E FOUR THE MICHIGAN DAILY TUESDAY, MAY 20, 1941 _ _ _ _ _ - - - -- -- THE MICHIGAN DAILY Editedand managed by students of the University of Michigan under the authority of the Board in Control of Student Publications. Pul Iished every morning except Monday during the University year and Summer Session. Member of the Associated Press The Associated Press is exclusively entitled to the use for republication of all news dispatches credited to it' or not otherwise credited in this newspaper. All rights of republication of all other matters herein also reserved. Entered at the Post Office at Ann Arbor, Michigan, as second class mail matter. Subscriptions during the regular school year by carrier $4.00, by mail, $4.50. REPRESENTED FOR NATIONAL ADVERTIMNG O8V National Advertising Service, inc. College Publishers Representative 420 MADISON AVE. NEW YORK. N. Y. CHICAGO * BOSTOR . Los AnGELEs * SAN FRANCISCO Member, Associated Collegiate Press, 1940-41 Editorial Staff Emile Gele . Robert Speckhard Albert P. Blaustei David Lachenbruc Bernard Dober Alvin Dann Hal Wilson Arthur Hill Janet Hiatt Grace Miller . . . . Managing Editor Editorial Director ri. . . . . .City Editor h . . Associate Editor . . . . Associate Editor . . . . Associate Editor * . . . .Sports Editor . . Assistant Sports Editor . . . . . Women's Editor . . Assistant Women's Editor Business Staff . . . Business Manager . . Assistant Business Manager . Women's Advertising Manager . . Women's Business Manager Daniel James7 Louise Evelyn H. Huyett B. Collins Carpenter Wright . NIGHT EDITOR: EMILE GELE The editorials published in The Michi- gan Daily are written by members of The Daily staff and represnt the views of the writers only. Mr. Haisley - A Fine Superintendeni T OMORROW EVENING Ann Arbor's Board of Education meets to decide whether to grant a public hearing to Otto W. Haisley-superintendent of schools asked not to return. Such a public hearing before the local board is the first step of the appeal process provided 'by the State Teacher Tenure Act to which Hais- ley has referred his case. We hope the Board will grant such a hearing readily, and avoid the legal appeals that will necessarily follow a re- fusal to grant a hearing. More fundamentally we hope the School Board will grant the hearing as an indication that it is representative of the hundreds of Ann Arbor townspeople who have shown by petitions, news- paper comment, and the spontaneous protest at last Wednesday's Board meeting, that justice must be done. Mr. Haisley has served well Ann Arbor's citizenry, and particularly its youth, for 17 years. Yet at last Wednesday's meeting the School Board voted 5-4 not to renew his con- tract without giving one reasbn. SOME MEMBERS of the Board gave indi- vidual explanations after the meeting, ex planations which have been shown up as the sheerest nonsense. The Daily in its editorial columns has already dealt with them adequately, and it's not the purpose of this editorial to deal with them specifically. Rather we wish to present a significant bit of testimony which shows clearly that any gen- eral arguments rationalizing the dismissal as due to alleged "coercion of teachers" or other arbitrary action on the part of the Superinten- dent must be suspect. This quotation from the case book of the Educational Policies Com- mission of the National Education Association gives an apt characterization of how Superin- tendent Haisley has carried out his office: " AN EXAMPLE of close cooperation be- tween the teaching staff and the board of education is found in Ann Arbor, Mich. Believing that the average board of educa- tion thinks too little in terms of educational policies as compared with fiscal matters, the superintendent arranges from eight to twelve board meetings a year at which dis- cussion is confined, as far as ,possible, to educational problems which confront the schools. These problems include curriculum, promotion, classification, health, teacher welfare, public relations, and so on. Groups of principals and teachers are invited to most of these meetings. Frequently they are chosen by their fellow principals and teach- ers because of their particular interest or fitness to discuss the questions up for con- sideration. This practice gives the members of the board, who are the official representa- tives of the public, opportunity to become more familiar with educational matters and to hear the views of teachers first hand. It also helps the teachers better to understand the administrative and financial aspects of the school system." QUCH is the considered praise of a commission o When is a Forum Not A Forum? By TOM THUMB I JUST CAME BACK FROM THE MOVIES and I'm plenty sore. The feature picture was swell, but they showed a short subject that took all the enjoyment out of the show for me (except for the fact that my best girl was sitting next to me). This short feature was called "Inte'rnational Forum" and was "the first in a series" of "for- um" movies on current problems. Now, I listen to the radio quite a bit, and I like the forum brozdcasts because they're usually pretty demo- cratic in that they present speakers with widely divergent opinions on various current issues. So it was only natural for me to expect to see some of this real democratic stuff. But what do they feed me? This forum, a discussion of America and the