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Wednesday, November 19, 1975
University Dally Kansan
Reform act needed
The U.S. Supreme Court has before it now a case challenging the first substantive attempt at campaign reform. And although the case may point out some problems with the current federal law, it would be a mistake to strike it down.
The case is Buckley v. Valeo, and it challenges the 1974 amendments to the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. The action was brought by such diverse political personalities as Sen James McCarthy, D-Minn., who say the amendments are vague and violate First Amendment freedoms.
Opponents say the full public disclosure of political contributions over $100 violates the First Amendment. Such disclosure should be limited, they contend, to those "who seek to influence government action unlawfully."
That's an unrealistic approach. Who's going to step forward and say 'I'll disclose my contribution because I seek to influence government action'? The law would be unforceable if it were changed as opponents propose.
Another objection Buckley and others have is the $1,000 limit on individual contributions to each candidate for each campaign involving up to $25,000. Free speech means free spending, according to opponents.
But that line of thinking led to exactly the same campaigns that the election reform bill delivered.
stop. How much money does it take to get a candidate's views across to the public? More and more money means slicker advertisements, propaganda and a positive relations campaign of the kind that could progressful for Richard Nixon in 1968.
Granted, the election reform bill has many problems. The agency created to regulate the reforms, the Federal Election Commission, is being deluged with questions about interpretations of the law. For example, when does a person become a political candidate in the eyes of the Commission?
Add to that the fact that the Commission is a new agency facing problems never recognized before. It's the first major attempt to prepare for climate change and to run wild for quite some time; naturally, there are going to be problems.
But encountering initial problems is no reason to give up. The avenue of change needed to clear up the vagueness and to protect First Amendment freedoms is in Congress, not the Supreme Court. If the campaign reform bill is declared unconstitutional, it will put us right back where we started in the long overdue effort to regulate election campaigns.
Without watchful eyes to ensure fair play and an honest campaign, the abuses that characterized Watergate will surely surface again.
David Olson
Contributing Writer
The Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor, but asks that letters be typewritten, double-spaced and no longer than 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space Limitations and the
editor's judgment, and must be signed. KU students must provide their name, year in school and hometown; faculty must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
Mary McGrory
WASHINGTON — President Ford, in Europe this weekend, may hear a wan joke that is making the rounds in Italy: "If Napoleon, the mayor can run Naples, he could run New York City."
Italian Reds of a different hue
letters policy
Last September, Maurizio Valenzi, a 65-year-old artist and a communist since his boyhood, became the magistrate of Naples, the first southern Italian city to fall under Communist control. He was elected by a coalition that succeeded after three months of struggle.
In the ominous June 15 elections, the Communists, who made gains of 7 per cent, took over most of the large cities and regions of the north, including Turin.
But Naples is regarded by most Italianans as not only ungovernable, but an industry overcrowding, unemployment that is staggering even by Italian standards, poverty, and a political backwardness, backwardness, cynicism and despair could only
be reversed by divine intervention.
In Italy recently, I decided to interview the man who had taken on this misery. As I left the Naples train station, I noticed that the usual litter in the street was covered with them before I smelled them. The cab driver proudly called my attention to the change.
The mayor lives in a modest apartment house high above the storied bay. He is vigorous, bald, bespectacled, calm and steady-eyed. He was recovering from a cold and running the city through his job as an interview because the phone rang, every three minutes.
Between calls, I managed to ask the mayor whether he thought he could save Naples.
"No," he replied instantly. "Only the people of Naples can save it."
If he succeeded in governing Naples, would he prove that the Communists were worthy to take over Italy?
He looked at me reproach-
fully. "It is not a question of
taking over, it is a question of
saving Italy."
The telephone rang again, and he handed me a catalog of his paintings, which were his first scenes from the concentration camp in Tunis where he was imprisoned by the Vichy government. Torture, Napier collapsing under a slut of skyscrapers.
How did he become a Communist?
The telephone rang and he handed me a copy of his inaugural speech to the council. It was a document that might have come from a progressive organization that need to attack unemployment, infant mortality and infectious diseases, to improve housing and relations with the business community, to attract new industry. He sought cooperation with nurseries and citizen participation.
"I was an ant-Fascist in high school. In the war against fascism, the Communists were involved, courage, brave and effective."
There were no Communist polemics, no propaganda.
