100 years ago in The Record
Wednesday, June 13, 1917
Troy mayor Cornelius F. Burns has been unanimously reelected president of the New York State Conference of Mayors, The Record reports. At their annual meeting in Buffalo, “all the mayors agreed that the Trojan had devoted more time and energy to the office than it was possible for any other executive to do.” A movement to nominate Burns’s vice president, Syracuse mayor Walter Robinson Stone, is nipped in the bud by Stone himself, who says that “the conference owed Mayor Burns the honor of a re-election.” First elected mayor in 1911, Burns gained national attention as Conference president last year for his advocacy of consumer boycotts in an effort to force down high food prices.
COMMENCEMENT DAY
Democracy is the great theme for commencement speakers at RPI and the Emma Willard School today.
Emma Willard graduates a class of 83 women who hear an address from James Byrne of the New York State Board of Regents.
“Whatever my topic, I must speak of war,” Byrne tells the graduates, “This was has taught us that women are as important in its service as men, and even though the women do not actually bear arms, they do splendid service and have suffered and died nobly.”
Looking past America’s war with Germany, Byrne says that “In the future we must regard democracy as the great good which must be universally achieved. Let us not barter with liberty, no matter how inefficient it may seem at times…. Let us reject the thought that the oldfashioned virtues of kindness, humility and mercy are outgrown by present day nations.”
The relative efficiency of democracy is the focus of the commencement speech by Charles Whiting Baker, the editor of The Engineering News Record, to 92 RPI graduates.
“There is a very general acceptance of the idea that a democratic government is necessarily inefficient,” Baker says. Germany’s “autocratic” government is widely believed to have an advantage over its enemies because that form of government is more efficient, while “some well-intentioned people defend democracy with the idea that efficiency in government is a matter of sordid materialism and of little concern to the public anyway.”
A better defense, Baker argues, would show that democracy is more open than autocracy to reform. He points to reforms in city governments since the days of Boss Tweed and claims that “there is no more encouraging record to the believer in popular government.”
Democratic reforms are sometimes held back, however, by “certain well-meaning patriots [who] seem to think that the plans of government devised by the founders of this nation are necessarily the best for all time.”