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University Daily Kansan Tuesday. October 31, 1961
The Big Bomb
It is hard if not impossible to detect any logical reason for the 50 megaton Soviet nuclear test held yesterday.
CERTAINLY THE REACTION in the United Nations and announcements made by the governments of various nations indicate that the current Russian test series is anything but a propaganda advantage for the Soviets. New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller recently said, "the very undertaking of these tests defied not only world opinion but also all the years of Soviet Propaganda invested in the pretense of seeking a ban on nuclear testing.
Indian Prime Minister Nehru, a neutralist leader who agreed with the Soviet stand in Berlin, has been very critical of the resumption of nuclear tests.
MANY NATIONS, SUCH AS JAPAN, have been strongly resentful of the way in which the Russians have subjected many millions of innocent people to the perils of nuclear fallout. But most of these nations have not been receiving nearly as much fallout as has been falling in many parts of Russia.
The Soviets, in an attempt to prove their military might, have exposed their own people to the dangers of fallout. However, there is little reaction to this in Russia because the Russian press has carried very little news of the test series. Only a very few Russians are aware that health damaging nuclear fallout is falling on them.
SCIENTISTS HAVE STATED that although considerable knowledge has probably been gained from the whole series of tests it is doubtful that the two large tests added much to the overall knowledge gained.
The detonation of the bomb is obviously an attempt, by the Russians, to do more than a flexing of the Russian military muscle. Nikita Khrushchev is proving that he will go to any length to prove Russian military superiority to the world. Only this time it appears that world leaders are not impressed but resentful about this senseless display of military might.
The world must certainly be careful in its dealings with a nation that will buck so many disadvantages to release a weapon of fear.
-Ron Gallagher
Censors and Literature
We note that Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" is being reviewed at 4 this afternoon in the Kansas Union. This controversial book was long banned in the United States and is still a target of harsh criticism.
The recent decision lifting the ban on the book was a welcome advance for literary freedom of expression. The unfortunate truth is that most of the censorship boards in the United States are not competent to pass judgment on whether or not a piece of literature is obscene. The board members can only apply their own personal values to the work, and that takes them into a very hazy area where the obscenity of a piece of literature is a matter of opinion. And we might note that even literary experts disagree on some books. D. H. Lawrence's novels are a good example.
OBVIOUSLY, THERE ARE SOME BOOKS which almost everyone would agree were obscene. They can be found in paperback form on many drugstore magazine racks. But even granted that the various censorship boards perform a
useful service in catching some of this type of trash, they still cannot prevent the flow of this kind of material by banning it.
The basic problem lies in the society the censorship boards have been set up to protect. There is a market for the kind of obscene paperbacks that are being produced in a steady flow or they would not be printed. If there is a market, there are people who will supply it, regardless of censorship boards and obscenity laws.
THIS IS PERFECTLY OBVIOUS IF YOU check the statute books of any state. There are far more laws on the books today than there were 30 years ago dealing with the problem of obscene literature. Yet there is more of the stuff around.
The problem is a moral one. Censorship boards can only soften the effects of bad public morality; they cannot correct it. So long as the public wants obscene literature, or will tolerate it, the flow of obscene material will continue.
William H. Mullins
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"REMEMBER KEI $\rightarrow$ I SAID THE TEST WOULD BE OVER CLASS DISCUSSION!"
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16. 1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East St. St., New York 22. New York University. International Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
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Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield,
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BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
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Short Ones
FLINT HALL FREDDIE says that Kennedy is not going to be re-elected because, in another year or so, the women are going to get awfully tired of Jackie's hair-do!
From the Magazine Rack
McCarthyism Revised
(Editor's note: This is the second and last part of an article reprinted from the Oct. 23 New Republic on Robert G. Colodny. He was a visiting assistant professor of history at KU during the 1957-58 and 1958-59 terms. The first part was printed yesterday.)
Pitt's Chancellor Edward H. Litchfield also defended Dr. Colodny, saying that as required by law the University had attested to the professor's loyalty when it hired him and that it had "found nothing substantive to date which would cause us to doubt his loyalty now." But as the attacks mounted, Dr. Litchfield announced the appointment of a three-man fact-finding committee to inquire further into the matter.
