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University Daily Kansan Wednesday. Jan. 16, 1963
Truth or Consequences
Let us beat a dead horse.
The deceased animal in mind is the idea that honesty is the best policy. Prior to May 7,1960, no one had much of an argument with this time-honored axiom.
But on that date the United States government applied this axiom to a foreign policy matter and, suddenly, the public was informed that honesty is outdated, especially as a foreign policy.
What happened was that President Eisenhower came forward and told the world that Francis Gary Powers, a pilot of a U-2 spy plane, was an agent of the United States.
THE PEOPLE WHO INFORMED the naive public that truth is outdated were the political scientists. No one, but no one, admits that a captured spy is on the timesheet.
They explained that it is totally unnecessary to admit your man has been caught redhanded. You know that you have been caught dipping into the cookie jar, the enemy knows, the nonaligned nations know, and the only people who do not know are the unwashed masses, and they do not need to know.
There, my fellow unwashed ones, is where the rub comes in.
Supposedly, the United States adheres to the general idea that an open society is best and we need not fear the competition posed by two-faced liars such as Nikita Khrushchev.
But the sophisticated, knowing political scientists point out (with apparent irritation) that international politics is just a game with a fixed set of rules. No one but a clod violates the rules.
BUT OUR KNOWLEDGEABLE FRIENDS miss the point; not only is truth the best policy, it is the only one which will consistently work for the United States.
At this point, they snicker; they smile at the naivety of the idea that lies of the past have not passed undetected. That is not important.
What is important are the government-issued lies which later have been detected. When this happens, the United States is caught not only with its hand in the cookie jar, but also with
both sides of its mouth working overtime.
The number of incidents in which this country has been forced to pay the double price of being caught doing it and caught lying about it have been both embarrassing and dangerous.
THE EMBARRASSMENT CAME during the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs debacle. The danger in a policy of telling anything but the truth is less pronounced but its affects are far-reaching.
As corny as it may be, lying destroys the public confidence in the government, and our system works best when backed with the confidence of the people it represents.
The effect that governmental double-talk has on the public confidence was shown recently when a story broke that several British fighterbombers slipped through our defense warning network and could have wiped out several major U.S. cities.
Military officials denied the story. They became irritated that their word would not be accepted as the gospel; they were incensed that their integrity was in doubt.
SORRY, BUT THAT IS what happens when you associate with occasional liars. People begin to doubt your word.
"You fools," cry the knowers, "we profit from the telling of an occasional untruth. Grow up, discard your childhood folk myths."
Unless every basic concept of the open society is outdated, any profit gained from lying is outweighed by the loss of public confidence.
Our system needs truth more than all the fleeting gains of expedient lying. Truth is either a uniform to be worn with confidence or it is a masquerade costume worn by princes of the Machiavellian cloth.
Let those who favor lying be known as liars. They are not playing with chessmen—they are playing with death and destruction.
Besides, it will not work. There are still a few responsible people around who will blow the whistle and tell the truth.
—Terry Murphy
Agee-Harvard Hillbilly
Bv Eob Hovt
(Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part article evaluating the career of Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Ages.)
Providing the book is not discovered and banned by a movement of over-organized and over-heated patriots, James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" will offer the economic historian a sensitive epic of the big breakdown in the momentum of capitalism. The book is unsurpassed as a documentation of the loss of individual identity with the land which Thomas Jefferson had hoped would be the foundation for this nation.
And in Agee's "A Death in the Family," the literate psychologist of the future will discover a moving description of middle-class Americans in times of personal crisis.
In Agee's critical works immediately after World War II, the journalistic historian will discover a man not only critical of the contemporary art forms, but also a kindly and rational observer of the evils of colonialism and racial problems before those topics became fashionable in mass journalism.
It can be argued that James Agee's whole career in journalism was a betrayal of his real talent. He had a flair for the smooth writing demanded by the Luce publications and as a journalist-critic he had few peers. In that capacity he wrote a quarter of a million unsigned words for Time and Fortune.
Today he remains relatively unknown, even in some literary circles, but his admirers cherish him like a shared secret.
His most widely known work is "A Death in the Family," which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in letters for fiction in 1858 and was later adapted for Broadway by Tad Mosel.
It is difficult to determine whether or not his journalistic
career was a detriment to his potential as a creative writer. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was sparked as a result of an assignment for Fortune magazine.
After graduating from Harvard in 1932, Agee went to work for Fortune. He and Walter Evans, a photographer for the Farm Securities Administration, were sent to Alabama to do an article on sharecroppers. They lived three months one summer with three tenant families in the back country of Alabama. For reasons obvious to anyone who has read the book, the story Agee wrote was never published as a magazine article. It was a rambling, involved, subjective discourse on life and philosophy set against a hopeless background and told in terms of the sharecropper situation in the South in the depression-ridden 1930's. Agee was at the time a Communist, and he had no love for the New Deal. At the end of that
Short Ones
Philosophy is the last refuge of a man with a witty wife.-George R. Walker.
