The Frustrated Labor Historian

The Frustrated Labor Historian
Dr. Horace P. Karastan, distinguished professor of labor relations history at the University and a widely recognized authority in his field, had readily accepted the invitation to speak at the upcoming winter banquet meeting of the Newspaper Owners’ Roundtable. Forty-five minutes had seemed to him to be somewhat on the meager side to properly accommodate the topic that he had been asked to handle—“American Labor Union History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.” But thoughts of the considerable remuneration that he would receive for this brief stint allowed him to forget his compunctions and he approached the date of the banquet with his customary optimism.
Unexpectedly, and sadly from Karastan’s point of view, the two speakers who preceded him at the microphone (a United States Congressman and a woman from the Internal Revenue Service) each consumed far more than the 15 minutes that they had been allotted. And the professor, originally scheduled to be presented to the audience at 8:15 P.M., did not get the floor until 9:10 P.M. The last words that he heard the Roundtable program chairman use in introducing him were “whose topic for the next few minutes will be ‘The Three Most Important Events in American Labor Union History.’”
What would you, as Dr. Karastan, now say to the audience—and why? (Sloane 81)