If nothing else, the move had the effect of forestalling a state inquiry. When the Walsh resolution finally was brought up for a vote in the legislature on April 26, it was defeated 125 to 69 with 12 abstentions, despite the fact that Walsh claimed to have new information, including the transcript of a 1938 radio broadcast in Chicago on which Dr. Colodny allegedly admitted he was a Communist.
THE SUBJECT OF THE RADIO BROADCAST came up again in early June, when Dr. Colodny suddenly appeared in Washington as a subpoenaed witness before HUAC. The committee was investigating tax-exempt foundations. The professor once had applied to one of the suspect foundations for a research grant. He didn't get it, but HUAC called him in anyway. The hearing was supposed to be in executive session, but a committee member (reliably reported to be Rep. Gordon Scherer) leaked a purported summary of Dr. Colodny's testimony to the Press, which used it in a front-page story headlined: "Memory Has Failed, Colodny Tells Probe."
The substance of the Press' report was that Dr. Colodny's "memory had been affected by a head injury during the Spanish Civil War and he couldn't recall" the broadcast or labeling himself a Communist. The final make-over of the Press for June 1 dropped the reference to memory and merely reported that Colodny, while admitting membership and activity in a number of alleged fronts, had "declared under oath" that he was not and never had been a Communist Party member. But by that time, the initial story had been picked up by radio-TV and the damage had been done.
DR. COLODNY, IN THE NEXT MORNING'S Post-Gazette, said that while it was true he had suffered a head injury which affected his memory, he did recall the broadcast and had told the Committee so. He also said that he had told them the so-called transcript was actually an outline prepared before the broadcast; that it was inaccurate, and on the air he had described his political beliefs as "anti-fascist," not Communist. He told the Post-Gazette, too, that he had denied under oath before the Committee that he was or ever had been a Communist. Only two or three questions during his more than five hours of testimony, the professor added, had been related to tax-exempt foundations.
Meanwhile, the University's own investigating committee was going into the charges in great detail, though without fanfare. The report turned over to Cancellor Litchfield consisted of 150 pages of staff findings and several thousand pages of testimony.
THE CHANCELLOR'S FINDINGS were issued on June 12 in the form of a seven page open letter to Gwilym Price, Chairman of Pitt's Board of Trustees. In it, he absolved Dr. Colodny of charges of subversion and said the professor was "a loyal American . . . an exceptionally gifted scholar and inspiring teacher" who "exhibits exceptional independence of thought and action, according to his own conscience, in both his scholarly and societal pursuits. . . No action on the part of the University is warranted and none shall be forthcoming."
Dr. Litchfield also took the opportunity to lecture the community: "An American university is by definition a place of free inquiry. . . Its role in society postulates question, criticism, controversy, debate and doubt in all matters, social as well as scientific. . . The University embraces and supports the society in which it operates, but it knows no established doctrines, accepts no ordained patterns of behavior, acknowledges no truth as given...
"I WOULD RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST that those who publicly try by innuendo and condemn by inference are not different from those who purge without a hearing; that intemperance and absolutism are equally dangerous whether they arise within or without; that vigilance like Janus must look in both directions..."
The Press answered that. "It is a peculiar form of scholarship which focuses to such a large extent in the field of subversion... It is all very well for the pseudoliberals to hail the Litchfield report as a great victory for the spirit of inquiry and the defense of freedom... We find Dr. Litchfield's preachments on the subject less than reassuring."
Representative Walsh was quoted as decrying the report and objecting to the fact that the Chancellor had released only his own statement and not the entire record of the University investigating committee. "Tm just getting started on this," Walsh told the Press. He promised to push his fight through veterans groups around the state. In July, when the Veterans of Foreign Wars met in state convention at Pittsburgh, they passed a resolution calling on the state legislature to withhold all Pitt appropriations until the entire record of the Colodny hearing was made public.
BUT COLODNY IS STILL AT PITT. And when an editor of The National Review came to Pittsburgh several weeks ago and said he knew Colodny in Chicago Communist-front groups in the thirties, nobody got very excited.