court finally has decided to let the railroad industry modify some of the union work rules protecting the "featherbedding" that has cost the already financially overburdened railroads millions of dollars.
UNIONS WERE very much in favor of progress as long as they were doing all the progressing. When industry wants to do a little progressing of its own, the labor unions are the first to drag their feet with all the determination of an 1890's "robber baron." - Dennis Branstiter
THE NEW printers union contract with the New York City newspaper publishers calls for only limited use of the teletypesetter machine, which sets type automatically from a perforated tape. And when such tape is used, the ITU demands that its members get a share of the savings made by the publisher.
New York printers boss Bertram Powers calls this "a share in the increased productivity from the introduction of outside tape." Of course, he neglects to mention that this increased productivity was financed by the publishers.
"SEEMS TO ME THAT THESE TEEN-AGERS ARE COMING TO COLLEGE A LOT MORE OPINIONATED THAN THEY USED TO BE."
Public Election New To Presidential Hopeful
(Editor's note: This is the first of two articles on the life of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The second article will appear on this page tomorrow.)
By Larry Schmidt
When Nelson A. Rockefeller was a senior at Dartmouth College he was so skilled in campus politics that his father was prompted to tell Dartmouth's president he had advised Nelson never to run for public office because his name would be a disadvantage.
Today, some 33 years later, that name represents what appears to be the Republican party's brightest ray of hope to unseat Democratic President John F. Kennedy in the 1964 elections. Kennedy himself has admitted that Rockefeller could have defeated him had the two been in competition at the polling places in 1960.
EVEN SO. Rockefeller followed his father's advice at the beginning of his career. He served 16 years in appointive service
under three national administrations before his first attempt to win the voter's favor in 1958. It was then that he captured the governorship of New York in a landslide victory over Democratic incumbent Averill Harriman. Even then, most voters seemed to know little more about him than that they liked the vital, friendly image on their television screens.
Rockefeller's lively compound of dedication, warmth, charm, and drive seemed to work magic over the voters. The ingredients were shaped by an inheritance as unique as Rockefeller's name and fortune, by a career that has blended government, the arts, and business, and by a temperament that is at once resilient, optimistic, and basically ambitious.
Born to unimaginable wealth, but raised to resist rich men's vices. Rockefeller is improbably youthful in looks and reactions for being the 55-year-old grandfather he is. Even standing still
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Fred Zimmerman ... Managing Editor
Ben Marshall, Bill Sheldon, Mike Miller,
Art Miller, Margaret Cathcart ... Assistant Managing Editors
Steve Clark ... Sports Editor
Scott Payne ... City Editor
Trudy Meserve and Jackie Stern ... Co-Society Editors
Murrel Bland ... Photograph Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Dennis Branstiter Editorial Editor
Terry Murphy Assistant Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
HE IS A good listener and obviously enjoys conversation. When in the midst of crowds, he winks, grins, and furrows his brow in endless contortions seeming to say to perfect strangers: "I'm with you. I understand."
Jack Cannon, Business Manager; Jim Stevens, Assist. Business Mgr.; Mike Carson, Advertising Mgr.; Joanne Zabornik, Circulation Mgr.; Brooks Harrison, Classified Mgr.; Bob Brooks, National Adv. Mgr.; Charles Hayward, Promotion Mgr.; Bill Finley, Merchandising Mgr.
Informality, presence, and a lot of experience make him a skilled chairman with a capacity for leading and coaxing the most unlikely people into agreement.
he gives an impression of restless energy, particulary when he is with the voters.
He was born July 8, 1908, in a rented house at Bar Harbor, Maine, near his present summer home at Seal Harbor. Family headquarters in Nelson Rockefeller's youth was the iron-fenced, 3,000-acre, wooded estate at Pocantico Hills. The somewhat starchy atmosphere was eased by the lively, understanding personality of his mother, the former Abby Aldrich. She brought with her an interest in the arts and humanities that survived and grew in her children.
Young Nelson went to a New York coeducational school at the age of nine. Here, among a broad cross-section of students, he was brought up as simply as the gilt-edged setting would permit.
HE. HIS four brothers and one sister had private use of lavish athletic equipment on the family estate, but each was started on a meager, 25-cent weekly allowance. They were required to assign 10 per cent of their income to charity and 10 per cent to savings. The use of every cent was recorded in ledgers.
Nelson was rated by friends as the son who adjusted best to what he has called an overpowering responsibility to add value and meaning to family traditions. He began early to steer his own course in life.
Rockefeller passed up some of the more prestigious Ivy League colleges for Dartmouth, where he was a conscientious student
and a good mixer who neither flaunted his family background nor buried it. Classmates still chuckle at the recollection of putting up a quarter now and then to get Nels Rockefeller into the movies.
Economics was his major subject and the field of a senior honors paper defending old John D. Rockefeller against the indiscriminate charges of economic freebooting then in academic vogue.
AT HIS father's request.
Rockefeller agreed not to smoke or drink until he was 21. The pledge earned him a $2,500 cash present upon graduation and still affects his habits.
Six days after graduation from Dartmouth in June of 1930, Rockefeller married the former Mary Todhunter Clark, an openhearted, outspoken Philadelphia post debutante who was a year his senior. She developed into a conscientious and devoted mother who raised all five of her children without the aid of governesses.
In the summer of 1931, Nelson settled down to his first two jobs. First he was a clerk in the foreign department of the Chase National Bank. There he gained knowledge of foreign trade that has proved of value in scores of later ventures. The second job was involved with the rental office at the Rockefeller Center Project.
At nearly the same time, he joined the board of the Museum of Modern Art, of which his mother was founder and leading sponsor. Eight years later he became museum president and today maintains a private collection of more than 1,000 modern paintings.
ROCKEFELLER MOVED between London and Paris for the Chase bank before his pattern of interests was broadened in 1935 by a tour of South America. As a direct result, he applied and became director of the Creole Petroleum Corporation with large Venezuelan holdings.
Following the pattern he uses today. Rockefeller backed his judgment with the counsel of qualified advisers who also happened to be good friends. Their collective reaction to what they saw later put Rockefeller into public life. One of his first Latin-American projects was the creation of development companies to build inexpensive sanitary housing for Creole workers.
Later, he and several of his friends suggested a new agency for the U.S. government to battle increasing Nazi influence in Latin-America. At the age of 32 he became head of the office of Co-ordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, a position with more title than responsibility.
By 1944, however, he had become FDR's assistant secretary of state in charge of relations with the Latin Republics. He was so co-operative in interagency dealings that he appeared to lack personal ambition in the power-grabbing context understood by officialdom. Yet, his methods opened doors quite as effectively as the standard brand of bureaucratic weight-throwing.
HE WORKED adeptly against substantial opposition to achieve Argentina's admission to the new United Nations, and went on to press successfully for a provision within the U.N. charter authorizing creation of regional defense pacts. Actually, the charter language later became the legal foundation for the formulation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
By November 1950 the pioneer Latin-American operations were drawing enough thoughtful attention for President Truman to name Rockefeller as head of a 14-man advisory board to steer the new Point Four program of technological assistance to underdeveloped areas of the non-Communist world. He resigned this post in 1951 upon submission of his board's report to Truman.