War" featured the following great and diverse minds: Dorothy Thompson, Linton Wells, Wythe Willianjs and William Shirer. It reminded me of an impartial mass discussion of the National As- sociation of Clothing Manufacturers on "Shall We Return to Nudity?" If a forum is a discus- sion where various viewpoints are presented, this wasn't a forum DOTTY THOMPSON would nonchalantly let a cigarette drool from her lips and she'd make some statement. Then Linton Wells wouldj say, "I quite agree with you there, Miss Thomp- son." William Shirer would rise to the occasionI and stick in an "Absolutely." Then it would be Wythe Williams' turn to exclaim "Exactly." It was generally agreed that (1) We'll enter the war very soon, and (2) it would be a fine thing. There was also hearty agreement upon the fact that this war is a struggle between God (us and the Allies) and The Devil (The Germans). They all liked that. Of course, there were minor disagreements. For instance, one of the "debaters". complained that 17 million men would not be enough for our draft army. The other two fellows said "Abso- lutely" and "I agree perfectly." Then Dotty flicked her cigarette into the ash tray and said prophetically, "Well, Bill, I'd go even further. I think we need 130 million people." She held the pose for a while and looked real heroic. Isn't it swell how people can get along so well together? But somehow the film gave me a strange desire to strap Dorothy Thompson into a theatre seat and show Fantasia over and over until the film wears out. RUT Wythe Williams really got in the last gag- line. They focused the camera on him, then he got sort of ethereal and hazy and faded into the distance, it seemed to me. As he left this world his voice boomed the message, "Those Germans won't forget us in a thousand years," his immortal words ringing and ranging through the vasty halls of history. I can imagine what No. 2 in the International Forum series will be. It may be a debate on the topic "Shall We Use Bayonets In Warfare."- a spirited discussion between four Army officers, whom, for want of a more fitting appelation, we shall call A, B, C and D. It might go something like this: A. I believe that we should exploit bayonets to the utmost. B. I agree perfectly, but I think they should be rammed into the belly. C. Oh, no, B. You should aim for the heart. It's quicker. B. Oh, but the belly hurts more. Or the neck. D. And don't forget about that agonizing little twist, A. Oh, yes! And so we (0close oi iparti'al litte forum on "Shall We Use Bayonets," Goodnight everybody. Go home and get a good night's sleep. Coming next week-"Shall We Lie On Our Backs or Stomachs When Dead?" NOTE: My apologies to the ROTC boys foor completely insufficient knowledge of the bayo- net, but right now I'm as close to a bayonet as I ever want to be-closer. Well, I'm glad my best girl was sitting next to me, anyway. SKm mings by the edit director jN LONDON is going on one of the lesser but most depressing of all the war's tragedies. A host of Poles. -probably the largest emigre' col- ony in the world- has been transplanted there, and with them have gone the characteristic anti- Semitism of Polish aristocracy. Most of the 13 Polish language dailies in London blatantly blame Poland's downfall on the Jews, and the exiled Polish national parliament has voted in effect that after the war Poland would have no place for Jews. One Polish newspaper openly pro- claims the validity of Hitler's racial theories- which are working today untold misery on the mass of Poles who are not so fortunate as to be in London . . . Some will never learn it seems. i' * * Louis Fischer-former correspondent in the land of the Soviets and author of the widely acclaimed "Men and Politics," sees in the de- parture of Molotov as premier of Russia in de- ference to Stalin, a logical step in the Soviet's "appeasement" policy toward Germany. Molo- tov, it seems, may have looked with disfavor on the results of the Soviet-Nazi "friendship" . . . We're waiting for the day when the Russian equivalent of a Messerschmidt cracks up in DRAMA Ann Arbor, Dramatic Season presents The Male Animal, by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent, May 19-24 at the Mendelssohn. THE CAST Tommy Turner, Conrad Nagel; Joe Ferguson, Leon Ames; Ed Keller, Matt Briggs; Ellen Turner, Ruth Matteson; Dean Frederick Damon, Ivan Simpson; Cleota, Eulabelle Moore; Wally Myers, Whitfield Conner; Michael Barnes, Robert Scott; Patricia Stan- ley, Perry Wilson; Mrs. Blance Damon, .Dorothy Blackburn; Myrtle Keller, Ada McFarland; "Nutsy" Miller, William Kinzer; Newspaper Feporter, Norman Oxhandler. AFTER I GOT BACK to the office last night, somebody, one of those people, said "It's very--uh, sort of apropos, isn't it? If you have ever seen a Thurber man in the New Yorker you know what Conrad Nagel was up against being Tommy Turner, and after things got going around the second act, he was a fine Tommy Turner. Something was gumming up the works during Act I and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what, except that maybe there were too many people on the stage part of the time and not enough people the rest of the time, but when I read the play I didn't think so, and I guess you know what that makes Act I. Part of the fault can be traced down to Ruth Matteson, who appeared to limp slightly through