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Show F '""""I WHO'S I NEWS This Week By Lemuel F. Parton Consolidated Features. WNU Release. NEW YORK. Scouting optimists in the news around the New Year, one finds Dr. Thomas Midgley Jr. becoming president of the Ameri-..., Ameri-..., can Chemi-Holds Chemi-Holds Science Will cai society. Clear the Way for after years r a l j of hopeful Peace, Abundance propheyand dotted-line-achievement. Among his prophecies have been his forecast of about three quadrillion dollars' worth of gold to be taken from sea water, inter-planetary travel, age control and the end of indigestion by the use of hormones. His achievements, achieve-ments, which are many, include his discovery of tetraethyl lead as a gasoline anti-knock compound, his development of non-toxic and non-inflammable non-inflammable refrigerants and his many contributions to basic research re-search in synthetic rubber processes. proc-esses. As to the mundane outlook in general, Dr. Midgley takes the cheerful view that the potential creativeness and productiveness of science, with its command of new energies and processes, will clear the way for peace and abundance in spite of our collective col-lective stupidities and villainies. These alluring, if remote, horizons, hori-zons, Dr. Midgley sees from his wheel chair in Worthington, Ohio, having been stricken with infantile paralysis in 1940. Thus afflicted, he has continued his research, with no slackening of either work or fervor, and a possibly pos-sibly heightened belief in some kind of happy ending, or rather fulfillment for the comedie bu-maine. bu-maine. His story would be a case in point for Thomas Mann, who says the calmest faith and truest personal integrity is attained at-tained through suffering. In Cornell university, where he was graduated in 1911, it was said that young Midgley would coast along through routine work, but was always busy on something out of the groove some idea of his own. This inclined him quickly to research and before he had been out of college a year he was threading the subatomic sub-atomic maze of synthetic rubber. It was in the years from 1922 to 1926 that he brought through his knock-less knock-less gasoline, which bloomed into the impressive ethyl gasoline industry, indus-try, with headquarters at Detroit, of which industry he is vice president. In his wheel chair, he is a big business busi-ness executive, with special telephone tele-phone rigs to make his inter-office communication around the country easy and casual like everything else about him. Speaking of attainment, through frustration, he worked with tellurium telluri-um when he was bringing through his non-toxic refrigerants and that permeated his genial person with a powerful odor of garlic. He took scientific measures something like protective coloring. When he traveled, trav-eled, he found in the smoking car the closest possible concentration of bad cigars. The fragrance of garlic was just a harmless added starter here, and nobody noticed him. He is resourceful, diligent, optimistic. PERSONS who have been a bit jittery about the government telling tell-ing us where to work and what to do may be assured by the public record ,,, . and attitudes He'll Square Oar of Grenville War Manpower Clark, the With Blackstone "ew Y!;k lawyer who drafts the quite unprecedented and drastic manpower bill for Paul Mc- Nutt. A stanch advocate of compulsory com-pulsory military service, and of any and all methods necessary for national na-tional survival, Mr. Clark has been at the same time an alert and outspoken out-spoken defender of civil liberties. He is a pioneer of the Plattsburg system and chairman of the National Na-tional Emergency Committee of the Military Training Camps, and an active advocate of a big and strong army, but he is a wary opponent of anything suggesting a military caste. In May, 1931, he said: "My experience in the war department de-partment has led me to distrust the participation of army or navy experts ex-perts in affairs of national policy." Similarly, he has opposed any encroachment on Constitutional safeguards by bureaucrats, or excessive centralization of government gov-ernment which might endanger individual liberties. He may be cited as a conspicuous holdout against both the weakness of a peace-loving democracy and the aggression of militarists and war-planners who might save the country but leave it no longer long-er a democracy. He thinks we can keep both the Bill of Rights and a strong wallop. That seems to be the nub of the argument, ar-gument, as military urgency closes in on manpower our most free and footloose zone of casual and migratory migra-tory tradition. Maybe we never wanted to move to Perth Amboy, but it's tough if anybody says we can't. Mr. Clark knows all about that. He drafted the original selective se-lective service act, and kept it legally le-gally in bounds. Mr. Clark was born in New York in 1882, was graduated from Harvard in 1903 and practiced law in New York. In 1909 he became a member of the late Elihu Root's law firm. Mr. Clark's insistence on the letter of the law in safeguarding individual rights for all and sundry led to his appointment as chairman of the American Bar association committee commit-tee on the" Bill of Rights, in 1938. It was soon thereafter that he issued a report for this committee, opposing oppos-ing the deportation of Harry Bridges without a trial. This from a corporation corpo-ration lawyer who came into public affairs from away over to the right. In World War I he was a lieutenant-colonel. |