The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and PoliticalLane, Franklin K.
History
The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
Lane, Franklin K.
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
Money? The lecturer would get his expenses from his home and back
again, and be cared for appropriately in one of the apartments.
Otherwise the incidental expenses of administration. Aside from
the single and simple building the whole thing should not cost
more than $100,000 a year.
To illustrate--it took years for the world to know what Rutherford
was doing with radium. Why should he not have been brought to some
central place and there, before all the students who might choose
to come, tell his story? Pasteur, Einstein, Bergson, Wright
Brothers, Wells (theory of Education). These names are suggestive.
The great of the world could walk, as it were, in the groves with
their pupils and critics, and we could have a new Athens. Whatever
progress the world had made, in whatever line, would be reported
at that time. And the world would know in advance that this was to
be so. Germany has been the world thought center for forty years.
England is now planning to take Germany's place. Why not America?
But the government has not the imagination, and this must be done
quickly.
Why not the Times? And why shouldn't you start it for the Times--
be the first Director?
Then I want someone to take over another of my ideas--a sort of
Federal Reserve Board on the good of the nation, an unofficial
group of men with foresight, who would be a spur to government and
suggest direction. Somebody whose business it would be to attend
to that which is nobody's business and so waits, and waits, until
sometimes too late. Why should we have had no plans for caring for
our soldiers as to employment and giving them the right bent on
their return?
There was no one to concentrate attention--the attention of
Congress and the public--on any definite plan. I tried it with my
scheme for making farms for soldiers, but Congress, as soon as it
found that I was really agitating, passed laws making it
impossible for me to use a sheet of paper or the frank for the
purpose. I do not say my plan was the best possible. Then someone
should have come forward with another, and pushed it against a
Congress made up of Republicans who feared that Democrats would
get the credit, and Democrats who feared Republicans would. Hence,
deadlock, and a great opportunity lost! ...
Seers, or see-ers, that's what these men should be. Elder
Statesmen, if you please, independent, away above politics.
Doesn't it seem to you that we are coming to be altogether too
dependent on the President? That office will be ruined. Every one
with a sore thumb has come into the habit of running to the
President. This is all wrong, all wrong. He cannot do his job well
now. And he is only nominally doing it, and only nominally has
been doing it for years. But each month seems to add to his duties
as arbiter of everything from clothes to strikes, from baseball to
disarmament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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