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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Jan. 4, 1963
Purging Red Products
Americans have done it again. A group called the National Committee to Warn of the Arrival of Communist Merchandise on the Local Business Scene has been formed in Miami, Fla., to harass local merchants into purging from their shelves goods manufactured in Communist satellite countries.
Local organizations also have sprung up in California, Utah, Illinois, Massachusetts and Missouri to campaign against local merchants who sell goods—canned hams, wicker baskets, or cut glassware—manufactured in Communist countries.
THE CAMPAIGN of the "protect American business" committee goes something like this:
1. After the committee's "snoopers" find Communist-made goods in a local store, the owner or manager is approached and informed about the goods and is asked to remove them.
2. If he refuses, the member is to write "a friendly, but firm and rational" letter to the store and at the same time tell friends that the store sells goods from a Communist country.
3. If the merchant still refuses, a "card party" is organized.
A "card party" is the final and most drastic action taken by the group. Several members of the group take printed cards which say "Buy Your Communist Slave Labor Imports at..." and place them in goods throughout the store. The cards are placed so that they will be taken home by the customer.
The committees recently have joined with the John Birch Society, which has released its "national framework" organization to spread the project.
In support of the project, the Columbus, Ga.,
City Commission passed a bill imposing a $1,000 fee on businesses that sell Communist merchandise. The businesses are to display a sign saying "Licensed to Sell Communist Goods."
But an operator of a Ben Franklin variety store in Illinois so far has resisted all efforts by the committee to force him into complying with their demands.
He says the government is encouraging trade with Communist satellites to relieve their dependency on the Soviet Union. And since the government is encouraging the trade, he will not submit to the pressure to stop selling the goods.
THESE GROUPS, like other right-wing groups before them, use intimidation and boycotting tactics to achieve their end. They say that they are protecting the Constitution and the "American way of life."
But in their paranoiae fear of subversion, they themselves subvert the guaranteed freedoms they say they're protecting. They violate a person's rights to conduct his business as he sees fit.
The sickness of their attitudes is apparent in the memorandum which was distributed listing the tactics to be used. The writer called the card parties "fun and uplifting to the soul of a conservative."
If a merchant removes the goods because of his principles, fine. But he should not be forced into complying with the narrow demands of groups who see subversion in every organization and a Communist at its head.
They feel that the Constitution is threatened by internal subversion from communism. But they themselves are a bigger threat to that Constitution and the guaranteed freedoms therein.
—Jerry Musil
California Returns to 3 R's
The United States needs a dynamic, progressive system of education in its elementary and high schools, not a regression to the antiquated "three R's" of the little red school house.
This statement has been fairly well agreed upon by modern day educators until the Californians, in an election earlier this month, elected a state superintendent of schools who has been labeled by the New York Times as an "ultra-conservative." This man has advocated a return to the "three R's" and doing away with "sloppy progressive experiments in California schools.
THE PROBLEM is that for the last two decades California schools have been the vanguard for elementary and high schools across the country. What California schools do, the rest of the nation will follow as "the thing to do."
Maxwell L. Rafferty, the man who won the California superintendent election, has advocated the return of such subjects as historical and classical heroism with "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" being sung at all school songfests.
He would do away with such experiments as team teaching and educational television. He has said that patriotism and classicism must be returned to an everyday curriculum if the United States is to stay in international competition. The three R's—readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic—would be the most important part of education.
There is nothing wrong with patriotism and the three R's, of course. But how could anyone teach Patriotism 101? How could anyone ever
give a test in a subject like that?
And now, about the three R's; naturally, they cannot be excluded. They must serve as a solid foundation for any education.
But this age is growing more and more complex. With such an expanding field of specialization in science, graduate education is almost becoming a necessity. There are such fields as biochemistry, the electron microscope and astrophysics that are necessary if this country is to keep competing with the rest of the world.
WITH THE NEARLY infinite number of printed pages coming out each year the field of humanities is also increasing at an alarming rate.
There is just not time for America's children to spend most of their years in high school and elementary school dealing with classicism and the three R's.
Students in Europe have five years in up to seven foreign languages by the time they graduate from high school. The Russians are speeding up their technical programs.
The United States, like it or not, is in competition with these countries. And this means our educational system is in competition also. Our programs, too, must be accelerated.
In this increasingly complex age, the United States must move forward in progressive education, and not revert to that victorian image of the perfection of the one room red schoolhouse with its three R's.
John Dorschner in the Colorado Daily
UNIT INDIY Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
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 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press 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, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Scott Payne
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT Clayton Keller and Bill Sheldon
Managing Editor
Letters
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Charles Martinache
Co-Editorial Editors
Business Manager
Too Many Party Pictures
Editor:
Rarely am I one to throw cold water on the fires of protest, but it seems incredibly meaningless to charge, as did a recent letter writer, that certain living groups are being discriminated against in the "party pictures" section of the KU yearbook. (See "Jayhawker Favoritism?" in the Letters section of Monday's Kansas.)
The question I have, if we are going to put the yearbook staff on the grill, is this: How can the staff justify devoting so much space to pictures of people holding beer cans up to the camera?
Let's face it — when you've seen one fellow hold a beer can up to the camera, you've seen them all.
Lawrence senior
It Looks This Way
Negro Has Seen Shame of Whites
By Fred Zimmerman
White Americans in search of their conscience should look into the eyes of the Negro. He has witnessed our most sordid acts, and the record of our shame is in his eyes.
The Negro knows us white Americans better than we know ourselves. For one thing, he knows we are lying, and have always lied, when we talk of brotherhood and equality. He knows that our churches are built of paper, that our religion is a joke. He has heard thoughtful men among us speak daily of postponing decency, and he knows we all are capable, at any moment, of the grossest possible inhumanity.
HAVING THIS WISDOM, the Negro must pity us. He sees what we cannot: Race hatred has become an American heritage, something we pass to our children as soon as they are old enough to ask about the color of a man's skin. And if he is at all versed in the history of civilization he knows well what such moral sickness can do to a nation.
He realizes that there is a strain of racism in nearly all of us even in us outside the Deep South who act appalled at the bigotry of a mob of rioting college students or a group of screeching mothers in front of a public school. Many Southerners blatantly display their hatred, while we, their more sophisticated brethren to the North, clothe ours in platitudes. The Negro knows this, for he is aware of the restaurants in Northern cities where he cannot eat and of the hundreds of Northern suburbs where he cannot buy a house.
HE SEES that we have become a nation of hypocritical empty heads. In our churches we sermonize about brotherly love, but he knows what would happen if he walked into our midst. And he sees what is perhaps most tragic of all, the way we teach our children, by precept and example, to hate and be stupid.
A few years ago I walked one day through a neighborhood in Kansas City into which, a week or so before, two Negro families had moved. It was a pleasant day, and three or four white children were riding their bicycles in circles in the street. As I approached I noticed a Negro boy about seven years old sitting on the curb watching the white children.
The boy, immaculately clothed (no doubt by a worried mother), was calling to the white children:
"Hi. What's your name? My name is Willis. . What's your name?"
THE WHITE CHILDREN did not answer. From a porch across the street their father watched, stern-faced and approving.
I do not envy Willis, now approaching high school age, who has probably learned that around white youngsters it will do him no good to speak unless spoken to.
But less do I envy those children who refused his friendship, for on them that day the warping process had begun. By now their souls are probably as hollow as their father's.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"IT'S AFTER PARK — I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND YOU GO TOO FAR
BACK — UNESCORTED."