University of Southern California
DAILY ® TROJAN
VOL. LVI, NO. 84
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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA TUESDAY, MARCH 3,1970
Steam car industrialist says steam impractica
“Steam is not the answer,” said William P. Lear, Jr., the man who has spent $6 million in a search for a workable steam engine for passenger cars.
Speaking yesterday afternoon in Hancock Auditorium to an audience of about 150 persons, including many engineering students, Lear described the system that his company, Lear Motors Corporation of Reno, Nevada, has developed and explained why it is not practical for public use.
Lear said that the problems
of developing a steam system have been solved and that his company was still spending $150,000 a day on the project.
However, the steam system that has been developed would be far too complex for the average motorist or mechanic. What is needed, Lear said, is a single element system.
He advocated as the car of the future a vehicle which would be equipped with a gas turbine and electric alternator system that would be efficient, light-weight, low in pollution, quiet and cool.
Statement expected in Law Center suit
The committee which is investigating possible intimidation of lawyers at the Western Center on Law and Poverty by the Los Angeles Police Department is expected to issue a statement soon.
The committee is also investigating possible pressures placed on the university to disassociate itself from the center. The university administers the federal funds that finance the center.
The pressures allegedly began after the center filed a suit against the police department on behalf of all black residents of Los Angeles. The suit charged the LAPD with harassing and intimidating blacks.
Betty Mcjunkins, a member of the committee, said the group spent Thursday and Friday talking with people at the center, members of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, university officials and members of the law school faculty.
Four members of the American Bar Association and the National Legal Defenders and Aid Association are conducting the investigation.
Miss Mcjunkins said the Western Center asked the committee to look into action taken by the Los Angeles Police Department after the center filed its class action suit against the LAPD.
Some members of the center, a legal service organization for the poor, feel the police department has been trying to intimidate the center’s attorneys on the case and make the university disasssociate itself from the center. It is now cosponsored by UCLA, Loyola and USC.
Miss Mcjunkins said the interviews the committee had been conducting are confidential because people talk more freely if their statements are not made public. She said she also hoped to avoid antagonizing both sides by not saying anything before the investigation is completed. She added that people have been cooperative.
Although she said the committee anticipates issuing a public statement regarding the case, she added that she was not sure this would be done. In some cases, committees like this one have encouraged action to protect the independence of poverty lawyers, Miss Mcjunkins said. However, the committee has not yet made a decision on this case.
She said the committee will report to the National Legal Defenders and Aid Association and the American Bar Association when the investigation is completed.
As a result of research into steam systems, several technical developments were achieved which produced serendipity or side benefits.
Among the products now produced by Lear’s company which resulted from the steam car research are a feed-water pump and an electric motor. Both products are extremely unconventional.
The jump can handle two tons of steam per hour under a pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch, and the motor can operate with a 95 percent efficiency and is controllable down to one rotation per minute.
Lear was particularly emphatic in his belief that the internal combustion engine must be eliminated. He said that research estimates have shown that in the period between 1975 and 1990 the internal combustion engine will cost the federal government $10 billion.
However, there are a great deal of political and economic pressures which have prevented a low-pollution engine from being developed and placed on the market. “The gas turbine could be in production and on the market, in a minimum of seven years,” Lear said, “but on ly if they (the auto manufacturers) are forced to do this.”
“The people of this country deserve more than a balance sheet of a company,” said Lear in commenting on the resistance of the Detroit manufacturers in working to create and market a low-emission system.
Lear termed Detroit’s efforts to alter the internal combustion engine so that it would meet minimum-pollution standards as “tinkering, tampering and patching of the internal combustion engine.”
“They’re going to force it down your throats as long as you let them,” Lear said. He said that he had been told by an executive of a Detroit manufacturer that if it were shown that the internal combustion engine was not practical, it would ruin the automakers.
WILLIAM P. LEAR, JR.
Photo by St«v« Bolingor
DT, El Rod named best in California
USC won the sweepstakes trophy for excellence in student publications at the convention of the California Interscholastic Press Association held last weekend.