Not even his best friends think
After 30 years of uninterrupted power, the Christian democratic, state major party identifies its ineptitude and corruption. The Socialists, who are weak and neglect their alliance with them.
Valenzi can handle Naples. But he is serious and intelligent and typical of the caliber of men whom the Communists are fielding in their effort to make the party synonymous with honest and efficient government.
"I tell you," a Christian Democrat said later in Rome, "if my party does not reform itself radically and quickly—within the next six months—I can promise nothing."
The Communists of Catholic Raly are proceeding toward their goal—whether it is participation in the national government or total control with exceptional tact. They want NATO to help the European Economic Community. Their positions on social questions are softer than the Socialists'.
Just how Communist they are is a question of increasing urgency. They are defensive and vague about their ties with the Soviet Union. They dissented on Czechoslovakia, an anti-Soviet communist nationalistic communism that some think could be repeated in Italy, with the same grim and crushing finale.
"We look to it as the country that innovated a Communist government," he said noncommittially.
I asked Mayor Valenzi how he regards the Soviet Union.
And how does he regard their policies on civil and human rights?
"Oh," he replied with a touch of condescension, "they have no tradition of liberty like us."
What anti-Communist Italians count on is that in the next national election—sated for May 1977 its protesting voters will be moved by more anti-Communist candidates clean streets and good city government and will vote again for liberty, Western-style.
(c) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate Inc.
Readers Respond / Rights lost in Shockley sbuffer
To the Editor:
"He is the running dog locky of United States imperialism and its ruling class. . . " And so we start another lecture in English 964: Humor in Political Rhetoric. The statement was made to Journal Ward during the February First Movement's press conference last Thursday in relation to Dr. William Shockley. The humorous part of the statement is that the person who made it wam't really trying to be funny. This leads us to believe that his political nature (any indication) is arrested somewhere in a prebloom, mere revolutionary state.
Running dog locks? Marx is probably tearing out his hair, Mao Tse-tung fling his copypads. Mao Tse-tung pouch his gravestone with both shoes.
But my intent is not to cast aspersions upon political childishness.
The purpose here is to challenge the justifications used by the FFM protestors to invade and disupt a University class.
First, the rights of the students in the class were ignored. They wanted to hear what Dr. Rohan said were prevented from doing so.
Second, the rights of Dr. Shockley were trampled upon. So what if he espouses socially distasteful theories? So what if he espouses racism? (He doesn't appear to be much different in respects). His right to speak freely in public is not limited by the content of what he has to say. (I thought it poignantly ironic that after the protesters broke up Shockley's lecture, they returned to Ellsworth Hall to conduct a press conference, where political effluent they desired—uninterrupted. I might add.)
And what would have been the consequences if some group had come bargaining into their press conference chanting and being interviewed Look out, World, the Riotous Dawns are making a comeback
But the point here is that no ones right to say what he wants to say should be abridged or
altered for any reason whatsoever, so long as he doesn't physically harm anyone in the process of presenting no physical menace, and the only other problems he might have caused were in the minds of those who were afraid to be attacked or might be at least partially correct.
I'm afraid that I might be accused of being supportive of Dr. Shockley's views, and that I am just another race running dog lackey. Quite the contrary is the case, since I am just as black (no subjective definitions, please) as any of the protesters.
As I said (and as probably everyone will ignore), I am not supportive of Dr. Shockley's advice, but I'm training in the rigor of experimental experiment to realize that he's shooting in the dark in a field in which he has little expertise and even less valid corroborative evidence. But I am confident that he right to demonstrate his loss of touch with those same rigorous experimental disciplines that
made him cowinner of the Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor.
(Does a transistor look and or behave like a gene?)
Name withheld on request
Mobs unacceptable
To the Editor:
As a graduate of this University, I am appalled that anyone, regardless of his theories, could be run off this campus by the administration or an official of the administration lay part of the blame to an instructor for not having "talked to some black students ahead of time;" and that the entire mess should be solved by the SUA's cancellation of his talk in the first place.
If the student body and faculty of this University had come out in defense of the all-essential freedom of speech, if they had risen up in academic activism to defend intellectual repression, then the protesters would never have gotten it into their heads that to
To run Dr. Shockley off campus is a violation of his right to speak and of my right to hear what he has to say. I will answer to him every time and I call upon the students and faculty of the University to denounce this and all similar actions on other campuses. It is, further, the responsibility of the student to address any issue with any student guilty of violating the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech. And we all must support the administration in its efforts to ensure that any one of us may be faced with a similar someday.
