THI MICHIGAN DAILY
P1AGE THRfEE
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Edited and managed by students of the University of
Michigan under the authority of the Board in Control
of Student Publications.
Published every morning except Monday during the
University year and the Summer Session.
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Entered at the Post Office at Ann Arbor, Michigan as
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A Word
Of Welcoe. . .
THE UNIVERSITY'S Summer Ses-
sion today enters its 44th year. Its
record is one of vast expansion in every field
tthat makes for educational greatness, and this
Summer -Session program promises to be the
finest yet.
More courses are being taught this year than
ever before to meet an expected record in en-
rollment. Distinguished additions to the fac-
ulty and to the curricula make this Summer
Session one of recognized distinction among edu-
dational circles in this country.
All of the various institutes which the Univer-
sity has sponsored in previous summers are
being conducted again this year and one, the
Institute of Far Eastern Studies, offering the
Chinese and Japanese languages, which are sel-
dom taught in this country, has been added.
Even outside the classrooms the Summer Ses-
sion has provided a myriad of activities that are
educational as well as entertaining. The annual
lecture series, in which several authorities in
different fields lecture each week, will be con-
tinued. Excursions to points-of-interest about
Ann Arbor will be sponsored by the Summer
Session, and the Repertory Players will produce
one play each week. In addition, the various in-
stitutes offer lecture series and exhibitions of
artistry.
The Daily extends its welcome to those stu-
dents who are new to Ann Arbor. We hope
that all summer students may find time to take
advantage of the many opportunities offered,
Our Forum
Volumn.
T HE DAILY regularly presents on
this page a Forum column, in
which letters to the Editor are printed. We urge
Summer Session students to contribute to this
column on any subject whatsoever. The Editor
reserves the right to condense letters of more
than 300 words. Names of communicants will
be kept confidential upon request.
cI, DRAMA
The power of laughter will open the doors
and turn on the lights in Lydia Mendelssohn
Theatre tomorrow night when the Michigan
Repertory Players open their ninth Ann Arbor
summer season with Katayev's new Soviet Farce,
"Path of Flowers." Like "Squaring the Circle,"
also Katayev written; which was the Players'
opening success last year, this new script laughs
at the idealistic Soviets who live today in a world
of tomorrow.
Zavyalov, young Communist leader and radio
wind bag preaches free love and non-clergical
marriages. He lives with a perfectly good and
sweet wife until he meets a little factory worker
who he dreams of as his mate of the future.
So throwing his winter underwear and rubbers
into a bag he leaves for his new woman and
the state of marriage utopia. When she begs
him for money he blows forth his usual steam
again and goes on to his third woman of the
future, to Vera Gassgolder, slightly bourgeois and
very much vamp. In the play's most hilarious
scene Zavyalov and Dmitri Gassgolder, symbol
of the middleclass, wrangle over Vera's last year's
fur coat, and building up risibilities that never
before have been imagined.
Katayev is today acclaimed the greatest master
of fare. His nlavs. all of them, poke sharp
On The Level
By WRAG
Witness our first cautious step. We are trying
to teach ON THE LEVEL to walk into your morn-
ing reading and entertain. It will endeavor to
bring the readers of The Summer Daily some-
thing of the humorous happenings that con-
tinually occur (we hope) on or about campus.
Having thus explained our purpose, and we fear
it may need a lot of explaining, we shall now
toddle on about the arduous task of finding your
funnybone at least once per diem.
* * * * .
Two amorous Summer Session boys (whose
names we shall mercifully omit) found that light-
ning does strike a second time in a similar spot
during the past week-end, and they are still
recuperating from the experience. Armed with
a generous graduate's address book and an auto-
mobile, they decided to scoop the rest of the
Summer Session boys and find a couple of good
Ypsi dates before the scourge arrived to beat
their time. Deciding finally on two of the better
sounding Ypsi names in the book, they arranged
a date with the girls for Friday eve. Both of the
girls; as it turned out, were ultra "goons," and
the only fun the boys had that night was in
finding nicknames for their respective blindates.
They called one "Edna May Oliver," and they
named the other after a prominent editor of a
baby mag and wife of one of our very best baby
kissers.