the opening innings supported oh the shoulders of the hard working male animals. Perry Wilson also bogged a bit, although her part is sort of sub rosa anyhow. Robert Scott, as Michael Barnes, didn't know what to do with his hands, and there's something about that man's mouth, but he saved himself and gave the whole play a shot of adrenalin with his work in the second act. By tonight there ought to be some o the old college pace in that first act, and from there on, it's a hit. To get back to Mr. Nagel, he dropped a line at one point, and threw the already nervous Ruth Matteson off for one brief instant, but like all good troupers, both of them dove for the ball, and things went on, but not real fast. Another little thing I'd like to see cleared upnbefore to- night maybe, is the footwork by Ellen and Joe, which to the tune of Who is supposed to look like angels, but was off the beat last night. It's a small matter, just go one-two, one-two, one-two. WELL, THAT'S ENOUGH growling, and I don't really feel that way, because as I said, after Act II, and especially after Robert Scott delivered that beautiful opening line in the second scene, "He-is-probably-still-running-with-that-ball," I was for it, and with company. Question-does the fact that Mr. Nagel plays the toughest part in the play, and does it with the utmost of utmost mean that I can't throw top honors to somebody else? I'll try. For my money, give me Leon Ames and Matt Briggs, the two top performances last night. Naturally in a cast made up mostly of professionals, the timing was good, lines came fast upon each other, and laughs were never killed or still-born, but for all around showmanship, the very best of comic act- ing, Ames and Briggs had it-oh boy did they have it. They convince and tickle the audience not only with the lines, but with faces, voices, mannerisms, and all the green-room tricks you ever saw. Whitfield Conner, playing the all-done Wally Myers, handled the most important part assigned to a Play Production student and handled it with plenty of stuff, equal to any- thing the pros put forward. Nan McFarland, though brief, sat in on the operations bit with Dorothy Blackburn, and comported herself very' well indeed. Quickly, for space reasons, I was not prepossessed with the work of Cleota, though some of the folks around me were, and the play is swell, and will refund your money or cigar Icoupons5 if you don't think so too -By Jay McCormick LETTERS rfO0rfI.11+aED1ITOIIA In Re Harry Bridge To the Editor: 'N THURSDAY'S DAILY an item from the Christian Science Monitor was reproduced, dealing in part with the case of Harry Bridges and citing it as an example of the recent govern- ment offensive against alleged subversive activi- ties. I wish to comment on the Bridges case. There are many of us-and we are not Com- inunists--who believe that the Bridges case is not all that it is represented to be. We have reason to think that the real motive behind the deportation proceedings now being carried on is not to rid the country of a radical but to iid it of an able, militant and successful labor leader. It would be very much worthwhile to the West Coast ship owners if they could, on one pretext or another, eliminate Harry Bridges. Several years ago when Congress was con- sidering a special bill to deport Bridges-which, by the way, would have constituted a bill of at- tainder and would have been specifically uncon- stitutional-Dean James M. Landis of the Har- vard Law School conducted a special investiga- tion. No one could accuse Dean Landis of Con- munist sympathies; yet after careful study of the evidence he cleared Bridges of the charge of' Communism. Now under a new law providing for the de- portation of aliens advocating overthrow of the government by violence Harry Bridges is being tried again, and all sorts of dubious evidence is being used to try to tie Bridges with the Com- munist Party, the IWW, etc. A GOVERNMENT that cannot organize its own country for production cannot organize the world for freedom. So long as the Knudsens remain at the controls of defense we risk our own humiliation and the contempt of the nations we have encouraged to resist Hitler. Business-as-usual cannot produce arms fast enough. "How can Britain and America hope to win the war this way?" a Greek asked an American correspondent as the "Panzer" divisions poured in on his country. "On October 28 Roosevelt pledged America's complete aid to Greece, but not a single cartridge has' yet arrived from America." In a year's time the defense program has grown from four billions to forty, but headlines are not armaments. When the backlogs of aircraft companies are eight times as large as their total pro- duction last year, ordinary methods will not deliver. One high army officer told the American Society of Tool Engineers on March 24 that the greatest service it could render defense was .to teach manufacturers "to find ways and means of securing production with the tools at hand or the tools now in existence." Our success depends on our ability (1) to divert present productive facilities to arms manufgcture (2) to keep the big companies from monopolizing defense work, and (3) to bring every idle machine into use by sub- contracting and "farming out" as much work as pos- sible. Machinery Reservoirs A confidential bulletin