PAGE FOUR THlE MICHIGAN DAILY TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1949 4 ._ Luck and Pluck r THIS WEEK the nation is commemorating the 115th anniversary of the birth of Horatio Alger. But today, only a half-century after the death of this well known American writer, the youth of this country is already in a miserable state of ignorance concerning the tried and true road to success celebrated by Alger in the "Luck and Pluck" series. Modern boys and girls are just too am- bitious, according to a report by the counseling and employment service of the Children's Aid Society. a In their rush to get to the top, they are a unwilling to start in "less glamorous jobs such as their fathers often hold," the re- port declares. The Aid Society has the touchy job of" convincing youthful job-seekers that the surest route to "plush offices and a battery of telephones" is to dig in as a clerk, mes- senger, stenographer or office boy and work up in the American tradition. Perhaps it is the insidious intrusion of the flashier editions of "Nancy Drew" and "The Bobbsey Twins" which has relegated -the Alger stories to a back shelf in juv- enile libraries. But it does not seem that our youth can afford to miss the valuable lessons Alger instilled in young Americans fifty years * ago in his "Tattered Tom" and "Ragged Dick." Surely some public-spirited editor can be convinced to revise and revive the Alger stories. A knowledge of Alger should make youthful job-seekers ready and willing to start at the bottom. If such steps were taken, the Aid Society and employers would be spared the trying task of shocking our modern teen-agers with the "revelation that they cannot earn $5,000 a year one month after graduation from high school." -Jo Misner. Editorials pnulished in The Michigan Daily are written by imernbers of The Daily -staff and represent the views of the writers only. NIGHT EDITOR: AL BLUMROSEN I'D RATHER BE RIGHT: Then and Now By SAMUEL GRAFTON TWENTY YEARS AGO: Just for fun, af- ter reading Mr. Truman's message to Congress, I went back to the clippings of twenty years ago, and read what Mr. Hoov- er had had to say in 1929 on the State of the Union. I will not try to break it to you gently that the messages are quite different. After his inauguration in March, un- der the old Federal time-table, Mr. Hoov- er called a special session. This was lim- ited to two purposes, tariff revision, gen- erally upward (ouch!) and farm relief. Farm relief took the form largely of a Federal Farm Board, to work with farm organizations on a voluntary basis for the improvement of marketing procedures. Mr. Hoover did not deliver a general mes- sage until December, well after the great stock market crash. He reported, with pleas- ure, that confidence had been re-established and that unemployment had been pretty well "prevented." It was a mild, almost an amiable mes- sage. The chief feeling one has on reading it now is that it seems remote and with- drawn, that it in no way reflected the crisis we were already in, or touched on the real fears of a people soon to be in desperate straits. AND NOW IN 1949: I notice that some Re- publican critics of Mr. Truman's mes- sage of last week refer to it bitterly as "so- cialistic." I have a funny feeling about that. I think that if Mr. Truman's message had been delivered in 1930, a year after the Hoover message mentioned above, these critics would have been right. I think the message really would have seemed social- ist, coming right after the previous one, and demanding that the government build houses for the people, give labor more rights, end discrimination, provide compul- sory health insurance, etc. ON WHERE YOU STAND: In saying this, I am not at all criticising the President, or suggesting that he has forgotten the lib- eral promises of his campaign. He has abundantly and vigorously fulfilled them. I am speaking, rather, of those conservatives who would like to apply to '49 standards of '29. It can't be done. Sure, it would have been a shocker in 1929. But then, in 1929, Mr. Hoover's mes- sage didn't seem terribly conservative to many of us. It has come to seem more and more conservative since. And the same kind of relative change has taken place in the other direction, too, so that if we judge Mr. Truman's program by the conditions of the year in w4ich we live, there is nothing startling in it. In the jazzed-up universe of this atomic age the President's message, as a matter of fact, offers a useful means for determing the individual time schedule by which each of us lives. If, after looking around you at a Credit for Honesty InvestigAtion WE GOT a quick look at a letter to the College of Literature, Science and the Arts department, yesterday, which makes us feel quite dissatisfied with the testing system in that school. The letter, evidently the result of a faculty meeting, dealt with the time-worn question of honesty. It purports to warn the professors of the ways in which those dishonest little rascals in lit school crib on an exam. Your instructor is warned to have all text books, notes, extra blue books and such de- posited at the front of the room. It even suggests that blotters can be used as cribs, although it doesn't tell the instructor how to go about getting your test pages dry if you're deprived of that mopping up instru- ment. But the grounds on which most stu- dents are resentful, and rightfully, is the number of proctors that dominate the testing room to a point where they dis- tract a student from his thinking pro- cesses. We don't seem to do our best work knowing that the eye of suspicion is on us from half a dozen sides. The college sug- gests one proctor for every 50 students as adequate to keep us in line. A great many lit school students consider it a challenge to their ingenuity to see how much they CAN get away with under these surroundings. We would like to challenge the facts which have led to the conclusion that the students of this college are more dishonest than their comrades in Engineering. As most of us know, the Engineers have had an effective honor system in operation which has the support of the faculty of that college. The question comes to mind whether the present lit school situation isn't more due to the doubts in the minds of some professors concerning their own ability to get the knowledge across to their proteges than it is to any inherent dishonesty among the students. Let's give college-age students, most of whom are certainly mature enough, the benefit of the doubt and get rid of this an- tiquated Inquisition-type method of exami- nation. -Don McNeil 11// uMi 0A