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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, Dec. 4, 1962
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'Hang Until Death'
Last Thursday evening, four hours before Lowell Lee Andrews died on the gallows, a KU student said he was going to take a date to the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing to watch the execution.
He said he had heard it would be a "swinging" affair.
"The mode of inflicting the punishment of death, in all cases in this state, shall be by hanging by the neck until such convicted person is dead."
THE STATE'S METHOD of carrying out the death penalty is just about as sickening as this student's morbid attempt at humor. Outside of stretching the prisoner to death on the rack as done back in feudal times, or whipping the condemned to death at the post, hanging is the most barbaric form of capital punishment that exists.
THIS STATUTE was passed in 1935, but the original law from which it was derived is older than the state of Kansas itself.
With the exception of a 28-year period in state history between 1907 and 1935—when no statute for capital punishment existed—the supreme penalty in Kansas has been death by hanging.
Andrews died under the stipulation of Kansas Law, 62-2401, which states, in part:
The death penalty was repealed in 1907 because of dissenting public opinion, but was reenacted in 1935 because of the rising number of
gangland killings throughout the state, especially in Kansas City. It was thought at the time of the reenactment that the death penalty would act as a deterrent to crime.
TODAY, HOWEVER, DEATH by hanging is still as barbaric as it was at the turn of the century, or, for that matter, as it was in the old days when vigilante committees "strung up" horse thieves from the proverbial "White Oak Tree."
Why is Kansas' method of capital punishment barbaric?
Simply because there are too many things that can go wrong during the execution that would cause the subject to die of strangulation rather than, as intended, of a broken neck.
Admittedly, this is sickening. But for the people who care exactly how a prisoner dies, there is no assurance that Lowell Lee Andrews died of a broken neck, as planned.
DR. ROBERT MOORE, the Kansas State Penitentiary physician, made five examinations of Andrews' heart with his stethoscope before pronouncing him dead, 18 minutes after he had fallen through the trap door.
No one will ever know whether Andrews was still alive when Moore made the first examination.
But it's something to think about.
Maybe Kansas should revise its method of carrying out capital punishment.
—Ben Marshall
'The Case' of Hiss Lingers On
By Fred Zimmerman
(Editor's note; This is the first of a two-part article on the Alger Hiss case.)
The strange case of Alger Hiss, resolved against him by a jury more than 12 years ago, is perhaps strangest today because it is still very much with us.
The most recent evidence of this has been on the nation's front pages in the past few weeks. Thousands of persons protested to a television network for allowing Hiss to appear briefly on a program about the career of Richard Nixon.
AMONG THOSE who became exercised over Hiss's appearance is a retired president, Dwight Eisenhower, who was never involved in The Case, as it has come to be spelled.
A less recent manifestation that the Hiss case is still around was the furor created by an article by Fred J. Cook in The Nation of April 7, 1962. Cook, a certified afficionado in these matters, spotted a reference in Nixon's recently-published book to an important piece of evidence in the case, Woodstock typewriter No. 230,099. Cook considered the reference worthy of three galleys of type and the assertion that Hiss now has the right "at the very least . . . to demand of the courts the release of the grand jury minutes that led to his indictment."
Further, since' the sentencing of Hiss in 1950 hundreds of articles and about 10 books have been written on the case. The passing of time seems to be the only thing that will silence the discussion, and obviously time is yet to have had its effect.
Reportedly having become skeptical of any chance for public enlightenment on the matter. Hiss lives today in a third floor walk-up on the New York waterfront, trying to do little more than make peace within his private world, now grown pathetically small. He is reading a lot these days, as always, and is earning a living by selling stationery to a relatively small clientele. He likes to walk through Central Park in the early morning and watch the birds—although he had a bad experience some years back with a prothonotary warbler. Today he lives largely in silence, the bitter silence of a man who has been asked the same questions too many times, while no one listened to the answers.
AS TIME PASSES, it is likely that there are as many people now asking "What was it all about?" as there are asking "Was he guilty?"
Briefly, here is the essence of the case;
In 1948, appearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), a former Communist named Whittaker Chambers accused Hiss of having been a Communist. Later Chambers said Hiss had pilfered confidential documents of the U.S. State Department and passed them on to Chambers. This happened, Chambers said, while Hiss was a New Deal official in the State Department. Chambers testified that Hiss had been a Communist then and that Hiss had been his best friend in the party.
Hiss denied all of this. He declared he had never known Whittaker Chambers by that name (or by the name, "Carl," as Chambers testified), and that his acquaintance with Chambers (whom Hiss acknowledged he once had known as George Crosley, a free-lance writer) had been a brief and casual one. Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers for having called him a Communist.
CHAMBERS LATER produced a wad of documents which he maintained were the stolen papers. State Department witnesses demonstrated that these documents were typed copies or photostats of authentic State papers. FBI's typewriter experts said these papers had been typed on that famous Woodstock which had once belonged to Hiss. Hiss admitted both of these allegations.