Clinton L. Laing Topeka special student
shout down someone with which whose theories you disagree, is acceptable behavior.
Response imbecilic
To the Editor:
Throughout the country Shockley's appearances have been met with the inattention they deserve. His small audiences have been made up of people who are better to do than challenge the logic of a man who is determined to be illogical.
At KU, however, Shockley's reception was marked not by his insistence on the form of emotionalism and political stupidity that has been more common in South Boston than in New York. The form of insanity is temporary.
Well, the deliberate imbecility of William Shockley has finally found its counterpart. Unfortunately, that counterpart exists among the members of the Nazi Party in February. First Movement.
Members of the FFM were right and reasonable in opposing SUA and KU-Y sponsorship of a forum for Shockley's ideas. It's a waste of student funds to pay somebody to claim that the world is flat. Shockley's theory has flared up into a flat world theory. His ideas belong in the category of concepts that the human race has tried and discarded as dead ends.
The FFM stopped being reasonable and right when Shockley came to KU and a mob denied him his constitutional right to be heard. The mob was sparked by blind emotion,
fueled by pseudo-evolutionary rhetoric and appeased by men who are paid to know better.
Mob rule is a concept that is just as immoral and infinitely more criminal than the motives of Shockley's. It is ironic that the race which has suffered most from mob rule in America is the case that mob as a means of oppression.
American history has many examples of rhetoric that are responsible, ideologically sound and revolutionary. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of FFM pronouncements is overshadowed by irresponsibility, ideological confusion and a fake revolutionary tone. Anyone reading the FFM pronouncements would think they were revolutionaries intent on overthrowing society rather than recognizing the benefits of a subsidized state university.
Let's hope that the future actions of the FFM will reflect the growing credibility that America has learned to expect from black men. At the least, maybe they will stop lending credibility to their ideas, so taking their ideas seriously enough to try to silence them.
Roch Thornton Winfield senior
Tactics are wrong To the Editor:
In the midst of this institution of higher thought last Thursday, William Shockley's presentation was interrupted, and he was forced to end his speech. Those speaking out in Birmingham in the early 1900s were shocked by what Shockley Shockley had college students snapping at his heels. How ridiculous. How embarrassing.
The demonstration I saw Friday afternoon was fine, at least in principle. We learned that the demonstrators were disgusted by racism and opposed any view that would support the idea of racial inferiority.
Shockley says is good or bad, but whether he should be allowed to say it.
It is doubtful that the majority of those participating in the demonstration knew any more of Shockley's theories than the necessarily inadequate descriptions by the Kansan that she generated genetically inferior to whites in intelligence" and the rhetoric the February First Movement handbills. People should be cautious about entering into activist activities without a full knowledge of the issues, because they would utilized towards goals with which they would otherwise disagree. Still, the question is not whether what
Are we that unsure of our feelings on racial equality that we cannot bear to hear another voice? Are we that unsure that will find that we do not truly believe what we say we believe? This type of self-conscious liberalism is only foolish. The kind of liberalism that was carried out is dangerous.
But it was espoused, to cheers, that first amendment rights surely could not apply to a man like Shockley. If those were the same people that silenced the man, they proved the point. But if Shockley was Shockley guilty of except being controversial and saying things people did not want to hear? If this is a crime, the demonstrators are no less guilty. Should they have been prosecuted? Or is there when we allow one man to be stripped of his free speech, we open ourselves to the same damage.
And a great damage this would be. It seems that the black struggle would be advanced by making people aware through free speech. When men were silenced or people refused to listen there was either dormancy or violence.
The demonstrators shouted,
"All the people must unite."
That's a nice thought. But people can unite in many ways, not only by a sense of purpose but by courage and hate. People can only advance through a free exchange of ideas.
It is clear that racism is a product of ignorance. Those who would silence free speech and squitch awareness perversely tend to ignorance, inflexibility and consequently, racism. It why one could say in the same breath that they feel that the actions of those who adhere and abhor the actions at stopping him from speaking.
The actions taken against Shocklee constitute a frightening precedent that shouldn't be followed in the future by students, faculty or administration.
Who could be proud of the events of Nov. 13?
Tim Smith
Chanute sophomore
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