Word: leland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twenty years ago, Leland Olds, like many another New Dealer, had some radical notions about capitalism. As a reporter for a labor news syndicate, he once wrote: ". . . Capitalism in the United States is rapidly passing into the stage which has marked the decay of many earlier social orders . . . The owners exist only [as] a privileged class of parasites whose idleness and dissipation become an increasing stench in the nostrils of the people...
Last week, 58-year-old Leland Olds found these old words still echoing in the ears of Congress. In the years since, he had risen to a position of power. As the dominant member of the Federal Power Commission for the past ten years, he had toughened Government regulation of utilities, helped cut wholesale natural gas and electricity rates by $40.6 million a year, successfully fought legislation to exempt the rich natural-gas business from federal control. In short, he had made himself the power lobby's No. 1 candidate for political electrocution...
Then the newsmen heard the President air a surprising view of how an appointment to a key Government office should be regarded. The case of Leland Olds, Mr. Truman said, was a question of party discipline, party policy. The trouble was, there were a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who thought they had a say in party policy, too. At week's end, they seemed to be in a mood to follow the practice of Senator Truman instead of the preaching of President Truman...
Apart from the legend, the official story goes that the university was founded soon after the death of young Leland, in memory of the boy who died just before he reached college age. Senator Stanford expressed the desire that the university should bring intellectual life to the West and add to the vigor of the Western experience. He wanted a college that was free from the outworn traditions of older universities, especially one that would, in his words, "qualify its students for personal success and direct usefulness in life." He felt that colleges had become too far removed from American...
Accordingly, the college was dedicated one year after Leland Jr.'s death, in 1885. It was built on the Senator's old horse farm, and the campus has been called "the Farm" ever since. In 1891, David Starr Jordan was appointed its first president, and in October of that year, the College began. From then on, Stanford grew with the West. Jordan quickly made the new school the intellectual center of the West. He led it through the troublesome early years and started its amazingly rapid growth. In 1915, Ray Lyman Wilber became president and completed the job of making...