Saturday found our two heroes back in Ann
Arbor trying to forget the dates of the night
before, when a fraternity brother approached
them with, "How'd you boys like a couple of
swell blindates for tonight?" "Sure!" unisoned
our two down but never outers, after making
certain the dates were in A.A. and not in Ypsi.
But the big surprise came when they picked up
their dates and found that they were th.e same
two "goons" they had dlated the night before! It
seems "Edna May" and "Eleanor" had come into
Ann Arbor to visit a girl friend. The two boys
will probably be seen at the Pretzel Bell from
now on-stag!
* * *
*
We like the appropriate advertising media
used by a certain company that manufac-
tures a salve for burns of all kinds. This
company apparently believed in stoning two
birds simultaneously when it started its re-
cent publicity campaign on the covers of
paper match packets!
* * * *
In looking over the crop of feminine pulchri-
tude that has returned to Ann Arbor from the
regular session and enrolled in the present eight
weeks slavehood, we noticed a couple of Martha
Cookians who ought to be warned against. At
least, a trick they pulled several times last se-
mester, without retaliation or publicity, gains
the official frown of this column. These two
girls, with about three helpers, used to leave their
dates (or their cokes) 15 minutes or so before
closing time and rush up to the third floor of
the Cook construction.
There they would frantically fill all the glasses,
vases ,and wax cups they could find with health-
ful Ann Arbor water. This done, they would tip-
toe to the front windows of the building, and
douse all the unfortunate good-night kissers
below. Of course, it was all done in the spirit of
good clean fun, but we think that Ann Arbor
weather is bad enough without artificial aids.
In defense of the girls, let us say that they are
such that they couldn't possibly be jealous of the
other girls' good fortunes, but most of the girls
were Psych majors and probably only wanted to
see what reactions they might get.
* * * *
It is gratifying to note that even in this
day of higher literacy, a college education
leaves its mark. The infield of the Plija-
delphia Athletics is composed of three Duke
graduates and oie ball player who came up
the hard way. The contrasting note is heard
when a pop up comes to the infield and the
three Duke boys wave their arms and yell,
"I have it!" while their teammate with only a
common education bellows, "I got it!" The
averages for hitting and fielding fail to show
any collegiate advantage, but those sitting
near enough to hear the boys speak must
certainly notice the distinction.
set against a sky of midnight blue, or New Eng-
land snow covered hills.
While Mr. Kyckoff is converting thumbnail
sketches into stage property, Evelyn Cohen will
be pulling nineteenth century costumes off her
sewing table. Her crew of meticulous assistants
will be studying period designs, and when the
bunch of them are finished her costumes will
have the same authenticity that are recognized
in her husband's sets.
The Players were fortunate this year in ob-
taining the first non-professional rights to the
production of "First Lady," which will fill the
stage of the Mendelssohn with some thirty char-
acters the third week. Katherine Dayton and
George F. Kaufman wrote it. And if you've
heard about or seen Kaufman's latest Pulitzer
Prize winner, "You Can't Take It With You," yo,
know in small measure what to expect. "First
Lady" is a satire on the dynamite which ex-
plodes over the tea-tables in our nation's capitol.
Full of Kaufman's sparkling wit and spontaneity,
it shows off that group of smart Washington
hostesses who bring in the cookies and tea, with
their senatorial and judicial husbands who hap-
pen to be running our government.
Before Sidney Howard left the eastern drama-
tic center to bury himself among Hollywood
ioneybags he spent some time with Paul de
Kruif, who had written a book called Microbe
Hunters. And during that afternoon Howard's
Old Age Pensions
By ABRAHAM EPSTEIN
(Executive Director of the American Association
for Social Security, in Harper's Magazine)
FOR A VARIETY of potent reasons, the issues
raised by the existing trends in the American
old-age security system must be of genuine con-
cern to all of us.
There is, first of all, the sinister fact that the
money now taken by the undeserving aged is not
only preventing adequate aid to those needy old
people for whose benefit the laws were instituted,
but is actually curtailing aid to other classes of
dependents. With both Federal and state funds
limited, the high proportion of aged in many of
the states is making the average pension so low
as to negate the basic aims of these laws and of
the Social Security Act.