of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce says that the automobile industry is our greatest reservoir of machinery for defense pro- duction. Knudsen seems to have devoted a large part of his energies to keeping that a secret. Only 3% per cent of last year's sales by his own company, Gen- eral Motors, were for defense. In the first quarter of this year the proportion of defense sales rose to- almost 8 per cent. The President says he wants a new super-bomber program to turn out 500 bombers a month, but everyone seems to have forgotten that last October Knudsen and the automobile manufac- turers promised us 1,000 bombers a month. They formed an Automotive Committee for Air Defense and announced that the work of manufacturing these bombers would be done "very largely with existing machinery and with little new equipment. Both time and facilities are lacking for development of new machine tools. The job is one of adaptation . . ." Mr. Roosevelt might ask Knudsen to explain why the Automotive Committee was disbanded, the 1,000- bomber program whittled down to 300 a month, the decision to use existing automotive machinery aban- doned. Six months have passed, and Ford and Gen- eral Motors haven't finished haggling over the terms of the contracts under which new factories will be built to turn out parts for these bombers. AM RELIABLY INFORMED that in its German factories General Motors is producing aircraft for Hitler. Why can't General Motors produce aircraft in its American factories? The answer, as I'showed in a previous article, is that this would interfere with the current boom in automobile production. The proposal for a small-scale test of the Reuther plan was rejected by Knudsen. Knudsen promised three weeks ago to supply Reuther with blueprints so he could work out the details of his proposal to manufacture planes in automobile factories, but the promise has yet to be kept. The American Machinist, organ of the machine- tool industry, said in its issue of April 2 that the Reu- ther plan had been "rejected squarely on its essential features-treatment of the automobile industry as one firm with the work parceled out in ,semi-compul- sory fashion and labor participation in management- rather than on the rather irrelevant arguments as to whether the plan could actually produce 500 planes a day." The "irrelevant" is appalling. Mr. Roosevelt says he wants every machine tool in the country put to work, but his wishes will remain ineffective as long as he depends onthe OPM to carry them out. Our smaller factories and idle machines can be brought into production only by widespread "farming out" of orders, but when you farm out an order you farm out the profit too. The Defense Com- mission has been issuing publicity on "farming out" since the first of the year--and quietly sabotaging the program all the while. The President's statement itself seems to have been the brain child of Knudsen's pub- licity office, and was apparently designed to provide a backfire against increasing criticism. The men who want to farm out orders were not consulted before the statement was issued, and it can be taken about as seriously as the State Department's moral lectures to Japan. The lectures do not interfere with ship- ments of American oil and copper to Japan, and the well-staged warnings of the OPM will not interfere with the backlogs of the big arms makers. By the middle of February the Bethlehem-du Pont group of companies, whence Knudsen himself comes, had 23 per cent 6f defense orders. Their huge backlogs in part explain why-according to OPM estimates-half the machine tools in this country are in use less than eight hours a day and many are idle. They also help to explain why the National Association of Manufac- ture); in its irecnt survey found that only 28 per cent of the country's manufacturing plants had received d1efense' orders. THIS CONTRAST between idl( machInes and swoll- en backlogs may also provide a clue to the failure As Ot See It e Cost Onusenism jhers Writer discusses failure of the national defense program to produce what has been promised - particularly scores :failure to 'farm out' production to small plants. r I. F. Stone in the Nation, May 17, 1941 of the commission to do the obvious a year ago and order an inventory, industry by industry, of productive capacity. The findings would have raised too many uncomfortable questions, and the answers would have interfered both with business-as-usual and with the defense profits of big business. Such an inventory would have disclosed how many machines in the auto- mobile industry could turn out parts of planes, tanks, and guns and have shown the vast reservoir of ma- chine' capacity in our smaller factories and-our small towns. It would have led to plans like Reuther's for the automobile industry and Murray's for steel, and it would have demonstrated the need for community pools, a form of democratic organization for defense from which the Knudsens and most of the army and navy bureaucrats recoil. These pools of productive capacity, utilized by Beaverbrook in England, serve to parcel out work and orders to machine shops and firms too small to handle a whole contract by them- selves. Pools of this kind sprang up last fall in some fifty communities which took seriously the talk of' bottle- necks and shortages. They 'found advice and encour- agement in Morris