The Daily Trojan was named the best daily newspaper, and the El Rodeo was named the best yearbook.
It was the second time in a month that the Daily Trojan was named the best college newspaper in the state. The California Newspaper Publishers Association named the Daily Trojan the best in the state at their convention in February.
The El Rodeo won four first place awards at the CIPA convention in the categories of general excellence, staff photography, writing, and art and graphic arts.
The Daily Trojan staff received four individual awards. Eric Cohen, columnist, won first place in sports columns; Roger Smith, city editor, won first place in editorials; Fred Swegles, former sports editor, received a third place in sports stories; and Don Shearer, former chief photographer, received a first place in the photographic series category.
The Daily Trojan was also awarded trophies for having the best single issue, the best sports section, and received a second place for its editorial section.
The California Interscholastic Press Association is an organization of college newspapers and journalism departments around the state.
SDS founder traces past use of terror
Socialism, terrorist tactics and Weathermen politics were discussed Sunday by Carl Oglesby, a founder .of Students for a Democratic Society and a prime mover in the development of New Left politics.
Oglesby’s seminar was part of the Left-Right Festival held at the Student Activities Center last weekend. The seminar traced the use of terror by socialist movements through history.
“We are at a stage of history that can no longer use excuses for terror,” Oglesby said. He cited Robespierre’s Reign of Terror following the 1789 French Revolu-Democratic Society, during an informal in the socialist movement.
“What grasps my imagination these days are the limits to the range of human activities,” he said.
“Socialism has produced the Reign of Terror, the purges, the mass trials. It produced Robespierre, Stalin and Mao. Perhaps we’ll never be able to tally the total number of victims of terror in the last two centuries of history,” he said.
Presently, Oglesby said, “We have not
developed any obvious options to the use of terror. We do not know how to proceed.”
He said that some insight can be gained by looking at terrorism in context of the conditions in which it occurred. “We will not be able to understand Stalinism unless we understand the conditions of Russian isolation then existent.
“We ought not to try to judge Cuba from the standpoint of modern America.”
He said that to understand the use of terror is not to forgive those who use it. “There are other roads than those taken by Stalin, Mao and Robespierre,” he said.
Oglesby described the W'eathermen, a militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society during an informal question and answer period later Sunday afternoon.
“The Weathermen understand that the working class in the United States isn’t going socialist. It might even be going the other way,” Oglesby said.
He said the Weathermen maintain a workable Marxist philosophy by translat-
ing the class struggle into an international struggle.
In Marxist terms the United States, with the exception of small colonies such as W'atts, is totally bourgeois, Oglesby said.
There are different levels of income and education among members of American society, but the Weathermen view these as insignificant, Oglesby said.
He said in the view of the Weathermen, the industrialized nations of the West are the petty bourgeoisie of Marxist class theory. South American, African and Asian underdeveloped countries form the proletariat, or wage-slaves, of Marxist classification.
Describing the Weathermen concept, Oglesby said, “America is an aristocracy of labor over the rest of the world. The primary goal, then, is that America be defeated. In this view America must be wiped out before socialism can succeed.”
Speaking his own thoughts, Oglesby
said, that in his view “What we have to do is move back from a dogmatically Marxist concept and try to see what has actually happened. The whole bourgeois movement was to perceive reality and to make it rule ideas rather than to make ideas rule reality.
“Basically the socialist differs from the capitalist in that he says, ‘I can do it better.’ So he sits around and waits for the capitalist to make a mistake so he can move in.
“If we are to move forward now we can’t go on talking as if it’s a difference between capitalism and socialism. For the underdeveloped nations, the goal is to industrialize. For industrial nations, it is to go beyond industrialization.”
Asked if he thought there was an inherent tendency toward authoritarian power structures in socialism, Oglesby responded, “I don’t believe so. No one is saying that we should fight to replace one tyranny with another tyranny, but are we to stop all revolutionary activities because of past failures?”