Oklahoma's high ratio of pensioners kept the
average grant down to about $8 a month until
November of last year; no payments at all were
made in September. At the same time, the State
checks for dependent children were reduced from
$4 monthly to $2 in October.
Pensioners in the Illinois counties beginning
with "W" did not receive their grants in April
because the State funds could not be stretched
that far down the alphabet. South Dakota had
no money to pay this year's May and June grants.
Moreover, as pointed out by Gov. Allred in
his appeal to the legislative "sit-downers" in
Texas, "The old folks over 65 years of age are
not the only people who are in need in this state.
There are several thousand blind people without
a means of livelihood. There are between 30,000
and 50,000 dependent children in unemployable
homes, suffering from malnutrition and under-
nourishment; there are 8900 widows in Texas
without employment, but with children to sup-
port; there are thousands of other citizens of
Texas who are unemployables and, believe it
or not, suffering from hunger."
The political manipulations are indeed en-
dangering the very existence of old-age security.
As the facts are revealed, the universal approval
which greeted the earlier and well-administered
laws is being succeeded by nation-wide protests
against the entire pension movement.
When it became known that in August, 1936,
Kentucky spent $31,136 in administrative salaries
as against total expenditures of $3391 on 411
aged, there was a howl throughout the state suf-
ficient to discredit the entire movement.
An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last
January cited the fact that 63 per cent of the
aged in Missouri applied for pensions and asked
why Missouri should have 58,747 pensioners
against Pennsylvania's 52,000 when the popula-
tion of the latter state is nearly three times
greater.
Charging that "old-age assistance has become
a racket, engineered by the politicians for par-
tison purposes," it denounced the conditions as
"a shameless business, this, by which deserving
old persons are failing to receive their full pen-
sions because of the cut taken by the unde-
serving ones." The editorial, as it reverberates
throughout the country, is eliciting widespread
denunciation of the entire pension movement.
Protests are also arising against a state of af-
fairs which permits the State of New York, where
the cost of living is highest and which pays 27
per cent of the Federal revenues, to skimp on its
own aged by paying them only $21.41 per month
on the average, while Colorado can afford to play
politics with $45 monthly minimum pensions.
While there is no longer any question of the
need for self-respecting assistance to the de-
pendent aged, it is also plain that we cannot
hope to operate a system of old-age security
in the traditional American fashion. Not only
are our dependent aged more numerous than
any war pension group, but our other problems
of dependency have increased at the same rate
and require the same expanded and improved
social action.
* * * *
As a result of our backwardness in social pro-
vision against economic ills, we now face prob-
lems of unemployment, widowhood, illness and
invalidism such as no other nation ever con-
fronted. Unless the old-age security system is
confined to its basic aims, the other relief plans
are bound to suffer. And unless we can meet all
these problems on an economical and socially
constructive basis, we shall invite social disaster.
The turning of an old-age pension system into
a political pie counter is only one of the dangers.
States are coming more and more to adopt the
more regressive taxes for this purpose. More and
heavier sales taxes and head taxes are becoming
the sources of revenue for pensions. In many
states, pensions depend entirely on the amount
of liquor their inhabitants consume. Thus, not
only is the social value of old-age pensions emas-
culated in the process of advinistration, but the
laws themselves may become extremely unpop-
ular.
With the excessive costs freezing taxes on pov-
erty and threatening states with bankruptcy,
demands are increasing for a complete reversal
in our present policy of protecting the aged, de-
mands that the administration of these plans be
turned back to relief authorities. And when af-
fairs have reached a point where Orville Car-
penter, the young state administrator of Texas,
is driven to urge the State legislators to deprive
pension recipients of their vote, then the basis
of popular government itself is in danger.
* * * *
If we add to these demands the clamor for
economy rising from those interests which have
most diligently striven to protect themselves from
taxation, we see that social security legislation is
threatened on two fronts. On the one side are
the interests which are against the idea alto-
gether, and on the other the political fraternity
who see in pensions and social insurance the
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