Llewellyn Cooke, the famous Phila- delphia consulting engineer, long an advocate of scien- tific management, who managed to find a cranny for himself in Sidney Hillman's division last October-Mr. Knudsen wasn't interested in his ideas. The com- munity pools he helped to organized were given the run-around, and he himself was shunted to one side in January just as the movement seemed to be making headway. The big-business crowd under Knudsen and John D. Biggers then toed over, with a Kansas City furniture manufacturer as front man. The Navy . Department had issued an "order" in January appeal- ing, as the President now does, for wider subcontract- ing. But the order, like-Mr. Roosevelt's statement, was hortatory. It was not implemented by any con- crete changes in procurement methods. We need an executive order or a law directing procurement offi- cers to force subcontracting, to take orders away from companies which refuse to subcontract, and to deny certificates of five-year amortization for plant ex- pansion to manufacturers whoeare not utilizing all subcontract possibilities. The ease with which these certificates are now obtained encourages the manu- facturer not to subcontract. Why should he share work and profits with smaller firms when he can get the government to finance a new plant for him? I TgOST OF ALL we need a bureau under someone like Cook to compile the information supplied by com- munity pools and provide orders for them. They offer the best way to mobilize the American people for de- fense. A good example of these pools and their possi- bilities was provided in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. There local manufacturers, civic agencies, the New Deal housing authority, the C.I.O., the A.F. of L., and the railroad brotherhoods joined in a model survey of its kind. They counted every idle machine and noted every idle square foot of floor space. They made a study of the products these idle facilities might turn out for defense. Though Beaver County already had several big concerns working at capacity and firms employing 77 per cent of the county's workers had defense orders, the survey uncovered an extraordinary variety of idle productive capacity for armament. Five modern machine-tool plants, with the skilled men to operate them, were working only two days a week. Of the seven plants in the county capable of producing alloy steels and aluminum castings, one was com- pletely idle. One large plant equipped to make shells had been closed. down for some years. The Beaver County committee came down here full of enthusiasm, with a handsomely-bound brochure itemizing the fa cilities they had available for defense, ready to take orders through one or two of their larger manufac- turers or to incorporate as a community committee and parcel out the work that way. They got nowhere. Community Committees BELIEVE the President could find no better way to tap our unused reserves of machines and man- power than by encouraging these community com- mittees. Through them he ,can reach down to the grass roots and set free the unused capacities in thou- sands of small business men, labor leaders, local "sparIplugs." They will organize themselves. The secret of the unsuspected energy put forth in great emergencies and in the great upheavals, of history, such as the French Revolution, is that the hidden abilities of thousands of unknown men and women break through the crust of bureaucracy, monopoly, and habit. Must we wait for graver danger to shake the Inudsens loose and call forth this wide participa- tion of the American people in the defense effort? Or can the President, by wise leadership, evoke it now? Much is to be gained by it-new ideas in defense pro- duction, the morale that comes from tasks to be' per- formed, the habit of cooperation among ordinary hos- tile elements. A. democratic mobilization on a basis like Beaver County's would do more than speed de- fense; the attitudes developed would ease post-war reconstruction. But the big industrialists understand that a mobilization of this kind is a menace to monop- oly. It can never come about as long as they are in charge of defense. They will try to keep "farming out" in their own hands, and as undemocratic as they can. ,Their background and training make it impossible for them to understand the meaning of a democratic de- fense or its necessity. DAILY OFFICIAL (Cntin U'd Fron Tlrw: 2) invited. There will be no meeting tonight. Graduate Speech Students: The1 Graduate study Club will meet Wed- er solar phenomena taken at the Mc- heard Wednesday evening from 7:30 Math-Hulbert Observatory will be to 9:30 p.m. shown on Wednesday,.May 21, at 8:00 The last Communion breakfast of p.m. in the Natural Science Auditori- the club will be held Sunday, fol- iim. While shown primarily for the lowing the 10 o'clock Mass. Tickets classes in descriptive astronomy, any may be secured any day this week others will be welcome. up until Friday in the chapel audi- The Society of Automotive, Engm- toiI . eers and the American Society of Mimes: I will be in the meeting Mechanical Engineers will hold a room at the Union beginning 7:00 joint picnic on Saturday, May 24, at o'clock tomorrow night to collect the 2:00 p.m. Tickets may be obtainedasestent gromheting ann:t from the officers of the organiza- attend the regular meeting at 7:30.