Page 2
University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, Dec. 4, 1963
What to Fear?
In the lower half of the Kansas City Star's front page Monday there appeared an innocuous appearing item date lined Roanoke, Va., which said a bill was being prepared to ban "un-American" speakers from the campuses of state-supported schools.
Of all the idiotic, sap-headed notions which periodically waft through the maze of confused ideals called a mind by the super-patriots, notions like this are among the worst.
THE PATRIOTS cry for strict interpretation of the Constitution, to halt the "liberty-smothering extension of federal powers," and yet they would deny free speech.
They bellow about the Communist menace but would deny to tomorrow's legislators — and housewives—a chance to learn about that which they must fight.
Those arguments, of course, are old stuff every college editor worth his salt has reared back and given the Birchers hell on those two points.
WHAT IS HARD to understand is what the super-patriots are afraid of.
If our system of government, and the philosophies upon which our institutions are founded, are so good and so desirable and so inherently correct, then they will win out over the inherently evil ideas advanced by the other side.
Milton said essentially that in his famous "Areopagitica."
And President Woodrow Wilson, shortly after he was elected, avowed that the best way to deal with evil is to hold it up where the public can see, at which time it will either straighten itself
IF OUR GOVERNMENT and our philosophies are not sound, or less sound than opposing institutions and ideas, then our institutions will fall, and fall they should.
out or die. (Wilson, of course, is suspect because of his preoccupation with the League of Nations.)
Such a competitive challenge to American ideals might indeed be a foolish challenge in a country where the people are badly educated or not educated at all, since the people could be supposed to lack the sophistication to compare ideals and choose between them.
In the United States such a supposition is silly, insulting and downright disgusting.
This does not mean that we should abandon our philosophical defenses. Quite the contrary. We must be even more diligent in presenting, explaining and clarifying what we do and why we do it.
IN THE WORDS of Walter Lippmann, "Within a free and democratic society it is necessary to agree to act on the assumption that the members of the community are living in a rational order. This means that they have all agreed to believe that by sincere inquiry and rational debate they will be able to hammer out a common understanding of what is true for their democracy and what is right.
To act to prevent this debate, as any law banning "un-American speakers" from college campuses would do, is to deny that the American people are capable of rational decision, and makes a mockery of the democratic ideals the law seeks to uphold.
— Blaine King
"What Do You Mean, We Haven't Been Producing? How About That Valachi TV Show We Put On?"
The People Say . . .
Chancellor Praises Student Turn-out
Kennedy's Corps
I wish to express publicly my pride in the University of Kansas students. Monday, Nov. 25, at 2:30 p.m., they gathered, sadly, reverently, and in numbers that taxed the capacity of Hoch Auditorium, to help us honor our late President in a memorial service.
Editor:
The services in Washington, D.C., in which the nation was able to participate through television, were barely over when our KU students, joined by faculty members, their families, and other Lawrence citizens, began to walk slowly across the campus, their mood solemn, their dress appropriate.
In a remote agricultural village of distant Pakistan, a young American works quietly along side of his Asian Friend. To the south in Peru, several middle-aged Americans assist their Latin American companions with a small but essential housing project. In a secondary school of Ghana, a youthful American teacher instructs twenty eager Africans in English and science. These Americans, along with more than seven thousand others, are volunteers in the United States Peace Corps and as such, are doing their jobs well. Those in the most distant and remote of places may not even know as yet that the man who implemented the Peace Corps idea in the spring of 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is dead.
They drew together quietly, they sang with us the Navy Hymn and the National Anthem, they bowed their heads to the Invocation, they listened to the reading, to the Chorus, and to the brief remarks, and they departed, feeling, I think, as I did, that a weight had been lifted, in some small measure, from their hearts and that they could face their continuing tasks with renewed dedication.
The KU students made this possible for us all. I thank them for it, and I will always remember their fitting response to this national tragedy.
w. Clarke Wescoe Chancellor
Considering the Peace Corps an intergal aspect of his New Frontier, John Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the new concept in American foreign aid shortly after his inauguration. Naming his capable brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver, as Peace Corps Director, President Kennedy worked closely with him in obtaining top men as staff members and in gaining legislative support for the Peace Corps. Although Kennedy's political opponents at first ridiculed and condemned the Peace Corps, President Kennedy lived to see the day that these and other early skectics and adversaries of the Peace Corps came to realize its vital effectiveness and world-wide impact. Tens of thousands of Americans from all walks of life volunteering for Peace Corps service and Congressional Peace Corps appropriations
Daili Hansan
111 Flint Hall
University of Kansas student newspaper
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
UNiversity 4-3198, business office
111 Flint Hall
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
trickey week 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated College Rep. Represented by National Advertising Service, 8 Election District of Key West 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 holidays. Accepts international examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
doubling every year are but two indications of the high domestic esteem for Kennedy's innovation in foreign aid. Moreover, international acclaim for the Peace Corps from leaders of the fifty countries of the world in which the Peace Corps is working, even from Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Nkrumah, testifies to the genuine respect held for the Peace Corps abroad.