The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing it exactly right. —Edward C. Simmons.
Let us not deceive ourselves; not only in Latin America but in the entire world we are living in situations that are radically new and that demand the establishment of a new system of relations between the highly industrialized and the underdeveloped peoples. — Juscelino Kubitschek, former President of Brazil.
New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. — John Locke.
The original article was rejected by Fortune and other magazines because, among other things, it contained many words which were against the law in Massachusetts. The article later became the basis of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," published in the early 1940's. The book did not sell well and many copies went back to the publisher. It was re-issued in 1960. complete with many of the photographs Walter Evans had taken during that summer in Alabama.
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" has been referred to as "a document of high-brow populism that saved a whole generation of bright leftist Harvards and Yales the bother of going down South and agonizing, sometimes eloquently over the sharecroppers."
summer he was reportedly no longer a Communist, but he had picked up no affection for the New Deal.
Agee was married three times, in 1933, 1939, and in 1944. He had one child by his second wife and three by his third. And he drank. One of his closest friends, movie producer John Huston, has described Agee as a "bottle a night" man who gave so much of himself and his time to other people that he had little left over for his art.
Agee himself has been described as a wonderful, shy, gifted hillbilly who looked much as Daniel Boone would have looked if he had gone to Harvard.
He was born in Knoxville, Tenn., Nov. 27, 1909, and died from a heart attack at 44 in a New York taxi cab, May 16, 1955. He sometimes wrote or talked with friends all night long, a habit which dated back to his Harvard days. He was a big man and had a mountaineer's hands, but those who knew him say he was kind and gentle. Yet he seemed possessed by a drive to self-destruction and was always disappointed with his writing.
THE TRAGIC ERA, by Claude G. Bowers (Sentry, $2.35).
Except for a bias which is quite obviously southern, this is one of the finest histories of recent years. And it is a history well worth reading. To Claude Bowers, "the tragic era" was that which came with the death of Lincoln and lasted until after the inauguration of Hayes.
Not that tragedy ended then. It seems fair to state that forces set in motion in the post-Civil War period are those which still keep apart North and South. For Bowers shows how the harsh peace exacted on the South led to conflict and repression and nearly brought a second war in 1876.
Bowers' chief hero is Andrew Johnson, and this is one of the best descriptions of Johnson himself and the impeachment battle. There also is a superb portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, and of the other radical leaders. One senses a grudging admiration for Stevens, who was at least honest. That could not be said for Cameron, Butler, or possibly even Sumner.
This volume, by the way, is beautifully bound and printed. Students of American history should have this one in their libraries. CMP
Bowers does not do much with the spoilsmen, except for their connections with government. It is interesting to see his interpretation of the famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast, who apparently used his pen chiefly to pillory Democratic scoundrels but blandly ignored those of the opposition party.
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Farrell probably rates in a second echelon of 20th century American letters. He once seemed higher. But he seems more and more like John O'Hara, a brilliant reporter who can chronicle in the simplest of language the drives and ambitions and seamy sides (seldom the lofty ones) of Americans. But his style is always undistinguished. He is not even as good as Dreiser.
WORLD I NEVER MADE, by James T. Farrell (Popular Library, 75 cents).
This book is mighty gamy stuff. It's the first volume of Farrell's Danny O'Neill series, but not yet do we see Danny escaping from the slums. He is still consigned to a life almost as grim as that of his brothers and that of Studs Lonigan.
To whom does one recommend Farrell? It seems necessary for students of American literature to know him, but is anyone else really interested, beyond those who get a thrill out of four-letter words and endless descriptions of sexual intercourse? Come to think of it, that takes in a lot of people.-CMP
* *
O PIONEERS!' by Willa Cather (Sentry, $1.80). MY ANTONIA,
by Willa Cather (Sentry, $1.80).
Of the great writers of America, only Willa Cather can approach Hemingway in unvarnished simplicity of style. Everything is clear and explicit. Warmly and compassionately she writes of her people of the Nebraska prairie, and as the years pass her stature—and that of her novels—grows.
Yet she was not completely a realist in her depictions of prairie life. There is almost a pagan appreciation of the land: "July came en with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night;..." Her books are not books of the Grange and the Farmer's Revolt and drought and grasshopper invasions.
Yet the city never conquers Miss Cather's people, as it conquered those of Norris and Dreiser. Antonia and Alexandra are both triumphant. The land is triumphant. This is the message of these books.-CMP
She writes of the new peoples in the prairie country—Alexandra and her brother Emil of "O Pioneers!" and the dreaming Carl Lindstrum. "My Antonia" details the coming of the Bohemians—the marvelous Antonia, her brutalized mother and brother Ambrosch, her idealistic and futile father—and what happens to them in the city.
Daily hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
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