The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1938-12-08
WHO'S
NEWS
THIS
WEEK
By LEMUEL F. PARTON

Again at ~ iiau an du1ielice
full of business and stepping high.
A friend, who was doing bust
ness there that day, reports to
me that the poppy visitor was
William G. Durant, twice head
of General Motors, once the
master of S100, 900 900, and that,
at the age of ~, Mr.. Durant was
scouting new capital for another
big tourney in motor finance.
My friend couldn't learn wheth-
er he got it, but said he had
heard there was deal on which
might put Mr.. Durant on the
main line again. He said the lit
tie Napoleon of early day auto
finance looked as if he were
about to merge all companies
and skim the cream.
It was in 1910 that the bankers
crowded Mr.. Durant out of the pres
idency of General Motors. He was
back in 1915 and out again in 1920,
| in the postwar crash, in which he
| jettisoned $90,000,000 of his own
money, trying to stop the down.
slide of the stock. He took his losses
casually and was busy for years in
daring market forays, but never
quite converted any of his passes.
An acquaintance of this writer,
who knew Mr.. Durant well, told me
how he laughed off his second re-
| Lnquishment of his motors kingdom.
'T built the greatest automo-
bile building in the world, at
Detroit" he said, according to
my informant, "and when 1 did
it, I fixed it so they won't soon
forget me. Hidden somewhere
in every column and every capt.
tai and big stack of that building
there is a deeply chiseled D.
There wasn't anything anon
ymOus about that job, and took
good care to leave my mark on
it."
So did the king in Kipling's poem,
when he was pulled off his big pal
ace building job, when "They said
thy use is fulfilled" He Carved
on every timber and cut on every
stone," and the poem concludes,
"After me cometh a builder; tell
him I, too, have known"
TOR several years, DR.. Karl T.
Compton, president of Massachu-
sets Institute of Technology and one
of the nations greatest scientists,
has explored the
" no mans land
Government between an eX-
Collaboration banding govern
ment and an eX-
panding technology. He thinks they
ought to get together but he is no
advocate of bureaucracy or extreme
liberalization. He doesn't like the
idea of the government getting on
anybody's neck. He thinks the gov
eminent, with its vast resources,
might be an invaluable collaboration
with science, and should be, in fact,
but he advances this idea warily,
as he finds creativeness and social
progress in the old American free
for-an, without elaborate govern
mental trimmings.
He never claimed an ivory
tower, and sees the problem in
its simple social compOnents of
jobs, rising standard of living,
social progress and security. He
notes the job-killing potentiali-
ties of the machine, in certain
individual instances, and as
sesses industrial management
with finding a corrective.
This qualified admission is in
sharp contrast to the view of DR..
Robert Andrews Millikan, another
distinguished scientist who has
wrestled with the same problem.
Doctor Millikan is for throwing the
throttle wide open, with the certain
ty that machines ultimately will
make more jobs than they destroy.
Both, however, prescribe as a cure
for our chronological ills more of
the hair of the dog that bit us. The
difference in view is that DR..
Compton urges certain collective
rationalizations and judicious self
imposed controls by industry and
management.
For many years DR.. Compton
has been blasting at the inner
citadel of the atom to seize there
the hidden golden key of umlim-
tied power which has long been
the ''pie in the sky" of the great
physicists. He batters down a
rampant now and then, and, in
, the long view of the scientists,
thinks that we may some day
tap reservoirs of energy so vast
that all our present ills will be
easily soluble therein.
He has headed M. I. T. since 1896.
Now rounding SO. He was head of
the department of physics at Prince
ton before 1880, one of the most
richly garlanded men of his profess
sion in honors and records of
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