The first trial ended in 1949 with the jury split, eight for conviction and four for acquittal. In the second trial, which ended in 1950, the jury resolved what was reported to have been an identical split and voted for conviction. Before the sentence was read Hiss made the following statement:
After what Hiss's defenders have called an unofficial and prejudicial trial before the House Committee—in which Nixon ably acted as prosecutor and the press reported the hearings in detail—the Hiss case came to a court trial. He was tried on two counts of perjury, one based on his denial before a grand jury that he had ever passed State Department documents to Chambers, and the other based on his denial that he had ever seen Chambers (exclusive of hearings and trials) after January 1, 1937. (The statute of limitations prevented Hiss's being tried for espionage.)
"I WOULD LIKE to thank your Honor for this opportunity again to deny the charges that have been
made against me, I want only to add that I am confident that in the future the full facts of how Whitaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed. Thank you, sir."
Following the statement, Judge Henry W. Goddard imposed the maximum sentence of five years on each count, to be served concurrently.
The skeletal information above would suffice in a general consideration of an ordinary trial. But this case was extraordinary, and it cannot be viewed properly without reference to the political temperament of America during the late Forties and early Fifties. For if Hiss were framed, which seems possible to many qualified observers, the reason—or at least a part of it—must surely have been political. If he did not receive a fair trial, which seems very probable, it was largely because of the actions of a group of politically-motivated men.
IN THE SUMMER of 1948, when the Hiss case began, an unusual climate prevailed in the United States. There was intense hatred and fear of the Soviet Union, and to this atmosphere was added the constant declaration of the HCUA that communism had been provided a stronghold in America during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The committee had yet to prove anything, but it had its listeners.
Further, Chambers made his first charges at the beginning of a presidential campaign, and in that campaign each member of the HCUA was up for re-election. Republicanists, who were convinced they had found an issue in F.D.R.'s "radicalism," controlled the committee. As part of an effort to prove that the New Deal had been a haven for spies, the HCUA subpoenaed Chambers.
Eventually the Committee met with more success, of course, than it could possibly have dreamed of when it started the Hiss investigation. By the time Hiss had been convicted, largely through the Committee's initiative, the American people had been horrified. "Twenty years of treason" became the Republican battle cry, and it was now an effective one.
today Alger Hiss is considered by a large segment of the population to be one of the most despicable figures of the century. And to these people the indefatigable Richard Nixon, who led the early attack on Hiss, is a national hero.
The second part of this article will appear tomorrow.
COMMENT
Linguistic Genuflection
A major scientific discovery could be made at this university tonight, and it would be six months before the bulk of the students cared about it. The reason for this is simple: it would take them six months to understand what it was all about.
It probably would be cloaked in a title like this: "Radiation- Induced Aberrations in Haplopappus." And that's the problem.
The scientist operates in a world far removed from the realm of normal man. His words are a mass of complex Greek and Latin suffixes, prefixes and nouns. His words are not designed to communicate with the rest of society. To most people, his words are gibberish.
BUT THE SCIENTIST is not alone. Every "special" field has its own brand of jargon unknown outside that field. Take the legal profession for example.
"The District Court, upon consideration of the bill and answer, with voluminous affidavits on both sides, granted a preliminary injunction under the first and second heads, but refused at that stage to restrain the systematic practice admittedly pursued by defendant..."
By the time you work your way through that, court has been dismissed, the jury has gone home, and the judge is fishing in the Adirondacks.
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, it made no difference if lawyers and scientists bandied about such words as "rep ipsa loquitor" and "potentiometric titration." No one but scientists and lawyers were interested in science and law, so there was no need to communicate outside their specialized fields.
But that principle is no longer valid today.
People today are interested in scientific advance. They are interested in space medicine and heart and cancer research, and food supplies taken from the sea. People today are interested, in fact, in many things that never before interested the "average" man.
BUT "INTERESTED" IS ABOUT as far as they can go. If they try to really grasp a scientific breakthrough or understand a legal battle which concerns them, they are hit over the head by a mass of polysyllabic words and esoteric language.
It is not feasible for scientists and lawyers to discard their jargon overnight, but it is something they can work for. If they try to make progress now, perhaps someday a Baptist minister and a nuclear physicist can sit down and communicate.
At the very least, the special fields can make an effort to interpret their technical data and special terms for the layman. Such interpretation could turn the mass of esoteric information into readable prose and hack those damned 23-letter words into small, unseen pieces.
PERHAPS IF THIS were done, public attendance would increase at scientific discussions. I wonder how many students showed up to hear a lecture on "Some Inorganic Syntheses at Moderately Elevated Temperatures," or "Complementary Sequence Spaces," or "Speciation by Saltation?"
Let's knock off this "free radical vinyl polymerization" and "habeus corpus" jazz and get down to some real understanding.
—Zeke Wigglesworth
Worth Repeating
To spend your time figuring out how to get a university loved by everybody is a waste of time. When you reach that point you don't have a university-you have a trade school.-Franklin D. Murphy, former KU chancellor
Daily Transan
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