In the remote villages of Pakistan, in the new urban developments of Peru, in the secondary schools of Ghana and elsewhere in the world young Americans, as Peace Corps volunteers, will continue to grow in size and significance, for its real benefits, both to Americans and to their world friends, are beginning only now to be realized. Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, as all Americans, grieve the loss of the man who challenged us all. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." They, as all of us, will remember these words as they strive to complete the work that our late President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so nobly and creatively began.
200 Swan,
Topeka senior
Campus Peace Corps Adviser
Help Us
Editor:
As the sun descended behind the heavily overcast sky Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, a muddy blood-red river flowed along the horizon. Fittingly, the bitter-cold day ended. After the initial disbelief, shock and grief over President Kennedy's death, the nation and the world began to mourn. But this period of mourning was in several instances superficial and only of a certain degree.
One person joked about the tragic event! Several persons were noticed laughing at the news! A student said that after arriving late to class and telling his teacher that the President had died, the teacher replied that he was sorry and handed the student an examination! On Monday. Nov. 25, a day of national mourning, the University of Kansas football team was practicing! Many students were forced to study for examinations during this solemn time!
Why were not all examinations postponed? How could one be expected to study during such a time? These incidences and others, added to the primal crime, make us look even worse. Oh God, help us!
Let the Word
Maurice Shapiro, Jr.
Overland Park junior
A nation's long silent scream of anguish has ended, and reverberates in the silence of an austere and unblinking winter afternoon. There was no hysteria, no panic, only the cold, unrelenting knowledge of loss. Unbelief was goaded by fact, incomprehension too thin a shield against the compelling on-march of a muffled drum beat.
One man, only one man, has been lowered to the ground, but with him the earth has swallowed up the embodiment of American potential, a symbol of hope to the nation and the world. Only a man, only a straw in the wind like the rest of us, but we must make our puny ceremonials, in the face of inexorable fact we must vent our grief and anger, horror and disgust, in the marching and singing,
He was only a man—not a god or even a saint, not even the wisest, best, kindest or shrewdest man ever. But he shamelessly defended ideals in a cynical nation and a disillusioned generation and he spoke in confident moderation to a world torn and divided, that had forgotten the universality of the plight of man.
The funeral orators have tried to give words to our outraged emotions, but they have also expressed hope that these fresh, fruitful inroads into new political possibilities will not be obliterated.
We laughed about the New Frontier, we laughed in our soft-nested homes at the thought of hardship, we laughed in our cynicism at the thought of sacrifice, but last Friday we lost our sense of humor. Americans have a place to go and a task to perform. Let the word go forth—
prayers, processions, in vain we must fight our bitter battle with death—and at last realize that we have lost. For he has been swept away from us.
Lou Beisner Natoma graduate student
No General Insanity
It can't happen here—the first reaction of all Americans. We're too modern, too big, too well organized for a President to be assassinated. Yet the possibility has always existed. President Roosevelt—shot at and missed in Miami. President Truman was marked for death—he too, escaped. Each president is at the mercy of some faceless fanatic. A president's life is dependent on the aim of an assassin. Yet there is a value in these mad men.
In 1914 a fanatic gave the Kaiser a chance to declare the war he wanted. I'm sure that certain conservative congressmen will sadly relate how they had warned the country, but no one would listen. To them this deranged man represents the great Communist plot. Although they disliked him when he was alive, in death Kennedy can serve their purpose.
Is the only lasting memory of a great man's life that he was the cause of a "holy war" to undercover all the "sinister subversion?" Should the tragic death of one who believed in greater freedom be used as the excuse to destroy it? It can be hoped that the freedom of a nation will not be imprisoned for the acts of one fanatic who happened to be a Communist, but who might have been a Fascist, Jew, or clergyman. What is the difference between a Stalinist purge and the possibility of a purge in the name of Americanism? Let us hope that the insane act of one man will not cause a general insanity.
Terry Joslin Kansas City, Mo. sophomore
When President John F. Kennedy died, many students felt as if a member of their own family had died. Students were shocked by the tragic news of the Presidents death. A friend of mine was so upset he could not study even though he had an examination on Tuesday.
How can we be expected to study on the national day of mourning? I have great respect for the teachers who postponed their tests.
Degenerating Society? Editor:
On Monday, the day of the President's funeral, the varsity football team was on the practice field only 15 minutes after the convocation had ended.
What is more important—paying our respects to the President or winning a football game? I hope this does not show that our society is degenerating.
May we always have the courage to stand up for our convictions in these days that try men's hearts and souls and minds.
S. J. Baker Mission junior
---